#hugelkultur bed

[inthecityofgoodabode]

August 2024: A Little Bit Of Everything

Monday harvest:

Tuesday harvest:

Seeds we collected from this year's leeks:

Wednesday harvest:

Curbside find of the week. These 100 gallon stock tanks run for around 130 bucks & this one was free. We're going to use it to make a container version of a hugelkultur bed:

Friday harvest:

These are some of the summer squash that volunteered in our front bed. They appear to be a hybrid of lemon squash & either straightneck or crookneck squash:

Tersa sphinx caterpillar:

Seen while walking:

Found while walking - two rocks... one obviously evil:

We have volunteer pumpkins in the front bed starting to make:

A volunteer crookneck squash from the front bed:

Sunday harvest:

I felt something on my back & snapped this photo:

And here it is biting me:

Out of focus shot of a hummingbird feeding at our chive blossoms:

My queen planted some lemongrass today to take the place of the Bells of Ireland that had gone to seed:

[toadstoolgardens]

Gardening in Raised Beds On Pavement

Growing in raised beds on top of pavement is an excellent strategy if you have limited growing space. Let's learn how to make the most of that concrete or asphalt!

Build Tall Beds

Crops need room to send roots down into the soil. Providing plenty of room to grow means your crops have a strong foundation, hold moisture longer, and can access more nutrients in the soil through deeper roots. Raised beds on pavement should be a minimum of 24 inches tall and ideally 32 inches tall! Taller is always better, especially if you live somewhere with hot and/or dry summers.

Filling Your Raised Beds

When you build raised beds on the ground, your crops have access to the soil underneath for draining excess water from above and wicking water up from below. Building on pavement takes this away, so how we fill the beds really matters!

Bottom Layer: Gravel

Fill the bottom of your raised beds with about 6 inches of gravel. This helps fight erosion, helps with drainage, and keeps your crop's roots from coming into contact with the pavement.

Middle Layer: Decomposing Wood

I highly recommend the hugelkultur method. A hugelkultur, or "mound culture" in German, is a raised bed with a base of decomposing wood. Rotting wood encourages fungal networks, holds moisture, and fills the space pretty cheaply. Get some logs, sticks, and other dead wood pieces and make a layer on top of your gravel.

Top Layers: Loose, Rich Growing Medium

There's lots of options for filling this space, but the goal is high-quality organic matter. Avoid bags of potting soil, as these aren't living soil. Living soil self-renews and keeps providing a nutrient rich environment. Potting soil will eventually dry out and lose nutrients. Instead gather things like:

Compost (homemade or purchased)

Coffee grounds (many coffee shops are happy to give out used grounds for free)

Living soil (from your yard or garden, even just a few shovels full will likely contain fungal networks and earthworms)

Grass clippings (not sprayed with anything!!)

Kitchen scraps (egg shells, fruits, veggies)

Leaf mold (leaves that have aged for two years)

Livestock manure

Shredded office paper

Worm casings

Alternate layers of whichever of these materials you're able to get and make a big raised bed lasagna. Save your compost for the top lasagna layer. Then top the whole bed off with mulch! Mulch helps hold water and keeps weeds at bay.

The Best time to Build Raised Beds is in the Fall

You can build beds any time, but building in the fall gives your bed contents time to settle and break down over the winter. Your lasagna layers need time to break down into finished soil, which crops generally prefer. Then just add some more organic matter on top in the spring before planting.

What To Plant

Here's some crop suggestions to go easy on your garden in the first year. After the first year though the sky is the limit!

Beets

Herbs

Leafy greens

Legumes

Onions

Maintaining Raised Beds on Pavement

Irrigate: Even with your fabulous organic material lasagna, your raised bed on pavement will still dry out. Prepare to water regularly, especially in the seed and seedling phase. After your crops get established a deep weekly watering should be enough unless it's extremely hot/dry.

Fertilize: During the summer, add some liquid fertilizer every couple of weeks (during your watering sesh) to push nutrients down into the soil. Some great liquid fertilizer options are comfrey tea, fish fertilizer, and worm tea.

Soil Renewal: Every fall top your beds off with some new organic matter. Over time your raised beds will decompose and sink, so fill those babies back up so they're ready for next spring! And don't forget to mulch!

Aerate: As your layers decompose you'll want to do some gentle aerating with a digging fork to keep the soil loose and crumbly.

Use Cover Crops: Cover crops help enrich the soil and keep it from drying out.

Summer cover crops: Buckwheat, cow peas, millet

Winter cover crops: Daikon radish, oats, winter rye

Happy growing!!

Source

[ncdweller]

Doing some Hugelkultur with logs from our great cherry tree that we had to have cut down a few years ago.

Next will be smaller sticks and twigs, then smaller stuff, then dirt and compost.

