Ray Ko

I've done it different ways: wood packed neatly and tightly (as you describe), haphazardly piled using a box blade and tractor to gather and pile wood/topsoil intermingled. Always plenty of soil layered throughout and piled on top. I still do some mounds -mainly to hide stuff. But they Don't produce well.

As for snakes, I love them. They eat the mice, whom I despise for the nests I find in places they shouldn't nest. Like my tractor.

I'm in Virginia, also, and raised mounds do not work for me. No matter how I layer and stuff them, they dry out. Burying the wood up to ground level works well. A single layer of logs on the surface works, but not as well as planting in the ground by itself. 4-5 foot tall mounds only work as snake/mice motels or as a way to conceal stumps, brush, contrary kinfolk, or other unsightly things.

I think too many folks see something on the Internet and abandon all common sense. I first learned of HK by seeing a diagram of a near-vertical pile of logs with some soil on top with the claim that I could grow a traditional garden with no fertilization or irrigation and it would even work in the desert.

I was skeptical, but figured what the heck. Over time, this HK was far less productive than adjacent garden beds. Some will say I did it all wrong or I need to buy a lecture or DVD series to learn the correct way. When I ultimately disassembled it, I found a bone dry core of slightly punkier wood than I had put in there. I get 30-40 inches of rain, so it's a far cry from a desert out here.

Applying some of the common sense the Good Lord gave me, over the years I used quite a bit of wood in ways that actually worked: buried below garden beds-no hugel . Cut into sections and used as mulch around trees. Constructing short, flat topped raised rows with maybe 25% cut woody material and the rest kinda a sheetmulched way of hiding stuff to decompose in due time. Then again, I am sure if I buried bricks and plastic jugs at the same depth or built a raised row with the same soil-to-brick and plastic jug ratio it'd produce just fine. That might be my next experiment...

Buckets as placeholders...that's just genius right there!

Dale-this one of my favorite posts. The dreaded HOA finally convinced me I needed to trim the hedges in front of my house. Personally, I wanted to be completely hidden from the street, but they had different ideas. Before digging the manual shears out of the garage, i wondered if I could use a hedge trimmer for other things and stumbled across this thread in my Googlings.

I wound up buying an articulating hedge trimmer attachment for my 32CC string trimmer. Because of the articulation, the trimmer can be adjusted all the way up to perpendicular to the shaft, giving me a cutting angle parallel to the ground as I swing the trimmer side to side as one would with the regular string trimmer head. But, i am just over 6 feet tall and getting closer to the ground than calf height is a tad uncomfortable. Out where I am cutting, calf height is a manageable height. Blackberry, saplings, pokeweed, horsetail, bracken fern and anything else in the way is quickly fodder for compost or mulch. I even cut and windowed some sunn hemp I planted. I'll let it dry and see how that works as "hay"

I was on the verge of buying a PTO mounted chipper for logging slash. Instead, one of these days I will just rent a 12" towable model. I would process material much faster and not have to deal with maintenance. Until then, the slash will just rot and roast the occasional marshmallow.

Not yet, but I am planning to this year. There are a lot of videos on YouTube. So, my useless reply mainy serves to subscribe to any useful replies that might be forthcoming.

I have been reading up and watching videos because it seems like the just the thing to easily plant cover in a troublesome area.

I see a lot of instruction how-to, but not a lot on how it turned out. Anyone do this successfully and have some pics to share? I am working on it, but I cant keep them from germinating before drying.

The property is in caroline county, but I live in stafford. I walked a couple parcels in Buckingham before buying the one I have. I liked it a lot, just a bit too far away. But, man, I still dream of the 10 acre pasture + 20 acres pine that was going for <2k an acre. Beautiful piece of land. But, I am waaay off topic.