June 9, 2011- The bales are doing well!

I’ve been busy and a bit absent from the blog…..it happens.  I wanted to hop on and show you all what’s going on with the straw bales. In 2 1/2 weeks there’s already been some significant growth.  You can see the original post on planting in the bales here. Check out the difference in the tomatoes.  Oh, I moved the bales and changed the set up to a spot that gets a little more sunlight than the original spot.  This one still only gets about 6 hours a day, but it’s the spot with the most (I think).  Hopefully it will be enough.

Zucchini plant with one big flower that looks like it's going to open soon. I hope the bees are ready.Watermelon and Cantaloupe growing out of the sides of the bale. I don't know if we have a long and hot enough growing season for these guys to produce fruit, but I'm going to give it a shot. I have a few more watermelon plants besides this one.

My little jalepeno plant is the only one that doesn't seem to be doing anything.....if it's possible, it looks like it got smaller. It's not dead yet so I guess that's a good sign.

One of the tomato plants. It's probably tripled in side in the past 2 weeks.

I just added this cucumber plant to the bale last weekend. It's getting a later start....

These pole beans are so cool! They wrap themselves around a pole as they grow. I have 4 of them. The front 2 are doing great. The back 2 aren't growing as much.

Here's a view of the current setup. Everything I read said it would be impossible to move the bales once they were wet, but with one other person it was totally doable. The 4 bales are now in a row and all three pots have tomatoes. If all of the tomato plants do well, I'm going to have more tomatos than I know what to do with.... which, of course, is not a bad problem to have.

I also planted some irises on the side of my house today. I had thrown some poppy and verbena seeds in there the other day too. We'll see what happens. I threw down some sunflower seeds in the front as well. I hope those grow. I tried them last year too, but was unsuccessful with the sunflowers. I have since improved the quality of my soil. Hopefully that helps.