Learn how to cultivate thriving fruit trees and gardens even if you don't have the best soil by using the Hugelkultur technique. Tune in to this Tuesday's live radio show and podcast with guest Paul Wheaton from Permies.com.
This month's contest prize is Garden Master Course by Helen Atthowe, an expert in "Beyond-organic" gardening. Valued at $85
This month's contest prize is Garden Master Course by Helen Atthowe, an expert in "Beyond-organic" gardening. Valued at $85
Podcast Prize Amazon Link: https://gardenmastercourse.com/
The host of The Urban Forestry Radio Show and Podcast is Susan Poizner of the fruit tree care education website www.orchardpeople.com. Tune into The Urban Forestry Radio Show LIVE by going to RealityRadio101.com on the last Tuesday of every month at 1.00 pm Eastern Time.
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Creators & Guests
What is Orchard People?
Learn how to grow and care for fruit trees with fruit tree care educator Susan Poizner of OrchardPeople.com. Discover how to create permaculture plantings, food forests, and forest gardens in both urban and rural settings. Meet experts on all aspects of comprehensive fruit tree care, including pruning, pest and disease prevention, fruit tree grafting and budding, and soil management.
Show host Susan Poizner, creator of the fruit tree education website OrchardPeople.com, is an award-winning author of three fruit tree care books and an ISA Certified Arborist. This podcast is the winner of the 2021 GardenComm Silver Award of Achievement for Broadcast Media: Radio Program Overall. Learn more and access archived episodes at https://podcast.orchardpeople.com/.
Learn more about Susan's books and courses at https://learn.orchardpeople.com/books.
Welcome to the Urban Forestry Radio Show. Here on Reality Radio 101. In this radio show and podcast, we learn about fruit trees, permaculture, aboriculture, and so much more. So if you love trees, and especially fruit trees, or if you're interested in living a more sustainable life, then this is the place for you.
I'm your host, Susan Poizner, of the Fruit Tree Care Training website, OrchardPeople. com. Thanks for tuning in.
Welcome to the Urban Forestry Radio Show with your host, Susan Poizner. To contact Susan live right now, send her an email. InStudio101 at gmail. com
And now, right to your host of the Urban Forestry Radio Show, Susan Poizner. Hi everyone. These days it is harder and harder to find the perfect spot for growing fruit trees. You may have a yard with access to full sun, and that's fantastic for most fruit trees, but often the sticking point is really poor quality soil.
In the cities, house construction and other disturbances can leave the soil really hard and lifeless. But in rural areas, things aren't always much better. Farmland is often overused and nutritionally bankrupt. So, as a result, many planting sites just don't have soil that's deep and rich enough to support fruit trees.
So, how can we transform terrible soil into a welcoming home for fruit trees and other plants? Paul Wheaton is my guest on the show today, and he's got some ideas. The magic lies in planting your trees and plants in something called, and this is a fun one to pronounce, hugelkultur. Paul is a permaculture advocate, and you may already know him from his many YouTube videos and his homesteading forum at permies.
com. I'm going to talk to Paul in just a moment, but first, I would love to hear from you. Please do send in your questions or your comments or just an email to say hi during the live show today, and we're going to enter you into today's contest. And this month's prize is a really good one. It's the Garden Master Course by Helen Atao, an expert in beyond organic 85.
So, to enter today's contest, all you have to do is send an email to instudio101 at gmail. com. That's instudio101 at gmail. com and do remember to include your first name and where you are writing from. I look forward to hearing from you soon. So Paul Wheaton, welcome to the show today. Thank you, Susan. I'm glad to be here.
I am so happy that you're here to talk about hugelkultur. Have I said that right? Hugelkultur. I first heard it pronounced hugelkultur, and that seems to be how I hear it the most. I think when I first heard the word, I was attending a PDC and a permaculture design course. And, we actually enjoyed the word so much.
I remember we were hiking someplace and we started all chanting, Hoogle culture, as we were walking along. I don't know. We got, it was weird. It was fun. We had fun. It's fun. It's fun. And it's a bit, Hoogle culture, Hoogle. Okay. I'm gonna, I'm gonna be able to say it good now. So I'm excited. so tell me a little bit about it.
What exactly is it? And where does the term come from? It is, soil on wood, emphasis on soil rather than dirt, but it's soil on wood, always heaped in and in fact, it comes from the German word, which means hill culture. So basically a raised bed garden. however, In the United States, it has evolved to have this meaning, and we're not sure how it got to this point, of meaning that it's a raised bed that contains large pieces of wood, like logs or branches, things of that nature.
Okay, so it's this wood with soil bed. why is this A thing, like, why is it a good thing? What are the benefits? Ah, the benefits are multifaceted. for one thing, a lot of people are very keen these days on biochar. And biochar is excellent in a tropical climate. But when you come to a cooler climate, like where you and I are, Hugelkultur is vastly superior, mostly just because you get all the benefits of, biochar, but with like about a tenth of the effort.
