Comments

Comments

the ultimate raised garden beds

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Score: 357
Author: jschwartzi
Link - Comments (127)

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NedFlaymer (0) : Hugelkulture is great. It will jumpstart the soil in even the most degraded of conditions. It provides time release moisture, the right combination of fibers, sugars, and micronutrients for fungi and bacteria, and plenty of spatial complexity for insects and such, which also accelerate the nutrient cycling process. It all combines synergistically to provide better conditions for the propagation of biotic life, in general. Though I've run into some problems with early beds in Brazil. As there are a lot of ants that live in old trees and love to much on leafy plants. The important thing in this case is to make sure your wood is completely underground, with no interface aboveground. If you're patient (as you should be) A healthy soil will, over the long run, prove to be protropic. Which means that soils improve, and this can happen because of, rather than in spite of, intensive cultivation. Important names: Sepp Holzer is an Austrian most responsible for popularizing this technique. He's known for using macroelements like rocks lakes and cliffs to create the climactic conditions capable of growing cherries and lemons (in the Swiss Alps). He also has a very interesting of cultivating (my favorite way) that is most likened to companion or guild planting, but he doesn't organize his plantings into neat little rows. He takes a patch of wilderness and tills it under, then goes out and throws out buckets of seed blends and leaves it alone. I personally prefer covering it with a banana leaf grass clippings or mulch cover, during the germination phase. Depends on where you are and what you are planting. Geoff Lawton did an incredible experiment in Israel. He greened the desert. He took a bulldozer and built a really long swale along the slightest slope and mulched it. Then the project ran out of money so they abandoned it. After a few years he managed to make his way back and checked on it. He found the mulch was teeming with fungi and mites. Species no one in living memory had ever seen. There were ducks and chickens and all kinds of interesting shrubs and fruit bearing trees. He built an oasis where everyone is running out of water, and resorting to using desalinated seawater and massive greenhouses to grow food. Check out the video on YouTube. Geoff Lawton Greening the Desert. Emilia Hazelip has done some interesting work with raised beds and mulching. With that she manages to keep out the weeds, control temperature, contain moisture, and accelerated microbiotic nutrient cycling. I like her work a lot, and have found it most effective. Another Important people of note is Bill Mollison. We need more people like this. Following through with their work. Sorry guys but throwing concrete dust on fields is not a good idea!!!

seotut2 (0) : The juxtaposition of diesel tractors and permaculture seems a bit weird to me. Wasn't the point of permaculture to make it more sustainable, less resource intensive and less environmentally destructive? If you already have tractors and heavy machinery, intensive agriculture is within reach.

minerjoe (0) : Zepp Holzer is the master of this dichotomy.

The thought is that Humans have already used (abused?) machinery such as bulldozers and chainsaws to drastically reduce the water holding capacity of the landscape, and our task is to use these machines in one big push to drastically improve the water holding capacity of the land permanently and then to not need to use them any longer.

See any of Zepp's large scale projects. He has been successful, and failed a few times, in projects all over the world with some amazing transformations.

mahaganapati (0) : To your point, I would say that the machinery has a negligible impact compared to the benefits of permaculture, and if makes permaculture more productive without greater risk, then it seems good. That is, we shouldn't have some kind of Luddite purist view of permaculture - it should be practicable. Things like this help to break the stereotype that permaculture is just hippies chanting in a field that conventional agriculture proponents seem to believe and do perpetuate.

cheeseprocedure (0) : The permaculture community emphasizes the concept of “appropriate technology,” which depends on context but generally means “seek simple/low-impact approaches.”

If you’re building large low-input beds that could last for a decade or more, a tractor might be an appropriate tool given your local constraints vs. a crew of horses/humans and a great deal of time/energy.

llamataboot (0) : Can also accomplish the same thing (on a shorter timeframe) with lasagna raised beds. I have been using layers of grass clippings and leaves as the bottom 60% or so of my raised beds when new (and then adding some layers over the next years) for a while now, and the plants seem to do almost ridiculously well with no weeding and no fertilization required.

llamataboot (0) : https://www.bbg.org/gardening/article/make_a_lasagna_garden_...

minerjoe (0) : I've help build a few of these, some using heavy machinery. The linked article is a bit misleading, in its "without irrigation" bit and the time it takes to get a fully established system. As with almost everything related to nature, "it depends". In Montana, where the author of the article resides, I've seen my share of hugels fail miserably without irrigation. For us here, I think the biggest advantage is the elevated soil temperatures in the spring due to the steep slope, but with that also comes an irrigation demand.

carapace (0) : Random shot-in-the-dark here but does anyone have any land within 3-4 hours drive of SF on which they would like to try out these techniques? Hügelkultur and "eco-mimetic" horticulture generally?

hosh (0) : Look up https://sharedearth.com if you don’t find any takers here.

You should also look into permaculture design (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture) as well as Sepp Holzer’s work (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holzer_Permaculture)

There is a lot more than just ecomimicry. Holzer made extensive use of those beds. He also did things like using his hogs instead of an excavator (by laying down things in the places he wants to dig, and letting the hogs have at it), or manipulating effective hardiness zones and microclimates to grow fruiting trees at elevations that are normally impossible.

projomni (0) : we've done a similar experiment--because our garden is on a hill, we created step-like 'beds' for veggies and fruit to grow. the results have been phenomenal so far. the only problem is, moles like this place too... so we've been battling them. highly recommended.

kjsthree (0) : Definitely do whatever you want with your land but thought I’d throw in my two cents on moles.

