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I 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

I 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 ago
I 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 ago
  Wow, 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 :)

themgt 6y ago

I 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 ago
Wow, 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 :)