14 ms·
Hugelkultur: Raised Garden Beds
- sidpatil 6y agoComposting is one of the most fascinating and useful technologies in existence—it is an environmentally-friendly method for organic waste management, resulting in a product with uses in agriculture, land/water management, and environmental remediation. I don't know why we don't do much more of it.
- ethanwillis 6y agoI think there just arent a lot of big businesses built around it. I'm actually planning on starting a compost business next summer. I've been planning out the process for the past 6-8 months and my go to market plan for it.
- maxerickson 6y agoHow will you sterilize it? Bad to remove the bacteria. Good to not spread invasive species like worms and such.
- ldiracdelta 6y agoIn USA the ship has sailed on European earthworms a loooong time ago. Combating that is like hitting a river with a stick.
- pfdietz 6y agoWell, we could import that giant leech that eats earthworms. :)
- AareyBaba 6y agoThen we could need cane toads to eat the leeches!
- ethanwillis 6y agoI think I've read this book.. eventually a lady will have to eat an elephant
- maxerickson 6y agoI didn't say "European earthworms", I said "worms and such". It's probably an okay idea to just slow the spread of various earthworms from Asia. There's lots of things that live in soil. We don't have to help them spread.
- tomjakubowski 6y agoSorry for the off topic tangent but your juxtaposition makes me wonder, are there species of bacteria that have been considered "invasive" on geographic scales? Like, one inadvertently brought by humans from one place to another, where they are now endemic and have disrupted the local ecosystem.
- jaggederest 6y agoThe classic example is old world / new world diseases. I believe syphilis is largely a new world disease, and athlete's foot was largely an old-world disease, along with of course smallpox, typhus, measles, etc. https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/qian/resources/NunnQianJEP.pdf https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/qian/resources/...
- ethanwillis 6y agoThat's a really good question that I don't have a solid answer to at the moment. The specific type of composting I'm doing is two phase. First I'm doing an anaerobic phase and then taking the output of that, pH balancing it if necessary, then feeding it to composting worms I've been breeding. Then I take the worm castings from them and bag that up. The initial source is really the problem. I'm taking local yard waste so it should be fine to redistribute locally, but sending it out further to other areas of the country could pose a problem. Ideally the anaerobic phase of the composting process should kill any invasive species in the compost, but maybe it won't. I know typically people go for an aerobic composting process and bank on the heat killing any pathogens in the compost.
- foxhop 6y agoThe easy answer is to only sell locally, in this way you don't need to sterilize and it doesn't cost as much to transport fertility which can be made on site, around the globe!
- ldiracdelta 6y agoI think there are quite a few such businesses, but maybe not in your area. I grew up going to such places with my Dad way back to the 80s. There is prior art before you take the plunge :-)
- aidos 6y agoI’m only just starting to get into gardening and we have a lot of garden waste to try to deal with (including a lot left by the previous owners). In the last few places I’ve lived, the previous occupants have always left a big pile of garden waste and it’s just sat there. Turns out you actually need to put in some effort to make compost - it’s really a big organic system that needs nurturing. Also, it does take a long time; months to years, apparently - but I’m not quite there yet so I’m no expert.
- alexose 6y agoThere are so many opinions on how to compost that it can be hard to know where to start! In this gardener's opinion, however, Charles Dowdings' teachings on compost are absolutely fantastic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kf6CGj7xpFE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kf6CGj7xpFE
- kampsduac 6y agoIt takes nurturing if you want to speed up the process, but this is optional. If you have long-standing piles of organic matter in a sunny location, make a garden bed there and you'll be blown away by how fertile the soil is.
- carapace 6y ago> a big pile of garden waste That's called a midden and it's a great way to get rats.
- foxhop 6y agoI can finish compost in as little of 30 days in the right time of year, with the right inputs. Cold compost process takes a couple years, hot compost takes months. Hot compost is great for kitchen gardens, cold compost is great for food forests. Hot Compost is bacteria dominant. Cold compost is fungal dominant.
