Corralling my Compostables

(Or more honestly, ‘Tidying that Garden $h!t Up’)

In between random downpours and snow flurries, and when the temperature gets up above 5C, I have been engaging in ‘productive procrastination’ in the garden.  Weeding – yup, love that one. Cutting odd stuff with secateurs – yup, love that one too. Rounding up all the branches, sticks and twigs that were either lopped last October and have been hidden under snow for 6 months, or have dropped off my trees due to weight of said snow – yeah, not so much. But with the weather limiting my options for more exciting things like pouring the concrete foundations of my new tool-shed, or ripping the roof off an old outbuilding, tidying that $h!t up is about as good as it has got recently.

Wood, wood & more wood

With a hungry wood burning stove that powers my homes’ central heating, you’d think I’d be revelling in so much free fuel, right? Well the OCD freak in me has of course devised a system for dealing with all this – as thick as a finger gets stripped, cut and bagged for kindling (8 sacks and counting), 1-2 inches thick gets stood up to dry (if it’s straight it’ll become tomato canes, otherwise it’s bigger kindling), and fat branches or trunks get stacked for burning. But the whole twiggy mess of a snail trail this has been leaving behind, Hmmm. Compost heap?

As you can see, my main heap didn’t fair too well over winter (build new heap already added to ‘must do’ list) and with my gut instinct telling me that adding a pile of twigs twice its size probably wouldn’t help it along, I researched alternative uses for my twigs (oh yes, that’s another top productive procrastination tool for indoor days when I should really be cleaning or building my kitchen). And then I found the mother of all valid excuses to dump that wood in a single place and call it meaningful – Hugelkultur.

Literally meaning ‘hill culture’, Hugelkultur is basically creating mounded raised gardening beds starting with a base of decomposing wood. YAY! As I am already growing in raised beds using the ‘lasagne’ method of building my soil, Hugelkultur seems not that much of a stretch. To boot, I also happened to have the perfect spot for my new bed - a long south facing trench behind my big barn that wasn’t doing much other than getting waterlogged every time it rained. Talk about serendipity!

I’m currently about half way through clearing the myriad piles of wood in the garden but so far my new Hugelkultur bed is looking pretty good …OK, maybe not good but it looks intentional at least. Once I’m done with the woody layer, I’m supposed to cover it with layers of composty stuff but as the contents of my existing compost heaps are bound for my current raised beds, I’m thinking it might have to be some concoction of cardboard, ground cover moss, chicken coop cleanings out, and grass clippings (the latter two begged from a friend in the village). Er – sounds just like a new compost heap to me. Oh well, if it gives me some place new to compost while I empty and rebuild my other heap, that’s great.

**There is a science to Hugelkultur BTW. If you want to know more, Permaculture magazine has a great intro HERE