Hugelkultur 101

 Hello and Welcome!

My first topic will be a Gardening project, the best way to enter to somebody´s life, through the roots! 

I have been living in California for the past 2 years, in a beautifull farm, where Community was once their stamp, and now we have legacy and a bunch of new age hippies doing what we can! :) 

I am originally from Spain, so excuse my language and if you cant grab my irony/jokes.

So, back to the Gardening project. yes! Hugelkultur. 

We are basically copiying Natures way, over and over again.. This technique which is basically growing over a mound of wood, has been used in Germany for the last couple of hundred years. It has been written down and developed by a philosopher/clairvoyant/architect/superhuman Rudolf Steiner, in which he praises receiving this technique in one of his clairvoyance journeys. 

So, thinking simply, when we look at our soil in a forest, we will have wood logs, which will rott and from there new vegetation will grow. when we think of rotten wood a bit buried in the earth we usually find Humidity!, and thats exactly what we need to grow plants... Nutrition+Humidity= Life (simple asumption... :) )

Now, lets imagine we get a bunch of these beautifull hard and rotting logs and we stack them together, we willl add some  branches, soil, some leaves and green manure (for those high tech, some compost) , and then cover it up with soil again. We played God and created a small little mountain ready to thrive!            Not only, you have increased your planting surface by creating a mound, but you are also creating a source of water conservation, where water will be retained in the logs, and a constant source of nutrients as all this vegetal matter will be composting. And instead of this Carbon being released to the atmosphere through burning, you are reintroducing it into the soil web. Boom! 

Genius, right? Well, so when i read about this, i couldnt wait to put my hands into action. I had to wait to gather all my vegies and wait till my garden was ready for a change, and on December 2020(North California is famous for Indian Summer, so we have good weather until nov/Dec), in the middle of an Apocaliptic pandemic, I decide to change my whole garden and start creating mounds, and ditches, and even change the direction of my garden. 

Its been 3 days now, a couple of developed hernias on my back and a nice afternoon with girlfriends working on the Garden, One mound is done, I even planted it and got well visited by hungry neighbour Rabbits. The second mound is still to go, as they are on a slope, i want to increase the height more and more, so my hernia will not affect me in the near future. ha! 

It is a gorgeous process of "tetriying"and intertwinning different logs and branches, heading to the forest and finding them, watching all this life that is exists in these different logs, from mushrooms, to salamanders, spiders,... . And layer after layer we are recreating the PachaMama & cleaning the forest of woods which can increase fires. 

Im looking forward to start planting veggies, I will definetly get some winter crop, Broccolis, Bak Choi and some garlics in there. Some cover crop to retain the soil, and ready to see magic happen. 

Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed and Ill keep you posted with what comes up or down!

xx