Hugelkultur??? Give it a Shot???

I read about Hugelkultur on line several places and I just happened to have a lot of wood and brush laying around. So going to give it a shot.  If you don’t know what Hugelkultur is you are not alone,I didn’t eithier. Of course I couldbe wrong and you and I are the only ones who do not know… any here is what Wikipedia has to say about:

Hügelkultur

The practice of making raised garden beds filled with rotting wood.^[16][17] It is in effect creating a Nurse log, however, covered with dirt.

Benefits of hugelkultur garden beds include water retention and warming of soil.^[16][18] Buried wood becomes like a sponge as it decomposes, able to capture water and store it for later use by crops planted on top of the hugelkultur bed.^[16][19]

The buried decomposing wood will also give off heat, as all compost does, for several years. These effects have been used by Sepp Holzer for one to allow fruit trees to survive at otherwise inhospitable temperatures and altitudes.^[17]

That said what I get from it is Lasagne bed. Just layering material over logs and rotting wood. OK so that is what I have started. I removed all the top soil from the bed and just for lack of a better place to put it I moved it inside the green house frame. This is all soil that I have been amending for several years with compost in my raised beds. I will use this on the hugelkultur bed along with the top soil from the green house site.

This is the bed with the wood and brush I had around the yard. I also used the old rotting lumber that was the other two beds.

I am not going to make a traditional hugelkultur, in that it wont be six ft tall and about 4-5 ft wide. This will be 4 ft wide and how every tall it gets. I might have to bring in some extra top soil, we’ll see.

 

this was just some shots around the yard. My better half Sharon told me that i needed something in the picture of the tree frog for scale to show how small they really are.

Going to get the IBC and two blue 55 gal drums that will be the grow beds. Once I get them and the IBC dug in I can put the green house up. I will get hem tomorrow, have to drive over Beullaville to pick them up , that will take most of the day tomorrow.  But I will be sure to get pictures.