Garden Update: Hugelkultur, Plant Starts, and Sage Gone Wild

Happy almost weekend! I thought I’d leave you with some garden pretties and a compromise. I recently shared how I had decided not to plant any annuals in the backyard this year. We have plenty of perennials, but I just don’t feel like watering veggies every day in the heat of summer. For some reason, I enjoy watering the front yard gardens, but this year, I dread having to do the same out back.

On Memorial Day Weekend, David and I went to the Kalamazoo Farmers Market and picked up some amazing fresh produce, plus oyster and maitake mushrooms, and a bunch of plant starts to tuck among the perennials up front. You can see the top/house-side of our cascading planter with newly added Russian kale, Japanese eggplant, dinosaur kale, trailing rosemary, and Thai basil rounding out the existing purple salvia, hyssop, and reseeded bachelor’s buttons.

Together, the beds up front house all sorts of perennial herbs and flowers, as well as being on last fall’s rotation for planting homegrown garlic. I allow parsley, cilantro, and arugula to reseed themselves so often that they might as well be perennials.

The garden sage has gone wild!

That sage comes from a rooted cutting of sage in my Goshen garden, which arrived in an over-wintered indoor pot from our Madison garden before that. In other words, that sage is at least thirteen years old. It sits in a five-gallon Smart Pot I bought in 2017 when we first moved here.

My plan was to go easy on the gardening this year and spend the liberated time on book research. Well, CPL (aka Crazy Plant Lady) had other plans. The farmers market food was good, but–as I told David–“I like what I like.” There are just certain varieties of veggies that I love. I also adore making salads with just-harvested lettuce. And peppers! Those freshly picked baby peppers are so yummy in red beans and rice. You never know when you might need an extra tomato beyond what you picked up at the store, and one can never have enough collards.

I realized that I couldn’t fit everything I want to harvest in the beds up front. Plus, that area is largely off the groundhog radar, and I’d like to keep it that way. If I put too many recognizable edibles up there and only up there, then it might turn into the new norm for those hungry little invaders. I add hot pepper flakes and use David’s pee around the perimeter, but I started to rethink my earlier intention to downsize.

A plan began to form in my head. I kept seeing the firewood that didn’t make David’s cut sitting in five-gallon buckets behind our shed. Those have rotted down for an extra year and a half. If I bury them in the long garden trough out back, the wood will–in theory–absorb and store the water that would otherwise drain out of the trough. Then, it can act as a slow release sponge for any plants in that trough. My idea was a variation on hugelkultur (pronounced hoo-gul-culture), which you can learn more about here.

I didn’t create the usual freestanding berm over piled up logs. Rather, I unloaded soil, added the rotting firewood near the river rock-lined bottom of the trough, and then covered the wood with compost from one of our rolling composters. (That’s the black tire-looking thing above.) I’m not sure exactly how long the hugulkultur portion took, but weeding the trellised bed and doing this trough project took about two hours total. All in all, much faster than anticipated. I then reattached the little fencing that doesn’t fool any critters, added the bean trellises, and planted some extra collards, Russian and dinosaur kale, and cucumbers in the bed.

Since the first year of a hugelkultur bed can rob nitrogen from the soil, I amended it with all sorts of goodies from our shed. I will intermingle a bunch of bush and climbing beans, which fix nitrogen into the soil. That’s an old permaculture and wood mulch gardening trick when you want faster benefits from rotting wood. I’ll have to go through all the seeds I bought in January to see which plants can fit into the remaining spots I have up front and in the trough. I hope that I can get away with watering the trough every other or even every third or fourth day.

I call this a compromise, because although I did plant annuals out back, in theory, it won’t add much time to my mornings. I decided not to plant the Garden Tower this year, since that needs more frequent watering. I also need to change out the soil since I let mosaic virus get out of hand on the Garden Tower beans last year. Plus, the protective mesh cage that keeps out the critters and cabbage moths collapsed in our blizzard this past winter. We had a new one already to go, but between unloading the soil, sterilizing the GT, then reloading, and watering and turning it each day … well … that’s more than I want to do this year.

If things go crazy in the world, or if I miss the extra produce, I can always plant a late summer or fall crop. For now, I’m happy with the weeded raised bed …

… and the newly hugelkultur’d and planted trough. Bring on the yummies!

How grows your garden this year?