This is a perfect example of what I love most about your videos. It does not need to be perfect or strictly according to the letter of the law in order to be productive. Obsession with perfection can kill motivation and action.
Thanks for this. It feels very important to spread the message of 'good enough' and 'quantity over quality' I think! The more we chip away at systems and not get worried about them being perfect the more things can just get started and move towards goodness.
I am building 18" raised beds and using oldish logs and twigs from our property to fill in the bottom, adding leaf mulch and a bit of topsoil mixed with peat and coir for the seeds and seedlings. As it breaks down I will continue to add layers over the winter of hay and leaves to help fill in as it breaks down. I love this concept of using the logs where they fall and hope I can convince my hubs to make better stacks with the help of the new backhoe we got.
The Explaining Hand returns! I love Explaining Hand. Your explanation of watching the cover crop to see where fertility is unlocking is amazing to me in that "wouldn't have thought of it, makes perfect sense once explained" way.
Awesome! SW New Hampshire zone 5 here! I now know my spring project once the snow melts a bit! Clean up the side wooded lot and create hugelmounds in the orchard where it’s mostly spent soil and ledge.
Thank you for explaining a much simpler method without all the big machinery. I have a Russian Olive I'm chopping down, and would love to use it for something better than being a water sucker. This is a great video.
ya can call me crazy but ai take me wheel barrow an 1/4in. sifter to the woods an collect the decomposing wood fer the gardens, along wit compost leaves an grass clippins thet gits all turned inta the garden beds,, thanks fer the ideas on them hugel mounds, thumbs-up,,, be blessed an safe
@@MrRJS27 ai have a 1/2in. screen sifter, ai jist thought thet usein the 1/4.in. sifter woud break down faster an give me more time in the woods, thank you, be blessed an safe
Made 4 hugelbeds spring 2018. I mostly made them to get rid of some old already half rotted logs and becuase it was a free way to make garden beds! Would have been quite expensive to buy soil/compost for those beds! This spring I will make a big hugelmound to get rid of more wood and the mound will work as a "privacy fence" and windbreak also. Full winter here in northern Sweden now with deep snow but I've started chopping down some trees thats are far to close to each other and blocks lots of light.
I did one except in my raised beds I put a layer of woodchips in the bottom and topped it up with very rich compost. The growth has just gotten crazier every year and I never water. I also only plant while it rains. I'm quite lazy with gardening.
Thank you for the great video! This is my first time hearing about hugelkultur, and it sounds like it could work very well in my part of Norway, which is temperate and wet year-round. This method is not especially relevant for my own garden (it's on a very steep slope), but a good portion of my grandma's property consists of wet marshes with coniferous trees and shrubs, and it's always such a shame to just have to dump all the branches and pines in a ditch, or, even worse, burn it. If the nutrients in the debris could it be used to produce new soil it'd much preferable. I'll have to try it in the future!
It really feels that way. I went to school for fine art and am glad to have that experience to help inform, to some extent, how it can feel to work with a landscape.
You said it ten different ways, you can't be in a rush. If you buy garden soil it, good for 6 months. If you build a pile of logs, limbs, twigs, leaves, and cover with the dirt and wood chips you will be gardening on it for 30 years. Also its like your worm island in the chicken yard it radiates out from the mound and improves the surrounding area. I bet if you filmed in the summer the weeds would be tallest and darkest at the pile and taper out 20" in all directions. Always love the property videos.
At about 13:28 or so... down with the sickness by disturbed began to play in my head but instead of sickness... richness haha Excellent video on your hugelbeds, some real fertility and utility that you've developed there
Hi. I love all your videos and you inspire me a lot. Thank you. I tried this on a lower scale and got so many wood bugs and slugs. I just tried and experiment to grow some garlic and see if I would get less wood bugs then but I thought I would ask you. Why do I have so many bugs? They eat what I plant then? :) France
I found your channel recently and have been binge watching your videos nightly! Thank you for all the great knowledge! I have a question about Hugelmounds. From this video it sounds like I shouldn’t expect much from a mound for a couple years. Is that what you experienced for your front yard garden? Did it take a few years to get those hugelmounds to produce? I am contemplating using this method as a way of managing much of the downed wood I have on our property. Thanks again!!
