Hugelkultur: Raised Garden Beds | Hacker News Reader

Hugelkultur: Raised Garden Beds

richsoil.com

401 pointsjschwartzi148 comments

On the subject of horticulture, there are still a great many amazing plants that aren't well understood and which resist cultivation. In addition it seems some fundamentally accepted default processes in the horticultural industry are ripe for review - for example, I read a paper recently which threw the conventional root hormone application wisdom for cuttings out the window: in that study it was found application atop a cutting (in the species covered) was superior to application below a cutting as conventionally taught. If things this fundamental are up for discussion, it would seem clear that we are really only at the relative tip of the iceberg in our understanding of biological systems and horticultural practice.

I suspect advancements in the next few years in areas like: new high yield crop combinations, improved robotic tilling/sewing/fertilizing/weeding/harvesting mechanisms, increased understanding of a broader variety of species seed germination requirements, combined horticulture/mycoculture/bryoculture strategies, autonomous tissue culture, autonomous offshore aquaculture and harvesting, etc. Robotics really should be a huge enabler here.

I already have a robotics factory in China and the personal and commercial motivation to build solutions in this space and am actively studying horticulture. Email me if you'd like to collaborate, have agricultural know-how and/or land and the medium to long term interest to collaborate, fellow startups welcome. Basically I am constrained by available land and time, don't believe in the long term economics of indoor/heavily synthetic conditions, and believe we are fundamentally at a crossroads for more sustainable, higher density agricultural practices enabled by new, more precise technology and more holistic conceptions of agricultural systems.

I would love to see this paper you mention. My wife loves all things green. Our house is filling up with house plants, which I am OK with as long I am not in charge of them. And the more she plant outside, the less I have to mow.

But anyways, she does a lot of cutting and if there is something else that can work, I would love to share it with her.

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/14981883.pdf

You could replace your lawn with a more natural meadow. You only have to mow them once a year.

What plant would you plant? I heard good things about Dichondra but unfortunately it doesn’t survive winter freezing / snowing.

That depends on where you live, you should plant native species. I would go to my local botanical garden and ask them what they have on their meadows. If you don't have a botanical garden around, a local university might have information, eg https://extension.umd.edu/hgic/topics/lawn-alternatives

In my area, they hold native plant sales through the local conservation district. Here is an example: https://kingcd.org/programs/better-backyards/native-bareroot...

I've purchased native trees, scrubs and native flower mixes through them. They seem to be held only once a year but the prices are very reasonable.

You could get a native wildflower mix, and seed bomb with that. After a few years, it’ll settle into patches that of species appropriate for the sun/shade level, and look more natural. It’ll make the native pollinators and birds happy too.

Sure, but then I might as well plant salad, rosemary etc (i.e. actually useful plants... along with some species that maintain / improve soil nutrition). In my view, the main purpose of ground cover is to be able to walk on it...

re: rooting, another anecdote there -- grapes have traditionally been dormant grafted and rooted vertical. But some people I know in the grapebreeding community have had more success recently with horizontal cuttings; at least for green cuttings, more experimentation required for dormant hardwood. In any case, a massive difference in terms of the amount of new root material produced.

And this makes sense when you think of how a grape would naturally clone itself in the wild (which they do, like _crazy_); they'll layer along the ground and send down roots from a horizontal shoot. So they're likely some kind of dominance for roots in that formation. We may have been propagating grapes wrong for 2000+ years :-)

What do you mean root hormone atop a cutting? On the leaves as opposed to the open stem?

On the bark above the cut end, is where the roots will come out, much if the time.

Oh got it. Makes sense. I typically did the whole end in which means there is some getting above the cut end

You can get rooting hormone in liquid form. The protocol is to dilute then soak the ends for x number of seconds depending on what kind of material you’re working with (green, woody, semiwoody). Apparently you can do it too long, which I did not know previously.

I sent you an email, let me know if you don't receive it, want to make sure I got the address right.

I love your comments

Hugelkultur is neat and if it works for you that's great. However there's little to no rigorous science behind it and traditional raised beds have some advantages (although some disadvantages).

http://pubs.cahnrs.wsu.edu/publications/pubs/fs283e/

On a hike the other day I was excited to see "natural hugelkultur" at many stages of development: fallen trees along the trail at Barlow Wayside near Portland, OR create earthy berms. You can see every stage of decomposition: newly fallen trees, fallen trees with ample ferns and seedlings sprouting, and earthen berms covered in vegetation that are basically hugelkultur.

The nurse log [1] is well studied and the hugel gets much of it's benefit from the same ecological processes.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurse_log

Ah thanks for the link! I didn't know the term for "natural hugelkultur."

I don't mean to denigrate hugelkultur, rather just point out it's a folk practice based on mimicking a well understood natural process. Since it's largely used for hobby farms and gardens where enjoyment is far more important than yield, it hardly matters whether it's a folk practice or the latest agtech discovery. Just be careful not to cause drainage issues with all those berms slowly eroding! Nature can take advantage of that process optimally while in your yard it might just cause a damper basement.

Another way to ask this: how does hugelkultur logs/material compare with a similar volume/mass/cost of other material e.g. traditional soil.

