Casa da Eira dos Nove: Hugelkultur I

Long time has passed and I have not posted anything. This normally happens when I have a lot to do, like the last days.

I build the first Hugelbeet Octobre 2015. Before I started the land looked like the next picture.

Then I added the first logs - lots of logs!
I said before that our blog is mean to be about good and bad experiences, but regarding the Hugelbeet I didn't had any bad experiences, I just learned a lot over the past year.

Here is one mistake: I piled up the logs on top of each other and I didn't spread soil in between the logs. I thought the soil would fill the gaps over time.

As you can see I started adding compost from brambles - we had to cut it back because they were dominating everything. You can eat the blackberries from this wild brambles but the production is very low.

The better way to do this is:
One layer of logs and cover it with soil, add the next layer and repeat the process. The compost I added wasn´t totally decomposed but it offered very good conditions for growing vegetables as soon as the composting process would advance.

After this huge amounts of shredded brambles I covered with soil on top. Then I waited one Winter before planting.

The production of vegetables we collected was decent but not as much I was expecting.

So now I'm using this Hugelbeet material to build a new Hugelbeet, where I make sure that the layers of soil and compost are arranged in the right order.

Here is a reference of how Hugelkultur should be done.