Local gardeners are experimenting with straw bales, taking advantage of the internal composting to help their garden grow. As a little boy growing up on a Minnesota farm, Joel Karsten wondered why the ...

Compost is black gold! It is the darling of the vegetable gardening community. So much so that people will spend untold hours and lots of back breaking labor creating it. This effort seems justified ...

Raised beds make gardening easy and productive, although it takes a bit of effort to get them set up. There are three basic ways to make raised beds: Hill up soil, surround soil with lumber or stone, ...

If you have embraced gardening at your local tack and feed store, you might be ready to move ahead with the straw bale gardening concept. It’s container gardening at its most compostable. The concept ...

Would you like to grow your own vegetables this year but simply don’t have a good garden spot? Or perhaps you want to start small and wish to avoid all the digging, weeding, and backbreaking work.

Add productive garden space and raise your planting bed with straw bale gardening. This technique allows gardeners to create raised-bed gardens on a patio, lawn or any area with poor compacted soil.

There are many ways to plant a garden. In-ground, raised beds, containers, there are choices that work for everyone. One unique type of gardening boasts many benefits and is easy to start and maintain ...

AKRON, Ohio - When Joel Karsten was growing up on a farm in Minnesota, he noticed how lushly weeds grew from rotting bales of straw. That made him wonder: If straw worked so well for growing weeds, ...

Slouching like a gardener on a hot summer afternoon, my straw bales are sagging under the weight of their growing load. Four humongous squash plants form a green umbrella with their large leaves, ...

A compost thermometer shows the temperature in the middle of a compost pile in the straw bale composting pile at the Wake Forest University Campus Garden. The ambient temperature was about 50 degrees.

A prospective outdoor gardener in a place without any viable soil faces a dilemma. Purchasing and moving large amounts of topsoil might compromise a secret location you’ve scoped out for cannabis ...