Why NOT???? Sounds like a cool raised bed garden to me. Nancy

Len oh my gosh!! I've read your blog before! By the way, great job! I actually designed our beds after yours, I'm so glad I've gotten to "meet" you! :) I used clippings from the yard and noticed horrid "hulk" ivy (that's our nickname for it) growing out between and under the bales... I had to take it all apart today and get that ivy out.. ugh! I think we're going to add some soil from the back yard just to help fill in the gardens.. We still have one more bed to fill and I'm tired of getting truck loads of manure. It's tough filling and unloading a truck bed with manure! Phew!

I have heard of both square foot gardening and straw bale gardening. I'm leaning more toward sheet mulch gardening, which is essentially the same as lasagna gardening. lasagna gardening offfers the advantages of both straw bale AND square foot gardening, in that you simply layer your organic materials (a little more work than simply cutting holes in straw bales and planting in that, but less work and less traumatic impact on the existing soil biota than tilling and amending as recommended in square foot gardening. Also, like square foot gardening, you can plant quite intensively in a sheet mulch bed, nearly as intensively as in a square foot garden. So, my 1200 square feet of planned sheet mulch beds will be the equivalent of around 2500-3000 square feet of traditional tilled beds, and, when you consider the row spacing needed in a traditional garden, add around 400 square feet more for comparison sake. Trust me, with all the winter sowing I am doing in the next month, I will need every square inch of space! Mark-

Hi all, I'm new here to this forum and to gardening in general but we did try a straw bale garden this year and we live in Gautier, MS here on the Gulf Coast. So far our straw bale garden has worked out fabulously. We haven't had any issues so far with overwatering. We use a soaker hose underneath a layer of potting mix to water the plants. Due to the nature of the straw bale itself, I don't think you can over-water it. The excess just runs out the bottom. I have noticed a slight algee growth on the topsoil but it has not seemed to affect the veggies yet. There is almost no weeding required for the garden and there are fewer bugs to deal with as well. These are some pics from about a week ago and everything is more than twice this size today. I'll try to keep you updated on the progress as we go along and share our lessons learned.