Bon,

Since keyhole gardens basically originated in Africa as a method of growing food in a very hot, often incredibly dry climate, I cannot imagine why they wouldn't work here.

I've long had keyhole gardening on my "want to do this" list, but haven't made it around to building one yet. I've followed Deb Tolman's efforts to popularize keyhole gardening in central TX for a couple of years now and think that if they work in central Texas, which often has weather very similar to ours, they ought to work here. I'm just not sure that they get as much wind there as we get here, but maybe they do. The very first time I saw anything about keyhole gardening probably was either in the Bountiful Gardens catalog or on the website of Ecology Action (which also runs the seed company Bountiful Gardens).

I think that, as long as you do use hugelkultur to fill the keyhole bed, it ought to work. The hugelkultur ingredients are very moisture-retentive which is very important in your hot and windy area. If you look at photos of many of the keyhole gardens built by Dr. Tolman and by folks adopting her gardening philosophy, you'll see they often have built-in structures that can support a shade cloth to help keep the garden from overheating and drying out too fast in summer. It doesn't have to be anything fancy---arches of either PVC pipe or electrical conduit would do the job. Old bedsheets likely would work almost as well as the much pricier shadecloth, and some forms of row cover can be used in the same manner as shade cloth. You just have to choose one that blocks enough sunlight but not too much. You also could use that pipe or conduit structure to put bird netting over the beds if birds start trying to steal your harvest.

One of the tenets of keyhole gardening involves using what you have since this is a method developed (by the charity organization "Send A Cow") to help make people in under-developed nations more able to provide their own food by growing it there where they live so that those families could become less reliant on emergency food aid from humanitarian aid organizations. You cannot just run down to the local hardware or home center store there----they have to work with what they've got. For people in that situation, I am sure that if sandstone is what they have, it is what they use. Down in central Texas' limestone hills and valleys, I bet local gardeners use stone obtained on their own property if they have it available.

A keyhole bed's moisture needs ought to be minimal if it is built with material that retains moisture well, and the only way you'd know which type of bed would work best for you (i.e. a keyhole bed vs. a regular but shorter hugelkultur bed) would be to build the two side by side and conduct your own experiment to see which one works best. That is what I would do. I know that, as used in Africa for some time, keyhole beds can get by on very little water. Down in central Texas, they have found keyhole beds to thrive with little to no irrigation, depending on what sort of weather year they're having. I wonder how those beds have held up this year in the constant flooding in central Texas?

In general, I'd never advise building a 4' tall raised bed of any sort if someone was only going to fill it with a purchased planting mix that is a combination of top soil and compost because it would be cost-prohibitive to fill and would dry out just as fast as any container. Having grown tomatoes (some years, not all) in containers for at least the last decade, I know that even in very large containers filled with a soil-less mix and with some big chunks of half-rotted wood in the bottom six inches of the container, (sort of hugelkultur style though I'd never heard of hugelkultur when I started doing that,) the containers still needed water once or twice a day in drought years in the typical summer heat we have here. I think if they'd been filled solely with hugelkultur and no soil-less mix, that they might have gotten by on far less frequent watering. In fact, my original containers were all soil-less mix the first couple of years and dried out much too fast, so that's when I started gathering half-rotted logs from the woods and dumping them into the bottom of the containers to help retain more moisture. While I started with a low amount of half-rotted wood in the bottom of the containers, the last few years I had tomatoes in containers, about half the container (the bottom half of the molasses feed tubs) was hugelkulture and the top half was soil-less mix. I also scraped up a couple of inches of leaf mold off the woodland floor and added it to the soil-less mix in an effort to get more of the soil food web established in the container more quickly, which is essential for organic gardening in containers. So, I think it likely is going to work out well for you as long as you can get enough hugelkultur material in the keyhole bed to hold moisture well. I rarely get a chance to see how my containers would handle a wet year, but this year is that rare chance. I don't have any tomatoes in containers, but do have lots of flowers and herbs, and some runner beans, in molasses feed tubs and have watered them 2 or 3 times this entire year. I watered them once to get the young plants off to a good start, and watered twice in early June during a dry spell in the midst of an otherwise rainy year. Now that it is hotter, I may find that I need to water them more often. Last summer, once rain returned to our area around mid-June, I didn't have to water the containers at all except during a brief dry spell that occurred in part of August and September. However, none of them have tomatoes in them. Maybe if I was growing tomatoes in those containers, I might have to water more often because tomato plants need a certain amount of water to produce fruit.

