Hugelkultur

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Food production on Beardsley Farm has been slowing down as the weather gets colder, but we have been digging into new projects nonetheless. We are building new beds, cleaning out the community gardens, transferring rainwater from our cachement system to our storage tanks, processing compost, feeding our worm compost bin, and being active with our school groups. And we are trying new things.

Our most recent venture was to build a Hugelkultur vegetable bed. Hugelkultur? What is that? While reading the book Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemenway I found a few paragraphs in a small insert about a way of building beds called Hugelkultur. The word is german and means “magic mound” and the more I read about it the more I believed it to be true! After reading all I could about Hugelkultur I decided to bring it up to the rest of the farm team to figure out where we might build such a bed.

After walking around the farm for a few minutes we decided to build it near our other C-beds, creating a clover shaped series of beds. We thought it would be aesthetically pleasing and at the same time get rid of one more area of grass to mow!

To begin the bed we laid down cardboard we scavanged from CAC’s recycling to act as a barrier to weeds, then we mulched the area heavily with wood chips. The main ingredient of a hugelkulture bed, or HK as we like to say, is brush, something we have plenty of at the moment! With the help of several volunteers we began pulling brush from our longterm compost pile and mounding it on our bed site. After we had a significant amount of woody material piled we heaped it with many layers of organic matter. One of our first layers was mushroom compost which is made of straw and woodchips that have been fully decomposed by mushrooms growing on them. The result is a spongy dense nutrient rich compost. The next layer was some kitchen scraps (no meat), followed by leaves raked from the park. Then we layered some of our finished compost with horse manure. Finally, we planted a cover crop of winter rye which we will cut in the spring and chop it into the soil further adding nutrients to the bed. The final result was a C shaped mound of organic matter about 3 ft high with an occasional stick poking through.

What is so special about HK you ask? How is it different than any other bed? The special ingredient is the bottom layer of brush. There are several benefits to it. The wood decomposes slowly over years releasing a steady supply of nutrients to the soil. The process of decomposition also creates a steady heat making the HK bed slightly warmer than the surrounding soil. One can actually plant an HK bed as much as one month earlier than a regular in ground bed. Have you ever picked up a piece of decomposing wood and found that it was sponge like, holding copious amounts of water? This is the 3rd principal behind an HK bed. The decomposing wood at the bottom of the pile acts as a sponge holding large amounts of water that would normally filter though the soil or evaporate. As a result HK beds do not need to be watered as often as other beds might. This is useful if you have an area that pools water in your yard. You can put an HK bed there to soak up the standing water, then in the summer you will not have to water that bed very often because it will be holding all of that water.

Now all we have to do it wait and see how well our new HK bed grows!
~Kirsten

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