Is a hugelkulture style raised garden bed viable? Suggestions welcomed. Should a perforated pipe for air be installed? Should a similar pipe be installed for water?
no pipes needed IMO. if you have stuff to bury i put them down deep enough to not interfere with the vegetables i'll be growing. i don't particularly like raised beds for much of anything, but we use some here for the low areas that might flash flood. every hardscape edge is work. i avoid them as much as i can and am glad to reduce the ones i have whenever i can.
Hi Mochasmo, the acronym "IMO" is commonly used online meaning "In my opinion" Paul Wheaton is a proponent of hugelkultur garden beds and has posted some information here: https://richsoil.com/hugelkultur/
I have two raised hugels currently and have plans for several more next year. My primary reasons for building raised beds are easy on my body (I can sit down to work the bed) and mole/vole control (I can stop the buggers from getting into these beds and wreaking havoc). My method is to excavate the top soil inside the bed and lay down rotting wood, large on bottom up to small on top, the wood usually stops 2 feet from where the soil surface will be. As I stack in the wood, I fill any gaps with leaf mold and compost then my cap is the excavated top soil mixed with more compost and composted manure. This sits for about 3 months and as it settles in I add more compost to fill it back up to the level I want. This year we had about a month long draught and I never had to water these beds, my other "conventional" beds had to be watered once a week during the draught period. I have a series of soil building threads on permies.com, https://permies.com/wiki/77424/List-Bryant-RedHawk-Epic-Soil that you might also find useful.
Hi Bill, good to be back. I use the "border" of the raised beds to stop the moles and voles by planting the bottom edge 15 cm deeper than the soil surface outside the bed. Voles and Moles in Arkansas seem to like sticking to the top 6 inches of soil for tunneling so by going down twice that, they run into the barrier and by making the upper side of the bed retaining wall around 60 cm above the soil level (outside the bed) they can't climb over it without exposing themselves to predators so they don't even try. I keep the ants away by using spent coffee grounds around the outside of the barrier wall, the worms drag them down into the soil and so far we haven't had any ants try to set up house keeping in those beds that I've treated this way. We also use lots of the coffee grounds in the growing soil and in our compost heaps.