Hugelkultur Update - Lessons Learned and Proof of Concept

A red potato from the
hugelkultur. 

We haven't had much rain here in Georgia for the past couple weeks, and everything seemed to be dying in my hugelkultur.  I decided to investigate, and after doing a little digging discovered that the center of what I built last year was pretty much hollow.  The dirt and straw I had piled on top didn't make it to the bottom, so any rain water that was down there couldn't make it's way up, and wasn't being stored.

I decided some fixes were in order.  Crazy I know, after all the hard work it has been to stack and haul the wood earth and straw I used to make this thing.  That said, there were several mistakes lessons learned that needed to be corrected:

1) Hugelkultur will not make the dirt fertile (at least not right away).
I should have known this from the start, but just piling Georgia clay on top of a pile of wood wasn't going to lead to a fertile planting area.  For one, the wood soaks up any available nitrogen as part of the decomposition process, so using already infertile clay and somewhat decomposed but mostly carbon rich straw wasn't going to provide a fertile environment for plants.

2) Don't leave massive gaps in the structure.  There will be plenty of air pockets no matter how tightly you stack the logs, so just go ahead and get them right in there.  Any serious gaps should be filled in with nitrogen rich materials.

3) You need a lot of compost!  If you living in an area like me where top-soil is not a given, it can be difficult to find enough organic material to cover the hugelkultur to provide sufficient nutrients to the planting areas.  By creating the mound, you are doubling or more the plantable space, so finding sufficient coverage is a real challenge.

It didn't take nearly as long to reform the hugelkultur as it did to construct.  The logs were much drier than they were when I laid them down, and the sticks I used were already starting to decompose and broke easily.  I re-set the skeleton of the mound, and starting piling on green material.  I will do so for the rest of the summer and maybe plant again next spring or this fall.

While I was messing with this creation, I did come across some potatoes that had done quite well, so there is hope for this experiment.