Hugelkulutr Garden Beds

We have been busy here at Woodhaven Place. The last few days have been freezing cold however we had some beautiful days of sunshine and temperatures in the 30s- 40s a few weeks ago. When the ground is frozen, it is a perfect time to take down some dead trees that are in the way of our future barn; two of the trees that we took down where rotten almost all the way through. We decided to turn that wood into our first Hoogle Bed. 

Hugelkultur is a German word and some people can say it the German way however we called it a Hoogle Bed. Hugelkultur is making raised garden beds filled with rotten wood. This makes for garden beds loaded with organic material, nutrients, and air pockets for roots. As the years pass, the deep soil of the bed becomes incredibly rich and loaded with soil life. As the wood shrinks, it makes more tiny air pockets which makes the Hugelkultur self-tilling and we are all about not tilling. Our big garden is a “Back to Eden” garden and is also no till. 

This was before we knocked down the scrub

There was a large rotten tree already lying in an area that was being taking over by scrub so we just knocked all the scrub down and put the wood from the fresh cut trees right on top of the knocked over scrub and the large rotting log. In the spring, we will have our tree guy dump a big load of wood chips on top of the logs and then we will put compost from a local ranch on top of that. Then we will plant our new Hoogle Bed! The bed will start out somewhere between 3-4 feet tall however it will not take long, maybe one or two years, for it to compost down to a more normal height bed. 

 

We knocked down the scrub and then stared laying down the logs to make a solid foundation

More logs were piled on top

The area looks better already

We really like this method of farming. It was a lot less work moving the logs into position in the bed than it would have been to get them across the property to the wood pile. Most of the wood was rotting anyway and would not have made great fire wood. The Hoogle Bed will also give us some fun micro climates to plant in and experiment with.