Garden Report: Katherine's Water Drop Shaped Hugelkultur Bed

Daughter Katherine loves flowers. 

The Water Drop hugelkultur bed is dedicated to Katherine and will be covered in flowers.

The Water Drop is tucked in beside her sister's feather-shaped bed.

They are both partially under the canopy of a Douglas-fir and in the first spring, they were planted with their lower canopy trees. Katherine's is a white flowering pear tree.

Comfrey has been planted around the base to both build up the nutrients in the soil and to hold the soil in place.

Katherine's hugelkultur bed is water drop shaped because she studied fluid mechanics and works at managing the flow of water on the land.

A garden bed full of flowering plants can become a magnet for insects - an insectary.

"Not only will insectary plants improve your garden's health, but the flash  and shimmer of multicoloured buzzers and flutterers will both delight the eye and attract many varieties of birds to eat them, further increasing your yard's biodiversity." Gaia's Garden a Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture by Toby Hemenway, p. 109.

Katherine's favourite flower colours are pinks and whites so I added that to the plant list criteria.

Almost any pollen or nectar producing flower will attract pollinating insects needed to set fruit and seeds. Predator insects are needed to gobble up unwanted bugs. I needed to find a variety of different types of plants to attract many different insects to this bed.

Another design goal was to have something flowering throughout the year.

These chives are pushing the colour scheme into purpley pinks and are something Katherine remembers helping to deadhead when she was very young. They are an early spring bloomer providing nectar when there is little else flowering in the garden.

A fall bloomer is this Autumn Joy Stonecrop Sedum that can be covered in different types of bees when the sunny days are getting shorter.

Behind the Liatris and Echinacea/Cone Flower is a Russian Tea (Camellia sinensis) plant forming the shrub layer in this ecosystem. It fits the criteria having masses of white flowers from September through to January as long as it gets enough hours of sun. This bed is south facing but our winters can have many cloudy rainy days so we will wait to see how much it flowers. 

It thrives in slightly acidic soil conditions which is a good thing with the bed being under the Douglas-fir. 

Bonus features are it is a nitrogen fixer to the benefit of plants around it and one can make tea from its leaves. 

It is the early stages of developing this Water Drop hugelkultur bed...

...while I have this picture in mind of Katherine with her wedding flowers.

Garden Report: Hugelkultur Bed - Bird Haven

This past summer was a bumper year for berries in the garden.

Mahonia bushes produced large bunches of berries. Individual berries weren't as large as other years but this year there were so many mid-sized ones the bushes were heavy with them 

The birds loved them.

The birds also started to enjoy the newly established Bird Haven Hugelkultur bed.

The original site for the Bird Haven bed was a tired grass lawn and a few natives under a Douglas-fir tree.

One of the first tasks Tom tackled with his big machine was to carefully bring the logs from a pile made when the lot was cleared to build the house, out into the backyard.

He picked up the native plants and placed them in a temporary bed outside the construction zone.

Construction of the Bird Haven began with Tom scooping out a trench inside the outline I had marked with yarn. Next, he laid logs in the trench to roughly fill the space.

He covered the first log layer with topsoil he had saved when he had cleared the Backyard site...

...then stacked on top another layer of logs....

...and covered it all with a layer of soil he packed down lightly.

Tom had made a hugelkultur bed (mound culture), a garden building technique long common in forests of central Europe. 

No scrap of wood is ever wasted. Piled up and buried the wood acts as a water reservoir accessible to plants during the dry season.

Here I am planting pieces of comfrey root around the base of the bed. The quick growing comfrey with its deep taproot will hold the base of the mound during the rainy season.

Ron and I began adding a variety of organic materials to the soil mound as a protective mulch - fallen leaves, grass clippings, coffee grounds, composted shredded garden clippings.

I cast a number of different types of seeds planning for them to grow as a green mulch cover. The birds thought I had laid out a smorgasbord and feasted before heading south. Oh well, I rationalised, they wouldn't have eaten every single seed. The remaining seeds will germinate in the spring and do their job.

