Why we got rid of our HUGELBED

[Music] good morning from the garden and welcome to today's video in which we're going to dismantle our hugelbed it's also my husband's birthday today so to all the people who are commenting will you marry me on videos this is what being married to me looks like so maybe you should reconsider i did bake him a cake so you know pros and cons but this is not what today's video is about it's about the hugelbet and first i want to tell you what a hugelbet is why we made one and why we are dismantling it today hugel is from the german word hugel which means a hill and it's basically an extreme kind of raised bed which is constructed out of large woody materials such as logs and large branches which are then covered with a layer of topsoil the wood will decompose slowly over time adding lots of organic matter to your soil but the hugel culture can have other benefits as well for example the decomposing wood acts as a sponge holding moisture which should in theory mean that you don't have to water hugelbats as much or at all hugelbats have become something of a fashion within permaculture they've been popularized by the austrian permaculture farmer seb holzer and i think sometimes they're even constructed or put in gardens where they don't make a lot of sense but there are definitely situations where i think they are a good solution to some problems for example when you have a lot of woody material that you need to do something with this is a good way to use it and composted it over time and that's also the situation that we were in when we bought our plot in 2015 there were some old diseased or dead even dead trees and large bushes that we had to do something with and uh those we used those we used to construct our bed and also we were making a pond so we were when we excavated the pond we had a lot of soil topsoil that we could use to cover the bed with furthermore the hugelbed helped us to create a favorable microclimate for the two most frost sensitive trees that we grow which is a peach and an apricot which flower very early and therefore are sensitive to early spring frosts or spring frosts and the hugelbed is to the northeast of the trees protecting them from the cold north northeasterly winds which was especially important when the trees were small we have planted the bed with lots of perennial herbaceous plants but also some small bushes such as i have a current here and even a small tree apple tree and we have some goji berries the herbaceous plants did well from the beginning because they had enough soil to start with but some of the bushes and trees struggled in the beginning because uh the depths of the top soil was not very deep the depth was not deep and of course it takes time before the wood will decompose sufficiently for the trees to be able to root into it also woody materials are carbon rich materials so there can be a like an and they use up nitrogen through their decomposition so there can be a temporary nitrogen deficiency in within the hugelbet so overall i would say that in our case the huge culture does work and would probably work even better over time as the wood continues to decompose so why did we decide to deconstruct it i have talked several times about how important it is to get rid of perennial weeds before you start planting up the herbaceous layer of a forest garden and in this case uh to start with there was uh there were no perennial weeds but over time the hugelbet got invaded by couch grass and once you got perennial weeds mixed with herbaceous perennial plants it's really impossible to get rid of them so what we're going to do today is move some of the large plants like the especially the apple tree and some of the bushes and maybe even some of some of the herbaceous plants being careful not to take with us any of the roots of the kutch grass because then we would be perpetrating the problem and then we're going to spread um the mass this way and then it will be covered with cardboard to get rid of the paint to kill the perineal wheats in the coming during the coming season and this will be the area where we will be growing winter squash this year fortunately i don't have to do all of this alone i got a crew consisting out of my son sebastian so boss can make it make a bow or something [Laughter] and romeo who is uh well we call him our honorary godson and he's been helping in the garden uh for several years now so how excited are you for uh today i'm so excited on a scale of 10 on a scale of 10. sebastian does not enjoy gardening it's not my passion out of 10 out of i'm honestly honestly you can be honest seven and a half now why that's better than i thought romeo solid nine there's of course also my husband who's behind the camera but maybe he we will put him in in the frame some uh he has not been on on the channel yet and there's one more thing i want to say i am very curious about what we will find when we start dismantling the bet um i want to see how much the wood has decomposed because it has been it's been the bed has been created in 2016 in june which is about three and a half years ago a little more than that so i'm curious to see how much the wood has decomposed over that time and also there could be some unpleasant surprises because we have had we think we have had some rats so what we could also what we also could find possibly is a rat's nest so that would not be that [Music] exciting [Music] [Music] real interesting [Music] [Music] okay [Music] oh [Music] [Music] yep [Music] so how is the cake this is excellent romeo it's a vegan cake what do you think i like it but half a kilo of chocolate it's a bust [Music] so we've just had cake to celebrate my husband's birthday and here's the progress that we've made i have replanted the currant and the apple tree and the and the boys have been uh uh chipping away resting now they've been working very hard and they're slipping away and uh and uh on the hugo bed and it's interesting to see how much the wood inside of it has really already um deteriorated or composted so i think that our plan like spreading it out you can show that like we're spreading it over here into a somewhat more even layer hopefully and then later we will cut cover this um with cardboard so that we can grow our winter squash here but um the winter squash should do really good really well this year because this is basically a really good compost one more thing i would like to show you uh we had some strawberry plants in the hugo bed as well and i don't remember what variety it was but it was some kind of sort of like good culinary variety and i've taken out the plants and i'm going to plant them in the greenhouse for hopefully a very early harvest that's a tip by my friends alexandre and elena from hallmer out to town call me argentine i will link their channel below for my dutch and belgian friends and they get a very early harvest of strawberries in the greenhouse by planting some plants at the end of the winter so that's what i'm trying to achieve here as well it's been about three hours since the intro of the video and i'm standing roughly in the same spot but you can probably see that it's quite a bit lower we've done um well mostly the guys have done quite a good job and the bed is almost gone there were some larger pieces of wood that were not quite rotten so these will continue to rot behind me but for now uh we're done and we're going home to make homemade pizza that i'm gonna ask for for his birthday but uh like would you what is your opinion now out of tents boss how was this for her dad's birthday six and a half romeo both went down okay thanks but of course it was remko's birthday so what's your rating i think it's a 9 out of 10 a pandemic proof birthday that i never well thought i would have do you want to do the outro yeah thank you i hope you enjoyed this video if you did please give it a thumbs up and hope to see you again soon happy gardening

Channel: GrownToCook

Views: 48,942

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Id: bUVzhlkad9k

Length: 12min 31sec (751 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 28 2021