Hugelkultur Organic Garden Bed

Creating a Hugelkultur Bed

Below are some photos of a new hugelkultur bed we are creating. The bed is actually an expansion of a berry bed. The ground to the left of the first photo is where I have baby blueberry bushes. The ground to the right is a path and then a second and established berry bed.We are widening the berry bed and narrowing the path to make room for more green chile plants. For us, hugelkultur is a way to grow in areas that most would never consider use-able. I hope by learning to grow in marginal areas I can share what I find with others and also provide encouragement to others.

Sean is digging the trench where we are putting the Hugelkultur bed. We do not till our soil. But when we are establishing hugelkultur beds in very poor areas where there is only heavy clay or mostly subsoil, we've found that double digging the bed before adding the rotted logs, twigs, trimmings, grass clippings, pulled weeds and kitchen scraps works much better. Sean decided to get a little ahead in his Spanish and listened to a Pimsleur Spanish lesson while he worked. He kept repeating the Spanish words aloud while he dug. The ditch ended up being about 22 feet long and about 3 feet wide and 22 inches or more deep. In this first photo you are facing east. The photos do not show that this is a fairly decent slope.	Jill found her own way to dig. She's hitting the shovel with a log. We experimented before deciding to double dig our hugelkultur beds. We made four beds and double dug two before adding the materials. In the other two we simply heaped the rotted wood and rest on top of the ground and then covered the heap with soil. I think because we must always start with very heavy clay, chirt and subsoil, the double dug beds did noticeably better. I will not dig into the beds ever again. They will remain strictly no-till from this point on so all the beneficial microbes will live happily ever after.
A curious spider found his way into our way! Its a bad photo but if you notice the shovel you can see our curious spider ws fairly large AND you can see that the soil is very much red clay. You can also see that intrepid bermuda that tries to take over everything. Some spots in our yard are so bad that not even bermuda will grow!	At the top of the hill we struck halfway decent dirt and we stopped digging. There is no need to dig into good dirt. We can leave soil building to the plants, worms and microbes here.
Michael, holding an ax, is down in the forest area behind our gardens, gathering rotted wood. You can't tell very well but he's standing inside half of a fallen tree that had an orginal diameter of more than 45 inches. (Michael is 6' 2'' inches tall so this stump is VERY large!) I am standing about 40 feet away and shooting this with a zoom.	The rotted stump in the previos photo is at the bottom left in this photo. The other felled tree is about 20 feet long. They have been rotting since a 1997 hurricane. Typically we try to take materials not out of the forest but out of the dry branch where they will wash away otherwise. But these logs are timber rattler havens in the dog's daytime 1/2 acre dog run. Just ten feet below these the land slopes down into one of our dry branches and then sharply slopes up into our gardens. You are facing north in the photo.
Jill is watching her dad pile up the rotted logs. These logs crumble fairly easily in our hands. If I had a better camera, close up you would see that these are full of mycorrhizal hyphae. To the right you can see that Sean is gathering the wood and transporting it to the beds. The photo shows that Sean is standing in the ditch up to about his knees. He's nearly 6 feet tall. Those rocks, by the way, will be part of the border around the bed when we are finished.
I like to put part of the rotted logs in, then put the rest of the yard refuse such as twigs, trimmings, grass clippings, etc in next and then top that off with more rotted logs. Michael cleaned the gutters which were full of acorns. He emptied four large black garbage bags full of acorns and leaves from the gutters down into the bed too. The rotted logs, twigs, leaves, kitchen scraps and weeds piled to about 22 inches deep.	Michael is viewing the results so far to see how much more to put in. Right behind him is a baby blueberry bush we chose to leave. If you are new to gardening and haven't already read my SOIL PAGE, the rotted material brings mycorrhizal fungi into the bed as well as makes a great place for all the rest of the beneficial microbes to live. Of course the rotted wood provides nutrients too!