The birds are enjoying the bed even before it is fully planted.

Backyard Project - Moisture - Mulch - Mulberry

Ron calibrating the moisture meter.

When the rains stopped late June and our dry season began we had to start hand watering all of the new beds. The irrigation system in the backyard had been destroyed by all of the construction and earthworks. The irrigation company we wanted to use was booked up for months ahead but they couldn't start anyway until the next phase of construction was underway. We were a bit tardy on getting that next phase of construction going. I was busy focusing on keeping the new soil beds alive with soil building activity.

After a month or so of me leaping out of bed before 7, every third day, to go and hand water all of the new beds for a couple of hours and coming inside with my PJs wet through Ron got into planning mode and set up a temporary irrigation system. It involved multiple timers, different types of hoses and a range of sprinklers.

In some places, the perfect spot for full coverage by the sprinkler was to set it in the middle of a path. Priorities. It took Ron several weeks of shifting sprinklers, gauging water pressure, testing soil moisture with the water meter and fine tuning the timers before the system could run with less attention.

I have drawn up a moisture level plan for each garden bed with different amounts of soil moisture  related to the number of hours of sunshine and the type of plants to be planted in each bed. The moisture requiremnets are different in each area which added to the complexity of setting up a manual irrigation system.

As some garden beds filled with plant growth the watering needed to be adjusted and all of the newly planted trees continued to need regular watering of a couple of months. We continued to monitor the system over the whole summer.

This year the rains started again with a sprinkle on August 28th and the irrigation system has been turned to manual. I still need small amounts of water now I am into to fall planting.

We are very pleased we got through the summer without any loss of life and now have beds full of deep rich soil. 

Davey Tree Truck full of freshly shredded tree prunings.

Ron made contact with a local Davy Tree company owner who lives near our place. When he has a truck load of good quality shredded trees and prunings he arranges for his truck to swing by our place and dump the load. It is convenient and a cost saving for them and a load of gold for our garden. A win-win situation.

We were finishing off the second mulch pile when the Davy truck came by with a third load this summer.

I must say I am fascinated watching the details of how vehicles work.

This driver displayed impressive driving skills when he backed his large truck in under a tree to dump the load exactly where I wanted it.

Here he is at Control Central with safety vest and ear protectors on. Stabilising legs go down, the cherry-picker hoist is raised, the back door is opened, the tray is raised, the load slides out - all with accompanying different warning signals.

And there it is. I am going to ask Sammy to bring around another load of spent hops from a local brewery to mix into this pile to get it activated and to speed up the breakdown process. 

And... I found a very healthy mulberry tree for the Leaf hugelkultur bed - more details about the tree choice later.

Backyard Project Update - What happened while we were away

While we were away Sammy and his crew continued to work on the Backyard Project.

They mulched the hugelkultur beds with straw to slow down evaporation from the soil as we enter our dry season.

Sammy cut more rounds from logs and extended the gardener's paths around the perimeter of each hugelkultur bed.

They started construction on another garden room - the fruit hedge. 

This room begins on the south side of the path next to the Gravel Bed Garden.

They made a lasagne bed composed of many layers of different materials. It will be left for the soil organisms to do their work breaking down these materials to make a rich soil. Once the soil has cooled down the trees and shrubs can be planted.

In the Cut Flower Bed, the peonies and irises are at their peak.

The alliums are moving into the seed-head stage which I enjoy as much as the flowering stage. I leave them in the garden until the stems are getting dry then cut them. I bundle up the stems and hang them in the garage to dry further.

In spring time the rate of change in the garden speeds up.

Backyard Project - Soil Building

Mulch

Stabilising the bare soil on a slope with jute coffee sacks that will eventually rot down. This stops the impact of raindrops eroding and compacting the soil.

Laura adds wheat chaff to the rock garden beds to build up the organic matter in the soil.

