Show me your hügel, please!

I'm nosey!

What climate are you in, and what's special about your hügel?

Bitte und danke! 😊😁

Here's my strawberry hugel pyramid in zone 5b. It has been working admirably for 2 years and the middle layer is now colonized.
https://permies.com/t/145053/Strawberry-Pyramid-Hugelkultur

My other one is a pictured below. It's more of a raised bed style chock full of hackberry tree, chicken manure, wood chips, leaves, and grass clippings. Built from treated timber and lined with sheet metal. Topped with soil mix so my annual veg would grow. I had to top with soil because the former top layer of leaves/grass/chips/manure was not broken down enough to plant in yet. Guess I was too OCD to make the standard pile hugle!

Just did a bunch of large (maybe 25 gallon) fabric containers half-filled with rotten wood from the woods.  Failed to take any photos, but I have a few more to fill -so next time!  Have often used hugel in raised bed as an amendment and filler to some good effect we think.  Time will tell how these containers pan out.  Zone 6b.  Appalachia.

Matt

I make my hugels every 2-3 years..I use straw bales for the container..3 on the 2 long sides and 1 on the 2 short sides; I fill this up with lots of old firewood and branches.  On top of that I fill in and around with tractor bucket loads of my local dirt.  It’s pretty much decomposed granite. Then I top that off with a peat, sand and manure mix.  The bales last 2-3 years.

Each fall I have topped with mulch.  This year I’m trying green manure.

After the bales are shot I cut the ties, pile everything up in the center and put new bales around. The soil is rich and healthy.

In the pictures you see 1 old hugel and 2 I made this year.

I am in zone 3 although this year it’s HOT AND DRY. My hugels are different because they’re straw bales.  They are the exact height for me to work on easily and big enough to provide a decent crop. And cheap!

I'm just starting with mine.  I built it in the fall of 2019.  I dug down about 12" and tossed the sod out, back filled with rotted firewood, rotten stump, hard and soft wood, wood chips, and the sod.  I layered it all up with topsoil.  Last year I just cover cropped it.  This year, I tried a bunch of stuff, but it's been dry and i haven't watered.  So for now i've just got barley, potatoes, and a squash plant.  I'm going to start watering now so that it's in shape come fall, and I'll try garlic again.  

I mulched it with alfalfa pellets for this year.  I ran out of wood chips and i can't get anyone to bring me a load.

Looks good!

I mulch my vegetable beds with straw or leaves; whatever I can get.  I do use sawdust ( shavings not wood chips ever) in my flower beds.  It all rots!

I have three beds that I started last year with fallen brush from the woods around my house and a load of dirt. Although not very deep, they grew food just fine last year, and I figured I will just keep adding material and building them up over time. This year, I enclosed two with rock (excess from what we had brought in for another project) and one with more brush, and topped them up with compost. I have a short growing season with really variable summer temps. Yesterday it was 90 F, but that's unusual. Today, it's 54 and rainy. I guess 70s is a typical summer day here. My soil is sandy and rocky but I have a lot of material to make compost (plus helpful chickens).  

I couldn't remember how to embed pics, so here is a link instead (with pics & info about what's in each bed):
https://www.instagram.com/p/CQ_zZEtrbqG/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

Hi ya'll! I'm just putting in hugelkultur beds this year. Zone 3, urban lot. So far the little one I've done is doing better than anything else on the property. This is the first one and it is dug down so it is less of an eye sore for the neighbors. It is 4' wide/tall and will be 30' long when finished. The next two will be taller and wider to meet SKIP criteria. I plan on building a rabbit warren into one of the larger ones as a test. I lost count of how many different species but there are garlics, potatoes, asparagus, beets, carrots, peas, beans, lettuces, chards, clover, mustard, volunteer oats from the organic straw, etc...

That looks great!  

I saw this when it first got posted but I forgot about it until I worked on Hugh and Gill today. They're my two hugel beds - Hugh and Gill - Hugh Gill...I know I am very clever.

Here is a thread about them both.

The pic below is them today after I pulled some weeds.

Hello,  I am in zone 8b, NorthTexas.  Soil is silty clay.
Area was a hay field just 1 yr ago.  Growing my garden slowly because hugel beds are labor intensive to start.

I dig shallow trenches with a shovel, approximately 12” deep and 12” wide.  We treat them like traditional planting rows and keep them covered with straw.  We keep mulching material down in between the rows.  I have grown in raised beds and my results from hugel beds is better.  Plants usually produce larger harvests either in size, quantity or both.  I’m not having to use pesticides at this time either.  I have noticed that the new fruit trees that are in between the hugel rows do better than the trees that are on the outskirts of the garden.  This garden does NOT get watered on a regular basis and is left to its own devices for weeks at a time because I don’t live there.  The tomatoes plants produce all summer long up until the first freeze.  

I just made this... probably 3.5-4ft tall, built along a small contour that collects a lot of water when it's wet.

Anyone have any suggestions on what I should plant in right now before winter?  First time here! :)

Here’s one I built several years ago at a educational garden that my master gardener group maintains.   We built the end of it against a plexiglass sheet so we could show what was initially in it and how it changes over time.

This was our first hugelbed. We sold it a few years later (the house was included), but I still reminisce about it. We put every effort into making it as close to perfect as we could, even though it was only about 4 feet high after settling. Since then, we've built a little under 200 feet of hugels on our acreage but none of them compare to the first one in terms of quality or  fond memories.
We're in Zone 1B.

Here's a few pix of my old friend Humphrey. More pix & his story is here.