Aspen Hotbed

First day in the Garden in 2013 (March 18)

You are looking at a pit that we dug at the end of 2012, and had filled partway -- and in the spring of 2013, we picked up right where we had left off. This was before I discovered using spruce, and the entire pit was built with aspen. 

Big thanks to Lee Johnson for generously bringing aspen here for the garden.

I layered in aspen, some wood chopping debris, manure, and soil.

Lee and my daughter Fawn helped sort rocks from the soil so that we could shovel soil back into the pit. Great teamwork! (I've never seen that girl work so hard.)

The uppermost section received a generous amount of manure and hay... over 10,000 pounds. (I ♥ wonderful neighbors!) The largest mass of horse manure in the whole garden is what gave this bed its name, "Aspen Hotbed."

More aspen on top of the manure and hay -- smaller pieces.

First week of April: Enter the best birthday present I could have asked for: two friends brought over a pickup load of REALLY BEAUTIFUL SOIL. Just in the nick of time for the top layer of the aspen hotbed! Thank you Jason Llewellyn and Lisa Eversgerd -- you rock!

Fast forward to August... the aspen hotbed is growing full tilt!

(a new pit started on the upper left, a story for another day)

September

Do you think the plants like hugelkultur?

Seems like they do.

*        *       *

At a glance:

Sawhorse Greenhouse

Just when whispers of spring were becoming audible, we received a big dump of snow. We needed it -- I'm not complaining. But it doesn't stop me from wanting to grow things! Here is my latest experiment to extend the growing season:

Last fall, someone I know was getting rid of two sawhorses. I snapped them up and fit them both in the Subaru (yeah, garden wagon!), along with some bags of leaves. Thanks, Brianne!

I chose a spot on top of an underground wood-for-food bed, hoping to capture some of the heat from decomposition when spring comes. This bed has spruce arranged horizontally underground, around 5 feet deep. Partway through last year, Lee asked me if I could utilize spruce instead of aspen, since he has a perpetual abundance of spruce that needs clearing. Shortly after Lee's offer of spruce, I was reminded by someone that Sepp (Josef) Holzer uses a lot of spruce in his hugelkultur beds. Ahah!

Above: The pit with wood in it was later filled to the top with wood and manure, and now has the sawhorse greenhouse on top of it.

Back aboveground, to the sawhorses: I set them just far enough apart to be able to place a wooden frame on top, also scrounged -- this time from amongst some palettes in town. It makes a good, sturdy roof-skeleton support. 

I stapled some plastic to the palette frame, leaving enough plastic hanging off the edges to wrap my sawhorses like a present. (It does feel like a present, by the way.)

Just like you'd do when gift wrapping, I folded the ends and pinned them -- with office clips and clothespins instead of scotch tape. I set a log on end where the pieces come together to bridge the small gap, then pulled cloth up over the bottom. 

Early this morning I checked on the interior only to find the ground frozen hard as a brick. I poured some warm water and compost slurry in a couple of patches and placed some kale and swiss chard seeds in the slurry. 

On top of the compost slurry and seeds, I placed plastic jugs with the bottoms cut off. Then I piled leaves up around them for insulation. Here's hoping the double greenhouse effect will bring some sprouts in the sawhorse-house before too terribly long!

From Knapweed to Veggies: 2010-2013

Sometimes it's good to stop and look back, to see where we started...

(Note: You can click on the pictures to get a closer look.)

~ 2010 ~

This is the only "before" picture I have of the garden. In 2010 we pulled a lot of knapweed (one of the piles, next to my daughter). I didn't know about sheet mulching with cardboard yet -- ha! 

~ 2011 ~

One day in the early spring of 2011, my daughter and I spontaneously decided that we would start a garden that year after all. We had initially thought we'd wait till we could get the backhoe to the property. But we couldn't wait! We quite randomly selected a spot and started digging. Boy, was that hard work. 

We hand-dug two pits about 2 feet deep; I sifted the soil and added my compost along with some sawdust back in. This process took several weeks. We didn't have a wheel barrow yet, so we used the wagon with a sledding saucer on top (above). It worked pretty well! Time would later reveal that we had chosen one of the rockiest, most difficult areas to dig -- just a little to the east was a nice pocket of looser, much less rocky soil. But I didn't know that then!

Thanks to an acquaintance named Shelby, I learned about sheet mulching. Just in the nick of time! I was saved from a whole season of intensive weed pulling around the garden area.

Google Earth 2011 imagery for our property was not very crisp at that time, but my husband pointed out that I had used enough cardboard that it could be seen from space! We laughed hard over that one. (What an accomplishment to make the sheet-mulching visible from space, given the low resolution.)

Eventually I was able to cover the cardboard with pine needle duff... I spent a lot of hours raking pine needles from around the Ponderosas on the property. It doubled as fire protection, and I didn't mind doing it. I erected a humble little fence using materials generously offered to me by our neighbors, who had put in some fenced trees, and the trees hadn't made it. They said if I wanted the materials, I could walk over there and pull the posts and wire. So I did! I fenced small sections to make it less appealing for deer to jump in, hoping they'd be afraid of not having enough room to bound out again. (It worked really well until late August, when desperation always makes deer bolder.)

~ 2012 ~

In 2012, I upgraded to wood chips from Oroville for mulching over the cardboard to control weeds. I was still only gardening in a portion of what would become the full garden, but I began expanding via above ground hugelkultur beds.

The garden was surprisingly productive, given its many limitations.

