The Garden Project Continued

A while back I did a short post about a small garden project I was starting, rebuilding a couple raised beds with cinder blocks and raising them higher. Today’s post is an update on the continuation of that project, which as so often happens with projects, became more time consuming than I first expected.

(Please note some of the links in this blog post are affiliate links. What this means is that should you click through them and make a qualifying purchase I will receive a commission which I’d certainly appreciate since it helps support this blog project. However, this shouldn’t increase your cost any, and certainly don’t ever feel like I’m pressuring you to buy things through the links I offer or anywhere else. I’m all about being frugal first!)

So I finished tearing out the old boards from the raised beds and hauling by hand roughly 2 more pallets of cinder blocks across the yard to build up the sides. This is in addition to the first 2 pallets. Things sat that way for a while as I was busy with other work. I also needed to get a load of topsoil brought in to fill the newly elevated beds. After a couple failed efforts from some places I did finally get an excavating/landscaping company to deliver me a 10 yard truck load of topsoil. The driver wasn’t willing to tackle getting it to my ideal location, which in all fairness would have been a very challenging job backing the large truck through a rather tight, turning obstacle course. He dumped it in my runner up position instead. The cost was $20 a yard which sounds kinda expensive to me, but then when I see how much is there with 10 yards and realize I only paid $200 for it the price seems cheap. I know I wouldn’t sell my topsoil for that little!

I could go rent a skid steer or something to move the soil quickly and easily via fossil fueled means, but I’d rather do it by hand for two main reasons. The first being that I really do need the exercise. Shoveling, hauling, and dumping all that soil is going to be a major workout for me, exercising various muscles I don’t normally use. The second reason to do it by hand is that I save a ton of money this way by not renting that skid steer. As I think about it a third reason is that I have much better access to the space via wheelbarrow. If I had tried to use a skid steer, or other such device they would have seriously torn up the landscape all around the raised beds creating major impact scars needing to be healed.

I didn’t just fill the new beds with topsoil though. What I wanted to do with these was create a bit of a hugelkultur bed. You might be wondering just what hugelkultur is as that’s not a common term, though hopefully it will become common. The short answer is that it’s soil on wood. As the wood rots down it feeds the soil, supports microbial life, and helps retain water.

As part of the recent Kickstarter campaign I was telling you about I got some gift codes for a micro documentary about hugelkultur. I’m thinking I’m going to use this blog post as an opportunity to give away a couple of them to interested people. If you’d like to be in the running to get a gift code for free access to this as a streaming video just leave a comment at the end of this blog post telling me you’d be interested. If only two of you are interested then you’ll both get it. If more are then I’ll roll some dice or flip coins to select the winners. I’ll select the winners about a week after this blog entry is first posted. If you’d rather skip all that and just get the micro documentary yourself you can get it here. I believe the current price is $3.

So anyway, what I’m making is really hugelkultur lite. Serious hugelkultur beds are 6 feet or more high! I’m just adding in a layer of logs. Later with what’s left of the topsoil I’ll probably try making a major hugelkultur berm somewhere on the homestead to see how it can really function when done full scale.

For the wood I went back into the strip of dying pine trees along one edge of my property and cut up some of the dead fallen trees. While I could now be using that pine as fuel for my rocket mass heater I’d still rather use the dead ash trees I have for firewood since they will have a higher heat value. The raised garden beds seem like a better use for the softer woods lying around like pine and popular. This is an excellent use for logs that are already rotting too! As an added bonus this reducing my wild fire danger by putting that built up potential fuel to a better use.

Let me offer up a little side note tool tip. If you’ve got a fairly small amount of property to maintain where it would be handy to have a chainsaw, but it’s not likely to get used all that much I can recommend getting a battery powered one such as the Oregon cordless chainsaw I have. I especially like the easy chain sharpening feature they’ve designed into it that literally takes just seconds to do! I bought an extra 4 amp hour battery to go with mine so I could swap out, charging one while using the other.

That said when I’m really cutting the dead trees for firewood I pull the logs in closer to the house where I can use a corded electric chainsaw. I had a Makita corded chainsaw which was working great, but then something went wrong where the chain seems to keep binding up even when I’m not cutting anything. I took it in to the local authorized repair place, paid way too much money to have a part replaced… and still have the problem. So I decided to break down and buy another, this time the Oregon corded version which cost about the same as what I paid to “repair” my Makita. Plus the Oregon one has that nifty chain sharpening system! Anyway, having an electric chainsaw that can plug in does give me more cutting power for when I’m really bucking up the logs into firewood. If you are doing a serious amount of chainsaw work out in the deep woods I’m sure a traditional gas powered one would be the best tool. However, for things here around the homestead electric versions are so much nicer to use. I like to call mine a solar powered chainsaw, since that really is how I power it!

So again, my first task in filling the raised beds was loading in a bunch of logs. You can use small wood, but I understand larger logs are actually better as they will break down more slowly over time. I also tried to leave a few inches of space at the top for soil so when I’m planting I won’t keep sticking a garden trowel into a log.

Another valid question might be whether such a minor type hugelkultur bed would be worth the effort? Is there a significant benefit to all the work? I’ve made other ones on my property, creating them as just raw mounds, and so far they’ve been functioning very well. They too are limited in size and volume of buried wood.

The best example I have to offer of that right now are a couple photos of some black locust trees. I planted them at the same time. They are fairly near each other, getting roughly the same amount of sun. The ones growing on normal ground have grown their trunks to about half an inch in diameter. I still stand taller than these trees. On the other hand, the ones on the hugelkultur bed have grown over my head and have trunks 1.5″ or more in diameter.

So in my experience thus far, even these small hugelkultur beds can provide a big boost to plant growth, hence why I want to try them for the raised garden beds.

Since I was hauling the soil over by wheelbarrow I decided to try and rig up a system that would let me roll it up onto the raised bed and dump the whole load at once. The alternative was to get the wheelbarrow alongside and shovel topsoil out one scoop at a time. To do this I built a temporary wood ramp that with a mighty heave I could push the wheelbarrow up over.

The question was, did I want to keep repositioning the ramp as I filled down the length of the bed? My answer was no! Yet I didn’t want to be compacting the soil either. So what I did was keep laying down more boards of scrap wood I could roll the wheelbarrow over. This let it not only roll much easier, but it dispersed the weight helping to minimize compaction.

This load of topsoil is a bit heavier on the clay than I would like so I’ll be needing to work in more organic matter over time, or rather I’ll try and provide plenty of organic matter and let happy, industrious worms and bugs work it in for me. To start though I have awesome neighbors who came over and let me know I was welcome to take all the composted bark mulch I wanted from large piles of it they have as a result of cutting and selling firewood for many years. So I did take advantage of that and added several wheelbarrow loads on top of everything. Then using my garden claw mixed it in some.

One reason I wanted to try raised beds like this was because it seemed like I should be able to easily insert and remove the climbing vine trellises by just sticking them in the cinder block holes. This seemed to work very well. I am concerned about just what will happen once they have a thick mat of greenery on them and get subjected to wind. I can envision them pulling the blocks down as they blow over, so I tried adding a bracing arm that stretches across to the other side. Time will tell if this will work or not.

I figure another advantage to this style raised bed is that I can put boards over the top to easily shade out and kill off weeds if need be, allowing their roots to decompose right down in the soil adding more organic matter.

The block sides also provide a place I can sit while working in the beds, or I can stand on them for when I’ll need to reach the beans up at the top of the trellises later in the season. I should note that I didn’t cement the blocks together at all. They are just dry stacked. Over time I expect they will shift a bit, however, since they aren’t cemented together I can always pull them down and just restack from scratch if I need to. I could even reconfigure the beds if I wanted.

I don’t know if it will work or not, but one more thing I’m hoping for is that the extra height of these beds, with the straight block walls will discourage bunnies from hopping up and hanging out in the beds as they do with my other slightly raised beds. So far so good. I’ve had nice tender lettuces growing unmolested in the first bed for over a week now.

I expect as the season progresses I’ll give an occasional update as to how things are doing. One should keep in mind though that hugelkultur mounds tend to do the worst on their first year when things are just getting started. They get better over time as the wood breaks down, holds more water, and the fungal networks develop.

Studio Snippet

With all the traveling I’ve been doing lately for the Santa Fe Symposium and the Society of North American Goldsmiths annual conference I haven’t been doing anything in my studio. Since returning home I’ve been focused on getting my garden in.

However, it does seem like I should share just why I was at the Santa Fe Symposium. So I’ll make that today’s studio snippet. In short, this symposium is where the winners of the Saul Bell Design Awards are announced. I was there to be awarded 1st place in the hollowware category for the 2019 Saul Bell Awards. 🙂

It was an honor to just be a finalist for these very competitive awards that draw in the best of the best from around the world. So it was even more of a thrill to actually win with my entry, Luminous Relic #1628.

You might also like this video they produced of this years winners.

I’m happy to have a site where I can again allow comments. (I had to shut them off on my main website because the spam was simply uncontrollable!) So please I encourage you to share thoughts of your own. My general rule about comments though is just to play nice. Differing views are fine, but I’m not interested in engaging in or moderating verbal fights. If I feel things get out of hand, by whatever criteria I decide, I’ll just start blocking or deleting things.