The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Mounds and bogs in the forest garden

Building mounds and swalesRobert Hart created mounds in his garden just like the mounds I built for my hazel trees.  He layered branches and leaves on the ground, then topped them with turf (grass-side down), compost, and soil.  He considered the mounds a method of increasing his gardening space, with the improved drainage being secondary.  According to Hart, mound-gardening originated in China and was also very popular in Germany, where it was known as Hugelkulturin.

Hart also created little bog gardens, laying down a sheet of plastic and topping it with peat.  The bog gardens allowed him to extend his repertoire to include cranberries and other bog plants.  In fact, varied habitats could be considered one of the themes of his overall garden, which contained the forest garden, bog garden, annual vegetable garden, and even a little pond.  Intuitively, Hart had latched onto an idea that every ecologist understands --- areas with multiple habitats can support more species than less diverse areas.

Check out our homemade chicken waterer.



This post is part of our Robert Hart's Forest Gardening lunchtime series.  Read all of the entries:





Anna Hess's books
Want more in-depth information? Browse through our books.

Or explore more posts by date or by subject.

About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.






profile counter myspace



Powered by Branchable Wiki Hosting.

Required disclosures:

As an Amazon Associate, I earn a few pennies every time you buy something using one of my affiliate links. Don't worry, though --- I only recommend products I thoroughly stand behind!

Also, this site has Google ads on it. Third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user's prior visits to a website. Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to users based on their visit to various sites. You can opt out of personalized advertising by visiting this site.