The very first hugelkultur bed I built in Fort Worth in the late-1980s was about a foot tall. I grew shrubs, vines, and perennial flowers in it, and almost never had to water it, but it was in the middle of the yard where it got sun only from about 10 or 11 a.m. until about 4 p.m. because neighbor's large trees on either side of us shaded it for the rest of the day. It might have needed irrigation if it had been in a full-sun area or if it had been in a windier area.

Have you read about Dr. Holman's keyhole beds in Texas? I know that one of their primary ingredients has been recycled phone books, which gave them a ready source of recycylable paper that other wise would have gone to the landfill and those phone books have helped the beds remain moisture retentive. I've been using hugelkultur to fill in our old lily pond, since I couldn't stand the way the water moccasins had moved to the lily pond to survive drought, and I've used tons and tons of cardboard in that bed. It isn't even full yet because rainfall kept us from making it into the woods prior to snake season to drag out enough logs to fill it, so it does have snakes in it this year, but so far we've shot any snakes threatening any person or animal and only one dog has been bitten, likely by a snake from that bed although we only know she was close to the hugelkultur bed when bitten. She did survive. You probably don't have as big of a venomous snake problem there as we have here since we are surrounded by woodland areas in which they thrive (we live in what is essentially a clearing in the woods with woodland on three sides of us so snakes are always hanging around), but I'd watch that area carefully for snakes because I can see how they might be attracted to the sandstone and want to lie on top of it on cool mornings or cool evenings to bask in its warmth.

You certainly have nothing to lose by planting a keyhole garden and giving it a try. I think it will work, but I don't live there and I don't have constant wind (the woodlands that drive me crazy because they are snake habitat also serve as a windbreak to some extent) to the extent that you do, but I think the water retentive-nature of the keyhole bed would counter the drying effect of the wind as far as the growing medium goes. The plants themselves may get whipped around by the wind, but if that proves to be a problem, you always can plant a windbreak of some sort. I have often used canna lilies, sunflowers, amaranth, lion's tail and sturdy field corn or broom corn for almost-instant windbreaks. It takes them a couple of months to grow pretty tall once planted, and only the cannas are perennial in my climate, but they grow quickly in spring and make a great windbreak for summer and autumn.

The hay bale beds I built behind the garage and filled with hugelkultur material are probably the most moisture-retentive beds I have or ever will have. I filed them with lots of compost, wooden logs, half-rotted hay and tons of cardboard.

I've seen some keyhole beds built using corrugated metal salvaged from old pole barns and such and have thought that was a great way to reuse that sort of metal too.

I'm going to link something that talks about Dr. Holman's keyhole bed movement, which was spurred by too many years of recurring drought in Texas. If they can do it there, I believe we can do it here.

Dawn

Keyhole Gardens In Texas

Dawn I am thinking about starting to incorporate hugelkultur in my garden. Do you have to use wood in the bottom? All of the article I have read use wood. I do not have access to wood like you do. I do have access to old hay and aged manure. Can I use these in my beds and in containers? Can hay and straw get too decomposed to use? I ask because I have some really old round bales that I could use. Also, doi have to dig a hole,or,can I start on the top of the ground and just build a raised bed hugelkultur style instead of soil.

The basic premise of hugelkultur is "hill culture" so that you are basically building a rough, raised bed just by laying wood on the ground and building up around it with other organic matter. Many people dig a shallow trench and start their hugelkultur in it, but build it up anywhere from a foot to several feet tall. This helps with drainage, and also ensures that, as the organic matter breaks down and everything sinks/compresses, you don't end up gardening in a pit that is inches or feet below the soil surface. You absolutely can build your whole pile above ground.

