Hey guys, welcome to the Kellogg Garden Youtube Channel. Today I'm going to review my hugelkulture
birdies beds that I've got here. I'm going to show you what I did, how I did it, and why I did it.
So, if you want to receive notifications when we put out great content like this, hit the subscribe
button. My name is Brigette, I'm the owner of San Diego Seed Company, and we planted these
birdies beds about six months ago. And, you can see they're thriving, they look incredible. Now,
these are very large raised beds, and it can be kind of expensive to fill these all the way with
soil. Additionally, you might be thinking "Well, do I need to fill it all the way with soil?" I've
got garlic, and I've got some herbs and flowers, and really those roots are not going to go
that deep. So, what did i use to fill these beds? Well, you actually can look here and we've got
a little layout of some of the stuff that we put in our bed. So, in the very bottom layer, we have
just plain stumps. This is wood that we cut from our farm, and we actually layered the bottom part
of that as a filler. Why would we do that? Well, as I said, these plants roots don't get that deep,
and so I don't need to have soil all the way down to the bottom. So, I layered them with extra
pieces of wood that I got from the garden, it's important to note that this is wood that
we've cut from trees in our garden and off of our farm. It's not wood that we bought from a store,
so it's natural, untreated, there's nothing in that wood except just 100 wood. So, we line
that on the bottom. The next thing that we added was tons of mulch. Why would we do that? Again,
it's a filler. We're filling the bottom with organic matter that will eventually break down,
and we happen to love mulch on our farm. We always have piles of it, so we put about a foot of mulch
at the bottom of this birdie's beds. Next thing that we did is we added some potting soil, or
raised bed mix, and that filled up the last third of the bed. Finally, in that potting mix
we added some fertilizer. Now, why do you do that? Well, it's because there's a lot of microbiology
in these raised beds, and a lot of things are happening, organic matter is getting broken down.
And so, by having a little bit extra fertilizer in there, as all of that carbon gets broken down,
we'll have a little bit of extra nitrogen for my beautiful plants. Now, you can see these beds are
thriving, both of them look incredible, and it's just proof that that system really works well,
especially in larger raised beds. If you don't want to spend the time and the money to fill
them all with potting mix or raised bed mix. Some other great reasons why you might want to choose
to do it that way is also because that layer of mulch, and the stumps at the bottom, they
actually act like really big sponges, and they soak up and they hold on to a lot of moisture,
and it stops the moisture when I water from just running straight through these beds and down
into the ground. So, there's some big benefits to to using different material in your beds.
One of the other cool tricks that I have that I love, is in my raised beds I always like to put
a grow oya, which is just a very simple irrigation method. It's basically a vessel that holds on to
excess water. I fill it up with water, I put the cap on, and it can actually seep out of this terra
cotta pot into the soil and keep it moist. In our really hot climate, even with irrigation,
it's nice to have this extra piece of safety net so that I can guarantee my boxes always have
moisture when they need it. All right and finally, what's important to note about this process is,
eventually those stumps, and that mulch and all the stuff that we put down at the bottom of these
beds is going to turn into soil. It's going to compost over time, all of the worms, and different
bacteria, and things in the soil are going to break down that matter, and eventually it's
going to turn into soil. So, it's a great way to save a little bit of money, have really happy,
beautiful beds, and it's fun! It's a great way to fill your beds with with different
materials and have some fun doing it. All right so, if hugelkultur is a new method
to you make sure you go check out our other video and you can see exactly how we did it.
And then, if you got any more questions leave them in the comment section. We'll be sure to
get back to you and answer them all so that you can have a beautiful, bountiful garden.