Swiss chard sans soil? Straw suits seedlings superbly

A nearly soil-less garden in King's County is attracting a lot of attention for the woman responsible for the idea.

Katrina Kierstead is growing vegetables in bales of straw at her home in Browns Flat.

"I have people who drive by and say, 'What in the world are you doing down there? It's something different.'"

Kierstead lives with her dog and some chickens on 50 acres that used to belong to her parents.

She took it over after her mom died and her dad moved into an assisted living facility.

Browns Flat gardener grows veggies in straw bale garden

4 years ago

Duration 2:32

Katrina Kierstead says a straw bale garden is an accessible and effective way to grow vegetables.

In her backyard she has a fenced in garden plot with several rows of straw bales, sprouting lettuce, zucchini, radishes, cauliflower, broccoli, beets, carrots, Swiss chard and herbs.

"Straw bale gardening, as far as I'm concerned, well, to me, it's the way to do gardening," said Kierstead.

New convert

She may sound like a longtime devotee, but this is actually only her second year growing produce using the straw bale method.

She first heard about it from a patient at St. Joseph's Health Centre in Saint John, where she works as a nurse in the ambulatory treatment clinic.

They were chatting about gardening and he told her about how he grew potatoes that weren't dirty.

He placed the seeds on top of about four inches of soil and covered them with another 10 to 15 cm of loose straw.

"You water and water and water and the potatoes grow," described Kierstead.

She was intrigued and decided to give it a try.

During her research, she found that other vegetables could be grown right on top of straw bales.

The potatoes she grew under straw last season turned out "huge," she said -- "about the size of a man's fist."

She liked the taste, too.

"The flavour of these vegetables grown in a straw bale is unbelievable," she said.

This year, she and a neighbour put up a fence around a 12 x 7 metrearea to protect the crops from deer and raccoons. It has four rows with five bales each.

"You can hardly walk inside of it because there's so many squash plants and the vines and cucumbers are just all over everywhere."

Pandemic therapy

Kierstead said working in her garden has been therapeutic during the pandemic.

She thinks of her vegetables and flowers as her "babies" and invites people to stop in to admire them or check out what she's doing.

"If you came and took a pea or a bean, I'd know it was missing," she joked.

Her boyfriend built flower beds around the vegetable plot, that now have more than 130 sunflowers, her favourite.

"It's crazy down there and it is so pretty," she said.

Kierstead said her neighbours call her a hippie, and some people who gather at the local store ask why she doesn't just grow a traditional garden.

"Because, I'm not traditional, first of all," said Kierstead.

Kierstead is a self-described "farmer's daughter" though, and has been gardening all her life. She's finding straw bales to be a great way to grow things.

There's little weeding required, she said, and a single bale is large enough to support six tomato plants. That's practical, for someone living in a rental who can't dig up the yard.

Bales also create a raised bed without having to build anything, she said, which is good for people who can't bend over to garden.

There is a lot of work up front, though, said Kierstead.

Getting the bales is the first step. Straw can be expensive and hard to find, she said.

Last year she got it from the Mactaquac golf course. This year she got some from a farm in the Royal Road area, north of Fredericton.

Then you have to place them out where you want them, she said, because once you start watering and fertilizing they're too heavy to move.

That's a labour intensive process, that takes up to four hours a day.

Kierstead doesn't mind. She only works part-time as a nurse and loves spending time in the garden.

"If I have some ladies from church or my friends or whatever come over, we can sit in the shade and look at something that's totally different and I don't have to go anywhere."

Sometimes she just goes to the garden to eat instead of eating in the house.

Last year, the bales began to decompose and were ready for planting after 14 days of fertilizing them.

You can tell they're ready when they start to grow mushrooms, she said.

She also used a meat thermometer and waited for them to heat up to 75 degrees. The bales also have to be lower than 98 degrees, she said, or the roots will burn.

This year, because of a cold spell in April, including a snowfall, it took 20 days before the bales were ready for planting.

But once she had them planted...

"The fertilizer kicked in and they grew and grew and grew."

She's already harvesting some greens and beans.

Every day she delights in seeing the latest sprouts

"It's Christmas morning all the time for me."