If your yard is big enough that you might have a felled tree from time to time due to lightning or winter storms, you may wonder how you can put the wood to good use. Most people who don't regularly heat with wood just post an ad on Craigslist for free wood if someone picks it up. Instead consider using the wood to form the backbone of a type of gardening bed known as Hugelkultur, that is, burying wood in your garden bed to gain many benefits including eliminating irrigation.
Permaculture site Rich Soil promotes the many benefits of Hugelkultur:
Hugelkultur is nothing more than making raised garden beds filled with rotten wood. This makes for raised garden beds loaded with organic material, nutrients, air pockets for the roots of what you plant, etc. As the years pass, the deep soil of your raised garden bed becomes incredibly rich and loaded with soil life. As the wood shrinks, it makes more tiny air pockets - so your hugelkultur becomes sort of self tilling. The first few years, the composting process will slightly warm your soil giving you a slightly longer growing season. The woody matter helps to keep nutrient excess from passing into the ground water - and then refeeding that to your garden plants later. Plus, by holding SO much water, hugelkultur could be part of a system forgrowing garden crops in the desert with no irrigation.
You can use freshly cut wood as well as rotten wood, but keep in mind that newer wood will consume nitrogen as it composts, which could bother some plants. As the wood decomposes it will leach the nitrogen back into the soil, so you will actually see a gain in nitrogen over time, but in the first few years you may have to add supplemental nitrogen if you use freshly cut wood in you Hugelkultur bed.
If you're interested in learning more about Hugelkultur the source link below has multiple videos, lots of photos, and a much more detailed section on how the beds work.
raised garden beds: hugelkultur instead of irrigation | Rich Soil More »
