Rebecca Norman wrote:
Slava On wrote: It is not a mound like, more like a little field.
What is recommended to plant on a hugel field? I haven't done any hugelbeds, but I've been curious and reading about them, and one thing I read was you shouldn't plant trees or woody perennials on a hugelbed, since it will settle.
Every mound will settle, that's just the nature of them. I would plant trees close to the base of a mound rather than actually on the mound, I do get some high winds and prefer my trees to remain upright. As for mound planting, you can plant most anything on them. I have not had much success with beets in a mound so far but we have special beds for those. Any of the squashes, kale, spinach, corn, all grains, peas, peppers, potatoes, and most other vegies will grow very well on a mound. If you have started the mound with added water during the build, you should not have to worry much about watering since that is the purpose of putting the rotting wood into them.
If you put any meat scraps in (mostly bones, any meat that is left on is what I couldn't keep with the muscle, true meats like left over from stock making either get fed to the dogs or go into the worm bins) put that in with the very bottom layer so those are deep in the mound. I build my mounds usually to a 4 foot or five foot height and have not had any problems with animals digging for the deeply buried scraps.
When I first finish building any mound, I throw on an initial cover crop of scarlet clover, rye cereal, winter field peas or kale. I build new mounds during our fall, so even if I plant during the end of November to the middle of December, the plants will get a foot hold. As and example, we planted new kale at the end of November and it is up and doing just fine now. In the spring, we will start planting squashes, spinach, peppers, radishes, melons, corn and everything else. We use row covers at the beginning then take those off by march 15 since that's when the weather starts to really warm up. By using stakes (2-3 ft. out of the ground) to hold the material off the plants, we can even use plastic as a cover and so have mini green houses over the mounds. I don't bring plastic all the way to the ground usually, just staple it to the bottom stakes a foot from the ground, this lets just enough air exchange happen to keep everything under it happy.