Hi Hanna,
I'm new here too but I'm way up on the west side of the Central Canadian Rockies! Unless you are on an old lake bottom (which you might be) no ground is completely flat, though it might seem so.
I wonder how closely you have observed the drainage pattern when the rain disappears? I suggest putting in some serious study time and consider whether it's going to work there. In observing where the water goes, it may be possible to aid it in draining faster. Some small trenches in that regard might be of great benefit to gardening in this location. If it just seems to puddle and just seeps down, then-as it dries-search and find the last places that are wet, map them out so that you can tell sequentially when they dry out, then dig in these places, connect them, and try to find a place for it to go.
You could line up logs
side by side, as if it was a floor, and then go perpendicular with another raft of logs on top of it, and then build your hugul bed on the raised platform. The platform is likely to rot out and be part of the bed in short order in your sub tropical location with such water action though.
You could build your bed quite tall, so as to mitigate the possibility of your plant
roots getting wet during these wet times. You could build the hugul on a foundation bed of large drainage rocks. The problem with the drainage rocks is that the bed will not hold the water that you do want without some kind of barrier like lots of
cardboard between the rocks and the bottom of your bed.
Everything is possible if you really want it to happen. It really depends on whether you think the additional labor/effort is going to be worth the result of having your dream hugul in this location.
Might better serve as a prime location to dig a hole and have an aquaponic
polyculture. That said, the idea of digging trenches down to the water may have merit. You could take the soil from the trenches to build larger raised fields as they did in an amazing Pre-Columbian culture around Lake Titicaca in Peru and Bolivia which was re-created in the 1980's in a research
project. I stumbled upon this a few weeks ago. Not sure how to find it but try a search if it interests you. In this style: trenches could hold fish, aquatic plants, the mounds could grow what you like. In this sense you would be thinking of it as a combination of a chinampa, a hugul bed, and a
pond system.
Either way, sounds like an interesting project. Good luck with it!
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