Hugelkultur

[Music] everybody this is the first uh lunch and learn of the year I think we've got a really great lineup for everybody it'll be fun uh to see what everybody presents every month if anyone has any ideas of future uh meetings or future lunch and learn let us know and we'll try to see if we can incorporate that in next year's we've already got this year's all planned out um So today we're going to talk about hugle culture that is the Texas way of saying it hugle culture uh I don't want to cough up a lugie to try to do it in German so they also call it hugle bed because literally hugle culture is the German word meaning Mound bed or Mound culture and it's just a type of raised bed so all of us do rais beds these days so this is just a way for you to to create your raised bed it's not the only way there's ways you might end up modifying uh there are all kinds of things on on Google searches that you can see where other people have done all kinds of different things to modify the hugle culture bed but anyway it was um let's see make sure I didn't miss anything the whole idea is it it actually does two things for your moisture it holds moisture in because of the logs but it also keeps everything up in the air so if you got a soggy spot keeping the raised bed we all know will help you with with the drainage so Huga culture is a type of permaculture hello and what is permaculture permaculture is just getting in touch with your nature okay it's using stuff that's around it's recycling it's being green without being green uh the term permaculture was coined in 1978 by Bill Mollison and David hrim who formulated the concept and what they were trying to do is they saw all these industrialized methods going on and they were like let's get Back To Nature let's get back to what what God does for us already and let's let's get let's go back into a more uh natural approach so Huga culture Mound components the biggest thing that kind of makes this bed different than most other beds is you're using wood in it you're not just putting wood around it that decays as you're as you're working your beds but you're putting wood at the bottom at the foundation of your of your bed so it's you can use you want to use fresh and decaying if you want it to last longer obviously the decaying kind of helps start the process the whole idea is you want the breaking down the decomposition but you but you also want to put in some fresh logs in there uh we'll talk about which kinds in a in shortly so that you have something for else for you to draw on uh so it just will make the bed last longer if you put both new and old logs in then you go with your with your uh branches those are your lenss it can be your cuting that you took off of uh when you're pruning back it can be stuff that you got now that you've got all the stuff that fell off of the the roof line and and your your old your trees when we had that really strong wind come through this week uh also you got yard waste is your next one that's grass clippings leaves pine cones needles hay uh what I will tell you is the Huga culture bed is usually designed with at least 80% Brown material okay so it it's not as it's not when you're doing composting you put more green matter in but with this one you're putting in 80% at least 80% Brown and only 20% green the other thing I want to remind you is when you're throwing in branches be careful that the branches aren't too new because you could literally start a nice little tree in there if if you got some good buds going on in there um then you have your compost and this is going to be not your not your compost that's already already made up completely it doesn't have to be that it can just be dried manure kitchen scraps uh and then then you're going to put your soil and depending on what you did how you created your bed you might already have soil there next to it or you have to use soil from somewhere else or you might even have to purchase soil so if you purchase soil remember you want to purchase soil that doesn't have any chemicals and and uh other stuff if you're trying to go natural so going forward I think I'll be calling this a hugle bed cuz the couter is really the bed so if you call it hugle bed you're literally saying the same thing so here's some questions you need to ask before you start your hugle bit one is are you trying to control an erosion problem because that could be a help for you are you looking to hold more water around established root systems I read one article where they were putting a Huga culture bed next to an established uh fruit trees because these fruit trees were on compacted ground and they just didn't have any place for their roots to go so it wasn't in the Hugo bed itself and the reason why you don't want to put it in the fresh Hugo bed is because the hugle bed will just keep going lower and lower and lower so it it's going to lose its stability if you put a nice siiz tree or or shrub in that hugle bed will the bed get the necessary sunlight for the plants to be added so it might be the perfect place for you to put it for erosion but will you get enough Sun for the plants that you're interested in planting and maybe you have to change your idea of what you want to have planted there if you really want the bed to be there what size do I want the bed to be uh they talk about putting your hugle bed starting it at six foot high because it's going to go down and down and down and within the next five to six years it's going to be more or less a flat or slightly raised bed when you get done so what size do you want the bed to be how tall do you want the bed to be just because you can stack it to 7 feet or 8T doesn't mean you have to okay again that's a it depends upon what you're trying to accomplish a lot of people like to have it because it makes it easier for them to to uh work it when they're not down on their knees uh working in their beds what plants do I want to incorporate into