On 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.
I 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.
re: rooting, another anecdote there -- grapes have traditionally been dormant grafted and rooted vertical. But some people I know in the grapebreeding community have had more success recently with horizontal cuttings; at least for green cuttings, more experimentation required for dormant hardwood. In any case, a massive difference in terms of the amount of new root material produced.
And this makes sense when you think of how a grape would naturally clone itself in the wild (which they do, like _crazy_); they'll layer along the ground and send down roots from a horizontal shoot. So they're likely some kind of dominance for roots in that formation. We may have been propagating grapes wrong for 2000+ years :-)
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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)
I'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.
Hugelkulture 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!!!
The 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?
You could, but it's more work as it takes a lot of digging. You could also have flat raised beds setup the same way, with logs and branches and hay - it's a lot more common thing actually. However small slopes and mounds on their own have a number of advantages: catching more heat when Sun is low on the horizon, and less in the summer/midday, and better drainage of any excess water - soil will never turn into mud, so less chances of roots rotting when there's too much rain - and there's also more air circulation around plants. However for smaller plants to get enough of the sun it takes more planning how to position them, as one side is always in shade. Slopes catch less rain, so in dry areas you need densely planted small plants or grass to catch it, and water that runs down needs to be channeled to accumulate on the bottom of the slope. Also, when planting and doing composting at the same time one needs to be careful that decomposition doesn't go too fast because the heat released in the process can hurt the roots, too.
Also, 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?
Depends on context but burring wood works just as well. I've done both but it's easier for me to build up the land then dig down because the contractors who built my house 20 year ago, ruined the natural forest and buried gravel and stone underground as fill ...
I do dig swales on contour and fill with wood chips to make garden paths. I harvest stone at that time to build garden walls and depending how deep the path is before filling I toss in some old logs before covering with woodchips for walking.
The end result is the walking paths become resavoirs for holding water and my feet stay dry and I'm left with topsoil to further raise up my garden beds and rocks to build with.
Basically rearranging the material that already exist on site to build a self renewing system!
You can do this below ground level, but it loses some other useful properties (catching more sunlight, improved drainage, ergonomics). Depending on where you live, one approach may work better than the other.
Can 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.
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.
Lots 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/)
Don't bury woodchips into hugelkultur, I found that to not work.
Better to use woodchips after digging swales/garden paths on contour as fill for the swale. After 3-4 years dig the garden paths again as the woodchips are ready to be applied to garden beds having mostly decomposed by then into a perfect growing material/medium.
Woodchips having so much more surface area _really_ shocks the soil and starves it of all nitrogen, a key element needed by bacteria and fungus in their decomposition process. Nitrogen deficit soils don't grow plants.
Grassed 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).
Hügelkultur 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.
On 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.
Random 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?
Composting 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.
In 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.
Does 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.
I 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.
There 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.
we'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.
I’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.
About 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.
The 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.
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.
The 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.
To 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.
[+] [-] contingencies|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cmrdporcupine|5 years ago|reply
And this makes sense when you think of how a grape would naturally clone itself in the wild (which they do, like _crazy_); they'll layer along the ground and send down roots from a horizontal shoot. So they're likely some kind of dominance for roots in that formation. We may have been propagating grapes wrong for 2000+ years :-)
[+] [-] hammock|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmrdporcupine|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stepstop|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] schmichael|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurse_log
[+] [-] NedFlaymer|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] carapace|5 years ago|reply
> "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.
[+] [-] Herodotus38|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coronadisaster|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foxhop|5 years ago|reply
Checkout my channel: 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)
[+] [-] chmod775|5 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] minerjoe|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NedFlaymer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shawnz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ivanhoe|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jchmbrln|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foxhop|5 years ago|reply
I do dig swales on contour and fill with wood chips to make garden paths. I harvest stone at that time to build garden walls and depending how deep the path is before filling I toss in some old logs before covering with woodchips for walking.
The end result is the walking paths become resavoirs for holding water and my feet stay dry and I'm left with topsoil to further raise up my garden beds and rocks to build with.
Basically rearranging the material that already exist on site to build a self renewing system!
[+] [-] cheeseprocedure|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] getpost|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] llamataboot|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] biztos|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foxhop|5 years ago|reply
Better to use woodchips after digging swales/garden paths on contour as fill for the swale. After 3-4 years dig the garden paths again as the woodchips are ready to be applied to garden beds having mostly decomposed by then into a perfect growing material/medium.
Woodchips having so much more surface area _really_ shocks the soil and starves it of all nitrogen, a key element needed by bacteria and fungus in their decomposition process. Nitrogen deficit soils don't grow plants.
[+] [-] oh_sigh|5 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] markdown|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blisterpeanuts|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] foxhop|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carapace|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sidpatil|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sigmaprimus|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] aliswe|5 years ago|reply
Edit: I'm thinking of doing the hugelbed but kinda upside down, under ground.
[+] [-] splittingTimes|5 years ago|reply
For example check out the "Greening the desert" project.
https://youtu.be/2xcZS7arcgk
[+] [-] AlotOfReading|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moralestapia|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chris1993|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lukasfischer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] projomni|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gdubs|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] foxhop|5 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] brainzap|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] everybodyknows|5 years ago|reply
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/german-english/...
[+] [-] mahaganapati|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seotut2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minerjoe|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cheeseprocedure|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mahaganapati|5 years ago|reply