And so we just, take these big blocks of wood and we stick them inside of soil and then boom, we've got all the benefits of biochar and we didn't have to go through all that biochar process. So then, and the benefits are the benefits of biochar and horticulture are that this matter inside of your raised bed is going to provide zillions of parking spaces.
for water and nutrients. So if you make your hugelkultur big enough, tall enough, you can eliminate the need to irrigate entirely. And so one very popular way to think about it is, rather than paying the neighbor kid to kill your garden while you're away, it'll be fine on its own. You don't need to involve the neighbor kid at all.
That sounds really good. Wow, to not have to water. I, love, I do love gardening. I'm not a big fan of watering, even though I feel for my plants, because I know they can't take nourishment out of the soil if they're not well hydrated. But luckily, I have a husband who does that. So that's what husbands are for.
But anyways, so okay, so by putting the wood in we are making parking spaces for water. for nutrients, maybe even for beneficial organisms. And that's definitely going to be good for the plants and trees. So let's say I have a backyard in my city and my, where I live, and I decide, okay, I'd like to test this out.
How much space do I need? And what would I do? What would be the steps involved in creating a little hogul culture garden? So if you're living in town, the average lot is a quarter of an acre and on that quarter of an acre, you got to have a house. So you're left with not very much space to work with.
At the same time, a big ingredient they're going to work with, because when I build a hugelkultur, I build them taller than seven feet tall. And I think. That when you're in town. In fact, when I used to live in town, I built hookah cultures, but I built them only two feet tall. And because I felt like in my backyard, I might be able to do four or five feet and feel like I'm not going to get extra drama from my neighbors.
But where I built my hookah culture, the patch of sun that I had was in that little strip between the sidewalk and the street. And I felt like if I might be able to start off with two feet and in time augmented to give it up to maybe mounted in the middle to three feet and nobody would, it wouldn't bring me any extra drama that I didn't want.
I want to just, I want to be a gardener and have a lovely day. I don't want to entice drama. And so I think when I talk about. So if you're doing hugelkultur in an urban environment, the number one thing that, that, people are concerned about is this drama factor. So, because if you do it seven feet tall, or taller, then you can eliminate your irrigation.
Whereas if you do it three feet tall, you have dramatically reduced your irrigation needs you might only irrigate once a month, instead of never. so. So, that's the thing to keep in mind. So, I would say that if it's in your backyard, I'd be a little bolder and go for four feet. but now here's the, thing to keep in mind when you're trying to think about the size of the hugelkultur that you're about to build, if you build something that is, I'm going to say five feet tall, and it's got very steep sides, then.
The actual footprint on the horizontal ground is also about five feet. So if it's 20 feet long, and it's five feet wide, and then it goes up five feet, the amount of real estate on each side is almost five feet, maybe even five feet, depending on how steep you make it. That means you just doubled your growing space.
You now have 10 feet of space where you could plant, and for people living in an urban environment, so often we go and we plant all our gardens, and our food forests, and things of that nature, and it's I need more space, I've, the seed catalog has seeds I haven't planted yet, the nursery has trees I need to buy and plant!
I need more. And so this, is the way to get more. how tall should you make it? What are the dimensions? That's your question. And I'm saying the bigger, the better, the taller, the more planting space you have. But if you make something 10 feet tall, it could trigger. That's true. That's odd reactions from your neighbors.
On the other hand, if you place it just right, you might be deleting your neighbors in a sense. That's true. Which could be a benefit. With your huckle culture mountain. We've got an email here. Let's see who's it from. From Ellen from Madison, Connecticut. Ellen, Hi Susan. Great show. Would love to be entered into the draw.
Thanks for making this info available. We've got a couple more. We've got a question here from Blaine. Blaine says, and Blaine is from Port Orchard, Washington, just wanting to say, hey, I've listened to dozens of your recorded shows, but this is my first time listening live. Oh my gosh, that's great.
I've got a one year old food forest planted on hogle mounds on swales. And that I just inoculated with wine cap mushrooms to help speed up the breakdown of the logs. Are there other species of mushrooms I can inoculate into my huggle beds that are edible? Looking forward to the show. That's from Blaine.
Oh, good question. Okay, so any answers there about mushrooms? I've been to Port Orchard, but okay, I don't want to talk about Port Orchard a whole bunch. And, as much as I want to talk about mushrooms for the rest of the show, I, I feel like it's very, important for me to address a thing that was mentioned in the question.
And that is Hoogles on swales. So, I want to point out that a swale is a wonderful and terrific thing for a tropical climate. Thank And, and I once recorded a podcast with Jeff Lawton and, and he insisted that a swale is a terrific thing, even in a cold climate. And then I recorded a podcast with him about a year later and he said, I said that and, I've had a year to think about it and I've changed my mind.
So, let's just say that, so I got, so Jeff Lawton agrees with me on this. point. Okay, so I'm just going to dive in here for one second. So we're talking about swales, which means little indentations where water can flow, right? So you've got your huckle count, huckle culture, little hills or big hills if you're you.
but these swales are where the water goes a little bit lower and you're saying it's not a good idea. Is your concern that the water will freeze and then damage plant roots? Is that what the problem is? What's the problem? I'm not concerned about freeze. now, of course, if we're going to talk about a swale, I don't think anybody is doing a swale in their backyard.