After the second layer of rotted logs, Sean is putting in grass clippings and then leaves. LOTS of leaves. We added a good bit of kitchen vegetable scraps in as well. Sean is my chile relleno and stuffed sopaipilla nut. He's a vegetarian so I make a mean green chile stew with potatoes and beans for him that he just loves to eat. He always works hard but he's very motivated to get this bed done as it is slated for green chiles!	We also added green material. In the foreground is that dreadful ground ivy, pulled and ready to compost. We'll mix the greens in with the leaves and add kitchen compost too. Sorry about photo but I lost my light had to lighten the photo, losing resolution. We haven't decided yet whether we'll but down the redbud that you can see in the top left of this photo. I don't think its roots are much of a problem and it won't grow very large.
I thought you'd like to see what we get in the way of results. I took a little red clay from the bed we just started and placed it on top of a finished bed we did two years ago, for contrast. We keep the finished bed well mulched and I grew red clover in it last winter. Look at the difference!	The bed pictured above was established at the same time as the bed in the photo to the left and sits adjacent to it. But we did not use hugelkulture in this bed. We did keep it mulched and we did grow red clover in it last winter. Again, you can see the contrast.
We mixed amendments into the soil that we've removed from the trench. I would normally mix in some finished compost but I have none right now. I mixed rock phosphate, calcium, lime, green sand and sand into the soil before we pulled the soil, all 22 or so inches, back over the pile. The last step was planting the entire bed in rye. I chose rye because of the steep slope, hoping to prevent erosion. The rye will help the materials in the bed degrade, keep the soil from washing away and bring some much needed nitrogen into the soil. Below is a not very helpful photo of how far we are now with the rye seed scattered on the mound. The mound, BTW, will in time level out as the wood decays. I covered the entire 22 foot area so that birds won't eat my seed. I buy sheer drapes at the thrift store for a dollar for this purpose, or I use burlap, cardboard and, rarely, plastic.	We're not finished! In the spring the beds will be ready to be planted into. What we'll plant is pots! To help ensure our plants have enough soil to grow, we make 6 - 8 inch or larger paper mache' pots using flour paste and newspaper. The pots are not sturdy ones but ones with just enough paper to hold the soil. We'll fill these pots with soil and compost and then plant peppers into them. As the pots degrade, so do the materials in the hugelkultur beds. The pepper roots will soon grow out of the pots and into the beds and beds will be ready for them. The first year you should not expect a good harvest. That will come the second year and every year after that as long as you keep the beds topped off with compost and keep them well mulched or in cover crops when you are not using them. Organic gardening is about long term and not quick fixes.
Hugelkultur is in a way like growing on top of compost piles. We also do that. Below are our latest compost piles just getting started. We use this method because we have little room for our plants and must find as much growing space as possible. These bins sit just outside of a dripline of a very large white oak as well as next to our forest. The bins will get about 14 hours of sun a day but the ground is full of oak roots, making the area nearly impossible to grow in. By filling each bin with compostable materials and then topping them with soil, we can grow potatoes. As the compost degrades, the level lowers and we can mulch the potatoes, encouraging a better crop. Dogwoods line the fence behind the bins and their roots also compete in this spot; I don't want to cut my dogwoods down! To help hold moisture in the bins, I plan to slide plain cardboard in along the sides to line the inside sides of each bin. My husband can bring a lot of cardboard home and we use it as fast as he finds it. I put about 3 inches of newspaper under each pile. This kept the roots of the trees out of the piles last year and I hope will do so again this year! Around the borders of each bin I planted Fava Beans just to see if I could improve the soil a little.	Another problem with growing near the oak is that the oak takes up the moisture quickly, making the soil in this area dry most of the time. Below is a photo of the top of one of last year's compost piles. Potatoes are growing in the top. The potatoes are just getting started (seen at the tip of my finger on Jan 12th). I can easily cover these bins if we expect a very cold night or two. I'm thinking I could perhaps grow some flowers around the outer edge of the bins or perhaps peas, bean or cucumbers and just not expect a great harvest. I'd like to use that nice verticle space, that's for certain! If you have gotten this far, I have a favor to ask. Please let me know if I have made any factual errors on this page. I always welcome new information and new ideas. And if you'd like to ask more, please feel free to write me at laurabrownmckenzie ["at" symbol] att.net [I post my email address this way to prevent spiders from picking it up for spammers to use. Thanks!]