Garden: Hugelkultur - First Steps in Permaculture

I am a lazy gardener. That, plus the recent onset of rheumatoid disease, has led me to adopt a largely no-dig approach in my vegetable garden; I say largely because I do engage in the occasional frenzied forking-over sessions to try and discourage the mole and more particularly the field voles. You can read my latest vole rant Here.

Whilst reading up on trying to run a no dig system in tandem with lots of happily digging mammals, I came across a reference to Hugelkultur and more importantly, Hugelkultur raised beds, a highly moisture retentive construction of decaying timber topped with soil.

Garden: Five Years On

This week we celebrated the fifth anniversary of our arrival in the Hautes Pyrénées and for a bit of fun I thought I'd take a look at a series of photos of the garden from over the last five years, to see how much the place has grown and developed.  

Week One.  The plot is a south facing slope - looking up from the house.  The topsoil has been entirely stripped off and in some areas it took three years for any vegetation to recolonise.  Importing soil and sowing grass seed was prohibitively expensive.

I was prompted by watching a gardening programme on TV where a couple had turned their three and a half acres into a magnificent and varied series of gardens in just five years. Mature trees and hedges divided the spaces into distinct rooms; courtyards, paved areas and stone walls contrasted with the enormous wildlife pool that doubled up as a summer swimming pond. It just goes to show what can be achieved with determination, skill, hard work and a lot of cash. 

We have three quarters of an acre, and we too started with just a field but five years on we still largely have a field with a now fertile potager.  We weren't afraid of the hard work and certainly had the time and determination, and I like to think that we have some of the skill as well, but with only a few hundred Euro to throw at a project each year, it was always going to be a slow process.  

We put in raspberries and fruit bushes, and five tiny fruit trees in the first year, all we could afford, and harvested our first fruit from the trees in 2014.  

The raspberry trench, cut from blue clay subsoil and filled with a blend of horse manure and clay.  

2011 saw the purchase of three more fruit trees, but the focus was on planting up our new pergola with a mermaid rose, a grape vine, a kiwi and two tender shrubs that promptly succumbed to a week below zero that winter.  A terrible waste!

2012 the big expenditure was on a ginkgo biloba and half a dozen hedging plants. photinias, a couple of buddleia, nothing very extravagant.  I was reluctant to spend much after the losses during the winter.  Luckily, we are surrounded by forest which regenerates given the chance.  This hedge runs along the length of one boundary, and is now six feet tall, amd it is entirely the result of simply not cutting right up to the boundary.  The hedge is made up of blackthorn, beech, field maple, dog roses, ash, cornus mas and a few things I've not yet identified!  It had its first cut in 2014.

From Clay to Clay Soil in Just Three Years!

It has taken three years to get the vegetable beds in my yellow/blue soil-less ground into state that might loosely be termed a suitable growing medium.  I began with just clay.  No, I lie. I began with clay with boulders.  Rocks that ranged in size from fist to Deux Cheveaux.  Slight exaggeration, but you get the idea.  One of the downsides of a new build on a hillside was that all the topsoil was stripped off and lost as part of the basic groundworks.  Not that there was very much to start with.

The first year of growing was somewhat akin to pastry making.  Add a dollop of well rotted manure to the ground and try to rub it in to the clay.  Fail. That first year was thankfully hot and dry so my clay was more like smash-able concrete than the thick gloppy slick it is today, after the wettest first five months of the year for decades.