How to properly fill a hugelkulture raised garden bed and in situ worms - ft Brenton Thwaites

Hey, welcome back. Today we're going to start filling these raised beds. We're going to do a wood core method, a hugelkultur raised bed method, and I'll show you some of the things to do, some things not to do, why we do things a certain way, kind of explain some of the science behind it. There's ways that we can do things better. So I'll show you that because it's a, it's a good lesson. We'll pull all that wood out. We'll put it back in properly. What am I talking about? Let's go check it out. Okay, so here's the raised beds and I've started pulling some of the wood out. But I was just going to do this and I thought, you know what? I'll do a little video on explaining why. So what the goal is with filling a raised bed with a wood core is largely to fill it up with free materials, but to do it in a way that's going to promote long-term soil water retention. This is why we want to use the wood. So first thing is that you want the wood to break down. This is the most important aspect of building a hugelkultur bed is that the goal is to actually get the wood to break down. So what happens when you fill a bed with smaller pieces like this is that you've got, you get a lot of air spaces and vacancies in between. And then especially if you try to do the really nice and good thing, try to kind of fill in spaces like this, where there's a bit of a blank space and they put small twigs. What that's actually going to do is it's going to create almost like an underground beaver dam where there's a hole that the soil doesn't really go down through. Rains will kind of try to bring some of that soil down in between the cracks of wood. But what you're going to get is a lot of void spaces in there. Three main things will happen if you have a lot of void spaces in your bed. The first off is that there's going to be air pockets and when roots hit air pockets, they kind of stop, they die back, and then they kind of spread out kind of the similar way that if you wanted to create a bush from a tree, you would make a heading cut on the tree. And then the plant would kind of fan out horizontally from there and kind of make more of a bush. The same thing happens under the ground with the roots. When they hit air, they will actually kind of bush out. Now this information can be good to know if you're say running a nursery and you're putting tree seedlings into a nursery bed and you want to have really vigorous root systems. Some people create something called air prune beds where it's like a floating raised bed and the plants can get in through the bottom. It's like a wire mesh on the bottom. When the roots hit that air, they'll actually air prune. They'll basically kill off any kind of further root and then they'll branch out laterally. But in the raised bed, we actually want plant roots to go and use as much of the nutrient as possible, even if it's down lower. We don't necessarily want to encourage the plants to have shallow and wide root systems where they'll kind of compete with each other. We want to encourage deep and long roots. It'll help more with drought resistance and all that sort of thing. So the other thing that will happen is there'll be a lot more root settling. So when the soil macro biology, you know, the bigger critters in the soil move around, the soil will kind of move with them and then it'll kind of tumble down and fill those void spaces. And over time your bed will kind of sink down. That's going to happen naturally, but we don't want these giant pockets to fall down. They also make really good homes for things like moles and voles if you have these little air spaces in your beds. So your beds will tend to be kind of more pest prone if you do that. Then the third most important thing, maybe this is fourth, the pests would maybe be third, this will be fourth. The fourth thing is that then the wood will actually not break down as fast. Wood doesn't really break down when it's in the air. It lasts a long time. It's why fence posts last a really long time. The bottoms of things in soil contact, those are the things that really break down fast. It's one of the reasons why we put the beds up on gravel to kind of minimize as much soil contact as possible and preserve the wood for as long as possible. Inside the core of the bed, we want the opposite. We actually want that wood to break down. We want it to be able to hold lots of moisture and act as a sponge for the plants in the bed. So for that, we want to have constant soil contact right up against the wood. So the way that we actually want to do that is we want to create almost like a raft. We want to build our raised bed the way that we would a raft. And we want to do a layer of wood and then pack some soil around it. And then a layer of wood and pack some soil around it. Start with the big pieces of wood, work up to the small pieces of wood. This is maybe also an analogy for life. If you fill your raised beds with the small pieces first, you don't have room for the big important pieces of wood that'll do a lot of the moisture holding and retention. Kind of similar to life. If you fill your life full of small little inconsequential things that don't matter, and you make those a big part of your life, you won't have time for the really important things that actually matter. So who would have thought our garden beds can provide even little tiny glimpses and analogies into life lessons. And then probably next year, we'll probably put a good six inches, eight inches of wood