What is going on everyone? Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast.

Kevin Espiritu here and I'm joined again by Joel Carson.

Joel is the pioneer of the Straw-Ph bail gardening method. We talked a little bit about it

and how Joel came across it in his gardening life and now we're actually going to get into

it. What exactly is the straw bail gardening method Joel? Okay if you think about

straw bail gardening as sort of a method of container gardening once you think about

the bail as being both the container and the media.

What's really important to understand is that the inside of this bail is going to go through

a rapid decomposition process, we call it conditioning, before we ever plant anything

into the bales.

And that's really essential.

What's happening during that conditioning period is we're growing bacteria inside the bale.

The bacteria are going to quickly colonize the inside of this bale and then

bacteria along with insects and worms and fungi and mold are going to go to work metabolizing the straw,

breaking the stalks and the leaves of that wheat or oats or barley or whatever rice

or whatever your straw bale is made of, breaking that leaf back down into

the cells that made the leaf and then the cells down into the compounds that made the

cells and then the compounds back down into the individual molecules that made the cells and then the compounds back down into the individual molecules that made

those compounds. Things we would recognize, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, libinium, zinc,

calcium, iron, manganese, all of the micro and macro nutrients that it takes to grow your typical

vegetable plant.

So as soon as that metabolization process begins from those, mainly from the bacteria and those molecules become

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