Some Lessons from a Year of Hugelkultur
I was once told–in a sewing group, no less–that I am the master of parallel truths. And this is one: I’m quite willing to spend money while also being exceptionally frugal. It’s why I can justify buying a great big house, purely for its acreage, but can’t justify putting expensive garden structures on that acreage. Where it confounds some, it makes absolute sense to me.
And this is how we found ourselves making Hugelkultur beds in our garden this year, instead of building any sort of raised beds or other garden structures. In fact, the only thing we purchased materials for was the fence. Which I think we all agree is a prerequisite of any garden in upstate NY.
Hugelkultur beds are a frugal gal’s dream–especially if said frugal gal has access to woody acreage. They’re a garden bed, built in a layered fashion, with compostable materials, starting with large logs or other sticks to create a nice rounded base. From there, you add layers of materials, getting finer and finer until your finest material–some top soil–is on top. Some people put a raised bed-like structure around those (as seen in the link above) but some–like us–just create free-standing mounds.
With access to 4-acres worth of fallen trees, Hugelkultur was immediately attractive to us. Once the garden was designed, we started by pulling large debris–logs and limbs–into four 20-foot long humps. Then, we piled them high with leaves, dead grassing, and other trimmings, and finally, we added on compost from the existing compost pile, and purchased about 6 to 8 inches of topsoil to throw on top of everything. All told, the garden bed was as cheap as the load of topsoil. Which isn’t free, but was much cheaper than building 4 20-foot long raised beds would have been.
In so many ways, I love that we were able to do this, especially when we knew nothing about growing on this land yet. Still, we learned some lessons about building Hugelkultur beds that are worth sending to the masses.
The manual labor was real.
We placed our garden in a clearing in the woods, which may sound like an odd choice for a number of reasons. The decision ultimately came down to finding the part of this land that was least wet, and leveraging the previous homeowner’s choice to use this same spot, which they had cleared.
This probably sounds great from a labor perspective. You’re building the garden out of the woods. What better location to build than in the woods? For us, though, a lot of our material was spread across the property, and the labor it took to get the debris back to the garden was intense. Thank god for tractors with trailers.
Volume was hard to achieve.
We pulled in almost every sliver of debris we could find on our property and our mounds were relatively short, at least compared to our expectations and those of the whole internet. Where I was expecting 4-foot tall humps, we only got about 2-foot tall ones, and we could expect to lose height and volume over time.
It was easy to plant in.
The structure of the beds–or lack thereof–made it insanely easy to plant in. I was able to step on and scramble all over the beds pretty easily. Because Hugelkultur is a no-till method of gardening, there was little to do to make it plant-ready. This made it really fast for me to get plants in the ground.
Too easy…
Because there is no real structure to Hugelkultur beds, it was relatively easy for me to lose my goddamn mind and plant on every dang surface of those things. I planted on every part of the hump, including the end caps, so that, when everything filled out, we had a ton of chaos. I would advise some self-discipline on this front and good planning around where you’ll actually plant.
A downside of Hugelkultur is also that all of the debris you're building the mounds out of has seeds and other plants mixed in. We assumed that this was a lot like compost, where the heat would eventually kill off those seeds. However, unlike compost, we’re not turning these beds regularly to help disrupt that process. I'm not sure we could have really prevented bringing in seeds and weeds. And, because of how compost-rich the beds were, everything–including weeds–grew really well. We weren't able to fight that very well because of some of the issues we had in our garden (read about that here). But thankfully we were able to work it out by the end of the season with some good old-fashioned elbow grease and a fantastic weed puller.
The edge of the beds blurred with the rest of the garden.
One unexpected challenge was that we had trouble telling the difference between the pathways of the garden and the lower edge of the beds, especially once we started stepping all over everything. This made it hard to maintain both the beds and the garden paths because we couldn’t tell weed from crop and didn’t want to mow or weedwhack willy-nilly lest we should commit vegetable-plant murder.
If I were to do this again, 1) I would try to make those edges a bit more pronounced or just not plant as close to them so that we could distinguish that area from the rest. Even though I still prefer this over raised beds, I could see a benefit to some sort of border of rocks or logs. 2) I would probably just be more cut throat and murder some vegetables. This is hard when you’re starting out. Killing viable plants feels like waste, like you might be making an irreparably bad choice. But I need to just learn to do it. For sanity, if nothing else.
It wasn’t great for root vegetables.
The jury still feels out on this one, but I’ll say, in our first year, that the veggies that grow in the ground–carrots and potatoes specifically in our case–felt quite stunted. It seems, based on the harvest, that these vegetables didn’t have the room to grow down the way we would have expected to, and I’m suspected that they essentially reached some of the harder debris toward the center of the bed and couldn’t grow the way they should. If you’re building Hugelkultur beds and plan to use them for root vegetables, you should consider this; you may need a deeper top for these, or you might consider an alternate type of bed for these. Like I said, the jury is still out for me on these… so I’m not sure what I’ll do next year.
Stay tuned for more updates (and probably some twists and turns)!