I gave up worrying about them after learning about all the good they do (aerating, eating grubs that turn into beetles that do harm my garden, etc). Turns out they don’t bother me at all. I live out in the woods though and don’t have a showy lawn.

foxhop (0) : I have a 5 year old food forest at my house. I take videos and upload to YouTube.

Checkout my channel: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UC1eySW_9TiI5wnvTnIIw2Nw

I have 5 year old hugelkultur beds and 1 year old beds and everything in between.

They really do work and are a blast to work with, each one a little bit different.

If your into this stuff please subscribe as I'm trying to grow my channel over 100 so I can unlock some YouTube platform features which I'm currently blocked on. (Namely live streaming from my mobile phone)

thehouseplant (0) : There you go, I am officially subscriber #100. Thanks for taking the time to make so many informative videos.

tomcam (0) : Ahh... the perfect symmetry of your user name and your good deed.

foxhop (0) : Thanks that, you would be surprised how hard it is to get subscribers in this space. I hope my videos current and future will help you!

aliswe (0) : Does anyone have ideas on what to do in a desert climate? I would love to try a variation on this in Saudi Arabia. I've read much about this but since it's on HN I might as well throw it out there, you often get unexpected expert input here.

Edit: I'm thinking of doing the hugelbed but kinda upside down, under ground.

splittingTimes (0) : I think you need a more encompassing approach. Permaculture might be something for you. They have developed specialized techniques for all climate zones.

For example check out the "Greening the desert" project.

https://youtu.be/2xcZS7arcgk

aliswe (0) : I really dislike the idea of continuously having to water in order to keep plants alive. If that will be the case, I feel it's not worth doing.

I mean that's the case none of these projects have REALLY taken off at scale.

fouc (0) : Nice video. This made me think about the potential of overlooked and possibly "cheap" land that could end up highly productive after just a few years.

moralestapia (0) : Shoot me an email (check profile), I used to live in Saudi and know plenty of agro as well.

aliswe (0) : Thanks!

AlotOfReading (0) : There are people who have spent thousands of years farming in environments as arid and hot as Saudi Arabia. What's out there isn't as well-marketed as permaculture, but it's also a lot less woo-woo and proven to be sustainable. In my area (California), I've found dryland techniques from Arizona natives to work extremely well. Considering Arizona is around the same climate as Saudi Arabia, but with more rivers, I suspect they'd probably work there too. Nabhan's Enduring Seeds captures the general principles decently, but the technical information is scattered about in various places. You may have even more luck with things like Sorghum (a highly drought-tolerant African crop) in a more local system.

chris1993 (0) : Swales, maybe?

aliswe (0) : I think swales should be part of the solution, sort of!

AdrianB1 (0) : I see many countries jumping to idea of such gardens, they can get more in property taxes for the surface than a flat one.

sigmaprimus (0) : In my experience when I build a new garden by hand on land that was freshly cleared, a hugelkultur like row will develop naturally. I normally plant strawberries in it.

When I start working the soil either by tilling and or raking I always end up with lots of roots and dead branches that get moved to the out side edge of the garden into a long pile or edge row of sorts.

Rather than haul it away, I rake a bit of decent soil overtop of all it and plant away.

It's almost as easy as the "Ruth Stout method", I'm not sure I would ever put the work into hauling logs and other materials from one area to another just to bury them. It's a great concept that probably works. I'm just not sure it's worth the "HugeL" amount of work over just bringing in compost in the beginning and top dressing (Which I have to do for weed control anyways) each year.

orasis (0) : Hugelkultur is a nice idea until you try to plant something the subsequent year - you can’t dig because there are still too many damn sticks.

jagger27 (0) : I don’t see the problem if you’re just planting small seedlings or doing direct sowing.

orasis (0) : It's not a problem if thats all you'll ever do with that piece of real estate. The tradeoff is future flexibility.

aliswe (0) : What jagger said, also Sepp almost exclusively relies on small machinery to do his work iirc.

Edit: like mini diggers.

chmod775 (0) : > I had to spend some time with google to find the right spelling.

Well... here goes the nitpicking.

The German word is "Hügelkultur". If you for some reason can't use an Umlaut, the proper spelling would be "Huegelkultur".

ben0x539 (0) : Thanks, this irks me disproportionally. People gotta respect our stupid proprietary vowels!!

xg15 (0) : If anyone wants to know, it also literally means "hill culture". ("Culture" in the biological sense I believe, like the cultures from your organic yoghurt)

washicalendar (0) : I don’t blame anyone for not knowing that ü = ue if they don’t speak German, but if you are/were one of those people who didn’t know this and just ignored the umlauts altogether (Hügelkultur -> Hugelkultur): the ü and u, ä and a, ö and o... are all different letters. They are not simply modifications to the letters a, o, and u. They are different letters entirely, which can also be represented as ae, oe, and ue. But they are NOT the letters ae, oe, ue, if that makes sense.

slim (0) : to be clear they sound different

contingencies (0) : On the subject of horticulture, there are still a great many amazing plants that aren't well understood and which resist cultivation. In addition it seems some fundamentally accepted default processes in the horticultural industry are ripe for review - for example, I read a paper recently which threw the conventional root hormone application wisdom for cuttings out the window: in that study it was found application atop a cutting (in the species covered) was superior to application below a cutting as conventionally taught. If things this fundamental are up for discussion, it would seem clear that we are really only at the relative tip of the iceberg in our understanding of biological systems and horticultural practice.

