- G'day. I'm Mark from Self-Sufficient Me and in this video, I'm
gonna show you what happens when you bury logs and other plant waste in the garden to create a hugelkultur raised bed. That's right, over four years ago, I filled this raised garden
bed with logs, sticks and other plant waste in the bottom half to create a hugelkultur mound, making it better for soil health and water retention. And now, I'm gonna dig down
to remove all this soil to see what has happened to all the debris I buried underneath. And on top of that, I'll
be doing this in the rain. Let's get into it. (gentle music) (birds tweeting) Now I'm taking the opportunity to show you what happened
to this buried debris because I can in a way,
I've got an excuse. This bed is bowing out, this is poor quality materials. I've learnt my lesson, I've talked about this type of bed before with the plastic posts. I've got to pull it apart now because it's only gonna get worse and that's just gonna cave in eventually. So I'm gonna take these sides off, I'm gonna replace the posts with some good wooden fencing posts and that should fix it up nicely and it should last a few
more years after that. And as you can see, I've got a number of plants
that are growing here. Carrots, jicama, potatoes. I'm gonna salvage as many
of the plants as possible to either harvest to eat or to regrow around somewhere
else and transplant. So I'll do that first, I'll get rid of the plants, salvage what I can here and then we'll start
putting that soil into there so I can just easily replace
it once the bed is fixed up. Nice big French carrot. Check him out.
(chuckles) You're meant to eat them
a bit smaller than that but it's a nice size. Mm, nice. There's a few jicamas
that have done all right. These were an over-planting. It's a lovely thing. These are just like a potato. Anyway, I do digress. Baby potatoes. Aww, so golden. Lots of good worms in here
as I'm digging around. Look at that. Plenty of activity in this bed, and that's all because of
all the good organic matter that's been placed in this bed. Right, that'll do with the crop salvage. I think we did all right actually. Now I'm just going to
dig out and get down. The reason I do the hugelkultur thing is because it saves space on filling our raised garden bed, you don't have to fill the whole thing with good garden soil. Some places who sell these
beds also put in drainage or something like that in the bottom. Over the years, I've found that drainage isn't the best way to go. But practicing the old German hugelkultur type mounded method in a raised garden bed
like this is really good because it does save
costs, it saves on fill but you get the added benefits of all that organic matter
in the base of the bed to feed the microbes, the worms, establish a better ecosystem
than would otherwise be there with just simple granite
crushed in the bottom or gravel or drainage or even indeed just soil. As expected, once you get
down eight or so inches, the soil is more compacted. It's still very rich. That's exactly what you want. You don't want it too free-draining, otherwise you spend too
much time and effort and too much water pumping into that bed. All right, we're finally getting to the business end of this thing. I can just see the pattern of the logs when I first put them in there. I'll take this front
panel away in a minute and see if we can have a look even further at what it looks like underneath. But of course, soil has
all fallen in over time and the logs are decaying as expected. But I'm gonna give you a much closer look. There's one of the logs. Pretty easy to pull apart and break. It's damp, not from the rain, but it's damp just being
down the bottom there. You can see little critters all over it, little compost critters and ants. There we go. I'll just scrape that away and we'll be able to
get a better look at it. Well, there you go. Look at it. It's still pretty solid,
no doubt about it, but if you get into it, you can see that it's breaking down. Slowly but surely, they're
turning into sponges. This here, it looks quite solid, but right at the top, if I get pick in, it's actually
starting to just sponge up. Full of moisture, easy to chip away. It's essentially breaking down. Let's explore it a little bit more. Let's just get in a bit further. These are some of the
horizontal logs I put in. Look at that, look at
all the wood roaches. Heaps of them. I don't know if you saw it on camera but heaps are running around. It's all wet under here. Yeah, there are some ants but they're just normal garden ants. They're the small little ginger ones. There's no big problem with them being in a garden bed at all, they're not gonna hurt your plants. They're wood cockies. No dramas at all being in a garden bed. They're just eating the wood. I bit freaky when they start
crawling up your leg though. There's another stump underneath there, fairly hard, not all completely broken down. But this is a very slow process and it's meant to be a very slow process. It's not meant to break
down in the first few weeks, that's what other matter will, small sticks and twigs. (chuckles) They're giving me the heebie-jeebies now. Small sticks and twigs
and that type of thing, they will break down really quickly. Leaves and plant clippings,
really soft stuff. Like this over here even. This was a fairly large stick at one point but just crumbling to pieces. It's almost turning into dust and dirt. You can feel the moisture in it. There you go, living in the log. That's what I'm talking about. That far under he was living in the log and probably eating this. Look at it just breaking down here, getting in all the cavities. I should also mention that
it depends on the climate, how much moisture the bed gets, the type of soil, and also the type of wood that
you put into the garden bed. If it's a really soft wood, of course it'll break down faster. If they're a hard wood, like this was, well, then it's gonna
take longer to break down. So all those conditions
will make a difference on how long this stuff
will take to break down. I can't really find any of the soft matter that I put in here, like the leaves or any
other types of garden waste. It's just the bigger
pieces of wood that is left and they are, like I said,
getting rather spongy. You just can't do this with your hand on a normal cut piece of wood. A log like this, pull it out, you just can't do that normally. And it's that that holds that moisture and I'll keep repeating myself, I am actually quite happy
with the results here. Although I've seemed to have
ruined a really great bed and ecosystem that has
to rebuild itself now once I rebuild the bed. Never mind. It's a bit disappointing
to ruin that ecosystem but it will rebuild itself and I think it was worth it to show you guys what happens when you do create a
hugelkultur type bed like this and put logs and heavy material
garden waste in the base. Yeah, I'm glad I did that now, even though it's been raining and wet and a lot of hard work. Yeah, cool. Really fascinating stuff. I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, make sure you
give it a big rotten thumbs up and subscribe to the channel
if you haven't already. Also, share the video around because that heaps the channel out, heaps a whole lot of dirt, helps the channel out a lot. Heaps. Thanks a lot for watching, bye for now. (breathes out heavily) How do I look? (breathes out heavily) Crikey, that was a heck of an effort. Still spinning a little bit. Now I've gotta fix it all up. Maybe that's another video.