- alexose 6y agoI agree, compost is amazing! I'm a small-scale farmer (maybe a large-scale gardener?), and one thing I've found about composting is that you just need a lot of material. Even at my small scale, it's almost an overwhelming amount of work to bring in the necessary inputs, or even just to move it around. One reason people turn to synthetic fertilizer, I think, is because of how incredibly nutrient-dense it is. A 30 pound bag of 20-20-20 fertilizer has a similar amount of nitrogen as an entire pickup truck bed of horse manure. If you've loaded/unloaded a pickup full of manure several times, you start to see synthetic fertilizers very differently :) A lovely aspect of hugelkultur is how little labor it requires over time, and how it uses logs as its main input. Logs are easy to find, easy to move, and decompose over many years if used this way.
- themgt 6y agoI have a garden in a front-yard with rock-hard clay. I'm no ideologue and still use synthetic fertilizer, but composting has been fantastic as well. First of all, after recycling and composting, I have very little trash waste - maybe a 10 gallon trash bag every couple weeks. Even junk mail and most packaging goes in the compost. Every so often driving by Starbucks I'll grab some of their giant "Grounds for Your Garden" bags and add that in too, and so the overall volume of compost is pretty high. After digging into the rock-clay a foot or two, I add soil+compost+logs and line each bed with logs that hold its shape but also compost into the ground over time. As you say I've put in very little effort after the initial, but the improvement over a few years in the entire yard has been dramatic - it's basically been brought back to life. The loop from garbage -> compost -> plant food -> my food is great, honestly makes me feel better about garbage. Highly recommended pandemic project.
- alexose 6y agoWow, you've described my situation almost exactly. Where my garden is now was nothing but hardpan and rocks. It's taken quite a bit of work over four years to "terraform" the area back to life. I've done a mix of techniques, but at the end of the day I've just found that the more organic material you can bring in, the better. I'm still looking for that silver bullet, though-- Something that can be deployed inexpensively at scale. I'm particularly excited to experiment with fracking daikon this winter (https://www.restorationseeds.com/products/fracking-forage-radish https://www.restorationseeds.com/products/fracking-forage-ra...). Anyway, it's validating to know that someone else has independently arrived at the same conclusions as me :)
- ip26 6y agoAt an industrial/commercial scale, there are probably significant challenges ensuring your input stream is all actually compostable. The same sort of problem faced by recycling- which impairs its commercial viability. That said, my county is planning on building a commercial compost facility as part of a strategy to stop spending money building landfills. 50% of our current non-recycling waste stream is allegedly compostable. I hope it pans out.
- alexose 6y agoGood point. I wish we could decide as a society to move away from non-compostable packaging. In most cases, composting seems to be a better, cheaper, and less energy intensive solution than recycling. I have to give Amazon a lot credit towards this effort. They never use glossy cardboard (yay!), and their tape actually breaks down in my compost heap (although the labels don't). I recently got one of their new bubble envelopes, too, which appear to be made out of thick paper and cellulose. Super cool.
- pfdietz 6y agoThe local organic grocery switched from polypropylene to compostable cardboard for the containers for their hot food bar. Sounds good, right? But why is it that sauces and oils don't soak into this "compostable" cardboard? Let's dig a bit on the net... hmm. The cardboard is coated with perfluoroalkanoates, chemicals similar to the old Scotchguard that won't break down even in a compost pile. Oh dear.
- genericone 6y agoAt commercial scale, I think what is done on more modern farms is cover cropping after a cash crop is harvested, with a winter that kills the cover crop before seeds develop. Before is dies and becomes a thin compost residue layer, the cover crop is photosynthesising and converting carbon dioxide into carbon and other nutrients which exude through the roots into the soils, keeping the microbiology alive for the spring crop. That live soil is going to be as good as compost, and it doesn't need to be disturbed like compost normally is.
- wcerfgba 6y agoY'all might find this project I discovered recently interesting :) https://www.makesoil.org/ https://www.makesoil.org/
- pascalxus 6y agoi totally agree. I haven't seen a single apartment complex with a community compost area, even here in supposedly green california. It should be a standard thing that's everywhere, like parks. and whoever's stopping by can vaulunteer to do the turning, once in a while or there can be a sign up sheet. Gardeners like myself would kill to get a good compost for our gardens.
