Our New Straw Bale Garden–Part I
...e like a botanical Robert Smithson piece–a front seat on nature’s balance of entropy and creation. The next step is to add fertilizer and water. We’ll document what happens so stay tuned....
Search Results for: label/water%20conservation/2010/06/the-urban-homestead
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Kevin West’s Saving the Season
...e Canning, Pickling, and Preserving blows all those other books out of the water bath. Full disclosure here: I’ve tasted a lot of West’s jams. I teach a bread making class at the Institute of Domestic Technology. After my bread demo West does a jam making session and I stick around to watch and, hopefully, filtch an extra jar. Those West jams are coveted items around the Root Simple household. What makes Saving the Season different from other pres...
Straw Bale Garden Part III: Adding Fertilizer
...l does not have much nitrogen in it.) Choosing the organic approach, we’re watering in two cups of blood meal a day to each bale for days four to six. Days seven through nine, we’ll cut back to one cup of blood meal per bale. By day ten the bales should be almost ready to plant. Once the bales are conditioned I’ll need to add a balanced organic fertilizer to provide potassium and phosphorous. And I discovered that taking the time to level the bale...
What’s in Worm Leachate?
...leachate (the liquids the flow our of your worm bin) from a home vemicompost setup. It’s pretty strong stuff! Gillman concludes, this could be a great liquid fertilizer if it were used properly. I’d recommend diluting it somewhere between 1:1 and 1:5 worm juice : water before applying it, and I’d only apply it once every week or two. If you want to use it, try it on something that you’re not too concerned about first, just to make sure that it doe...
Straw Bale Garden Part IV: Almost Ready to Plant?
...been “conditioning” my straw bale garden by adding blood meal and a lot of water. During the conditioning process we had both a freak rainstorm (helpful) and a freak heatwave (not so good). The bales did not heat up as much as I expected–as of this morning they are around 80° F, around 15° to 20° higher than the ambient temperature. Several sources I checked, however, suggest that this is hot enough. The test will be when I plant seedlings. If the...