I have received at least two questions on the alternative gardening method that I was going to try this year. Today I will try to answer those questions. This has been a fun year to garden because of this experimentation. Let me start from the beginning. In March, my wife sent me an email that had a link in it to hay bale gardening. Yes, I still have hay fever. :) I don't know if any of you have ever heard of this before but it was an interesting subject to me. I always had a fascination with things that were unconventional and just plain odd. :) I told my wife that we would have to come up with some hay bales which was something that I just don't carry around in my hip pocket. Through a friend of ours who has some horses, we were able to come up with 8 bales of hay. I thought that would be good enough to carry out the experiment. Two of the bales were packed loosely so I ended up with six that I could use. I laid down some black plastic and put my bales over the top of them in a double row. Why did I put down the plastic? The short answer is that my wife told me to. :) She said she read somewhere that it would help hold the moisture in the bales longer. I angled the last two because I wanted too. :)
Now by the book, you are supposed to water the bales (it takes a lot of water) and add ammonium nitrate to them daily. Now of course I didn't do this. I watered them a little and put regular fertilizer on them and watered them down heavy to make it soak in. Ammonium nitrate is the better way to go. It is a regulated chemical and you will have to sign for it if you use it. This is the same stuff that those nut cases used to bomb the Federal building in Oklahoma City a few years back. That is why you have to sign for it. You can find it at a farmer supply type place. You could call around in your area and probably find it without too much trouble. Like I said, it is the better alternative for this type of gardening. You add the fertilizer and water daily for a week. I really think that a week and a half to two weeks would be better. The fertilizer generates heat like you would get in a compost pile. The heat has to dissipate so that you won't kill your plants.
I water these things daily unless it rains. I water them heavily because they have no way to hold on to large amounts of water. After the initial fertilizing, I fertilize with something like Miracle-Gro once a week. Now these are the results down below after a few weeks. I am growing yellow squash, tomatoes, eggplant, and pepper. Next year I think this would make a wonderful way to grow bush beans without having to bend over so far. That will take quite a few bales. I think an herb garden would be wonderful grown this way. You would just want to start the seedlings somewhere else first. This is a test, it is only a test. :) If you would like to know more about this subject from an expert you should check this link. This man lives in the same county I do but I do not know him personally. His videos are the most informative that I have found on the subject. If you want to do this right, it will be worth checking the videos out. My results are just OK. I think that is because I didn't do it exactly like it was supposed to be done. Going against the grain seems to be a weakness of mine. I've already started seedlings for the second wave of plants I will use after these are spent. I plan to do this until first frost. That's pretty much it and I wish you all a happy growing season! :)
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