Hügelkultur Raised Beds

[gtaus]

We have a short growing season where I am as well. I will be nagging asking my husband to help me build these raised beds in the spring.

I find that my raised beds warm up a good 2 weeks earlier than I could plant in the ground. For us who live in short growing season locations, 2 weeks can make a big difference.

Not only can you plant earlier in the year, but if you add a cold frame (Google pic) to the raised bed, you can continue to grow food in your raised bed gardens for weeks longer in the fall....

Building that type of frame is on my list of projects next year. I would love to grow some Kale and Swiss Chard late into the fall. But I need a cover for the bed because the deer will eat all my Kale and other cold weather greens once the easy green grass is gone.

 

[Sally PB]

Before I got chickens, I practiced trench composting. Just dig a trench alongside a row of plants, fill it with kitchen scraps and other organic matter, cover it back up with the soil, and in a few months the worms will have turned it into soil. Worked great for me.

The neighbor who told me about Hugelkultur used to live in Viginia. Or West Virginia. Probably both, because she's lived everywhere. Anyway, the soil was red clay. She started doing just exactly this. By spring, she had some nice, rich soil. Her neighbor thought she'd brought in topsoil.

Now she does her own style of hugel, and has worm hotels. Those are 5 gallon plastic buckets with holes drilled in the sides, buried up to the rim in the garden. For over winter, fill them with organic debris, cover, and let the worms work their magic. When there isn't snow on the ground, use them as compost bins. The cover keeps the raccoons or other pests out. A half cinder block on the lid helps with that, if you have a tight fitting lid that is difficult to pry up. Or a random lid that doesn't quite fit the bucket.

I find that my raised beds warm up a good 2 weeks earlier than I could plant in the ground. For us who live in short growing season locations, 2 weeks can make a big difference.

Two weeks can be the difference between crop success and produce being "not quite ripe."

 

[SueT]

My husband and I went out w the tractor and brought back a pile of rotting logs for 4 new beds we will be setting up. This 11” high bed will be for strawberries. If I fill it with the logs, will it settle too much and need soil on top of the berry plants? How would that work? Can you add soil on top of perrienial plants?

It will have all winter to settle before planting tho

 

[TooCheep]

It is probably impossible to avoid some settling. When you are filling the bed, add some logs, fill around with soil/compost and pack as best you can. Then add another layer of logs and soil. Finally, finish filling with soil/compost.

Per this post, you may have up to 2 years of noticeable settling.

Allowing it to settle over the winter will certainly help. Since you want to plant perennials, I'd recommend creating small mounds when you plant your strawberries to minimize problems with the plants ending up too deep. Looks like you have a good setup to work with.

An alternate solution (which I will be using), will be to plant annuals for the first year or two and then plant perennials.

 

[SueT]

It is probably impossible to avoid some settling. When you are filling the bed, add some logs, fill around with soil/compost and pack as best you can. Then add another layer of logs and soil. Finally, finish filling with soil/compost.

Per this post, you may have up to 2 years of noticeable settling.

Allowing it to settle over the winter will certainly help. Since you want to plant perennials, I'd recommend creating small mounds when you plant your strawberries to minimize problems with the plants ending up too deep. Looks like you have a good setup to work with.

Good idea about the mounds

 

[DuckLady]

I find that my raised beds warm up a good 2 weeks earlier than I could plant in the ground. For us who live in short growing season locations, 2 weeks can make a big difference.

Not only can you plant earlier in the year, but if you add a cold frame (Google pic) to the raised bed, you can continue to grow food in your raised bed gardens for weeks longer in the fall....

A 4 week extension with a cold frame would make a huge difference. One year, I was crushed by the arrival of an unexpected early hard frost in late August that wiped out the tomatoes I had been dreaming of all year.

The deer eat anything not nailed down, except certain flowers, which are all I grow. Though the year I planted a ton of iris, they managed to pull most of the rhizomes out of the beds out of curiosity. I gathered them up and replanted and they haven't bothered them since.

 

[gtaus]

Now she does her own style of hugel, and has worm hotels. Those are 5 gallon plastic buckets with holes drilled in the sides, buried up to the rim in the garden. For over winter, fill them with organic debris, cover, and let the worms work their magic. When there isn't snow on the ground, use them as compost bins. The cover keeps the raccoons or other pests out. A half cinder block on the lid helps with that, if you have a tight fitting lid that is difficult to pry up. Or a random lid that doesn't quite fit the bucket.

Yes, you can also supersize that in-ground composting in a container idea. At one point, I had two 30-gallon plastic trash bins buried up to almost the rim, and used them as compost bins. I drilled all kinds of holes on the bottom and sides for the worms to crawl in and out. I started filling up one trash can, then when full, I started on the other one. By the time the second trash can was full, my first trash can was fully composted. Mind you, for me, that was about 1 year sitting in the ground.

The big advantage to using buckets or trash bins in the ground for composting like that is you can shovel out the finished compost and use it wherever you want. I did that system for a number of years, but then I got into pallet wood compost bins, above ground, and found that easier for me as I was getting older. Then I got chickens and now all my composting is done in the chicken run, which I find the best overall option for me.

If you build some raised beds, you might want to consider digging an ice cream pail into the middle of the bed and dumping your compost material in it. With holes drilled all over the pail, the worms will come and go, carrying your compost material throughout the raised bed. I have seen some people use that system and they say it works great. I have never tried it, personally, but I would imagine it would work really good.

In my case, I top off the entire hügelkultur raised bed every year with chicken run compost before planting because the soil level in the raised bed normally drops 1-2 inches per year as the Hugel wood and organics decompose below. Again, that is a feature of the hügelkultur system. You want to see a small drop in soil level each year.

 

[TooCheep]

In my case, I top off the entire hügelkultur raised bed every year with chicken run compost before planting because the soil level in the raised bed normally drops 1-2 inches per year as the Hugel wood and organics decompose below. Again, that is a feature of the hügelkultur system. You want to see a small drop in soil level each year.

I match that 1-2" annual drop with my non-hugel 1ft tall raised beds. That is normal for organics breaking down and plants absorbing each year. The chickens are great for making compost to re-top the beds each year.

 

[gtaus]

A 4 week extension with a cold frame would make a huge difference. ...
The deer eat anything not nailed down,

I really need to build a nice cold frame for some of my raised beds. I like the idea of using hardware cloth for the summertime to keep the chipmunks, squirrels, and rabbits out of the garden, then stapling some plastic on the same frame in the fall to add those additional weeks for the cold weather greens that I like so much.

One year I had a really nice, raised bed full of Kale and Swiss Chard. I got great greens just about all summer long. I was really looking forward to growing and harvesting those cold weather greens well into late fall and maybe even into early winter. Unfortunately, one morning I went outside to find everything had been eaten by deer.

I am also thinking the A-Frame design would work best for me. If we got some snow, it would slide off the A-Frame and not collapse. For those of us who live in snow country, we know that some years we might get an early snow but it might melt and we still have weeks of cool weather, but not yet snow that stays for the winter.

 

[Awaytome]

I'm curious if anyone has tested their hugel soils once the wood begins breaking down: pH and other nutrients and salts? Would be interesting to see how the soil changes over time, especially if you aren't supplementing with nitrogen or other fertilizers.