Hügelkultur Raised Beds

[gtaus]

@1cock2hens said: Strawberries only live on average 5 years. The first year they are getting settled in and producing fruits as well as a few runners. The second year they produce well and send out even more runners. The next few years the strawberry plants produce much less and send out more runners before finally dieing.

That makes sense in what I saw with my strawberry plants as well. This was their third summer but I did not have them covered against predators, so I failed to get even one ripe strawberry this year. Must have fed lots of green strawberries to the chipmunks, squirrels and birds. I won't try growing strawberries again until I have a nice cage system to cover and protect them.

In the end, I bet I paid almost $1.00 per strawberry that I ever got from those plants. My bad.

 

[gtaus]

Composting!

My chickens love watermelon. I toss them our watermelon rinds and they eat everything down to about the last bit of the outside peeling, which gets composted there in the chicken run. I hope your chickens got some of that watermelon!

 

[JacinLarkwell]

Composting!

Oohhh. Are they empty? They looked like full halves in my screen

 

[fuzzi]

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.

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You could certainly do that in a raised bed if you wanted.

Now that I have chickens, we feed all our kitchen scraps and leftovers to the girls. They eat the food, break it down into chicken poo, which gets added to the litter in the chicken run, and makes the best chicken run Black Gold compost.

My mom was an organic gardener long before people were aware of the concept. She wanted a compost pile but never got to build one. Instead she would dig holes around the plants and in the paths and bury kitchen scraps like potato peelings. She took a garden patch that was mostly sand and within a few years turned it into loam.

 

[fuzzi]

My chickens love watermelon. I toss them our watermelon rinds and they eat everything down to about the last bit of the outside peeling, which gets composted there in the chicken run. I hope your chickens got some of that watermelon!

I didn't have chickens then

 

[fuzzi]

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.

Soil in my backyard, lots of clay

Hugelkulture bed after adding compost

I had the soil tested after we bought the house. It's extremely acidic, a mix of gray and yellow clay. In some areas it's dusty, and rainwater just runs off. I've been trying to amend but focusing on the raised beds instead is physically easier on me.

 

[fuzzi]

Oohhh. Are they empty? They looked like full halves in my screen

They were mostly empty, that's just the rind. A couple of the watermelons got overripe. I broke them open, and the wildbirds and other critters enjoyed the insides. The raised bed devoured the rest.

 

[gtaus]

I found the YouTube of the lady telling about her pallet wood raised bed mistakes that I liked so much. She identifies 3 mistakes in her build.

1) Not using corner posts to screw the boards into. The corner ends just came apart.

2) Using too thin wood as inside rails to nail the boards on to. Result was sidewall blowouts.

3) Not using a plastic liner on the inside of the raised bed. Her wood was rotting out in just 2 years. (I don't use a plastic liner, but more on that later).

Here is her 5-minute YouTube video cued up to the start of her explaining her mistakes...

I attempted to address these mistakes in my pallet wood raised bed v2.0 design as shown in post #6 in this thread.

1) I used 2X4 framing on the outside and 2X4's for the inside posts. That gives more strength to the raised bed compared to the thin wood she was using. My corners have not blown out.

2) I don't use rails inside the raised bed to attach the sidewall pieces. My framing was on the outside and the sidewall pieces are inside the framing. So, the soil pushes out on the sidewall wood which is held in place by the 2X4 outer frames. You can see in her design with the rails inside the raised bed, that the soil wants to blow out those boards with nothing on the outside to hold them in place. But I think you can see the advantage in strength of having the framing on the outside of the raised bed.

3) I don't use any plastic liner in my beds. I have not seen any significant rot in my wood, the oldest raised bed being maybe 8 years old. But I think that might be affected a lot by where you live. It might be a very good idea to line your raised bed with plastic to keep the wet soil off direct contact with sidewall wood. Since I have not really seen any rot in my raised beds yet, my idea was to replace any boards as needed which would be very easy in my design. But frankly, if a raised bed starts to fall apart after 5 years or so, I'll just build another one. Takes me less than half an hour to put one together, so it would be faster just to build a new raised bed than trying to repair an old bed.

Here is a picture of my 1-year-old raised bed, but my oldest 5-year-old raised bed of this type of design still does not have rotted wood.

I know there are all kinds of raised bed designs, but I wanted to point out some construction considerations for anyone building new raised beds. Some construction methods are stronger than others. Whatever design you chose to build, just think about how it will hold up over the years.

I am lucky in that I had access to lots of free pallets. Each 16-inch high, 4X4 foot pallet wood raised bed costs me less than $2.00 in screws and nails to build. Not bad if you can cut your wood, swing a hammer, and drive in screws. I enjoy building stuff. If not, I guess I'd be looking at kits that were ready to assemble - wood or metal.

Would love to see pictures of what others have for raised beds. Please post some pictures of your raised beds and tell us what you think about them. I suppose every design has some advantages and disadvantages to be considered. Share the knowledge. Thanks.

 

[Sally PB]

I had the soil tested after we bought the house. It's extremely acidic, a mix of gray and yellow clay. In some areas it's dusty, and rainwater just runs off. I've been trying to amend but focusing on the raised beds instead is physically easier on me.

Amend the soil you're growing your plants in first, of course.

This thought has helped me when I've had daunting tasks:

Do the best you can with what you have where you are.

 

[gtaus]

Amend the soil you're growing your plants in first, of course.

This thought has helped me when I've had daunting tasks:

Do the best you can with what you have where you are.

Exactly.

I read online somewhere that the guy(s) who came up with the idea of Heugel mound gardening was simply trying to get rid of all the junk trees that he had on his property. So, he just piled up the wood, dumped some junk organics on it, and threw dirt on top of it to grow stuff. Turns out, the system had benefits and hügelkultur started to become a thing for gardeners. I don't know how much of that origination story is true, or not, but it would be a perfect example of using what you have available and turning it into something more beneficial.

I live on a lake and have terrible, sandy soil where it's really hard to get things to grow well. I tried to amend my in-ground garden for years and years, but eventually I learned that it was much better for me to grow plants in a contained raised bed where I could amend the soil in just one place and not go broke trying to "fix" my in-ground soil.

And I had lots of trees and old logs on my property, so it was a natural fit to use that stuff up in hügelkultur raised beds. When I got a backyard flock, my composting efforts went to another level and my gardening results have dramatically improved.