Kip Brown

sun seeker app for ipad is amazing. well worth the 10 or so dollars. find sun angles for any date of year and hour of day for any place on earth. for example, i wanted to know if some trees would block the sun during winter so i could decide where to build my house. i just input the dates, pointed my ipad at the trees, and saw where the sun would be in the sky during those dates (they have a little yellow sun and its path superimposed on the view through the camera). imho, cant get any better than that. also used it for hugelbed placement, and am even using it to decide where to park when im down in south texas to avoid the blazing sun as much as possible.

im going to copy this. thanks.

incredible blog, Eric. I sent a link to my wife and she is super happy with your step by step explanations of your experiments. thats going to help us a bunch.

So, Tyler and Eric - you both mentioned fortifying the soil that will be in the most direct contact with the vegetable roots, with manure or wood chips. Will the addition of these amendments transform my bad soil into something new, or will I now have chunks of good mixed in with chunks of bad? Also, just to be clear, you think I'll be ok just putting that bad soil directly on the lower levels of the hugel bed? What impact would a saturated hugel bed have on my vegetables? Thanks.

I have two 4' x 25' trenches, about 4 feet apart, that will be slowly filled with freshly cut sweetgums and a huge willow oak that fell down a few years ago. To me, an amature, the soil in this particular spot seems to be of very poor quality with almost no topsoil. To quote from a soil report used for septic system leach field evaluation, "Soils on the property were derived from a mix of intermediate rock parent materials (gabbro) and Carolina slate rock (silty soils)...soils contain expansive clay mineral subsoil textures." So, I don't think that water that seeps into my hugel beds from above will filter on through, is this OK? These beds are at the top of a slope, so a drain could be devised, but is it really necessary? Also, I don't think the dirt that came out of the trenches should be used to cover the wood, it looks like something that was slate rock millions of years ago that has now degraded to slate that I can crush easily with my hand, maybe even work into a clay if I added water and squished it enough. Should I bring in dirt, and if so, what kind? I could put the hugel beds in an area with better soil if need be, but I wanted to take advantage of the hugel technique and make an area that is otherwise not useful, useful. Also, trees seem to thrive in this same soil, with some huge shagbark hickories, many cedars, oaks, sweetgum, pecan, dogwood, sycamore, persimmon, maple, etc. I want to grow a large variety of vegetables in these beds.