The Trusty Gardener-I’m Preparing to Set Up a Hügelkultur Garden Bed

I Will Give This German Gardening Method a Try

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Welcome back. Well, Mother Nature has thrown us another curve ball. After teasing us with some nice warm weather earlier in the month, yesterday the high temperature was around 15 with the windchill at 0 degrees. Complete with snow squalls. Yikes. It was basically like a January day. Today wasn’t much better. We even got around an inch of snow. I am getting excited about gardening, however, the last few days it felt like we regressed 2 months. I have been researching an old German gardening method called Hügelkultur, which is a type of raised bed.

Being of German descent and coming from a family of avid gardeners, I am surprised I have never been aware of this gardening method before now. I stumbled across this on the internet and it seems like a perfect fit for me. It basically involves building a mound of rotting wood and other organic debris to create a composting mound of sorts to plant on.

My parents always had a compost pile made mostly from grass clippings, plant material, etc. Since pumpkins and gourds were normally placed on the heap in the Fall, they inevitably came up the next year. It always seemed like the best pumpkins and gourds grew on the compost pile. This was not a coincidence. I…