So if we're going to, it can happen. Oh, fair enough. It could happen. Something that I've been thinking of myself. So Really? Okay. Oh, weird. I have never seen a swale in a backyard. but you're right. It could happen. It would probably need to be a pretty big backyard, but let's talk about small swale.
But anyways, yeah. So, Generally, let's, talk about what a swale generally is. It's, basically a pond. that is a long, skinny pond. It's a long, skinny, leaky pond. It's supposed to be leaky. And, let's say a small swale, in an, in a rural environment might be, three feet across and a hundred feet long.
And it's, like a level ditch. It's built on contour. So, and, the idea is that the downhill side, where, you plant trees is, intended to be very leaky. So if a bunch of water comes down the hill, it gets trapped in the swale. And so if you have like this. gully washer rain event, it'll fill the swale, and then that water will slowly leak out over the next few days, it's slowing the water down, and then you create a water lens, downhill of the swale where those trees are planted, and they will, that, soil there will get very saturated.
Now, here in a cold climate, there are people that have done gardening and built food forests, and they've made some boo boos. And one of those boo boos is, that if you plant all your trees in this certain way, then it creates a frost pocket. And I want to point out that the way that you make a frost pocket.
is generally identical to the way that you make a swale. So a swale is going to be on contour. So all these trees are growing in a line, and if you've got a bunch of cold air coming down your slope, and a swale only, to me, makes sense on a slope. So you've got this cold air coming down the slope, it gets trapped.
By these trees all in a row, and so now you've been you've increased the amount of frost. You have a shorter growing season right here. Wow, that's huge. That makes a big difference. It also means you could be more likely to get frost damage on the blossoms of your fruit trees if it's keeping that cold air.
That is so true. I was asked to go and do a bunch of earthworks, teach an earthworks workshop years ago down in San Diego, but we were far enough away from the coast that we were in an area that got frost. So we built swales and we built areas of hugelkultur, because we wanted to take some areas and make them cooler all summer long.
And we have reason, if you're in a hot area, there's a lot of reasons to do that. And it's, and swales are the answer. And we took areas and we made it so that they would be warmer all year long. and then that's going to be really good for where we want to plant things that are very frost sensitive.
And they were in such an area that if we could just. Add 10 degrees all year long, they can grow a lot of extra stuff. And so they did that. I think they planted a macadamia in that tree there. And so, all So we've got the swales. That's a great discussion. So now a lot of people, a lot of people like to build their hugelkultur on the, on that downhill side of the swale.
and it's on contour. And that's, and I just want to say that is a terrific idea in a tropical climate. The only problem is, that hugelkultur in a tropical climate doesn't do so good. Because all of that, all those woody bits on the inside tend to, Decompose very fast, which is why biochar is so good biochar last 500 years, but you've got to prep the biochar, which is a big bunch of work.
But here in a cold climate that would that you put on the inside will last. 30 to 50 years, maybe longer. And if you've got brown cubicle rot, a type of fungus, and we're about to talk about funguses, it'll last 500 years. And what, for those of you that are asking, brown cubicle rot, what's that?
we're going to try and find some rotten wood to stick into our hugelkultur. But I imagine everybody who's listening has been for a walk out in the woods and they saw a stomp that looks like it was made out of Legos. It was broken down into these little cubes, like millions of little cubes. That's Brown cubicle rot.
Ooh, that's, some of the very best stuff to put into hookah culture. It will last 500 years. All right, Susan, thank you for being patient with me. You know me. I am patience personified. Not really, actually. I'm totally not patient. But anyways, you did a good job with that. So okay, so now we're going to go on to mushrooms.
Tell us about mushrooms. I would say you can plant things, but of course mushrooms get a little tricky. if, if the wood is already rotten, then chances are a lot of different mycelium has already moved in. In which case, it's, there are challenges at getting mushrooms planted within it. So a lot of people...
Competition, basically. They'll compete with each other for that wood. Yes. So when you're trying to get, say, oyster mushrooms or, shiitake mushrooms or something like that to grow, then a lot of times you're like, okay, I'm going to start with some green wood and then I'm, I've got my spawn ready to go.
I'm going to drill some holes into this log, this green log I just cut. And I'm going to, plug those into those. Now set those aside in a shady spot and I'm going to keep them wet. And so, so the question is Hey, can I do this with hugelkultur? I don't know about. was it Port Orchard, Port Orchard, but I know, I think a Port Orchard, this will work because I know it works here, but every time I build a brand new Google culture, I am rewarded the following spring.
Without doing anything, I'm rewarded with morels. And I don't know about everybody else, but morels are the best. Wow, they're very expensive and fancy. So, oh my goodness. Okay. I didn't do anything! And there they are. So build Hoogaholters so you can have morels! Yes, that sounds pretty good. got a couple more emails.
Shall I have a look at those? Let's see what we've got. Hello Susan and Paul, this is from Grace. Listening to you from Little Rock, Arkansas. Interesting topic today. Is this something really new or has it been around for a while? Oh my goodness, by the way, just so you know, we have six more emails. So we'll do a quick answer to that one.
I'm going to, the, perfectly correct answer is, I don't know. I know that, in 2005, when I first heard the word, I went onto the internet and looked and there was nothing on the internet. Not a spec. And so I created the very first web page about hugelkultur. Oh, get out. That's amazing. Okay.
