“Deconstructing Straw Bale Beds, and Preparing Our Garden For Spring.”

Finally, we picked out the last of the tomatoes (most were green) and ripped up the straw bale raised beds! Once they were up and the bale strings were taken off, we tilled our whole garden section up!

Hoping We Wouldn’t Hit Any Unwanted Nests In The Bales:

After taking down our lettuce bed early, due to a yellow jacket nest, I was skeptical we would get away without another, but fortunately, we didn’t have any other nests in the bales! We did however, find tunnels on the bottom of the bales, once we lifted them up. They looked pretty abandoned, and we never saw any animal. Probably because, our loyal mouser (Forest), kept everything clean of pesky rodents. Very grateful, for a cat who takes his job seriously!

Rabbits Put To Good Use!

Once we took them up, we just used a pitch fork and ripped them apart, so that the tiller had an easier job of mixing it into the ground. Now, this is the part I’ve been waiting for, to get good use out of my Rabbits! (other than breeding them). I was thankfully able to mix all their Rabbit poo (AKA garden fertilizer) into the garden so my husband could till it all up! This is great, because now after all the rains come and go, this will get the grounds all nice, fertilized, and ready for our garden beds, this Spring!

Our Upcoming Garden Bed Plans:

Our back yard is a bit sloped downwards. So another nice thing is, that when tilling all those bales (and fertilizer) into the ground, it really helped get us progressing, towards fixing that slope. We hope to get a coop built soon, and some chickens out there to continue mixing up our soil, but we have so many projects right now, that isn’t the main priority, quite yet. We are just glad we got that finished and ready for spring.

Recap Of How Straw Bales Worked:

If you haven’t read my last garden post, and are thinking of doing Straw bale raised beds, I will link that post here. We liked them a lot, for where we are located (gardening zone 8B), and how we could till it all for the next garden season! I will also post a picture of how they looked, way before we started taking them down.

The beds we are doing next, will be concrete block raised beds, and I can’t wait to write a post on what we will do for that! Where we placed our straw bale beds, wasted some of our yard space, because we put them in a bad spot, space wise. So, this time around, we are hoping to utilize our space better so we can have more, useable room back there. Although the bales, were a very versatile option, the blocks are also versatile and we can’t wait to try those out. We’ve seen a few people use that method recently, and it turned out great, so we wanted to give it a shot!