Straw Bale Garden Update: Success!

July 15, 2013

...input of outside resources in the form of straw and fertilizer, straw bale gardening is a great solution for beginning gardeners or for those cursed with bad soil. And the skunks that have decimated my previous vegetable gardens are unable to get up on the bales. I’m considering trying another straw bale garden during our winter season. And I’m also pondering building boxes to put the bales in to make the garden look a bit neater. Compare the stra...

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Straw Bale Garden: What I Learned

Mr. Homegrown

November 12, 2013

Gardening, Straw Bale Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

29 Comments

...ost! My future in straw bale gardening I’ve decided to continue straw bale gardening on a smaller scale. I’m going to build some raised beds and fill them with soil, but I’m leaving room for two bales to grow nitrogen hungry crops, principally squash. I’m also planning on building a box to hold those bales so I don’t have to stake them every season. Like most things in life it’s not an either/or proposition. You can have a conventional vegetable g...

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090 Garden Myths: Nitrogen, Roundup, Compost Tea

Mr. Homegrown

July 27, 2016

Gardening, Podcasts

5 Comments

...guest is Robert Pavlis. We touch on a number of controversial, hot-button gardening topics such as synthetic fertilizers, roundup and compost tea. Robert maintains a six acre garden near Guelph, Ontario all by himself, he’s a master gardener and a speaker. He has a background in chemistry and biochemistry and runs two blogs: gardenmyths.com and gardenfundamentals.com. During the show we also discuss the “whys” of gardening, mosquito prevention, s...

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De-Cluttering the Garden

Mr. Homegrown

February 12, 2015

Domesticus, Gardening, Tidying up

8 Comments

...e stream.” Heed Hereclitus’ enigmatic saying and you’ve got the essence of gardening and nature: periods of equilibrium punctuated by change, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. De-cluttering our tended gardens is to work in imitation of and in concert with nature. So what would be some de-culuttering steps in the garden that welcome and work with change? First would be getting rid of junk such as construction debris and those failed projects Kelly al...

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Defining a Garden’s Purpose

Mr. Homegrown

July 8, 2013

Garden Design, Gardening

13 Comments

...of plants as being a kind of green background material are doing a kind of gardening, albeit one that is not helping our planet. What kind of gardening did I see from the train? The photo above sums it up. The most common sight was dead grass and junk storage. In more affluent areas people had lush grass and maybe a pool. Some had vegetable gardens, a few chickens and goats. One enterprising person, somewhere between Bakersfield and Fresno, had a...

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