- hnick 6y agoYou can even cook with with! One of the traditional ways to make black garlic is to tie it in a jar and bury it in compost which cooks it low and slow over weeks.
- shawnz 6y agoThe author notes how there are advantages to having the bed raised, like less irrigation required, but why can't you get the same effect by burying the logs instead?
- jchmbrln 6y agoAlso, either way, what kinds of plants can you grow without irrigation or rain for a full summer? I'm guessing only ones whose roots go deep enough into the pile?
- quixoticelixer- 6y agoAlmost any plant (except in very dry areas).
- jchmbrln 6y agoIn this context, what's a very dry area? I get 11-12" of rain annually; generally none May through October.
- minerjoe 6y agoExactly. The apex of the hugel is fruit trees and perennials. with annuals filling in as they can. Zepp Holzer, the originator of the word, scatters seed mixes with great numbers of different species while at the same time planting out many fruit, nut, and other trees.
- NedFlaymer 6y agoAnd what's interesting is that the roots of short and mid height vegetation join together, creating a dense mat of roots and fibers, that contain a surprising amount of mostuire. When you combine that with spongy soils, buried wood, and shade they provide localized cycles of fluids and humidity. Overall it makes for much more resilient and productive food systems. Though you have to pay more attention to what you are doing. If you plant one by one, neatly spaced apart, you won't have this type of nutrient cycling and moisture uptake.
- biztos 6y agoI wonder: 1. Is this effective without "sod," i.e. can you just shovel your local dirt onto it? 2. Would it work with wood chips? The second point is interesting to me because I know someone who's about to come into a large quantity of 100% organic natural pine chips and has no idea what to do with them, other than pay someone to take them to the dump.
- alexose 6y agoLots of gardeners would love to take those wood chips off his hands! There's even a clever startup for this exact problem (see: https://getchipdrop.com/ https://getchipdrop.com/)
- oh_sigh 6y agoGrassed over improves water entry to the hill (instead of forming small streams and running downhill as it might on a dirt hill), and also prevents erosion. It would work with wood chips just fine, but you may want to supplement with actual logs as well. Otherwise you'll need to build your hill very high, or keep rebuilding the hill for a few years(a pile of wood chips has way more air in it than a log, and will compress way more than log would).
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- markdown 6y agoWood chips would work better for the short term, but for long-term use (on the scale of 1-3 decades), using logs would be better.
- aliswe 6y agoHugelbeds are said to be "needed" of rebuilding in about 3 years before their production efficiency deteriorates Edit: That said I agree with the short term distinction for wood chips. Edit 2: I'm guessing the 3 year thing comes from the breaking down of everything except the logs.
- foxhop 6y ago
- brainzap 6y agoHügelkultur
- everybodyknows 6y agoHügel: hill or mound https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/german-english/hugel https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/german-english/...
- contingencies 6y agoI wonder if there are any cultures that aren't associated with hills?
- mahaganapati 6y agoOr Huegelkultur
- seotut2 6y agoThe juxtaposition of diesel tractors and permaculture seems a bit weird to me. Wasn't the point of permaculture to make it more sustainable, less resource intensive and less environmentally destructive? If you already have tractors and heavy machinery, intensive agriculture is within reach.
- mahaganapati 6y agoTo your point, I would say that the machinery has a negligible impact compared to the benefits of permaculture, and if makes permaculture more productive without greater risk, then it seems good. That is, we shouldn't have some kind of Luddite purist view of permaculture - it should be practicable. Things like this help to break the stereotype that permaculture is just hippies chanting in a field that conventional agriculture proponents seem to believe and do perpetuate.
- foxhop 6y agoAffirmative, use the best tools for your context, especially when those tools were used to destroy the natural system that used to be there. (My land was filled with stone and gravel with 4-6 inches of soil ontop using machines...) Use any means nessasary to move the current system into one that will self-renew and self replicate. That's permaculture. Set into motion a permanent self-renewing system!
- cheeseprocedure 6y agoThe permaculture community emphasizes the concept of “appropriate technology,” which depends on context but generally means “seek simple/low-impact approaches.” If you’re building large low-input beds that could last for a decade or more, a tractor might be an appropriate tool given your local constraints vs. a crew of horses/humans and a great deal of time/energy.
