Jerry Jones

I was first introduced to strawbale gardening when my wife and I visited the Flower and Garden show at Epcot Center at Walt Disney World in Spring of 2015. We love to visit here when the show is going on because of all the fresh ideas for gardening. What really captured our attention is when we saw the straw bale plantings in one of the exhibits. The cabbages were huge and the strawberry plants were beautiful. After reading about the process I felt it was perfect for us. We live in Northwest Oregon about 15 miles west of Portland. I felt that the strawbale gardening technique would be perfect for our clayish soil and be a god sent for the slug and other insect problems and the horrendous weed problem we faced each year.

We set up 3 rows of 10 bales for our veggies and two 4 bale squares for potatoes. Our yield was fantastic. I had beans galore as well as cabbages, carrots, beets, peppers, tomatoes, peas and of course potatoes. The really fantastic thing was I was able to grow sugar baby watermelons, cantaloupe, edemame and okra which I never had success with in the past.

I love this method of gardening for it’s ease of working, weed and pest control, and the fact that it is fairly maintenance free. I travel a lot but with automatic watering set with soaker hoses, my wife did not have to worry about dragging hoses and placing sprinklers all over etc.

I learned some lessons to carry over into next year but am sold on this form of gardening and cannot wait to start conditioning my new strawbale garden next year.

Jerry Jones