Building and Hulgelkultur Planting

Since we were about to buy the property (little over a month ago) we decided to try our hand at building a raised bed area. We drew up plans and had big ideas. We've come to realized that we went about it all wrong.

We bought cedar boards and lattice to build the beds, mistake one. Cedar is darn expensive, SUPER darn expensive but it looks great!

We spent maybe a weekend building everything, it was a great learning process for me. We have gopher and moles on our property so we fortified the underside of our beds with chicken wire. The holes are big enough for worms to come in but too small for anything else. Also, I lined the beds with cardboard so there's a temporary form of protection just below the wire lining.


This serves as a barrier so my garden had time to get roots deep before weeds try to take over. The other benefits are water retention and as the cardboard breaks down from being eaten by worms it will provide rich nutrients to the soil. Win-Win in my books. The boxes aren't a 100% weed proof method, the bothersome things found their way into the beds but I'm able to manage the numbers easily.


Mistake two: We built this thing where it gets shade from 1pm and on. We have trees behind the beds that are very tall and throw shade on most of the structure starting early afternoon. My herbs are fine with the shade, mints, purple basil, catnip, purslane and sage. My tomatoes and peppers are not on board with the shade at all, fortunately I planted the tomatoes where the sun hits the beds the most. My peppers I had to just pray they would produce (they did but they don't look very healthy).


Our method for soil preparation was going the hulgelkultur route. We live in Texas and things get dry during the hots days of summer. I like this method for water conservation since we have only city water at the moment. So far this is working like gangbusters and I will be using this throughout future gardens. We have a huge woodpile in the back of our property that has been there for years and been added to over time. We used older logs and branches to place on top of the wire and cardboard bedding. The older the better because the mycelia had begun working at breaking down the logs which make the nutrients readily available to the garden. Also you get mushrooms which I love finding on cool damp mornings.





The soil we used was potting mix from a big home garden store, soil from our aged woodpile and top soil mixed with compost we got down the road from a soil and rock store. I also threw in compost I made. After we planted we mulched with cedar wood chips, minor mistake number three. I say mistake because I would rather native mulch than cedar up near the plants plus it would break down faster than cedar. I think if we were to use cedar again it would be only for walk ways between the garden plots.


I know there's lots of talk about Back to Eden garden method which would be great at water retention as well but we don't have a form of free manure to amend the soil when needed. I have noticed that the wood chips seems to attract a lot of bugs. Nothing that seems to hurt my garden but its a bit concerning when I step on the mulch and tons of these little stinkbug looking things come scurrying out. This maybe just a Texas thing, I don't know.


What we have done to remedy the lack of free manure for the time being is by purchasing a worm farm and many red wigglers. This will take some time for us to reap the benefits of the worm castings but it's helping with all the kitchen waste while my compost bins are tied up with cooking up the last grass cutting of the season, previous kitchen scraps and leaf collection. I would do an open pile but we have so many wild animals that scavenge the property at night I would hate to keep up with the mess.


I also do some chop and drop if my herbs are getting to be too much for me to harvest and use. I just move the wood chips and place the vegetation around the root zone and then cover up again.


We decided to do in ground planting but still utilizing the hugelkultur method with a no till. Just layering the plots and also ensuring a crop rotation in each plot to keep things healthy. The raised beds are beautiful but too costly and the wood boards will eventually need to be replaced over time. We rather just plant in ground and section each plot off with nature barriers or with mulched walk ways.


Here are some pics of the raised beds from beginning to now: