Building the Hugelkultur Garden

Piles of Oak branches and wood.

This site is full of useable organic material. The site also had a large Burr Oak to prune.  Lots of material.

Good top-soil.

The long-bed taking shape.

Just keep adding material.

Will and his associate.

Putting the top-soil back on the mound.

Good soil and nice rotten logs.

Leaf mulch pulled from the yard.

Oak branches

The long-bed on the right and the wells on the left are taking shape.

The pruning of the oak provided a nice amount of material for the structure of the wells.

Keep adding material.

Adding in the last of the soil.

Add wood-chips and manure then cover it with compost.

This garden just needs a big infusion of quality organic compost.  We will add about three cubic yards and plant the vegetables in that. 

We will have more to come. 

Pruning the Big Oak

 

 

The next step in the building the Hugelkultur garden was to prune the large Burr Oak (Quercus macrocarpa) that was growing on the site.  Burr Oaks can be huge trees.  The way in which they relate to their space sometimes needs to be managed.  When that time comes an opportunity is presented to the client to utilize the material that is removed from the tree in a Hugelkultur garden.  Here is a link to Hugelkultur:

 Hugelkultur link.

 

This Burr Oak has a beautiful canopy.  Don't be fooled!  It will still produce quite a bit of material and look none the worse for wear.

This nice little Red Oak needs some room to breathe.

The large limb over the garage will be reduced by about 30%.

It needs to be pruned away from the wires.

Lots of wire to worry about!  The tree needs to be pruned to grow in a way that leaves it at least ten feet from primary wires and a reasonable distance from the service line to the home.

Beauty!

We will do a little reduction to clear a little space for the neighbor's Arbor vitae (Thuja occidentalis).  

 

 

Here is the result of the pruning prescription:

Now it's clear of the lines.

Now there's plenty of the room for the Arbor Vitae and the Black Walnut.

The Red Oak will grow nicely into this space!

The material starts to add up.

This material will work very well in a Hugelkultur garden.

A note on "the pruning of Oaks":  

Oak pruning should only be performed by trained arborists at the proper time of year.  Due to the prevalence of disease vectors for Oak Wilt fungus (Ceratocystus fagacearum),  pruning of Oak species in Wisconsin should only be done when the tree is in a dormant state.  That means Oak pruning should only be done between the time the leaves fall off in the fall and when the buds swell to push out in the early spring.  In Madison and Milwaukee there are dates that coincide with times of the year when it is legally okay to prune Oaks and other trees.  Notice that the tree in this post did not have leaves. 

 Site Prep

I have a client that is interested in starting a Hugelkultur garden.  I started with a free site visit and assessment.  When I got there I was pleasantly surprised to find an ideal scenario.  This site was packed with leaves and volunteer plants.  It contained a couple of nice trees that would benefit from the water retention qualities of a Hugelkultur garden. This site gets a lot of sun and will be able to sustain a vegetable garden as well as a nice variety of perennials.  The site has a few nice volunteers as well.  I was happy to notice a nice Yellow-bud Hickory (Carya cordiformis).  A couple of Horse Chestnut (Aesculas hippocastanum) also popped up.  They are the descendents what is now a tall stump on the site that will be used for a structure upon which to grow peas.

Horse Chestnut stump

Lots of woody debris on this site!

The site is loaded with organic material.

We scraped the site clean of all the leaves and other debris that was not mulching something important and collected it in piles on the site.  We were going to be able to start a Hugelkultur garden but wouldn't have nearly enough material for the size of garden that the client desired.  There was a resource that would be able to provide quality material for free.  This site has three large trees residing within it.  The dominant tree is a Burr Oak (Quercus macrocarpa).  It is a wonderful tree!  This Hugelkultur garden will of the most benefit to this tree.  It is well worth the effort to provide quality soil and water retention for this great resource.  The site also contains a nice immature Red Oak (Quercus rubrum) as well as an adolescent Black Walnut (Juglans negra).  There is a nice American Beech in front of the house which provided some very nice leaf mulch for the garden.  We will prune the Burr Oak and use the material for the garden.  We will not use the material from the Black Walnut because of a toxic chemical that is produced by the tree.  In the next post I will outline the pruning process and illustrate the volume of valuable material that is produced by a mature tree.