It will be a while before we garden up here, but I have seen the straw bale method. One of the neighbors down the road did it that last couple years, had great looking tomatoes. I plan to put one in this year after my break last year. May switch to some long raised beds that will work a bit better for the square foot method I am using. Have a chunk of the Monk Garden to play in two as I have been assigned a section of the new kitchen garden this summer. It is around 10,000 sq feet but that is broken up by very wide paths and the actual garden spaces are much more manageable. Some raised beds, some flat areas that may end up as examples of green manure fallow years in rotation gardening. Guess it is time to get out the graph paper.