Hügelkultur Raised Beds

[gtaus]

I was wondering if any of you have noticed an increase or decrease in your harvests using this method. I’ve searched online for results but am having difficulties finding much.

I live on a lake. My sandy soil was very poor for gardening. I tried for years and years to improve the soil, adding compost, leaves, grass clippings, etc... It helped, but in truth, it was never good soil. I had very poor harvests every year.

I got into raised beds about 15 years ago using the Square Foot Method. I filled the raised beds with Mel's mix. I had a great crop that first year, but you have to feed the raised bed with fertilizers every year because the Mel's mix medium is not natural soil. The big downside to Mel's mix was the high cost of building and maintaining the growing medium. I needed to find a more economical means of gardening for the long term.

Then I got introduced to the Hügelkultur method and how I could use it in my raised beds. I have 3 acres of wooded property, so I had all the wood I needed. Using the wood as a filler, I was able to cut down on the cost of filling every raised bed. When I got my chickens and started making my chicken run compost, I no longer needed to buy fertilizers. My Hügelkultur raised beds are now topped off with about 6-8 inches of a high quality top soil and chicken run compost mixed 1:1. I have to buy the topsoil, but it's nowhere near as expensive as the Mel's mix I used in the past.

Since then, my plants in the Hügelkultur beds have more than doubled in size. I get maybe 3X-4X more harvest than before with the inground garden. Maybe 2X as much as the Mel's mix beds. I know it's a combination of the topsoil I buy and that chicken run compost mixed in. Every year, I just add more chicken run compost to the beds.

The 4 I just got are fairly big, 4x8x2 feet high so they’ll each take a lot of material to fill but I have plenty on hand and then some so I’m not concerned with that. I got the higher beds because of increasing age and difficulties with the back so I’m hoping these will makes things a lot easier for me.

Yeah, I kind of aged into raised beds as well. My pallet wood raised beds are 16 inches tall, but I do have some 2 foot tall raised beds and even a number of elevated sub-irrigated planters/beds as well. My days of inground gardening are pretty much over. Plus, as I mentioned, my native soil is too sandy to grow anything good.

I fill my Hügelkultur raised beds up to the point where I only add 6-8 inches of topsoil and compost in the bed. That has worked for me, although I read some people like to have as much as 12 inches of topsoil in their beds. Every year, I have to add another 1-2 inches of new compost material to make up for the decrease in the soil level in the beds as the wood in the beds breaks down.

I had to fence it all in because of the deer population.

Yeah, I got hit by deer this year for the first time. See my previous post...

Anyway, I was just wondering about results of this method. I’ve been gardening in ground and while the production has been okay, I know it could be much better so I’m hopeful this method is the answer. I have prescribed to taking the best care of my soil that I can because that’s really what produces results.

Somewhere I read/heard that what we need to do is feed the soil, and the soil will feed the plants, and then the plants will feed us. I like that concept.

I have converted almost all my gardening into Hügelkultur raised beds and will never look back. It just works so much better for me. I had very poor native soil. In my Hügelkultur raised beds, I can make and maintain a much healthier soil.

 

[Land of Lincoln]

Thank you very much for your replies. I appreciate the time you took to respond and the details of your experiences.

I’m pretty sure we all want the best gardens we can have and I’m no different. There’s information overload out here on the web and it can be difficult to subscribe to just one method. There’s a method for everybody and what works and doesn’t work for them.

I’m still in the “trying to find out” mode but am zeroing in on it and tweaking it here and there to get the results I’m wanting.

I know I’m going to try the method because I’m sitting here having coffee on the deck looking at this…

That’s a wood chip pile to the right and off to the left is a monstrous pile of logs from 4 trees I took down a year ago. It’s kinda making my back ache just looking at it and knowing what I have planned for it.

Have a great weekend everyone!

 

[gtaus]

There’s a method for everybody and what works and doesn’t work for them.

I agree. I tried a number of different ways to garden, and eventually found hügelkultur raised beds was the best for me, where I live, and given the poor native soil I have to work with. If I had good native soil where I live now, I'd probably never would have tried raised bed gardening.

