Hugelkultur Gardening in Raised Beds

Hugelkulture is a German word that translates into “mound culture.” Essentially you pile up leaves, sticks and wood underneath a mound of dirt. These base layers act as a sponge to lock in moisture and make an excellent gardening technique for dryer climates. Here is a post that explains more.

While I don’t love the look or the practicality of having tall mounds of dirt on the ground, the layering method works! So I like to blend Hugelkultur with raised garden beds. It just makes sense to have a layer of logs underneath your soil to lock in moisture. Containing all those layers in a neat raised bed is my preferred way of gardening now.

You will also save money by loading up your garden beds with as much free filler as you can find. Newspapers, cardboard, sticks, brush, shrubs and logs. Many times people have to take down trees on their property and will post free firewood ads. The more you fill the less dirt you have to buy, and raised bed dirt ain’t cheap.

After we put in our first garden bed which was made with wall blocks, I wondered if we could have done things more sustainably. We purchased many bags of raised bed mix which was a lot of plastic to dispose of after. We also bought a lot of expensive cedar wood.

My husband’s boss was removing a deck and offered to give him the planks. We were able to bring home hundreds of dollars of reclaimer lumber. I was excited to build two new raised beds that would be much higher than our first garden beds. After all, we had so much free lumber to build with. Plus my back was tired of bending over.

My husband got to work on building the raised beds. He has building skills and it took only a few hours to assemble two boxes. We opted to line the bottom with hardware cloth to keep out the pesky gophers.

With a skilsaw, a drill and some deck screws you can easily assemble a frame like above to get your box started. We made our boxes three feet wide so that a three foot roll of hardware cloth could easily attach to the bottom.

The decking that my husband salvaged was tongue and grove which made it really easy to stack the boards on top of each other. We went four boards high which made the bed a little under two feet high. I think that this is an ideal height for a raised garden bed. The three foot width is really nice too and they are easy to bend over and work in.

Two beds came together in no time. It is important to have a center support board on each of the long sides of the raised bed. This will ensure that they will not bow out over time. We have had our beds in going on their second year now and they have no signs of bowing.

Now it’s time to fill them up and water them! We had a lot of wood logs just laying around on our property after clearing out some trees that had died from an invasive bark beetle we get out here in Southern California. It’s sad to see a beautiful oak tree brought down by such a small creature. Now these wood logs will be giving new life to our herbs and veggies by acting as water sponges. After you have loaded your beds about half way full, then fully saturate the logs with water.

We have a local nursery nearby that sells an organic soil mix. They have a tractor on site that is able to scoop the dirt up and fill your truck bed in no time at all. We were able to fit one cubic yard (or it may have been two) of soil in our six foot truck bed. This filled up both of our three foot by six foot garden beds almost to the top. It was nice not to have to load plastic bags of soil mix, or have any plastic waste in the end to throw away.

We are on year two of these new raised beds so it was time to add compost. Just one bag was the right amount for this three foot by six foot bed. Be sure to add compost or fertilizer before the start of each new growing season.

This year we decided to try out adding perlite to our raised beds. Perlite helps with aeration and keeps the soil from getting too compacted. It can be expensive, but a little goes a long way. I also plan to add some vermiculite, which helps with moisture retention.

I love my new raised beds! They are so easy to work in since you don’t have to bend over so much.