Tuckers (Janklabs) GAMCOD

Hey I’m Tucker and this is my GAMCOD submission. I’m an off grid homesteader and content creator who lives in a tiny house. Because I’m a content creator I plan on making videos on my channel about the process of making my GAMCOD gardens, you can find me on YT, Instagram and TikTok with the username Janklabs. I’ll be recording everything on my S22+ smartphone.  I am making a 7 by 26ft hugelkulture for GAMCOD. The hugel is going to be in an open grassy field with full sun and heavy clay soil. The soil here has been used and abused for 100 years before I got here so it has next to no organic matter in it. The field produces a meager amount of weedy hay every year which a local farmer comes and collects for his dairy cows.

The last few days I’ve been busy chopping up fallen trees in the woods next to my house for my hugelkulture. So far I’ve spent almost 10 hours just cuting logs with a chainsaw and using a wheelbarrow to bring them to the garden plot. It’s been some serious work already and I think I may have to double my log collection to make the hugel as tall as I’d like. Near the end of today I placed the first layer of logs and started digging the soil surrounding the hugel and heaping it onto the logs. I hope to make the hugel 3ft tall and dig 3 feet surrounding it to make a 6th tall hugel like Paul suggests in his hugelkulture podcast video. So far this has already been a ton of physical work so I hope it pays off.

If I finish the hugel with time to spare before early may I’d also like to start a second flat conventional garden with a deep mulch for GAMCOD as well so I can compare the productivity of both methods.

Hey Tucker, thanks for sharing!
Sounds like an awesome plan, I'm excited to see your progress here.

A random heads up
7*26 = 182 7*28 = 196

You might be able to extend your bed an extra two feet, if you have the wood.

What type of climate are you growing in? How much rainfall do you typically get?

Clay McGowen wrote:Hey Tucker, thanks for sharing!
Sounds like an awesome plan, I'm excited to see your progress here.

A random heads up
7*26 = 182 7*28 = 196

You might be able to extend your bed an extra two feet, if you have the wood.

What type of climate are you growing in? How much rainfall do you typically get?

Thanks for the heads up. I may extend the growing area that extra 2 feet if I have enough logs. And I’m growing in upstate New York where the average rainfall is 35-40 inches per year

Welcome to Permies, Tucker! I look forward to seeing how your hugel progresses.

Permies is a big community with a lot of things going on. There is a thread called How permies works for reference.

I’ve made some big progress on the hugelkulture! So far I’ve spent approximately 19.5 hours of labor to make it by myself. And oh man it has been some real hard work chopping up all those logs hauling them over with a wheel barrow. The gigantic mound of dirt has been making my neighbors very curious. They’ve been asking questions about what on earth I’m doing lol.

The hugel is about 5ft tall currently if you measure from its lowest point in the dugout pit next to it. I’m not sure if I want to keep digging because the clay becomes almost rock hard at the depth I’m at now. The pits next to the hugel are also collecting water but I’m thinking that may be a good thing. I can just scoop the water with a bucket and use it to water the mound. I think what’s next is going to be hauling over some compost I’ve been working on(which isn’t much) and top dressing the hugel with that. And then covering the whole thing in lawn trimmings and leaf mulch. Our last frost date is in early may so I won’t be able to plant until then. But I’ll probably be starting some seedlings indoors soon.

I plan on planting some sunchokes, walking onion, potato’s, pumpkin, and turnips. I may also sprinkling in some corn and sunflower too but I’m skeptical on how well they will do in this terrible clay dirt.

Spring is upon us and the hugel bed is coming to life.
The sun chokes are exploding with growth! This is the first time I’ve ever grown them and they are just as vigorous as everyone says. So far the hugel is growing Sun chokes, pumpkins, barley, black beans,  corn, potato’s, amaranth,



I’ve also dug a second GAMCOD garden next to the hugel. I tilled up the soil with a grub hoe and mulched with lawn trimmings. It’s growing all the same stuff except for sun chokes.

Establishing the flat bed has been far less time intensive than the  hugel mound. I’m eager to see how they perform compared to each other.

Hi Tucker, how has the hugel done this year?

Jeremy VanGelder wrote:Hi Tucker, how has the hugel done this year?