I suspect advancements in the next few years in areas like: new high yield crop combinations, improved robotic tilling/sewing/fertilizing/weeding/harvesting mechanisms, increased understanding of a broader variety of species seed germination requirements, combined horticulture/mycoculture/bryoculture strategies, autonomous tissue culture, autonomous offshore aquaculture and harvesting, etc. Robotics really should be a huge enabler here.

I already have a robotics factory in China and the personal and commercial motivation to build solutions in this space and am actively studying horticulture. Email me if you'd like to collaborate, have agricultural know-how and/or land and the medium to long term interest to collaborate, fellow startups welcome. Basically I am constrained by available land and time, don't believe in the long term economics of indoor/heavily synthetic conditions, and believe we are fundamentally at a crossroads for more sustainable, higher density agricultural practices enabled by new, more precise technology and more holistic conceptions of agricultural systems.

hammock (0) : What do you mean root hormone atop a cutting? On the leaves as opposed to the open stem?

hinkley (0) : On the bark above the cut end, is where the roots will come out, much if the time.

cmrdporcupine (0) : I sent you an email, let me know if you don't receive it, want to make sure I got the address right.

stepstop (0) : I love your comments

varikin (0) : I would love to see this paper you mention. My wife loves all things green. Our house is filling up with house plants, which I am OK with as long I am not in charge of them. And the more she plant outside, the less I have to mow.

But anyways, she does a lot of cutting and if there is something else that can work, I would love to share it with her.

contingencies (0) : https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/14981883.pdf

adrianN (0) : You could replace your lawn with a more natural meadow. You only have to mow them once a year.

tomp (0) : What plant would you plant? I heard good things about Dichondra but unfortunately it doesn’t survive winter freezing / snowing.

adrianN (0) : That depends on where you live, you should plant native species. I would go to my local botanical garden and ask them what they have on their meadows. If you don't have a botanical garden around, a local university might have information, eg https://extension.umd.edu/hgic/topics/lawn-alternatives

hedora (0) : You could get a native wildflower mix, and seed bomb with that. After a few years, it’ll settle into patches that of species appropriate for the sun/shade level, and look more natural. It’ll make the native pollinators and birds happy too.

tomp (0) : Sure, but then I might as well plant salad, rosemary etc (i.e. actually useful plants... along with some species that maintain / improve soil nutrition). In my view, the main purpose of ground cover is to be able to walk on it...

shawnz (0) : The author notes how there are advantages to having the bed raised, like less irrigation required, but why can't you get the same effect by burying the logs instead?

jchmbrln (0) : Also, either way, what kinds of plants can you grow without irrigation or rain for a full summer? I'm guessing only ones whose roots go deep enough into the pile?

quixoticelixer- (0) : Almost any plant (except in very dry areas).

jchmbrln (0) : In this context, what's a very dry area? I get 11-12" of rain annually; generally none May through October.

minerjoe (0) : Exactly. The apex of the hugel is fruit trees and perennials. with annuals filling in as they can. Zepp Holzer, the originator of the word, scatters seed mixes with great numbers of different species while at the same time planting out many fruit, nut, and other trees.

NedFlaymer (0) : And what's interesting is that the roots of short and mid height vegetation join together, creating a dense mat of roots and fibers, that contain a surprising amount of mostuire. When you combine that with spongy soils, buried wood, and shade they provide localized cycles of fluids and humidity. Overall it makes for much more resilient and productive food systems. Though you have to pay more attention to what you are doing.

If you plant one by one, neatly spaced apart, you won't have this type of nutrient cycling and moisture uptake.

foxhop (0) : I grow raspberries and strawberries on mine. Videos in my other comment.

Potatoes on a 2nd year old hugelkultur are amazing!

I live in zone 6b Connecticut

prawn (0) : Not overly familiar with it, but could wicking beds work in this situation?

My parents have just added a few to their setup, but we're in winter here in Australia so yet to see their effectiveness through summer.

cheeseprocedure (0) : You can do this below ground level, but it loses some other useful properties (catching more sunlight, improved drainage, ergonomics). Depending on where you live, one approach may work better than the other.

aliswe (0) : Also you get almost 2x the growing space by raising it.

getpost (0) : Of course, buried logs take years to decompose. Most people don’t plan garden beds years in advance, or have the space for beds that won’t be used.

ivanhoe (0) : You could, but it's more work as it takes a lot of digging. You could also have flat raised beds setup the same way, with logs and branches and hay - it's a lot more common thing actually. However small slopes and mounds on their own have a number of advantages: catching more heat when Sun is low on the horizon, and less in the summer/midday, and better drainage of any excess water - soil will never turn into mud, so less chances of roots rotting when there's too much rain - and there's also more air circulation around plants. However for smaller plants to get enough of the sun it takes more planning how to position them, as one side is always in shade. Slopes catch less rain, so in dry areas you need densely planted small plants or grass to catch it, and water that runs down needs to be channeled to accumulate on the bottom of the slope. Also, when planting and doing composting at the same time one needs to be careful that decomposition doesn't go too fast because the heat released in the process can hurt the roots, too.

gdubs (0) : I’ve been considering hugelkultur as one option for the massive amount of poplar we will soon have on our hands. It’s taking over, and a hazard to our structures, so it’s gotta come down. (We’ll replace with more appropriate trees.) My one concern is that the poplar will simply start sprouting again. It root-suckers, aggressively.

