Hugelkultur is a relatively unknown concept, and provides a plethora of benefits and advantages to mainstream farming and gardening techniques.
Hugelkultur means hill culture or hill mound.
At a basic level, Hugelkultur involves building your garden bed as a raised mound over a base of dead wood. The wood helps disseminate nitrates and other nutrients in a natural way, as well as help retain water, amoungst other advantages.
- grow a typical garden without irrigation or fertilization
- Has all the practical advantages of other raised garden beds
- has been demonstrated to work in deserts as well as backyards
- use up rotting wood, twigs, branches and even whole trees that would otherwise go to the dump or be burned
- it is pretty much nothing more than buried wood
- can be flush with the ground, although raised garden beds are typically better
- can start small, and be added to later, although bigger is better
- Sequesters carbon
- perfect for places that have had trees blown over by storms