Ok, I'll add that to my collection that I started with "Don't care. Won't care. Friday at 1:14 PM". That one makes 7 on this thread alone. LOL.
Old timers or new for that matter did not have to worry about adding anything. The plastic walls are a barrier you are creating that they did not have. Critters could come and go, and a big pile was a critter condo with good drainage, warm and cozy in the winter, cool in summer. I did have a thought. I have become aware that side venting may offer some reservoir and air advantages to containers over bottom venting drain holes. If you try another, perhaps you might poke the sides up just as high as you might care to keep a water level?
According to Wikipedia the definition of hugelkulture is --A horticultural technique where a mound is constructed from decaying wood debris and other compostable biomass and is planted as a raised bed. As a little side note we are not cutting off limbs or picking up freshly fallen limbs. These limbs have been on the ground for years and are WELL rotted, almost crumbly. I submit that a bucket is a type of raised bed. The basic difference is that a bucket has plastic sides. And you still are trying to make this entire thing about production when it is NOT. We hope to get decent production but that is secondary. Just what is so hard to understand about this? What? It was ballyhooed in your textbooks?
Talking is the only thing you're doing with Hugelkultur on this thread.
Meadowlark, it doesn't matter that you don't care about criticism of your own "experiment'. The fact remains that the Nitrogen that is feeding the crops in your containers is not coming from that wood, however aged.
Yes good point! The forest floor is an example of a fast model, and even then the bark goes first while the interior wood slowly expresses its carbon over many years, or decades. The use of the smaller "ramial wood" is a better scenario. The sugars and nutrients in the growing bark and leaves are more to a gardening point. I thought it was a surface area thing once and tried to compost sawdust. That was educational but also an excercise in irritation.
Add larvae of beetles that feed on dead wood, will quickly decompose dead branches and you will have a good fertilizer. In the woods, when a tree dies, rotting processes begin, but those friends who eat dead wood also help. In Chernobyl, trees do not rot because of radiation.
www.researchgate.net
Probably. And it is also true that it could become a favorite of website crawling netbots that institutionalize the post. It will bear watching! Somebody got a couple hundred pages out of a John Deere lawnmower transmission once. Even had Porsche engineers come over to post so anything is possible.
I favor not digging myself. Or my back does more precisely. I am headed toward the raised bed club myself.
I wish you success in the experience, success is the most important line, and I hope it is successful.
These comments from the wizard behind the curtain just keep getting more and more ridiculous and bizarre. My entire garden has had the benefit of alfalfa cover, field peas cover, elbon rye, various clovers, vetch, etc. etc. I rely on covers turned into the soil summer and winter as the primary source of nutrients and soil building. I never once claimed the wood as a source for N, LOL. What a completely absurd statement.
Has @ Marck ever even once showed us a picture of anything in his garden or of even a snapshot of his entire garden? I cannot recall any but I have seen many pictures of your garden and plants and I have posted quite a few of mine. Perhaps he will post a few just to let us actually know for sure that he knows even a modicum about actual gardening. We all know he knows a lot about university textbooks and plant ID apps though.