the bed what materials do I need to gather or purchase so you don't want to just start doing this and then realize you don't have any soil for instance to to so make sure you've got all the all the uh materials you need and then is there are there septic fields that should have been an art are there septic fields or underground utilities that you need to avoid most of us are not in the situation with the utilities but it's important that you don't put it over U your septic lines because if they have to do any digging up or whatever you're going to it it could also add extra weight so you don't want to put it on your septic fields so now I have this guy that's talking and I don't know if this is going to come out very loud or not my musy baby is not very loud but listen to it and if he if we can't well then at least I can tell you what he's talking about as he goes through hog culture has become our favorite way for my wife and I to grow our own food we built three hugle beds in the fall of 2020 and we had our best Garden ever growing in these last year it's probably hard to tell that this is actually one of the beds in front of me it's settled down quite a bit since I built them but anyway there are many different ways to build a hugu culture bed so I decided to make a list of five of the most common methods so you can decide for yourself how you might like to build one these days hugle culture has become quite popular thanks to platforms like YouTube and other social media which enable gardeners from all over the world to share their experiences using this method so with that you've probably already heard of Hogle culture before he clicked on this video but if not you could always check out my playlist with a link down below or at the end of this video the basic idea with hugu culture is to pile up logs branches leaves compost and soil in that order you can also add in or substitute materials like grass clippings Garden waste wood chips straw leaf mold or well roted manure keep in mind that most of the material should be brown Woody matter with only 20% or less being green nutrient-rich material and the bigger the logs the better larger wood pieces will take longer to decompose and as they do they'll soak up more water and release their nutrients over a much longer period so with that let us now explore five ways to build a Huga culture bed the first method is to use any kind of raised bed it could be a shorter one like this or a taller metal frame whatever you have and then fill that with the material that I mentioned starting with the larger wood pieces on the bottom layering up to the soil on top with a rais bed you won't have to do any digging so if you unable to dig or you'd just rather avoid it that would be the way to go but then of course you will still have to bring in soil from elsewhere whether you purchase that at the store or you happen to get some top soil for free from a neighbor just make sure that it's going to be safe for growing food and with any Hogle culture bed the material is going to settle down over time as that wood decomposes so especially with a raised bed you will have to keep adding more top soil each year to keep the level close to the top of the bed the second method is very similar to the first one except rather than using a rais bed frame you can just pile all the material directly on the ground so of course you will still have to bring in soil from elsewhere and a thick layer of arborous wood chips all around the bed will help to keep weeds from creeping in around the edges the last three methods all involve digging and out of those three this next one is probably the easiest or the least amount of work anyway you can build the pile like I showed in the last method and then just dig up the top soil all around the bed and pile it right on top of course then you will have a slight depression all around the bed but that will naturally act as a Swale to catch rainwater that will slowly soak up into the bed then you'll wind up with a little bit of a muddy puddle so you can add some wood chips around there which will still allow the water to drain through without getting your feet too muddy the fourth method was the one that I used used to make our three beds and I already showed how I did this in my first hug culture video but I'll summon up again for you now so I dug the trench for the first bed and I piled that soil close to where the third bed was going to go then I filled in the material into the first trench and as I was doing that I started digging out the soil for the second bed and piling that under the first one and I made sure to fill in all the gaps between the logs then I repeated that process for the next two beds by the time I got to the end I had the soil from the first bed waiting right there to go onto the third one as you can imagine that turned out to be a lot of digging by hand but we had just gotten this tree cut down I wanted to use as much of the wood from this as possible so it seemed that digging the trenches would be the best way to do that and it was a lot of work if I had to do it again I would probably try to find a way way to use the previous method to make it a little bit easier this is still a great method but it was definitely the most difficult to accomplish using only hand tools and that's where we come to Method number five which employs the use of heavy machinery to do all that digging for you I call this the Holzer method after permaculturist sep Holzer who played a big part in popularizing the use of Hogle culture he dug deep trenches on his is massive permaculture Farm in Germany and filled those trenches with lots of dead wood and organic matter and piled up the soil to a height of about 6 ft and the Huga culture bed that large can soak up so much water that it never needs to be irrigated so if you have a huge property and access to some Earth moving equipment by all means go for it so I hope that gave you some ideas