chips on top and grow no-till gardening in these Hoogle raised beds. So hope you enjoyed. This is massive raised beds done on a budget using recycled wood and metal that would have otherwise ended up in a landfill somewhere. Okay. So we got the beds cleared now and we're going to start with the big stuff. So these are some stumps that sometimes are by the side of the road and I like to kind of pick them up if I ever see them out there. Okay. We are going to put these right in one third over and another one third over. And I'm going to try to line them up right with this board here on the side. That way I know where they are. Okay. So what is this? This is big old drainage pipe and you can get types that are solid or have little perforations in them. Like this one here has little perforations in it. I'll collect these when I see them in garbage or whatever at a municipal lot. And what I'm going to do with these is actually put them right on top of the wood stump. And I'm going to make a in-situ worm bed inside the actual garden. So here's the drainage holes and I'm just basically going to probably go in and open all these up a little bit. And I want to get it where worms are going to be able to come right into this drainage pipe and get food scraps that I can put right into the kitchen, right into the garden, kitchen garden. And I can also, if I have hotter things like manure, I can put some in here as well. And they'll be slightly further away from all of the tree roots. So be inside this. And what I do is I cut them in half and I use them as trunk protectors. So this will also be a little bit of a entry point for the worms. So that's good. So what I'm going to do is put this right on top of the log. I'll put a little cap on top and then I'll be able to put kitchen scraps in there or like really fresh manure. If I have some and I don't want it to burn the plant roots, I can put it in here. Worms will eat that, they'll leave behind their worm casting. And then, you know, if it rains, any kind of water or leachate that would come out of that, I want it to go right down on the log and drip all down the log. And the log will actually turn into a sponge and kind of soak all that nutrient up and hold it in the raised bed. So that's my plan with that. I want to have a nice big log, roughly a third into the bed. And then another one, a third into the bed. I'll cut a couple pipes and we'll have an in-situ worm farm right in the raised beds. And then for the rest of the logs, I really want to try to maximize soil contact. So I really need to get the big ones in first, do them in a way that gets as much soil contact down. And then I want to fill in the spaces with other logs as much as possible. I don't want to just dump this stuff in here and leave a bunch of voids. I really, you know, we took a lot of time to actually make these beds. We're going to take a long time using these beds. So I want to really make sure that we do it right and set these up for as much success as possible. See, then where I have void spaces, I want to fill that with soil. So that's essentially how we're going to do it. I'll show a little speed up of me working on this and we want to fill it in a layer and then we want to fill in the spaces and then a layer and then fill in the spaces. We don't want to just throw in a brush pile in here. We want to build like a raft. Also don't forget that you're actually inoculating your beds with life. So make sure that you go and find stuff that actually is good in a garden. Okay. So I watered between layers of the big stuff because I really want the manure to get in and have soil contact with the wood. Remember that's the key. Soil contact with the wood and we're using fairly fresh manure. Usually I let manure sit for a year or two, but here we want actually super fresh manure because we want the high nitrogen to help break down the wood. Remember the goal is to actually break the wood down and then I'm just using some pine twigs act as like a little brush and one more thing you want to use wood that actually will break down. Remember again, the goal is to break the wood down, not to have it just sit in the bed. So you want to avoid things like locust. You want to avoid cedar. You want to really do like softwoods if you can. This is one of the areas where softwoods are actually really good. Really go on. Even if you're doing hardwoods, do hardwoods that mushrooms really like. Like maple is really good. Willow, oak, birch. These are all really good woods to do as well because they'll break down fast. You might've also noticed that we did bigger stuff on the bottom and progressively smaller as we get up top. This is for a few reasons. The big stuff will be the real big water soak. We really want that in the bottom to capture and hold any water that wants to drain out. This will drain well, but we want the water to be held in a sponge not like in a basin. You also want less nitrogen tie up higher up closer to where the roots of the plants are going to be. So as we get higher and higher because we're going to be growing annual veg in this, we want to have a really bacterial dominated soil. So we want to start going more and more manure, heavy compost, heavy at the top because that's what the roots will be in. Trees like fungal dominated soils, grassy plants, leafy plants, like bacterial dominated soil. So up at the top, we're going to focus on compost and manure. We are going to do a layer of shredded leaves. Kind of is like the final carbon layer. This is mostly to help out with the worms and we're going