Hugelkultur Community Gardens

Winter is a great time to work on getting ready for the spring planting season. This February we designed a rewarding project for the Riverstone International School 9th grade Wednesday field experience. The school wanted to create community gardens along the back of the play fields. The soil back there is mainly river rocks and has a lot of weed seeds from not being cultivated for many years so we came up with a new (old) idea! Some recent studies have shown that traditional raised bed gardening has a larger impact on our environment than most of us would expect so we looked back to historical models. We used reproposed and recycled materials from the waste stream to create hugels. Mound agriculture has been practiced around the world for a couple of thousand years, and this specific technique is reported to have been used for the past two hundred years. It is a commin practice in places where soil was glaciated and mostly rocks to raise the growing area on top of the rocks, which is what we accomplished with these beds.

This technique is a great way to incorporate waste material into a beneficial use and use it for years to come. We were able to use the logs included in our ChipDrop deliveries (see my other post Sustainable Mulch to learn more). We made layers of materials over the top of the rocky and weeds ground creating a planting environment which discourages the weeds from growing through and will provide community benefits for years to come. One of the assets of this method is that the large volume of large woody debris can absorb water over the winter and spring and acts like a sponge, watering the garden over the course of the summer and creating a very high water retention capacity- therefore you can grow food with less water inputs.   We were able to incorporate the food waste that was diverted from the landfill at the school using our three Green Cones (see my post on Green Cones at school, they are awesome!) and some donated branches from powerline clearance projects around the neighborhood.

Hugelkultur beds can take a couple of years to settle and allow the wood to age to be a sponge enough to create the greatest benefit, so I am looking forward to seeing how these age and perform in years to come. We hope to build two additional hugels for the community garden using older wood and incorporating a plexiglass window into the design so  you can observe the different materials change over time.