We are continuing our series Straw Bale Gardening. Today, we are talking about what to do when other plants around your garden start to over grow into your garden. This series is following Joel Karsten’s book Straw Bale Gardening. It is really important to keep your garden clear from other plants overgrowing into your straw bale garden.
The two primary reasons you need to keep other plants from overgrowing your garden is to make sure your garden gets plenty of sun, and airflow. Obviously, we want the plants to have sun. The leaves of your straw bale garden plants convert sunlight into sugar and will drive that to the fruit or tubers (or whatever part we eat). You have spent a lot of time planning your garden, make sure your garden gets the light it deserves. It will help you keep your stocks full the rest of the summer.
The other reason, is that we want plenty of airflow through the garden. This will help dry out leaves from overnight dew or rain. This is important because excess moisture on the plants increases the chances you get a bad fungus, rot, or other problem.
Finally, in my own opinion, the straw bale garden is starting to look really good. Cut back extra growth to highlight your gorgeous garden.
Here’s the audio of the video:
Hi this is Chris from LiveDan330.com. We are continuing our series on straw bale gardening. Um, We have this false indigo and some other plants that are starting to creep into our garden. We want to make sure that we cut those back because we want to have our tomato’s and the peppers to have room to grow and make sure they get air flow and to make sure they have light and this is just going to compete with them.So, in a minute, Iam going to come back here and just trim that. You can see a little bit over here too. We’ve got some grass in the back. I’m going to pull that up. We’ve got some wild raspberries that are starting to creep in here too. So we are going to get rid of those. And actually, finally, right over here… I think this is a honeysuckle. We are just going to cut that out of here because we don’t need that competing with the pumpkins. Alright, so, I just took a little snips like this and we cut away from the bales. Um, you can see right here we cut the false indigo in about a third, we also ripped up the grass and the blackberries and raspberries that were growing back there. So, this is going to get a lot of extra room and breathing air to flow there and make sure our plants get plenty of light as well. Um, that’s really the only purpose so were done.
