Rose Prairie Quilts and Farm

Five on Fridays is back on Amy's blog so skip over there and give it a look to see what others are posting for their five My five this weeks........  Is lessons learned on straw bale gardening This was my first year to attempt straw bale gardening. It's a very ingenious way of gardening if you do not have good soil, the space or energy to have a garden. It's temporary so if your're a renter, you don't have to worry about making any permanent changes to the yard. It can be done on concrete if you don't have any place for garden. I do not fit any of those criteria's but I wanted to give it a try anyway. I have a large enough garden to keep me busy all year but I was fascinated by this idea and wanted to give it a try so here are the five things I learned from my experiment this summer 1. I found out that you will need to look for a tightly compress bale. Mine were loosely packed which created some issues when com...

I want to share an update on my straw bale garden experiment. I hadn't planted anything before I left to go to California last month. I was afraid it was going to be hot and dry and no one to tend to the bales. Boy was I wrong, we had a record amount of rain and cool weather while I was gone. My bales were perfect for starting a garden. They were well into the composting phase of their development and ready to plant. Last week I planted pumpkins, a climbing butternut squash and some cucumbers. I planted vines variety because my bales are next to the fence and I figured I would take advantage of it As you can see they all came up so beautifully except for some older pumpkin seeds that I went ahead and planted.... being very doubtful they would even come up.  So I'll need to replant something in that spot As you can see from this photo I have some weeding to do around my bales. weeds find any crevice to grow. After I do that,...