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This was a great year for growing tomatoes in straw bales. I have never grown such lush foliage and so many really large tomatoes in all my years of garden.
As you can tell in the picture the bales have broken down to about 1/3 their original size. At first I planned to till the broken down bales into my dirt row growing area for compost. Now, however, I have decided to enclose the row of bales inside a R/R tie box that will measure 2' wide x 24' long x 16" deep. When the box is completed I will remove the wires that held the bales together and level out the spent bales. New bales will go on top of the old ones and the process will begin again.
Once the R/R ties are secured with rebar rods there will be attached to the R/R tie box a system
for caging the tomato plants. This year I had a guy wire strung between two trees which worked by trailing twine from the guy wire to the base of the plants and then attaching the vines to the twine with plastic clips made for this purpose. It worked well, but the weight of all that lush foliage tended to cause the wire to sag in the middle like a cloths line full of wet cloths. As the bales began to break down they settled and pulled away from the root system of the plants exposing some roots. The plants couldn't follow the collapsing bales because they were attached to the guy wire via the twine and clips.
Jerry
This message was edited Aug 22, 2009 12:22 PM
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