Since then, I have. What year was that? What year was that? That was 2005. Oh, goodness. And, after that, I was rereading Toby Hemingway's book, Gaia's Garden. And I found it mentioned in the first edition. And so. And it was a very tiny mention in, there. So I, that's the earliest mention I've been able to find.
Now, of course, if you talk to somebody from Germany, they're like, it's just hill culture. It's just raised bed gardens. People have been doing that for a long time. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. This next one is from Lisa. This is Lisa Dalish.
Daily ish. Daily ish. That's my email. That's your email. Okay. I love Lisa so much. Okay, so glad I got the whatever from Permies to listen in. Love everything Paul does. I have done some small hugelkultur in Kansas. After the third year it just explodes. So don't get discouraged if it doesn't the first year.
Wow. Neat. Quick comment on Lisa's. Yes. Exploding garden. And so the key is, that hugelkultur is soil on wood. And a lot of times, for a lot of us building hugelkultur, we're a little short on soil. We may even be short on wood. And we may even be short on good wood. And so it's like we, we build them with what we have, which is usually dirt or subsoil or something like that.
And it's okay, so the general recipe is, that you're going to build it. And you're probably not going to have very good soil. So then we got to build soil because, you're, going to build the soil. And then, once you have soil on wood, then it starts to rot and do its magic. Now I have, I've seen people, I've seen hookah cultures.
I have heard from people and, and they have, they got the dirt. and then here's the general recipe that I want to state for the normal person who's not going to really think it through and do all the details, which is great. You're going to build it. You're going to plant it. You're going to irrigate it like a normal garden for the first year, then you're going to irrigate it half as much the second year.
Now the soil is all built. And so for the third year and beyond, you don't have to irrigate it anymore. But for that first year, you irrigated it as part of your soil building process. So to get the magic, in this case, the magic comes the third year, provided that you did all of your irrigation steps. And that makes sense from the listener's email that whoops, all of a sudden it starts with not a lot going on and then boom, it explodes and the plants are happy.
Okay. Next we've got an email here from Grace from Cincinnati, Ohio. Hello, Susan. I have been re listening to your podcast episodes from the beginning. Oh my gosh. And I am so grateful for this podcast. Thank you. A quick question for Paul. I recently heard that adding coarse wood chips To raise fed. beds, lowers the nutrients when growing vegetables.
Would huggle culture likewise lower nutrients while it deteriorated in the soil? Grace, I love your question because I just want to say I've experienced this firsthand. When I was a new gardener, I, we have raised, we had raised beds and I cleverly, not really, mulched them with wood chips. after planting my tomatoes.
And I couldn't figure out why my tomato plants went yellow. And it turns out that later I understood that as they break down, maybe you can clarify Paul, but they, wood chips actually take nitrogen out of the soil that the plants need. So can you comment on that? Oh, yes. In fact, that is I'm so glad that the question was asked because this is so important.
when we put wood inside, please use big wood. Please avoid using small wood. And so the thing that both you and grace experienced is called nitrogen immobilization. And what it is, that when you have soil. And you, which has nitrogen in it, and then you have these wood chips or the sawdust or a small carbon thing, something where it has a lot of contact with the soil.
It turns out, and I'm going to anthropomorphize nitrogen for a moment, that the nitrogen would prefer to do the compost dance with the carbon. Then to do the feed the plant dance so that nitrogen gets locked up for a few years while it's playing with the carbon and now all your plants turn yellow due to a lack of nitrogen, immobilization.
So when you have lots of wood chips or sawdust. Uncle Paul says, that's a great mulch. Don't put it inside your hugelkultur. That's a bad idea. Yeah. So if you think about it, you got a giant log. Then the amount of, soil to wood content, contact is low, but if you take that same piece of wood and pulverize it into a million pieces, the amount of soil to carbon or wood content contact is very high.
There's a lot more of that carbon touching all your nitrogens and locking them up. So you want to have big logs or big sticks, that's what you want to put on the inside. Great. Let's do one more question before we have our little commercial break and we got lots more to come. So this is going to be a listener question show because you guys have lots of great questions.
Okay, this one is from Scott. Scott is from Owen Sound, Ontario. Hi Susan, loving your show and website. The first question I'll have for Paul, which he may be answering anyway, is this. Are there any species of wood or tree that are better than others to be used as the buried material in the hugelkultur mound?
That's from Scott. The answer is... Yes. Now, I suppose that he'd like me to expand on that a bit. If he doesn't want you to, I would request that, please. Thank you very much. So, first of all, let's talk about what not to put inside of a hugelkultur. You wouldn't want to put black locust. in there. It just doesn't break down.
And that's what we want. We want rot. Black locust is 4 percent fungicide by weight, which is why it lasts so long. And so it's not going to, it is not going to be your friend inside of your hugelkultur. Another one is cedar. all conifers contain allelopathic agents, basically naturally occurring herbicides.
That's why you go to a cedar grove or, you'll go to a conifer forest and there's not much else growing there. And that's because the, cedar has four different kinds of herbicides. herbicides that it's poisoning everything around it. This is like cedar only country here. We don't want anything growing here but cedar.