That’s a wood chip pile to the right and off to the left is a monstrous pile of logs from 4 trees I took down a year ago.

You certainly could make all kinds of hügelkultur raised beds out of that material! Very nice!

What I would do is put the big logs in the bottom of the beds. Then I would fill and pack the wood chips around the logs to fill the gaps and voids. That will help later on when you top off the raised bed with soil. If you leave lots of gaps and voids between the logs, the soil will work its way down and fill those voids - causing your soil level in the raised bed to drop more than normal. So, I like to fill those gaps and voids as much as I can.

I became a true believer the in hügelkultur method one year that we had a drought summer. All my inground plants dried up and died. All my plants in my Square Foot Garden raised beds with Mel's Mix growing medium dried out and died. But my hügelkultur raised beds, with those large water battery logs, kept feeding my plants all summer long and made it to harvest. Maybe only about 60% of a normal harvest in the hügelkultur raised beds that year but compared to dried up and dead plants everywhere else, it was a real eye opener to the value of the water retention ability of the hügelkultur logs.

As I have 3 acres of wooded property, and always have extra wood to use, it just made sense for me to eventually discover the hügelkultur method for raised beds.

Somewhere along the line I got older, and those tree rounds got too heavy for me to toss around. I bought an electric log splitter to split the rounds into smaller wedges that were easier for me to work with. The split wedges also pack better into my hügelkultur raised beds with fewer gaps to fill, which is a bonus.

If I were younger, I would not bother to split the rounds. But you get to a certain age where it just makes more sense to split the wood and protect your back. I figure the money I spent on the log splitter was money I saved in medications and treatment for a sore back.

BTW, beautiful lawn you have there. My dad worked on a golf course in the summers, and he had my lawn looking great like yours. I'm not as good as my dad, and my lawn does not look like a golf course anymore. But I mow the grass and feed the grass clippings to the chickens.

I think of my lawn more as a crop to feed to the chickens than a golf course to be looked at and enjoyed. Times have changed!

 

[fuzzi]

I was wondering if any of you have noticed an increase or decrease in your harvests using this method. I’ve searched online for results but am having difficulties finding much.

The 4 I just got are fairly big, 4x8x2 feet high so they’ll each take a lot of material to fill but I have plenty on hand and then some so I’m not concerned with that. I got the higher beds because of increasing age and difficulties with the back so I’m hoping these will makes things a lot easier for me.

I have a huge fenced in area that I’m putting these in as I had started a few years ago with the back to Eden method. I’ve went through 10 truckloads of woodchips and it does work but also requires a lot of tending to keep because of its sheer size. 50 feet wide by 175 feet long, it’s a large area. I had to fence it all in because of the deer population. They kept destroying my young fruit trees so I put up the fence.

Anyway, I was just wondering about results of this method. I’ve been gardening in ground and while the production has been okay, I know it could be much better so I’m hopeful this method is the answer. I have prescribed to taking the best care of my soil that I can because that’s really what produces results.

Hi! I've been gardening for almost 60 years.

I think I was five years old in this photo. I helped my mom in her gardens. I was paid for picking insects off the plants, so to this day I am not squeamish about smashing pests in my fingers.

At seven I got my own 3'x3' area within my mom's vegetable garden. It was weedy but I grew marigolds and learned about gardening, especially the organic method.

Skip ahead to the last three years. I hadn't done vegetable gardening for about ten years, focusing mostly on perennials. I am feeling my age, and digging in the ground is difficult. My knees won't let me squat or kneel, so I invested in raised beds. I ordered one kit from Greene's Fence, cedar planks, 8'x4'x14".

From the Spring of 2022:

I filled the bottom with cardboard, then debris from the 2021 flower gardens

I added composted yard clippings, peat moss, and Black Kow.

It did really well!

I can bend and reach within the 4' width. If I need to make them taller I can order more planks and posts from the company. They're like Lincoln Logs, but dovetailed so they lock in place.

I added chickens to my life in February 2023, so now I add composted litter as well as yard clippings. I have added four more beds, three which I have used this year. The fourth is full of "hot" chicken litter and will be planted in the Spring.

