Straw Bale Gardening?

I've been reading some articles about straw bale gardening.  We are thinking about trying a few bales to see how it works for us.  I asked DH to get us four of five bales for us to plant.
I'm thinking about putting some tomatoes, squash and zucchinis in the bales.  We will still plant in the raised beds too in case the straw bales don't work out.

Have any of you ever tried straw bale gardening before?  It's tempting to me because I won't have to bend over so much (back pain) and there should be no weeding.  Another plus is at the end of the season we can compost the straw.

Looking forward to any information you may have concerning the straw bales.

I've never tried growing in straw but have read about it. It sounds interesting. I have grown in grow bags that I sewed out of landscape fabric. I've also seen people grow right in the bags of soil they bought at the store store. They just cut a hole in the bag and added a plant or some seeds.

Another thing I've seen recently was to make a layered compost bin encircled with wire fence and plant around the perimeter of the fencing. Then you water the compost pile and it feeds the plants.

I've been reading about planting tomatoes around a five gallon bucket that compost and water are put into.  We are going to try that this year also.  We have an area that DH cleared but we've never used so we're going to put some old chicken manure in it (Almost three years of sitting there manure)  and plant some tomatoes there.  

I'm hoping to get some rabbits in the next few weeks.  If we do we will use the rabbit poo in the buckets.  

These may not work like they're cracked up to do but there's nothing like trying.  

Exactly, you won't know what works for you if you don't at least try.