- minerjoe 6y agoZepp Holzer is the master of this dichotomy. The thought is that Humans have already used (abused?) machinery such as bulldozers and chainsaws to drastically reduce the water holding capacity of the landscape, and our task is to use these machines in one big push to drastically improve the water holding capacity of the land permanently and then to not need to use them any longer. See any of Zepp's large scale projects. He has been successful, and failed a few times, in projects all over the world with some amazing transformations.
- llamataboot 6y agoCan also accomplish the same thing (on a shorter timeframe) with lasagna raised beds. I have been using layers of grass clippings and leaves as the bottom 60% or so of my raised beds when new (and then adding some layers over the next years) for a while now, and the plants seem to do almost ridiculously well with no weeding and no fertilization required.
- llamataboot 6y agohttps://www.bbg.org/gardening/article/make_a_lasagna_garden_in_a_raised_bed https://www.bbg.org/gardening/article/make_a_lasagna_garden_...
- orasis 6y agoHugelkultur is a nice idea until you try to plant something the subsequent year - you can’t dig because there are still too many damn sticks.
- jagger27 6y agoI don’t see the problem if you’re just planting small seedlings or doing direct sowing.
- orasis 6y agoIt's not a problem if thats all you'll ever do with that piece of real estate. The tradeoff is future flexibility.
- aliswe 6y agoWhat jagger said, also Sepp almost exclusively relies on small machinery to do his work iirc. Edit: like mini diggers.
- fluffernutter 6y agoThis will become useful for my move away from the Bay.
- schmichael 6y agoHugelkultur is neat and if it works for you that's great. However there's little to no rigorous science behind it and traditional raised beds have some advantages (although some disadvantages). http://pubs.cahnrs.wsu.edu/publications/pubs/fs283e/ http://pubs.cahnrs.wsu.edu/publications/pubs/fs283e/ On a hike the other day I was excited to see "natural hugelkultur" at many stages of development: fallen trees along the trail at Barlow Wayside near Portland, OR create earthy berms. You can see every stage of decomposition: newly fallen trees, fallen trees with ample ferns and seedlings sprouting, and earthen berms covered in vegetation that are basically hugelkultur.
- minerjoe 6y agoThe nurse log [1] is well studied and the hugel gets much of it's benefit from the same ecological processes. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurse_log https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurse_log
- schmichael 6y agoAh thanks for the link! I didn't know the term for "natural hugelkultur." I don't mean to denigrate hugelkultur, rather just point out it's a folk practice based on mimicking a well understood natural process. Since it's largely used for hobby farms and gardens where enjoyment is far more important than yield, it hardly matters whether it's a folk practice or the latest agtech discovery. Just be careful not to cause drainage issues with all those berms slowly eroding! Nature can take advantage of that process optimally while in your yard it might just cause a damper basement.
- asah 6y agoAnother way to ask this: how does hugelkultur logs/material compare with a similar volume/mass/cost of other material e.g. traditional soil. My guess is it does pretty well: traditional soil struggles to retain water, which can be scarce and even when it's plentiful water is difficult to optimize for high density gardens, especially urban gardens. If I understand the hugelkultur design, the sod/straw layer keeps the berm from eroding.
- minerjoe 6y agoI've help build a few of these, some using heavy machinery. The linked article is a bit misleading, in its "without irrigation" bit and the time it takes to get a fully established system. As with almost everything related to nature, "it depends". In Montana, where the author of the article resides, I've seen my share of hugels fail miserably without irrigation. For us here, I think the biggest advantage is the elevated soil temperatures in the spring due to the steep slope, but with that also comes an irrigation demand.
- aliswe 6y agoDoes anyone have ideas on what to do in a desert climate? I would love to try a variation on this in Saudi Arabia. I've read much about this but since it's on HN I might as well throw it out there, you often get unexpected expert input here. Edit: I'm thinking of doing the hugelbed but kinda upside down, under ground.
- chris1993 6y agoSwales, maybe?
- aliswe 6y agoI think swales should be part of the solution, sort of!
