Building a Dryland Hugelkultur: Water-Wise Gardening for Arid Climates

High Desert Permaculture: Implementing Hugelkultur at Stony Oasis Farms

It was a beautiful early spring day up on Stony Oasis Farms....leaves just budding out on all the trees I have planted in my food forest. I cannot express how much I am looking forward to living there...it is my personal Oasis!

This is the second Dryland Hugelkultur I have built up on Stony Oasis farms, with many more to follow. You can see the big pile of brush in the image above....all that brush will end up pushed down into the ditch (I used the excavator for that) I am digging then burned to create both ash, and bio-char.

I then start adding amendments, and soil back into the ditch. here is the brush burning...creating the bio char... it is amazing how much brush you can burn and still not take up much room.

I actually forgot about adding the natural compost I can get up there. You can read about that over on Just Cannabis Seed. JCS is how I generate funds to do everything I will be doing up there. Here is that link, which will open in a new tab....Guerrilla Composting Onsite: The No-Turn Guerrilla Method.

Amending the Dryland Hugelkultur

I am all about creating a planting bed which will not only feed whatever plants I plant in it, but also continue to feed plants for years to come. Here are some of the amendments I have added to this bed...

Ammendments I used in this dryland hugelkultur...

• Kelp Meal (micro nutrients)
• Bone Meal (potassium)
• Blood Meal (nitrogen)
• Dolimate Lime (sweeten the mountain soil just a bit)
• Organic Plus Potting Soil (cheap, but good)
• Natural compost I will collect and use in each planting hole
• Ash from burning brush in the ditch
• Bio-Char created when I burned the brush
• Unburned woody debris (slowly releases nutrients, and holds water)

Conclusion

This is the second Hugelkultur I have build up there, and there will be many more to follow, I have an awesome customer who has decided to help me out up there by buying me many bare root fruit trees...thank you Christopher!!!

The next Hugelkultur I build will be for these trees. I expect the trees and any deep rooted plants to respond well to this technique, and I will share successes, and any failures right here on Stony Oasis.

Do you have any experience with this planting method? Have you ever built one and used it? Tell me about it! I love chatting about off-grid, permaculture topics.