YES! Straw bale gardens do prevent weeds! Oh my gosh. I can’t believe how well it works.
This post is part of a series on straw bale gardening. We are following Joel Karsten’s book Straw Bale Gardening. We are trying our very first straw bale garden and letting you know how it goes.
Joel says that the straw bale gardens keep weeds down to about zero. I didn’t believe it when I read it, but I believe it after trying it. I can’t believe how well my garden is keeping out the weeds.
I really put the garden to the test because the space my garden is in now was totally neglected last year. It is almost embarrassing how bad my vegetable garden got. It was so overgrown it was practically useless. So, if there was ever a challenge in keeping weeds from growing, it was in this spot.
In earlier posts, you saw how easily I made the paths in the garden. I will never plant on dirt again. It is so nice to stroll through the vegetable garden without getting muddy. The plants are better than I have ever had and they are weed free! I bet I have pulled less than 20 weeds all summer.
Watch the video below. It’s short, and I you can see for yourself how weed free the garden is. Plus, I show you a patch that I left untouched. The difference could not be much greater.
Here’s the text of the video:
Hi this is Chris from LiveDan330.com. Today we are continuing our series on the straw bale gardens. I want to show you a little bit about how well these paths and the straw bales work at preventing weeds. You can see we just have some little things that are coming up here. They are very easy to pull out and manage at this point here. Um, There is just nothing to them. The wood chips have done a great job. We have virtually zero weeds growing in the bales themselves. I want to show you what it looked like last year. This over here was a asparagus patch and the entire garden would have looked like this had we not done something else about it. So very very happy with the way that these gardens prevent the weeds.
