E. Gordon

OK, all, I have an idea.

I've converted as much of my little Maryland rowhouse's yard to hugelkultur raised beds as I reasonably can. I'm also trying some shallow wick beds on my porch roof, some container fruit trees and some other supplemental food production strategies.

The big, obvious, difficult part of creating a pretty robust little food system on my property is the sort of protein/fertility benefit that could come from keeping some animals. I'm starting a worm bin for some fertility, but, you know, I don't eat worms.

So I've been thinking of seeing if there's a type of fish out there that would work in a really simple tank setup in my basement. I do not really intend to do a full on recirculating aquaponics type system, but instead something like this: have a couple of tanks/tubs with an edible fish growing out in the basement. I'd use some little independent solar powered pond pumps/airstones to keep the tank in good working order.

Through the tubes of said solar pond pumps, I'd run some small fraction of the fish-water each day out this (existing, currently plugged) small hole in my basement wall to garden beds, right to the roots of some of my heavy-feeding garden plants. Then, I'd top up the tanks (using city water or stored rainwater, or whatever source seemed to make the most sense depending on the fish's needs and my availability).

So, questions:
think it would work?
think there will be good benefits to the hugel beds?
Are there any good, hardy, omnivorous fish besides tilapia that tolerate tank growing (I ask because I don't want to take on the electricity investment for tank heating to keep water in the 80s)?

Thanks!

Hey all,

I posted a few weeks ago as to whether you all thought hugelkultur would work ok over concrete. The consensus seemed to be that it would, so I built a 3 foot deep hugelbed over the concrete slab behind my little piece of Baltimore City.

I also built a much shallower bed where I'm testing out some of the sub-irrigation techniques suggested for lightweight rooftop growing (and you can see the set of sub-irrigated buckets that I used while I was a renter, in the background). The primary purpose of the shallow bed, though, is to test out various cover crops and have some space for my dog to lounge/roll around on. She was being pretty cute sunbathing on the concrete all the time, but it just seemed wrong for her to have no dirt.

I've attached a couple of pictures of the bed. I used all of the cut wood and brush that my neighbor gave me (more than is pictured went in before I filled. mostly long thin branches, up to 2 inches in diameter, and a hodgepodge of wood types) and covered with a mix of composted leaf mold and restaurant food scraps mixed with some screened topsoil. There's a really good composting operation nearby that delivered this for me. I'm setting up a worm bin as we speak, and plan to keep adding leaves as top mulch, in the fall.

I'll try to keep updating on how it works.

Hi all,

I have scraped together enough money to get my first piece of owned-land in the concrete jungle of East Baltimore. The yard is about 800 square feet and almost entirely concrete. For various reasons, removing the concrete isn't feasible, at least for the first few years. However, I was thinking of covering the vast majority of the space with a quite tall (though not for hugelkultur, about 3.5 feet) raised bed.

Do you think a wood-core bed makes sense for this application? And given that my max soil depth will only ever really be about 3.5 feet plus any mounding on the top of the bed, what sorts of perennials do folks suggest that could thrive with those restrictions?

Thanks for all advice.