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Hugelkultur 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 advantag

Hugelkultur 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 ago
The 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 ago
  Ah 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 ago
    Another 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.
- jhoechtl 6y ago
  Beneficial to those plants which do not belong to the sort of early succession. They need disturbed sites and bare soil. Some of the bread and butter trees of aggro-forrestry establish better on bare soil rather than a thick layer of humus from decaying trees.
  - minerjoe 6y ago
    From what I understand, it gives long lasting benefits. One of my mentors is a soil scientist that has been doing ecological restoration for over 30 years. He tells this story of where he had to walk across a mountain range pushing a long metal rod into the ground every 3 meters. While most places barely took the probe, the places where there were nurse logs he could sink them deep in all the way.
Herodotus38 6y ago
Thanks. That was a great link and had what I feel is a very reasonable, skeptical but also nice tone that explores the history behind this and the actual evidence behind it. It also gave me a rabbit hole of links to explore regarding evidence based self-sufficient gardening.
NedFlaymer 6y ago
A good bit about food production has never been accounted for in "scientific" tests. Science is about rigorous observation. Is reductionism the only technique that is valid for understanding ALL phenomenon? Seems like this consideration has not been applied all too rigorously. As for reductionism: when dealing in this sphere it has thus far proven itself to be, well, limited, at least in providing a comprehensive understanding of food systems. The understanding that is applied to food science, that has any merit, comes from botany, ecology, climatology. IMHO the best food science comes from the likes of Sepp Holzer and bill mollison, who at least the latter is an actual scientist. The military food scientists thus far have not ss done well at applying most scientific advancements to the domain. Since all war scientists started applying their trade to food production in the fifties, it's been one fiasco after the next. Empirically speaking, chemical, genetic, and mechanical intervention (so called enhancements) is meme science. If you study up on it, you'll see that there is plenty of empirical evidence that the genetically selected rice and wheat grains pushed on Eastern Asia were worse on almost all counts than their traditional seed. After more than a decade and a half of failure, they showed some marginal benefit, but only if the right amount of fertilizer was applied during a period of extraordinarily ideal environmental circumstancses-- and this is what it boils down to: chemical companies wanting to sell fertilizer and pesticides. Asian farmers kept planting these grains because they received subsidies backed by the local and US governments to buy fertilizer, machines, and pesticides, and received favorable purchasing conditions for providing the right variety of grain. After getting locked in, or facing bankruptcy, many times they dont have a choice but to continue. The results are there, refer to Food Production in the 21st Century. It was written in the mid nineties by an academic worthy of your time if you have any interest in this topic. If there is political motivation muddying up your science at the institutional level, it's not going to be rigorous.
- cellular 6y ago
  Yes! Observation is what made me forget about well drained raised beds in Texas! Now, I waterproof my raised beds to keep in moisture. They are so much better! It's crazy to have conventional raised beds in Texas! I make YouTube videos about it. https://youtu.be/HrVOONqgdsE https://youtu.be/HrVOONqgdsE
coronadisaster 6y ago
I had 3 pepper plants in pots (raised bed) and planted 2 of them in the ground and 6 months later the one in the pot is still doing good but the 2 others died (all watered the same and next to each other)... There could be many reasons why that is but they appear to grow better in pots
- asah 6y ago
  Thanks!!! for sharing this. My proper plants also love their pots but I didn't realize soil could be risky for them.
carapace 6y ago
From the link you gave: > "Then the earth itself will have the tendency to come inwardly alive and become akin to the vegetative." > ~ the term [hügelkultur] first appears in a 1962 German brochure written by avid gardener Herrman Andrä. This captures the crucial point: soil is a kind of organism. The corollary: farm the soil and the soil grows the plants.
- SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
  > soil is a kind of organism. Surely, like a sourdough starter, a patch of soil is a small _ecosystem_ ? I say "small", but bear in mind how numerous microbes are: dry yeast is said to be around 20 billion cells per gram. There are far more individuals in your sourdough starter than there are humans on earth.
  - carapace 6y ago
    I am beginning to suspect that a patch of soil thinks and behaves like a kind of organism, literally.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
      This is the "Gaia hypothesis" on a smaller scale.
      - carapace 6y ago
        Yes, if you like. Consider the stromatolite, or trichoplax. It seems to me that the boundary, if any, between "ecosystem" and "organism" is conceptual rather than physical. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatolite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatolite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichoplax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichoplax

minerjoe 6y ago

The 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 ago
Ah 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 ago
  Another 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.
jhoechtl 6y ago
Beneficial to those plants which do not belong to the sort of early succession. They need disturbed sites and bare soil. Some of the bread and butter trees of aggro-forrestry establish better on bare soil rather than a thick layer of humus from decaying trees.
- minerjoe 6y ago
  From what I understand, it gives long lasting benefits. One of my mentors is a soil scientist that has been doing ecological restoration for over 30 years. He tells this story of where he had to walk across a mountain range pushing a long metal rod into the ground every 3 meters. While most places barely took the probe, the places where there were nurse logs he could sink them deep in all the way.

Herodotus38 6y ago

Thanks. That was a great link and had what I feel is a very reasonable, skeptical but also nice tone that explores the history behind this and the actual evidence behind it. It also gave me a rabbit hole of links to explore regarding evidence based self-sufficient gardening.

NedFlaymer 6y ago

A good bit about food production has never been accounted for in "scientific" tests. Science is about rigorous observation. Is reductionism the only technique that is valid for understanding ALL phenomenon? Seems like this consideration has not been applied all too rigorously. As for reductionism: when dealing in this sphere it has thus far proven itself to be, well, limited, at least in providing a comprehensive understanding of food systems. The understanding that is applied to food science, that has any merit, comes from botany, ecology, climatology. IMHO the best food science comes from the likes of Sepp Holzer and bill mollison, who at least the latter is an actual scientist. The military food scientists thus far have not ss done well at applying most scientific advancements to the domain. Since all war scientists started applying their trade to food production in the fifties, it's been one fiasco after the next. Empirically speaking, chemical, genetic, and mechanical intervention (so called enhancements) is meme science. If you study up on it, you'll see that there is plenty of empirical evidence that the genetically selected rice and wheat grains pushed on Eastern Asia were worse on almost all counts than their traditional seed. After more than a decade and a half of failure, they showed some marginal benefit, but only if the right amount of fertilizer was applied during a period of extraordinarily ideal environmental circumstancses-- and this is what it boils down to: chemical companies wanting to sell fertilizer and pesticides. Asian farmers kept planting these grains because they received subsidies backed by the local and US governments to buy fertilizer, machines, and pesticides, and received favorable purchasing conditions for providing the right variety of grain. After getting locked in, or facing bankruptcy, many times they dont have a choice but to continue. The results are there, refer to Food Production in the 21st Century. It was written in the mid nineties by an academic worthy of your time if you have any interest in this topic. If there is political motivation muddying up your science at the institutional level, it's not going to be rigorous.

cellular 6y ago
Yes! Observation is what made me forget about well drained raised beds in Texas! Now, I waterproof my raised beds to keep in moisture. They are so much better! It's crazy to have conventional raised beds in Texas! I make YouTube videos about it. https://youtu.be/HrVOONqgdsE https://youtu.be/HrVOONqgdsE

coronadisaster 6y ago

I had 3 pepper plants in pots (raised bed) and planted 2 of them in the ground and 6 months later the one in the pot is still doing good but the 2 others died (all watered the same and next to each other)... There could be many reasons why that is but they appear to grow better in pots

asah 6y ago
Thanks!!! for sharing this. My proper plants also love their pots but I didn't realize soil could be risky for them.

carapace 6y ago

From the link you gave: > "Then the earth itself will have the tendency to come inwardly alive and become akin to the vegetative." > ~ the term [hügelkultur] first appears in a 1962 German brochure written by avid gardener Herrman Andrä. This captures the crucial point: soil is a kind of organism. The corollary: farm the soil and the soil grows the plants.

SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
> soil is a kind of organism. Surely, like a sourdough starter, a patch of soil is a small _ecosystem_ ? I say "small", but bear in mind how numerous microbes are: dry yeast is said to be around 20 billion cells per gram. There are far more individuals in your sourdough starter than there are humans on earth.
- carapace 6y ago
  I am beginning to suspect that a patch of soil thinks and behaves like a kind of organism, literally.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 6y ago
    This is the "Gaia hypothesis" on a smaller scale.
    - carapace 6y ago
      Yes, if you like. Consider the stromatolite, or trichoplax. It seems to me that the boundary, if any, between "ecosystem" and "organism" is conceptual rather than physical. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatolite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatolite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichoplax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichoplax