Hi Shaer. I only have a shallow one beneath one of my planters. It is my absolute best performing dirt. I plant my carrots with EASE, there now that it is somewhat spent. The bigger the plot, the longer it lasts. Yours will last a decade or more. Its' awesome that you had someone to help you dig yours. That's my problem, no help. So, mine was shallow. Even though it is shallow it has been priceless. I have planted peas, carrots, (volunteer) tomatoes, squash, purple hyacinth, ecinachea, leeks, chives, onion, parsley, coriander and milkweed. Everything LOVES to grow there. Any decent seed WILL germinate there and I've used it to germinate seedlings and, then, transplant.

I have found salamaners, frogs, crickets, spiders of all sorts and many more soil organisms all in this one spot that really took advantage of the beneath ground environment. No plants have ever had any issue of disease with exception to the echinacea last year and I think that is all on the echinacea plant (aster family) and never have I had a problem with excess nutrients or nitrogen. I suppose the plants have so many options beneath ground, they work it all out.

The best part: So very little work on my part and absolutely no need water unless the top surface soil is just way too dry for whatever I'm growing. You won't need to do anything but weed, if you like. You're good to go for a very long time.

Congratulations!

Wow, thank you. That's so good to hear as it's a lot of work so you hope it's worth it. Yes, I'm lucky that I have 3 sons who, at any one time, are poor - lol. And since we live in the middle of a forest there are plenty of good sized logs to use. Now I'm thinking I might have said sons to dig me a couple more - ha ha. I'm trying to plan my garden future ease of work and drought tolerance so this may be the way to go.

I'm so happy for you. Drought was exactly why I built it. With disabilities it is very hard to water. I built this one in 2011. I never needed to water.

Watch out for snakes, though. That being said? The snakes will eat the underground critters that attack your crops. It all works out.

Snakes don't bother me unless they are poisonous. We do get copperheads out here and I've seen a couple of pygmy rattlers. I guess they burrow down and into the wood? Heaven knows there is wood everywhere so that wouldn't be unusual. I wish my chickens were closer to the garden - they kill snakes in a matter of seconds. I love my girls but am always amazed at the vicious little creatures (chickens) - haha. No mouse is safe either.

Chickens can be mean! And they'll eat just about anything. Like goats with feathers. haha Goats are more fun. :\

Shaer, Earlier today I described some of my hugelkultur beds on an onion thread. I think it was the one about mulching, so I won't repeat it all here. You can see it all there.

I've used various forms of hugelkultur since the 1980s in Texas, long before I heard of hugelkulture in the late 1990s or early 2000s. I loved it and found it a great way to use up logs and limbs after cutting down a tree, instead of putting all that wood out on the curb for the trash pickup. It also is a terrific way to fix clay soil because, as the wood decomposes, it leaves lots of humusy compost in its wake and improves both the way the clay drains and the way that it holds water. (It always amazes me that organic matter corrects both kinds of issues----clay soil that drains too slowly in wet spells and that doesn't hold water long enough in droughts.)

Here in Oklahoma, I have not used it so much in my big main garden because I have a perpetual issue there with timber rattlers that slither out of the nearby woodland and make a beeline for my garden. I have had more encounters with Crotalus horridus that I can count and it is terrifying each time. The last thing I need is hugelkultur piles that they can hang around in (and guess how I know that they do that!).

I have used hugelkultur piles to fix eroded areas over a period of years back in the pastures behind our barn. Almost all our property slopes, so I have tons of eroded areas to fix. I'll drag logs, big tree branches and other organic matter and use it to fill in an eroded gully, slowly, over time. When the eroded gully has filled in about even with the higher surrounding ground, I put soil and old spoiled hay on top of it all and sow a wildflower seed mix. Then, I start a new hugelkultur pile or piles in new eroded areas. I consider those working hugelkultur piles because I'm still adding stuff on top, and working piles always have snakes in them----sometimes venomous snakes and sometimes non-venomous ones, so I'm always very careful around them.

In the onion mulching thread you can read about the hugelkultur piles we built behind the barn. I leave the gate to that area open all winter so wildlife there (bobcats, foxes, etc.) can hunt for any rodents that might take up residence there. I also mention in that thread that we're filling in our former backyard lily pond with hugelkultur materials. We gave up on the pond after 3 or 4 years of having the water moccasins move to it when surrounding ponds and creeks dried up. It is too risky to have a water feature attractive to that kind of snake during drought, especially close to the back door. I've been throwing materials in it all of last year and this year, so far, but haven't dragged up enough logs out of the woods to complete that pile yet. It is amazing how much material it takes to fill in even a moderately-sized pond.

I love hugelkultur, but our snake population makes me use it less than I'd like. We are in a very rural area, with the Red River to our east, south and west, so we'll never be snake-free. Last year was the worst year ever. I had more encounters with timber rattlers than I could keep track of, and was within 12" of one of those suckers at one point. They're everywhere here, and it isn't like we don't have other snakes-----for years and years I saw more copperheads than timber rattlers, but last year we had plenty of both.

Also, this word of caution about using hugelkultur near any wooden structure----by putting wet wood (it will be wet soon if it isn't wet when you create your hugelkultur pile) in/on the ground, you could inadvertently attract termites, carpenter ants and other pests you don't want near your house. I had no qualms about putting hugelkultur/haybale beds behind the metal barn, but I'd never put them near our house.

Our chickens free-range during the day and are locked up securely in their coops at night. They will get little snakes, but they run from the big ones. When we had guineas, they were much more vicious with the snakes than the chickens have been. The lily pond hugelkultur pile, though, is their playground. They climb all over it and dig in it daily, digging and scratching happily and looking for yummy stuff to eat. I believe they think this particular hugelkultur bed is their playground, which might be a problem later on when I actually plant something there. Other than this bed, they've never shown the least bit of interest in the other hugelkultur piles, but they'll raid the compost piles daily. They are fenced out of the garden because they'd also destroy it, but I let them in there to roam in fall and winter so they can dig and scratch and eat weed seeds and bugs.

Dawn

Dawn,
We have a few 6 foot rat snakes here. They steal an egg or two per week. Oh well, they don't think of me as food and they keep the mouse and rat population in check.
Works for me.
Johnny

Lisa, The thing about the timber rattlers that bothers me is that in the beginning I saw maybe one a month in snake season, though I saw plenty of the other types of snakes, both venomous and non-venomous. Now, I see the timber rattlers weekly, and sometimes daily. Why? Why is the population of a supposedly reclusive and increasingly rare breed of snake soaring at our house? It is driving me crazy, and even has made me rethink moving to the country. (Hmmm. It is about 16 or 17 years too late to change my mind now.) I will say that the increasing numbers of timber rattlers began after a neighbor knocked down an old structure that had been unoccupied for decades, and I'm wondering if the snakes had been living in it...or feeding on rodents living in it. I guess we'll never know, but it seems like that was when the latest snake nightmare began.

Johnny, I have tried to tolerate those 6' long rat snakes, but they come here in huge numbers and eat every egg and all our chicks and keats. I caught a big one in the guinea coop one day that had 4 huge lumps in his body and a fifth keat in his mouth. He wiped out our whole spring hatch of keats in one meal. Those keats were about half-grown already, but didn't stand a chance as they were young and likely ran into the coop and huddled in the corner to get away from the snake, which was a bad move. We wiped him out. Tim used to remove chicken snakes and rat snakes from our coop and carry them 200 or 300 yards away and release them. I think that sometimes they made it back to the coop before he made it to the house and after walking into the coop and finding a snake there for the umpteenth time, I put an end to the catch-and-release program.

Nowadays we don't tolerate any sort of snake in or around the chicken coop, greenhouse (copperheads seem drawn to it), detached barn-style garage, potting shed or house. We have 14.4 acres and the snakes can freely roam about 11 or 12 acres, but if they venture into the couple of acres surrounding the house and outbuildings, they are toast. I should make clear that if we see one out in a pasture while mowing, we leave it alone if it leaves it alone....but if I find one on the little porch outside my potting shed, it is a goner.