All the beds have had logs and branches added to the bottom when assembled, and lots of compost. They have been very productive and I wouldn't, couldn't go back to gardening in the ground.

 

[Land of Lincoln]

I cut a big tree down back in 2018 and for no real reason, I let one of the logs from that tree just sit on top of the ground for all this time. I didn’t cut it up or split it like I did the rest of that tree.

It sits under a canopy of trees that act as a fence row and has been exposed to the elements for a little over 6 years now. It’s really starting to decay and is really brittle now but thought it was appropriate for this thread. This stump was 4 feet long and about 38 inches in diameter when it was originally cut down.

This is what it looks like now:

It sort of resembles a wooden sponge with all of the voids and what nots going on. I can imagine a raised bed with several of these babies on the bottom will hold water for quite some time.

I have a massive pile of logs now for my raised beds so I’m going to put them to use.

All I need is a bottle of Aleve and some energy and away we go.

 

[talkinboutchickens]

I have hugels but they're not raised

 

[fuzzi]

I cut a big tree down back in 2018 and for no real reason, I let one of the logs from that tree just sit on top of the ground for all this time. I didn’t cut it up or split it like I did the rest of that tree.

It sits under a canopy of trees that act as a fence row and has been exposed to the elements for a little over 6 years now. It’s really starting to decay and is really brittle now but thought it was appropriate for this thread. This stump was 4 feet long and about 38 inches in diameter when it was originally cut down.

This is what it looks like now:
View attachment 3971667
View attachment 3971668

It sort of resembles a wooden sponge with all of the voids and what nots going on. I can imagine a raised bed with several of these babies on the bottom will hold water for quite some time.

I have a massive pile of logs now for my raised beds so I’m going to put them to use.

View attachment 3971669

All I need is a bottle of Aleve and some energy and away we go.

Do post pictures of your progress.

 

[Land of Lincoln]

Have got 1 of the 4 of my raised hugelkultur beds filled. These beds are 8 feet long, 4 feet wide and 2 feet deep. They are open on the bottom.

Here I’ve got the logs covering the bottom of the bed:

Here I’ve got woodchips filling as many of the voids between the logs as I could. I pushed them as far down with my hands as I could to fill the space. These logs are a little over a year old and some of them have the fungi growing from them, which I’m assuming is a good thing. Bed is close to 1/2 filled also at this point:

Here is the bed completely filled with a soil/compost mix with a ratio of approximately 50/50 of each:

We are expected to finally get some rain here in central Illinois here in the next few days so I know there will be some settling and the soil level will drop as it fills the voids and air pockets.

I have three more beds identical to this one to fill and my goal is to have them all done before winter hits so they can absorb all of the moisture we may get. Any settling will be topped most likely with either fall leaves, compost or a combination of the two.

Hopefully I’ve created a good home for all of the microbes and worms so they can move in and do their thing.

 

[fuzzi]

Have got 1 of the 4 of my raised hugelkultur beds filled. These beds are 8 feet long, 4 feet wide and 2 feet deep. They are open on the bottom.

Here I’ve got the logs covering the bottom of the bed:

View attachment 3978632


Here I’ve got woodchips filling as many of the voids between the logs as I could. I pushed them as far down with my hands as I could to fill the space. These logs are a little over a year old and some of them have the fungi growing from them, which I’m assuming is a good thing. Bed is close to 1/2 filled also at this point:

View attachment 3978638

Here is the bed completely filled with a soil/compost mix with a ratio of approximately 50/50 of each:

View attachment 3978639

We are expected to finally get some rain here in central Illinois here in the next few days so I know there will be some settling and the soil level will drop as it fills the voids and air pockets.

I have three more beds identical to this one to fill and my goal is to have them all done before winter hits so they can absorb all of the moisture we may get. Any settling will be topped most likely with either fall leaves, compost or a combination of the two.

Hopefully I’ve created a good home for all of the microbes and worms so they can move in and do their thing.

Very nice. I see you had an audience, too.

 

[Molpet]

Very nice. I see you had an audience, too.

I missed those gals lined up just waiting for a chance to dig