on how you might decide to build a hugle culture bed for yourself depending on your own situation coming soon I will have a video about how to care for a hogu culture bed in the first few years after it's built and as it starts to mature on its own so thank you very much for watching please remember to subscribe for more videos like this stay safe out there and happy hling [Music] I liked him because he showed it to you and it it it's doable you know this is in his backyard uh I was really when I started talking about this subject I was just looking at all the dead Big Trees laying around and trying to figure out how could we incorporate something like that into it uh and so this is the shallow dig method that he was talking about I thought I'd go over it just a little bit more but um I think you again I don't know that I would dig of course I've got someone who can dig for me right it might be worth it to rent one of those cute little diggers yeah the bucket on the tractor yeah so here's a step-by-step build of a shallow dig so uh choose your location of your bed dig down he was digging down about shovels like six to8 Ines and then he saved he didn't show it very well on the pictures but he saved the turf you can just if you can just cut the turf off you can lay that Turf back on your on your uh bed upside down so that hopefully it doesn't grow anything then you're going to place your logs and your big branches he cuts his big logs to help decompose a little faster okay uh and then you put the the all the little little smaller branches around it's important that you try to fill it in as tight as you can because you can get Pockets if you don't do that or you can actually have collapses of your bed when your your decomp your decomposing happens then you add your Turf and and top soil fill in your gaps as much as possible water thoroughly he didn't talk about watering thoroughly but everything that I've read about this and other other layers is it's always good to layer to water heavily each one of your layers so uh fill in your gaps as much as possible it might just be with wood chips if you don't have anything else but just something that that you can make the bed bill has sawdust so we're talking about incorporating sawdust in ours then you add wood chips leaves small branches and kitchen scraps water again thoroughly so again this is kind of hard to see but he say these are not just leaves these are branches with leaves on them and with us pine cones and pine needles are just fine to put in your bed as well then you add a thick layer of composted material in water again and this is where some people will throw in some red wigglers doesn't hurt right yes sir you don't want to put green pine needles in it have to be no it would be dried dried pine needles thank you Bill yeah then you cover the mount in a thick layer of soil and finish with mulch which it doesn't have on there and water again in completely um one of the things that I did see that I thought was really good when he was talking about the the The Lazy method where you no it was the the trenching where you take the dirt and you put it on and you've got a little bit of a a trench around no matter which ones you do it's a good idea to put something to stop the the the grass from growing in as f as much as possible obviously what you want to do is get stuff grown into that bed before the weeds and the grass get a hold of it because that's what nature does covers up its bare spots what to PL in your new hugle bed your night shades are real happy in that uh your tomatoes eggplant peppers uh garlic onion chives if you're going to plant the onions I would recommend you plant them on the top because you need again a more solid base and that's where you're most your most solid if you put it on the side and it hits the air spot it's not going to it's not going to prod produce your your uh your good size onion uh your brasas your broccoli cabbage kale collards arugula cauliflower all of those like being in on the on this bed uh your herbs and small berry bushes again it suggest small berry bushes um it would depend upon what size it is if you're putting in a a really good size one and you want to put some black berry BR I would think that that would work really well um leafy green salad mixes and herbs so then what not to plant so again your root uh your root crops at least your first year you don't have enough uh the soil is not uh compacted enough uh and and so what happens is as soon as your little carrot hits a hits a uh airspace it quits growing so if you have to just absolutely want to put something in there put in the little bulb like carrots put in the radishes but uh I would really especially your first year uh stay away from your root crops same way with potatoes and then the trees and shrubs again just the fact that that they will have a problem staying on top of that uh bed as it keeps dropping down yes Michelle I wonder when you these have you thought about making sure that the sun doesn't go to just one side you'll end up with one side being in sh too much the day you're not ter right so one of the things that they suggested was that you think about you set something out there and look at your sun all day and remember that during the winter which is when you're probably going to be checking this out you don't have any leaves on your trees so make sure you remember that that might need that might be leaves on on the trees that will keep it even more shaded the other thing to think about is there are some plants that need lower light so your lower light plants you can put on the dark side darker side North Side north side I was never good with the nor southeast west so then where to plant where to plant on the bed we've already talked kind of about where to plant where to put the bed but where to plant on the bed so your your Mediterranean like herbs your oregano and stuff like that they'll like to be on the top because that's