I think it is our location that is at fault. When pickings get slim in the river bottom lands, the snakes just migrate up here to higher ground to visit everyone's barns, animal housing and gardens. We have neighborhood friends on the speed dial that will rush over here and shoot a snake for me if I am outdoors and encounter one. (I learned long ago that if I go inside to get a gun or to call someone, the snakes aren't sitting out there waiting for me to come back. I cannot believe I ever thought they were just sit there and wait.) One of our friends recently asked me if I didn't have snake problems last year because he didn't have to come shoot a single snake. I told him that all of last year's snake days occurred when Tim or Chris were home and could come out with a gun and shoot. As near as I can tell, if I carry a gun, that must repel snakes because I won't see a single one. If I don't carry a gun, I'll have a 5' long timber rattler racing me to the garden gate and it won't be any more amused than I am when we arrive there simultaneously. One day last year a snake was in our neighbor's pasture across the street and it crossed the street, crossed our pasture, came up through the garden fence and then into the garden while I stood and watched. For once, I had my cell phone with me (I often leave it indoors while gardening so I can have relative peace and quiet) and called Tim to come get it. Know how I knew that snake was coming? Because Mississippi kites were dive-bombing it in the pasture across the road, and then blue jays began dive-bombing it when it got close to my garden, so I was standing and watching to see what had the birds all riled up.

I have friends here who grew up here (I did not---I am a city girl) and they can pick up a sharp hoe and chop a venomous snake to bits in no time. I just cannot do that---I really cannot even bear to look at a snake of any kind. It totally gives me the heebie-jeebies. They give me nightmares.

The worst things the snakes do is they keep me from turning my compost pile. If you find a snake in/on your compost pile literally every time you turn it, you stop turning it. At least I did. I just heap stuff up on top of my compost pile year-round, I only remove compost from roughly early December through late March or early April, during the part of the year when the snakes are not active.

I hate, hate, hate snakes and living here has made my snake phobia worse than ever. If I have another snakey year in the garden this year like I had last year, I don't know what I'll do. It might make me give up gardening altogether. Last year was a truly horrible snake year here and my nerves were shot long before snake season ended.

Dawn,
Maybe a pet eagle. They love to kill snakes.

That's a lot of snakes.

Scary, scary! I've not seen that population of snakes here but who knows what this year will bring. We had more copperheads and pygmy's last year than before. Is the wood in your beds buried? I buried mine about a foot hoping this might eliminate critter problems. Maybe not though.

Hi Shaer. I do not recognize your name. Since you have the pygmies AND copperheads I wonder where you live. Just curious. East of Lexington? Seems like the pygmy rattlers start out past 120th and go east from there. The north and south range does not seem to be real far. Just east. Are you in hickory country maybe?

Johnny,

About 5 or 6 years ago I came home from a wildfire and let my dogs out of the house into the back yard as soon as I got home, then went outside to move some plants that I was hardening off onto our screened-in porch to get them out of the wind. It still was fairly chilly weather---probably late March or early April. The dogs began barking wildly. I was in the side yard by then so walked around to peer through the back yard fence to see what was wrong. I saw a snake. It seemed to be hiding underneath or behind what I thought was the upside-down (sort of belly-up or at least a twisted sideways almost belly-up) body of a chicken. I was so confused! The snake was alive and, from quite a distance away, I could see it had a venomous head, so I quickly ran indoors and opened the back door to get the dogs back inside as the snake in question was only about 6" from the dog yard's fence. I called a friend who said he'd be right over. I thought that if the chicken was still alive, since he was a good shot, maybe he could shoot the snake and save the chicken. Now, for the rest of the story.......

While I waited for him to drive the short distance from his house to ours, I went outside and edged a little closer to the chicken and snake, but still couldn't figure out why the "chicken" wasn't moving or why the snake was hiding beneath it or behind it. I wasn't brave enough to get any closer than about 10' away though. When my friend arrived, he looked at it all and said "I don't think it is a chicken" and about then the snake rattled at us, so at least we were sure the mostly hidden snake was a rattlesnake. He shot it. Killed it with one shot the way I knew he would. Then he moved in to get the snake and, of course, since the "chicken" hadn't moved, we knew it was dead.

What did we discover? First, in my own defense, I never did see the chicken's feet because of the angle of the body or I would have figured this out on my own.....

