This technique will become more important in North America, over time, as water becomes more scarce. It also helps to address the problem of chemical fertilizer availability.

We have reserved an area in our garden for HugelKulture pits. We plan to dig shallow pits with a small tractor. I am trying to find tree trimming companies to provide the chopped up tree limbs.

I think all the wood in that needs to be covered with soil. good idea to get started, mine is nowhere near growing crops after two years.

Everytime h-kulture comes up I start to lecture. I'm not gonna do that, but say Yes! Best garden bed(s) I have. Johnny Coleman is spot-on.

Do bury it all real well or your snakes will have babies there. I am doing it a little at a time. I moved my original pile of wood to the edge of the woods and will bury pieces on the edge of my garden when I can. I started big and didn't get it covered; things were living in there.

I first made hugelkultur beds in my back yard in Fort Worth in the late 1980s when building flower beds. They worked so well I then built some in the side yard, and had the best beds of mixed shrubs/flowers there for as long as we lived there. I rarely had to water them even in the hottest, driest summer weather.

Here, I quickly found that snakes like to live in them, but I built them anyway, using hugelkultur beds to fill in eroded gullies in our pastures. I just pile stuff up for years and years and it decomposes very slowly and eventually the eroded areas have filled in, are level with the surrounding ground, and I can spread a "final" layer of soil on top of them and sow a seed mixture of prairie wildflower/grasses there so it then blends in with the rest of the pasture instead of being a big, eroded gully of bare, red clay. Since the hugelkultur areas have a lot of decomposed wood, humus, compost and leaf mold, the pasture plants there generally are prettier and greener than the rest of the surrounding pasture. I do have to be careful when working near one of the hugelkultur piles because snakes inhabit them all the time during snake season.

Two years ago I built hay bale/hugelkultur beds in a newly-fenced garden area north of the barn. The hay bales are the 'walls' of the new beds and they are filled in with hugelkultur materials---mostly wood gathered as deadfall from our woodland, but also twigs, leaves, old plants I've pulled from the garden, and every now and then a little soil or a shovelful of home-made compost. Of course, the field mice moved into the hay bale beds right away and they attracted snakes. So, for two years all I've done with them is grow sorghum and clover. This year I might actually plant winter squash back there and let it ramble and roam. I don't know how I'll work up the courage to go in there and harvest the winter squash because I am sure it will be snakey. Everything here always is snakey.

Last year we started filling in our former ornamental lily pond in the back yard with hugelkulture material because I got tired of having water moccasins in the lily pond. We have put oodles and oodles of hugelkultur material in the lily pond and it still isn't filled in yet, but I hope to get it finished this winter. I'll probably just sow flower seeds there the first year. The hugelkultures sink as they fill in, so I don't plant anything permanent in a hugelkulture bed until it is a few years old and I just keep adding more mulch and other organic material to it every year to keep it level with the surrounding grade so it doesn't become a sunken pit that holds too much water during heavy rainfall.

Now that I'm close to finishing the lily pond hugelkultur, I'm eyeing our big empty pond for one. It was a really big pond that held water well for decades until the spring that apparently fed it stopped running in a drought year and never returned. I'd love to fill it in and eventually plant something nice there---maybe a fruit tree orchard or long rows of black berries.

I love hugelkultur beds but so far have kept them out of my two big fenced veggie/herb/flower/fruit gardens because of the issues with snakes in our very rural area near the Red River. We already have huge venomous snake problems in the summer and I have far too many of them in the gardens as it is. I don't want to put anything in there that will attract more snakes. If we lived in a less snake-filled area, I'd do nothing but hugelkultur beds in my garden areas.

I also have noticed the rabbits like the hugelkultur beds and often have nests for their babies in any shallow depression in or near the hugelkultur that they can find.....and the only bobcats I've see lately on our property are lurking near areas around the hugelkultur beds where I've previously seen the bunnies. It is a dog-eat-dog world out here in the sticks and hugelkultur beds become just another part of the ecosystem where the wild critters can try to carve out a little niche in which to live.

Hugelkultur is a great way to dispose naturally of deadfall, tree trimmings and such and it does really rebuild poor soil, but along the way you may find some creatures you do not want will move into your hugelkultur beds. I've never put any of them close to the house for fear the wood might draw termites. I do have them close to the barn, but it has a concrete foundation, steel framing and metal walls so the termites wouldn't find much to eat there.

Dawn

Yeah. They do sink over time. I end up using trash limbs and twigs because we burn the logs in the stove. It works well - sometimes better - but it'll sink within a couple of years. One, in particular, is a raised bed. I find myself scrambling to fill it.