Picture the way ranchers who clear a field often have someone with a dozer push all the brush into a big pile and then they wait for it to dry out some if it is still green and then they burn it. Well, when we clear brush, we don't burn it. We build the "burn pile" on an eroded, washed-out area and then we never burn it. I just throw stuff on that pile over the years and it decomposes. Eventually, there's enough compost that stuff starts growing out of the pile. If I am lucky, I get four o'clocks or sunflowers or something (because I threw deadheaded flowers or something on the pile over the years). After a few years, the erosion not only has stopped, but all the organic matter that has broken down has enriched the soil, the earthworms and other soil-dwelling creatures have tunneled through the soil improving it so it drains better AND holds moisture better in droughts and we have healed a scar that was on our land. Eventually, when native plants return to that area on their own, we move on to the next badly eroded area and put a new pile there. Slowly we are healing many areas on our land that had slowly eroded over the decades. Now, instead of being bare red clay with little gullies cut through it, it has returned to nature and grows native grasses and wildflowers. I'm not building a strictly agricultural hugelkultur in those areas, but I'm using hugelkultur techniques to heal the land. I try to help along the reappearance of native grasses and forbs by harvesting seeds of plants in the fall and scattering them on the hugelkultur areas.

I think it would work just fine to build one with wood---there's nothing wrong with working with what you have, like "The Man Who Stopped The Desert". He didn't have wood either, but look at the link below to see what he did. In fact, part of permaculture involves finding ways to work what what you've got in a way that is the best use of resources. I love the way he turned his desert into a forest, and he did it without wood because, of course, there's a lack of wood in the desert.

You can use anything that once was alive---what is important is that you use some materials that do contain carbon. I've used old, spoiled bales of hay that were practically composted in side and fell apart when I cut the bailing wire and they were a wonderful way to enrich the soil and improve both its drainage and water-holding capability. Some of the old hay I have used has been at least 5 years old. I'm not picky. I'll take whatever I can get. Really, nowadays with all the trouble with the persistence of picloram and similar herbicides in hay, manure, compost, etc., I'd rather have hay so old that it is falling apart because it is likely the herbicide carryover, if there ever was any, has dropped down to almost nothing by the time hay is that old. I also use a lot of plain old cardboard because it attracts earthworms and the earthworms will digest the cardboard and improve your soil for you.

If a person has very little organic matter on their property, then you can grow your own by growing anything with stalks and then using those stalks: corn, sorghum, broomcorn, virtually any other grain (I love amaranth because it reseeds everywhere and gives me a million plants the next year), and even weeds like lambsquarters or pigweed. While they are annoying as weeds, if you can get the stalks and use them after the plants have gotten big and kind of woody (but discard the flowers/seeds if they are still attached to the plants), there's you a source of a wood-like material for your hugelkultur. You also could grow fodder beets or turnips or whatever in the fall/winter and not harvest them, just leaving them in the ground to rot....improving the soil as they decompose. There is, as my granny used to say, more than one way to skin a cat.

While we have been using hugelkultur to heal eroded gullies on our property and also have been using it to fill in the former lily-pond-turned-cottonmouth-habitat, when I build actual hugelkultur beds in the garden, I don't dig anything. I have clay and digging is too hard.

My personal issue with hugelkultur beds is that they are very attractive to snakes and other wildlife that like to hide in brushy areas, so I haven't put too many of them in the veggie garden yet, and when I do, I pile soil from the veggie garden on top of them. What we essentially did with the last raised bed we built (for the potatoes, lined with hardware cloth to exclude voles) was that we built the wood framing for the bed, attached the hardware cloth, and then I slowly filled the bed, mostly starting it out with cardboard on the very bottom, and then lots or small pieces of wood and sticks raked up when raking leaves, and the leaves themselves, and then over time, I'd toss a piece of wood into it now and then, along with anything that would decompose, including grass clippings, more cardboard, chopped up/shredded leaves, more cardboard, sticks, twigs, pieces of scrap 2 x 4 lumber my son has discarded while building his house, etc. I tossed anything in there that would decompose and then "stole" some soil from the adjacent raised bed to top it off. I filled it up for over a year before using it, and then so much of that stuff decomposed that I added a lot more last winter and filled it to the top again. When we replaced the rotting boards of another raised bed that were over a decade old and disintegrating into compost we threw those into the new hugelkultur bed. The only "rule" I have is that if I am building a raised bed for a root crop, I try to have all the woody parts of the pile down low and then I pile on tons of compost and other organic matter on the upper portion so my root crops aren't hitting the wood and finding their growth stalled. Potatoes love, love, love the hugelkultur beds.