One other thing to note is that if you do anything on a slope, it would be wise to at least chat with a structural engineer about it. I’ve heard tale of people building hugel mounds on contour / swales, and basically creating landslide conditions.

Edit: another thing I’m curious is how advantageous the water retention actually is. A lot of species really want a lot of drainage, and won’t survive with wet feet.

dendroverse (0) : To reduce root suckers cut the tree in the fall and apply an herbicide to the cut. The root system will pull the herbicide as it would have the carbon from the leaves. This will kill the root system and suckers.

gdubs (0) : Sure, but then you’ve got tree-killing herbicide in hour hugel-mound...

foxhop (0) : On a small scale you can try hugelkultur in a pot. Works great for nursery baby trees. The baby trees root I to the log and use it to regulate water and also form relationships with the fungi decomposing the wood. Use plenty of Compost.

biztos (0) : I wonder:

1. Is this effective without "sod," i.e. can you just shovel your local dirt onto it?

2. Would it work with wood chips?

The second point is interesting to me because I know someone who's about to come into a large quantity of 100% organic natural pine chips and has no idea what to do with them, other than pay someone to take them to the dump.

oh_sigh (0) : Grassed over improves water entry to the hill (instead of forming small streams and running downhill as it might on a dirt hill), and also prevents erosion.

It would work with wood chips just fine, but you may want to supplement with actual logs as well. Otherwise you'll need to build your hill very high, or keep rebuilding the hill for a few years(a pile of wood chips has way more air in it than a log, and will compress way more than log would).

markdown (0) : Wood chips would work better for the short term, but for long-term use (on the scale of 1-3 decades), using logs would be better.

aliswe (0) : Hugelbeds are said to be "needed" of rebuilding in about 3 years before their production efficiency deteriorates

Edit: That said I agree with the short term distinction for wood chips.

Edit 2: I'm guessing the 3 year thing comes from the breaking down of everything except the logs.

alexose (0) : Lots of gardeners would love to take those wood chips off his hands! There's even a clever startup for this exact problem (see: https://getchipdrop.com/)

sidpatil (0) : Composting is one of the most fascinating and useful technologies in existence—it is an environmentally-friendly method for organic waste management, resulting in a product with uses in agriculture, land/water management, and environmental remediation. I don't know why we don't do much more of it.

ethanwillis (0) : I think there just arent a lot of big businesses built around it. I'm actually planning on starting a compost business next summer. I've been planning out the process for the past 6-8 months and my go to market plan for it.

maxerickson (0) : How will you sterilize it?

Bad to remove the bacteria. Good to not spread invasive species like worms and such.

ethanwillis (0) : That's a really good question that I don't have a solid answer to at the moment. The specific type of composting I'm doing is two phase.

First I'm doing an anaerobic phase and then taking the output of that, pH balancing it if necessary, then feeding it to composting worms I've been breeding. Then I take the worm castings from them and bag that up.

The initial source is really the problem. I'm taking local yard waste so it should be fine to redistribute locally, but sending it out further to other areas of the country could pose a problem.

Ideally the anaerobic phase of the composting process should kill any invasive species in the compost, but maybe it won't. I know typically people go for an aerobic composting process and bank on the heat killing any pathogens in the compost.

ldiracdelta (0) : In USA the ship has sailed on European earthworms a loooong time ago. Combating that is like hitting a river with a stick.

pfdietz (0) : Well, we could import that giant leech that eats earthworms. :)

AareyBaba (0) : Then we could need cane toads to eat the leeches!

ethanwillis (0) : I think I've read this book.. eventually a lady will have to eat an elephant

maxerickson (0) : I didn't say "European earthworms", I said "worms and such". It's probably an okay idea to just slow the spread of various earthworms from Asia.

There's lots of things that live in soil. We don't have to help them spread.

tomjakubowski (0) : Sorry for the off topic tangent but your juxtaposition makes me wonder, are there species of bacteria that have been considered "invasive" on geographic scales? Like, one inadvertently brought by humans from one place to another, where they are now endemic and have disrupted the local ecosystem.

jaggederest (0) : The classic example is old world / new world diseases. I believe syphilis is largely a new world disease, and athlete's foot was largely an old-world disease, along with of course smallpox, typhus, measles, etc.

https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/qian/resources/...

ldiracdelta (0) : I think there are quite a few such businesses, but maybe not in your area. I grew up going to such places with my Dad way back to the 80s. There is prior art before you take the plunge :-)

aidos (0) : I’m only just starting to get into gardening and we have a lot of garden waste to try to deal with (including a lot left by the previous owners). In the last few places I’ve lived, the previous occupants have always left a big pile of garden waste and it’s just sat there. Turns out you actually need to put in some effort to make compost - it’s really a big organic system that needs nurturing. Also, it does take a long time; months to years, apparently - but I’m not quite there yet so I’m no expert.

carapace (0) : > a big pile of garden waste

That's called a midden and it's a great way to get rats.

alexose (0) : There are so many opinions on how to compost that it can be hard to know where to start!

