Mature hugelkultur bed after 20 years
I have 5 Ponderosa Pines at the end of my yard. Sure, they're great for shade, but what do you do with trees that shed long needles all over the place and throw pinecones everywhere? Mowing the grass means patrolling the lawn and picking up all the cones before you mow. And while you're gone for a few minutes dumping the cones, the trees throw more down, just to mess up your poor abused lawnmower (I swear I'm gonna get a goat someday soon!) Those things are murder on lawnmower blades.
In an effort to avoid mowing that area, I decided to put in a "flower" bed. I had an idea to make it a forest garden, complete with a pathway. I live in an area where rainforests rule, so ferns, creepers, mosses and other shade and acidic soil loving plants were going to be my plantings. Luckily, a friend had most of those and was more than happy to get rid of unwanted baby plants.
The day before I faced the backbreaking work of digging up the area between three of the trees, I remembered something I'd read about and had wanted to try. Hugelkultur.
Intrigued? Follow me beyond the orange garden path.
Hugelkultur is a method of gardening that works extremely well in cold climates. It can extend the growing season by at least a month, which is a boon in places like Norway, Sweden and Germany. In fact that is where this idea was born. Another plus to hugelkultur is that once put in place, it requires little watering, so places facing drought could use this sort of gardening.
It still requires some heavy labour, which is why my poor body ached for a few days while building my bed. At least it didn't involve digging out a bed through heavy clay and miriad tree roots. Halfway through, I wondered if the effort was going to be worth it. And I confirmed what the neighbours already thought of me...I'm a little batty. They watched as I hauled all the stuff they'd thrown away back to my house.
Hugelkultur as described by Wiki, is a method of useing the natural process of decay to feed the plantings, similar to what "nurse logs" do in forests. This method has the added advantage of not only providing food for the plants, but also water retention and soil enhancement.
Okay...so I only want shallow mounds. I still have to remove the sod, so I can place my wood slightly below ground level in order to avoid a mound 5 feet high. At first I though I would be able to avoid that, but more research into hugelkultur showed that indeed it would be best to remove the sod in the horeshoe shaped area I wanted to put the bed in. That proved to be less backbreaking than I thought...so far so good!
Now on to collecting all the woody trash I'd need. There's a designated area for any garden waste in my seniors community. I grabbed my wheelbarrow and off I go to collect cut logs and branches. 6 trips later, my poor back was complaining loudly, but I persevered and got the wood arranged in the trough, grabbed some garden waste from a friend and added kitchen scraps, then, after a good long watering, piled the sod I'd dug up, grass side down, to cover the whole thing. That's was me done for the day. Even a hot bath in Epsom Salts didn't help much. I was exhausted and aching.
This is what the basic inside of a hugelkultur looks like:
The beginning:
Mid stage (all the filler branches and other compostables added):
End stage (sod replaced and covered with soil, ready for planting):
The next day I ached so bad, I had to resort to painkillers...that helped! After spreading topsoil over the whole thing, and placing rocks and long birch branches around the bed, I was ready to get the plants and get them in. Whew! It looks slightly out of place in a flat area, but once the plants and moss grow, it should look like it belongs there. This natural method of feeding plants from under the soil will allow my garden of delicate mosses and ferns, wild orchids, various creepers and Lily of the Valley, to grow healthy and strong without me having to disturb them by adding soil amendments and cultivating.
Some other sites on hugelkultur:
http://www.richsoil.com/...
This site has great pics of the stages of building one and some large scale use of them.
http://www.inspirationgreen.com/...
MFP today...the dratted cat and the deer have been at it already. The cat made a deposit and the deer stomped all over it on the way to eat my rhododendron. Lovely.