I'd like to put nothing but hugelkultur beds in the back garden, which has sandy soil in one area and clay soil in another, but I cannot find a way around the snake issue, so I haven't done much to that back garden yet except mulching heavily and letting the mulch decompose. We already have voles back there much worse than in the front garden, so I also worry that hugelkultur would encourage them. Maybe I'll build keyhole beds lined with hardware cloth and fill them with hugelkultur type materials. I had hoped to do something with that back garden this year, but flooding rain arrived and I never did anything with it, so the few perennials I have back there are surrounded by head-high grasses and weeds. My plan is to bravely venture back there one day and cut down all the weeds with a string trimmer and leave them lying on the ground to decompose and enrich the soil. I would have done it already, but I'm pretty sure there's snakes in there. If so, I hope they are feasting on the voles.

In gardening, I try not to get too hung up on rules about how to do things. I have found that I break almost every rule in the book at times, and the world doesn't end, and my garden thrives and I am happy. My garden. My rules.Yacouba Sawadogo: The Man Who Stopped The Desert

Know what you could be watching for? A big ice storm. The next time central OKC has a big ice storm and people pile up big tree limbs and little ones too by the curb for pickup, drive around in the pickup at night and haul home all you can get. Lots of people get hugelkultur material that way, and bags of autumn leaves for compost piles in the same way.

You can build your hugelkultur bed or your keyhole bed your way. It is your garden. Your plants. Your rules. Forget all the "shoulds" and "musts" and "have tos" and just do it your way. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by how well a hugelkultur bed will work no matter what you use to build it.

A person who is a member of this forum built incredible garden soil by hauling home rotten produce from either supermarkets or farmer's markets. While the details are kinda fuzzy in my aging brain and it has been several years since we discussed it, I believe she entered into a verbal contract with them where she promised to come and haul away everything they had to dispose of.....and she did it and she built great soil. That was her solution that enabled her to obtain tons (literally tons) of organic matter she didn't already have on her property. I think we all need to be that creative when faced with a problem that needs a solution!

Happy Hugelkulturing!

Dawn

Now, here's the link:

The Man Who Stopped The Desert

Thanks Dawn, I am going to try a Hugelkulture bed next. I think I have everything I'll need. Mine will be on top of the soil I have solid clay also and I'm not going to dig.

In ground hugels are better at being drought proof just because it's in ground. Our winds are pretty rough and that air gets through an above ground hugel which is why I'm wavering on the keyhole bed's height. I think mortaring the stone would help from the winds, too.

The biggest hurdle with an above ground hugel is the source of dirt to cover it. For the in-ground, you're using the dirt you just dug out to cover it.

The difference between hugels with wood logs and those without: The amount of time before you will need to replenish the bed with more organic material. The bigger the wood, the longer it lasts. Rotted wood provides more nutrition to the soil and to the plant roots and holds more moisture, but even green logs will work okay as they break down. In these cases, I always find some rotted twigs and branches and throw in some dirt from some very old areas of the yard or garden. It introduces those types of microorganisms.

A shallow hugel bed can last a couple of years. A deep (big) hugel bed with organic material can last a couple of years before you'll need to open it up and put stuff in. A hugel bed with tons of half rotted tree trunks at the bottom mixed in with some large green logs can last a decade. Just to give you an idea.

We burn for warmth. Most of the good logs get burned leaving a ton of brush. I pack in the brush by trimming them to the size of the exposure surrounding wood where I'm stuffing it to get more wood in there and adding hay, a little of innoculated dirt (from somewhere or some thing) and green materials of any imaginable source. These types start sinking after about 2 years. And don't worry about an unlevel bed. The plant roots know what and where they're going! I just shoved tomato plants in about 1" of dirt atop a hugel with old rotten tree trunks. It's happy! (But I gotta make sure the soil doesn't wash off.)

