Hello Everybody,
After touring the Polish Hill Wilds and seeing the oppurtunities that exist for the urban gardener or designer I want to give a brief description of making and using a hugelkultur raised bed.
The basic idea is a deep layered bed composed of mostly woody debris, topped off with great stuff like leaves, straw, woodchips, manure, and or compost and soil.
With the abundance of nonpervious surfaces like concrete and asphalt, as well as invasive and spreading plants such as certain vines, knotweeds, and tree of heaven throughout urban environments, hugelkultur beds can turn problems into solutions.
A hugelkultur bed can be built on top of bare ground, concrete, gravel, or just about any other surface formidable to traditional gardening.
A hugelkultur bed can also make use of the abundant and under utilized invasive species, using them as the main ingredient in building rich fertile soil. These beds are basically a big rough compost pile topped with a medium to plant into.
The Process
Step 1: Gather course woody debris like rotting logs, branches, twigs, and brush. Apply these as the base layer of your future garden. They take a long time to decompose, but are great for building complex soil biology, and do a great job of holding moisture on nonpervious surfaces.
Step 2: Gather and Apply a layer of finer organic material to fill in the spaces and gaps in the coarser materials. This is where leaves, vines, straw, woodchips, and hay come into play.
*Optional* Add a layer of mulch innoculated with gourmet mushrooms...oysters are a good choice.
Step 3: Apply a couple inch thick layer of topsoil, compost, and or manure to create a nice planting medium, and top off/cover over the debris to aid decomposition.
*Optional* Topdress bed with mycoryhzal fungus innoculum...this aids plants in nutrient absorbtion and promotes extensive and healthy root systems.
Step 4: Seed and or transplant as usual, water heavily at first to speed decomposition, liming may be nessesary as woody material tends to be on the acidic side.
The hugelkultur bed tends to be somewhat disorderly and upon completing construction they should be relatively huge and bulky, up to 2 or 3ft tall. As time passes the bed will settle and the once hard woody tissues will be converted into a rich dark humus that vegetables love.
Hope this sparks some urban creativity
Wiggy
Can you make a bed out of Japanese Knotweed?