Homestead Rescue Update #2 – Hugelkultur Garden!

Hugel-what? Hugelkultur is the type of gardening technique that Misty Raney helped me put in on our homestead during our episode of Homestead Rescue. Hugelkultur is a German word meaning “mound” or “hill” gardening and has it’s roots in permaculture. This has been a HUGE help to our homestead!

While the pond may not have worked to help us get more water, the new garden has taken us a long way to becoming more self-sufficient, working toward my dreams of growing our own food with what we do have.

When the Raney’s were here, we filled the new Hugelkultur bed with fall and over wintering crops that did fairly well and provided us with quite a few fresh vegetables well into spring 2020. There are actually a few things I planted with Misty that are still producing! However, that first trial run was during our rainy seasons so I really didn’t know how it would fair through our long dry summers.

While not every crop was a success, overall it did great! (see my post about the Winter Stock Up we were able to achieve here.) I only had to do minimal watering in the Hugelkultur garden to get a few seeds and sensitive plant starts going. It used SO much less water than our prior attempts at gardening and at the same time produced SO much more! I’m still figuring out a few problems, but I can’t speak of this technique highly enough.

How to Build a Hugelkultur Garden of Your Own

While the technique is pretty labor intensive to get started, it’s really very simple to implement with out a lot of gardening know-how.

Put down logs or large sticks. Old partially rotten or aged wood is preferred, but we used a lot of fresh wood in ours and still had pretty good results. The newer wood may pull nitrogen for a time as it breaks down and that may mean lower yields for the first year. Depending on your terrain and soil type, it may also be beneficial to dig a trench the size you want your garden bed to lay the logs in so they are below ground level. We have very dense clay and the garden is on a slight slope, both of which are advised against doing the ditch method so we put our wood right on top of the existing ground level. Aim to get the wood at least a foot deep. The wood is going to soak up water and act like a sponge to water your plants. As it breaks down, it will also provide nutrients.

Don’t stress if you don’t have perfect, large, logs! Use whatever you can find. We used fresh wood, old wood and any and all other twigs and branches that fell around the property. You do need to be just a little picky when it comes to some types of wood that put off chemicals which prohibit other plants from growing – black walnut and cedar are the two most common to avoid (we happen to have both here, but not in large amounts). I think ours are mostly alder.

Cover wood with layers of organic materials. You are basically making a compost pile out of your garden, but you do not need to be an expert in gardening or composting to do this! See what you can find around your property or neighbor hood. This can include grass clippings, manure, leaves, animal bedding, compost, wood chips, even cardboard and shredded paper. You want to aim for a mix of green and brown materials, although I would lean a little more towards green materials and/or manure to give a nitrogen boost to a brand new bed, especially if the wood you used is on the fresher side. Aim for this material to also be a foot deep, more if you can or want a taller bed. These materials are going to provide nutrients to your plants, helped the wood break down and also offset some of the nitrogen that the decomposing wood might otherwise tie up.

Cover with soil. If you have good top soil, one benefit to digging the initial ditch to place the wood is that you then have the soil you need to add back on top! Since we didn’t do that here, we had to buy soil to bring in. Depending on the size of your garden bed, it will take a lot! I think the Raney’s brought in 6-8 pickup truck loads (about a cubic yard each) to get our three beds covered. Each bed is about six feet wide by 25+ feet long. It would have taken us forever to build beds that big by ourselves!

Add a layer of mulch. A thin layer of straw or wood mulch on top of the soil will protect it both from drying out in the sun and also from being washed away by rain. Always keep some kind of mulch on the surface of the soil for the most effective hugelkultur bed.

And now you are ready to plant! Some experts recommend planting a cover crop, not planting at all or only planting certain things for the first season to give the bed some time to break down and release nutrients/fertilizer for the plants. But I say go for it if you can afford to risk some small yields or losses for the first planting. We didn’t wait, planted all of the advised against stuff and still had a pretty good result the first season. I say take the gamble.

This year I grew all of our food crops in the beds the Raney’s put in and we had the most productive garden we’ve had here on this property! We added one more in the spring, totally throwing in just whatever we could scavenge on our property (except the top soil) and even though I planted while it was brand new we had an amazing dahlia crop in it! (More about growing dahlias soon). We are now in the process of building another one, loosely following the rules and so far so good.

Problems to Look Out For

While I am loving this method for a lot reasons, mainly the ability to grow with little to no water, it has not been without it’s problems as all gardens will have.

First, the new beds the Raney’s put in just exploded with grass the following spring! Whatever they used for the straw mulch, was also something they bought for the goats (more on the goats coming soon) and all signs indicate it was full of pasture seed. The beds were covered in a lush green grass exactly where I didn’t want it and it took me hours and hours to pull it all out while trying not to remove the top soil they brought in and then re-mulch. We’ve been mulching since with the straw we have available at our local feed store and so far haven’t had any other major problems. Just do your best to try to find mulch materials that don’t have a lot of seeds or chemicals in them. While I have still had to do some weeding since the grass fiasco, it’s been WAY less than a traditional garden and the weeds pull out so easy.

SLUGS! Here in the Pacific Northwest we have a ridiculous amount of slugs already, but the hugelkultur beds seem to be a breeding ground for them. I’ve never seen so many slugs in my life! They just destroyed my spring starts and I had to re-plant some crops several times before I finally got the slug numbers reduced a little with some organic slug bait. They were still around in the garden all summer, but at least in small enough numbers that the plants could outgrow them.

Nutrient deficiencies. While I’ve talked to some hugelkultur purists who insist there is no need to do soil testing in hugelkultur beds, I may consider it next year. There were a few types of plants in a few spots of the garden that just did not grow well, seemed stunted and warped. I’m going to try adding a few things first and rotating crop types, but if the same thing happens next year I suspect there might be pockets where the mix of materials was lacking and not feeding the plants well.

If you have any questions about hugelkultur, comment below and I’ll answer to the best of my experience! Happy Hugel-ing!