- splittingTimes 6y agoI think you need a more encompassing approach. Permaculture might be something for you. They have developed specialized techniques for all climate zones. For example check out the "Greening the desert" project. https://youtu.be/2xcZS7arcgk https://youtu.be/2xcZS7arcgk
- fouc 6y agoNice video. This made me think about the potential of overlooked and possibly "cheap" land that could end up highly productive after just a few years.
- aliswe 6y agoI really dislike the idea of continuously having to water in order to keep plants alive. If that will be the case, I feel it's not worth doing. I mean that's the case none of these projects have REALLY taken off at scale.
- AlotOfReading 6y agoThere are people who have spent thousands of years farming in environments as arid and hot as Saudi Arabia. What's out there isn't as well-marketed as permaculture, but it's also a lot less woo-woo and proven to be sustainable. In my area (California), I've found dryland techniques from Arizona natives to work extremely well. Considering Arizona is around the same climate as Saudi Arabia, but with more rivers, I suspect they'd probably work there too. Nabhan's Enduring Seeds captures the general principles decently, but the technical information is scattered about in various places. You may have even more luck with things like Sorghum (a highly drought-tolerant African crop) in a more local system.
- AdrianB1 6y agoI see many countries jumping to idea of such gardens, they can get more in property taxes for the surface than a flat one.
- gdubs 6y agoI’ve been considering hugelkultur as one option for the massive amount of poplar we will soon have on our hands. It’s taking over, and a hazard to our structures, so it’s gotta come down. (We’ll replace with more appropriate trees.) My one concern is that the poplar will simply start sprouting again. It root-suckers, aggressively. One other thing to note is that if you do anything on a slope, it would be wise to at least chat with a structural engineer about it. I’ve heard tale of people building hugel mounds on contour / swales, and basically creating landslide conditions. Edit: another thing I’m curious is how advantageous the water retention actually is. A lot of species really want a lot of drainage, and won’t survive with wet feet.
- dendroverse 6y agoTo reduce root suckers cut the tree in the fall and apply an herbicide to the cut. The root system will pull the herbicide as it would have the carbon from the leaves. This will kill the root system and suckers.
- foxhop 6y agoAbout half of my food forest is dedicated to poplar a very fast growing semi hardwood. We cut a mother tree down and hundreds of Poplar clones sprouted from its roots. I selected to keep 30 of them and my idea is to pollard them every few years for a constant supply of semi-hardwood stakes for building fences and staking tomatoes, and more. Videos on my YouTube channel, search "Russell Ballestrini Poplar". A sharp machete can topple a 2 year old poplar sapling/clone into a stump roots with a single swipe. Don't worry about it. These poplars are pioneer species, which harvest carbon from the air and store it into wood! Use these baby trees as trellis for cucumber, peas, and beans. Then research the pollarding techniques of yesteryear for yearly maintenance. Great shade givers as well!
- contingencies 6y agoOn the subject of horticulture, there are still a great many amazing plants that aren't well understood and which resist cultivation. In addition it seems some fundamentally accepted default processes in the horticultural industry are ripe for review - for example, I read a paper recently which threw the conventional root hormone application wisdom for cuttings out the window: in that study it was found application atop a cutting (in the species covered) was superior to application below a cutting as conventionally taught. If things this fundamental are up for discussion, it would seem clear that we are really only at the relative tip of the iceberg in our understanding of biological systems and horticultural practice. I suspect advancements in the next few years in areas like: new high yield crop combinations, improved robotic tilling/sewing/fertilizing/weeding/harvesting mechanisms, increased understanding of a broader variety of species seed germination requirements, combined horticulture/mycoculture/bryoculture strategies, autonomous tissue culture, autonomous offshore aquaculture and harvesting, etc. Robotics really should be a huge enabler here. I already have a robotics factory in China and the personal and commercial motivation to build solutions in this space and am actively studying horticulture. Email me if you'd like to collaborate, have agricultural know-how and/or land and the medium to long term interest to collaborate, fellow startups welcome. Basically I am constrained by available land and time, don't believe in the long term economics of indoor/heavily synthetic conditions, and believe we are fundamentally at a crossroads for more sustainable, higher density agricultural practices enabled by new, more precise technology and more holistic conceptions of agricultural systems.
