Hügelkultur

Table of Contents:

What is Hügelkultur?
Is Hügelkultur Worthwhile?
Common Hügelkultur Mistakes & Problems
Making a Hügelkultur Raised Bed

If you've been in the gardening world for a little while, you've likely heard of the hügelkultur method.

It's been making waves recently - and for good reason! Hügelkultur is a great way to start a garden or a raised bed on the cheap, while utilizing materials you may already have lying around.

While hügelkultur has some great advantages and is a worthwhile technique, there are some common pitfalls / problems that you should be aware of before you start a hügelkultur project.

Here we'll discuss how to achieve great success with this method, while avoiding the most common mistakes and issues that folks regularly encounter along the way.

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What is Hügelkultur?

If you're not yet familiar with hügelkultur, this is a German technique used by gardeners and farmers that involves filling plots, mounds, or raised beds primarily with wood and decaying material.

The raised beds seen below measure 8ft x 4ft x ~2ft. That's 64 cubic ft per raised bed. With 4x raised beds, that's about 170 bags of soil (at 1.5 cu ft ea.) to fill all 4 with soil alone.

You can see how soil prices and quantity rapidly get out of control even for a small project like this:

hügelkultur raised beds with logs branches and cardboard — *Building these raised beds hügelkultur-style, we started with logs, then tree limbs, branches, twigs, leaves, and cardboard before adding amendments and topping with compost.*

Rather than fill these beds with soil alone, they were filled roughly 2/3 of the way with logs, branches, sticks, cardboard, and coffee grounds before adding any soil.

This reduced soil costs by about 2/3, only requiring soil to top off the beds and give the plants a nice band of nutrients on top while the carbonaceous materials below slowly decompose.

With any luck, the logs and branches will continue to supply nutrients gradually for the next decade or more.

Is Hügelkultur Worthwhile?

While there are a few potential pitfalls and mistakes to avoid, hügelkultur is absolutely worthwhile! I'm a huge fan of this method for gardening, especially as an inexpensive way to fill a garden while utilizing materials you may already have on hand.

cucumbers zucchini and broccoli beautiful organic produce — *Some beautiful organic cucumbers, zucchini, and blue-green broccoli grown from the same hügelkultur* *bed above.*

Common Hügelkultur Mistakes & Problems

The following mistakes and problems are some of the most common issues that gardeners run into while attempting hügelkultur.

If you learn from these, you can avoid most pitfalls and save yourself time and frustration as you learn how to make this resourceful method work for you on your land.

Water Retention & Drainage

One of the most common issues with hügelkultur is water retention

Carbonaceous material can absorb a lot of water, especially wood chips.

Keep in mind here that hügelkultur is essentially a compost pile beneath your plants, and that compost is generally not watered as much as garden plots because they can easily become too bioactive.

If you're going to be decomposing big chunky material under your plants, it's important to make sure your drainage is adequate and things aren't becoming anaerobic.

Just like a compost pile, too much water can mean too much bioactivity - evidenced by pests and smells.

Some of the best options here are open-bottom planters and raised beds, and adding sand, perlite, or rock dust to help improve the drainage. Bonus points for the minerals which sand and rock dusts add - these will help your hügelkultur beds or plots to thrive for many years to come.

Be especially mindful if you're in a very wet climate to add more of these drainage-improving grit / mineral additions to really help break up the absorbant carbon aggregates.

Nitrogen Lockup

Another issue with hügelkultur is the potential for the woody carbonaceous material to lock up nitrogen from the soil. This is temporary, but can cause issues for years if there is not enough nitrogen to counteract this.

The thing to remember here is simply that carbon needs to be balanced out with nitrogen. Filling a bed or plot with logs, branches, wood chips, and cardboard makes for a very carbon-heavy bed.

This carbon must be counteracted with some nitrogen.

You do not need nearly as much nitrogen by volume as carbon, but adding coffee grounds, grass clippings, green leaves, food waste, tea leaves, hedge trimmings, and other fresh forms of nitrogen will be required to counterbalance the carbon.