My guess is it does pretty well: traditional soil struggles to retain water, which can be scarce and even when it's plentiful water is difficult to optimize for high density gardens, especially urban gardens.

If I understand the hugelkultur design, the sod/straw layer keeps the berm from eroding.

Beneficial to those plants which do not belong to the sort of early succession. They need disturbed sites and bare soil.

Some of the bread and butter trees of aggro-forrestry establish better on bare soil rather than a thick layer of humus from decaying trees.

From what I understand, it gives long lasting benefits.

One of my mentors is a soil scientist that has been doing ecological restoration for over 30 years. He tells this story of where he had to walk across a mountain range pushing a long metal rod into the ground every 3 meters. While most places barely took the probe, the places where there were nurse logs he could sink them deep in all the way.

A good bit about food production has never been accounted for in "scientific" tests.

Science is about rigorous observation. Is reductionism the only technique that is valid for understanding ALL phenomenon? Seems like this consideration has not been applied all too rigorously.

As for reductionism: when dealing in this sphere it has thus far proven itself to be, well, limited, at least in providing a comprehensive understanding of food systems.

The understanding that is applied to food science, that has any merit, comes from botany, ecology, climatology. IMHO the best food science comes from the likes of Sepp Holzer and bill mollison, who at least the latter is an actual scientist.

The military food scientists thus far have not ss done well at applying most scientific advancements to the domain.

Since all war scientists started applying their trade to food production in the fifties, it's been one fiasco after the next. Empirically speaking, chemical, genetic, and mechanical intervention (so called enhancements) is meme science. If you study up on it, you'll see that there is plenty of empirical evidence that the genetically selected rice and wheat grains pushed on Eastern Asia were worse on almost all counts than their traditional seed. After more than a decade and a half of failure, they showed some marginal benefit, but only if the right amount of fertilizer was applied during a period of extraordinarily ideal environmental circumstancses-- and this is what it boils down to: chemical companies wanting to sell fertilizer and pesticides. Asian farmers kept planting these grains because they received subsidies backed by the local and US governments to buy fertilizer, machines, and pesticides, and received favorable purchasing conditions for providing the right variety of grain. After getting locked in, or facing bankruptcy, many times they dont have a choice but to continue. The results are there, refer to Food Production in the 21st Century. It was written in the mid nineties by an academic worthy of your time if you have any interest in this topic.

If there is political motivation muddying up your science at the institutional level, it's not going to be rigorous.

Yes! Observation is what made me forget about well drained raised beds in Texas! Now, I waterproof my raised beds to keep in moisture. They are so much better! It's crazy to have conventional raised beds in Texas! I make YouTube videos about it. https://youtu.be/HrVOONqgdsE

Don’t they get absolutely soggy in the Texas rain?

Do you know of a book or article that goes into this in more detail?

From the link you gave:

> "Then the earth itself will have the tendency to come inwardly alive and become akin to the vegetative."

> ~ the term [hügelkultur] first appears in a 1962 German brochure written by avid gardener Herrman Andrä.

This captures the crucial point: soil is a kind of organism.

The corollary: farm the soil and the soil grows the plants.

> soil is a kind of organism.

Surely, like a sourdough starter, a patch of soil is a small _ecosystem_ ?

I say "small", but bear in mind how numerous microbes are: dry yeast is said to be around 20 billion cells per gram. There are far more individuals in your sourdough starter than there are humans on earth.

I am beginning to suspect that a patch of soil thinks and behaves like a kind of organism, literally.

This is the "Gaia hypothesis" on a smaller scale.

Yes, if you like. Consider the stromatolite, or trichoplax. It seems to me that the boundary, if any, between "ecosystem" and "organism" is conceptual rather than physical.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromatolite

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trichoplax

Thanks. That was a great link and had what I feel is a very reasonable, skeptical but also nice tone that explores the history behind this and the actual evidence behind it. It also gave me a rabbit hole of links to explore regarding evidence based self-sufficient gardening.

I had 3 pepper plants in pots (raised bed) and planted 2 of them in the ground and 6 months later the one in the pot is still doing good but the 2 others died (all watered the same and next to each other)... There could be many reasons why that is but they appear to grow better in pots

Thanks!!! for sharing this. My proper plants also love their pots but I didn't realize soil could be risky for them.

I have a 5 year old food forest at my house. I take videos and upload to YouTube.

Checkout my channel: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC1eySW_9TiI5wnvTnIIw2Nw

I have 5 year old hugelkultur beds and 1 year old beds and everything in between.

They really do work and are a blast to work with, each one a little bit different.

If your into this stuff please subscribe as I'm trying to grow my channel over 100 so I can unlock some YouTube platform features which I'm currently blocked on. (Namely live streaming from my mobile phone)

There you go, I am officially subscriber #100. Thanks for taking the time to make so many informative videos.

Ahh... the perfect symmetry of your user name and your good deed.

Thanks that, you would be surprised how hard it is to get subscribers in this space. I hope my videos current and future will help you!

Subscribed! I am currently working on my own backyard conversion journey.

Can you add what part of the world your garden is in the YouTube about?

It would help me see what things would be relevant vs not in my area.