- varikin 6y agoI would love to see this paper you mention. My wife loves all things green. Our house is filling up with house plants, which I am OK with as long I am not in charge of them. And the more she plant outside, the less I have to mow. But anyways, she does a lot of cutting and if there is something else that can work, I would love to share it with her.
- adrianN 6y agoYou could replace your lawn with a more natural meadow. You only have to mow them once a year.
- NedFlaymer 6y agoHugelkulture is great. It will jumpstart the soil in even the most degraded of conditions. It provides time release moisture, the right combination of fibers, sugars, and micronutrients for fungi and bacteria, and plenty of spatial complexity for insects and such, which also accelerate the nutrient cycling process. It all combines synergistically to provide better conditions for the propagation of biotic life, in general. Though I've run into some problems with early beds in Brazil. As there are a lot of ants that live in old trees and love to much on leafy plants. The important thing in this case is to make sure your wood is completely underground, with no interface aboveground. If you're patient (as you should be) A healthy soil will, over the long run, prove to be protropic. Which means that soils improve, and this can happen because of, rather than in spite of, intensive cultivation. Important names: Sepp Holzer is an Austrian most responsible for popularizing this technique. He's known for using macroelements like rocks lakes and cliffs to create the climactic conditions capable of growing cherries and lemons (in the Swiss Alps). He also has a very interesting of cultivating (my favorite way) that is most likened to companion or guild planting, but he doesn't organize his plantings into neat little rows. He takes a patch of wilderness and tills it under, then goes out and throws out buckets of seed blends and leaves it alone. I personally prefer covering it with a banana leaf grass clippings or mulch cover, during the germination phase. Depends on where you are and what you are planting. Geoff Lawton did an incredible experiment in Israel. He greened the desert. He took a bulldozer and built a really long swale along the slightest slope and mulched it. Then the project ran out of money so they abandoned it. After a few years he managed to make his way back and checked on it. He found the mulch was teeming with fungi and mites. Species no one in living memory had ever seen. There were ducks and chickens and all kinds of interesting shrubs and fruit bearing trees. He built an oasis where everyone is running out of water, and resorting to using desalinated seawater and massive greenhouses to grow food. Check out the video on YouTube. Geoff Lawton Greening the Desert. Emilia Hazelip has done some interesting work with raised beds and mulching. With that she manages to keep out the weeds, control temperature, contain moisture, and accelerated microbiotic nutrient cycling. I like her work a lot, and have found it most effective. Another Important people of note is Bill Mollison. We need more people like this. Following through with their work. Sorry guys but throwing concrete dust on fields is not a good idea!!!
- foxhop 6y agoI have a 5 year old food forest at my house. I take videos and upload to YouTube. Checkout my channel: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC1eySW_9TiI5wnvTnIIw2Nw https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC1eySW_9TiI5wnvTnIIw2Nw I have 5 year old hugelkultur beds and 1 year old beds and everything in between. They really do work and are a blast to work with, each one a little bit different. If your into this stuff please subscribe as I'm trying to grow my channel over 100 so I can unlock some YouTube platform features which I'm currently blocked on. (Namely live streaming from my mobile phone)
- thehouseplant 6y agoThere you go, I am officially subscriber #100. Thanks for taking the time to make so many informative videos.
- BeefySwain 6y agoWhat video would you say is the best starting point for a newcomer to your channel?
- foxhop 6y agoThis playlist should show land transformation and give some of the theory behind growing food in this way. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPqlh_ebFYDFE86vPFjEYixegxjQueIvf https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPqlh_ebFYDFE86vPFjEY...
- spikej 6y ago
- foxhop 6y agoOn a small scale you can try hugelkultur in a pot. Works great for nursery baby trees. The baby trees root I to the log and use it to regulate water and also form relationships with the fungi decomposing the wood. Use plenty of Compost.
