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hugelkultur beds for guerilla growing??
- Thread starter Kygiacomo!!!
- Start date
Kygiacomo!!!
AppAlachiAn OutLaW
so far nothing has tried to make a home in mine. i filled mine in well and compacted it down. im gonna be planting my malawi in the bed around 1st of may and see what happens. from all i have read about permaculture the beds dont show their full potential till the 2nd season which is when u rarely have to even water so that is my main purpose of trying this method on a couple of plants to see whats up
Rico Swazi
Active member
bump
Kygiacomo!!! , been three years , what did you find as the result of the effort?
Kygiacomo!!! , been three years , what did you find as the result of the effort?
Sweetdog760
Member
For any1 interested a good way to speed up the hugel process is to fill the trench/ hole/ whatever with a mix of wood chips/ compost/ alfalfa/ and straw. Then cover with straw or mulch. You end up with a hot compost pile so it can't be planted into right away but you'll get the results you're looking for much faster. The key is to use the most broken down wood material you can find.
Vaporizando192
Member
It is even more better now! And safe too!
Was Perfect if you could cover the sheep with some soil first, to give the right time to decompose properly!
I'll be trying a sort of huglekulture bed this summer. 2 actually.
I'm building 2 16' x 3' x 30" deep frames, digging the ground out underneath them to make it deeper than the frame and filling it with logs from a tree I had cut down a couple years ago. Plus a bunch of extra shredded mulch from a silver maple I trimmed up last year.
I'm going to try and find some other manures locally as well- goat, horse, rabbit. Probably throw a couple bags of cow manure as well as some EWC into each.
There's also a winery nearby that sells off their wine production waste as mulch which is amazing so I'll get a yard of that.
Then top each off with fresh topsoil.
These are for my vegetable garden, btw. My state has no legal cannabis. And probably won't for a while.
I'm building 2 16' x 3' x 30" deep frames, digging the ground out underneath them to make it deeper than the frame and filling it with logs from a tree I had cut down a couple years ago. Plus a bunch of extra shredded mulch from a silver maple I trimmed up last year.
I'm going to try and find some other manures locally as well- goat, horse, rabbit. Probably throw a couple bags of cow manure as well as some EWC into each.
There's also a winery nearby that sells off their wine production waste as mulch which is amazing so I'll get a yard of that.
Then top each off with fresh topsoil.
These are for my vegetable garden, btw. My state has no legal cannabis. And probably won't for a while.
Vaporizando192
Member
Everything sound so interesting!
Be sure that Winery do not use pesticides or others chemicals on their grapes
St. Phatty
Active member
These are 2 of my grow spots.
The first one you can sort of see the mound. I had about 6 cubic feet of baled dirt, with the Perlite, and about 3 cubic feet of rotted creekbed soil - basically ant and termite castings. I was trying to do fire control and found the fantastic soil in the crevices that have a creek in the winter. But they don't get any sun.
It's almost like someone was trying to bury the sand & rocks in the creek, and felled dozens of madrone trees in the creek bed.
Anyway, I put the baled dirt down first, and then realized that the bags of creek dirt, with all the wood pieces, maybe should have gone down first, on the bottom.
So for a second it was upside down hugel culture. Then I dug a pit down the middle and picked up all the wood pieces and put it in the bottom of the pit, and piled the soil over it.
In any case I wanted to get it down anywhere from 2 to 4 weeks before planting, so it can get wet and the worms millipedes etc. can do their thing.
The other picture is a depression between 2 madrone root burls.
There are about 6 inches of madrone leaves on the bottom of both soil patches.
What I look for is morning sun and afternoon shade. That means the sky is open to the Southeast but there are trees for shade in the Southwest from the grow spot. The afternoon sun really is like the fictional planet Tatooine, so any garden that gets afternoon sun has to be watered almost every day. Which is too much work for me.
The other pic is one of the water tanks I have set up. That one is about 8 feet on a side, a triangle. So it's 32+ cubic feet of water - which is 1800+ pounds. It's held in place with maybe 4 plastic twine strings. I guess the ground is taking most of the weight but because I don't think the twine is good for 450 pounds.
I have 5 gallon buckets all over for fire control reasons. Also so if I get any flak for water storage, I can reasonably state that it's for fire control reasons as part of the FireWise program.
See how the gray Rubbermaid pretty much destroys the stealth of the one grow spot ? A little too visible from the air.
Attachments
I will go check it out then , if everything's ok , maybe i will try to grow there, cheers!
Rico Swazi
Active member
that was the old way of thinking and many beds were failing to deliver fertile soil for several years ,
Sepp Holzer set Paul straight over 5 years ago but those first pics and drawings from Paul are still taken as gospel. Heres the latest
soil to wood contact is as important as the biomass
half way down the page is the above pic
https://permies.com/t/1080/17/Paul-Wheaton-hugelkultur-article-thread
I posted in another thread last year showing one of two new beds being built, made mention of why beds fail there also-
https://www.icmag.com/ic/showpost.php?p=8566193&postcount=75
my backyard guerilla grow did quite well last year at hiding my plants from being seen from the street.
healthy and potent plants though partly shaded
This is the first time I have been able to utilize that part of my yard for growing and you can bet there will be three plants going in there this season
Rico Swazi
Active member
After 3 years or more I would think it would have decomposed into fertilizer but your climate may say otherwise.
How big is the bed Forest?
Could you plant at the other end ?
shame to let it go unused
grab a pic of the soil life if you think of it mate
Rico Swazi
Active member
vermiculture worm condos
Rico Swazi
Active member
mini hugels from 2014, no need to knock yourself out if you want to grow guerilla
was a dry year and the 3x6 ft beds needed very little water
managed to grow moss at wood level as shown in 2nd pic
was a dry year and the 3x6 ft beds needed very little water
managed to grow moss at wood level as shown in 2nd pic
Organilush
Member
beautiful garden Rico!
Rico Swazi
Active member
thanks Organilush ! I was only able to copy those and a few others from a dead hard drive. A friend suggested I plastic bag it and put it in the freezer overnight then see if it would spin up. It worked for a while then started alarming 'cannot read from disk. I'm still hoping to find/access pics of the build as it was the first year I felt I had the soil to wood ratio more inline with what Sepp was saying to do at the time.
couple more pics of dry soil and healthy plants
Can't remember if Sepp said it on yoob or where I heard it but something like this -
"best to remember the woody biomass is an amendment and not the soil itself"
couple more pics of dry soil and healthy plants
Can't remember if Sepp said it on yoob or where I heard it but something like this -
"best to remember the woody biomass is an amendment and not the soil itself"
