In 2009, I introduced you to Charlotte Nelson who was beginning to garden using the straw bale method of gardening. That blog post is one of my most viewed posts to this day. You can view it here. When she emailed photos from her 2011 garden last week and asked if I would like to share more, I quickly said, "Of course!"
2009 was a very good year for gardening for Charlotte and because of that she enlarged her garden exponentially. Charlotte said, "The 2009 season was my "straw bale testing" year, and so in 2010, I increased my straw bales from 10 bales to almost 50.
"I call it my "lazy lady garden," due to the lack of digging and weeding, etc."
One thing I like about her method is now nice it looks in her yard, the grass is totally undisturbed. There is no tilling at all. Her lawn is beginning to green for the summer and is undisturbed.
I love her flowering trees. If you examine the wooded area closely (especially in the first photo). You can see flowering trees intermixed with the trees in the woods behind her straw bale garden.
This is a photo from her new section. Beautiful!
I do agree that her 2010 garden was even better than the 2009 one.
Another view. I like that she is planting marigolds in with the vegetable plants.
According to Charlotte, she had an abundant garden in 2010. I think it is one in which anyone would be enormously proud.
So what is Charlotte doing during this cold, icy weather? She said, "I am going through seed catalogs online in anticipation of the spring."
"The 2011 season is almost here and I am planning on more ideas for crops in the straw bales. I still had tomatoes in early November ... not to mention a boatload of different peppers and eggplant. I also created a small area for spinach and turnip greens to test and WOW, they did so well in the bales, too."
During the summer months, Charlotte sells her excess produce at the Surplus Vegetable Market at the Coweta Fairgrounds. I can't wait to see photos from 2011 because she certainly is an inspiration to me.
Instructions on how Charlotte created her first straw bale garden are still online here in case you want to know more.
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