The chicken was actually a hawk. The hawk apparently had swooped down to scoop up the rattlesnake. The snake itself was caught in the hawk's talons which is why it had stayed in the same spot and never moved. This also is the likely explanation for why the snake didn't bite our dogs who were barking at it from just a few inches away on the other side of the fence. The snake had bitten and killed the hawk but still couldn't escape its grasp. It was just a bizarre thing. And, the feathers on the underside of the hawk were about the same color as the color of the feathers of our Buff Orpington chickens, which is why I thought I was looking at the body of a chicken.

After it all was over, I was extremely grateful to our friend for coming over and shooting the snake. I was afraid to try to shoot it because snake encounters upset me so much that my hands shake and I was afraid in my shakiness that I'd kill the "chicken", which of course, wasn't a chicken and already was dead.....though I hadn't yet realized that.

As for eagles, I have seen both golden eagles and bald eagles occasionally. One year two bald eagles had a nest someone along the Red River to our west and often sat on top of a nearby barn while (I assume) hunting for food. I saw them fairly regularly that year while walking our dogs. It was 2004 and some friends we'd hired to build our barn-style garage/shop building were at that time working on it and one of them saw both eagles fly over our house together one day while he was working on the barn roof, which he thought was pretty cool. I haven't seen eagles as often in recent years but they're probably still around. They are welcome to come catch all the snakes they want, but I hope a snake doesn't get them the way that rattlesnake got the hawk in our back yard.

Hi Scott; We're close the the west side of Lake Thunderbird near 84th in Cleveland County. I was surprised to see pygmy's last year as from what I read they are normally found east of us but I found one in the garden and one on the path to the lake. Beautiful snake but very venomous I think.

Oh, and yes, I'm new to posting on the forum although normally just lurk. I retired last spring so this year I have time for serious gardening which is great and I'm trying to get all my ducks in a row so to speak - lol.

My closest venomous snake encounter that I know of was with a pygmy around March 2006. It was about 2-4" from my hand. I'm west of I-35 in southern OK and we never had seen a pygmy rattlesnake here until that day, and we've owned this land since 1997 and lived here since 1999. I've only seen one other pygmy rattlesnake then, but I largely avoid the woodland during the snake season.

With any wild creature that is not common here, I always say to myself "we don't have that here" until I see it here, and then I change my tune.

...which brings up a subject that we won't discuss. right? :) lol.

I believe that. There's no way I would have thought a pygmy could be this far west until there it was, right under a struggling azalea. Unfortunately, we live right in the middle of the woods - trees all around us - which is nice for hunting morels but not so nice with copperheads and now pygmys. And speaking of things that you really don't see here often - I saw a pileated woodpecker a couple of weeks ago and we had one that we would see every now and then last fall. They are usually more eastern.

Crikey! Dawn, every time I read one of your snake posts I pull my feet up off the floor and thank my lucky stars I live in the suburbs (even though the other 99% of the time I hate the suburbs and wish I lived in the country!) You are a brave woman!

This is an article about hugelkultur, but the reason I am posting it is way down the page is a drawing of strawbales replacing the wood. It said it wouldn't last as long as one using wood, but I had never seen this option. Straw bale hugelkultur

Lisa, I will not even say that word because every time I mention it to someone who lives around me, they tell me who has seen one most recently.....and the last time that happened, about a year ago, they had seen one crossing the road about 150 yards south of our house. So, in order to avoid attracting the cursed predator that must not be named, I won't name it. : )

Shelley, You know, to some extent you get used to it, but there is an inherent danger there because getting used to it means you might let your guard down. I have tried to train myself to walk looking at the ground during snake season, scanning the area ahead of me and around me for snakes at all times. It is such an ingrained habit that I'll be doing it even when we're at a mall in the D-FW metro area, and I arrive at an exterior door, realizing (with a rueful laugh) that I was still scanning the concrete for venomous snakes as we walked from the car to the mall extrance.

For all my snake troubles, at least I've never been bitten. They've scared me many times, but they've never hurt me. Scorpions, on the other hand, are seen less often, but they'll really hurt you if they bite you. My body reacts to a scorpion bite with a lot of localized swelling and pain, and both last a couple of days. If we could make our place snake and scorpion-free, there wouldn't be much left to fear here.

