Anybody used hugelkulture? share thoughts, please

[Joel_BC]

I’m wondering who here has tried hugelkulture. If you have, I have a few questions…

Have you felt that production of edibles from the hugel(s) was high, or not (compared with other methods you’ve used)?

Do you feel the hugel (mound or high-raised bed) is a good use of space, and a good use of your available soil for the amount of “footprint” involved?

Did you prepare your hugel(s) by hand or using a machine quite a bit? Have you decided the productivity made the preparatory work (with the logs, etc) involved worthwhile?

What do you feel about the effort involved in harvesting from the hugel, as compared with other growing layouts/formats you’ve used?

At what point (year one, year two, etc) did your hugel become impressively productive?

If you’ve decided the hugel was successful for you, I’m interested in what kind of soil you have (e.g., loamy, sandy, clayish… whatever?)

Looking forward to the voice of experience.

 

[Lazy Gardener]

I have a HK bed in progress. I am only building it b/c I have a nasty spot left over from having a lot of tree removal and earth work done. The site is heavy clay, and some gravelly sub soil mixed in, with plenty of large sized rocks. It is about 40' long, with the high elevation butting up to the flat area that would/could be lawn. My chicken coops are also close to that area. It slopes down to an area that would require a huge amount of fill to make it useable. I had a lot of dead wood available, so decided to build a HK into that bank. I've completed about 16' of it. all without any power equipment. I did not have the benefit of the recommended trench, so it is constructed with logs piled up, covered with lots of leaves, garden debris, coop litter, soil stolen from other locations, grass clippings. So, you might consider it to be a HK/lasagna hybrid. The area planted has produced very well. But, it required lots of watering due to the many voids left between the logs due to not having the needed soil to construct it properly.

Here's my take on the method: It is viable, but only for the home owner who has a site that would otherwise be not usable. And only if you have the materials on hand to create the Hk. I would not use wood to construct a HK if that wood could be used to heat my home. If you have a lot of dead wood to get rid of, a site that needs this kind of management, it's a worth while project. It would be awesome as a way to manage water drainage. And it would be awesome if there were power equipment to build it according to the recommended technique including starting with a trench, and topping it off with the soil removed from the trench.

It is a huge amount of work if building without power equipment.

Last season, I grew a huge crop of squash in the small completed area. Most of the hubbards were 20 - 30#.

 

[freemotion]

I talked about this in another thread recently. I made a hugelculture bed for my raspberries a few years ago and production was immediately four times what it was in the rows where I got my plants. The only machinery I have is a shovel and a wheelbarrow. I used deadfall from a storm a couple or three years previous to building the bed. The first layer that I covered that with was stall and coop cleanings. I topped that with compost and then ramial wood chips. The soil underneath was pretty much pure sand that barely even grew grass. Details of the project are on my blog.

 

[baymule]

I made a hugelculture bed. I found it to be not so great. I made a high one, like described on Permies and was disappointed with the results. Then the chickens discovered it and scratched away lots of the mulch. Because it was high, it was hard to keep the rain from washing the mulch and soil down. It's maybe 4' high. I had LOTS of dead timber and I thought it was a good way to use it. I still do. I am going to re-work it and re-mulch it.

I dug a trench just outside the garden fence on the low end and buried large tree trunks. My thinking was to stop erosion, trap moisture, and it has done so. I planted grapevines on the fence, but by the time the nursery shipped them it was HOT here and they all died.

I recently dug a few trenches, filled with wood chips, covered back up with soil and then topped with wood chips. I am going to plant purple hull peas.

We spent last summer cleaning an acre of green briar infested forest. There are a few low spots that we piled dead branches in. We cleaned out the barn and covered them with horse manure. I'll plant clover seed on the piles this coming fall.

I am also using the BTE wood chip mulch method. Our first year here was a total failure. The soil is sand-like beach sand. The second year we hauled pine shavings from a horse event center, wintered pigs in the garden and the 2nd year was only half a failure. This year is starting out good, lots of wood chips to hold the moisture in.

On the tall hugel beds, for me at least, the jury is still out.

 

[Joel_BC]

I was suddenly locked out of Permies at one point, too. And I agree that many of the ideas are theoretical and have not been tried. Or have not been tried in comparison with more realistic ways of doing things. I followed the owner some years ago and found him to be a big talk no action type, unable to answer any questions on anything he posted. He mostly posted other people's ideas and at one time use this forum to direct people to his site.

The agricultural exemplar they most often point to on the Permies site is Sepp Holzer (Google that name with Google Images and you'll get a swack of hits). There's also a Wikipedia article about Holzer. Thing is, he inherited a multi-generational farm with farm equipment to move earth around. And he developed his own methods & techniques over many years.

Some of Holzer's experiments didn't work out, some did - so he's continued with the ones that worked. But his approach to various things developed in-place. So some of the aspects of his approach wouldn't necessarily work in other situations.

I'm not sure if his farm in itself is a profitable business, it might be... But I've read that his household earns money by conducting paid tours.

 

[milkmansdaughter]

@freemotion, thanks for the link. I read your information on the raspberries.

 

[freemotion]

@freemotion If production is that good, this can be a great way for gardeners with limited space (for example city and town dwellers) to get good productive gardens in limited space?

Can you share some pics of your project please?

Yes, the difference is amazing. I also find production has gone up dramatically with BTE gardening. Pictures of the raspberry bed project are detailed on my blog.

http://blueviolafarm.blogspot.com/2012/04/hugelkultur-raspberries.html?m=1

 

[Joel_BC]

I asked all of these questions on the Permie site and got shut out of the site. Apparently they didn't like pointed questions as to the efficacy of this method for producing food, as no one could really give me a definite answer as to if the work involved and space involved yielded more food~or even as much food~ than the traditional gardening on flatland.

I'm a member of Permies.com. My status there is not all that high - I'm identified, I believe, as a standard organic gardener (but a serious one).

I respect the site in that I believe its aims are to promote & discuss permaculture design & methods that are associated with it (or emerging within the permaculture movement). The people at the center of site management at Permies are dedicated to that. But I have found some experienced homesteaders and small-scale farmers on the site.

 

[Beekissed]

I find many of the "permie" ideas regarding gardening and livestock production are impractical, at best, and downright silly, at worst. The chicken house brush pile is an example of incredibly silly thinking and the one perched on hay bales, was needlessly cumbersome and labor intensive for the expected outcome.

Mounding up wood and soil into a mound in order to plant a few shrubs or perennial type food stuff seems, to me, to be a huge amount of work for too little pay off. One could just layer in compost materials over time and get the same sustainability, moisture retention, and good yields, so I'm not a huge fan of the whole hugel type gardening unless one has a problem area in the yard~big hole filled with brush/wood/rocks and has a pile of said materials there and want to use the space anyway, though I am on board for permaculture.

 

[freemotion]

Thanks. I went to your blog, too.

The blog date indicates you established the raspberry hugel in 2012. Do you have pictures of the raspberry bushes from later years? That'd be fun to say (and probably impressive, from what you're relating).

Actually, they grew to full fighting height that very year. I got that quadruple harvest that first season. Ever since then, the harvests are huge and the big battle is beating back all the shoots every spring. If I wanted to I could have acres of raspberries right now.