MY first big concern is the mention of "Lake Wall", that sounds more like a Dam to me.
Earth dams fail a lot of times because of the wrong sort of things happening over time.
Tree
roots will actually destroy the holding ability of earth dams, there is one being redone right now in a housing development because of tree roots.
If you do as you mentioned, you could actually create a dam failure, from clay saturation, that probably would not be good for you. 5 acres of
water is a lot of water.
With that much rainfall, have you addressed the control of water yet?
That would be the first thing to do. Hugels would come later so they were placed correctly.
Once a
hugel is properly built it will settle from the top down, the wood will slowly become saturated with water (this happens faster if the wood is already decaying).
A good hugel has lots of water holding ability,
enough that clay would stay saturated for weeks or even months after it became saturated.
I am just concerned for your land. I'm sure you can use hugels as you want to but you might need to rethink their location and it is better to do that before you build one and find out it created issues you didn't expect or want.
If you could post a couple of photos, it would be much easier for us to give you pertinent information.
Redhawk
