Pronounced HOO-gull-cult-ur, it's a farming method dating back to medieval Europe. The term is German, translating to "hill cultivation" because the end result looks like mounds of plants.

The idea behind it is to bury logs and pile the unearthed soil on top, plant on that soil and there you have a growing bed that will feed the crops on top for years as the logs decompose. You can use it season after season. It's cheap, effective, and takes very few tools to do though it is labor-intensive at the beginning.

What we've done is similar, but more practical for our situation. Many ideas about growing have purists who define what good practices are, but know this: if you garden, just do what you can with what you can work with. You'll have to adapt to some kind of limitation: space, money, ability, resources...

Though it's been around a long time, hugelkultur is not that common a method, especially here in Missouri where a five-minute drive takes you to vast open tilled fields of corn, soybeans, and hay maintained by massive tractors and similar machinery.

When I built this garden years ago, all we had were limitations. No large equipment for digging or tilling, no money to pay for wood or metal to contain raised beds or potting soil to fill them, and I was in the middle of a very painful bout of sciatica, so a lot of the garden was planned to avoid having to bend over for more than two seconds to pick something up.  Digging for any extended period was out. But I had a lot of time, space, and dead tree material, so this is what it became. Born out of practicality more than anything else.

So it's not strict hugelkultur. I did no digging so the logs aren't buried in the ground. I just put hardboard and cardboard on the ground, covered that with large logs that had been cut into two-foot sections, covered that with large branches, then smaller branches, twigs, and many layers of manure (rabbit, horse, and a mixture sold by the Kansas City Zoo), meadow grasses, top soil, wood chips, and lots of compost. I built these beds with hand tools and a cart attached to our sad 48-inch mower. Also, manure has seeds in it bringing weeds, so after the third year of fighting with weeds, Mandy and I got tired of it so we covered everything with landscape fabric which helped enormously.

I have four beds measuring 4 feet wide by 15 feet long and they are incredibly potent when combined with good seeds and consistent watering. After four growing seasons, I've found zucchini, squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, and bush beans to be the best crops for these beds. Basil and marigold also grow very well. I plant them as companions to repel bugs and help crops. The yield I get from few plants is undeniably impressive. Eight cucumber plants produced 30 pounds of cukes a week for six weeks. A similar amount of squash and zucchini. We had giant tomatoes for three months. We wouldn't be branching out to sell our surplus if we hadn't produced so much!

I have other garden areas that aren't hugelkultur. I use containers and in-ground planting too. Not all crops are appropriate for these beds, like pole beans. Some didn't respond at all.  Adapt and learn.

Permaculture is a set of practices built on ideals of farming in harmony with nature. We like this approach, but we found that permaculture practices are simply more practical for us based on the resources we have and what we can do. So necessity dictates our adherence to permaculture, and the ideals are a beneficial coincidence.

We use compost as a growing medium. We find it a powerful alternative to soil, producing more prolific plants and larger fruits and vegetables. It saves space and effort. Our location in Johnson County isn't ideal for in-ground growing. Clay is very close to the surface, sometimes exposed, so we wouldn't have much luck without heavy machinery and a lot of unnatural expensive soil amendments. Compost is cheaper, and this year we are transitioning from being dependent on outside sources of compost to creating our own. It's one of the areas we are expanding into, and it'll be one of our major projects for 2021.

Tilling the soil is efficient and maybe has virtues for large farms, but it encourages weeds and upsets beneficial fungi that assist with plant growth. Because we have no heavy machinery, we practice no-till farming everywhere but a 10 ft x 10 ft patch of exposed soil. We planted peanuts there last year which need exposed soil to proliferate, but this year we're forgoing peanuts for more bush beans. And though we grow in-ground in this area, we add so much compost that we don't have to dig very far down. Instead, we pile the compost around each seedling. We'll have three 30-foot lines of crops in our pen area that will mostly grow vertically. They'll be planted directly in compost so we won't have to dig.

We do have pest problems, so not everything is in harmony with our planting. Our two biggest foes are raccoons and squash bugs. Better fences make for a good raccoon offense and we'll be adding a stronger fence this year, but the squash bugs are trickier. We prefer not to use insecticides, but once in a while will employ diatomaceous earth, a gentle powder safe for food plants, to give our seedlings a fighting chance. Mostly we practice companion planting, or placing plants that help each other nearby. Troublesome bugs seem to dislike basil and marigolds, so our hugelkultur beds always have at least one of each. We're adding nasturtium this year, a beautiful flower that squash bugs seem to hate. Good! We're also planning to add ducks to the mix, and will marshal their bug-eating forces to help our growing areas.

We "maintain" a meadow (i.e. mow it once a year) surrounding the garden area to encourage pollinators to stick around, which they have done with gusto and panache. Our cucumber and squash flowers are often covered in wasps and solitary bees. And hummingbirds are frequent visitors. Someday we'll get infrared cameras to see if bats visit at night. All are welcome in light or dark.