The transformation from knapweed and yarrow to vegetables became more apparent...

So many great memories already!

~ 2013 ~

At the tail end of 2012, we had started digging pits with the backhoe, removing rocks, and adding large wood, leaves and manure back into the ground. 

One day in early April 2013, I received over 10,000 pounds of manure and hay from my neighbors. I can estimate the weight because the dump trailer was rated at 10,000 pounds, and it was too heavy to lift and dump! In this photo, Bob is transporting some of the manure with the front end loader, into the "Aspen Hotbed," the pit on the far left. This is the horse manure that made it hot (and the pumpkins went crazy in there).

Green starts to emerge from the soil - this photo was taken on July 11, 2013, just before the garden exploded into a jungle.

Here it is the next day, July 12, from space!

Several weeks later, on August 31 -- the jungle has arrived on our semi-arid landscape.

Strawberries in September!

~ 2014 ~

And now the garden is asleep, waiting for spring...

A Limerick from Lee

Today my good friend Lee Johnson sent me a limerick...

 and it's too much fun to keep to myself! 

I know a young woman from Nine Mile

She gardens with joy in a new style

When I bring her some wood

She asks, "If we could?"

"In this pit we should build a big pile."

Good wood in the ground is a shame

Firewood cutters might be prone to claim

No smoke, fire or heat

No burning to warm up your feet

Some see it a waste, with no flame!

But the heat in the ground happens slow,

Helping all of those vegetables grow.

A process of making food from wood:

Slow burning this way is surely as good

As the harvest will deliciously show

Thank you, Lee, for telling the Wood for Food story in a poem, and for your tremendous effort in bringing wood for the slow burn! 

Hugelkultur Goes Underground

In November 2012, when the year's harvest was done, we began transforming the garden into a massive rotting wood battery. Why wood? The goal is conservation and availability of both water and heat, as well as creation of rich soil in the long term.

It is not a job for a shovel, to replace the first 5-6 feet of compacted soil and rocks with rotting wood and manure. 

My husband, Bob, has a front end loader with a backhoe attachment. We've been tackling the garden area in sections, digging one pit at a time. On average, the pits have been about five feet deep, and around 12x12 feet across. Some pits were 6 feet deep, and a couple were shallower; they were dug side by side, essentially joining on the edges. 

The process has been to remove the soil and rocks from a section, piling it off to the side. Bob removes the large boulders, and I hand-sort the cobble and small boulders from the soil, setting interesting rocks aside for future above-ground projects. Once the majority of the rocks are removed, the soil is available to put back in the pit, layered in among large pieces of rotting wood, manure, leaves, and whatever other organic matter I can get my hands on. 

Big thanks to Bob for all the digging, and for teaching our daughter to operate the backhoe in the process too!

The above-ground hugelkultur piles built during 2012 were a great source of woody organic matter for the new beds. One by one, they were pulled into the pits with the backhoe. The above-ground piles also had pieces of biochar in them -- partially burned wood that has a strong ability to hold water, helps reduce leaching of nutrients, and fosters the uptake of nutrients by plants.

The first few pits were filled with aspen, thanks to our friend, Lee Johnson, and our neighbor, Betty. I had read that aspen is a great species of wood to use for hugelkultur, so I sought it out. Aspen groves have a propensity to thrive and die in cycles, and around here, it is easy to find landowners who would like it out of the way after it dies. I was able to make real progress on this project because Lee decided to help by bringing wood by the truck- and trailer-load -- one of the most amazing gifts ever! Thank you, Lee!

The Willy's truck is loaded with manure from our neighbors, Chuck and Kathy, who own alpacas. The manure from their alpacas was amazingly rich and supported a lot of robust veggies the following growing season! This pit started off with long sections of aspen, which were arranged in rows, with alpaca manure...

...and leaves! I was able to use a lot of leaves thanks to the generosity of local people like Lenore and Paul Bouchard, Brianne Rowe Smith, and others. 

Here is the same shot facing East instead of West.

The second layer was made up of shorter lengths of aspen, being nudged into place here with the backhoe. Soil was also spread over each layer.

Into the pit goes one of my best producing above-ground hugelkultur beds. It was quite small and would not have produced well for as long as this new, larger bed will. 

Dark, rich, rotten wood, going in... The advantage to using existing hugelkultur beds in these pits is that they had already started breaking down, and their functionality was ready to peak.

Spreading soil over the wood, manure and leaves ~ looking West, November 2012

Looking South across the first two pits, September 2013

Harvesting fava beans from the first underground wood-for-food bed (Sept. 2013)

Big, beautiful onions from the aspen & alpaca manure pits (October 2013)

Don't have a backhoe? No problem!

It is not necessary to dig deep pits in order to reap the benefits of rotting wood for growing food. Our design came into place because of the fact that we have a backhoe. If you are working with a shovel, you can dig a trench only as deep as you feel like digging, and build your hugelkultur mainly above ground -- or don't dig at all and grow everything on the surface. 

There are pros and cons to every approach, but you can be successful regardless of what angle you take. I am excited about the pit system we are implementing, because it allows me to experiment with rainwater collection with the surface contours, and because of the mass that can be developed for water retention and for generating heat to extend the growing season. 

Benefits to above ground beds include quicker solar heating in the spring, and the ability to take advantage of solar exposure (South vs. North facing sides). Also, you can create microclimates depending on the shape and arrangement of the beds. 

The sky is the limit! Eventually, I hope to have a combination of below and above ground wood-for-food beds in our garden.