Thanks very much for all the videos . Amazing wife and husband team , templates for now and the future. It is defiantly in terms of soil (12.56mins in video) a evolution. These are the skills we need to move towards a more sustainable future. Hugel mounds are in some ways a time machine, they create the perfect atmosphere for aggressive production , short and long term. If we all start being more aware in LIFE, consciousness will certainly expand. We are all one from the trees to the amoeba , animated life. Thanks Team
Experimented with taller mounds? Paul wheaton style. I'm at 4ft and 10ft long roughly. I like the idea of draping protection without buying framing and could make a cold frame around when one leaves enough branches overhanging on the side. Even cold rest winter sowing bottles within the overlapping./ periphery.
We don't have enough raw material in one place to build that tall, so I spread it out to match closer to what the landscape is offering where it offers it.
lol. - My young hugel mounds back in NJ were chipmunk havens. Root vegetables got pulled out, tasted and tossed aside. The little bleepers kept right on pulling out things they had already tried and tossed aside. Not something that mad me smile. Turnip that size? Never happened for me, because at about marble size it would have been pulled and gnawed on, whether they liked it or not ;)
A friend sent a screen capture of auto-closed captioning for this video and they thought it was: "Google Culture" nope... Ha! Happy New Year to you too!
Great idea... I think I will try to start this winter on my to be some day off grid cabin site (few years down the road...) I have a wet marsh spot on the edge of a lake have some cranberry's growing, there's a lot of fallen spruce trees near by, what do you thing of making raised beds with the trees filling in with branches wood chips then leave it alone for a few years until I need to plant... since the water table is real high is there only certain plants I can plant or does it depend on how high the sides are I'm in southern east Canada bordering Maine zone 5B I think... I probably will video before and after sorry so long winded
I think the basic idea sounds great to me. Adding some muck from the boggy/edge area of the water near where you build the beds could help them break down faster, but you could also simply lay it all out where you want production to eventually happen and wait!
Any thoughts of putting preprocessed compost(food scraps, etc) in with or underneath the fresh mounds? Would the scraps break down prematurely? The thinking being to add some more diverse nutrients to the mounds. Thanks another great video
I wonder what the carbon balance is for this kind of wood decomposition and soil formation. Considering wood falls and decays in forests, forming soil for future forest, this practice seems like a great form of mimicking & restoring ecosystems!
With regard to planting trees on hugel mounds, Sepp recommends against it. These mounds are meant to be transient things, not permanent landscape features. They're a mechanism for converting woody debris back into soil while getting productivity from the area as it breaks down.. Can you build permanent raised beds that start as hugel mounds? Yes, but at some point in there it's all broken down into soil and it isn't a hugel anymore ;) at that point, you can choose to leave it as a permanent raised bed - or you could relocate that fertility, thinking of your hugel as a really long term compost pile ;)
Good notes here. For our poorly drained landscape it is nice to have areas of particularly rich, well drained soils that long term trees can enjoy. I've just learned not to plant too early or I'll be sad.
This makes me wonder if this would be a good idea to use on a slopped property edge, to fill with, and as it develops and rots, it will fill up and become a level planting area...???
Thanks again for the walk about! I'm finally starting to work on my Zone 5 forested area. I'm on a challenging but fun sloping 3/4 acre in Connecticut. Is it worth moving wood in your zone 5 closer to home, or further up hill if too far away? Or is it better to save the energy and build the mounds close to their origin? Thanks for the hints about crops to try on a juvenile mound.
