Diana Noonan shares her top hügelkultur tips
To imitate a forest’s natural patterns of nurturing life and absorbing decaying organic matter, hügelkultur gardeners pile together woody material, such as prunings, hedge trimmings, and fallen or felled logs and trunks. These eventually compost and provide nutrients to anything planted into the topsoil that covers the pile. To get the best from your hügelkultur bed, keep these tips in mind.
• Just as decaying material on a forest floor soaks up moisture, a hügelkultur bed does the same – gradually releasing water to the plants that grow from its surface. So, if your piece of land is prone to flooding, a hügelkultur bed can help absorb and manage excess moisture.
• while all hügelkultur beds aim for height, the overall intention is to create as much surface area as possible for planting, which may suggest that hügelkultur beds should be both as tall (to provide vertical planting space) and wide (to provide a flat-topped bed) as possible. Practicalities, however, dictate otherwise. if the mound is too high and too wide, the gardener (who cannot climb the hügelkultur without damaging it) is unable to reach into the centre of the horizontal planting area, or to reach its upper levels. For that reason, a hügelkultur bed’s dimensions should be designed to suit you!
• creating a large hügelkultur may seem like a lot of work, but the resulting ‘garden’ will last for three to six years before it requires any serious injection of nutrients. A top-up of just a centimetre of compost each growing season is sufficient to nurture ongoing plantings.
• One major advantage of large hügelkultur beds is their ability to absorb and decompose the sort of garden material that could cause a problem in a regular compost pile, such as turf and weed seeds.
If you’re a gardener in a hurry, a hügelkultur bed may not be advisable as even small-scale beds require a period of months to settle. small-scale gardeners will do best if they can persuade neighbours to donate unwanted material to help the pile grow. Larger-scale gardeners will almost always have material on hand and can also take advantage of machines to help them lift heavy trunks and branches into place, as well as to top the pile with soil or compost.
If you’re excited about making a hügelkultur bed but don’t feel you have the required energy level, just remember that building one doesn’t need to take place in one hit – it can happen over a period of weeks or months. Better still, why not develop a hügelkultur bed in a community garden, where many hands can help to make light work!