In this gardener's opinion, however, Charles Dowdings' teachings on compost are absolutely fantastic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kf6CGj7xpFE

kampsduac (0) : It takes nurturing if you want to speed up the process, but this is optional.

If you have long-standing piles of organic matter in a sunny location, make a garden bed there and you'll be blown away by how fertile the soil is.

alexose (0) : I agree, compost is amazing!

I'm a small-scale farmer (maybe a large-scale gardener?), and one thing I've found about composting is that you just need a lot of material. Even at my small scale, it's almost an overwhelming amount of work to bring in the necessary inputs, or even just to move it around.

One reason people turn to synthetic fertilizer, I think, is because of how incredibly nutrient-dense it is. A 30 pound bag of 20-20-20 fertilizer has a similar amount of nitrogen as an entire pickup truck bed of horse manure. If you've loaded/unloaded a pickup full of manure several times, you start to see synthetic fertilizers very differently :)

A lovely aspect of hugelkultur is how little labor it requires over time, and how it uses logs as its main input. Logs are easy to find, easy to move, and decompose over many years if used this way.

themgt (0) : I have a garden in a front-yard with rock-hard clay. I'm no ideologue and still use synthetic fertilizer, but composting has been fantastic as well.

First of all, after recycling and composting, I have very little trash waste - maybe a 10 gallon trash bag every couple weeks. Even junk mail and most packaging goes in the compost. Every so often driving by Starbucks I'll grab some of their giant "Grounds for Your Garden" bags and add that in too, and so the overall volume of compost is pretty high.

After digging into the rock-clay a foot or two, I add soil+compost+logs and line each bed with logs that hold its shape but also compost into the ground over time. As you say I've put in very little effort after the initial, but the improvement over a few years in the entire yard has been dramatic - it's basically been brought back to life.

The loop from garbage -> compost -> plant food -> my food is great, honestly makes me feel better about garbage. Highly recommended pandemic project.

pascalxus (0) : i totally agree. I haven't seen a single apartment complex with a community compost area, even here in supposedly green california.

It should be a standard thing that's everywhere, like parks. and whoever's stopping by can vaulunteer to do the turning, once in a while or there can be a sign up sheet.

Gardeners like myself would kill to get a good compost for our gardens.

hnick (0) : You can even cook with with!

One of the traditional ways to make black garlic is to tie it in a jar and bury it in compost which cooks it low and slow over weeks.

ip26 (0) : At an industrial/commercial scale, there are probably significant challenges ensuring your input stream is all actually compostable. The same sort of problem faced by recycling- which impairs its commercial viability.

That said, my county is planning on building a commercial compost facility as part of a strategy to stop spending money building landfills. 50% of our current non-recycling waste stream is allegedly compostable. I hope it pans out.

pfdietz (0) : The local organic grocery switched from polypropylene to compostable cardboard for the containers for their hot food bar. Sounds good, right?

But why is it that sauces and oils don't soak into this "compostable" cardboard? Let's dig a bit on the net... hmm. The cardboard is coated with perfluoroalkanoates, chemicals similar to the old Scotchguard that won't break down even in a compost pile. Oh dear.

alexose (0) : Good point. I wish we could decide as a society to move away from non-compostable packaging. In most cases, composting seems to be a better, cheaper, and less energy intensive solution than recycling.

I have to give Amazon a lot credit towards this effort. They never use glossy cardboard (yay!), and their tape actually breaks down in my compost heap (although the labels don't). I recently got one of their new bubble envelopes, too, which appear to be made out of thick paper and cellulose. Super cool.

genericone (0) : At commercial scale, I think what is done on more modern farms is cover cropping after a cash crop is harvested, with a winter that kills the cover crop before seeds develop. Before is dies and becomes a thin compost residue layer, the cover crop is photosynthesising and converting carbon dioxide into carbon and other nutrients which exude through the roots into the soils, keeping the microbiology alive for the spring crop. That live soil is going to be as good as compost, and it doesn't need to be disturbed like compost normally is.

wcerfgba (0) : Y'all might find this project I discovered recently interesting :) https://www.makesoil.org/

fluffernutter (0) : This will become useful for my move away from the Bay.

carapace (0) : The forums there are lively and civil.

brainzap (0) : Hügelkultur

mahaganapati (0) : Or Huegelkultur

everybodyknows (0) : Hügel: hill or mound

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/german-english/...

contingencies (0) : I wonder if there are any cultures that aren't associated with hills?

koonsolo (0) : It's a nice theory, but in practice I see an issue with water.

I have a raised part in my garden (just dirt, no wood below it), and the bushes on there have a hard time growing, simply because that hill is really terrible at collecting water.

schmichael (0) : Hugelkultur is neat and if it works for you that's great. However there's little to no rigorous science behind it and traditional raised beds have some advantages (although some disadvantages).

http://pubs.cahnrs.wsu.edu/publications/pubs/fs283e/

On a hike the other day I was excited to see "natural hugelkultur" at many stages of development: fallen trees along the trail at Barlow Wayside near Portland, OR create earthy berms. You can see every stage of decomposition: newly fallen trees, fallen trees with ample ferns and seedlings sprouting, and earthen berms covered in vegetation that are basically hugelkultur.