What video would you say is the best starting point for a newcomer to your channel?

This playlist should show land transformation and give some of the theory behind growing food in this way.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPqlh_ebFYDFE86vPFjEY...

> I had to spend some time with google to find the right spelling.

Well... here goes the nitpicking.

The German word is "Hügelkultur". If you for some reason can't use an Umlaut, the proper spelling would be "Huegelkultur".

I don’t blame anyone for not knowing that ü = ue if they don’t speak German, but if you are/were one of those people who didn’t know this and just ignored the umlauts altogether (Hügelkultur -> Hugelkultur): the ü and u, ä and a, ö and o... are all different letters. They are not simply modifications to the letters a, o, and u. They are different letters entirely, which can also be represented as ae, oe, and ue. But they are NOT the letters ae, oe, ue, if that makes sense.

to be clear they sound different

Thanks, this irks me disproportionally. People gotta respect our stupid proprietary vowels!!

If anyone wants to know, it also literally means "hill culture". ("Culture" in the biological sense I believe, like the cultures from your organic yoghurt)

I've help build a few of these, some using heavy machinery. The linked article is a bit misleading, in its "without irrigation" bit and the time it takes to get a fully established system. As with almost everything related to nature, "it depends". In Montana, where the author of the article resides, I've seen my share of hugels fail miserably without irrigation. For us here, I think the biggest advantage is the elevated soil temperatures in the spring due to the steep slope, but with that also comes an irrigation demand.

Hugelkulture is great. It will jumpstart the soil in even the most degraded of conditions. It provides time release moisture, the right combination of fibers, sugars, and micronutrients for fungi and bacteria, and plenty of spatial complexity for insects and such, which also accelerate the nutrient cycling process. It all combines synergistically to provide better conditions for the propagation of biotic life, in general. Though I've run into some problems with early beds in Brazil. As there are a lot of ants that live in old trees and love to much on leafy plants. The important thing in this case is to make sure your wood is completely underground, with no interface aboveground. If you're patient (as you should be) A healthy soil will, over the long run, prove to be protropic. Which means that soils improve, and this can happen because of, rather than in spite of, intensive cultivation. Important names: Sepp Holzer is an Austrian most responsible for popularizing this technique. He's known for using macroelements like rocks lakes and cliffs to create the climactic conditions capable of growing cherries and lemons (in the Swiss Alps). He also has a very interesting of cultivating (my favorite way) that is most likened to companion or guild planting, but he doesn't organize his plantings into neat little rows. He takes a patch of wilderness and tills it under, then goes out and throws out buckets of seed blends and leaves it alone. I personally prefer covering it with a banana leaf grass clippings or mulch cover, during the germination phase. Depends on where you are and what you are planting. Geoff Lawton did an incredible experiment in Israel. He greened the desert. He took a bulldozer and built a really long swale along the slightest slope and mulched it. Then the project ran out of money so they abandoned it. After a few years he managed to make his way back and checked on it. He found the mulch was teeming with fungi and mites. Species no one in living memory had ever seen. There were ducks and chickens and all kinds of interesting shrubs and fruit bearing trees. He built an oasis where everyone is running out of water, and resorting to using desalinated seawater and massive greenhouses to grow food. Check out the video on YouTube. Geoff Lawton Greening the Desert. Emilia Hazelip has done some interesting work with raised beds and mulching. With that she manages to keep out the weeds, control temperature, contain moisture, and accelerated microbiotic nutrient cycling. I like her work a lot, and have found it most effective. Another Important people of note is Bill Mollison. We need more people like this. Following through with their work. Sorry guys but throwing concrete dust on fields is not a good idea!!!

The author notes how there are advantages to having the bed raised, like less irrigation required, but why can't you get the same effect by burying the logs instead?

You could, but it's more work as it takes a lot of digging. You could also have flat raised beds setup the same way, with logs and branches and hay - it's a lot more common thing actually. However small slopes and mounds on their own have a number of advantages: catching more heat when Sun is low on the horizon, and less in the summer/midday, and better drainage of any excess water - soil will never turn into mud, so less chances of roots rotting when there's too much rain - and there's also more air circulation around plants. However for smaller plants to get enough of the sun it takes more planning how to position them, as one side is always in shade. Slopes catch less rain, so in dry areas you need densely planted small plants or grass to catch it, and water that runs down needs to be channeled to accumulate on the bottom of the slope. Also, when planting and doing composting at the same time one needs to be careful that decomposition doesn't go too fast because the heat released in the process can hurt the roots, too.

Also, either way, what kinds of plants can you grow without irrigation or rain for a full summer? I'm guessing only ones whose roots go deep enough into the pile?

Exactly. The apex of the hugel is fruit trees and perennials. with annuals filling in as they can. Zepp Holzer, the originator of the word, scatters seed mixes with great numbers of different species while at the same time planting out many fruit, nut, and other trees.

And what's interesting is that the roots of short and mid height vegetation join together, creating a dense mat of roots and fibers, that contain a surprising amount of mostuire. When you combine that with spongy soils, buried wood, and shade they provide localized cycles of fluids and humidity. Overall it makes for much more resilient and productive food systems. Though you have to pay more attention to what you are doing.