So I don't want to put it inside of my hookah culture because then it's going to basically be an herbicide for whatever else I plant there. Probably the very best is going to be cottonwood, alder is good, there's a lot of those, hardwoods that are actually softwoods. Those, hardwoods that rot very fast, they can become punky really fast.
Those are going to be really good. Now, for most of us, we don't get to pick what wood, and there's some people where they get this thing of I'm going to build the best hugelkultur that's ever been built. I'm going to drive 200 miles to go get it, rod and wood, and it's oh, I think you lose all your fun points when you do that.
And so, what you use is what you have, because the beautiful thing about hugelkultur is right now, I imagine 80 90 percent of your listeners Are like taking woody bits from their current horticultural endeavors, and they're cutting them up into pieces so it'll fit inside that green can that gets hauled away.
And I'm, thinking and then they go out and they buy. Some kind of organic matter to put on their garden and don't do that. Stop buying that stuff. It's garbage. It's oh no, now you've got sponsors coming up. I hope I didn't just offend your sponsors. Okay. So the key is you have this woody bit that you are.
Thinking of hauling away, but that's gold to a gardener. That's organic matter, full of carbon, full of goodness for your garden. Don't, take that gold away. You've raised this wonderful organic bit of gold. And it's it, wants to help you with all your projects. No, this is good stuff.
You want to keep it. You want to do things with it and, and never import organic matter. That's always a bad idea. Fantastic. Okay, I'm going to sneak in one more little question or comment. This is from Jerry. Jerry says, Hi, this is Jerry enjoying the show today. I'll be retiring next month, and I can't wait to spend more time with my trees.
Hi, Jerry. Nice to hear from you. All right, I would love to go into more details about hookah culture growing with you, Paul. and we'll do that in a few minutes, but I would love to take a moment to hear a word from our sponsors. Are you okay staying on the line and not flying away somewhere? I'm going to stay right here.
I've got so much more to say. I know you do. That's wonderful. Thank you. Okay, great. So you'll stay on the line. Thanks, everybody. You're listening to the Urban Forestry Radio Show and Podcast brought to you by the Fruit Tree Care Training website, orchardpeople. com. This is Reality Radio 101. And I'm Susan Poizner, author of the Fruit Tree Care books, Growing Urban Orchards.
And growing fruit, grow fruit trees fast, and we're going to be back right after this break. Do
you want to learn how to grow organic fruit trees quickly and successfully? I'm Susan Poizner from OrchardPeople. com and I teach online courses. Here's some feedback from one of my happy students. My name is Jennifer Chandler and I started growing fruit trees three years ago now. I would recommend Orchard People courses primarily because it is an excellent way to get up to speed fairly quickly and to build your confidence.
There seem to be so many different theories of what to do and different recipes for this and that. One isn't overwhelmed by the advice in Orchard People. I just find it so much faster to get up to speed and build confidence than trying to piece it together surfing the web or at the library.
Check out my courses at learn. orchardpeople. com.
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Welcome back to the Urban Forestry Radio Show with your host, Susan Poizner, right here on Reality Radio 101. Contact us right now. Our email address is In studio one oh one at gmail. com
and now right back to your host of the urban forestry radio show, Susan Poizner, you are listening to the urban forestry radio show and podcast brought to you by the fruit tree care training website, or should people. com. This is Reality Radio 101, and I am your host, Susan Poizner. In the show today, we've been talking to permaculture advocate, Paul Wheaton, from permies.
com, and we've been talking all about hukul culture plantings. So, in the first part of the show, we explored a little bit about what hukul culture is, and we're going to go into more details now. But first... I want to hear from you, the listeners. If you are listening to this show live today, you can enter today's contest, and we've got a great prize.
So, the prize for today's episode is the Garden Master Course, and it's by Helen Atow, an expert in beyond organic gardening. It's valued at 85. Okay, so we're going to talk to Paul Wheaton in just a minute, but if you want to enter that contest, you send us an email right now to instudio101atgmail.
com. That's instudio101atgmail. com and be sure to include your first name and where you are writing from. And now back to Paul. Okay, Paul, let's field a few more listener questions. We have so many good questions today. This one is from Ellen. Oh, Ellen again. We heard from her earlier. Ellen says, Hi Susan, I'm growing a lapin cherry on a four foot high berm mound.
We get occasional flooding from a low salt brackish salt marsh, hence the berm. It has survived three years in the berm and it's doing very well. Can I transform my berm into a hugelkultur? By digging in logs and green matter and compost, Ellen, wonderful question. I was thinking that myself. So tell us, Paul, what do you think?
So, an odd thing happens is so I have a book I wrote a few years ago and I thought, everybody's going to, everybody who reads the book is going to enjoy this part and this part the but the weird thing is, that I, talked about people trying to Grow. I had a page dedicated to how to grow a better lawn organically with less care and, and in it I introduced this idea of you can drill a hole in the ground that goes three feet deep.
And then in the hole, you're going to put a couple of sticks, you're going to put some kitchen scraps and some of the dirt that you took out, and then you're going to put a little bit more dirt and a couple more sticks, and so basically you're going to refill this hole, and I call it a worm town, and I explain earthworms are your friends, and they need a place to go dormant for the winter, and so you need to make a place for them to live.
