Clara Teixeira wrote:
Kai Walker wrote:LOL Looks like someone wrapped a basketball with banana tree leaves and called it a head of lettuce!
Dang wish mine would produce like that.
I have things starting to die already.
Might be because of the 12 inches of rain we got in the past 2 weeks though.
Dunno....
I see they had a mini excavator to use. We had a household small rototiller and 2 shovels to do ours.
And unbreakable hardpan 4-6 inches down too.
We were very fortunate my dad had a tractor that he hauled to our place and helped out with a lot of the soil hauling. This year we are building a second 100' completely by hand and after 1 month of working on it just in our spare time we are only halfway done. Our soil is sandy loam but big rocks in every shovel full. So it can be done, just takes much longer. They are worth the effort in our area!
Mine is a box within a box style instead of one long one. It took us 5 1/2 months to build by hand. 17 tons of materials to only make it 1/2 height. It shrank 35% after the first year. Of that 17 tons we put in about 4 tons of used
coffee grounds (wet of
course). Oh and a bunch of doubled mowed leaves. Not to mention
wood chips wood chips wood chips since the property owner wouldn't let us put in a lot of logs like we were supposed to.
It is about 30 feet long, 15-20 feet wide outside dimensions I think. Except the ends which are about 8-10 feet-ish.
In the middle I have an 18" walkway which can be entered from either end. Easier harvest and maintenance.
When I
water I fill the inside walkway until it can't hold any more.
Water slowly filters into the base of the garden. Any excess runs out the outside bottom.
I uploaded a few pics. Can't do them all due to high cost of hotspot data :-(
We did surround the base of the garden with
concrete blocks to help maintain the shape as time went on. And a 4 foot
fence too.
Inside walkway we shored up the inner walls with plain 1 x 6's roughly and plain wood stakes to hold them. Inner concrete blocks help hold the walls further and act as baffles to keep water rushing from one end down to the other. We had a little grade to deal with.
And another
yard grade directs excess water from the lawn right to the garden.
Every bit helps when summer rolls around.
To rehydrate the garden takes about 1,000 gallons of water (or about 1 hour of water pumped in through a 2 1/2 inch hose)
Last year we had to do this at least every week. This year I shouldn't have to do all that watering.
And boy did it get HOT HOT HOT!
Perhaps you could try that setup?
I did read that Hugelgardens
should be a limited length and I think anything too long might be problematic. Dunno. A beginner here too.