As I wrote before, I was skeptical about the idea of growing vegetables in bales of wheat straw. Obviously, my doubts were unfounded. Every day we pick more squash and zucchini, way more than we can eat. Fortunately my students like it too, so every couple of days I come to class with a bag of fresh vegetables and tell them to help themselves.The green beans have begun to come in now too. We only have about 5 or 6 plants, which haven't produced a great quantity of beans, so next year we will probably plant more.
The only problem we've encountered, other than the hailstorm, has been slugs on the beans. Teresa read that slugs have an aversion to copper, so she placed some copper scouring pads around the base of each bean plant and that seems to have repelled them.
The bales don't require as much water as I thought they would. Initially we thought we'd need to water twice a day, but the bales seem to hold water pretty well--we neglected them for 5 days of 100-degree weather in June and they came out fine.
Anybody want some squash????
2 comments:
Very cool. You can grow your veggies and recycle the straw. I might have to give that a try next year.
This has been an interesting experiment. Theresa's veggies look great. Can you post a picture of the bales as they look now? I have been wondering. Also like the tip about slugs not liking copper. Ihadn't heard that one before. I could possibly get some copper to lay around my hostas so the darn slugs wouldn't eat them so.
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