Matt’s Adventures in Northwest Gardening

I bought a straw bale on Saturday at the aforementioned Reber Ranch in Kent. It was a little more than I expected, mainly because they only had one size available for purchase this weekend. It was $8 for the bale, which I paid and added to my costs for the project.

Usually at this place, you take your semi-truck and get a couple hundred bales of hay for your farm or whatever. I drove my little pickup and handed over my ticket for the one bale, which was promptly loaded on the back of my truck, and away we went.

The bale weighs 90 pounds. I have no idea if this will be a sufficient amount of straw for my project, but we’ll find out. Below is a picture of the bale in my truck on the way home. We left a pretty neat trail of little straw pieces from Kent to our house, I think.

I called the local feed store in Kent, WA - Reber Ranch. They sell bales of straw for $5.75, which I think is incredibly reasonable. I have no real frame of reference for the average cost, so I may be way off.

I was originally assuming that for my potato project, I would need to a bale of hay - my pseudo-cosmopolitan lifestyle (local crops are limited to llamas, jumbo jets & meth) led me to think that straw and hay were interchangeable terms. Well, turns out they are not so much: Straw is made from the stalks of long grains, where hay is really just cut up grass rolled up. You put straw on the floors where your horses stand, and you feed them hay.

I have also been made privy to an alternate above-ground potato growing system. This method uses a wood box, with removable slats for the sides. You start the potato at the bottom, and cover it with dirt up to the height of the first slat. Then, as it grows, you subsequently pile more and more dirt on it as it grows taller, forcing the plant to effectively keep pace with the dirt, and thus grow up into the box. Sounds a bit more complex, but it is still in the same idea of my initial straw-centric project.

I also got a book today on Lawns, since I have no idea how to grow anything except dandelions. More when I read it.

And yes, I have a local feed store. Don’t you?

One of my gardening goals for this year is the creation an autonomous potato growing unit.

This is [theoretically] a single purpose, free standing garden, perhaps constructed from chicken wire or an old rubber garbage can and filled with straw, where I can plant potatoes and harvest them with great ease. You see, we presently have a separate garden that is laid out with wooden railroad ties that can leach nasty creosote into the ground and food grown there. In addition, an unknown number of years ago, a potato was tossed in there, causing new plants and hundreds of the little underground tubers to grow there every summer - no matter how thoroughly I attempt to dig them all up, more grow each year.

So to solve this, I will attempt to grow them above ground so that I can easily harvest them this fall.

This idea was inspired by a co-worker, whose parents use huge discarded semi-tuck tires filled with straw. Since I have no idea how to locate an old tire of that size, nor the desire to store something that large and useless during the winter, I am thinking that some chicken wire or chain link, rolled into a tube shape would reproduce the same effect.

Now Jen says, “But Matt, potatoes are cheap.” While this is definitely true, I would like to attempt this experiment to see:

a.) if growing my own potatoes is actually cost prohibitive &
b.) if home grown potatoes are better than those available in the local grocery store.

Next step: locate and price out a bale of straw.