If you plant one by one, neatly spaced apart, you won't have this type of nutrient cycling and moisture uptake.

Not overly familiar with it, but could wicking beds work in this situation?

My parents have just added a few to their setup, but we're in winter here in Australia so yet to see their effectiveness through summer.

I grow raspberries and strawberries on mine. Videos in my other comment.

Potatoes on a 2nd year old hugelkultur are amazing!

I live in zone 6b Connecticut

Almost any plant (except in very dry areas).

In this context, what's a very dry area? I get 11-12" of rain annually; generally none May through October.

Depends on context but burring wood works just as well. I've done both but it's easier for me to build up the land then dig down because the contractors who built my house 20 year ago, ruined the natural forest and buried gravel and stone underground as fill ...

I do dig swales on contour and fill with wood chips to make garden paths. I harvest stone at that time to build garden walls and depending how deep the path is before filling I toss in some old logs before covering with woodchips for walking.

The end result is the walking paths become resavoirs for holding water and my feet stay dry and I'm left with topsoil to further raise up my garden beds and rocks to build with.

Basically rearranging the material that already exist on site to build a self renewing system!

You can do this below ground level, but it loses some other useful properties (catching more sunlight, improved drainage, ergonomics). Depending on where you live, one approach may work better than the other.

Also you get almost 2x the growing space by raising it.

Of course, buried logs take years to decompose. Most people don’t plan garden beds years in advance, or have the space for beds that won’t be used.

Can also accomplish the same thing (on a shorter timeframe) with lasagna raised beds. I have been using layers of grass clippings and leaves as the bottom 60% or so of my raised beds when new (and then adding some layers over the next years) for a while now, and the plants seem to do almost ridiculously well with no weeding and no fertilization required.

https://www.bbg.org/gardening/article/make_a_lasagna_garden_...

I wonder:

1. Is this effective without "sod," i.e. can you just shovel your local dirt onto it?

2. Would it work with wood chips?

The second point is interesting to me because I know someone who's about to come into a large quantity of 100% organic natural pine chips and has no idea what to do with them, other than pay someone to take them to the dump.

Lots of gardeners would love to take those wood chips off his hands! There's even a clever startup for this exact problem (see: https://getchipdrop.com/)

Don't bury woodchips into hugelkultur, I found that to not work.

Better to use woodchips after digging swales/garden paths on contour as fill for the swale. After 3-4 years dig the garden paths again as the woodchips are ready to be applied to garden beds having mostly decomposed by then into a perfect growing material/medium.

Woodchips having so much more surface area _really_ shocks the soil and starves it of all nitrogen, a key element needed by bacteria and fungus in their decomposition process. Nitrogen deficit soils don't grow plants.

Grassed over improves water entry to the hill (instead of forming small streams and running downhill as it might on a dirt hill), and also prevents erosion.

It would work with wood chips just fine, but you may want to supplement with actual logs as well. Otherwise you'll need to build your hill very high, or keep rebuilding the hill for a few years(a pile of wood chips has way more air in it than a log, and will compress way more than log would).

Wood chips would work better for the short term, but for long-term use (on the scale of 1-3 decades), using logs would be better.

Hugelbeds are said to be "needed" of rebuilding in about 3 years before their production efficiency deteriorates

Edit: That said I agree with the short term distinction for wood chips.

Edit 2: I'm guessing the 3 year thing comes from the breaking down of everything except the logs.

Hügelkultur is fascinating. Early this year, my kid and I built an 8'x4'x2' Hügelkultur raised bed for vegetables. We're fortunate to have some fallen trees and rotting logs in the back of the yard, and we were able to fill the first foot of the bed with this debris, then regular soil and compost.

The plants are thriving and producing plenty of edibles, and now I'm thinking about building a second one.

The most interesting discovery is that the bed seems not to require much moisture. I was watering it every day for a while, until it seemed that it was turning into a big mud pit, so I stopped, and the plants have continued to thrive.

I also built a drip irrigation system into the bed, very easy to do actually, but have not turned it on for the same reason. The ecosystem seems to retain water and is not draining moisture into the ground nearly as much as I first anticipated.

If you build a raised bed, it's a good idea to put in 1/4" (1 cm) metal mesh at the bottom and up the sides a bit, to discourage burrowing creatures. Then add a layer of cardboard (old pizza boxes or shipping boxes work fine), followed by your Hügelkultur logs and branches, and finally some decent organic raised bed soil and quality compost.

Another lesson: this system is heavy. Make sure you use strong wood and solid construction techniques. To do it again, I would add more reinforcing beams, because a couple of the side panels are starting to bulge a bit. I will be patching them with struts later this year, probably.

Another interesting discovery: Hügelkultur is conducive to slime molds. I noticed this weird, alien life form appearing overnight and had to ask in a gardening forum: yellowish domes of soft, fungus-like stuff. It turns out to be Fuligo septica, commonly known as dog vomit slime mold (any players of Hack out there?). It's harmless and even beneficial, but looks horrible.

I've started using Hügelkultur in my patio buckets and ceramic pots as well; half the pot gets the rotting sticks, then top it off with dirt. Thus far, these pots are doing very well.

