The 2016 garden has long been put to rest, but I wanted to make sure that I got my year in review post up before this year closes.
When I started using hugelkultur a few years back, I’ve enjoyed documenting the process and results through this blog. It began with probably my most popular post to date: “How-to: Hugelkultur Raised Garden Bed Start-to-Finish”. The motivation for a start-to-finish post came from frustration in my own research before I even built my first hugel bed. I found many, many photos and information on how to build them, but very little results photos. Did this type of gardening actually even work?
Well, long story short, the answer is yes.
I continued the following year with an expansion of my hugelkultur garden and even wrote a how-to article for Lake Time Magazine. You can see the article and a start-to-finish slideshow of my 2015 garden here.
Which brings us to 2016. This year, my family was featured in Acres U.S.A. magazine, with a focus again on our successful use of hugelkultur gardening in our harsh climate. The garden saw yet another expansion with new hugel beds of different shapes and types (round bed, curved bed, raised framed bed, and keyhole bed) and the footprint of a new hugelkultur future market garden was laid.
Here is my 2016 start-to-finish garden slideshow. Enjoy.
Great slide show Erin. loved watching it! Every time I see your gardens Im totally green with envy lol. My little garden is so small, how I would love to have that much space. Because Im in the desert no trees but I do a kind of modified hugelkultur just using small little limbs from some of my flowers, straw etc but with similar results on a much smaller scale. The depth helped to keep it cooler even in the extreme heat. I was able to grow sweet potatoes and am just harvesting now. Keep sharing 🙂
Are you adding much dirt to your hugels at the start of a new season? I noticed mine have settled significantly this past winter, and I have a few holes too. I used a ton of rotten wood, mixed with fresher stuff, and also threw in a bunch of leaves just cuz. Perhaps it’s all the leaves, ha ha. I see you use a fair amount of straw too, so perhaps that decomposition is enough to keep things up….
Hi, Eddy! So sorry for the late reply. In the fall, I add a TON of leaves, stuff them into any of the holes (along with wood chunks) and do a very thick layer, along with manure. That all gets to break down all fall and winter and in the spring I have a new “dirt” layer. And yes, the straw from the growing season helps too (the straw is from my duck bedding, as well as what we use to cover the underground line for our well to keep it from freezing). You will have the most significant settling of your beds in the first two seasons. The larger stuff takes a lot longer to break down than the little stuff- a lot of that littler stuff such as twigs, leaves etc all break down in that first year. I always stuff the holes with chunks of wood that won’t break down as fast, then cover them with mulch, leaves, manure, whatever you have available. Hope this helps!