do I need to dig a trench?

Hi all.  I want to start a Hugel bed but do not have access to anything but a shovel and a pick axe and that will be a lot of work!  Can I just put logs, etc. directly onto the ground without digging?  I have loads of access to trees, medium to small, as well as composted horse poo.  I appreciate any and all ideas!

No trench needed; as long as you have plenty of manure and/or other suitable stuff to cover the wood, it will work just fine as an entirely raised hugel. I've used less-rotten wood to build a frame for a raised bed around such hugels and been entirely happy with the results.

Probably you are already aware, but best to be very sure there are no persistent broad-leaf herbicides in that horse manure, they can pass right through the horse and fuck your plants up if the hay was sprayed!

No trench needed. However, from my understanding, a good amount of soil layered with the wood is needed for it to work as a growing bed anytime soon. Of course, if you have a couple years to let the leaves, sticks and stuff break down into soil, cool!

Here is a link to Paul's huglkulture article.

Raised hugel works fine, probably easier to build up high too since you are not limited by trench depth. The composted horse poo is a real bonus, should help it get going much faster than wood alone.

Paul Wheaton’s method:


I don’t make nearly that big hugels because I am one person working alone, decently strong but not extraordinarily (well maybe not that strong), and I use hand tools. All the sawing, dragging of logs, etc. are a lot of effort. I hope to do more in the future but for now, 2 or 3ft hugels are what works.

D Nikolls wrote:No trench needed; as long as you have plenty of manure and/or other suitable stuff to cover the wood, it will work just fine as an entirely raised hugel. I've used less-rotten wood to build a frame for a raised bed around such hugels and been entirely happy with the results.

Probably you are already aware, but best to be very sure there are no persistent broad-leaf herbicides in that horse manure, they can pass right through the horse and fuck your plants up if the hay was sprayed!

Really good to know.  I might put a small berm at the bottom of the lower side of mine to trap water however, since it's all on a steep slope.

I think mulching with whole logs is a perfectly fine thing to do as well. After all, this is how soil is built in the forest. They are habitat for snails and such, but also beneficial and edible fungi, salamanders, and ring-necked snakes. Very rarely, I have noticed, does one see an abundance of slugs on the forest floor. (However, the forest slugs and snails can be very big and pretty!)


I’m hoping to do more log mulching over the fall and winter.

I also have the resources of pond and river muck, very fertile, in great abundance, as long as I have the strength to shovel and carry it up the hill, which I usually do with a bowl on my head. They would be a good substitute for compost in building a hugel.

The experience I've had with mini hugels  and raised beds with punky wood in the bottom is that covering the hugel or filling the bed with just compost+/-manures doesn't seem to grow things that well. However, when I made a point of tossing in even relatively small layers of our clay soil, the garden did much better.

That may have something to do with my ecosystem, but I think a big part of the, "put the wood on the ground, then dig a trench beside it, tossing the dirt onto the wood" actually makes the system work better. I don't have an explanation for this, but the next time I build such a thing, that is what I will try.

I also recall Sepp Holzer saying at one point that it won't work as well if you use too much wood compared to soil/compost.

Jay Angler wrote:The experience I've had with mini hugels  and raised beds with punky wood in the bottom is that covering the hugel or filling the bed with just compost+/-manures doesn't seem to grow things that well. However, when I made a point of tossing in even relatively small layers of our clay soil, the garden did much better.

That may have something to do with my ecosystem, but I think a big part of the, "put the wood on the ground, then dig a trench beside it, tossing the dirt onto the wood" actually makes the system work better. I don't have an explanation for this, but the next time I build such a thing, that is what I will try.

I also recall Sepp Holzer saying at one point that it won't work as well if you use too much wood compared to soil/compost.

Really good to know.  I'll add soil/clay from where I'm going to dig bunds/demi-lunes.

Please what is Reinforce handle