But even more than that, if you make one of these every three to five feet throughout your yard, then eventually your whole yard will get greener just because of the worms moving back and forth between the worm towns. And, We've had so many people do this and had great success. So the answer is basically, yeah, make a worm town.
And, I got one important, really important thing. And whenever you're building a hugelkultur, I want everybody to do this as well. But if you're going to make a worm town in your berm and you dig this hole out, that's three feet deep and maybe a foot across or something, and you're refilling it with a stick.
And, now here's some kitchen scraps and another stick and. And the one thing that I want you to put in there is to go to your, best soil, your, garden or wherever your soil is the very best and to dig up. A blob of that's about the size of a basketball. Do you have basketballs in Canada?
Yes, we do. Believe it or not, we actually do. Okay. Okay. The size of a basketball. Yeah. And now the important thing is, to keep it together. Don't, let it break up. Hold it together. And you're going to put this into your hugelkultur or into your Wormtown as A contiguous basketball that never got broken.
So the thing is, that inside your best sample of soil, there's all this life and there's worms and there's all kinds of stuff going on in there. But if it breaks up, it dies. And we want to keep it all, so keep it together as best as you can and transplant this night. I call this a soil seed. So you're going to take this basketball sized seed and you got to hold it together and transplant it into its new home where it's going to expand and grow.
It has all this beautiful life in it that's going to expand. So that's what you're part of what you're going to refill this hole with. And you're going to end up with more, it's going to end up being a little bit mounded, but as everything breaks down in time, your mound is going to come back to ground level.
So I think this kind of helps paint a picture of how to, add organic matter to a place for because you don't want to dig up that tree, you'll make the tree sad. So don't, we don't want it. We don't want sad trees. That's brilliant. By the way, I have a previous episode on vertical mulching, which is something that arborists are now doing where they are making these holes a certain, and they're filling it with, I don't know, compost and actual worms.
They get the worms, they pop them in there and it works. So that's a different episode. If people want to listen to that vertical mulching episode, I think that will dovetail in really nicely. Okay. We have about 10 more questions. So let's keep going through, oh my gosh, I don't get any time for my questions, but that's fine because people are asking better questions than the ones I had planned.
So there you go. Next one is, oh, another quick one from Edwi, from Ellen, follow up question. Does the hoko culture slowly sink as a result of the wood decomposing underneath? Ooh, good question. Now, after I built a bunch of Hugelkultur, I got to meet, my hero, Sepp Holzer, who is famous for being the most Hugelkultur guy in the world, and, and, he doesn't speak a lick of English, and I don't speak a lick of German, but he adamantly insists that they never shrink.
Never. And I, insist that they do, they get shorter over time. And I think, that, if you, if it lasts 50 years, it'll be half the height of where you started, but now the soil will be incredibly rich. And on top of that, there's ways to augment the top as the years go on so that it just goes up and up and up.
Yes, I believe it will shrink. Okay, and now we've got Olivia from Brooklyn, New York. hi Susan and guests, this is fun. Apologies if I missed it, but where is your guest from? And how did they get familiar with huggle culture? And where do you suggest getting your wood from? That's from Olivia. Tell us about yourself.
I didn't let you tell us about yourself. I know that like you, the, garden master program that you are giving away, that is because, in 1996, I took the master gardener program here in Missoula, and I visited with people to learn that what I took was vastly superior to any other master gardener program, but, and, my instructor is a market gardener.
And a very passionate about organic and beyond organic and for a few people, I'll throw this name out and let's see if you recognize it. She was an intern for Masanobu Fukuoka. And so, oh look, Susan knows that name. Familiar, yes. Yes. And so, she is bonkers about Fukuoka's techniques and she has expanded on them and she has so much for 17 years she taught the master gardener program and but the leash that you're on.
When you teach that is got tighter and tighter with every passing year and so she dropped it and then I invited her back to teach the same course but to throw out all the herbicide and pesticide stuff and replace it with permaculture and fukaoka and food forests, commercial food forests, all of these kinds of things that we love.
Thank you. market gardening, so this course is the Master Gardener course, dramatically upgraded. And this is what we're sharing as part of this prize today, right? This is what people, yeah, oh my gosh, yes, it is. She is a glorious teacher, just absolutely magnificent. So all right, you asked me a question like, where do I come from?
And it's And where can people find you? Because we too, we've got a few more questions to go. So most importantly, how can people find out more about all of your educational offerings? if you go to permies. com, that's the jumping off point for a thousand things. And we have a community that's made of 300, 000 people.
We get 1. 8 million visitors per month. so we have a very active forum, very active community, very keen on permaculture and homesteading and really all of the permaculture and homesteading starts with gardening. And so, we have, I believe, 300 forums right now. And, so for everything. It all starts by going to permies.
com. Awesome. Okay. I am in Montana and, this is where I started. I grew a garden and my first attempt ever at growing a garden, everything died, everything. I think I got a couple of potatoes that were like the size of a quarter and that was it. I felt so bad that these poor seeds. We're so unfortunate to land in my hand, did not have a green thumb.
