k's garden: Ta daa!

I've been working on this project for awhile, and it's finally done.

What is it? If you ask D, he'll say I buried Thor, but the real answer is that this is my first attempt at hugelkultur.

I'm pretty stoked about it, so I'm going to explain what I did, but this absolutely should not be taken as any kind of instruction on how to do hugelkultur. I'm fairly certain that I did several things wrong because when it comes to things like this, I only read enough to get the basics, and then I completely wing it from there. If you want to learn more about hugelkultur, and the right way to do it, the place to look is permies.com.

I had stumbled onto some articles about hugelkultur recently and got really excited when I realized I had a tree that needed trimming. One day in April, a tree guy cut several large branches off a linden tree in my front yard. He thought I was crazy when I told him I wanted him to leave all the branches in the yard and just cut the biggest ones into shorter pieces, but he did it anyway. I started with this:

April 11th

On the first day, I cut down all the pieces, and arranged them by size.

Then I hauled them all into my back yard. I know the neighbors thought I was crazy. Next, I starting laying out the largest pieces, trying to figure out how big I could make the structure.

April 12th

I settled on roughly four feet by ten feet. Then I started digging out the sod.

All of the sod went into a wheelbarrow, and I started piling the biggest pieces of wood.

April 19th

I started adding the small branches and also laid some of the sod upside down on the pile.

The next weekend, I finished laying all of the dug-out sod on top of the branches.

May 26th

Then I bought several bags of top soil and poured it into the cracks, in an attempt to fill the spaces in between the branches.

This was a very dirty task.

After that, it sat for a few weeks. I didn't want to finish it off too early, because I wanted to be able to put seeds on it right away. I also didn't want it to get rained on as soon as I finished.

The final touch was several more bags of top soil poured over the top.

May 17th

I had decided I was going to try to grow the squash seeds that Seed Savers Exchange gifted me with, but they won't grow fast enough to cover the mound, so I also scattered lettuce and radish seeds all over it. Then I covered it with straw to hopefully help hold everything in place in the rain.