James Johnstone

Kale and squash are probably not the best thing to plant 1st season in a hugelkultur bed. Both require boatloads of nitrogen, which you are unlikely to get in a hugelbed in the first year. You ought to have planted something that is nitrogen-fixing. Over TIME the hugelbed will have plenty of N, but not in the first year.

Paul linked to this thread recently, and I see that it is missing the following:



This is a drinking song in celebration of the brewing of Sorghum Wine (Gaoliang). It is from the movie "Red Sorghum" (thus the thread relevance) by Zhang Yimou. The lyrics are basically, "Alcohol, alcohol, alcohol, it makes you do crazy things, yea man."

Much Gaoliang today comes from Taiwan, where it is an extremely potent (100+ proof) distilled grain spirit made from a mixture of wheat and sorghum.

Proving once again that really that only reason to grow grain crops is to make alcohol.

Because female urination necessarily concentrates all of the waste in one place, you're at risk of adding too much nitrogen to that spot and burning the vegetation. It would probably be better to collect and broadcast it, or at the very least make sure you go in a different area each time.

The exact same thing happens with dogs. Males can naturally broadcast urine over a wider swath of vegetation: this is fertilizer. Females deposit a full bladder in one spot, and the result is nitrogen burning.

If you farm without debt, other than perhaps a land loan, and sell direct-to-consumer (whether fresh or to a processor/restaurants) in my observation permaculture techniques result in yields so astronomically greater than in monoculture farming that I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it for myself season after season.

If you have to mortgage your great-grandkids in order to get the materials you need to get a crop in, and the only way to have a chance of paying that off is to run a contract with a major ag-business company and take out crop insurance if such is available, then permaculture is not economically advantageous, simply because none of those entities will accept anything other than a monoculture acreage.

So, to the extent we buy in to a retarded agricultural system that subsidizes monoculture, monoculture will be, at the margins anyways on sizable acreage, more profitable. To the extent we ignore the retarded agricultural system and engage in permaculture techniques, including alternative business plans and marketing strategies, permaculture is far more profitable.

These are all great resources for getting started, but if we're honest there really is no pre-made resource for companion planting. We like to think that we can reduce agriculture to a science: "Plant these two things together and they will do well." And we can benefit from applying scientific principles in agriculture...but it is really more of an art - a poetry of the soil.

The exact same variety of plant situated on one side of an acre will behave differently from on the other side of the acre, because micro conditions differ. Likewise, what makes a good companion planting in one climate, soil, and other such conditions may be a terrible in other conditions. For every book or resource espousing never-fail companion planting charts, I've had someone who very successfully applies companion-planting principles tell me that the author is crazy and that combination never works for them.

While pre-made resources can indeed be a great place to start, there is no substitute for simply experimenting by planting various combinations of plants together on your own property and seeing what happens.