Hugelkulture vegetable garden beds

When we cleared the forest around our house site we levelled off about 5 feet of hill top and created a large area for the house and yard/compound. Although we still haven’t quite finished the house- that’s going to be an ongoing project for the next few years – we’ve started planning how we want to landscape the compound. I would like to apply the permaculture principle of zoning to designing some of our planting. Zone 1 is the closest to the house and includes areas that you visit everyday and harvest from regularly for your kitchen. Unfortunately when we levelled the hill we were not able to save the top soil so now the area around our house has a lot of exposed infertile soil, not great for growing vegetables. As a measure of how poor the soil is, its been over a year since we cleared this area and still very few plants or weeds have rooted themselves. This in a climate were vines and other weeds take over cleared ground in just a few weeks.

I’ve doing some reading online about permaculture and came across the concept of hugelkulture as a means of improving the soil and retaining water in the soil.  Basically you dig a trench on contour so that is is level and not sloping. You then fill the trench with a mixture of old logs, branches, compost, leaf litter, and cardboard covered by a final layer of dirt. There’s some great examples of this technique on youtube. We’ve (as in we hired a group of young strong men) dug and prepared three hugelkulture beds and are planning for another 2.  This will eventually transform an otherwise unusable and ugly slope to hopefully a very abundant garden.

In the mean time Sainimili, Esther and I have been starting lots of seedlings including tomatoes, three types of eggplants, cucumbers, lettuce, bok choy, peppers and pumpkin.  And we’ve directly planted long bean, french bean and blue pea into the first bed. Of course I never plant just a few seedlings so I’ve got enough of everything to plant a market garden as well which we’ve located where we used to house our chickens before the new coop was built.  The soil has been nicely fertilised by the chickens so the crops in that location are growing very well.

Update:  This blog has been in draft for almost a month waiting for time to upload pictures.  The hugelkulture garden is doing really well. We’ve had our first harvest of bak choy cabbage and the first tomato plants have blossomed and set the first tomatoes.  The market garden is also doing well.  We’ve sold about $40 worth of bak choy at $2 per bundle of 5 cabbages and planted over 400 tomato plants and 150 eggplant plants. The bad news is that most of the veggies are going to ripen while I’m in Canada in September – October.  I’ve reminded Arthur that he needs to keep the garden going so that there will be produce when I get back.