Oh, and I'm not brave. That's why I call for someone to come shoot the venomous snake for me. I am a chicken and I am shaking so hard from the snake encounter that I'd probably miss it even if I had a gun with me and tried to shoot it. When a friend of mine talks about grabbing her hoe and chopping up copperheads, I feel like I am going to throw up. See, I am not brave or tough----I am a big city girl sissy.

Shaer, The woodpecker was a cool sighting. We see them occasionally, but not often.

We also see painted buntings pretty often---and by that I mean a few times a year, and a couple of years ago I finally saw Indigo buntings here. Last year a wild turkey hen spent about 6 months here. At one point she had an injured leg and I didn't think she'd make it. I'd put out food for her and she'd hop or fly over to it, lie down on the ground to eat it, and then get up and hop, hobble or fly away. Eventually her leg healed. If I didn't have some hen scratch out for her, she'd come stand by the pickup truck until I noticed and came to feed her. She travels with a doe I call "Hey Baby" and her twin yearling fawns. I haven't seen the turkey in over a month, though Hey Baby and her family have been here twice this week (attempting to each branches and/or blooms off the plum trees), so I'm hoping she's made it through the winter okay. Watching the wildlife is one of the pleasures of living out in the country.

Amy, That's a nice hugelkultur link. My haybale hugelkultur beds are starting their 3rd year, I think, and I'm pretty happy with them. The first year, they were a bunny nursery as all the mama cottontails apparently thought, for some odd reason, that we had built a cottontail rabbit maternity ward with those bales and tree limbs. I added a lot more soil, and I guess that discouraged the rabbits somewhat, though not as much as the constant visitation by cats discouraged them. I built them on top of ground that was so hard in 2011 (and ever since) that our big rear-tined tiller just bounced off the soil and Tim got that pained expression on his face every time I talked about how badly that soil needed to be improved. So, instead of trying to rototill and work amendments into the soil, we just built up above the soil. Eventually, the improvement will spread to the grade level soil. It already drains better than it used to.

Someone in Texas has been building keyhole beds with old phone books, which is a clever way to use up old phone books. I'll try to find something online about that (I think I read about it in a magazine or newspaper) and come back here and link it.

I went and found some info on the Texas keyhole beds that include old phone books. It isn't the article I originally read but it has the same information, so I've linked it below.

Dawn

Keyhole Beds

Dawn, do you have any idea how much your hay bale hugel has sank since you built it? Not that it matters in the end, was just curious.

Amy, thanks for the link on straw bale hugelkultur. It's really nice to see pics of the different types of beds. Plus you could sit on the bales while weeding or picking produce. My only problem is that I don't have the room in the smaller garden area that gets sun. I have to plant stuff fairly compact.

Dawn, so it looks like keyhole beds are a form of hugelkultur but in the round (minus the slot)? Or am I looking at this wrong? I read a couple of articles that use the open center as a place to deliver water and compost tea. Also, they used sections of large plastic sewer pipes with holes driven in them every couple of feet in a bed and filled these with water or compost tea which then slow-delivered the moisture/nutrients to the plants. I might try that. Have to keep them covered so varmints and mosquitoes don't take up residence.

Painted buntings would definitely be cool. I've only seen one in the 10 years we've been here. Do occasionally get flocks of bluebirds which is wonderful. This year lots of cedar waxwing and goldfinches. I hope your turkey came through the winter also. There's a flock of turkey that have a peacock in with them. It kind of makes you do a double take when you see them crossing the road. We've deer but I don't think they like our goats because after we added the goat pen, the deer stopped coming close to the house. Our little goats are pets so maybe they smell humans on them.

The cardboard got me thinking. We have tons of cardboard as my husband reads constantly and so we get lots of books from amazon - all in nice cardboard boxes. Plus I order lots of things thru them as it's easier than going in to shop. We've been recycling it but now I think I'm going to start using it more in my beds...especially more in my hugelkultur.

Bon, It has sunk by about 50% but I just add more stuff on top of it so that it still looks about the same. I can only add stuff, obviously, in winter when the snakes aren't out and about.

