Frenzo De Frenzis

Thanks Cristo for all your suggestions. Actually I agree, and I already do hunt slugs (then feed them to the ducks) in the morning. But I can catch mostly snails. Slugs are difficult to spot, and the very small ones hide in the mulch and eat all the sprounting. Anyway I will rely more on transplants from now on. Or letting the plants grow bigger before mulching with straw..
Again. Regarding your method of discouraging rodents in the hugel bed, I am grateful you shared your solution, thank you. The only drawback is a lower height of the bed which requires a better back and kneeling down while gardening (which I don't mind really being no dig/mulch gardening not that hard anyway) , but the advantages are major humidity retention and less voles. Why not everybody does it this way? I read a lot of people desperate with their infestations in the hugelbed. And the ones who did not have the problem (lucky indeed) could only suggest cats, dogs, snakes...
I agree that the ecosystem must be balanced, but, those little rodents are among the most succesfull animals in the history of evolution, so we have to create ourselves the conditions to disincentivate and repel them. Even Bill Mollison wrote, as I quoted above, to plant vetiver fences to keep burrowing rodents out!
So just to be clear.How long did you start your hugel pit and how visible is the declining in voles damage? Thanks

Cristo Balete wrote:I had the same problem with hugel mounds. The rodents were thrilled, everything dried out worse than ever.

I switched over to hugel pits, as deep as my patience allows at the time. Even just one shovel blade deep works. I soak the wood first, try to fill it in with a mixture of stuff. I mound it a little, because it will settle. Mulch it thickly with mowed stuff. Then it doesn't matter if they get into it from below because the sun isn't involved, there are fewer creatures in a wet and damp zone like a hugel pit.

Very interesting indeed. Thanks for sharing. So the final result is a bed on ground level, slightly raised, or pitted? I think a slightly raised bed is better for my climate in center Italy. Our summer used to be low rainfall but the last 5 years have been very rainy and stormy. It rained heavily and damaged urban sites and coltures everywhere. Working with raised beds saved my garden from rotting in a heavy clay soil. Next time I have woody materials I will make a new hugelkultur (or maybe I will dismantle the one I have rodents in..), and bury the woods and other green materials in a pit as you suggest, while taking care of filling all the holes. That will be a reservoire for water and slow release nutrients.
Having a problem with slugs as well I will not use straw for mulching. Maybe I will just not add anything as mulch to the hugelkultur beds at all and plant only thickly (living mulch), cut everything and let the roots rot inside while taking the air portion of the plant to the compost heap. Then make compost for my other NON Hugelkultur raised beds to use as a mulch (which fertilizes the soil as well) once a year.
I will use black compost through the winter/spring, and only when the sun is too hot in summer, and the plants are grown a little more, I may be adding some straw to decrease soil temp and evaporation.

The point in hugelkultur is that against a big amount of work up front you get fertility (nutrients and water) for many years with less work. So I won't make compost for these.

What do you think guys?

Sure, Vetiver dies when the ground freezes, plus you need a fine mesh fence above it to keep rodents out. What bugs me is this: even if you have predators in the garden, but still have plenty of food for the preys (say potatoes), won't you end with zero potatoes for you and a lot of predators which have predated a whole lot of preys grown thanks to those easily accessible potatoes? I mean if it is easy for voles to eat all the food in the garden then they will do it even if there are predators, you need to wait for the predators pressure to build up and eventually, one year you will have few voles. But then predators will diminish in numbers and the cycle starts again from the beginning. What a hassle!
THis is why I think the gardener still has to repel pests and proactively make things difficult for them to say the least.
I am also starting to believe that hugelkulture is a bit overkill and that I prefer the Charles Dowding method of no dig gardening which uses mature compost as mulch ( https://youtu.be/HATC3rG6NbQ ) . Its stuff grows beautifully.

This is my second year. I planted a hugelkultur with potatoes and they have being eaten so rapidly by voles that I had to harvest early. I looked into barriers and somebody in this forum made an underground fence (made of expensive steel!) against burrowing rodents and had success with it. I was thinking of doing it as well but today, reading again the Permaculture manual by Bill Mollison I found, at page 272 that he wrote "The roots of vetiver grass prevent rodent burrowing from outside the system, as do root masses of Euphorbia species". Why nobody in this forum ever talked about using vetiver for blocking voles? Did anybody try it? It seems to me a very permacultury way of preventing the problem. Thanks