Forest Garden Year 3 (2012): Huggle-Trenches

Among my goals for the 2012 growing season, I wanted to put in some sort of water catchment. I love the idea of swales, but I was unable to find a resource on exactly how to do it; or at least none I could decipher.  A problem with swales, however, is I am not sure you can apply them to an existing garden without tearing it all up and starting over. My garden was done mostly on intuition and I did not spend time observing the land or researching proper plants and placement. Nonetheless, I am hesitant to dig up these plants because they are a part of me and we are evolving together. Another problem I heard is that swales are better suited to areas that do not have winter; I am not sure exactly where I heard this, but I believe it was from Paul Wheaton talking to either Geoff Lawton or Sepp Holtzer.

I decided I liked the idea of hugglekultur. However, I still had the same problem of it is best suited to a new landscape or gouged out area rather than an existing one. Another problem I have is I had a limited amount of sticks, no large tree trunks, and no extra soil. My dilemma then was how to apply huglekultur to an existing landscape using only sticks and without the assistance of extra soil. I wanted my trees to benefit from the huglekulture too. With these constraints, I came up with the idea of making a hugle-trench and digging it outside the drip line of my baby trees so that the roots can grow into the moistness.

I dug my trenches about 12" deep and averaging about 18" wide; some were narrower and some were wider depending upon the area I was digging. Below is one trench I dug.

 I filled these with sticks, some pencil thin, but most around 1-2" thick. In the trench I dug along the fence for wildflowers, I put in some branches about 6" thick. I also had a limited amount of 4" logs that I interspersed among my trenches. I did encounter some roots from some near-by, existing trees; I cut these roots and since they were mostly small, I do not think that will do any damage to the full-grown existing trees. Below is a trench with some sticks.

When the trenches had a good amount of sicks, I covered the sticks with the dirt, tamped the dirt by walking over it several times, and then thoroughly watered them. Below is a covered and watered-down trench.

 

 



The picture below is an updated graph of my garden space. My measurements were more accurate on this picture than the one before; on the first one I did alot of guess work assuming my space was square :/.  On this graph I show a rough estimate of the current crown of my trees; the first one showed what I expected their coverage to look like a few years from now. The brown areas show the trenches I dug. The pink dashes are stepping stones that line the edges of my beds, as shown above, or simply stones to walk on within beds.