In this era of uncertainty, growing your own food is a great idea, and it's good to see such brilliant ideas as Hügelkultur and square-foot gardening being widely disseminated.

Probably next year we're getting chickens.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuligo_septica

On a small scale you can try hugelkultur in a pot. Works great for nursery baby trees. The baby trees root I to the log and use it to regulate water and also form relationships with the fungi decomposing the wood. Use plenty of Compost.

Random shot-in-the-dark here but does anyone have any land within 3-4 hours drive of SF on which they would like to try out these techniques? Hügelkultur and "eco-mimetic" horticulture generally?

Yes, actually.

I live due east of the SF Bay Area in the Sierra Foothills. Per Google Maps right now it's only 2 and half hours by car, realistically it's typically at least a 3 hour trip or so to make it out here.

I have been working remotely as a software developer out here since 2014, when I left the Bay Area and my commute behind. My property is a little over two acres.

I got into permaculture right around the time we moved. I have yet to try Hügelkultur specifically but am working on establishing a food forest and various other perennial systems. It's slow going - there are challenges to this climate and elevation that I certainly didn't face in the mild climate of the SF Bay Area. Our summers are very hot and irrigation is pretty critical. But working outdoors on the weekends and PTO days is actually a very welcome change from being in front of a screen all day.

Living here the past six years, I have learned tons about what works and what doesn't on this property.

If you want to hear more, seriously reach out - there should be a pointer to my LinkedIn and an email in my HN profile.

That's awesome! I didn't see an email in your profile but I sent you a message on LinkedIn. My email is via hushmail.com, username sforman. I'd love to hear more.

Look up https://sharedearth.com if you don’t find any takers here.

You should also look into permaculture design (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture) as well as Sepp Holzer’s work (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holzer_Permaculture)

There is a lot more than just ecomimicry. Holzer made extensive use of those beds. He also did things like using his hogs instead of an excavator (by laying down things in the places he wants to dig, and letting the hogs have at it), or manipulating effective hardiness zones and microclimates to grow fruiting trees at elevations that are normally impossible.

Oh yeah, I'm all over it. I got a PDC years ago and last week I put a deposit down on some Kunekune piglets. FWIW I suspect Nature made us to do Permaculture, et. al. ;-)

(I just laid in seventy seeds in a mini greenhouse to start: melons, the Three Sisters: corn, squash, and beans, some dwarf Tamarillo and ground cherries, etc.)

Sharedearth.com looks awesome (not technically, technically it's crude but functional) and I just signed up and made a profile. Finger's crossed! Thank you!

That’s awesome man!

I only started deep diving into permaculture a couple months ago, but it pulled together many things that I had been exploring for a long time. It was like coming across the keystone piece in a lot of things for me. But it has been chasing me for a while. I had been fascinated by the design diagrams I would see popping up, and finally looked up what this funny word “permaculture” meant.

I think permaculture is the next evolutionary step for our civilizations, even if on the surface, if appears to go backwards. But it is not. It is progressing forward into post-industrial, decentralized practices. I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and it was easy to be blind to what “Information Age” meant (globalized control of industry), but I now see what it really enabled is the decentralization of agriculture and industry through the interconnecting web of relationships of people. We finally have the technology that put us on par with the mycellium network, and start understanding — having the lived experience of — network effects of ecology.

It definitely affects how I evaluate tech and startups.

Pretty much, almost every permie I have encountered have this intense optimism and fertile generator of fresh ideas, even with COVID-19 going around the world. I don’t think there are many other groups that are like that. It is good to see :-)

Cheers! It sounds like we're on the same wavelength, I see this too as the recognition of a superior nanotechnology that has been optimized over hundreds of millions of years, and a natural (no pun intended) next evolutionary step of our civilization as you say.

Have you seen "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System"? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698

BTW, I joined SharedEarth and messaged some people but haven't heard back from anyone yet. Do you know much about it? It kind of seems like a demo (from a technical POV.) And there's no "contact us" page for it.

I have not seen that youtube video. I have worked with visionary plant teachers and explored consciousness that way, and so the idea of a different kind of cognition outside of a nervous system is not foreign to me.

I got the SharedEarth from this podcast episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/permaculture-for-the-f...

The host interviewed someone who got 100% of his food from forage or grown, for 1 year. He did not own land, and made deals with landowners to start gardens in their front yard. He was the one that mentioned this side. I had just heard about it a couple days ago as I was making my way through listening to the back episodes of that podcast.

Maybe this is another avenue to contribute— contact the operator and see if they need help adding features.

My email is talktohosh at gmail if you want to continue this conversation off of HN.

Composting is one of the most fascinating and useful technologies in existence—it is an environmentally-friendly method for organic waste management, resulting in a product with uses in agriculture, land/water management, and environmental remediation. I don't know why we don't do much more of it.

I agree, compost is amazing!

I'm a small-scale farmer (maybe a large-scale gardener?), and one thing I've found about composting is that you just need a lot of material. Even at my small scale, it's almost an overwhelming amount of work to bring in the necessary inputs, or even just to move it around.

