Hugelkultur in my raised beds

I survived the flu!

So i decided to celebrate by going out and doing some good ole manual labor!  Nothing like being house-bound for over a week to make me go mad.  

The "Hugelkultur" thing is a fancy name to an old technique of simply burning wood and debris under your garden to help maintain moisture and improve soil quality by adding lots of organic mulch and wormfood!  In fact, this is not the first time I have used this technique in this same raised bed!  

Depending how much wood, the size of the wood pieces, and other factors, about every three years I dig in more wood.  This time I did discover some of the wood pieces hadn't quite all rotted up yet, but they were close enough.  This time I added a considerable bit more wood to the mound.  Also added some leaves that didn't get to the curb last fall.  

The soil quality is much improved where I have done this in the past.

You can still see some raw clay here in the dirt i dug out from deeper down and along the edges of the bed.

Here it is all filled back in and ready to plant

I still need to put a fence around this - the dogs LOVE to dig in fresh soil!

Also, I don't trust this weather - damn near hot recently - and then cold and windy just days later.  This doesn't bode well for the fruit trees this year!