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[Jessi]

^ After one year

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Hugelkultur is nothing more than making raised garden beds filled with rotten wood. This makes for raised garden beds loaded with organic material, nutrients, air pockets for the roots of what you plant, etc. As the years pass, the deep soil of your raised garden bed becomes incredibly rich and loaded with soil life. As the wood shrinks, it makes more tiny air pockets - so your hugelkultur becomes sort of self tilling. The first few years, the composting process will slightly warm your soil giving you a slightly longer growing season. The woody matter helps to keep nutrient excess from passing into the ground water - and then refeeding that to your garden plants later. Plus, by holding SO much water, hugelkultur could be part of a system forgrowing garden crops in the desert with no irrigation.

http://www.richsoil.com/hugelkultur/

Has anybody actually tried doing this? Apparently you can do it with new wood, too, but fresh wood consumes nitrogen that might take away from plants that you have growing there.

[jasserEnv]

That is a very interesting approach and I have never seen the like before. I wonder if such an approach could be used in forest areas that have been logged because these areas always have waste trees that currently end up being burned? The wood is not rotten after being cut but is beginning to rot by the time they are done clearing an area. If this could be done, it could very well be a very good way to improve the forest reclamation in the area. Right now, these areas often become desert-like for a number of years because of the lack of ability of the soil to retain the moisture over the whole summer. Thanks for highlighting this.