Interesting... That space has been converted into a large pond, and the rich soils of hugel mounds in the making have been moved to nearby areas. Tons of trees, shrubs and annuals planted all around!
Shawn you might be able to do Phoenix oysters. I’m using them on some pines. The culture is important as you have mentioned you would benefit from one that was found on pine. I think I got them from mushroom mountain.
BTW I am using that Phoenix culture on hugels with spruce pine which is similar to the white pine. The Other “seed logs” included oyster on poplar and shiitake on various woods of close to played out logs. So far shiitake is not working to propagate but oyster is happy.
Don't walk them down with machinery! If the were made without soil in the middle, so there are air spaces inside, you can shift the logs around a bit and pour in liquified dirt. Walking them down with equipment will compact the soil around them, which is where I've often seen the most improvement with top covered hugel.
For the patient and for the homeowner as well I guess. Here's hoping the people living in my old rental house are enjoying the productive soil resulting from the beds I put in before I had to move. Full on oof.
Ah, hügelkultur. At the present, we're having a row. No kidding.. got Canadian thistle in my mounds.. interwoven amongst my logs and branches.. huge. Problem.
That sounds challenging. Might be worth topping off the beds with deeper compost/woodchips and sowing out some cover crops to hopefully smother things.
@@edibleacres yeah.. I had been pulling them.. I put cardboard and a thick layer on it but honestly, for my sanity, I'm moving the last remaining small plants (rhubarb ) and I'm going to dig through the bed.. major pita. Lol. I hadn't fully understood what I was dealing with the first time it showed up. I'm hoping to get it out of the bed and then put in an edger of some kind to prevent reentry and then fight it out in the grass.. I figure if its roots starve long enough I won't have to resort to anything more radical.. 🙏
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This is a perfect example of what I love most about your videos. It does not need to be perfect or strictly according to the letter of the law in order to be productive. Obsession with perfection can kill motivation and action.
Truth!
Obsession with efficiency and profit is how we got into this mess! So happy to see humans rewilding ourselves.
Plus I love the topic of hugelkultur
Thanks for this. It feels very important to spread the message of 'good enough' and 'quantity over quality' I think! The more we chip away at systems and not get worried about them being perfect the more things can just get started and move towards goodness.
You are the Mr. Rogers of soil. I mean this in the most positive way.
I love that description! I couldn't agree more
I am building 18" raised beds and using oldish logs and twigs from our property to fill in the bottom, adding leaf mulch and a bit of topsoil mixed with peat and coir for the seeds and seedlings. As it breaks down I will continue to add layers over the winter of hay and leaves to help fill in as it breaks down. I love this concept of using the logs where they fall and hope I can convince my hubs to make better stacks with the help of the new backhoe we got.
The Explaining Hand returns! I love Explaining Hand. Your explanation of watching the cover crop to see where fertility is unlocking is amazing to me in that "wouldn't have thought of it, makes perfect sense once explained" way.
👍!
Awesome! SW New Hampshire zone 5 here! I now know my spring project once the snow melts a bit! Clean up the side wooded lot and create hugelmounds in the orchard where it’s mostly spent soil and ledge.
Sounds like a good plan, just make sure you don't expect pure gold from them right out of the gate :)
Thank you. That works well here in the AZ desert.
Very important in the drier climates, where rain comes super hard and fast and then LONG times between...
The cover crop sowing seems to have worked well, not bad considering how long those logs have been there!
That turnip came out of a hugel made back in July.
Thanks for another great video!
Always enjoy seeing what new on TH-camrs
Thanks for this, looking to slowly clear some land in the 'city' and this will be perfect for changing our into a planting area.
yes, yes, yes,,,,,,great work, and a lovely turnip, i love doing these
Thank you for explaining a much simpler method without all the big machinery. I have a Russian Olive I'm chopping down, and would love to use it for something better than being a water sucker. This is a great video.
Fantastic video
I love this video. Thanks. It was fun seeing you in the excellent book “ Farming the Woods”.
