FOR NEARLY 30 YEARS I have grown my vegetables in raised beds, but the kind that you need to purchase lumber and bolts and use a saw and hammer to construct, then fill entirely with soil and compost. Lately I’ve been looking longingly at photos of a centuries-old, sustainable way of making raised garden beds called hugelkultur, or hill culture.
“It’s like sheet mulching or lasagna gardening,” says Dave Whitinger of the National Gardening Association, who regularly lectures on the subject, but in hugelkultur, “wood is the first level of your sheet-mulched bed.” That’s his robust hugelkultur onion bed up top.
Read along as you listen to the April 22, 2013 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or Spotify or Stitcher (and browse my archive of podcasts here).
my hugelkultur q&a with dave whitingerFOR DAVE (above), the idea of this style of recycling came from a walk in the forest—from the observation about how spongy and alive the ground is from all the years of fallen wood and leaves, and his wanting to emulate that. With some research, he and his wife found that it wasn’t a new idea, and that hill or mound beds with a woody base layer had been around for hundreds of years.
A Texas accent notwithstanding (Dave gardens and farms in East Texas, in Zone 8B), he tells me that hugelkultur is pronounced “HOO-gul-culture.” It’s a permaculture-style practice that uses woody debris including branches, twigs, and even logs as a resource, rather than burning them or removing them.
By capitalizing on woody debris, Dave says, you’re not importing and not exporting things, either–in other words, acting sustainably. “If you burn wood, you’re literally exporting
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Ah, garden dreams. We all have them. You drive by someone’s front yard and gasp at how original, yet welcoming it is. Or you go to a friend’s garden party and get positively green with envy over their, well, greenery and the overall flow of the space. To achieve such greatness, you decide you need to hire a landscape designer. And then you realize you have no idea what to do next.
In Yorkshire we are lucky to have several gardens designed using the theme of a Himalayan Garden. The Hut near Ripon at Grewlthorpe is  ‘The Himalayan Garden’ with all the plants you would expect in such a setting including
Holland Park has some Zen like features but fails my Zen test. The classic elements of a successful Zen are stone, sand or gravel, water, plants and space. Then there is a question of balance between yin and yang. Cramped or cluttered gardens inhibit the flow of spirit so space is potentially the key ingredient of a Zen garden.
Not what you would expect for a garden called ‘The Phoenix Garden’ in the middle of Tottenham Court Road near Crown Point. It isn’t a phoenix from the ashes of a great fire or a WW11 bomb site at but was built on a disused car park in the 1980s. It may be part of an overflowing burial ground for St Giles-in-the-field church back in the 1600s and is reputed to be the last surviving Covent ‘Garden’. The entrance is located in St Giles Passage
My name is John Rohde. My garden is located 15 miles north of Baltimore in Towson, Maryland, in Zone 7b. This is the second full year for this pandemic garden. I enjoy mixing annuals and perennials with trees and tropicals in containers. There is a water feature, tubs of lotus, a patio, and a vegetable garden at the rear of my house.
Garden Sprouts is a program I run at the South Carolina Botanical Garden that is designed for preschoolers and caregivers. This class takes place once a week for three months every spring and fall. The goal is to share age-appropriate nature-based activities with children, who are mostly three to five years old, but sometimes younger or older. Over time I have learned the caregivers also learn things they never knew, enjoy the activities immensely, and are able to connect more deeply to the natural world through this program. The structure of this hour-long program is three-fold, we begin inside with a book related to the theme of the day, a walk or outdoor activity, and finally a craft. In this blog, I would like to share some of the books, outdoor activities, and crafts we have done in this class.
Perennial vines in the genus Vinca have proved to be sturdy and seemingly indestructible groundcovers for the Southeastern Unites States. However, over the past few years, vinca leaf-folder caterpillars have been ravaging landscape plantings of perennial vincas (Vinca major andVinca minor). Both can be infested, but V. major seems to sustain more damage. According to Dr. Matt Bertone, Entomologist at NC State University, this pest is likely Diaphania costata.
Can’t travel right now to see the Chihuahuan Desert in Mexico, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona? Come for a visit to the South Carolina Botanical Garden to see selection of the interesting native plants at the Chihuahuan Desert Garden Display.