With the opportunity to use some aspen trees I dropped last year and sawed into logs, I gave this season a go with a Hugelkultur mound.
What I enjoy most about the idea of a Hugel is that after much searching, reading and planning, it became clear that these grow mounds have a ton of flexibility in design and creation. So armed with a medley of logs, branches, twigs, semi aged compost, manure, leaves, kitchen waste and random other ingredients, I went to work this April. 3 months later I have to say I am stunned how well it is growing plants.
Because the soil in my yard is river bed with a skin of top soil, I decided to go up with the mound instead of a pit style Hugelkultur. It was more work keeping it mounded and not sloughing off the sides, but so far the results have been beyond my expectations.
Here were the steps I took:
- Dug a trench and removed the sod
- Raked the bed and removed exposed rocks
- Laid down logs - watered (props to my daughter for the artful log design)
- covered in leaf litter - watered
- spread gooey kitchen scraps saved all winter - watered
- added top soil removed from bed
- spread chicken manure (with bonus maggots!)
- top soil - watered
- laid aspen and willow branches
- partly composted leaves and grass
- added the removed sod (dirt side up) - watered
- leaf litter
- small branches/sticks - watered
- topped with nearly finished compost
- spread soil/manure mix over top
- finished with some bagged potting soil I had laying around from previous year
I took the cue from PaddyMC and planted three winter squash after threat of frost had passed and added some meadow mix flower seeds, a few sunflower seeds and let it rip. Oddly, I have three tomato plants, several random sqaush (assuming pumpkin but not sure) and even two potato plants pop up. I can assume this was from the kitchen scraps that were added, but not really sure. I will let them be and see what happens.
Here is a progress photo from today...