Steve is a great friend of ours!
Beautiful video, thank you! I've set up a hugel or two but it's a waiting game, as you say. Hoping to put in some shrubs this year!
You could also do like how Sepp Holzer does and plant the shrubs/trees on the edges of the mounds and keep annuals on the mounds themselves.
ya can call me crazy but ai take me wheel barrow an 1/4in. sifter to the woods an collect the decomposing wood fer the gardens, along wit compost leaves an grass clippins thet gits all turned inta the garden beds,, thanks fer the ideas on them hugel mounds, thumbs-up,,, be blessed an safe
That's what I do as well, I like to think it's a semi-instant hugelmound. I use 1/2 rather than 1/4 sifting.
@@MrRJS27 ai have a 1/2in. screen sifter, ai jist thought thet usein the 1/4.in. sifter woud break down faster an give me more time in the woods, thank you, be blessed an safe
Considering forests generate soil: if you use that soil for gardens that facilitate forestation, seems like a very virtuous cycle!
Made 4 hugelbeds spring 2018. I mostly made them to get rid of some old already half rotted logs and becuase it was a free way to make garden beds! Would have been quite expensive to buy soil/compost for those beds! This spring I will make a big hugelmound to get rid of more wood and the mound will work as a "privacy fence" and windbreak also. Full winter here in northern Sweden now with deep snow but I've started chopping down some trees thats are far to close to each other and blocks lots of light.
I did one except in my raised beds I put a layer of woodchips in the bottom and topped it up with very rich compost. The growth has just gotten crazier every year and I never water. I also only plant while it rains. I'm quite lazy with gardening.
You could say lazy or more appropriately say smart with your time and energy!
Thank you for the great video! This is my first time hearing about hugelkultur, and it sounds like it could work very well in my part of Norway, which is temperate and wet year-round. This method is not especially relevant for my own garden (it's on a very steep slope), but a good portion of my grandma's property consists of wet marshes with coniferous trees and shrubs, and it's always such a shame to just have to dump all the branches and pines in a ditch, or, even worse, burn it. If the nutrients in the debris could it be used to produce new soil it'd much preferable. I'll have to try it in the future!
On a steep slope you may find laying out these types of beds exactly on contour could help hold more water higher in the landscape.
Got a couple going at our place!
Yes!
sketching is great! I think of land stewardship as sculpting
It really feels that way. I went to school for fine art and am glad to have that experience to help inform, to some extent, how it can feel to work with a landscape.
I really learned a lot from this video and I love the idea of patience and long term planning. Do you have room for elders or woofers on the land?
You said it ten different ways, you can't be in a rush. If you buy garden soil it, good for 6 months. If you build a pile of logs, limbs, twigs, leaves, and cover with the dirt and wood chips you will be gardening on it for 30 years. Also its like your worm island in the chicken yard it radiates out from the mound and improves the surrounding area. I bet if you filmed in the summer the weeds would be tallest and darkest at the pile and taper out 20" in all directions. Always love the property videos.
THanks for the kind words!
At about 13:28 or so... down with the sickness by disturbed began to play in my head but instead of sickness... richness haha
Excellent video on your hugelbeds, some real fertility and utility that you've developed there
I'm so happy your mounds look like mine (only larger! 😅). I'm hoping to plant some shade lovers this year.
Piles of old rotting logs and debris can look pretty similar :)
Hi. I love all your videos and you inspire me a lot. Thank you. I tried this on a lower scale and got so many wood bugs and slugs. I just tried and experiment to grow some garlic and see if I would get less wood bugs then but I thought I would ask you. Why do I have so many bugs? They eat what I plant then? :) France
Not sure about the bugs but I suspect things will just get better each season.
