Are Hugelkultur gardens really the 'ultimate' in raised garden beds? (Part 1)

For over a decade I have been making hugelkultur gardens. I started accident — by making gardens out of the piles of composting weeds and woody debris that just happened to be accumulating on the edge of my ‘regular’ garden fields where I was growing vegetables for my market-garden business. I soon started noticing that these composting mounds, or hill gardens often did a lot better — my plants were larger, healthier, and more resilient — than many of the conventional gardens I had made by ploughing, and then disking or harrowing, and then tilling the soil and planting my seeds or transplants into the disturbed the soil.

Hugelkultur — or ‘hill culture’ in German — has become the rage in permaculture circles. There’s lots of information online on how to build a proper hugelkultur garden, which basically goes something like this: Dig a trench in the soil by removing the sod (set aside the sod with its top soil in a separate pile), place logs in the trench — length wise works best. Preferably, this first layer of large woody debris is in some state of decomposing and might even have a few fungi fruiting bodies sprouting out of it. Next, on top of the base of rotten logs add a layer of woody debris, but only this time the diameter of the wood is smaller — in other words sticks! Next, add a thick layer of composted leaf litter, then some well rotted compost from your compost pile, or get some composted animal manure from your local livestock farmer. Finally, add your top layer of soil, which could be from the soil you saved when you removed that first layer of sod to make your trench. Voila! You have an official hugelkultur garden.

An alternate way to make a hugelkulur garden is to stack your log and compost layers right on top of the ground (which could even be bedrock, if that’s what you’ve got to work with!). Follow the above directions - all except digging the trench, which you can’t do anyway if you’re working on top of bedrock. For your final layer of top soil, you’ll have to go scrounging around to scrape some up, or you could even go and get a bag of soil at the garden centre.

Armed with these simple directions, you are now ready to start cooking up your own hugelkultur creations. But remember, as with any recipe, the difference between a cook and a chef is the impulse to tweak and innovate. So, don’t be afraid to tweak the above recipes and make them your own. For instance, if you live near the ocean you can season your hugelkultur garden with some seaweed that has first been desalinated in the rain.

I really got immersed in researching hugelkultur gardening around 2014 as part of my Phd studies that explored indigenous land-based relationships. This is around the time I became obsessed with hugelkultur! I started building these hill gardens just about everywhere I went. I convinced a lot of my friends to start building them too.

Aside from the obvious benefits of accumulating organic materials into nutrient-dense growing sites, I pondered whether hugelkultur gardens were appealing to people because they satisfied our innate desire to create, by building beautiful and functional structures. This creative drive is foundational to architecture and many other artistic endeavours. Limited only by your own imagination, your Hugelkultur garden could be any shape or size you wanted it to be. In fact, most of the hugelkultur gardens my friends and I were building were more often than not, whimsically non-linear and unabashedly organic in form. Gone were the old-school gardening rules that mercilessly dictated straight lines and right-angled corners. Rounded edges - heck scalloped edges with fungi-laden logs poking out, here and there — became our artistic expression. You could build a hugelkultur garden as big as you wanted (don’t believe me — look online — people are using excavators to build them) or small ones that could fit in a flower-pot on your apartment balcony.

There is something innately egalitarian about hugelkultur gardening —where anyone who has access to a bit of rotten wood (no wood preservatives please!), some piles of leaves or weeds, and a shovel-full of loose dirt could join in all the permaculture fun everyone was raving about.

I became further convinced of the potential of hugelkultur gardens while living in a very rustic cabin in the bush, on top of the Canadian Shield near Bancroft Ontario. Here, my options for gardening were drastically limited, in large part because there was hardly any top soil. And what soil there was turned to dust when the summer drought hit that first year and I had no source of water except rain barrels.

Like many other places in Canada, much of the land in this region of Ontario has been severely (and repeatedly) deforested over the past couple of centuries. What soil remained after the virgin forest had been logged was further degraded by the desperate attempts of homesteaders trying to survive on marginal agricultural land. Much of the forest soils that had existed prior to this era of colonialism and settler desperation had either washed down the granite hillsides into streams and lakes or blown away. In fact, many of the lakes in Algonquin Park are a tea colour because of the tannins leached from the erosion of boreal forest soil.

So, here I was faced with a dilemma — if I wanted to grow food for myself (which I did!) I would need to actually create the soil where I was planning to garden. The following is a series of photos from those two years of garden building using the principles of permaculture and the techniques of hugelkultur. I did everything using hand tools!

Scrubby re-growth after a clearcut, next to my cabin in Lake St. Peter. Late fall 2016

Piling up woody debris for my hugelkultur garden. A lot of the wood was not as decomposed as I would have liked, but I worked with what I had.

A couple of piles of woody debris. Starting to take shape as a hugelkultur garden!

Gathering leaves from the forest for my hugelkultur garden.

My first hugelkultur garden. Late fall 2016.

Spring 2017!! That’s hail on the ground. You can see the original path my dog had been running on in the first picture is now the centre of my emerging hugelkultur gardens.

First hugelkultur bed planted with a variety of vegetable transplants. I planted comfrey along the front of the gardens to help stabilize soil as well as having some ‘chop and drop’ plant material handy for composting.

I continued to build hugelkultur gardens all summer, even as the first ones I had constructed were starting to grow vegetables. I used my scythe to cut grass for mulching the pathways to hold moisture. I had no water source except a rain barrel.

Early summer. My first hugelkultur garden bed is planted as a polyculture - lots of different species of vegetables. I did not know what would do well in the first year.

Mulching the garden paths with hay I cut with a scythe. Twig fences to trellis plants. The vernacular aspects of hugelkultur gardening appeals to me.

That first growing season (2017) I was impressed with how ‘productive’ the hugelkultur gardens were, considering I had little in the way of fertility to add to the soil except household compost. I also made comfrey leaf tea and watered the gardens with that to help raise fertility levels.

I was able to harvest a significant amount of food from those first season hugelkultur beds, including some Mohawk white corn that usually grows in southern Ontario (zone 6). I was in zone 3b, so very cold winters. These gardens were also in a microclimate from the surrounding forests and south facing slope.

I was definitely looking forward to expanding my hugelkultur gardens throughout the fall and winter and having even more garden space to plant in the spring of 2018.

To be continued….

---

Calendar:

Saturday July 2 - Baddeck Community Market

Sunday July 10 - Mabou Farmers Market

Sunday July 24 - Mabou Farmers Market

.