Hugelkultur Garden Beds

We used some of our excess logs that we didn't want to burn in the wood stove for hugelkultur garden beds. Below are some pictures with descriptions of how we built them.
You can read more about hugelkultur from richsoil.com, here.

The main advantage to hugelkultur is that as the wood rots it will hold water for use by your plants and give out nutrients while decomposing, which will cut down on watering the bed and needing to amend the bed with fertilizer.

I dug out two beds 4' x 12' to a depth of about 12 inches for my hugelkultur beds. Since I will be adding wood to the two hugelkultur beds, which displaces much of the dirt I've dug out, I used the excess dirt to make a third conventional raised bed.

Once the first bed was dug out I filled it with logs to be be about level with the surrounding ground.

The second hugelkultur bed is filled with smaller logs than the first bed. I just used what I had on hand.

All Three beds ( 2 hugelkultur beds and 1 normal raised bed) are finished with a layer of soil, then good top soil with manure and compost mix, then finally pine needle mulch. 

This picture was taken as I was adding wood chips in between the beds to cut down on the weeds and it helps keep it from becoming muddy during spring.

It is hard to see in this picture , but we also put up three cattle panels as a lattice for growing peas, cucumbers and pole beads. It worked great last year so we may be getting a few more of those panels from the local feed store.