I found your channel recently and have been binge watching your videos nightly! Thank you for all the great knowledge! I have a question about Hugelmounds. From this video it sounds like I shouldn’t expect much from a mound for a couple years. Is that what you experienced for your front yard garden? Did it take a few years to get those hugelmounds to produce? I am contemplating using this method as a way of managing much of the downed wood I have on our property. Thanks again!!
Yes, as he says in the video it takes a few years
California needs your hugle practices
I hear you. Long term soil building, deep mulches, contour based designs, etc. are all so desperately needed around the world.
Thanks very much for all the videos . Amazing wife and husband team , templates for now and the future. It is defiantly in terms of soil (12.56mins in video) a evolution. These are the skills we need to move towards a more sustainable future. Hugel mounds are in some ways a time machine, they create the perfect atmosphere for aggressive production , short and long term. If we all start being more aware in LIFE, consciousness will certainly expand. We are all one from the trees to the amoeba , animated life.
Thanks Team
Experimented with taller mounds? Paul wheaton style. I'm at 4ft and 10ft long roughly. I like the idea of draping protection without buying framing and could make a cold frame around when one leaves enough branches overhanging on the side. Even cold rest winter sowing bottles within the overlapping./ periphery.
We don't have enough raw material in one place to build that tall, so I spread it out to match closer to what the landscape is offering where it offers it.
lol. - My young hugel mounds back in NJ were chipmunk havens. Root vegetables got pulled out, tasted and tossed aside. The little bleepers kept right on pulling out things they had already tried and tossed aside. Not something that mad me smile. Turnip that size? Never happened for me, because at about marble size it would have been pulled and gnawed on, whether they liked it or not ;)
I see that happen a lot early on. As the mounds evolve and break down the habitat starts to reduce and production goes up.
My main mound is there for wildlife to feed on and protect my other stuff lol.
watching this in 2022 - the year of tree planting in the Hügelbeete (hopefully) 😉😊🙃
Who gull what?! Hahah. Just kidding, happy new year buddy.
A friend sent a screen capture of auto-closed captioning for this video and they thought it was:
"Google Culture"
nope...
Ha!
Happy New Year to you too!
Great idea... I think I will try to start this winter on my to be some day off grid cabin site (few years down the road...) I have a wet marsh spot on the edge of a lake have some cranberry's growing, there's a lot of fallen spruce trees near by, what do you thing of making raised beds with the trees filling in with branches wood chips then leave it alone for a few years until I need to plant... since the water table is real high is there only certain plants I can plant or does it depend on how high the sides are I'm in southern east Canada bordering Maine zone 5B I think... I probably will video before and after sorry so long winded
I think the basic idea sounds great to me. Adding some muck from the boggy/edge area of the water near where you build the beds could help them break down faster, but you could also simply lay it all out where you want production to eventually happen and wait!
@@edibleacres thanks for getting back to me I will mention you and refer back to ur vid when I start the beds... thanks again
Denis
Any thoughts of putting preprocessed compost(food scraps, etc) in with or underneath the fresh mounds? Would the scraps break down prematurely? The thinking being to add some more diverse nutrients to the mounds. Thanks another great video
That could work. We already have our chickens working on food scraps and compost so they get first dibs.
The King of the Hüg!
Big moundin'
I wonder what the carbon balance is for this kind of wood decomposition and soil formation. Considering wood falls and decays in forests, forming soil for future forest, this practice seems like a great form of mimicking & restoring ecosystems!
It is super high carbon, and pretty slow without much finess, but works just fine if you have a relaxed time scale you are happy to work within.
With regard to planting trees on hugel mounds, Sepp recommends against it. These mounds are meant to be transient things, not permanent landscape features. They're a mechanism for converting woody debris back into soil while getting productivity from the area as it breaks down.. Can you build permanent raised beds that start as hugel mounds? Yes, but at some point in there it's all broken down into soil and it isn't a hugel anymore ;) at that point, you can choose to leave it as a permanent raised bed - or you could relocate that fertility, thinking of your hugel as a really long term compost pile ;)
Good notes here. For our poorly drained landscape it is nice to have areas of particularly rich, well drained soils that long term trees can enjoy. I've just learned not to plant too early or I'll be sad.
