We have ideas in our heads about things we want to try in the garden and here is one small example of how we brought it to life. We used goat panels to build an arch so that our vines could grow up and over. The idea was to be able to walk down the middle of it and harvest during the summer. We planted watermelons, cantaloupe, cucumbers, zucchini squash, crook neck squash, basil and a few others.

The soil where we live is pure clay right where we had the space for the arch. In order to keep from drowning the plants, we brought in bales of hay to plant into. Before planting into bales, you first condition them by sprinkling fertilizer on them and watering it in for about a week. After that we put about two inches of compost on top of the bale and planted our seeds. We wanted to grow from seed rather than buying a plant from the store because there just seems to be more satisfaction from growing food from a seed.

Here is a photo of how the arch looks early in the season. The biggest issue we ran into was I placed the bales too far apart when I planted into them. Once I built the arch, I had to move one full row of bales that had plants already growing. The reason it was a mistake was that the bales were already beginning to decompose so moving them ended up having us lose some plants and causing uneven bales. The plants just didn’t grow as well in the disrupted bales. Make sure if you choose to do bales that you place them exactly where you want them before conditioning and before planting.

We knew that there would be trips where we would be out of town so we ran drip lines to the bales to enable us to not lose our plants in the summer heat. I’ll make another post on the drip lines later as well as the timer we chose to use in order to keep the watering schedule scalable.

If you look closely you can see the watermelons growing in the middle of the arch. What we found was that when a watermelon would begin to grow, the plant would send out runners to wrap around the wire to give extra strength to the plant. That would then enable it to grow without snapping off of the vine. It was incredible to see the plant adapt and grow amazing juicy watermelons.

If you have any questions about how we made the arch or why, please feel free to send us a comment.

-Sara and Jimmy

Bale Garden Growing Arch