[nururu]

prepping shallow graves for my enemies

[savanagarden]

SAVANA garden beds can vary in height and size for any garden space. From square to round to rectangular, no matter the shape of your garden, we have the perfect solution.

[crzygthumbs]

Winter: Garden Planning

Winter is a wonderful time to read up on gardening literature. When your garden is fast asleep, it is the perfect time to make preparations for next year. Whether you are new to gardening or an old hand: this is the yearly time for reflection. What has worked for you? What have you struggled with? What are you sure of? What would you like to learn about? Learn how to create a long lasting, low…

[fthrdvs]

Winter: Garden Planning

Winter is a wonderful time to read up on gardening literature. When your garden is fast asleep, it is the perfect time to make preparations for next year. Whether you are new to gardening or an old hand: this is the yearly time for reflection. What has worked for you? What have you struggled with? What are you sure of? What would you like to learn about? Learn how to create a long lasting, low…

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

The problem with gardening is that you'll be filling up a water trough for the chickens and you'll see that big dangerous dead tree you need to get cut down and you'll think 'I wonder if the tree guys will let me keep the wood, I can use it for those hugelkultur beds I've been meaning to set up on the slope out there" and "oh I need to plan that carefully to direct the water flow because I've been meaning to build a channel out there to direct water away and stop it from flooding the house every winter, maybe I can use the beds to help channel the water" and "where should I put the pond? Maybe I can use them to build a deep swale and see if that holds water year-round instead and save money on the pond?" and before you know it you've been standing stock still in your yard for fifteen minutes mentally planning water channels and you don't know how long your water trough has been overflowing for

[jillraggett]

Plant of the Day

Saturday 19 October 2024

This cultivar of Beta vulgaris subsp. cicla var. flavescens (Swiss chard) had dramatic red stems. This group of cultivated beets can produce an edible crop all year round and are known for their resistance to bolting (running to flower and seed). These plants were being grown on a ‘hugelkultur’ (hill culture) which is a no-dig raised bed filled with biomass (wood, leaves, cardboard and other compost) and finished with soil. This feature holds moisture, builds fertility and maximises the surface area.

Jill Raggett

[thestudentfarmer]

9-5-2024 Garden and homesteading update,

Hello, hello!

Life's been keeping me a bit busy recently but I do have a bit of an update for the garden~

Finally Got manure in to fill in a few beds and top off rows. (Which I've started and got going to prep for winter)

Pulled everything but the carrots, cucumber, peppers and 1 tomato (tho the tomatoes on a wire line. I'm still thinking bout pulling it)

I found a few of the armenian cucumbers that might have viable seed, ive got to pull them apart and clean them tonight to dry and give a viability test. I'll leave the cucumbers growing for now. The pollinators and hummingbirds have been using them for shade and fuel. Plus I like the flush of lush foilage and ground cover. It's been extra hot this summer so we haven't seen as much produce as I usually crow about from them. When the weather starts going back to regulalry below 95*f I'm hoping to see more fruiting.

Started up a new bed in the garden. Its a raised bed, two boards tall. This one will be layered on the bottom as usual with cardboard thickly to repell and deter the grass a little bit. Instea dof paper shreds, i cracked up the sunflower stalks I've been saving up to fit the bed size and filled it a good bit with the smaller ones. Topping it off with the manur/compost. I also threw some of the dead cucumber vines with the sunflower stalks to sort of fill it. Not tight packed, just loosely. Just wanna see of it'll work similar to hugelkultur. (Link at end to Wikipedia page).

The sweet potato vines are starting to take off. Thankfully this means I'll have some greens to split between family and the chickens soon. Maybe even some spuds at the end of the season 🤞

The thyme plant kicked the can, the asparagus is ferning out, but not stalking. The basil is seeding pretty good. So with luck some wild seeded basil starts soon.

The sunchokes have stunted a bit, this week I'm gonna see about putting a shade up to see if that'll help them out.

The hollyhocks in the hen alley have been sort of taken over by grasshoppers. So not too much growth among them. Think I'll need to spend a few nights catching them, freezing them and giving them to the chickens for a little extra snack time delight. (Plus getting them out of the garden) I think at that time I'll also lay out some new cardboard as the ground cover has disintegrated pretty well. Looking good beneath on the soil.

Started filling in the area I wanted to put melons in, may instead end up using that area to grow winter veggies, like cauliflower, cabbage or broccoli.

Still need to mix the seed starting soil, cut up some cardboard tubes (gonna try to use them for some seed starting) and get those winter crops started up.

Getting ready to dig out my floral patch to plant elsewhere. (I've been waiting for cooler weather.)