So I read more than a hundred gardening books that next year and had a much better garden than that following year. So I didn't torture these poor things like I did the first year. so as opposed to people who grow a glorious garden and they don't know how. I couldn't do that. I had to learn how and I have shared a lot of that.
And so, I'm able to talk about these things and, over the years, I got excited about, in fact, with hugelkultur back in those original days when I was taking the master gardening course, that was so good. I had this idea that I wanted to water my garden less. Thanks. And I knew that by creating organic matter in my raised bed gardens, that would help with that, but I wanted to go so much farther and when I found out about hookah culture, it's this is the thing that I was looking for all of my life, and I can't help but think that.
Everybody who's listening right now that their gardening adventure will be ten times more delicious with hugelkultur and it'll be the cornerstone of everything you do from here on out. It is just, it's right up there. I would say the only thing that's better than hugelkultur is mulch and, it's and we use mulch on hugelkultur as well.
They get two for one, two for one. Okay. Let's go through a few more quick emails. We've only got 10 minutes left of the show. Where is the show gone? Oh my goodness. Okay. Brandon writes, hello. First time live. I just wanted to be put into the raffle and to say hi. Hi Brandon. Would you like to say hi to Brandon?
Hi Brandon. Okay, next one. Whoops, I just popped into, hopefully I didn't miss one. Nancy writes, Hello, Susan and Paul. My name is Nancy. I live in Yakima, Washington. Today, I'm working in my garden while listening live to the show for the first time. I am having a poplar tree cut down today and was wondering, I have an older hugelmound.
That has shrunk. Can I add height to it by layering my poplar wood and branches along with new soil on top of the existing huggle mound? Thanks, Nancy. What a good question. Oh, yeah. And that's Nancy in Yakima, Washington. Yakima. What is it actually called? Now I'm embarrassed. I think, you just said Yakima.
And I thought... Oh, Yakima. I've never heard it pronounced that way. Oh, didn't you know the name has been officially changed? You're just not up to date on that. So, Nancy, I love where you're going with this. Now, one thing to keep in mind when you're doing that, because your idea is brilliant. And, now since this is a show about trees.
Then one concern that I have is that if you're growing trees on there, and you augment your hugelkultur, you, take it from where it's maybe two feet tall now and you're like, I'm going to make it seven feet tall with brand new stuff. The problem with that is, is that If the roots of your existing trees are in there, and they are happy being six inches from the surface, and you suddenly make those roots be seven feet from the surface, they're going to be sad, and we don't want that.
And so on the other hand, if there's nothing growing there, oh, yes, what you propose is wonderful and delicious and delightful and amazing. And on top of that, poplar is an amazing wood to use instead of just make sure. It's very dead and dry. Otherwise, you might have a lot of poplar trees. Oh, yeah, that's right.
Good thing to think about. Now, I'm just going to ask Gary in the studio. Gary, can you come on the line just for a second? If we go over time just a wee bit, what's going to happen to Paul and I? You're okay. We're okay. Okay. Cause we have six more emails. Everybody's got such great questions. I just don't want to say yeah.
So you keep us posted. Okay, Gary. And can I have lots of love from all the listeners for Gary in the studio? Who's being so kind to us. Yay. Gary. We love you, Gary. Okay. All right. Let's go. Donald has a question. hello, Donald here. I'm a sponsor of one of Paul's books. Quick, question about evolving soil in urban areas.
What kind of mix, in brackets, pioneer, nitrogen fixing, et cetera, would a person plant in a city property like a park or city hall or the police station? I think, Donald is suggesting gorilla gardening. And so is that what it is? I wasn't exactly sure what was going on in that question. Okay. Yeah.
Yep. If he has my book called Skip, inside of Skip, we have something called Forage Gardening, and the idea is, that you might go to land that is unused, and it may be it's your own land. Maybe it's not. And what kinds of seeds might you plant there to, have to, basically play the role of Gaia.
You're going to go and, grow glorious things all over the place. And, and so, Donald's question is, and I gotta say, my favorite of all time of seeds to plant wherever and anywhere. My favorite is. apple seeds because Every time you eat an apple, you get like five free seeds and, you could just tuck them in your pocket.
And the next time you're someplace that looks like it's deficient in trees, then, you can plant those seeds. And by then maybe you got a few more in your pocket and, only one seed out of 20 will actually make it for one reason or another, but, it'll be a tree. It'll be, it'll.
And on top of that, it will produce apples. and about and more than half of the time. roughly about 80 percent of the time, they are actually quite tasty. They're a good apple. They're a delicious apple. About 20 percent of the time, they produce something that's referred to as a spitter. And, but it's still an apple tree.
And the wildlife will still enjoy those spitters. And so, but, you could come back later and, have some delightful apples. and it's just that the variety of apple is going to be comical. It's not going to be something that's well documented, and that's fine. You'll have some great apples that just don't have a name yet.
Exactly. And maybe we can call them the Paul Wheaton apples. We can name them after you. We'll name our apples after you. Okay, let's keep going. We got Donald, right? Just to say hi. I would love to enter to win the Garden Master. Donald's from Washington. And we've got, next we've got Dawn. Dawn says, good afternoon.
