Example of commercial Hugelkultur ?

For example is 10,000 sq feet doable for Hugelkultur ? How many wood logs would be needed ? Does the type of terrain matter when you have a sizable garden ?

andrew cutter wrote:For example is 10,000 sq feet doable for Hugelkultur ?

I'm pretty sure Sepp Holzer has more than that, and has installed more than that for other people, too.

andrew cutter wrote:How many wood logs would be needed ?

A whole lot. About 10,000sqft worth, which depends on if you just lay them in rafts or if you stack them in pyramids or a more round-topped shape. That would also depend on the size of the logs.

andrew cutter wrote:Does the type of terrain matter when you have a sizable garden ?

Well, making hugelkultur on slopes is a bit trickier than doing it on level ground, and may require grading. The terrain should be a consideration whenever you put in hugel beds anyway.

Here's a large-scale garden based on ideas by Sepp Holzer: http://permaculturenews.org/2011/11/17/fresh-worlds-wildest-supermarket/

update: http://permaculturenews.org/2012/06/06/fresh-the-worlds-wildest-supermarket-june-2012-update/

This garden would not lend itself to machine harvest . I would think that most farmer would not go for this method unless machine could be use to harvest the food . Too time consuming to walk the whole garden to harvest . Glad someone is trying hugelkultur on a large scale . It would nice to find out what problem they ran into now and in the future .

Considering many conventionally grown fruit and vegetable crops are not harvested by machine, but by hand, I'm not sure it's a special problem that hugelkultur probably can't be harvested by machine. The need to harvest by hand is a problem faced by many or possibly most small-scale vegetable and fruit farmers.