Grow a vegetable garden in your parking lot!

Growing a garden, particularly a vegetable garden takes years of soil conditioning, with addition of manure and compost, and a rotor-tiller, right?  Wrong!  It is completely possible to grow a beautiful garden on your old concrete patio, or in the parking lot behind your office, if you grow a Straw Bale Garden!

A Straw Bale Garden is really just a different take on a container garden.  The bale forms a crust on the outside edges as the season progresses, and the inside of the bale is conditioned, and becomes the growing media that plants thrive in.

Straw bales are cheap, and you'll get about 14 c.f. of planting media inside each bale, that's equal to $75 worth of bagged planting mix from the store. 

Bales are raised up off the ground making it easier to plant for anyone with physical limitations.  Wheel chair users find that growing in bales is a great way to garden, without the huge investment and permanence of raised beds.

Straw bales are weed free, so this means you can spend your summer by the pool rather than pulling weeds every day in your vegetable garden.

You can grow anything!  There are very few crops that don't thrive in the bales, most do better growing in the bales than in traditional soil.

Less insect and disease problems occur with a Straw Bale Garden, because the plants get better air flow around them, and since you have new "soil" inside the bales each year there is no lingering insect or disease problems that often carry over from year to year in traditional soil.

You can read much more on the topic at if you'd like to know more check out www.strawbalegardens.com.  Read more details on my blog there as well.