Grass to Hugelkulture Bed - lets make a wood core bed.

What do you do when you have a small wooded area with lots of fallen branches and dead wood, three horses that poop a lot and a desire for raised garden beds? You build a Hugelkultur garden. Hugelkultur, pronounced Hoo-gul-culture, means hill culture or hill mound.

It is a raised garden bed that is built from the bottom up with logs, sticks and branches, wood chips, grass clippings, manure, leaves, food scraps, egg shells, coffee grounds… everything you would put into a compost heap. Top it all off with a layer of topsoil and/or more compost and you are ready to plant.

The way it works is that as the wood decays it retains moisture and supplies nutrients to the mound. The decaying wood provides a home to the beneficial soil bugs that help break down organic matter. In the first few years the soil will warm from the decay going on so your growing season will be longer too. It can work in the desert as well as an urban backyard. It also is a great way to use dead and fallen trees that otherwise would get burned or go to a landfill.

Ideally we do not use Juglans species due to the juglone (although as long as no husks are used, it's probably fine longterm), and we try not to use fungal resistant woods such as locust and cedar, because the goal is for the wood to break down as quickly as possible. They can still be used, but the bed will just kind of sit there and do nothing for longer.

These beds can be a bit of a gimmick in my opinion - at least as far as people exaggerate how amazing they are. They are still great beds, but they just aren't the second coming. They CAN be, but it takes longer than people are willing to admit, and in that meantime you may be fighting a weed battle. They are also not ideal beds for growing greens (as people often use them for), but rather as a fungal dominated soil bed - you got it, they are TREE beds.

The bacterial to fungal transition will happen over time, more and more. So grow your pumpkins and squash in them in the first few seasons as the manure and compost remains bacterial dominated. But over time the bed will get more and more fungal, and you really want to transition it over to shrubs and trees.

Also, it's better to build these over a few months and not all at once, because they will settle. They need to be topped up regularly at first. After that, you can sow a nitrogen fixing cover into them like clover, cowpea, vetch, etc. This helps because the soil will be nitrogen depleted for a few years, due to all that buried wood.

https://mgsoc.info/2019/01/hugelkultur-what/ (pictures there, and the first few paragraphs of my description were borrowed from that site - but I added to it.)

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