How To Build A Hugelkultur Garden

Despite having a difficult spelling, a Hugelkultur garden is quite easy to build. Though this farming technique has been around for thousands of years and is quite popular in Germany and Eastern Europe, the term ‘Hugelkultur’ is coined by two German horticulturists Hans Beba and Herman Andra in the late 1970s. Hugelkultur simply means mound culture or hill culture.
Hugelkultur is a farming technique that employs the construction of raised planting beds on the top of decaying plant materials. This farming method is built on the same principle with forest floor decomposition. In fact, Hugelkultur is designed to create the same effect just like the one created by forest floor decomposition on the forest. However, in this case, Hugelkultur effect is felt on the garden space.
Hugelkultur creates fertile raised beds by using compost and soil to cover rotten woods and plant materials. As the rotten woods and plant materials decay, they slowly released nutrients into the soil and help build soil fertility, help increase the moisture retention capacity of the soil, and help improve soil drainage. This is the same way that nutrients are recycled in natural woodland.
Hugelkultur as a farming technique can be used in all areas, but it was designed for areas with difficult soil types. Areas with difficult soil types such as those with compacted soils, low moisture-retaining soils, and soils with poor drainage can benefit a lot from using this farming technique as Hugelkultur has the potential to significantly improve the fertility, the moisture-retaining capacity the drainage of soils.
So, if the soil is your area is compact, is unfertile, has low moisture-retaining capacity, and has poor drainage and you want to deploy the Hugekultur farming technique to cultivate the flowers and plants in your garden, how do you go about building a Hugelkultur garden?
Building a Hugekultur garden is quite simple. Here are some steps needed to build a Hugelkultur garden:
1. When building a Hugelkultur garden, experts recommend that you should an area that is approximately 6 feet by 3 feet.
2. The materials needed to build a Hugelkultur garden include fallen leaves, twigs, branches, branches, nitrogen-rich manure such as kitchen wastes, cow dung, etc, mulching materials such as straw and top soil. Since all of these materials are needed to build a Hugelkultur garden, you should try to get all of them.
3. After gathering the above listed materials, the next step is to start the actual building process of your Hugelkultur garden. While materials with largest biomass should be laid at the bottom, the ones with the smallest biomass should be at the top of the garden. You should first lay the logs at the bottom, followed by the branches, sticks, and twigs in that order.
4. Water these layers.
5. Fill the spaces between these layers with nitrogenous-rich materials.

6. Finally, cover these layers with top soil and mulch.
Congratulations! You have succeeded in building your own Hugelkultur garden.