Herodotus38 (0) : Thanks. That was a great link and had what I feel is a very reasonable, skeptical but also nice tone that explores the history behind this and the actual evidence behind it. It also gave me a rabbit hole of links to explore regarding evidence based self-sufficient gardening.

coronadisaster (0) : I had 3 pepper plants in pots (raised bed) and planted 2 of them in the ground and 6 months later the one in the pot is still doing good but the 2 others died (all watered the same and next to each other)... There could be many reasons why that is but they appear to grow better in pots

minerjoe (0) : The nurse log [1] is well studied and the hugel gets much of it's benefit from the same ecological processes.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurse_log

jhoechtl (0) : Beneficial to those plants which do not belong to the sort of early succession. They need disturbed sites and bare soil.

Some of the bread and butter trees of aggro-forrestry establish better on bare soil rather than a thick layer of humus from decaying trees.

schmichael (0) : Ah thanks for the link! I didn't know the term for "natural hugelkultur."

I don't mean to denigrate hugelkultur, rather just point out it's a folk practice based on mimicking a well understood natural process. Since it's largely used for hobby farms and gardens where enjoyment is far more important than yield, it hardly matters whether it's a folk practice or the latest agtech discovery. Just be careful not to cause drainage issues with all those berms slowly eroding! Nature can take advantage of that process optimally while in your yard it might just cause a damper basement.

carapace (0) : From the link you gave:

> "Then the earth itself will have the tendency to come inwardly alive and become akin to the vegetative."

> ~ the term [hügelkultur] first appears in a 1962 German brochure written by avid gardener Herrman Andrä.

This captures the crucial point: soil is a kind of organism.

The corollary: farm the soil and the soil grows the plants.

NedFlaymer (0) : A good bit about food production has never been accounted for in "scientific" tests.

Science is about rigorous observation. Is reductionism the only technique that is valid for understanding ALL phenomenon? Seems like this consideration has not been applied all too rigorously.

As for reductionism: when dealing in this sphere it has thus far proven itself to be, well, limited, at least in providing a comprehensive understanding of food systems.

The understanding that is applied to food science, that has any merit, comes from botany, ecology, climatology. IMHO the best food science comes from the likes of Sepp Holzer and bill mollison, who at least the latter is an actual scientist.

The military food scientists thus far have not ss done well at applying most scientific advancements to the domain.

Since all war scientists started applying their trade to food production in the fifties, it's been one fiasco after the next. Empirically speaking, chemical, genetic, and mechanical intervention (so called enhancements) is meme science. If you study up on it, you'll see that there is plenty of empirical evidence that the genetically selected rice and wheat grains pushed on Eastern Asia were worse on almost all counts than their traditional seed. After more than a decade and a half of failure, they showed some marginal benefit, but only if the right amount of fertilizer was applied during a period of extraordinarily ideal environmental circumstancses-- and this is what it boils down to: chemical companies wanting to sell fertilizer and pesticides. Asian farmers kept planting these grains because they received subsidies backed by the local and US governments to buy fertilizer, machines, and pesticides, and received favorable purchasing conditions for providing the right variety of grain. After getting locked in, or facing bankruptcy, many times they dont have a choice but to continue. The results are there, refer to Food Production in the 21st Century. It was written in the mid nineties by an academic worthy of your time if you have any interest in this topic.

If there is political motivation muddying up your science at the institutional level, it's not going to be rigorous.

cellular (0) : Yes! Observation is what made me forget about well drained raised beds in Texas! Now, I waterproof my raised beds to keep in moisture. They are so much better! It's crazy to have conventional raised beds in Texas! I make YouTube videos about it. https://youtu.be/HrVOONqgdsE

lindaberry (0) : Hello guys I’m Linda from Georgia looking for serious relationship here’s my email lindaberry229@gmail.com

lindaberry (0) : Chat me up on my hangout lindaberry229@gmail.com

blisterpeanuts (0) : Hügelkultur is fascinating. Early this year, my kid and I built an 8'x4'x2' Hügelkultur raised bed for vegetables. We're fortunate to have some fallen trees and rotting logs in the back of the yard, and we were able to fill the first foot of the bed with this debris, then regular soil and compost.

The plants are thriving and producing plenty of edibles, and now I'm thinking about building a second one.

The most interesting discovery is that the bed seems not to require much moisture. I was watering it every day for a while, until it seemed that it was turning into a big mud pit, so I stopped, and the plants have continued to thrive.

I also built a drip irrigation system into the bed, very easy to do actually, but have not turned it on for the same reason. The ecosystem seems to retain water and is not draining moisture into the ground nearly as much as I first anticipated.

If you build a raised bed, it's a good idea to put in 1/4" (1 cm) metal mesh at the bottom and up the sides a bit, to discourage burrowing creatures. Then add a layer of cardboard (old pizza boxes or shipping boxes work fine), followed by your Hügelkultur logs and branches, and finally some decent organic raised bed soil and quality compost.

