Has anyone ever tried making a Hugelkultur raised bed?

[Rhys]

I was doing a bit of generalised reading and came across a permaculture technique called Hugelkultur, which is broadly building raised beds 5 – 6ft high, with the interesting feature of using logs at the base/in a trench, with each layer going up being sequently more on the road toward humus (branches and twigs, then leaves, the inverted grass sods, then soil, then straw, with everything knotted together using stick wedges/’nails’)):

http://www.permaculture.co.uk/articles/sepp-holzer-brings-hugelkultur-michigan is the article I initially read, and obviously you can find plenty on the subject through further browsing.

The originator, Josef Holzer, farms in Salzburgerland in Austria at about 1000m above sea level, where more rain fall in the summer than winter (which will obviously also fall as snow at that time of year).

From what I can read the principle is that you get benefits in terms of continuous provision of nutrients for up to 20 years from the logs once they start to break down, apparently you get very superior water retention such that watering becomes almost not required and they are also apparently verty good for growing crops requiring very rich nutrient bases (like squashes, tomatoes, celery, potato etc).

I was wondering if anyone had any knowledge/experience of this in England, since here in the SE, we could certainly do with ways of retaining water in summers where rainfall may be pretty absent or deficient for up to 2 months at a time??

[charles]

Yes these sound great but Sep Holzer made them to use up a surplus of tree trunks he was clearing on his alpine farm. For most of us, tree trunks are scarce! or valuable for burning.

In 1981 I made a mound rather than hugelbed, with twigs as bottom layer then leaves, grass and soil/compost on top. This gave good harvests for three years, same principle of slow breakdown and more practical for most of us. Moisture retention was good – but no better I felt than where using a good layer of compost.

[Rhys]

We do a reasonable amount of tree pruning each year – this year our local man took away a full truck load after he had finished his work and, as I was only thinking of dedicating 5 sqm initially if I were to do anything, we’d probably have enough stuff to build one. Branches are probably up to 15cm across, more commonly 5 – 10cm and the local roadsides have already yielded me two green waste bags worth of rotting leaves at the bottom of which there was already black soil and worms, despite being just at the side of the road!

There’s also some major work going on down the next street and some logs/tree stump pieces are sitting out the front of the house, which was why I was wondering!!

Thanks for the insights, anyway!

[zuf]

Hugels are interesting… 5000 years ago in China they were doing beds like this and they are quite common now in Europe permaculture gardening.

rtj211, with fruit tree pruning and other things you mentioned it works great.

With similar climate as you i can tell you they work, but there are challenges to grow veggies on them.

 I see them more as tree planting feautures, perennial plant ecosystems, like strawberries, and fruit bushes they work really well.

Squash and pumpkinks like them a lot, that’s true.

Usualy they get dry on top, as they are steep, unless they are head hig and around 2m wide. I usualy make them more flat and smaller for veggie garden.

Lots of rodents life in them.

More challenges that don’t come to mind right now.

So for veggies i don’t really like them. I prefer slightly raised beds made with top soil from path on top of growing area and then compost on top.

[Rhys]

Your suggestion is the way I’ve been going to go for the four main beds. I spent the summer building up a much bigger reserve of composting materials so hopefully we will have sufficient ripe stuff next year to do more than one and a half 5m * 1.5m beds that I could manage this autumn (through which winter onion, spring cabbage, spring chard and garlic are already growing/planted).

We have an extra area of less ferlile ground (about 25% less fertile due to less sun, maybe tree roots from large trees in neighbours gardens having a negative effect, and less compost to date) which is where I’m worndering about doing something. If we do it, it’ll be in autumn 2015, not now, as I already have rocket and over-wintering spring onion in the ground.

 

Cheers anyway!

[Author]

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