as a gardener, I'm sure you've heard of the hugelkultur method. It's actually something we've talked about quite a lot because it's the method that we recommend for filling tall raised beds with woody material at the bottom and then with soil at the top to save you money and actually build better soil. But did you know that the hugelkultur method is actually an inground mound system? Right here, I'm actually going to be standing right on top of a hugelkultur mound I built in my garden and planted weed into, and it's probably going to be the most fertile, water-retentive bed I've ever built in my garden. So, let's go over how to actually build a traditional hugelkultur mound in your garden right now. Before building a traditional hugelkultur mound, you will need some supplies because remember, we are literally building a mound up off the ground. We can't just do that with soil that's already there. So, we need some logs, we need some other material, and all of this is usually labeled as

Garden waste that gets hauled off to a landfill thrown away where you never see it again. But here we are going to be turning this into fertile rich soil that feeds our plants and allows us to garden with less water. And the first and most crucial ingredient to any hugle culture build is a nice pile of logs. This is what's going to help us reduce our water use in the garden because as logs break down they literally become spongy. This is an ancient log I've had hiding in my yard for quite some time now. You can see how easy it is for me to break it apart. This is basically a sponge now. If water gets on this it'll soak it up and also soil life loves to live in all the nooks and crannies of a decaying log like this building a very rich soil. This is also physically going to be acting as a big part of the bulk in the mound. The big logs are a really important part of the base of the bed but we also need a lot

of little logs, little sticks, and branches. In my case, I love using hedge trimmings or tree trimmings because they have all these tiny branches and tons of leaves. The way we're going to be using these is as a scaffolding to build up our mound. Just picture piling up a bunch of leafy branches like this and then throwing soil on it. It's going to be much easier to build a mound when you have materials like this. Besides soil, we will also be using a bunch of compost to build this mound. The reason why we're using compost is because it's going to be acting as our initial sort of kickstarting fertility to the bed. It's going to allow the first set of plants to grow as all this other material begins to break down underground to eventually become nutritious soil. Now, one thing that I've always wondered in the past is how long does it really take for all this material to break down. I know the logs are going to take a long

time, but what about all these leafy branches? Well, I'm super curious myself, so I want to dig up this mound after 6 months, and we'll see what's actually remaining underground. But before we do that, we have to go build the mound, so let's get started. For now, I'm moving the mulch, but this is going to become important later. The pit has been fully dug out, and the last thing I'm doing here is just using this fork to sort of break up the bottom and rough up the surface a little bit. This is going to do two things. First, it's going to allow water to infiltrate into the ground much more easily, and second, it's going to allow me to level this in an easy way. Now, leveling is technically optional, but I highly encourage it. Right now, we're right in the bubble level, which I'm happy to see, because when this fills with water, you don't want all the water to sit on one side, leaving the other dry for a couple of reasons. The plants are not going

to grow as well on the side that's higher 'cause it's not getting enough water. And also, all the material that we're about to put in in this next step won't break down as evenly, so it won't provide you all those wonderful benefits of a Hugelkultur bed. So, let's get this wood into this pit, and I'll tell you what kind of wood you might want to avoid, what's the perfect situation, and what you could do if you don't have access to wood like this. When it comes to building these hugel mounds, you really want to make sure that your wood is as old as possible. If it's fresh cut, it's still going to be very wet, which means it won't be able to accept new moisture, and it won't break down as quickly. Now, of course, if you only have access to fresh green wood, you can use that. It will just take a little longer to get the full benefits of the hugel built. The only important thing to worry about here is when you're laying

down the logs. You want to make sure that there's space in between all the wood pieces, and you'll see why in a second here. During this whole process, I'm going to be watering in every single layer, including this first initial just wood layer. I want to make sure that there's water all the way through at the very beginning, so I don't have to fight to get this bed nice and hydrated once I'm ready to actually plant it. Already, you could see that the water isn't just flowing to one side or the other, and it is sitting where I want it, which is perfect. So now we're ready to actually fill in all the space between the logs. The reason why we left space in between the logs is 'cause we want to make sure that they get filled with soil. This is going to ensure a couple different things. First of all, that the plants that you put in here next actually have somewhere to cling onto and grow instead of just hitting a wall of logs as soon as they hit this base. You basically want