And start up the new direct seed rotation plan (carrots, lettuce, radish, nasturtium and other)

And a few other minor tasks related to the garden and some major ones later too that I'm not gonna get ahead of myself yet on grandoise plans 😂

That's the garden update for now :)

🌱💚Happy Gardening and homesteading💚🌱

Links for additional infos:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%BCgelkultur

[obsessiveplantlady]

June garden update

Omg, so many things have changed since May, but I try to do my best to summarize:

- Planted tomatoes, paprikas, eggplants and cucubers. They are looking pretty good now!

- Created a raised bed, I used the hugelkultur method

- Lettuce, tomatoes, zucchinis, and sunflowers are getting HUGE

- Ruccola is not growing very well, I might have to find a less sunny spot for them

- Coreopsis just started blooming

- I got hooked on growing microgreens, I will post a separate little article about it later

[solar-sunnyside-up]

Started digging my raised garden bed today. Going to apply some hugelkultur concepts so I don't need as much soil to fill it in. I've also been amassing leaves from my driveway/gutters/etc to turn into soil, and it's going well so far- a whole container of former leaves, turned into good soil almost, in only a week! Plus my compost pile is chugging along, making great compost from vegetable scraps.

This is awesome!!!! That's a lot of hard work your putting in, congrats on all of that!!

Enjoy some snacks and rest in between!

[panthertown]

The part-shade beds are lined, mulched, and surrounded by paths. They're partially-buried hugelkultur mounds, which we put in 3 years ago, but they've never quite been productive and I've been terrible about maintaining them. I wish I had some before pics but it was so weedy it was kind of hard to photograph.

The nettles in the lower bed are promising -- the groundhog leaves them alone, they provide several harvests of tasty greens, they're perennial and shade-tolerant, and I might figure out how to harvest fiber from the stalks. The upper bed has some daylilies which I'll harvest for tubers once they spread a little more.

As for the middle bed, I just got five lbs of mushroom spawn:

I tried wine caps once already but I don't think I gave them adequate substrate so they didn't produce very much. I also overloaded the middle bed with nitrogen (composted sheep manure) last year and definitely killed off the mycelium in that one :( Added a bunch of shredded cardboard for carbon and a little bit of compost. If this experiment goes well, I'll invest some effort into creating a huge mushroom bed along the north fence line.

I mulched the beds weeks ago and almost forgot that I also threw some cress seeds down under the mulch toward the bottom of the mushroom bed. So far the pests have avoided my other cress patch, so I'm happy to have finally discovered some greens I can grow and actually get to eat. The motherfuckers DESTROYED my sochan this year, which is weird because they've left it alone for so long :'(

[path-of-grass-and-leaves]

I went on one of those Buy Nothing groups and asked for small logs and branches. People were pretty excited for the free yard cleanup and I brought home so much wood!

I'm going to convert my current vegetable garden to a native pollinator garden and use some of these logs and branches to start a hugelkultur raised bed. There's a huge area of bare soil in the yard where we had one of those tiny Intex pools, which I'm rehoming. I just don't have enough space or privacy for a pool and last year one of our cardinal fledglings fell into it (and quickly escaped thanks to critter pool ramps), so it's a safety concern for the wildlife.

The bare patch of soil is going to be a big vegetable, flower, and herb garden, with the hugelkultur positioned in the center. I'm hoping all the decaying wood, leaf litter, compost, and grass clippings from the hugel will yeild a nice healthy layer of soil. Leftover logs will be used to grow mushrooms and some of the smaller branches will be piled in a corner for fireflies and overwintering insects.

I also bought some native seeds for the pollinator garden. Right now I've got Wild Strawberry, Early Goldenrod, Red Columbine, and Spotted Touch-Me-Not in the fridge for stratification.

I've got Purple Coneflower started in pots and a packet of Blue Flag Iris seeds, which I'll be planting this autumn. We also have some American Cranberrybush and Bloodroot seeds, but I won't be starting those yet since they have double dormancy requirements. We already have Bloodroot in the garden but I want to plant even more.

At some point I want to try my hand at building a tiny pond for vernal pools. We have a slug problem so I really want to encourage toads and salamanders. I'm not sure if I want to do something above ground with lots or ramps and hiding spots or something in-ground but very shallow, like 6"-8" maximum depth.

It's going to be a busy spring!

[victusinveritas]

Hugelkultur:

A link from MSU Extension Master Gardeners regarding this fascinating form of gardening. Hugelkultur incorporates a compost pile directly into the garden bed:

https://mgsoc.org/2019/01/hugelkultur-what/

Below, another diagram and examples of what a finished Hugelkultur garden might look like.

[savanagarden]

We are building our very first raised garden bed for growing fresh vegetables. You can get some inspiration from our process and be ready to embark on your own gardening adventure, enjoying the rewards of homegrown produce.

Join us and let's get started on building your first raised garden bed!