Shaer, Yes, a keyhole is similar to a hugelkultur, but it is designed for maximum gardening space and minimal walking space. You can put a series of keyhole gardens together to create a mandala garden. I'd like to do that in the back garden, which is only about 3 years old and has no raised beds. My original garden, which sits in front, between the front yard and the street (our house is 300' back from the road), has mostly linear raised beds, so I think it would be fun to turn the back garden into a mandala garden. I just have to get motivated enough to do it because it will be a lot of work. I think building one keyhole bed a year would be doable, and eventually they'd all connect to become a mandala garden. (See the link below about mandala gardens.)

I've used black perforated pipes to deliver water and compost tea to my Japanese tomato rings, back when I had Japanese tomato rings for about 5 years in the early 2000s, and the water drains quickly enough that mosquitoes don't have a chance to hatch in there.

Cardboard is my favorite way to attract earthworms. They come, they eat it, they tunnel through the soil and they leave earthworm castings behind. I use cardboard wherever I can, and I save cardboard obsessively, which drives Tim crazy because I pile it up in the garage. However, we built the garage really big in order to have storage and a workshop area, so I am using the storage area for storage. There's no law against storing cardboard until you're ready to use it.

Here's the link that shows keyhole gardens connected to form a mandala.

Keyhole and Mandala Garden

I like that. I may do one in the future after I have more green manure. Just makes sense. Still, it's a toss up between the compost and the ground, much less a third spot.

It is hard to choose which area gets the most time/attention and the most compost. I love the idea of keyhole beds. I just don't know where a busy gardener who already has too many ongoing projects and too little time ever will find time to build something like that.

I always think I'll do bed-building and soil improvement in the fall and winter when the snakes aren't out and about but the older that I get, the less inclined I am to want to be outdoors working hard in the cold winter months. It is so much more enjoyable to be indoors and warm. It also can be hard to work around winter rain and snow because you can't do a lot of soil work in a wet winter.

We had a wet autumn. We had a wet winter. We're having a wet spring. Most of the compost I've added to beds this year is right on top of the beds because it has been and continues to be too wet to work the soil. So, this year, I may have what is pretty much a no-till garden. So far the only bed that has gotten rototilled and fluffed up in between rounds of snow has been the onion bed because I wanted to ensure the onions didn't rot and I wanted the compost incorporated into the soil for them, not lying on top of it. I was lucky to squeeze in that little bit of soil work with my Mantis because it generally has been too wet to do anything like that.

Our forecast has lots of rain chances in it during the coming week so my plan is just to plant the rest of the front garden without rototilling as it just keeps getting wetter and wetter out there.

Dawn, just saw my first copperhead of the year. 18" long and curled up on top of a post in our goat barn feed room. I almost reached right over him. Scared me but got the snake catcher and put him in a bucket and took him up to our neighbor who is a herpetologist and loves the things. I'm thinking I'm going to enclose the feed room in plywood with a cement block floor so snakes can't get in and bite me or the goats. geeesh.

I knew they would be out soon. I am always in peoples yards digging around. About a month ago I decided it was about time to start using my boot or a handle or anything to probe around in places before my hand goes in there. You never know what is under that innocent looking pile of leaves! This warm weather has them out and about, I saw my first snake a week ago near Purcell. And if I remember right Dawn saw some a month or so ago.

Shaer, I'm glad you saw the snake before it had a chance to bite you. You're a better person than me. I'm not touching a snake, even with a snake catcher. Well, a couple of years ago I picked up some hay mulch that was in my wheelbarrow and I found myself holding a small snake, but it was a non-venomous one.......and seeing it still creeped me out.

Scott, You have a good memory. It never is a good thing to have snakes out in February and, really, most years I don't necessarily see them out in March. They've been out early this year. I've always thought of February as a relatively snake-free month, but it wasn't snake-free this year, and neither is March. We've already found snake skins in the potting shed and garden. I'm not really ready for snake season----it still seems too early.

After that Marine was bitten by a rattlesnake in the Wichita Mountains in February and subsequently lost his leg, I went into full snake alert and have tried to be extra-careful since then. Still, at some point every year I find myself much too close to a venomous snake and always marvel that I didn't get bitten by it. I hope my luck doesn't run out.

Dawn