Hugelkulture isn’t something I looked too much into. We don’t have access to a lot of wood at our house and it’s so dry here I didn’t believe it would work well anyway. Last year I pruned our wind break line heavily. We had a lot of death and I was tired of looking at dead trees. So we finally had access too wood. Not a huge amount but enough to play around with. So I decided to try hugelkulture, sunken hugelkulture.
So like all of our projects we brought out the Kubota tractor and dug a hole. This hole was less than 24″ deep (power and water lines are usually 24″ deep) and around 8×8′ in size. Once the hole was dug (which I didn’t get pictures of) I began filling it with dead wood, biochar and chicken bedding.
I then covered it all back up and added a final layer of compost on the top.
I put tires along both ends of the sunken hugel. One line for potatoes and another for tomatoes. I then filled the tires with biochar and compost.
I planted sugar snap peas in the middle of the hugel and put a crib mattress frame for them to climb up.
We mounded compost and planted the corn seeds in the mounds. Around the mounds we planted bush beans. In the gaps between the tires I planted basil and other herbs.
This last weekend I brought over a wooden trough we got for free from the local Kubota store, filled it with dirt and now all I have to do is wait.
I’m not planting out my hard grown tomatoes until I know they are going to have ideal conditions.
Here are the tomatoes I grew from seed this year. This is the first time I’ve ever been successful. I think it’s because I put them in an unused fish tank with lights.