going to dry out the soonest your sun-loving plants need to grow where the sun shines longest uh Place tall plants at the base where the roots will have more stability and will get more water water so uh I've got a picture of one where they've put the tomatoes along kind of along the base line it also it makes it easier for you to kind of trellis them up shady areas can be planted with salad greens and some herbs you'll need to check and see what herbs like darker area north side then uh plant n nitrogen fixing plants such as bush beans and field peas this is the one if I want to say there's a con one of the the cons of the hugle beds is that it's going to be it's going to be using up a lot of the nitrogen in in the bed because it's decomposing so to offset that you want to go ahead and plant some n what we call nitrogen fixers and those are plants that bring nitrogen uh make the nitrogen usable I think is the correct term for that is that correct naine that's okay okay I didn't say anything too wildly incorrect uh bush beans if you if you're uh letting it set for a while you might be able to go ahead and put uh red clover on it uh something like that the other thing to do is when you've got your plants in just keep an eye on them and and if they start showing signs of yellowing leaves you might have to do some compost tea to kind of help them along a little bit your wildflower seeds are a great way to fill in your empty spaces so again Nature has a way of covering up its bare spots so if you just cover your hugle bed with everything then it's going and mulch you're going to have a much better time of keeping the weeds out because the weeds are going to fly and they're going to land and then you're going to have weeds cuz weeds are happy out here so plant every inch of your mound so the weed seeds will not have a place to go so what are some of the pros of the Hugo bed so they heat up faster in the spring they retain moisture need need no further fertilizer again that means once the bed starts what I call perking or it once the bed is breaking down it's going to provide its own fertilizer you might have to worry about the nitrogen like I said at the beginning that could take a couple of years up to two years yes okay my question is and this might be something more toward noing when you bury logs you create a great environment for termes and especially having moisture so what's your thought on that I don't think you can keep that from happening no uh you're you're right you have you've made an environment where you're going to have to watch for termites and you're going to have to watch for fire in yep and then if if you have those things then you're going to have to be super careful about how you manage those because you you basically you've got a vegetable Gard there and a lot of the insecticides that you would reach for are not okay for a vegetable there now if you're growing if you're growing nothing but ornamentals you'd have a lot more freedom to control the little beasties that way but that's not probably not what you're right trying to accomplish I've never really had a problem with termites in the garden I mean they're there I'm not saying they aren't there but they're they're not the termites are not going to they're not going to go after fresh growing plants and they're not going to bite you while you're trying to work there I worry more about fire ants than about termites really right and I think the fire ants are going to be more uh on the side of the the bed or up I mean you'll be able to tell where they're at yeah because they've got to have an opening too um use less irrigation produce more food and less space the idea is that if you go up you obviously got more space to plant than if you were on a flat surface uh easier to weed again the idea there's two reasons why one is if it's heavily mulched it's much easier to pull out the weeds and and two it's up a little bit so you don't have to do if you're like me you don't have to go find something that you can grab so you can crawl back up makes use of excess material stuff you have around the house I mean not around the house around the yard are rich in nitrogen again that's the mature bed less bending squatting for the gardener so the cons ants love the beds I mean it's just going to be a fact of life then air pockets can be favorite nesting spaces for small Ries so that's why it's real important to try to pack it as well as possible to keep you from having Little Critters living in that uh root crops hit airspace and don't develop Mound beds compress significantly over time now just because it compresses doesn't mean you can't pile more stuff on top of it but you need to be realistic and if you're putting it up like say for privacy or something like that this is probably not going to be what is going to work the best for you also if you're putting it up like a burm you're trying to maybe you're trying to work a water source going a different direction again it's not a it's not permanent enough for you to do that eventually the water is going to break through that so it is it it it can manage your water somewhat but it's going to be uh somewhat temporary lifespan of the bed is about 5 to six years uh soil dries out much faster than clay oh sandy soil uh I did have uh a couple of YouTube videos where I was watching that the guys had a lot of sandy soil I've got sandy soil um and so it talks about the fact that you really need to to figure out out they're uh they talk about taking your branches and cutting them so that they make little spikes and putting them in and then laying your branches so that you've got you've got a more of control over your your slope otherwise you're you're not going to be able to keep your slope the very first rain you've got it all just slides down so if you plan your your uh and I think I've got some pictures that show that if you actually put some of your branches upright and put them towards