The Hugel results are in! Unfortunately the final harvest wasn’t great. But it wasn’t the Hugels fault. I had some insane groundhog, insect, and slug pressure which devastated my crops (the potato beetles were apocalyptic) And then we had a record drought this summer in upstate New York. These in combination with my inability to water the hugel at all due to my well being broken made the final harvest very lack luster. The stars of the show were the sunchokes and sugar pumpkins.

The original crops I planted was
(Plants).      -    (Harvest weight)
Walking onion -  0
Sunchokes - 29lbs 3.7 oz
Corn - 0
Sugar pumpkin - 19 lbs 13.3 oz
Peppers - 0
Black beans. 4oz & 14 grams
Potato’s  - 3lbs 11.8oz

Many thanks for the update.  We also had record drought over here in the Midlands of England.  Even our normally reliable sunchokes barely reached half the height the plants normally achieved, I harvested less weight of potatoes than I planted, and the yacón only survived rather than thriving.

I hope you won't be disheartened, "there is always next year" is gardeners yearly refrain.

Your conditions look quite challenging: there is minimal beneficial ecosystem in the near vicinity of your growing beds.

Plus you have done all this hard work improving the growing conditions this year, giving you a head start for the new year.

So I'm hoping you are starting to think positive thoughts about what your next steps might be.

One question: I've read that different varieties of winter squash may not come true to type due to cross pollination if grown within 250m of one another.  How do your eating pumpkins taste?

Good luck!

I was very impressed with the Hugel mound overall. I’ve also built a “control plot“ next to the Hugel, where I simply tilled up the existing soil, and then planted all the same crops into that soil. And practically everything in there immediately died while the Hugel was still thriving. The soil became instantly compact like concrete again. The soil here is super dense clay. You can really hardly even call it soil. Past the 1st inch of topsoil, you could take up a clod of earth and throw it on a potters wheel and make some pottery out of it. It’s so bad even the sunchokes barely grew. I planted about a dozen, but only two of them survived, and they were very small compared to the Hugels sunchokes.

I recorded everything from beginning to end and I plan on submitting the footage to the GAMCOD movie.

I made some videos on my social media about building and harvesting the Hugel. I linked those below.

Building the Hugel
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DIJ_QyKPaVU/?igsh=cjJybXFqZDYxOGx5

Harvesting the Hugel
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQued5nEZUa/?igsh=MW1hZGk3bnE3bTdrcA==

Ac Baker wrote:Many thanks for the update.  We also had record drought over here in the Midlands of England.  Even our normally reliable sunchokes barely reached half the height the plants normally achieved, I harvested less weight of potatoes than I planted, and the yacón only survived rather than thriving.

I hope you won't be disheartened, "there is always next year" is gardeners yearly refrain.

Your conditions look quite challenging: there is minimal beneficial ecosystem in the near vicinity of your growing beds.

Plus you have done all this hard work improving the growing conditions this year, giving you a head start for the new year.

So I'm hoping you are starting to think positive thoughts about what your next steps might be.

One question: I've read that different varieties of winter squash may not come true to type due to cross pollination if grown within 250m of one another.  How do your eating pumpkins taste?

Good luck!

I am not discouraged at all! In fact I’m very happy with what I saw before the critters ate everything. I’ve been trying to get a decent harvest out of this soil for 3 years with no success and the Hugel is the very first garden I’ve ever had with such vigorous growth!  I’m very excited for next year since I’ll actually be able to water it now that the well is fixed.  And I figured out how to keep the groundhogs out and I’ll be able to use snail bait to keep the pests down. I have a feeling the harvest next year will be beyond my wildest dreams for this awful soil I have here.

Ac Baker wrote:Many thanks for the update.  We also had record drought over here in the Midlands of England.  Even our normally reliable sunchokes barely reached half the height the plants normally achieved, I harvested less weight of potatoes than I planted, and the yacón only survived rather than thriving.

I hope you won't be disheartened, "there is always next year" is gardeners yearly refrain.

Your conditions look quite challenging: there is minimal beneficial ecosystem in the near vicinity of your growing beds.

Plus you have done all this hard work improving the growing conditions this year, giving you a head start for the new year.

So I'm hoping you are starting to think positive thoughts about what your next steps might be.

One question: I've read that different varieties of winter squash may not come true to type due to cross pollination if grown within 250m of one another.  How do your eating pumpkins taste?

Good luck!

Oh and I didn’t get a chance to taste the sugar pumpkins. The squirrels and my chickens found my stash so you’ll have to ask them how they tasted haha.