Hugelkultur is not a solution for every site. Nor are raised beds, or hardwood edging, or anything really. Permaculture is all about intelligently, creatively, sensitively responding to the nature of a site and the creatures, human and animal, that inhabit it. But hugelkultur has worked here on our retrosuburbia refit of a small, suburban block in a subtropical, coastal site. This is its story.
This was the front yard when we moved in. After living for nearly 40 years in a place where the view out any window was entirely forest, the wall of trees along the front boundary was one of the big emotional attractions of the house for me. But the zone and sector analysis was unequivocal – it had to go.
I hung on to the powder puff bush (Calliandra haematocephala) – it had some value as a nectar source. It’s still there though heavily pruned. The rest were nearly all exotics, several of them invasive. “Small and slow solutions” is the permaculture principle, but one of the big advantages of a holistic site design is the courage to do major work – terraforming, tree removing, water droving – before investing too much effort in things that will need undoing later.
So the trees went. Almost all of them in one weekend. The friends who helped expected to be loading trailers for the dump all weekend, but I couldn’t bear to see that much biomass go offsite. The idea of “too much” of anything of biological origin just doesn’t compute for me. So we stacked it all and went with the “observe and interact” principle for a few months. It was too hot and dry to do much else anyhow. That turned out to be a good decision.
Once the rain came, the site showed us its other side. Though the native soil is sandy and poor in water holding capacity, the site is flat and slow draining. And, though the front yard has the best aspect for sun, in suburbia light is at a premium, and every bit of height improves sunlight access. The initial design of in-ground beds for intensive annual veg gave way to the idea of raised beds.
That brought on a multitude of design decisions – how high, how wide, how deep, what layout, what material – none of them given. We ummed and ahhed about metal or recycled or hardwood edging. In this salt water atmosphere, metal rusts out fast, and all the recycled timber we could find was treated. We ended up finding a local supplier of ironbark. We made the central path wide enough for a wheelbarrow but all the others 40cm – just wide enough to plant and pick from – to maximise growing space.
The cut trees had been sitting for a few months by this time, and the leaves had all dropped to the bottom of the piles. The beds were filled by reversing the layers – the heaviest timber at the bottom, lighter wood on top, then a layer of horse manure and washed seaweed and some grass clippings, then the decomposed leaf litter mixed with sand from the bottom of the piles, then a layer of worm castings and bought compost. The final layer, being as how it cost money, was frugally applied.
We planted straight into this, aiming to get the beds ‘alive’ as soon as possible. The seedlings made daily watering worthwhile. We tucked kitchen waste under the top layer to feed worms, fed with diluted seaweed brew, and turned our attention to the next major project – getting worms and chooks going on producing soil for the next round of planting.
Even in that very first year we ate well out of that front garden – this is it seven weeks later. And the beds have continued to bear well. They are now in their third year and have produced hundreds of kilograms of vegetables, kept us pretty well fed right through the El Niño drought of the first year and the La Niña floods of the last. The beds have continued to slowly subside as the wood rots, and each time I plant, I top up the bed with compost produced by our backyard chooks (more of that in another post). There was a period of a couple of months where the slug populations got ahead of the ability of the local blue tongue and skink populations to deal with them, and I resorted to beer traps. But the next season there were lizard babies and otherwise there have been no real problems. Our hugel beds happily grow carrots these days.
Glad you’re blogging again, Linda
Thanks for sharing your urban journey!
There’s quite a bit of garden bed there – maybe 20 square metres? Do you use much water? I’m in Adelaide and most our veges are growing in wicking beds which are great for water saving but the trade off its more infrastructure.. we’ve got about 12 square metres, suboptimally managed 😉
Cheers Angus
Hi Angus! It is good to hear from you again too. There are 8 beds, each 1.2 by 2.4, plus 2 slightly longer, near enough to 30 square metres. It took quite a bit of geometric drawing and a few domestics to figure out the optimal use of timber and space to get as much growing area as possible :). (As a side note, even working a full-time high pressure job, (termporarily, for the sake of the mortgage), I feelI could easily manage double that area. More than double and I’d have to start worrying about distribution, but at double I’d be able to fully supply our daughter’s household as well as ours). One of the attractions of hugelkultur was water holding. The theory is that the wood gets spongy and holds water – important in our sandy coastal soil. I don’t know if it is that, or that I’ve added a *lot* of organic matter over the last three years, or that we’ve just been in a La Nina most of that time, but the watering so far has been quite moderate. We have installed a water tank, and that helps (but mainly waters the trees and the seedlings – I still raise advanced seedlings in a nursery area before planting out). The beds themselves susrvive most of the year on rain, and seelings watered in well when they are planted out, except for about 8 weeks in November/December, out hot dry season. Up here, the climate is less Mediterranean though, more tropical. By late December, we are getting thunderstorms, and by Februay it is east coast lows and flooding rain.
I am happy I have found your blog again Linda. My veggie garden started out as the mandala veggie garden from your book The Permaculture Home Garden complete with chook dome. The dome has since been sold and two big chook pens and very large run for them installed and my veggie garden doubled in size around the two pens here in Homeleigh just outside Kyogle. I have also installed raised beds after the rain and used the Hugelkultur method. It works very well.
Hi Janet, I’m glad hugelkultur is working for you too. I’m using deep litter for my chooks now too.
Thank you for sharing your new journey. We’ve graduated back to suburbia from rural, like yourselves. And like yourselves, we’ve transitioned from your wonderful Mandala garden system, which we LOVE, to a deep litter composting fun for our chooks and a vegetable garden. We’re still working out the kinks in ours and this post has been particularly useful. I just love hearing about permaculture-led decision-making processes. THANKS – so inspiring, as always ✨
This is great. Ended up doing setting up a couple of hugel beds at our place this year (for much the same reasons – trying to use up giant pile of prunings!) – good to know they hold up!