Aurore Whitworth

Sounds very interesting! Shame you're on another continent, I would have liked to visit your farm.

The technic I've heard (apart from home made compost) to regenerate soil "quickly" is the ramial wood chips. I'd love to experiment with that but I'd have to ship it here and it's just too expensive... So I'll stick to seaweed!

Isn't there any other plant full of minerals that are local to where you live? (comfrey, dandelion, ...)? A lot of "weeds" can be turned into fertiliser I think.

I'm very lucky to have seaweed on my doorstep pretty much... Not many other advantages to help grow stuff over here!

I can gather seaweed very easily here and was planning to incorporate some into the hugel bed. Don't like mulching with it too much as it's difficult to prevent it from touching the plants or seedlings (and it's very windy up here). I've incorporated a few bags of it to the garden soil in Autumn instead... Hope it makes sense to proceed this way!

Sheep that have access to a beach often graze on seaweed, especially in winter.

Thank you very much Bryant, this is very helpful.

We have tons of the douglas fir, some of it prettily chiselled by massive sea worms, and therefore not fit for construction purposes (apart from bug hotels!).

Hi there,

we've just built a greenhouse and a bed that runs on the length of it is ready to be filled. I was thinking of adding some wood at the bottom, a bit of home made compost and chicken litter (in wood shavings) and fresh comfrey.

We live in Shetland, so needless to say there aren't many trees around... We have some unusual stuff : massive beams of douglas fir that have spent about 20 years at the bottom of the north sea (hubby got them of work and used some of it to build the greenhouse). They've been out of the sea for a couple of years now and lying outside. Do you think they'd be any use for a hugel bed? Other option would be to use driftwood.

Many thanks for any piece of advice you can give!