Love the topic today. Only catching bits and pieces due to internet issues on my end. I'm sorry about that, Dawn. Dawn's from Michigan and she's one of my students. Okay, now we've got James who writes, hi James. Hello from PNW. Pacific Northwest. Oh, thank you. hello from PNW. Fun show. I'd like to enter the giveaway.
That's from James. And coming up with the last one, actually, we've got, this is a miracle. We've got an email now from Derek. Greetings from Southern Manitoba. First, for Paul's reference, basketball was invented by a Canadian.
You don't know that. Thank you so much. I have somebody, Derek, thanks for being on my Canadian side, helping to stand up for the Canadian people. I didn't know that, if it's true. So, Derek says, I too came to today's episode via the Daily ish. I haven't fully coming round, I haven't fully come round to using Huggle Culture, but I have used Hoogle culture inspired practices on my properties.
In the first case, we purchased raised beds for our small urban property and used a bunch of large, wood as a base, top by smaller branches, then top by soil and compost. Okay. The second use was in creating small berms on the three acres we took back from a neighbor after an overspray incident into our small orchard.
Oh boy. we laid out a line of logs in a pleasing to us pattern, then covered it with soil. No question, but I wanted to get my name into the draw. That's fun. I love that. But Derek, I really appreciate your email, not just for being Canadian and standing up for the Canadian basketball people. but also I love your description of, a lot of the listeners today will have small spaces, won't be able to build a huge mound.
But the fact that we can actually integrate some of these principles into our existing raised beds or new plantings, whether it's two feet high or three feet high, I think really today's conversation is thought provoking, and it's exciting to show the different opportunities that we have as growers to try different things.
So, wow. We, it's time for the contest. We got to know who's going to win this contest because we have a lot of people who are entering. You ready? You ready? I'm ready. Yeah. You're gonna help. Oh, but first I just want to thank some of the listeners. Every month I have some wonderful listeners who write to me just to say hi.
So, I've got two Monicas that called me this, that, that emailed me this month. One of them is from Wisconsin, one I'm not sure from where, Mark from Colorado, Cindy from New Mexico, and also Jazz wrote me, thank you Jazz, don't know where you're from. But I also got a really beautiful comment on the Orchard People Facebook page I wanted to share.
It's from a listener called Steve and Steve writes, I never catch the live show, but I am obsessed with the podcast and have made tree decisions based on persimmons.
I have two growing now. That was so nice. That made me feel really good. So Steve, thank you so much for the comment. And if there's any other listeners out there who are really enjoying the show, I would love it if you guys could go to Apple Podcasts and submit a rating and review for this little podcast that not a lot of people know about.
Then more people will come and find me and I can do lots more show free shows for you guys. So that would be awesome. And thanks so much again, Steve. Okay, time for our contest. Gary in the studio is going to help us. The prize for the episode is the Garden Master Course. By Helen Atao, an expert in beyond organic gardening valued at 85.
Gary in the studio, can you help us? Oh, this is an exciting day. Paul, the studio audience here is on their feet. We have extra security today because you were a guest. We see that. So what we're doing is all the names are in a little bucket. I'm going to shake that bucket. You tell me when to stop. You will hear it and I will draw a name.
Are you ready? Okay, do it. Shake. Okay. Stop. Stop. Okay. The look at the audience here. They're up against the glass. I can't believe it. I can't believe what I'm seeing here. Susan. Stay safe, Gary. I know they get really excited. So just stay safe. And here is the audience cats. That's what I was. It's just a bunch of cats.
No, they're clapping already. And I didn't get anything. They're so excited and we don't know who the winner is. Yes! Blaine Arnold from Port Orchard, Washington, is the winner of this crowd, Susan. They're crazy in here today. They're crazy. They're so crazy excited. it's Lane, is it? Lane? Blaine. Blaine.
I believe it's Blaine, of course, Blaine was one of our first emails, Blaine, you got the prize. That's amazing. And Gary, I love how you can get the studio audience to go quiet really quickly like that. They really listen to your hand signals. Security is now escorting them out. I hope they didn't leave a mess.
That's all. Blaine, congratulations. We're going to make sure to send you an email and link you up with Paul. So those guys will send you a link so you can go on the course. And if anybody else is interested in the garden master course, Paul, is there a link where they can find out about it?
Is it at permies. com? I think if you go to permies. com, it will be on that first page, but I, know that we gave the garden, master course is so popular that we gave it its own page. And I think it's, yeah, gardenmastercourse. com. that's a great name. Good. Yeah. Excellent. Easy to find.
So if anybody else is interested, it certainly sounds like a fabulous course that I should be taking as well at some point. So okay guys, first of all, Paul, thank you so much for coming on the show. This was so fun. This was really fun. Thanks for having me, Susan. This, was great. I'm always glad to infect more brains with my silly ideas.
that's fantastic. Okay, so thank you so much to Paul Wheaton from permies. com. And that's all for the show today, everybody. If you want to listen again or download other episodes, all you have to do is go to orchardpeople. com slash podcasts. And you can learn more about growing fruit trees on orchardpeople.
com where I also have lots of articles and I have courses as well on fruit tree care. So that's all for now. I hope you guys will join me again next month when we are going to dig into another great topic. Bye for now, and I'll see you next time.