Straw bale garden problems

[judith]

My pole beans, cukes and squash leaves all have dry brown edges, circling the entire leaf . I am checking bales for water and temp and seems ok. I use a soaker hose and do it twice a day for 45 minutes. I use miracle grow. I have replanted both beans and squash and the new plants are starting to do the same. I live in NE Fl. I am 80 yrs old, was a mstr gardener for years. I no longer am able to hoe a garden so decided to try staw bales. Any suggestions?
Judith

 

[Beth_B]

Hi judith.

Good for you gardening at 80! Hope I still am.

Anyway, I did straw bales for about five years quite successfully. I've never heard of using Miracle Gro in them. I'd use either/or both fish or bone meal. Also I know it's hot (and dry?) where you live but that seems like an AWFUL lot of water, even with bales needing more water than in ground plants.

Pictures would help if you can, but I'm going with subpar fertilizer, and too much water, being the problem.

 

[judith]

Thanks for your reply Beth. I got the bone meal and the fish stuff. But I am pretty convinced the straw is contaminated with insecticide. As soon s the roots get long enough to get into the straw things start dying.

 

[Debi]

Troubleshooting strawbale gardening... This is my first year planting in bales as my rototiller finally gave out. We planted 18 bales of tomatoes, peppers, squash, mellons, cucumers and beans. We planted in late April and we live in Northern California in zone 9. We conditioned the baledfor nearly a month using 46-0-0 and and waited until we saw black spots popping up with a few grass strands and lots of mushrooms. However, I did not take a temperature reading.

My plants look absolutely stunted. They blossomed and we got a few veggies but they look a little yellow and just didn't really grow. We water twice daily for 30 min with a soaker hose and fertilize once a week with miracle-gro for veggies once a week (1oz per gallon of water) we simply hook it up to our soakers and let it do it's thing. Feeling discouraged and wondering if we should continue next year or mark it up as a bad experiment. Any ideas of what went wrong would be appreciated.