permaculture

[Michael Pilarski <friendsofthetrees@yahoo.com>]

Hi Jay Woods,,

You hugelkultur surrounding an acre sounds monumental considering you are 
doing a lot of it with hand work.  You mention using urbanite for retaining 
walls.  I'd just to point out for you and other readers is that the concrete 
makes the soil nearby alkaline.  Thus plants that like an acid soil are 
likely to do poorly, I got tipped off to that when someone asked why their 
rhododendron was doing poorly after being surrounded with urbanite.  It 
wouldn't be good for blueberries for instance.  Of course it would be great 
for plants that prefer an alkaline soil.

Michael Pilarski

--- On Fri, 9/9/11, Jay Woods <woodsjay@cox.net> wrote:

From: Jay Woods <woodsjay@cox.net>
Subject: Re: [permaculture] Some other big Hugelkulturs.
To: "permaculture" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
Date: Friday, September 9, 2011, 6:19 AM

On Friday, September 09, 2011 02:21:45 AM Michael Pilarski wrote:
> The biggest hugelkulture I have ever seen was near the Bullock's property
> on Orcas island.  The owners had cleared an acre or so of land and had big
> piles of logs.  I don't know the whole sequence of activities as I was not
> there,  but the finished product was that the big slash piles of logs were
> piled up and buried with soil on top.  The area was large and the mound
> was perhaps 20 feet thick. 
> 
> The 2nd biggest hugelkulture I have seen was at Wise Earth community
> outside of Seattle Washington.  Albert Postema, the land owner, runs a
> heavy equipment business specializing in green septic systems. Albert had
> stockpiled a lot of big logs and stumps over the years and made a
> hugelkullture hundreds of feet long and about 15 feet high.  it
> incorporated many dump truck loads of manure and was topped up with soil. 
> We planted an orchard, etc on the top and sides of the hugelkulture. 
> After two years there were still blowholes of steam coming out of the
> top. 
> 
> Sepp Holzer makes big hugelkultures also.  Basically, the bigger the
> equipment, the bigger you can build huglekultures.  You can make some nice
> ones by hand.  In my opinion most hugelkultures should be built by hand
> without heavy equipment.  I just built one last month and it is already
> bearing eggplants. The concept works at many scales.

The one I'm building is a berm around an acre. Since I'm forcibly retired, 
the 
hand labor (including doctor bills for aggravating a bad back) is free.  
Heavy 
equipment is not readily available but brush and weed trees are. The beds 
don't sag down as much as I expected during the summer. They are about the 
same height as they were when covered with soil in May. The beds are six feet 
wide. Since the city complained about using logs for retaining walls, I am 
using urbanite. They surprised me by not collapsing at all. I've used up 5 
dump truck loads so far and expect to use another 25 truck loads before the 6 
foot height is reached. 

Concerning urbanite (concrete sidewalk and driveway chunks mostly). I am 
happy 
to report that a lot of other useful waste will be delivered. This city is 
over a hundred years old and expensive materials were used for sidewalks, 
curbs, and streets. I have put to use a lot of quartzite slabs (at 600 lbs 
each - those were difficult for two people to move by hand - I need to break 
down and get some heavy cables and pulleys), granite curbs, and street 
pavers. 
My driveway strips are looking great from the slabs and so are the two new 
benches under the trees.
> 
> Michael Pilarski
> 
> --- On Thu, 9/8/11, Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com> wrote:
> 
> From: Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>
> Subject: Re: [permaculture] Biggest hugelkultur?
> To: "permaculture" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
> Date: Thursday, September 8, 2011, 10:30 AM
> 
> I'm hoping our hugel's design will deal with most of the issues people have
> brought up. We started with a 5-6 foot deep trench, so at least 2/3 of the
> hugel is underground. That should help keep it moist. And I expect the
> walls of the trench to collapse, so soil will mix in with the wood.
> 
> We lined the trench with 2 feet of hay, so that bottom layer should hold a
> lot of water. And if that part tursn to a gley -like liner, it will just
> hold more water.
> 
> When we added the wood, we had in mind a concrete-aggregate approach, where
> there is a range of sizes so that the pieces form a pretty solid matrix.
> So we put a lot of small stuff between the big logs, and added a lot of
> green aspen and young pines to get nitrogen down in the wood. Lee then cut
> up a lot of the longer logs so that the pile collapsed. And to compress it
> further, I bashed it with the backhoe, which was great fun. I agree that
> mixing soil into the hay would have been a good idea, but that was about
> 2100 lbs of hay on top, so hand-mixing would have been pretty tedious
> (with that nest of angry yellow jackets ten feet away, we didn't like
> hanging around on the pile that much) and we ripped the bales apart pretty
> well with the backhoe and forks, so I think the soil will filter into it. 
> 
> Toby
> http://patternliteracy.com
> 
> On Sep 7, 2011, at 10:55 AM, paul wheaton wrote:
> > A coupla bits:
> > 
> > 1)  I would very much like to see pics in about two years.  Especially
> > around mid august where the surrounding vegetation is brown and
> > dormant and the stuff on the hugelkultur is green and lush.  And if
> > the vegetation could be stuff that is easily recognizable as typical
> > garden plants (tomatoes, melons, etc.) that would be even better.
> > 
> > 2)  I think I would have mixed the hay in a bit.  Mix it in with the
> > wood and mix it in with the soil.  To keep it from turning to
> > glie/gley and making a water/air barrier.
> > 
> > On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 10:19 AM, Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com> 
wrote:
> >> We've been spending the summer at White Deer Ranch in Montana, north of
> >> Yellowstone while I've been writing. Yesterday the owners, Lee and
> >> Roxanne Dunn, asked me if I wanted to help them put in a hugelkultur
> >> project. Sure. I just didn't realize that Lee never does things on a
> >> small scale. He dug a trench 40 feet long with a backhoe, we dragged
> >> some huge logs and a mountain of brush from around the 450 acre ranch,
> >> added roughly 3500 pounds of old hay, watered it in with water from the
> >> ranch's 12-acre pond, and tomorrow we will cover it with soil.
> >> Definitely the biggest hugelkultur I've seen.
> >> 
> >> Roxanne posted photos of the project on Facebook.
> >> http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.245701522132088.52346.100000767
> >> 271564&type=1&cmntid=245736072128633
> >> 
_______________________________________________
permaculture mailing list
permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
Subscribe, unsubscribe, change your user configuration or find out more about 
this list here:
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/permaculture
Garden Hand Tool Sourcelist and Biointensive Gardening Guide
http://www.ibiblio.org/ecolandtech/documents/gardening-hand-tools.faq
permaculture forums http://www.permies.com/permaculture-forums
Texas Plant and Soil Lab
http://www.texasplantandsoillab.com/