No matter how one does a hugel bed. It's worth it because the soil will be enriched for a very long time. Hugels aren't really garden beds. They're microclimates. When you build it, you build homes -- for things that make your plant roots really happy.

Salamanders in drought.
Snakes.
Frogs (GALORE).
Lizards
Worms.
Every imaginable underground bug will go to it, including roaches.
And so do all the microorganisms that support these bigger life forms.

the only spot available for me to "move" my garden in time, last month, was a 5' strip behind our back fence which happens to be the 5 foot easement. I'm certain there is a gas line down there. I'm also certain we're not using that gas line, but no other lines. the above ground hugel bed option was the best uninvasive way to garden in this spot. Containers was the other, but I don't like watering. Actually, I hate watering.

___

Dawn, yesterday, I did a walk about and returned to check out that link and some others that I stumbled across. The walk about reminded me to slow down, keep it simple and take things a step at a time. Well, actually, that was learned by taking on the 5,000 sq feet that I am now attempting to level off into a yard, again.

No regrets. I had too much fun and learned much. But I'm not going to bite off more than I can chew, this time.

I first saw a keyhole garden on Pinterest. It was intriguing. So much so that I started doing a little research. One of my favorite things I came across was a video of women and children in Africa building one. It took no time and they just used what was at hand...sticks, rocks, scrap paper, etc.. I've read that one keyhole can feed a family of 10. One of these days...!

Sometimes I think we're all pretty spoiled, and it is amazing what people can build with only what they have on hand. And, for those folks in Africa, it often is a matter of survival, so it is nice to know that this method of gardening helps them raise a lot of their own food.

Bon, I'm glad you're not going to try to improve too large of an area too quickly. It is exhausting to do so much at once. I find I'm happier when I work on smaller areas within the larger area.

With my very first hugelkultur in Texas, we had cut down a dead oak tree and maybe a dead hackberry as well. (It was long, long ago.) Tim cut the limbs into 2' lengths and I stood them up vertically in a row like a rough picket fence, sinking their ends about 4" into the soil. Those limbs roughly outlined the shape of the hugelkultur bed. Then I filled it in with lots more limbs lying horizontally, and I piled compost type material on top of them, including tons of autumn leaves and compost from a big compost pile I had in the back corner of the yard. We added soil on top. I no longer remember where that soil came from, so maybe we bought a load of dirt and had it delivered. Everything grew so well in that area that I then added smaller pieces of rotting and decaying tree limbs and branches to existing shrub beds and flower beds. It was the easiest soil improvement I've ever done.

Were it not for the plentiful population of venomous snakes here, I'd do nothing but hugelkultur beds. I'm just afraid that every bed I built with hugelkultur would be a haven for snakes....mostly because, so far, every one I've ever built has, in fact, become a haven for snakes except for the last two that I built using regular lumber and hardware cloth. So, maybe the secret to success in my snakey area is that it has to be an enclosed bed filled with hugelkultur inside of it, but not a pile directly on the ground at or below grade level where the snakes can just slide right in. Snakes are so awful all the time here. If a thunderstorm brings down branches and limbs from the pecan trees (they shed wood all the time---I think if you look at a pecan tree in the wrong way and offend it, it will drop branches just because it is mad), if you rake them up, you need to pick them up right away. If you leave a little pile of raked-up limbs lying on the ground for a day, then when you go to pick it up, there will be a snake coiled up under there somewhere. If you pick up a concrete stepping stone or a big rock, there will be either a snake or scorpion underneath it. If you pick up a board or a piece of sheet metal, you'll find a snake. During snake season, there isn't anything I'll pick up off the ground without using a fence post or garden rake to lift it first, just to make sure there's not a snake lurking underneath it. The last time Tim picked up a concrete stepping stone off the ground (last spring) without using some sort of pole to lift it first, he found a coiled-up copperhead ready to strike.

