Hugelkultur

Sorry again for the delay in posting.  We've been doing a lot of digging. 

What kind of digging? First of all, all the trees we ordered back in February came in, so we planted all of those. (Pictures to come). Then, we tried to hack our house's drainage. But before both of those, we built hugels.

We were introduced to some avid gardeners here and asked them what the best way would be to grow vegetables on our very wet, clayey soil. They told us to try out hugels. These are basically raised beds in layers. First you dig a little into the ground. Then on the bottom you put tree branches. On top of that, you put straw. Then you add dirt on top of that. The idea is that the plants are always in well-drained soil. At the same time, though, their roots can always access the water that has pooled down by the branches, and they can benefit from the decomposing organic matter in the bed. The result is "Hugelkultur" (as they would say in Austria). We did a bit of research and built a few. Our hugel's progress:

Step one: remove sod and add lots of sticks from the woodlot out back.

Step two: add more sticks!

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Step 3: take straw from chickens that they've, er, "nutritionally enhanced". Though when you pile up the straw, they  like to play around in it.



Step 4: Put the straw on top of the sticks and mix it with dirt in a desperate attempt to add organic matter to your soil. Our soil is very lumpy.

And that's pretty much it. You are now the proud owner of a hugel.

We've made two hugels so far and are working on a third. We just planted them, so we don't know how well they work yet. Though the seedlings are coming up. So far, so good. The only problem is really that these hugels take a lot of shoveling dirt, and a lot of picking up sticks. It's hard work, and it takes quite a while - I'd say a full afternoon to get a 4 by 8 foot bed. Covering our land in hugels is going to take years if we'd want to do it.

There was one moment of satisfaction that I didn't manage to get on camera. We'd used some straw as mulch on one of the hugels. One evening a week or two ago, we were weeding the hugel and L moved a clump of straw...to reveal a toad sitting at his ease in the wet dirt. I was going to shoo him off but he moved himself deeper into the dirt. So finally we covered him up with straw again and let him be.