Hugel culture

Hügelkultur is a German word describing a form of culture involving a raised planting bed. The technique is said to have been practiced in German and Eastern European societies for hundreds of years but for us there was one significant benefit, one that was less important to those early cultivators; it is a way for us to dispose of significant quantities of wood. This is something that we have rather a lot of, cut down from the land just beyond our back fence. What it consists of is mostly long, odd shaped lengths of gorse and rhododendron branches, not really thick enough to be suitable as fuel for our home log burner stove, but rather than leave it lying about in heaps where the undergrowth will eventually swallow it up we have moved some of it into our garden where we have a particular use for it, in a Hugel bed.

Perhaps at this point some explanation is needed.

The idea is to create a raised bed for growing plants, some of which we might eventually eat. To do this, however, we first have to dig a large trench in the ground, putting the soil to one side so that eventually it can be heaped on top.

The trench is filled, first of all, with pieces of wood, in our case, mostly gorse branches. On top of this there are layers of other material such as cardboard, inverted turfs, cut grass, leaves and then eventually layers of compost. The idea is to create a raised heap so that vegetables or other plants can grow on it. The bed can be contained within a box like a conventional raised bed but this is not essential. The important part is what is at the bottom, the wood, which retains moisture and as it rots down will release nutrients for the roots of what is growing on top to burrow into and absorb.

At the start our Hugel bed looks a complete mess, a heap of long, awkward shaped sticks. We have more wood to fill in the gaps but we need a reliably dry day for this so I can use my electric chop saw outside in the garden and just now we are not getting many of these. In fact the amount of rain that has fallen of late has made it impossible to do anything outside. The season of autumn has arrived.

But a few days later the rain pauses and phase two follows. A few noisy hours are spent cutting long lengths into short sticks which are used to fill in the gaps in our wood heap then we lay some leafy hedge trimmings on top of this. A layer of wet cardboard (packing material from something we bought a while ago) goes on top of the wood and to hold this down we dump some wet turfs on top so it doesn't get blown away. It now looks even more of a mess and after all the rain there is a soggy patch all around the edges into which our feet easily slide but the heap is growing in height with each layer. The next rain will start to consolidate the heap so for the moment we can rest.

For phase three we raid one of our garden compost bins and spend the morning layering the contents on top of the heap, trying to create a uniform smooth surface. Once again we know that when the next lot of rain comes along it will soak into the heap but hopefully it won't wash away too much of the soil. There are unwanted weeds in the heap and we know that some of these will need to be removed but once we have planted things on top the weeds will have competition and it should be possible to keep them under control.

At this point we are not planting anything on the heap, the idea being that it should be left to consolidate for a while.

The Hugel bed now represents an impressive landmark in our garden, a conversation piece if nothing else, and a considerable amount of wood has disappeared out of sight.