What color is my thumb? Black, Yellow, or Green?

So this year, rather than envy over other people's garden, I decided to give gardening a go myself. Yes, I have matured into a full southern woman. I have decided to blog about to document my either raging success or pitiful failure so we can once and for all discover what color my thumb really is. Green would equal a raging success and a bountiful garden, yellow would be some mild success stories, and black....well that means that I have killed all my plants.

One problem, I don't like to dig in dirt and usually go to great lengths to avoid it. Enter straw bale gardening. It is a type of container gardening where you take straw bales and condition them until they start to compost and then you plant directly into the bale. To condition the bales you have to follow this watering and fertilizing schedule to get the bales to "cook" and start to compost. Well, I have already frayed from the plan and didn't follow the fertilizing schedule. They had you dumping bags of lawn fertilizer on the bales. Uh yuck. One of my main reasons for wanting to garden is to limit the amount of chemicals we eat, so I had to find another solution. The organic conditioning process isn't as well developed so I had to use a little trial and error. This might be my demise....

Here are my 4 lovely bales during the conditioning processes.

All they are growing at this point is grass from the seeds left in the bales. I had to wait a few extra weeks to plant because of the crazy rains and the organic conditioning process. I planted on Friday (5/13) and so far not a whole lot is happening. Owen (our giant hyper dog) has had a few run ins with the bales and dug up a few things. I'm pretty sure he has murdered my cantaloupe plant. On the to do list for this weekend: build garden fence.

My first lesson, compost is way grosser than dirt even if it is just straw. Which, yes sounds obvious, but caught me off gaurd because I'm not familiar with compost of an kind and hope to never be again!

So here's hoping for green...or yellow....just please not black!