Wheat chaff, spring fern prunings and paper all go in the mix. We are aiming to support a wide range of microorganisms in the soil. Before any planting, it will never be easier to build up the soil.

Laura and Mat level out a path across Gunilla's Garden and cover it with cardboard and waste paper. 

Several times a year heavy hoses are dragged across the ground to fill the fuel tanks so it is sensible to make a path through the bed.

The path is covered with fresh Douglas-fir wood chips.

In season, the path will be inoculated with mushroom spores to make a mushroom bed. It is a perfect spot for it under the shade of a large Douglas-fir tree.

Daughter Elizabeth came for a weekend visit. She inspects her 'feather-shaped' hugelkultur bed.

When asked what themed ecosystem she would like on her 'feather,' she said, "Plants that support birds." Of course. Now I need to go research and plan the ecsosytstem - something I really enjoy doing.

Real-time Update: February 2016

Most of my blog posts are about events that happened some time ago. I focus on telling a chronological story because my blog is a journal.

However, I have decided to make the occasional post in real-time to document what I am up to in the present. So here goes - my first Real-time Update.

In my studio, I am working with buttons, lots of buttons. After sorting washing and placing them, I am sewing them onto a ground with the machine. 

Outside the studio, in the studio beds, the first of those spring bulbs I planted as soon as the garden beds were constructed, have popped out of the ground. They are the hyacinths.

About the same time as planting the bulbs, I planted a green manure mix of seeds and compost over the hugelkultur beds. The seeds the birds didn't take have germinated and the remnants the deer have left after their nightly grazing have turned into a green fuzz now the days are warmer.

We have had 40% more rain this winter than in any other we have experienced since we moved here. The damp conditions are ideal for rotting away the leaves while leaving their skeletons. I am collecting some of them for a work called  'Earth Repair.'

So that is what has been happening inside and outside the studio, today.

Backyard Project: Advantages of Hugelkultur Beds

The three finished Hugelkutur beds

The nearest one is in the shape of a water drop. The one beside it a feather and the far one a leaf. But more about their shapes later.

I have placed a temperature probe in one of the beds to monitor the soil activity. The logs in the centre of the bed will slowly break down and provide food for the plants. The logs will also act like a sponge and soak up a huge amount of water that will be accessible to the larger plant roots.

Tom gently packs the sides to make the beds stable. The slope reduces compaction of the soil, a major problem in garden beds. The slope also acts to greatly increase the surface area available to plant. Another plus is raised beds are so easier on the back when working on them than conventional garden beds.

The beds are orientated in a north-south direction to get the warming sun on the plants all day. The curved shapes with drier top areas and wetter lower areas make for micro-niche growing areas to suit a wide range of plants. 

During the first year while the green manure crop is growing, I will spend time observing the movement of the sun and identifying these niches while planning what to plant where in the second year. I think I have the patience to wait.

Tom laid down the base for the path to the studio then placed a layer of top soil either side for the studio lawn. The place in front of my studio doesn't look like a construction zone anymore.

Backyard Project - Phase 2 About to Begin

Phase 2 of the Backyard project is about to begin so I took a lot of 'before' photos.

What is left from the studio construction are 2 piles of untreated wood sorted by length. The left hand 'short' pile is firewood for this winter. The 'long' pile will have to be cut before it will fit in the fireplaces.

Also, the rough gravel construction pad for vehicles and materials is left. In some areas, the gravel will be scrapped off and used elsewhere but most of it will be incorporated into the design as is.

The service track coming into the backyard area will be reduced in length and width, but will again be used by construction crews.

Ron and I laid out rough lines of where structures will be built, as guides for the earthworks.

I used wool to mark out the shapes of the 3 hugelkultur beds. 

The trees that were cut down to make a clearing for the house and lawn 12 years ago will finally be put to good use.

I have piled up the ornamental river stone in preparation for using it in a more functional way.

I enjoy walking around visualising how it is all going to look in 3 to 5 years.