- lindaberry 6y agoHello guys I’m Linda from Georgia looking for serious relationship here’s my email lindaberry229@gmail.com
- lindaberry 6y agoChat me up on my hangout lindaberry229@gmail.com
- chmod775 6y ago> I had to spend some time with google to find the right spelling. Well... here goes the nitpicking. The German word is "Hügelkultur". If you for some reason can't use an Umlaut, the proper spelling would be "Huegelkultur".
- ben0x539 6y agoThanks, this irks me disproportionally. People gotta respect our stupid proprietary vowels!!
- washicalendar 6y agoI don’t blame anyone for not knowing that ü = ue if they don’t speak German, but if you are/were one of those people who didn’t know this and just ignored the umlauts altogether (Hügelkultur -> Hugelkultur): the ü and u, ä and a, ö and o... are all different letters. They are not simply modifications to the letters a, o, and u. They are different letters entirely, which can also be represented as ae, oe, and ue. But they are NOT the letters ae, oe, ue, if that makes sense.
- slim 6y agoto be clear they sound different
- xg15 6y agoIf anyone wants to know, it also literally means "hill culture". ("Culture" in the biological sense I believe, like the cultures from your organic yoghurt)
- carapace 6y agoThe forums there are lively and civil.
- carapace 6y agoRandom shot-in-the-dark here but does anyone have any land within 3-4 hours drive of SF on which they would like to try out these techniques? Hügelkultur and "eco-mimetic" horticulture generally?
- hosh 6y agoLook up https://sharedearth.com https://sharedearth.com if you don’t find any takers here. You should also look into permaculture design (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture) as well as Sepp Holzer’s work (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holzer_Permaculture https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holzer_Permaculture) There is a lot more than just ecomimicry. Holzer made extensive use of those beds. He also did things like using his hogs instead of an excavator (by laying down things in the places he wants to dig, and letting the hogs have at it), or manipulating effective hardiness zones and microclimates to grow fruiting trees at elevations that are normally impossible.
- carapace 6y agoOh yeah, I'm all over it. I got a PDC years ago and last week I put a deposit down on some Kunekune piglets. FWIW I suspect Nature made us to do Permaculture, et. al. ;-) (I just laid in seventy seeds in a mini greenhouse to start: melons, the Three Sisters: corn, squash, and beans, some dwarf Tamarillo and ground cherries, etc.) Sharedearth.com looks awesome (not technically, technically it's crude but functional) and I just signed up and made a profile. Finger's crossed! Thank you!
- hosh 6y agoThat’s awesome man! I only started deep diving into permaculture a couple months ago, but it pulled together many things that I had been exploring for a long time. It was like coming across the keystone piece in a lot of things for me. But it has been chasing me for a while. I had been fascinated by the design diagrams I would see popping up, and finally looked up what this funny word “permaculture” meant. I think permaculture is the next evolutionary step for our civilizations, even if on the surface, if appears to go backwards. But it is not. It is progressing forward into post-industrial, decentralized practices. I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and it was easy to be blind to what “Information Age” meant (globalized control of industry), but I now see what it really enabled is the decentralization of agriculture and industry through the interconnecting web of relationships of people. We finally have the technology that put us on par with the mycellium network, and start understanding — having the lived experience of — network effects of ecology. It definitely affects how I evaluate tech and startups. Pretty much, almost every permie I have encountered have this intense optimism and fertile generator of fresh ideas, even with COVID-19 going around the world. I don’t think there are many other groups that are like that. It is good to see :-)
- projomni 6y agowe've done a similar experiment--because our garden is on a hill, we created step-like 'beds' for veggies and fruit to grow. the results have been phenomenal so far. the only problem is, moles like this place too... so we've been battling them. highly recommended.
- kjsthree 6y agoDefinitely do whatever you want with your land but thought I’d throw in my two cents on moles. I gave up worrying about them after learning about all the good they do (aerating, eating grubs that turn into beetles that do harm my garden, etc). Turns out they don’t bother me at all. I live out in the woods though and don’t have a showy lawn.
- foxhop 6y agoSame here, my garden with raised half-finished hugelkultur is teaming with life: moles, voles, and chipmunks. As soon as that happened the birds of prey started hanging out. Since my cat passed last year, a large 5 foot black snake has filled the void as the top preditor. (No worries it's a constrictor! Not venomous!)
