My Hay Bale Garden Adventure

2016 Garden

Side note: I should mention this up front, I'm new to Houston, the South. I mean I visited NC and SC while I was in the military, but living here, gardening here, is a completely different experience. The climate, the weather, the flora, the fauna. Everything is different than where I grew up. I grew up in the desert. My parents owned a nursery business for about 20 years. I helped. I like to think I picked up on stuff. My husband and I moved to Houston with our daughter in 2015. So now we get to figure stuff out.

So, I found a really cool idea for a vegetable garden for this year: a straw bale garden. But living in the Houston area, actual straw is damn near impossible to find, much less for a reasonable price. I spent weeks looking, but finally decided to just try my hand at a hay bale garden. 

In comes Craigslist and a kindly old fella about 30 minutes from me selling several bales for about $5 each. I bought 24, loaded them in my rental trailer (and 2 in my 2011 Kia Sorento, which has kinda turned into my work truck for now), and drove back home. 

I unloaded them into the spot in the back yard that the hubby and I had decided on, then I spent the next few days "conditioning" the bales. This entails days of soaking and fertilizing. Because I was using hay instead of straw (which hay naturally has more nutrients like nitrogen), I  didn't have to fertilize as often. 

The part of the yard where we had the bales is currently low in elevation, as well as spots all around the yard. This being the case, this last week of flooding rains showed me just how bad our drainage is. The bales have just been sitting in standing water. 

I  decided a few days ago that I needed to move them. I found that the area right outside of our property gate drains better. I also noticed that our neighbor a few doors down had put in his own full-scale, permanent garden outside his property gate; cement borders, sprinkler system, etc. Pretty sweet setup. so I moved them. They were heavy with being soaked, and smelled awful from the standing water. But I fucking moved them!

Pre-move. My hay bales getting drenched by rain. Huge puddles.

Texas Brown Snake. But unfortunately I did not know that until after I had already chopped off this little guy's head. Not familiar with the fauna here. I assumed better safe than my 5 year old being bit by a copperhead.

Hay bales moved and settled in. I dug a trench around, put in the lattices, put up stakes, and wired the stakes for the vines. My husband then put together a simple PVC piping for a hose-fed sprinkler/drip system. I drilled the holes and attached it myself.

Mushrooms popping up in the hay bales next to my plants.

First sprouts. 

My cucumbers were doing well in the beginning. Even producing.

Did my green thumb get amputated or just skip a generation? Or does the difference in climate here give me SOME sort of learning curve? Not 1 tomato out of 12-15 plants; very few peppers; all my awesome purple tomatillos never reached full maturity; only 2 itty bitty watermelons were harvested out of about 18 or so plants; cucumbers started great, then completely dried up after about 3 good harvests; peas and green beans were choked out; and not 1 usable squash! 

Look at those HUGE tomato plants.

Green (and multi-color) beans.

My squash had something wrong with it.

Teeny tiny watermelons.

It was so pretty and full of potential. 

My poor cucumbers. My cucumber plants completely shriveled. I am still not sure what happened.

Corn I planted on the back of the garden, near the property fence. It grew about 1.5 feet, then just stopped.

At first glance, my garden looks successful...

...aaaaand then in doesn't.

Nice, right?

Wrong.

So, it didn't quite work out. I tried, and I will try again. The hay bale gardening turned out to be awesome. But I think I did some stuff wrong in this new Houstonian environment. We ended up moving late in the summer to be closer to my hubby's work. Those watermelon pictures are the last I got. Again, I will try again.