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Building Beds With Wood Waste

Dug a trench down the row and filled it with wood.

Hugelkultur, roughly translated from German to mean “hill-culture,” is a soil-building method that raises the growing space by burying wood-waste beneath the soil.   We are rich in rotting wood here on LSSI, including live oaks, pines and some pecans, so we’re employing the method to areas in the garden prone to flooding— the “fields” between the orchard rows. 

After our summer harvest, we plowed the fields for one last time, as it will take years for the wood to rot and we can’t very well push a plow on top of it! Then we dug a trench down one of the rows and began to fill it with wood, mostly downed oak limbs that had fallen in the lodge areas.  (Some kinds of wood you don’t want to use include cedar and black walnut. A Google search yields lively discussions on the matter.)

Next we added, food scraps and other nitrogen sources like bloodmeal and feathermeal to speed-up the break-down of all that carbon in the form of wood-waste. Then we watered the pile before we covered it back with soil.

Added  N: food scraps, blood and feather meal.

Adding nitrogen via food scraps and meals is not necessary, however.  You can just bury the wood and the nitrogen in the soil will work to slowly break it down. But we wanted to hasten the process a little.  The idea is: the rotting wood will be a slow-releasing fertilizer over the years. Initially a lot of nitrogen will be tied up in breaking down the carbon.  But after a few years, it should have broken down substantially to begin releasing nitrogen, which will make your veggies grow.  While you’re waiting for that process to occur, best to plant crops like onions and potatoes which don’t require a lot of nitrogen.  Or legumes that actually fix their own nitrogen from the atmosphere.

I first learned about this old soil-building method in a permaculture course a couple years back where its benefits for building fungal-rich berms around fruit trees were highlighted. I am sure the roots of the citrus and fruit trees on either side of our vegetable rows will meander to the beds and benefit immensely as well!

Check out this resource to learn more:  http://www.richsoil.com/hugelkultur/