General

Hügelkultur Farming

What do you do with those large limbs and logs that fall from the trees around your home after a windstorm? Unless you heat your home with wood, chances are that you either call a tree service to cut them up and take them away or line them up on the curb for the garbage truck to deal with. Hügelkultur garden beds offer a fantastic way to use those limbs and logs to create an oasis of fertility for your garden and surrounding landscape.

Why Your Garden is Losing Fertility?

The soil is undoubtedly a complicated and complex thing. While to the bare eye it may appear to be nothing more than brown or black dirt, there are literally billions of living organisms in every handful of fertile top soil. The fertility of the soil comes from the slow but steady natural process of organic matter falling onto the surface of the ground and then being decomposed by those billions of creatures that make up the soil community.

The plants that we grow send roots into the soil. Those roots pull up nutrients that are provided by healthy soil. In natural ecosystems, such as forests or prairies, the nutrient balance in soil is continually replenished. The nutrients used by trees, bushes, shrubs, and grasses are given back to the soil when leaves fall or grasses die and are slowly reincorporated into the soil.

One of the (many) problems with modern agriculture, however, is that we want our plants to get the nutrients they need from the soil, but we don´t offer nutrients back to the soil itself. Monocultures of grain crops or vegetables that are grown year after year after year suck up the available nutrients from the healthy soil. After a certain amount of time, that soil is left with zero fertility. The abundant soil organisms gradually begin to die off as the soil essentially “dies.”

Photo Credit: Richard Bogdanowicz

What Are Hügelkultur Garden Beds?

The term “hügelkultur” was coined by Austrian permaculturist and organic farmer Sepp Holzer. Hügelkultur means hill culture. A hügelkultur bed is essentially a pile of logs and twigs that are buried underneath the soil and covered with a mulch of hay, straw, or other organic material.
Instead of burning the excess wood that comes from your land, hügelkultur beds transform that excess wood into high areas of fertility. It is important to use wood from hardwood trees since they bring more beneficial organisms and healthy bacteria and fungus into the decomposition process. Soft woods like cedar are very hard to be broken down and invite “brown rot”, a type of fungus that can be detrimental to plant growth.

How Do Hügelkultur Garden Beds Work?

Like all organic matter, wood will slowly decompose into the soil. Billions of bacteria, mycelium from fungi, and other creatures will slowly colonize any sort of wood and begin the process of turning it back into top soil.

Hügelkultur beds, then, basically help the soil organisms along their path by giving them a concentrated amount of food material. By placing large amounts of logs, branches, and other woody materials, you are inviting a whole host of different organisms into a specific area.

These beds are also a source of long-term fertility. Whereas mulches and leaf litter will be broken down into fertile topsoil in a couple of months, it will take years for the soil organisms to transform that wood pile into soil. You can plant crops into those beds and on top of the slowly decomposing wood piles. The logs and tree limbs in hügelkultur beds act as a slow release fertilizer that will offer fertility for your plants for several years. By covering the hügelkultur beds with top soil, finished compost, and mulch, you are creating a medium where you can immediately plant out almost any sort of crop.

Hügelkultur beds can also retain enormous amounts of water. If you have ever come across a decomposing log in the heart of the woods, chances are it felt moist to the touch, even in the middle of a serious drought. Wood holds water well, and by creating a garden bed sitting on top of a pile of decomposing logs, you are essentially creating a mini reservoir of water that will be available to your plants even during extended droughts.

Where to Get Material for Your Hügelkultur Beds?

One of the advantages of living in urban areas of industrialized countries is that waste is abundant. Any time a tree limb falls from a wind storm or a tree must be pruned back due to the electrical lines, that wood is taken to the curbside for the garbage truck. After a significant wind storm, chances are you could easily pick up more than enough wood to build several hundred hügelkultur beds. A simple phone call to your city’s electrical company or municipal tree service should get you access to more than enough raw material.

If you would rather rely on your own trees for your hügelkultur beds, coppice forestry is an easy way to get a steady and sustainable supply of medium-sized tree limbs. Coppice forestry is simply the process of cutting fast growing trees back. These trees have an enormous capacity to send up new growth after being cut back. Coppice forestry, then, allows you to cut back excessive tree growth without killing off trees.

