KW Homestead

Pasture Raised Poultry & Edible Landscaping Plants Since 2013

Tag: hugelkulture

Hugelkulture: Which Wood is Best?

What kind of wood should I use for my hugelkulture or wood-core bed? Whichever you have access to. With a few exceptions of course.

This question seems to come up all the time after someone discovers the benefits of rotting wood in a hugelkulture bed and permaculture garden. Is pine okay? Oak? Softwood vs. Hardwood, alleopathic woods, fresh or dead? The list goes on, and I’ll try and answer some of the most common ones today.

Maple Hugelkulture

Maple filled hugel bed by of Paul Wheaton at permies.com

First, a general rule.

Use whatever wood you have easy access to.

Now, an exception to that rule.

Don’t use alleopathic or rot resistant woods like cedar, black walnut, and black locust.

Okay, that makes it easy. Pine is okay for hugel beds, so is oak, maple, sweetgum, apple and most any other species of tree around.

That includes softwood species as well. These trees, like pine, will typically rot faster than hardwood trees in a hugelkulture mound. This can be good or bad depending on your garden design, and your wants and needs. Sepp Holzer, the father of Hugelkulture, uses primarily softwoods on Krameterhof in the Alps because those are the trees most readily available.

For example, a hugelkulture bed that is used to support and establish a perennial system of trees, shrubs, and bushes, can be made of quicker rotting wood. This is because once the wood is completely decomposed into rich hummus, the deep roots of the plants are so well established that the benefits of the hugel mound are less needed and appreciated by the system at large.

But what about acidity? Isn’t pine acidic?

Yes and no. Pine trees, especially in the Eastern United States, are often found in old fields and clearings as a pioneer species. Their needles are full of ascorbic acid (vitamin c) and can acidify soils. This is useful in some circumstances, around acid lovers like blueberries and azaleas, but can be detrimental in other areas if allowed to swing the pH too far to the acid side.

So, you should avoid pine trees in your hugelkulture raised bed, right? No, while pine needles are acidifying, the wood is not, and neither are the brown needles. Pine is fine, just don’t fill your bed with bales of green needles.

black walnut hugelkulture

Black walnut and hugelkulture do not mix
Photo courtesy of Jim Linwood

Okay, what about these alleopathic trees that should be avoided in the garden? These are plants that for one reason or another (usually to provide an ecological advantage) inhibit the growth of nearby plants with chemical warfare. The most famous of these is black walnut, which secretes juglone, a chemical only a select number of species can tolerate. Pecans also secrete juglone, though not as much as black walnut.

Some other plants to avoid are the cedars, and black locust which is highly rot resistant and composed of high levels of fungicidal components, not the best combo for a hugelkulture or woody bed. These woods are also generally higher value woods and have many other uses, such as firewood (black locust firewood may be the best firewood available), cooking and smoking, furniture making, wood carving, and fence posts.

So, what is best material for a hugelkulture bed? Whatever you have lying around–it will all rot–some just at a different pace than others. The most important thing is to not over analyze it and start digging, because regardless of the wood chosen, it takes time to start to decompose and harvest nitrogen before you can see the effects of the wood core in your garden or permaculture system.

What woods have you used in your hugel beds? Let us know in the comments if some worked better than others in certain applications.

our garden: just the beginning

since we moved to our new, 16 acre land in march of 2013, we’ve added the first portion of our backyard garden. it took time and effort, but all of the work has been rewarding and all the fruits of our labor (vegetables, really) have been delicious!

the picture below shows what our yard looked like before we started digging…

backyard before garden

a picture of the backyard of our home a few months before we purchased it in march of 2013

and here is the first step we undertook in building the beds:

hugelkultur experiment

digging the first, and most downhill bed

since we wanted raised beds, first we dug down about 8 inches and scooped the soil out. as you can see from both pictures, we decided to line a portion of this bed with small, felled trees and dead brush. this was jason’s hugelkulture project and he wanted to experiment with how much the slow rotting and decomposition of the wood would benefit the roots of the plants growing above. the portion of the bed that is unfilled was later filled with leaf mold from the woods. this was my project: i wanted to see how the decomposing leaf mold would benefit the plants in much the same way as the decomposing wood. after filling the ditch with these materials, we layered all of the dirt on top and dug out an adjacent path (also about 8 inches deep) and placed that dirt on top too.

making a hugelkultur raised bed

the base of the bed–half filled with small trees

the reason for the half-and-half bed liner was simple: i wanted to do it one way and jason wanted to do it another way. so, we compromised and split the bed in two. this way, he could have it his way, and i could have it my way!

later in the season we planted tomatoes, peppers, basil, amaranth, chia, squash, potatoes, corn, sweet potatoes, and various other crops. considering that we started everything much later than desired, the garden made quite a bit for us this year (much more on this later).

you can see our small dwarf apple tree in the foreground of the the picture below, and the tomato cages; we use woven wire bound in cylinders and pinned to the ground with bent electrical piping (my father’s tried and true method).

the first season's planting in our garden

the first season’s planting in our garden

our sweet potato vines really took over and yielded around 120 pounds of “wild man candy bars,” as my father calls them. you can see the lush vines in the second nearest bed.

raised beds with sweet potatoes, chia, peppers and tomatoes

the first season’s planting in our garden. you can see our barn in the background.

all in all, it was a great year for our first garden together. we learned something about compromise and also what you do when groundhogs threaten to eat all of your sweet potato vines…

i also documented each of the planting and harvest dates for our crops and whether or not each crop was deemed a success or a dud.

i will be posting the calendar that we followed this year and the outcome of our different plantings soon. this way, perhaps we can start a dialogue about planting and harvesting in our region!

.:.

© 2024 KW Homestead

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