If we didn't have all these snakes here, life and gardening would be a lot easier.....except we'd be totally overrun by rodents. I could hugelkultur to my heart's content.

Every year a friend of ours who is trying to make extra money for Christmas gifts asks Tim if he can come into our woodland and collect deadfall or cut down dead standing trees to sell as firewood. Every year the answer is no. (Don't get me started on how much more of a "No" and an explanation this guy would get if he were asking me if he could do this!) I'd never let a stick of wood leave this place when I know how much it improves the soil as it rots in place. Our woodland has the most wonderful rich, humusy soil imaginable. I am really careful not to take too much wood from any single area of the woodland because I don't want to strip any part of the woods of the raw materials that decompose and enrich it.

I may be the only person in our neighborhood who is just completely 100% delighted to hear a tree crash down in the woods. As soon as I hear it hit the ground, I know I've got plans for that tree somewhere down the line.

I've dragged tons of tree limbs and brush to fill in eroded gullies over the years. I did that for ages and ages before I ever used any of the wood for our garden. When you fill in eroded areas, you pretty much stop the erosion. Then, as the brush and limbs decompose, the soil becomes worthy of growing something. I just keep piling on brush and wood until the eroded gullies aren't gullies any more. At the point that the gullies are level with the ground on either side of the former gully and native plants are sprouting, then I start dragging everything to the next closest gully. I think it is exciting when I see native grasses and trees sprouting in an area that used to be bare, eroded land that eroded even more every time it rained. I'm glad I have a plentiful supply of trees that eventually drop limbs or die so that we can replenish the soil here, but if we didn't have them, I'd just use cornstalks, prairie grasses and anything else I could get my hands on .

It just seems so perfect here for gardening, in a small city with convenient access to ordinary livelihood, but sufficiently lax in enforcement to allow small thickets to remain unkempt unless it is close to a home or the front portion of a residential area. Like that old pecan tree that is dying. This year was the year we were planning on taking it down. We were saving up.

Then, a dog gone red headed woodpecker showed up and began pecking a nest into that old pecan tree. One of the limbs fell off in a recent storm. Minimal damage for us, but I noticed the hard work from the wood pecker was on it. Poor thing. I even talked to him, told him it was a bad idea to be pecking on that old tree, there were plenty others outside the property nearby. Well, maybe he/she will have a chance to complete another life cycle before someone else takes the rest of the pecan tree down.

So much life depends on those nasty-looking rotten logs and dead trees.

I think I've convinced myself that I'm not going to have a problem with poisonous snakes in my hugel beds. That's probably a bad idea. Granted, I'm not going to have a sea of them as you describe on your place. Sheesh! But I should be careful, nonetheless. We have plenty of snakes around and I see them all the time since I let that back yard grow in. I'm only fooling myself that there are no poisonous ones. Still, the hospital is very close.

I'm loving all these fascinating posts. Best gardening reading I've done!

Hey. Thanks for bringing it back up. I was just thinking of keyhole yesterday and trying to remember the conversations regarding.

Property ownership came up for grabs and I had to level every sq foot of it - by hand.

I've started over with a smaller plot. Considering putting in a waist-high keyhole behind the cottage.

I haven't had time to read the whole thread, though I probably did when it was first written, but my thought was locate the bed where it is sheltered from prevailing winds or fashion some kind of wind break. Once upon a time I found a website that confirmed my belief that my prevailing winds were from the south east. Of course, in March, when they were rattling my green house they came more often from the north west. But it's usually cooler when the wind comes from the north.

Oklahoma Gardening on PBS had a show about Keyhole beds.

If you wish to view very detailed information on your local area's prevailing winds, you can see it on the Detailed Climate Information page accessed from the Climate section of the OK Mesonet webpage. If you click on the link below, you will see the county page index. Click on the county you wish to view, and skip the quick facts on one page and go to the Detailed Climate Information page. It has more wind info that you'll ever want to know. If you live in between two Mesonet stations, you might need to study the location of each and pick the one closest to you, or if your community straddles two counties, you might need to determine which county's info is most applicable to you.

County Climate Information