Hugelkultur

Even being laid up with a broken leg and a torn tendon in my ankle, situated here on my sofa with my leg up and my laptop on my stomach trying to type, I am constantly thinking about my garden and almost in tears that I cannot be out there doing gardening chores and harvesting vegetables.

But my laptop is my window on the world and I am taking advantage of that on a daily basis. I check out the Garden Rant blog daily and I have previously “liked” the Facebook pages of Sustainable Seed Co. and Mother Earth News.

I am currently in a mode where I am working to conserve water in my garden in an ongoing way. I am tired of paying high water bills. I am also very much in favor of leaving all of my garden waste (redwood fronds,  leaves, spent or dead plants) right in the garden instead of carting it all off to a compost pile. Too much work! Finally, I am tired of buying expensive fertilizers and really want to go back to natural fertilizers - with a main focus on manures.

So I have been looking at and putting into practice lasagna gardening techniques, before the injuries, and after examining a post from Sustainable Seed Co., I really like the concept of hugelkultur. Here are some informative links about this concept:

Hugelkultur: The Ultimate Raised Garden Beds, from the “Rich Soil” web site;

Hugelkultur: The Composting Raised Beds, from the “A Growing Culture” web site; and

Hugelkultur, Nature’s Raised Garden Beds, from the “A Way to Garden” web site.

The main idea of this type of garden bed and culture is the use of logs, limbs, and tree cuttings, rotten or new, at the base of the bed and then layering on, lasagna-style, other organic components until you have a large mound. Now, a lot of wood I get from around here in Guerneville comes from downed trees and limbs as the results of our winter rain storms. So, I am inclined to cut these up and use them in my wood burning Quadra-Fire stove. But I am sure I can locate enough to create hugelkultur beds. I just do not want those beds in huge mounds.

From: http://www.richsoil.com/hugelkultur/

 

From: http://rescape.co.nz/methods/hugelkultur/