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Winter.
Yeah. Planting season. Uh...I mean planning season.
Years ago, in a cellar far, far away, one of our friends, zippyt,
This guy-->
planted a seed in my mind about a gardening idea that took root in my head and has grown and grown, under the surface. This winter, the first brown shoots of his idea appeared on the surface and now the progress is really noticeable. Of course I'm talking about hugelkultur. I know you knew that, right?
My yard used to look like this:
Where the wide board is on the left, under the long trunk of that ancient apple tree... that's what the yard USED to look like.
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ok, jeeze. bedtime. that bike's not gonna pedal itself, right?
oof.
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I didn't remember Zippy doing that. Such a cool idea, let's see how it goes!
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Didn't he do something with bales of hay? Plant in them, or something like that?
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'maters.
He put his tomatoes in his hay bales, or straw bales.
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Fine.
Here we go.
Hugelkultur:
Put simply, hugelkultur is a centuries-old, traditional way of building a garden bed from rotten logs and plant debris. These mound shapes are created by marking out an area for a raised bed, clearing the land, and then heaping up woody material (that's ideally already partially rotted) topped with compost and soil.
This space in the yard is mostly under a long horizontal section of an ancient apple tree. I can't mow under it without crawling behind the mower, the deer eat the head-high apples and leaves. These guys. They look right at home, don't they?
I might as well put something pretty in that space instead of the grass that looks like it lost a fight with a prison barber. Wait a minute... look at all that partially rotted woody material right there... Oh! Hugelkultur.
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Fun project!