Laying the Foundations for a Hügelkultur Garden Bed
This week has been blazing hot. We live in Southern Wisconsin and the temperatures here were an abnormal 90-100 degrees Fahrenheit. On top of that, our area has had very little rainfall this summer and lots of poor air quality days due to wildfires north of us. This latest heat wave kept us almost exclusively indoor during daylight hours.
Still, several days this week, as the sun rose and before my husband went to work, I was out in our northeastern acre setting the foundation for our first garden bed. Today we woke up, it was Saturday and it was different. It began cool and breezy, very overcast in a — it might rain kind of way. I was looking forward to getting my shovel in the soil.
We are using a gardening technique called Hügelkultur which involves building a mound with tree limbs and other yard waste to create a garden bed that will better retain water. There’s a great fact sheet about Hügelkultur on the Oklahoma State University Extension website.
We moved to our 7.5 acre homestead about a month ago and it has needed a lot of cleaning up. Though we are pretty limited on aged compost at the moment, I am excited to get some of the raw organic matter just lying around the yard into the ground and decomposing for our plants. We also have several outbuildings that used to shelter animals — manure and hay will make a great addition to the soil.
We are building a bed that is 25 feet long, 6 feet wide and potentially 2 feet deep with a 3 foot mound. I don’t know how deep I will realistically be able to dig in this soil since it is my first time digging into it. It is located at the bottom of an old horse pasture that slopes towards a tree lined ditch and then continues on down to the road.
This morning, while my husband did some very important and dangerous work at the house, my two little kids and I took a layer off the soil of most of the garden bed. We created several huge mounds of dirt which the kids shaped into dirt people and climbed all over. Worms, centipedes and countless ants we found so far have become close friends.
In the next weeks we will continue digging until we reach the desired depth and then fill the hole first with large logs, then with layers of sticks, leaves, manure, grass cuttings and packing each layer to fill the gaps. Finally we’ll mix some compost with the recycled layers of topsoil to form the growing medium.
My current plan for the bed is to plant a cover crop to overwinter and to get our garlic planted in October on the eastern and western sections of the mound. This will be a beautiful bed with its unique design and I am excited to see how it retains water and produces nutrient rich soil over time. Wish us luck ❤