One reason people turn to synthetic fertilizer, I think, is because of how incredibly nutrient-dense it is. A 30 pound bag of 20-20-20 fertilizer has a similar amount of nitrogen as an entire pickup truck bed of horse manure. If you've loaded/unloaded a pickup full of manure several times, you start to see synthetic fertilizers very differently :)

A lovely aspect of hugelkultur is how little labor it requires over time, and how it uses logs as its main input. Logs are easy to find, easy to move, and decompose over many years if used this way.

I have a garden in a front-yard with rock-hard clay. I'm no ideologue and still use synthetic fertilizer, but composting has been fantastic as well.

First of all, after recycling and composting, I have very little trash waste - maybe a 10 gallon trash bag every couple weeks. Even junk mail and most packaging goes in the compost. Every so often driving by Starbucks I'll grab some of their giant "Grounds for Your Garden" bags and add that in too, and so the overall volume of compost is pretty high.

After digging into the rock-clay a foot or two, I add soil+compost+logs and line each bed with logs that hold its shape but also compost into the ground over time. As you say I've put in very little effort after the initial, but the improvement over a few years in the entire yard has been dramatic - it's basically been brought back to life.

The loop from garbage -> compost -> plant food -> my food is great, honestly makes me feel better about garbage. Highly recommended pandemic project.

Wow, you've described my situation almost exactly. Where my garden is now was nothing but hardpan and rocks. It's taken quite a bit of work over four years to "terraform" the area back to life.

I've done a mix of techniques, but at the end of the day I've just found that the more organic material you can bring in, the better. I'm still looking for that silver bullet, though-- Something that can be deployed inexpensively at scale. I'm particularly excited to experiment with fracking daikon this winter (https://www.restorationseeds.com/products/fracking-forage-ra...).

Anyway, it's validating to know that someone else has independently arrived at the same conclusions as me :)

I’m only just starting to get into gardening and we have a lot of garden waste to try to deal with (including a lot left by the previous owners). In the last few places I’ve lived, the previous occupants have always left a big pile of garden waste and it’s just sat there. Turns out you actually need to put in some effort to make compost - it’s really a big organic system that needs nurturing. Also, it does take a long time; months to years, apparently - but I’m not quite there yet so I’m no expert.

There are so many opinions on how to compost that it can be hard to know where to start!

In this gardener's opinion, however, Charles Dowdings' teachings on compost are absolutely fantastic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kf6CGj7xpFE

I can finish compost in as little of 30 days in the right time of year, with the right inputs.

Cold compost process takes a couple years, hot compost takes months.

Hot compost is great for kitchen gardens, cold compost is great for food forests.

Hot Compost is bacteria dominant.

Cold compost is fungal dominant.

It takes nurturing if you want to speed up the process, but this is optional.

If you have long-standing piles of organic matter in a sunny location, make a garden bed there and you'll be blown away by how fertile the soil is.

> a big pile of garden waste

That's called a midden and it's a great way to get rats.

I think there just arent a lot of big businesses built around it. I'm actually planning on starting a compost business next summer. I've been planning out the process for the past 6-8 months and my go to market plan for it.

I think there are quite a few such businesses, but maybe not in your area. I grew up going to such places with my Dad way back to the 80s. There is prior art before you take the plunge :-)

How will you sterilize it?

Bad to remove the bacteria. Good to not spread invasive species like worms and such.

Sorry for the off topic tangent but your juxtaposition makes me wonder, are there species of bacteria that have been considered "invasive" on geographic scales? Like, one inadvertently brought by humans from one place to another, where they are now endemic and have disrupted the local ecosystem.

The classic example is old world / new world diseases. I believe syphilis is largely a new world disease, and athlete's foot was largely an old-world disease, along with of course smallpox, typhus, measles, etc.

https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/qian/resources/...

That's a really good question that I don't have a solid answer to at the moment. The specific type of composting I'm doing is two phase.

First I'm doing an anaerobic phase and then taking the output of that, pH balancing it if necessary, then feeding it to composting worms I've been breeding. Then I take the worm castings from them and bag that up.

The initial source is really the problem. I'm taking local yard waste so it should be fine to redistribute locally, but sending it out further to other areas of the country could pose a problem.

Ideally the anaerobic phase of the composting process should kill any invasive species in the compost, but maybe it won't. I know typically people go for an aerobic composting process and bank on the heat killing any pathogens in the compost.

In USA the ship has sailed on European earthworms a loooong time ago. Combating that is like hitting a river with a stick.

I didn't say "European earthworms", I said "worms and such". It's probably an okay idea to just slow the spread of various earthworms from Asia.

There's lots of things that live in soil. We don't have to help them spread.

Well, we could import that giant leech that eats earthworms. :)

Then we could need cane toads to eat the leeches!

I think I've read this book.. eventually a lady will have to eat an elephant

The easy answer is to only sell locally, in this way you don't need to sterilize and it doesn't cost as much to transport fertility which can be made on site, around the globe!

Y'all might find this project I discovered recently interesting :) https://www.makesoil.org/

At an industrial/commercial scale, there are probably significant challenges ensuring your input stream is all actually compostable. The same sort of problem faced by recycling- which impairs its commercial viability.

