Matt Frazier

Please include lots of how-to on the welding -- equipment and process.

Hi A.J. --

I'm not going to claim to have a firm answer on this, but I've obviously been pondering it same as you. Here's the conclusion I've come to.... If you put ia bed 100% on contour it becomes almost like a swale with wood in the berm. Yes, it would hold lots of water, but it also dams cold and makes less water available to down-slope beds (a 'run-off shadow' effect). If you run them completely (ie 90 degrees) to contour, you shed the cold air but don't get the benefit of nearly as much water capture. So my thinking is that the optimal answer is somewhere in between. Heck, we're trying to mimic nature, right? Do trees always fall exactly on contour?

The best hybrid I've come up with is to put the beds off-contour and also not to have each one be too long. Having them off-contour should help them shed the cold air while still letting them slow-down and capture a significant portion of precip. Any precip not captured by one bed should flow off the end and hit the next bed which then has a chance to soak it the excess moisture. I think exact angle off contour probably depends on amount of precip, the distance between bed, and steepness of slope -- I'd say let intuition be your guide.

Re-reading some Sepp Holtzer last night......he actually emphasizes doing beds off contour so that the lower ones don't try out.

Good timing! Right as I try to plan out this year's projects. Looking forward to it!

A pond above might be possible, but it would essentially be in a dip at the top of a ridge, so it wouldn't have much of a watershed. Another alternative would just to plan a small irrigationline along the top or through the middle of each one so that I could easily plug them into roof cachement or something later on. (That might be a year or two though...at this point there are no roofs.

For orientation, I was thinking less of going ful N/S and more like just putting them off contour slightly. Two options I had thought of so far.

One was to 'fish scale' them, so rather than having very long hugels, I would just make them (making up number for sake of discussion) 50 ft long, then have a gap of 50 ft, and then do the next 50ft long hugel -- but still staying on contour. If I do another set below them, I would make them offset, so the one below would catch any extra water that had run down from the gap above and any cold air sliding down the hill could easily pass through the gaps.

Alternative B was to just take the hugels slightly off contour so that instead of being trapped any cold air would slide down the hugel and off the end. This approach seems like it would be less effective, especially as the bed got longer. Hwever, it could potentially be combined with the first option to help the cold air move past.

Anybody tried anything like that?

Good questions / suggestions. Annual precip is about 20-25 inches. Most of it comes Oct through June and then July-Sep is very dry (as in often no rain at all). Soils are very deep and mostly silt, so I'll be needing to build lots of organic matter. Beds ill be on a north slope, but not a steep one. They'll still get good sun in summer, especially at the higher parts of the beds. Beds would be running mostly E-W if I do them on contour. For the time being Irrigation will be limited to what I can haul to them in 275gal totes. Size is a good question....The ultimate goal, if this is the setup I go with, would be maybe 500' long each (although they could be broken into sections for cold air dumps, etc.)

I am thinking of putting in some hugel beds this spring. A lot of people talk about doing them on contour, but I also seem to recall someone (Paul? Sepp?) mentioning the benefits of doing them off contour in colder regions. i think the ideas is that something at an angle to contour could let the bed shed cool air rather than creating frost pockets. Obviously, the downside is that having them off contour diminishes the swale-like effect. Thoughts? Experience (good or bad) with doing them off contour or having them hold frost? (I'm zone 4/5) Thanks!