Hugelkultur

Every autumn a heap of logs and prunings appears at the bottom of the garden, too wet to burn and too lumpy for the compost heap. Sooner or later you wonder whether it could grow vegetables instead. Hugelkultur says it can: bury the wood under turf, leaves, compost and soil, and plant on top.

This book shows you how to do it well, and it is straight with you about what to expect. There are, as yet, no peer-reviewed studies of hugelkultur, only a handful of small student trials. One found mounds holding a little more water in their top 30cm than flat ground over a single humid summer, which is encouraging. Beds that never need watering, soil warmed by several degrees and carbon locked away for decades are claims nobody has measured, and the book says so. What remains is a deep, loose, well-drained bed that turns unwanted wood into growing space, sinks steadily as the core rots, and asks for most of its work at the start.

What you’ll find inside

• Where the method came from, from Hermann Andrä’s 1962 German booklet to Sepp Holzer’s mountain farm
• How wood actually rots, and why buried wood can borrow nitrogen from your crops
• Which woods make a good core, and which to leave out, including black walnut, treated timber and diseased wood
• How to gather wood, leaves, turf and compost, and how to spot manure or straw carrying persistent weedkiller
• Step-by-step building of full mounds, sunken trench beds, boxed raised beds and low versions for small gardens
• Settling, topping up and deciding when to rebuild after five or six years
• What to plant in the first and later years, crop by crop, and where on the mound to put it
• Watering, feeding and mulching a bed whose crest dries faster than you might hope
• Slugs, rats, voles and fungi, including whether a buried log core really does shelter slugs
• Fair comparisons with no-dig, lasagne beds and ordinary raised beds, a month-by-month year plan and a troubleshooting table

Who it’s for

Beginners can follow it from the first log to the first harvest, and experienced growers will find the evidence set out claim by claim, with disagreements between authorities given both ways round. It suits you best if you have a supply of healthy, untreated wood, room for a bed bigger than the usual, and the patience to let it settle. If you would have to buy most of the materials, it will tell you that too, and point you towards the cousins that might serve you better.

Wherever you garden, it helps you build a bed you understand, and then watch it slowly turn into something rather good.