the root to come down hit this log and then go around it into the soil. But if it was entirely locked up with logs, it would be harder for the roots to get access to the Earth. So, that is why we have space between the logs. Adding the soil and layers and jetting in with the hose ensures that you're filling in any of the voids and gaps between the logs, which will reduce settling in the future, making for a much more even hugle Mound. Now, another topic is the wood. If you don't have access to Wood like this, you can use firewood if you're desperate to try this sort of hugle build. I got most of this lumber from Lumber cycle, which is a local San Diego firm that salvages trees that are broken and dying and tries to turn them into something more useful. In this case, I was able to turn them into a hugle build. So, let's move on to the next layer of this wonderful Mount. We're now at the point where the

hugle mound is well, almost a mound. It's at least soil level, and it's time to start going vertical. We've already put the big logs down here. These are the ones that are going to last the longest, create the most spongy material to capture water. But now we need to start building structure to retain soil as we keep going up. The way we're going to do that is by using a bunch of smaller branches, logs, things like that. I also even have some of these trimmings from the bush on my driveway that I just trimmed back. So we're going to use this to also bulk up this material. This is essentially a way to deal with waste, any sort of organic waste you have, whether it's semi-broken down compost, random wood debris, or branches that you just cleared out of the way. You could repurpose them, put them in your garden to build better soil over the long term. We are now barely above the soil level, and we have quite a lot of wood inside this bed. Now, of course, a lot of people

might be wondering, but if you bury wood in the ground, it steals the nitrogen, and you can't grow anything. Don't worry, we'll deal with that at the end, but first, we need to put on the next couple of layers. This is where we're going to be adding a little bit more fertility to the act of putting down compost to make it easier to hold all those compost in place. We are going to be putting down these branches from those bushes that I mentioned earlier. This is just going to act as basically a net to hold on to any of the compost we're about to throw on here to give us a little bit more heft to build this mound up. Before we add that compost layer, I want to get rid of all that soil I dug out earlier. The whole purpose of this is to not generate more material but to use it all up, and now we're finally adding some compost. This is all homemade compost that I've made here over the past year. It includes some of my chicken bedding, so this should have quite a few

nutrients in it to kick us off, but we'll probably need a little bit more after this layer. As I was scooping that compost onto the bed, I remembered I had all these leftover containers from summer, and rather than just leaving them here to sit and get rained on, I might as well put them to use inside this bed. So, we're going to go ahead and dump in a bunch of old potting mix as well. Building a hugelkultur style mound is all about making use of whatever sort of stuff you have laying around. So, in this case, it's a whole bunch of wood, different sorts of bushes, cutting leftover potting soil for my containers, all this old compost that I've had sitting around. It's all about repurposing what you have to build the best soil that you could possibly build. Over time, what's going to happen is that all the earth critters, the worms, the beetles, fungi, bacteria, they're going to get inside there, they're going to start eating the wood, breaking down the lignin.

and what's left is going to be a spongy material that is going to hold on to water for a very long time. What that means is that after probably a couple of years, this bed will essentially become self-watering, 'cause that little pit we built is going to hold on to a whole lot of water with all that spongy wood. This little layer of compost on top is going to give our initial plants some sort of nutrients to get this thing kick-started. But if we stopped right now, this whole mound would probably just fall apart. So once I finish this compost layer up, I'm going to go on to the next most crucial step. Once you build your first mound, I have to say this mound is looking quite impressive. Now it is about a foot off of the ground level, and when you hit it with water like this, what you'll notice is that most of the water does drain in, but the water that doesn't runs downhill. And then as it goes downhill, it actually sinks down into the soil. That is the

