Community
Growing in a bale
Surely growing in a straw bale couldn’t possibly be as good as growing in the soil… …
March 24, 2017
No Comments
Surely growing in a straw bale couldn’t possibly be as good as growing in the soil… …
An ongoing documentary series celebrating sustainable communities and ecovillages around the world is promoting the off-grid way of life. Living in the Future hosts a free online series, a regular blog and a set of three feature documentaries – Ecovillage Pioneers, Lammas and Deep Listening – which follow the development of ecovillages, and communities, around the world.
Ecovillage Pioneers follows filmmaker Helen Iles’s search to find various sustainable, affordable, alternatives to our modern, consumptive way of life. Her journey takes her to a permaculture village in Australia, small communities in Ireland, Somerset and the Gower Peninsula, the more established Findhorn Foundation in Scotland, and the Centre for Alternative Technology in mid-Wales – all projects that inspired Lammas, the UK’s first legal low-impact settlement.
The second film, Lammas: How To build An Ecovillage, shares the highs and lows of the nine trailblazing families who embarked on the pioneering venture to create their homes and a community while dealing with the nightmares of planning applications. After more than six years of planning and construction, Lammas is now a successful off-grid community, spanning almost 50 acres of depleted pasture land in Pembrokeshire, Wales.
Living in the Future’s online series celebrates the innovative and creative individuals who are finding new ways to build self-sustainable houses, including Rachel Shiamh, who won a Grand Designs Award for her two-storey load-bearing straw-bale home in Wales – the first two-storey load-bearing house in the UK, and only the second in Europe.…
I have always loved the idea of using straw or hay, lots of it in my garden as a thick mulch, I follow the Ruth Stout methods of gardening. Then came strawbale gardening, planting directly in the strawbale itself, I witnessed one of these gardens planted by a neighbor who had very rocky soil and couldn’t grow anything before, her tiny strawbale garden exploded with veg, it was very happy there.
Now I discover that with all the pesticides and poisons that are being sprayed, it’s now a problem for those of us who just want to garden using straw or hay. I was under the assumption that if you got something that was used for animal food and bedding that it must be safe, turns out I was making huge and incorrect assumptions.
It seems that it is common practice for the farmers to spray their fields with weed killer and pesticides, it’s apparently not a major issue for the animals eating it, though honestly I can’t see how it can be good for them. But once these contaminated bales hit your soil, they can and do affect how your are able (or not) to grow your food. What you thought was safe and organic is not so safe to use.
What can you do? You must find out the history behind that bale of hay or straw before purchase, find an organic grower and stick with them, yes it may cost you more, but how much is your health worth? You might even be able to get a better price on “old” or spoiled hay or straw from an organic grower.
You can learn more about this here:
https://thegrownetwork.com/hidden-dangers-straw-bale-gardening/
…