Pseudo Hugelkultur

By Maurice Robinette

One of the principles of holistic management financial planning is to control expenses.   I constantly try to figure ways to be more efficient when I’m working in the woods. Using the slash for the Department of Natural Resources fuel reduction program to create an orchard is my latest effort.

Since 2016, I have participated in the DNR’s fuel reduction program.  This program is designed to reduce ladder fuels and the damage done by wildfires. I completed my fifth project this June.   

In the first project, I disposed of small trees and limbs by renting a large chipper and stockpiling the chips for my large animal compost effort. In the second project, I stacked and burned small piles of slash.  

For the third project, I bought a chipper and hauled the chips to my central location.  The fourth time, we chipped in place to replace the biomass I had cut.   We were also logging in the same area and had additional slash to deal with.

A few years ago I became aware of the work of Sepp Holzer, a permaculture advocate from Austria.   He developed a technique of piling logs sticks leaves compost manure and topsoil into a mound and called it Hugelkultur. The idea is to let the logs decompose and become a sponge that self-irrigates the mound and provides a good base for a garden.

I decided to try it on a very large scale by piling slash in a row about ten feet wide and four feet high.  During the fourth project we tried stacking the limbs by hand on top of logs that were placed by my tractor.  This worked well but was still labor intensive.   

 For the fifth project, I did all of the stacking with the new grapple.   We also discovered that a small pile of small trees (less than three inches in diameter) could be skidded behind an ATV with a chain or chocker cable. This was much faster than using the grapple to transport slash a quarter mile to the hugelkultur.  Once the pile was built, a foot of topsoil was placed on top of the pile, dug from the adjacent rich meadow soil.  

The first hugelstrip is 430 feet long.  The second one is currently 1,250 feet and growing.

My long term plans are to keep adding topsoil and compost until a good seedbed is developed. Then, a variety of trees, including aspen, willow, apple, pear, cherry, and chestnuts will be tried.   

We had the unfortunate occasion of testing two of these projects last month with the Gray Road fire.  The good news is they worked to prevent the fire from getting into the tops of trees, The bad news is it didn’t matter much as the fire was so hot many of the trees were killed anyway.

 For more on hugelkulter, see this article from Sunshine Farms in upper New York State. It discusses hugekultur from a gardening perspective. A well-done video is included in the article.