- sigmaprimus 6y agoIn my experience when I build a new garden by hand on land that was freshly cleared, a hugelkultur like row will develop naturally. I normally plant strawberries in it. When I start working the soil either by tilling and or raking I always end up with lots of roots and dead branches that get moved to the out side edge of the garden into a long pile or edge row of sorts. Rather than haul it away, I rake a bit of decent soil overtop of all it and plant away. It's almost as easy as the "Ruth Stout method", I'm not sure I would ever put the work into hauling logs and other materials from one area to another just to bury them. It's a great concept that probably works. I'm just not sure it's worth the "HugeL" amount of work over just bringing in compost in the beginning and top dressing (Which I have to do for weed control anyways) each year.
- koonsolo 6y agoIt's a nice theory, but in practice I see an issue with water. I have a raised part in my garden (just dirt, no wood below it), and the bushes on there have a hard time growing, simply because that hill is really terrible at collecting water.
- foxhop 6y agoHills are amazing at collecting water. You need to build swales on contour with the land (typically I fill my swales with woodchips and they become walking paths. The dirt and turf that is removed from building the swale goes on the lower side so you end up having double the topsoil in a bed the same length as the swale to grow food in. Additionally because you have a hill, you may capture water in a reservoir (home made rain barrels) and then use common rubber hose (can be broken/found freely) to transport water around the property with just gravity.
- blisterpeanuts 6y agoHügelkultur is fascinating. Early this year, my kid and I built an 8'x4'x2' Hügelkultur raised bed for vegetables. We're fortunate to have some fallen trees and rotting logs in the back of the yard, and we were able to fill the first foot of the bed with this debris, then regular soil and compost. The plants are thriving and producing plenty of edibles, and now I'm thinking about building a second one. The most interesting discovery is that the bed seems not to require much moisture. I was watering it every day for a while, until it seemed that it was turning into a big mud pit, so I stopped, and the plants have continued to thrive. I also built a drip irrigation system into the bed, very easy to do actually, but have not turned it on for the same reason. The ecosystem seems to retain water and is not draining moisture into the ground nearly as much as I first anticipated. If you build a raised bed, it's a good idea to put in 1/4" (1 cm) metal mesh at the bottom and up the sides a bit, to discourage burrowing creatures. Then add a layer of cardboard (old pizza boxes or shipping boxes work fine), followed by your Hügelkultur logs and branches, and finally some decent organic raised bed soil and quality compost. Another lesson: this system is heavy. Make sure you use strong wood and solid construction techniques. To do it again, I would add more reinforcing beams, because a couple of the side panels are starting to bulge a bit. I will be patching them with struts later this year, probably. Another interesting discovery: Hügelkultur is conducive to slime molds. I noticed this weird, alien life form appearing overnight and had to ask in a gardening forum: yellowish domes of soft, fungus-like stuff. It turns out to be Fuligo septica, commonly known as dog vomit slime mold (any players of Hack out there?). It's harmless and even beneficial, but looks horrible. I've started using Hügelkultur in my patio buckets and ceramic pots as well; half the pot gets the rotting sticks, then top it off with dirt. Thus far, these pots are doing very well. In this era of uncertainty, growing your own food is a great idea, and it's good to see such brilliant ideas as Hügelkultur and square-foot gardening being widely disseminated. Probably next year we're getting chickens. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuligo_septica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuligo_septica
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoOne thing I don’t understand is wouldn’t burins large amounts of wood increase the nitrogen requirement is the soil? It seems to me that the soil would want to break down the wood as fast as possible.
- chrisjarvis 6y agoDoes anyone know why you don't have to water it? I didn't understand that from the article.
- chrisjarvis 6y agoif anyone sees this: wikipedia answers: "Hügelkultur is the practice of burying large volumes of wood to increase soil water retention. The porous structure of wood acts as a sponge when decomposing underground. During the rainy season, masses of buried wood can absorb enough water to sustain crops through the dry season"
- lukasfischer 6y agoNice! So many gardeners and permaculture enthusiasts on hn. Fun to read the comments. #gardeningnerds