Another lesson: this system is heavy. Make sure you use strong wood and solid construction techniques. To do it again, I would add more reinforcing beams, because a couple of the side panels are starting to bulge a bit. I will be patching them with struts later this year, probably.

Another interesting discovery: Hügelkultur is conducive to slime molds. I noticed this weird, alien life form appearing overnight and had to ask in a gardening forum: yellowish domes of soft, fungus-like stuff. It turns out to be Fuligo septica, commonly known as dog vomit slime mold (any players of Hack out there?). It's harmless and even beneficial, but looks horrible.

I've started using Hügelkultur in my patio buckets and ceramic pots as well; half the pot gets the rotting sticks, then top it off with dirt. Thus far, these pots are doing very well.

In this era of uncertainty, growing your own food is a great idea, and it's good to see such brilliant ideas as Hügelkultur and square-foot gardening being widely disseminated.

Probably next year we're getting chickens.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuligo_septica

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[Epistemic status: Pretty good, but I make no claim this is original]

A neglected gem from Less Wrong: Why The Tails Come Apart, by commenter Thrasymachus. It explains why even when two variables are strongly correlated, the most extreme value of one will rarely be the most extreme value of the other. Take these graphs of grip strength vs. arm strength and reading score vs. writing score:

In a pinch, the second graph can also serve as a rough map of Afghanistan

Grip strength is strongly correlated with arm strength. But the person with the strongest arm doesn’t have the strongest grip. He’s up there, but a couple of people clearly beat him. Reading and writing scores are even less correlated, and some of the people with the best reading scores aren’t even close to being best at writing.

Thrasymachus gives an intuitive geometric explanation of why this should be; I can’t beat it, so I’ll just copy it outright:

I thought about this last week when I read this article on happiness research.

The summary: if you ask people to “value their lives today on a 0 to 10 scale, with the worst possible life as a 0 and the best possible life as a 10”, you will find that Scandinavian countries are the happiest in the world.

But if you ask people “how much positive emotion do you experience?”, you will find that Latin American countries are the happiest in the world.

If you check where people are the least depressed, you will find Australia starts looking very good.

And if you ask “how meaningful would you rate your life?” you find that African countries are the happiest in the world.

It’s tempting to completely dismiss “happiness” as a concept at all, but that’s not right either. Who’s happier: a millionaire with a loving family who lives in a beautiful mansion in the forest and spends all his time hiking and surfing and playing with his kids? Or a prisoner in a maximum security jail with chronic pain? If we can all agree on the millionaire – and who wouldn’t? – happiness has to at least sort of be a real concept.

The solution is to understand words as hidden inferences – they refer to a multidimensional correlation rather than to a single cohesive property. So for example, we have the word “strength”, which combines grip strength and arm strength (and many other things). These variables really are heavily correlated (see the graph above), so it’s almost always worthwhile to just refer to people as being strong or weak. I can say “Mike Tyson is stronger than an 80 year old woman”, and this is better than having to say “Mike Tyson has higher grip strength, arm strength, leg strength, torso strength, and ten other different kinds of strength than an 80 year old woman.” This is necessary to communicate anything at all and given how nicely all forms of strength correlate there’s no reason not to do it.

But the tails still come apart. If we ask whether Mike Tyson is stronger than some other very impressive strong person, the answer might very well be “He has better arm strength, but worse grip strength”.

Happiness must be the same way. It’s an amalgam between a bunch of correlated properties like your subjective well-being at any given moment, and the amount of positive emotions you feel, and how meaningful your life is, et cetera. And each of those correlated is also an amalgam, and so on to infinity.

And crucially, it’s not an amalgam in the sense of “add subjective well-being, amount of positive emotions, and meaningfulness and divide by three”. It’s an unprincipled conflation of these that just denies they’re different at all.

Think of the way children learn what happiness is. I don’t actually know how children learn things, but I imagine something like this. The child sees the millionaire with the loving family, and her dad says “That guy must be very happy!”. Then she sees the prisoner with chronic pain, and her mom says “That guy must be very sad”. Repeat enough times and the kid has learned “happiness”.

Has she learned that it’s made out of subjective well-being, or out of amount of positive emotion? I don’t know; the learning process doesn’t determine that. But then if you show her a Finn who has lots of subjective well-being but little positive emotion, and a Costa Rican who has lots of positive emotion but little subjective well-being, and you ask which is happier, for some reason she’ll have an opinion. Probably some random variation in initial conditions has caused her to have a model favoring one definition or the other, and it doesn’t matter until you go out to the tails. To tie it to the same kind of graph as in the original post:

And to show how the individual differences work:

I am sorry about this graph, I really am. But imagine that one person, presented with the scatter plot and asked to understand the concept “happiness” from it, draws it as the thick red line (further towards the top right part of the line = more happiness), and a second person trying to the same task generates the thick green line. Ask the first person whether Finland or Costa Rica is happier, and they’ll say Finland: on the red coordinate system, Finland is at 5, but Costa Rica is at 4. Ask the second person, and they’ll say Costa Rica: on the green coordinate system, Costa Rica is at 5, and Finland is at 4 and a half. Did I mention I’m sorry about the graph?