advantage of the mound. It gives you a lot of area for water to actually run down into it, but there's nothing holding it in place except for the friction of the branches and the soil itself. We need roots in here to lock this down. That is why we're actually going to seed a cover crop. In this case, this is hard white wheat. It's actually just wheat berries I bought to mill to make sourdough bread, but in the end, it is actually just seed that you can grow your own wheat from. So, that's what I'm going to do here. I'm going to seed it very densely. I don't necessarily care if I get wheat back either way. I'll get straw. What I really want is a bunch of roots, and wheat has very deep roots. That'll actually stabilize this entire hill. So, they come next spring or summer when I harvest out the wheat or just mow it down. I could transplant whatever I want in here without any fear of this running away, and also the wheat will help break down

some of this material to make it more fertile for the future. I got to say this thing looks absolutely wonderful now that it's been fully mulched around with fresh wood chips and it's been deeply watered. The wheat should sprout in about 2 weeks and then We're Off to the Races. It has now been 6 months since I seated the weed directly into the Hugo culture M here and the wheat is ready to harvest. It's golden brown, it's dry, so let's get this wheat out of the way and actually take a look inside the he culture Mound itself to see how much decomposition has happened just over the last 6 months. Might be hard to tell on camera but this is the ground and this is the top of the mound and we probably still have 8 in to about a foot of height relative to the ground. This is very dry cuz I stopped watering it once my wheat started drying down so I'm going to sprinkle this with a little bit of water to set it and then

Tomorrow we'll dig right into it. Now for the Moment of Truth, we are going to be digging into this bed and see what remains and what's still breaking down. Just going to start removing the surface and we'll see what we hit first. So far, it's just soil. Here we go, we've hit the first layer of actual material that we've added. So, a couple of sticks. Take a look at that. I mean, that, yeah, that is entirely hollow. It's fully broken down. So, any of that sort of smaller material that we added on the surface seems to have entirely been consumed by whatever soil life is in here. And the sticks are fully hollow, so I know that they've broken down. Now, I see zero leaves. Remember, we put a lot of that leafy material in here, and none of that is left. Now, we are starting to get into some of the bigger branches. These are still quite woody, but you could see what's really interesting is that the roots are growing on the branches themselves, which is exactly what we want.

to see because these guys are loaded up with water as it's been raining through the seasons. That water has been soaking into this wood, which The Roots have found and made use of. One thing that I really like is that as I'm going deeper into this bed, you can see we started with pretty dry material, but everything down here where all the wood is is not only wet but quite damp, damp enough that I could squeeze this into a ball, and the soil fully holds together. And remember, I haven't run any irrigation in here; it's just been simply the rain and a little bit of water that I added last night. So, there's a big log, so no surprises here. The large chunks of wood that we buried are still fully intact. They still feel very woody, they're very dense and heavy, but what I really like to see is all this rich soil here. And I'm actually looking over here, there's a worm that's thriving right on the surface of that wood. There's all these roots that have actually wrapped

itself around the log. Now, what's really impressive to me is that if I look underneath that log, the soil here is so damp that it's actually sticking to my fingers. So, what this means is that I've already created a huge water basin here that'll allow me to grow plants even in the summertime using less water. The logs are really doing a wonderful job of holding on to that soil, stopping it from going elsewhere, stopping it from evaporating, and of course, as we saw here, all that smaller material that we put initially is fully essentially broken up. It is now just a spongy material. It's covered in life. It's covered in roots, and that's exactly what we wanted to see happen. Now, over the course of 20 years, these logs will entirely disappear, maybe even as little as 10 years, but already we're off to a fantastic start, and every year I might try to add at least one more hugelkultur bed to my garden 'cause the results that I'm seeing over here

already have me extremely impressed. So, good luck in the garden. Keep on growing and try building your very own hugelkultur bed.

Hugelkultur: The Best Raised Bed Technique You've Never Heard Of

Hugelkultur: The Best Raised Bed Technique You've Never Heard Of