That said, my county is planning on building a commercial compost facility as part of a strategy to stop spending money building landfills. 50% of our current non-recycling waste stream is allegedly compostable. I hope it pans out.

The local organic grocery switched from polypropylene to compostable cardboard for the containers for their hot food bar. Sounds good, right?

But why is it that sauces and oils don't soak into this "compostable" cardboard? Let's dig a bit on the net... hmm. The cardboard is coated with perfluoroalkanoates, chemicals similar to the old Scotchguard that won't break down even in a compost pile. Oh dear.

Good point. I wish we could decide as a society to move away from non-compostable packaging. In most cases, composting seems to be a better, cheaper, and less energy intensive solution than recycling.

I have to give Amazon a lot credit towards this effort. They never use glossy cardboard (yay!), and their tape actually breaks down in my compost heap (although the labels don't). I recently got one of their new bubble envelopes, too, which appear to be made out of thick paper and cellulose. Super cool.

At commercial scale, I think what is done on more modern farms is cover cropping after a cash crop is harvested, with a winter that kills the cover crop before seeds develop. Before is dies and becomes a thin compost residue layer, the cover crop is photosynthesising and converting carbon dioxide into carbon and other nutrients which exude through the roots into the soils, keeping the microbiology alive for the spring crop. That live soil is going to be as good as compost, and it doesn't need to be disturbed like compost normally is.

You can even cook with with!

One of the traditional ways to make black garlic is to tie it in a jar and bury it in compost which cooks it low and slow over weeks.

i totally agree. I haven't seen a single apartment complex with a community compost area, even here in supposedly green california.

It should be a standard thing that's everywhere, like parks. and whoever's stopping by can vaulunteer to do the turning, once in a while or there can be a sign up sheet.

Gardeners like myself would kill to get a good compost for our gardens.

In my experience when I build a new garden by hand on land that was freshly cleared, a hugelkultur like row will develop naturally. I normally plant strawberries in it.

When I start working the soil either by tilling and or raking I always end up with lots of roots and dead branches that get moved to the out side edge of the garden into a long pile or edge row of sorts.

Rather than haul it away, I rake a bit of decent soil overtop of all it and plant away.

It's almost as easy as the "Ruth Stout method", I'm not sure I would ever put the work into hauling logs and other materials from one area to another just to bury them. It's a great concept that probably works. I'm just not sure it's worth the "HugeL" amount of work over just bringing in compost in the beginning and top dressing (Which I have to do for weed control anyways) each year.

Does anyone have ideas on what to do in a desert climate? I would love to try a variation on this in Saudi Arabia. I've read much about this but since it's on HN I might as well throw it out there, you often get unexpected expert input here.

Edit: I'm thinking of doing the hugelbed but kinda upside down, under ground.

I think you need a more encompassing approach. Permaculture might be something for you. They have developed specialized techniques for all climate zones.

For example check out the "Greening the desert" project.

https://youtu.be/2xcZS7arcgk

I really dislike the idea of continuously having to water in order to keep plants alive. If that will be the case, I feel it's not worth doing.

I mean that's the case none of these projects have REALLY taken off at scale.

Nice video. This made me think about the potential of overlooked and possibly "cheap" land that could end up highly productive after just a few years.

There are people who have spent thousands of years farming in environments as arid and hot as Saudi Arabia. What's out there isn't as well-marketed as permaculture, but it's also a lot less woo-woo and proven to be sustainable. In my area (California), I've found dryland techniques from Arizona natives to work extremely well. Considering Arizona is around the same climate as Saudi Arabia, but with more rivers, I suspect they'd probably work there too. Nabhan's Enduring Seeds captures the general principles decently, but the technical information is scattered about in various places. You may have even more luck with things like Sorghum (a highly drought-tolerant African crop) in a more local system.

Shoot me an email (check profile), I used to live in Saudi and know plenty of agro as well.

Thanks!

Swales, maybe?

I think swales should be part of the solution, sort of!

Nice! So many gardeners and permaculture enthusiasts on hn. Fun to read the comments. #gardeningnerds

we've done a similar experiment--because our garden is on a hill, we created step-like 'beds' for veggies and fruit to grow. the results have been phenomenal so far. the only problem is, moles like this place too... so we've been battling them. highly recommended.

Definitely do whatever you want with your land but thought I’d throw in my two cents on moles.

I gave up worrying about them after learning about all the good they do (aerating, eating grubs that turn into beetles that do harm my garden, etc). Turns out they don’t bother me at all. I live out in the woods though and don’t have a showy lawn.

Same here, my garden with raised half-finished hugelkultur is teaming with life: moles, voles, and chipmunks.

As soon as that happened the birds of prey started hanging out. Since my cat passed last year, a large 5 foot black snake has filled the void as the top preditor. (No worries it's a constrictor! Not venomous!)

I’ve been considering hugelkultur as one option for the massive amount of poplar we will soon have on our hands. It’s taking over, and a hazard to our structures, so it’s gotta come down. (We’ll replace with more appropriate trees.) My one concern is that the poplar will simply start sprouting again. It root-suckers, aggressively.