to build the worm bin kind of right on top of that. And then we'll backfill in with a little bit of mix of compost and native soil. See, and this is also another good way to make sure you've got lots of soil microbiology. If you have any leaves that have been sitting around for a year, look at all the little critters that are in there. Now they can start multiplying on the horse manure. They will love it and they will thrive and multiply. Here we're just breaking up clumps. Okay. So now I'm going to go get a compost biochar mix. It's been sitting around for about two, three months now and we're going to put that in there. I usually like to inoculate my biochar for about a year, but there's so much nitrogen fertility. I'm not at all worried about the biochar tying up fertility in this bed. So if you don't know what biochar is, it is a 2000 year soil amendment. It's super dead easy to make. I have multiple guides on it. It helps retain moisture in the soil. It also helps retain nutrients in the soil. It acts as a buffer for many harmful chemicals. It'll just suck it up. They use it in industrial filters to actually do that exact job. And then it acts as a soil habitat. Microscopically, this is a bunch of little hallways and honeycomb structure and all the bacteria and microorganisms that help grow our food will actually colonize that. It's also fairly hard, like it's got a it's easy to squeeze, but it actually has a fairly hard hardness like Rockwell hardness. And that actually helps worms. They'll take it in and actually use it as grit. OK, so now we're going to add some compost from last year. So this is well aged compost. And this one has some garlic in it, so who knows? Maybe I get some garlic. So I got some baby kale transplanted, some Egyptian walking onions. Getting at them very much. I think we'll just mulch with leaves for now for this year because I don't want any kind of heavy carbon to get in too deep. This whole bed's going to sink. So we'll just go leaves this year. They break down fast enough that I'm not too worried about them, but you should always cover your soil, never bare soil. Now, you can see these were kind of matted a little bit. Means they were anaerobic. So I really want to fluff them out. The anaerobic bacteria will get vastly outcompeted very quickly by aerobic bacteria. You just don't want anaerobic conditions in your gardens. Here we'll fill our little worm things. A little manure, put in some comfrey. I'll pack it down. And then we'll put some leaves in there. And water it down. Now, if you have really bad slugs, like if you're in the UK, I hear that you guys have really bad slugs over there, then I would definitely recommend not doing something like leaves. Charles Dowding runs compost as a mulch. I'm not really a fan of using something that plants grow in as the mulch layer. I think that basically is just, I don't know, burying your plants a little deeper in the ground. I don't really think it has the same water retention capability as like an actual carbon based mulch wood. The carbon in the mulches will also help break down and make soil in your beds more. So if you're just systematically only using compost in your beds, then you're also kind of not really growing soil. You're just importing in soil. I'm always a fan if I can turn carbon into soil instead of necessarily bringing in soil. So we use leaves in most of our gardens. We use wood chips as well. I've heard they're bad for slugs from a couple of people. So you could try it out. But if it doesn't work for you one year, then, you know, move towards something else. So last thing, and this is important, so I really do want people to understand this, is you have to set your expectations. A bed like this is a long term play. If I wanted to have amazing beds that look great on YouTube, I'd probably do what a lot of other people do and actually just say one thing and then use fertilizers. The problem is, is that if we want to grow our food chemical free, we want healthy, nutritious food that's sustainable and good for the planet, but also good for your body. Then we have to grow in ways that nature does. Nature grows soil slowly. Nature grows soil by layers, by dropping down leaves onto soil and having them break down over the course of decades. A bed like this can get up and functional faster than that because we're importing in a bunch of stuff. You know, all the manure that I brought in, all the compost that I have been doing on my property that I brought into the bed. We can fast track the process. But it's really important to know that no matter what your inputs are into the bed, that the soil microbiology needs to grow now. So even though I brought inputs in, it's the soil microbiology that needs to grow. So the fungus needs to take over and spread its mycelium everywhere. That takes at least a year. The carbon and nitrogen need to balance themselves out and break down. The organic matter takes two to five years to build. So it's really important that we don't do something like this, judge our results off this growing season right now and then decide whether or not we're going to do it. It's really important that you stick with a plan that's bound in good, solid science and, you know, history of other people being successful with it. And then you give it the time that it needs to develop and mature. So thanks for watching. Will this bed be amazing this year? Probably not. But this bed is going to be amazing in anywhere from two to five years, and it'll get better every single year that goes by until the day that I die.