How to grow tomatoes in straw bales
It's pretty easy to do and it saves space.
When I grew tomatoes in my driveway outside Washington, I bought three straw bales from a local nursery one year and made my first foray into straw bale gardening. It worked, and now that I live in a part of the country where straw is both more easily obtained and cheaper, I’m trying it again.
I also have to admit that now that I have a pickup truck, I’m always looking for excuses to put it to use. Carrying the bales home in the back from a local sod farm makes the whole experience much cooler, at least in the mind of this wannabe farmer.
To prepare straw bales – and they should be straw, not hay, which has more seeds – you essentially create mini, self-contained compost piles out of them that over the course of the summer create a rich, disease-free growing medium for your plants. There’s a 12-day conditioning period before you can begin planting into them.
Here’s how you do it:
Arrange the bales where you’ll want them to remain during the growing season. They get heavy once they’re wet and moving them is a pretty big chore. Don’t remove the string that holds them together. Leave them tied or you’ll end up with an unwieldy pile of straw. You can place them with the strings on top of the bale or on the side. I prefer having the string on the side but it doesn’t really matter. Next, you’ll want to water them thoroughly from the top every day for about 10-12 days. About one minute per bale with an open hose should do it. After the first two days of watering, begin sprinkling the top of the bales with about ¼ to ½ cup of nitrogen-rich fertilizer every other day. It can be organic or not. Blood meal or urea work, and you can buy bags at most nurseries. So does any standard lawn fertilizer -- which is usually high in nitrogen -- as long as it doesn’t have any weed killers included. No “weed and feed” mixes!
Continue watering every day, including the alternate days you don’t add fertilizer. After a few days the temperature inside the bales should begin heating up as the water and nitrogen begin doing their work. You can put a compost pile thermometer into the bale if you have one. The temperature should max out at 120 degrees or thereabouts. But you don’t need a thermometer. You’ll be able to feel the heat by sticking your fingers or a hand into the pile even though the straw will be very tightly bound. As a side note, my brother in law, who’s a fabulous architect in Boston, was here over the weekend and was watering the bales and remarked that he now understands why early settlers built houses with thatched roofs. It’s really hard to get water to pass through them. But in this application they do moisten and begin to loosen up.
After about a week to 10 days you should notice the temperature inside the bales begin to cool off. This is a signal that they’re ready for planting. Stop fertilizing them at this point, though you can continue watering.
I plant tomatoes in my bales, but you can grow almost anything in them, from lettuce, kale and beans to squash and zucchini. You can plant seedlings or in the case of lettuce, for example, spread a layer of potting soil on top of a prepared bale and plant the seeds directly into the soil. To plant a tomato, use a hand trowel to dig a hole through the straw into the bale. The straw should be getting loose and loamy. Go as far down as you’ll want to plant. Drop in your tomato plant, fill the hole with standard potting soil and water it in. That’s it. I put a maximum of two tomatoes in each bale, spaced about 24-30 inches apart.
While straw bales do hold moisture pretty well you’ll want to stay on top of the watering over the summer months and you’ll want to add some fertilizer to each bale once a week. Unlike during the conditioning process add a balanced (10-10-10) fertilizer, the type you’d use in your garden. The reason for the regular fertilizing is there are no natural minerals or nutrients in straw. When the season’s done you can use the straw as a mulch or add it to a compost pile.
I’m in the process of conditioning my bales at the moment. I held back because I didn’t plan on planting the tomatoes out where I live in western Massachusetts until after Memorial Day. This week, though, the temperatures are in the mid-80s and there’s no late spring frost forecast. I’m wishing I had started earlier.
I’m using the straw bales to use space in my vegetable garden more efficiently. The plants will grow out of the bales vertically up the fence, giving me more room in the beds for other plants.
Back to my truck, if you care to indulge me, it’s one of the first big things I bought after relocating to the Berkshires. I got a used Honda Ridgeline, which is a great car that actually is more comfortable to drive than our Subaru. Having it has paid off multiple times.
There’s the weekly trip to the dump, or transfer station as the town likes us to call it, when I fill the back with garbage bags, a garbage can of glass and plastic, cardboard and paper plus anything else we’re trying to get rid of. I’ve filled the truck with gravel and drove it out back where we put in a stone walkway. I’ve picked up a load of cow manure for the compost bins and several loads of compost and soil. I’ve moved trees, shrubs and plants from the garden center to our house, and a load of twisted, broken down cast iron metal fencing that had sat between our land and the adjoining property for 170 years. It’s also been great for our late afternoon sunset drives when we crank up Arthur Russell on Spotify, roll down the windows, soak in all the fields, woods and hills that surround our village and try to get lost.
Lately I’ve filled the back with straw bales, though I’m slightly chagrined to admit I lost a bale on my way home a few weeks ago. Mark, the nice guy at Sheffield Sod Farm where I get the straw, asked me if I wanted to tie them down but I said I’d be fine. It’s only a 4-mile drive from the farm to our house. He said, Okay but don’t do any hot-rodding. I didn’t do that but I did make a turn, where one of the bales slid off the back and onto the road. When I noticed it was gone a couple minutes later I turned around to see if I could find it. At the corner where I suspected it fell off I didn’t see a bale, only a loose pile of straw on the pavement. I hope whoever got it put it to good use, like bedding their horse stalls with it or maybe even starting a straw bale planter.
When I returned for more straw this week, I told Mark the story as I secured the bales in the back with mesh netting I’ve since purchased. He seemed pleased this flatlander may have learned a lesson, adding with a twinkle that now I could drive home really fast.
I’ll keep you posted with the progress of my bales and tomatoes but if you have any questions please reach out. I’m happy to chat.
Great post Matt! I’d love to try it, but my plants are already in the ground. Maybe next year.