the front you have a up towards the the Apex it gives you a better chance of keeping your bed in a shape that you're looking for so why would you want to build a Hugo bed uh again you can utilize the materials on your property instead of burning it or hauling it off uh you want to be more green by using materials provided uh you prefer to put more effort in creating the bed now so that you will have require less work for the next five years or so you're looking to grow plants without having to water maybe you don't even have a water source available and you're having to haul water to water something this would be a good alternative for that hoping to provide a place for tree roots in compacted soil which I had talked about that's kind of a unique use of of this uh raised bed and then raised plants above the ground that stays too wet so I have some real lowline areas that if I had any kind of a raised bed it would help it would help keep those from getting their Roots wet too wet and then Aesthetics uh I don't know something about a totally flat garden bed versus versus a a garden that has a little bit of movement in it is aesthetically pleasing um the other could be that it you put it in your front yard or you know you you work around and and just make it make it maybe uh just gives more interest to your to your property so I again these are some copies of uh some pictures that I took off from Google and I thought this was real interesting the one over there on the far right they're growing corn on this bed which I find interesting uh but look how high look how high they've got this up here and it again it'll start breaking down I can see cucumbers uh growing well on these H beds and and melons too pumpkins here's the one that's have a pump it does have a big sunflower in it U they also put logs around the base and I've noticed that in a couple of them and if you put something like that around the base it kind of helps it from spreading out so that helps too so this looks like a cemetery bed but notice that they use rocks I don't know about you guys I have no rocks in my property but uh that would be something else that obviously would make it more permanent as far as the shape this is real pretty is't that pretty and again they just used the the Rocks along the sides to hold it in place um the other option obviously would be to plant all the way down uh another one talked about putting straw bail bail bales of hay around it instead of your logs to keep it into again it's going to break down over time uh it's just a much thicker material than if you were just laying a layer it's a so this is using bales of hay this was a unique one this one goes quite up quite a ways up and uh in order to keep it in shape they lay they uh put up pallets I thought that was real pretty a lot of people talk about using this for strawberry beds so I could see a strawberry strawberry bed in this really pretty uh this one was a demonstration bed and you can see where they've got they've got their logs up quite a bit higher than I would normally put my my loog my my logs but um it gives you an idea of what a Huga culture bed looks like inside this one they're using using uh uh branches to keep it in shape and um your little iron re re bar yeah this is a I would call it a a maturing vegetable bed you've got you've got your I guess that's garlic possibly and you've got some greens in there he's even got again he's got corn up there on the top this is real pretty this is a see and it's not very high this one's probably probably no more than I would say three feet uh but it it it it fits well in the your garden without it being too shady on either side Teresa that one back one did did he like plant that intermingle to help support some of the bigger ones help support some of the smaller ones maybe does that make sense corn is really bad when corn gets real tall it it flops around so I could see how but really what they're trying to do is talk about you can plant it more intensively because you've got you've got a a water source and you've got uh you know you've got the nutrients coming directly from from the you could you could probably on something like that um use popcorn because it doesn't get nearly as tall as most kinds of there you go is it true the popcorn all you have to do is take that little just the little pop and just put it in a bag and it pops you don't have to take it off of the husk I've never tried I've never tried that but it's not oh it's not hard it's not hard to just pull it right off here this one he's got see where they're planting the the uh tomato plants down at the bottom yeah and they're using uh some metal to keep it in shape this one is is using the method that we talked about where you're you're giving the root systems of your fruit trees someplace else to go and also obviously keep it from getting too dry so I thought that was a really good idea uh we all have we all baby our fruit trees when they we first get them out there so that's on a slope yeah catches the water catching the water [Music] too obviously this need this was just done they need to put something on it or our nature is going to put something on it there's another bed this really looks real similar to I just wanted to show you they're using the big wood they even got that that looks like some old Lumber up there and then this is my favor I'm going to get build to build me [Laughter] this I just thought well that would be fun just to walk around and see planted in flowers and vegetables I just think that'd be gorgeous anyway those are my references this the the video was from this guy some room to grow and he has some excellent videos if you're interested in in watching that want more [Music] information

Channel: Leon County AgriLife Extension

Views: 13,803

Keywords: Hügelkultur, Hugelculture, gardening, raised beds

Id: WudQjXpPCGo

Length: 33min 53sec (2033 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 19 2024