How to never water a hugel even if it's too short

So Paul and Sepp love to talk about how if you build a hugelkultur bed seven feet high, it will never need to be watered. All very well and good. But what if you don't have access to all that wood, but you don't want to water? Well, I never once worried about that, because the answer to it was so obvious to me that I didn't realize that it might be a problem for some people. I just use strategic placement, keyhole paths, tree driplines, circumferential trenches and swales to passively water my one-to-two-foot tall hugels with runoff. I don't know if this is something everyone does, so I want to talk about it and spread the word that you don't have to have a mountain in your yard (and collect enormous tree trunks, etc.) in order to avoid watering with hugel techniques. I'll post photos and examples if anyone is interested.

Yes, examples please! I've found that drawings make the examples clearer than just a picture. Topograghy is diffucult to see in photos.

Joylynn Hardesty wrote:Yes, examples please! I've found that drawings make the examples clearer than just a picture. Topograghy is diffucult to see in photos.

Drawings coming right up!

These drawings are in chronological order. If anyone needs help understanding them, just ask.

All of these hugels were built by digging a hole in the shape I wanted the bed to be, adding layered wood and food scraps, and adding the sod and dirt back on top.
The first one is the first hugel bed I ever built. It was at a house we were short-term renting, and I wanted to try out the technique, even though I knew that we would never see that particular bed in it’s full glory. It was right next to the house on the south side, and the roof had no gutter, so plenty of water went into the trenches around the bed. There was also a bit of a sunscoop on the south side of it, but the north side got sun reflection from the windows on the second floor balcony. This bed was managed by chop n’ drop, and did occasionally get liquids poured on it, such as diluted pee and spoiled milk. But these were more or less by virtue of the bed being right next to to the house, so it was super convenient to dump things on it. This bed’s keyholes were at ground level, not dug out, and they had grass growing in them. My parents wanted me to pull out all the “weeds” in the bed, but I refused, and only chop n’ dropped anything that shaded our crops too heavily. From this bed, we harvested a lot of greens and veggies throughout the summer, including some beets with a brix of 15. For those who don’t know, that is off the charts high.

The second drawing is of a bed at the house we are currently renting. Its keyholes are dug out and connected with the rest of the circumferential trench. It features a keyhole in-ground vermicomposter in the back, it gets runoff from the garden path, and it is directly under the drip line of an apple tree. I designed, built and planted this one in the fall, and stuff is already sprouting in it. In the ring around the back of the vermicomposter I planted comfrey and berry bushes.

The third hugel is connected to a swale that I dug to control erosion. There was a water flow of rain and snowmelt on my friends’ property, and it was washing away soil. I stopped it, took it out on contour, and soaked it into the berm and a rectangular hugel bed, on the right. I haven’t even planted this one yet, but the extra water should keep the soil moist.