But isn’t the line of best fit (here more or less y = x = the cyan line) the objective correct answer? Only in this metaphor where we’re imagining positive emotion and subjective well-being are both objectively quantifiable, and exactly equally important. In the real world, where we have no idea how to quantify any of this and we’re going off vague impressions, I would hate to be the person tasked with deciding whether the red or green line was more objectively correct.

In most real-world situations Mr. Red and Ms. Green will give the same answers to happiness-related questions. Is Costa Rica happier than North Korea? “Obviously,” the both say in union. If the tails only come apart a little, their answers to 99.9% of happiness-related questions might be the same, so much so that they could never realize they had slightly different concepts of happiness at all.

(is this just reinventing Quine? I’m not sure. If it is, then whatever, my contribution is the ridiculous graphs.)

Perhaps I am also reinventing the model of categorization discussed in How An Algorithm Feels From The Inside, Dissolving Questions About Disease, and The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories.

But I think there’s another interpretation. It’s not just that “quality of life”, “positive emotions”, and “meaningfulness” are three contributors which each give 33% of the activation to our central node of “happiness”. It’s that we got some training data – the prisoner is unhappy, the millionaire is happy – and used it to build a classifier that told us what happiness was. The training data was ambiguous enough that different people built different classifiers. Maybe one person built a classifier that was based entirely on quality-of-life, and a second person built a classifier based entirely around positive emotions. Then we loaded that with all the social valence of the word “happiness”, which we naively expected to transfer across paradigms.

This leads to (to steal words from Taleb) a Mediocristan resembling the training data where the category works fine, vs. an Extremistan where everything comes apart. And nowhere does this become more obvious than in what this blog post has secretly been about the whole time – morality.

The morality of Mediocristan is mostly uncontroversial. It doesn’t matter what moral system you use, because all moral systems were trained on the same set of Mediocristani data and give mostly the same results in this area. Stealing from the poor is bad. Donating to charity is good. A lot of what we mean when we say a moral system sounds plausible is that it best fits our Mediocristani data that we all agree upon. This is a lot like what we mean when we say that “quality of life”, “positive emotions”, and “meaningfulness” are all decent definitions of happiness; they all fit the training data.

The further we go toward the tails, the more extreme the divergences become. Utilitarianism agrees that we should give to charity and shouldn’t steal from the poor, because Utility, but take it far enough to the tails and we should tile the universe with rats on heroin. Religious morality agrees that we should give to charity and shouldn’t steal from the poor, because God, but take it far enough to the tails and we should spend all our time in giant cubes made of semiprecious stones singing songs of praise. Deontology agrees that we should give to charity and shouldn’t steal from the poor, because Rules, but take it far enough to the tails and we all have to be libertarians.

I have to admit, I don’t know if the tails coming apart is even the right metaphor anymore. People with great grip strength still had pretty good arm strength. But I doubt these moral systems form an ellipse; converting the mass of the universe into nervous tissue experiencing euphoria isn’t just the second-best outcome from a religious perspective, it’s completely abominable. I don’t know how to describe this mathematically, but the terrain looks less like tails coming apart and more like the Bay Area transit system:

Mediocristan is like the route from Balboa Park to West Oakland, where it doesn’t matter what line you’re on because they’re all going to the same place. Then suddenly you enter Extremistan, where if you took the Red Line you’ll end up in Richmond, and if you took the Green Line you’ll end up in Warm Springs, on totally opposite sides of the map.

Our innate moral classifier has been trained on the Balboa Park – West Oakland route. Some of us think morality means “follow the Red Line”, and others think “follow the Green Line”, but it doesn’t matter, because we all agree on the same route.

When people talk about how we should arrange the world after the Singularity when we’re all omnipotent, suddenly we’re way past West Oakland, and everyone’s moral intuitions hopelessly diverge.

But it’s even worse than that, because even within myself, my moral intuitions are something like “Do the thing which follows the Red Line, and the Green Line, and the Yellow Line…you know, that thing!” And so when I’m faced with something that perfectly follows the Red Line, but goes the opposite directions as the Green Line, it seems repugnant even to me, as does the opposite tactic of following the Green Line. As long as creating and destroying people is hard, utilitarianism works fine, but make it easier, and suddenly your Standard Utilitarian Path diverges into Pronatal Total Utilitarianism vs. Antinatalist Utilitarianism and they both seem awful. If our degree of moral repugnance is the degree to which we’re violating our moral principles, and my moral principle is “Follow both the Red Line and the Green Line”, then after passing West Oakland I either have to end up in Richmond (and feel awful because of how distant I am from Green), or in Warm Springs (and feel awful because of how distant I am from Red).

This is why I feel like figuring out a morality that can survive transhuman scenarios is harder than just finding the Real Moral System That We Actually Use. There’s a potentially impossible conceptual problem here, of figuring out what to do with the fact that any moral rule followed to infinity will diverge from large parts of what we mean by morality.

This is only a problem for ethical subjectivists like myself, who think that we’re doing something that has to do with what our conception of morality is. If you’re an ethical naturalist, by all means, just do the thing that’s actually ethical.

When Lovecraft wrote that “we live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far”, I interpret him as talking about the region from Balboa Park to West Oakland on the map above. Go outside of it and your concepts break down and you don’t know what to do. He was right about the island, but exactly wrong about its causes – the most merciful thing in the world is how so far we have managed to stay in the area where the human mind can correlate its contents.

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