Terry Frankes

I've built 6 raised bed hugels now, most recently 2 last season.  Every time I've done so, I've changed the design.  Most recently, I'd scoured the woods for the most rotted and the mostly quickly rotting varieties.  When i dug up my 2019 model, I couldn't believe the wood was still dry down 3 feet.  The drought was awful.  

Joseph Lofthouse wrote:I visited many hundreds of farms in the last decade. The one's I like the best do not bury wood in the ground, they leave it laying on top. When I observe wood buried in the ground, I notice super low soil fertility, and plants struggling to survive. When I see wood laying on top of the ground, and not intermixed with soil, I observe thriving ecosystems.

In England, they showed me what they called "dead hedges". Basically an area, often between trees, where they piled the woody (and other) debris from the garden. They hosted an abundance of life: pollinators, predators to eat the slugs, wildflowers, fungi, etc.

Could you expand on that more?  Are you asserting that a raised bed with chunks of wood in it will never perform as well as one that is solid soil, and both covered in mulch?  I'm not arguing, I'm genuinely curious.  I'm about 6 years into raised bed hugels and it's been a mixed bag so far.  My oldest one is finally doing great, but the newer ones are still struggling, even after a full third season.  I've also been struggling with drought for 4 years, and I think it's be very difficult to get the beds fully hydrated, even once.  

I went out before spring started and shoveled as much snow onto them as they would hold (mine are flat for drought resistance purposes).   Maybe I got lucky and put in inch or two of water into them with all that snow.  

Do you have any growing season pictures of what does grow there?  

That is an interesting soil test for sure.  No amount of synthetics is going to change that mineral composition.  But biological activity will affect availability of the things you need.  Does your land grow thistles now?  What else is being farmed in the area?  

My brain goes straight to high pH cover crops, and that means whatever is growing on the plains and to the west:  Yellow sweet clover, chicory, ragweed, flax, barley, rape, hairy vetch, alfalfa, black eyed susan, bee balm.  I'd be looking to grow whatever will grow there, including thistles.  I have actually promoted the growth of thistles to unlock their soil healing benefits.  Once your soil begins to heal, natural plants will return.  It just takes some time and a little rain.  

Whatever you can get to grow there, do not plow or rip the soil in anyway.  Try to get to a healthy blanket of crop residue and keep planting through it and pressing it flat until you've got a nice organic material quilt on the soil.  It will hold moisture and get to hosting a whole world of biological activity.  

Be careful you're not building a gopher paradise.  You probably need to get some cats and a good dog to help with that.  I'd take the neighbor's feedback seriously and see if she has a point.  It's one thing to take on a wonderful project, but be sure you get the project done and the risk of fire, while temporary, is handled as quickly as possible.  

Lots of well intentioned projects start, and never get completed that become eyesores or worse, dangerous.  I think it's abundantly clear, southern California is on it's own for fire suppression, so it's understandable people are looking at their surroundings differently, knowing the state has basically set the stage to burn everything.  Look at your property right now, if it caught fire today and nobody came to put it out, what would happen?  

If that causes you to suddenly panic, fix it.  

Serious question here, these posts really creep me out.  Why are they always made by people who only post one time and vanish, or otherwise don't stick around?  And then they are answered by other people who only post 1-2 times and they leave.  Am I in left field that this is really really strange?

What is the pH?  If you've got fern coming, you've likely got room to add some lime.  With the right lime, you can nudge that sand in the right direction.  Soil tests for N, P, and K are of no use to homesteaders.  They will always test low in poorly managed soils.  Once you transition to a living soil system, you'll have all the NPK you need and with none of the toxicity.  

A $7,000 excavator is no deal.  If that thing starts breaking down, and it will, it's going to get exponentially more expensive to fix.  Shop rates can be $200+/hr and you have to have the equipment to haul it there, or pay $300 every ten miles for the field truck to come visit you.  

Pumps wear out, engines wear out, hoses get brittle and blow, seals wear out, pins and bushings wear out, etc.  

Revamping a homestead is a campaign, but that doesn't mean you can't rent your way to it and come out way ahead of owning old equipment.  Check for rentals and use some savvy vacation time to rent one for a week at a time.  Write down what you really want to do, and then assign times to each chore.  40 rental hours on a properly sized and newer machine will run circles around a small old machine on weekends.  You'll probably get a year's worth of projects done in 40 hours.  

Backhoe loaders are good when you need a tractor that can periodically dig and also lift light loads, can also get around faster than an excavator.    

An excavator is for when all you need to do it dig and move heavy things.  Machines have the ability to destroy themselves, and tractors with loaders are champions at that.  They will lift more than the front ends, arms, tires, and hydraulics are meant to, and they'll be junk far faster than they otherwise should.  And that amplifies the real cost of that machine.  

Compost will not fix this.  It will help, but that will not last.  You need to change the physics of the soil.  

Heavy clay is an oxygen problem.  You need to mix coarse sand into that soil.  Given the size of that plot, I'd rent a trencher for the afternoon and trench deeply across that garden as tightly as you can while still keeping the trenches open.  Backfill the trenches with a blend of wood chips, compost, gypsum, and sand.  Do that across the whole garden one way, like all east to west lines.  Backfill them all, and level it off, and then do it again the other direction north to south.  The trencher will rip up and through what you just put down, but also rip into all the spots you missed between the rows.  

If you can pick the trencher, get one that goes narrow and deep.  If you're gonna have this garden for many years, I'd do this and get it fixed right, and right away.  Skip the rehab years and just get it done.  

Has anyone thought about building a RMH for doing maple syrup?  I had thought about some day getting into it at my place, but I've got no inclinations to make mountains of firewood to cook down my sap.  However, if i could adapt an RMH to host a basin at the top of the barrel, I'd have to imagine this would seriously cut down the amount of wood needed to produce a unit of syrup.