One other thing to note is that if you do anything on a slope, it would be wise to at least chat with a structural engineer about it. I’ve heard tale of people building hugel mounds on contour / swales, and basically creating landslide conditions.

Edit: another thing I’m curious is how advantageous the water retention actually is. A lot of species really want a lot of drainage, and won’t survive with wet feet.

About half of my food forest is dedicated to poplar a very fast growing semi hardwood.

We cut a mother tree down and hundreds of Poplar clones sprouted from its roots.

I selected to keep 30 of them and my idea is to pollard them every few years for a constant supply of semi-hardwood stakes for building fences and staking tomatoes, and more. Videos on my YouTube channel, search "Russell Ballestrini Poplar".

A sharp machete can topple a 2 year old poplar sapling/clone into a stump roots with a single swipe.

Don't worry about it.

These poplars are pioneer species, which harvest carbon from the air and store it into wood!

Use these baby trees as trellis for cucumber, peas, and beans.

Then research the pollarding techniques of yesteryear for yearly maintenance.

Great shade givers as well!

Great reply, thanks!

The ones that definitely need to come down are the 1-200’ behemoths that are way too close to the house. I’m a tree lover, so, despite most people telling me to take them down yesterday, it hasn’t been an easy decision.

The shade is amazing. Also, nothing makes quite the shimmering sound that poplar leaves make. I recently read Homer’s The Iliad, and they talk often about their love of poplars.

You’ve given me enough pause to consider trying to keep a small selection. But I don’t know, lol.

To reduce root suckers cut the tree in the fall and apply an herbicide to the cut. The root system will pull the herbicide as it would have the carbon from the leaves. This will kill the root system and suckers.

Sure, but then you’ve got tree-killing herbicide in hour hugel-mound...

Don't do this. The suckers are removed with a couple swings of a machete...

Hügelkultur

Hügel: hill or mound

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/german-english/...

I wonder if there are any cultures that aren't associated with hills?

Or Huegelkultur

The juxtaposition of diesel tractors and permaculture seems a bit weird to me. Wasn't the point of permaculture to make it more sustainable, less resource intensive and less environmentally destructive? If you already have tractors and heavy machinery, intensive agriculture is within reach.

Zepp Holzer is the master of this dichotomy.

The thought is that Humans have already used (abused?) machinery such as bulldozers and chainsaws to drastically reduce the water holding capacity of the landscape, and our task is to use these machines in one big push to drastically improve the water holding capacity of the land permanently and then to not need to use them any longer.

See any of Zepp's large scale projects. He has been successful, and failed a few times, in projects all over the world with some amazing transformations.

The permaculture community emphasizes the concept of “appropriate technology,” which depends on context but generally means “seek simple/low-impact approaches.”

If you’re building large low-input beds that could last for a decade or more, a tractor might be an appropriate tool given your local constraints vs. a crew of horses/humans and a great deal of time/energy.

To your point, I would say that the machinery has a negligible impact compared to the benefits of permaculture, and if makes permaculture more productive without greater risk, then it seems good. That is, we shouldn't have some kind of Luddite purist view of permaculture - it should be practicable. Things like this help to break the stereotype that permaculture is just hippies chanting in a field that conventional agriculture proponents seem to believe and do perpetuate.

Affirmative, use the best tools for your context, especially when those tools were used to destroy the natural system that used to be there. (My land was filled with stone and gravel with 4-6 inches of soil ontop using machines...)

Use any means nessasary to move the current system into one that will self-renew and self replicate.

That's permaculture. Set into motion a permanent self-renewing system!

It's a nice theory, but in practice I see an issue with water.

I have a raised part in my garden (just dirt, no wood below it), and the bushes on there have a hard time growing, simply because that hill is really terrible at collecting water.

Hills are amazing at collecting water. You need to build swales on contour with the land (typically I fill my swales with woodchips and they become walking paths.

The dirt and turf that is removed from building the swale goes on the lower side so you end up having double the topsoil in a bed the same length as the swale to grow food in.

Additionally because you have a hill, you may capture water in a reservoir (home made rain barrels) and then use common rubber hose (can be broken/found freely) to transport water around the property with just gravity.

One thing I don’t understand is wouldn’t burins large amounts of wood increase the nitrogen requirement is the soil? It seems to me that the soil would want to break down the wood as fast as possible.

Hugelkultur is a nice idea until you try to plant something the subsequent year - you can’t dig because there are still too many damn sticks.

What jagger said, also Sepp almost exclusively relies on small machinery to do his work iirc.

Edit: like mini diggers.

I don’t see the problem if you’re just planting small seedlings or doing direct sowing.

It's not a problem if thats all you'll ever do with that piece of real estate. The tradeoff is future flexibility.

I see many countries jumping to idea of such gardens, they can get more in property taxes for the surface than a flat one.

Does anyone know why you don't have to water it? I didn't understand that from the article.

if anyone sees this: wikipedia answers: "Hügelkultur is the practice of burying large volumes of wood to increase soil water retention. The porous structure of wood acts as a sponge when decomposing underground. During the rainy season, masses of buried wood can absorb enough water to sustain crops through the dry season"

This will become useful for my move away from the Bay.

The forums there are lively and civil.

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