Prepare Your Garden Soil:
Making Hugel Beds
What Is A Hugel Bed?
Many gardeners have access to trimmings from tree limbs and shrubs or wood chips from crews maintaining electric and phone lines. Hugelkultur is a strategy to improve your garden by placing this waste wood below the soil in garden beds. In northern Europe, where the technique was developed, waste logs and branches are piled on the ground and soil is piled over it. In a cool climate with heavy soil, this allows the soil to warm up more quickly in the Spring.
Hugel beds are also well-adapted to tropical vegetable gardening. In hot conditions, and they are becoming more common, the carbon in waste wood, brush, palm fronds, etc. quickly cycles back to the air, whether it is burned or just left on the surface. Wherever the carbon cycle is fast, as here in Costa Rica, it is very difficult to build optimal soil organic matter. Burying waste wood under the soil can help build organic matter and slow the return of carbon to the air.
Whether the waste wood is piled on top of the ground and then covered with soil or buried in a trench under the bed, the slowly rotting wood absorbs a lot of water. In addition to improving the water holding capacity of your soil, the slowly rotting wood is excellent habitat and food source for beneficial bacteria and mycorrhizal fungi.
Good for Sandy Soil, Tropics Too
Where you have both very sandy soil and a hot climate, as is the case here in north Florida, above-ground type Hugel beds drain way too quickly and overheat. A modification of the Hugel strategy that is usually better suited to sandy soil and tropical heat is to dig out the topsoil and place the waste wood below the growing bed.
Let's Build A Hugel Bed!
- To make a hugel bed in sandy soil start by digging your bed out at least two feet deep, setting aside the topsoil to add back to the bed after the wood is in place.
- We sometimes put a layer of cardboard or newspaper at the bottom to further slow drainage.
- Then begin laying in waste logs and branches to about 12 inches from the ground level.
- We usually pour wood chips over the waste wood to fill in some of the gaps, but it is not necessary.
- Next, soak the waste wood with water and begin covering it with topsoil. Then smooth out the topsoil and your modified hugel bed is ready to plant.
Less than two years after digging the U-shaped hugel bed, it supports vigorous winged beans, hyacinth beans, bitter gourds, and pumpkins growing on trellises.
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