"thanks, time"
Time is a huge ally if you drop into it and go with it.
This makes me wonder if this would be a good idea to use on a slopped property edge, to fill with, and as it develops and rots, it will fill up and become a level planting area...???
That probably would work. Lay it out on contour, dig a walkway above it to get the soil to cover it and you're off to a great start.
You should inoculate them with mushroom spawn too
Oysters love them.
Thanks again for the walk about! I'm finally starting to work on my Zone 5 forested area. I'm on a challenging but fun sloping 3/4 acre in Connecticut.
Is it worth moving wood in your zone 5 closer to home, or further up hill if too far away?
Or is it better to save the energy and build the mounds close to their origin?
Thanks for the hints about crops to try on a juvenile mound.
My suggestion is to build the piles/future-gardens as close to where the material is as is reasonable.
As your 100th Comment on this video, did you plant trees on that huglemound this year?
Interesting... That space has been converted into a large pond, and the rich soils of hugel mounds in the making have been moved to nearby areas. Tons of trees, shrubs and annuals planted all around!
Basically you are doing furrow and ditch gardening
Great content... any plans on just spreading some inoculated spores for mushrooms to hopefully assist in the decomposing of the trees faster?
We could, although the pine clan doesn't really respond well to most of the mushroom types we'd want to grow.
@@edibleacres icic... Thanks for clarifying :D I can't wait to watch more content of yours... Cheers!!
Shawn you might be able to do Phoenix oysters. I’m using them on some pines. The culture is important as you have mentioned you would benefit from one that was found on pine. I think I got them from mushroom mountain.
BTW I am using that Phoenix culture on hugels with spruce pine which is similar to the white pine. The Other “seed logs” included oyster on poplar and shiitake on various woods of close to played out logs. So far shiitake is not working to propagate but oyster is happy.
nature never read the how to grow plants book
how to reduce the chance of fire hazard in your system?
Where he is in New York State, he has nothing to worry about concerning fires. His ground is naturally wet.
We're way more wet on average, and piling soil on top of the logs and branches would take care of any concern if we had a drier time.
will walking on a young mound with a cat help the decomposition process? or would that ruin the biology party going on in there? thanks homie!
You won't hurt it by walking on it. It won't compress much with your weight. :)
I walk around on em all the time. Sometimes with a cat sometimes even just by myself, catless as it were. Helps break up sticks and whatnot.
Don't walk them down with machinery! If the were made without soil in the middle, so there are air spaces inside, you can shift the logs around a bit and pour in liquified dirt. Walking them down with equipment will compact the soil around them, which is where I've often seen the most improvement with top covered hugel.
I'm SOOO far behind. :( lol
For the patient and for the homeowner as well I guess. Here's hoping the people living in my old rental house are enjoying the productive soil resulting from the beds I put in before I had to move. Full on oof.
I've left many a garden bed behind in my life. Hoping yours are enjoyed and appreciated :)
Ah, hügelkultur. At the present, we're having a row. No kidding.. got Canadian thistle in my mounds.. interwoven amongst my logs and branches.. huge. Problem.
That sounds challenging. Might be worth topping off the beds with deeper compost/woodchips and sowing out some cover crops to hopefully smother things.
@@edibleacres yeah.. I had been pulling them.. I put cardboard and a thick layer on it but honestly, for my sanity, I'm moving the last remaining small plants (rhubarb ) and I'm going to dig through the bed.. major pita. Lol. I hadn't fully understood what I was dealing with the first time it showed up. I'm hoping to get it out of the bed and then put in an edger of some kind to prevent reentry and then fight it out in the grass.. I figure if its roots starve long enough I won't have to resort to anything more radical.. 🙏