Photo Credit: Richard Bogdanowiz

How to Build a Hügelkultur System?

One of the most unique aspects of a hügelkultur system is that it allows you to recycle otherwise unwanted wood into an essential part of your agricultural system. Furthermore, hügelkultur beds also allow you to integrate different and diverse design elements in your landscape design.
For example, let’s say that you only have a small backyard bordering on a tree line. You could easily gather more than enough fallen wood from the tree line to build a series of raised garden beds. Instead of having to spread compost over those beds every year, however, the slowly decomposing wood from the hügelkulturs would provide fertility for several years.

If you lived and farmed on sloped land, hügelkulturs could also be integrated into the landscape through placing the mounds of wood on contour across the slope. You could dig swales or drainage ditches above the mounds of wood and use the excavated soil to cover the wood.

Whichever design you come up with for your hügelkultur beds, the basic process remains the same. Simply, find a plentiful supply of hardwood limbs and logs. Place those logs and limbs in the area where you want to create a garden bed and cover them with upturned sod, soil, compost, and mulch. You can plant into your hügelkultur bed immediately and reap several years of harvest before having to rebuild your beds.

Hügelkultur Beds for More Productive and Sustainable Gardens

Living sustainably requires us to continually find ways to provide for ourselves while not diminishing the capacity of the natural world to replenish its natural fertility. While growing your own food is certainly a step in the right direction, even the most dutifully tended to garden will eventually lose its fertility after years of growing out annual crops. Hügelkultur allows us a path to grow the food we need while simultaneously contributing to the health and resiliency of the soil that gives us our sustenance.

Tobias Roberts

After working in the development industry for over a decade, Tobias decided it was time to stop advising Central American farmers how to do things if he didn´t have a piece of land to live coherently with what he taught. Together with his family he runs a small agro-forestry farm, tourism cooperative, and natural building collective in the mountains of El Salvador.

6 Comments

  1. Hello,
    I am new to all this and loving your videos. I live in the tropics and wondered if i can place the hugelkultur bed in a boggy area? It seems like an ideal way to lift it up and make it usable, especially as in the seasons here, it can be boggy for 6 months and then dry the next 6.
    Thanks for your time.
    Caron Yompook.

  2. Good article, however, I noticed a common misconception that I have been guilty of as well. You must use caution if you intend to integrate hugelkultur in a water-retaining swale system. If the slope or the amount of captured water is excessive it can become unstable and result in disaster. It is better to keep hugelkultur applications on flat, or mildly sloping areas. Also, comparisons of buried wood in holes vs. covered mounds above ground might be helpful to some. This is not intended to be a criticism. it is good information and I hope that more people will become aware and start using it more.

  3. I did it in my front garden some years ago.

    Didn’t notice any special benefit.

    BUT voles came, built their nests inside (because it’s nice and warm inside the wood and branches filled “Hügel”) and ate the roots of my berry bushes so that I lost them.

    After some years the “Hügel” collapsed and left a hole that I had to fill up with soil.

    Also the “Hügel” dries out.

    Much work to build the “Hügel” for no benefits and in addition it needs more maintenance than a flat soil.

    Better place good compost on the soil.

    NoSecret

    “Das Edaphon” https://edaphon.org

  4. Hi,
    very good article. Some pracitcal suggestions.
    Size matters, so use really logs and not only twigs, a hügelkultur bed should be at least 1-1,5m high.

  5. Mounds are not suitable for low rainfall areas as the water tends to run off them. I made some in holes in the ground so that they collect rather than repell water but as the material broke down the papaya trees I planted in them fell over.
    One of the issues I have with “permaculture” people is that far too often they are not speaking from their own extensive experience. Just because something works in a particular situation doesn’t mean it can be universally applied. We all need to be experimenting to find what actually works for us, rather than just believing what sometimes seems like dogma.
    I would suggest planting trees beside rather than in such a hugel.

  6. Be careful giving out advice on essentially putting raw material in a giant pile on contour to absorb water. Landslides in extreme cases. Have you successfully done this on a steep slope?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Articles

Back to top button