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In a recent conversation on a serious plantnerd listserv, a question was asked re hügelkultur – ”

“I …have just run into this term lately. Has anyone undertaken this approach? We have clay soil, standing wet and plenty of downed branches and rotting logs.” “Is it worth a try?” asked this highly experienced gardener.

There were various ‘give it a try, why not’ answers, but one of the replies caught my attention, as the writer dismissed the method as temporary, weedy, and non-scientific, and then linked to a 2022 article by Dr. Linda Chalker-Scott of The Garden Professors fame for the Washington State University (WSU) Extension.

Dr. Chalker-Scott obviously did not approve due to the lack of peer-reviewed, scientific studies supporting it.

Perhaps the initial dismissal by my listserv colleague and the article caught my attention as both are in direct contrast to my own experience.

I have successfully cultivated a 100′ x 15′ hügelkultur for over seven years now. It acts as the backbone of my lower garden and its water retaining abilities saved my skin (and my tropicals) during the last few periods of drought. I do not have pumped water to these gardens and rely on water barrels and the sponge-effect of this structure.

It has lost stature (perhaps 12-15″) off its original height of four feet in some places. But to be fair, so have I.  It is only peer-reviewed when I have plant friends over, and then, only with a drink in their hands.

I’m all for scientific studies and peer-reviewed research — but what I’m not for is the dismissal of ideas based on the lack of science or peer-reviewed research.  It takes funding, interested parties and/or departments, and sometimes political will, to get worthy hypotheses tested. A few research minions help too. Not all studies get peer-reviewed, and the peer-review process is not without serious drawbacks.

Can we go back to the question? What’s Hügelkultur?

No, it’s not a Millennial-rebrand — even if it’s got some traction on social media.

Dr. Chalker-Scott attributes the first use of the term to a German paper by gardeners Herrman Andrä and Hans Beba in 1962 (Hügelkultur—die Gartenbaumethode der Zukunft), and lays out the method.

From the publication [translated]:

Hügelkultur is a German term meaning hillock or mound cultivation. It is a method of building garden and landscape beds using woody material, garden debris, and soil arranged in long, tunnel-shaped mounds. Since these beds are three-dimensional, they create additional space for growing plants.

You can find drawings from the original text illustrating the ‘classic’ concept in the WSU Extension Publication. 

Here’s a photo of a newly planted classic hügelkultur bed in the garden of Permaculture author, Michael Judd in 2018. 

When you’ve got more detritus than dirt

In creating my hügelkultur, I did not carefully follow the rules espoused by Beba and Andrä and examined by Dr. Chalker-Scott. I simply used the abundance of organic material I had — layers of rotting logs, branches, twigs, weeds, leaves, soil, wood ash, poultry coop bedding (situating logs near the bottom), and topped them with approximately 6 inches of composted chips to keep down weeds while plants established. 

Here’s an aerial view of the lower garden in June 2018.  We moved to Oldmeadow in 2013 and began planting on this field in 2015. On the left is the winding serpentine hugelkultur bed which I started two years later, most of which is still under construction in this photo. The first part is planted and I am slowly finishing and claiming sections each season for planting (very roughly estimated below).

The other beds outlined on the right are (top) a mounded earth bed, and (bottom) a bed amended with some organic material and dressed with composted chips.  As I grow water-hungry tropicals in all three places, it provides me with an excellent comparison for plants in the same general microclimate.

 

I ‘claimed’ 10 feet of the bed at a time each season, sometimes less, as it was all I could keep on top of without help. I outlined the rest of the bed, built layers and allowed scrambling squash vines to keep down weeds and provide free pumpkins in the autumn. 

Hügelkultur saved my kitchen garden from flooding during our great flood in 2021, as the serpentine bed acted as a barrier and channeled water away. Where the bed sits perpendicular to ground water flow in times of a higher water table, it seems to slow down the flow of that water by absorption – to the benefit of moisture-loving plants.

This hügelkultur will not last forever, but it has unarguably improved the odds of survival for the types of plants I grow in it. Andrä asserts that they should be rebuilt from scratch when they finally break down, but I don’t know that this is necessary and/or practical.

By the time they have decayed, they have done the job for which they were intended (recycling of bio-waste, creating viable beds, establishing root systems, retaining moisture, providing nutrients) with great benefit to plants — their partial loss is more an aesthetic one than anything else.

Though I don’t use them for vegetables (the pumpkins are long gone), I agree with Beba and Andrä that more square footage is created for growing; and I also agree with their assertion that “mound culture” provides more of a pleasing visual effect in a large garden than “flatland culture” — particularly for gardeners who never thought of their earth canvas as more than two dimensional.

Keith Wiley’s garden Wildside is a great example of this, though he physically moves earth rather than creating organic-based mounds. (I’m taking a group there in September – join me and you can see for yourself!)

Sorry. Science says ‘NO.’

Like many growing methods, hügelkultur has up sides and down sides. For me, the former outweighs the latter.  But the cold lens of ‘Science’ doesn’t always see nuance, and often we go with our instincts.

It is time-worn experience that matters for most gardeners, and if something seems to work well across cultures for many people and their plants beyond the mindlessness of “we’ve always done it that way,” scientists would be better employed figuring out why that might be, rather than seeking to tear it down and tell gardeners there’s no point in doing it.

I doubt there’s an actual scientific study that shows that pebble trays keep humidity levels higher for houseplants, but my bromeliads tell me it’s a good idea.

Lack of evidence isn’t evidence. 

In the WSU Extension publication produced to slap the listserv questioner with an immediate cease-and-desist, it was not replicable peer-reviewed scientific studies that have negated the perceived benefits of hügelkultur .

In the absence of such data Dr. Chalker-Scott uses circumstantial (inferential) evidence. It feels as if the intention of this publication is not to look at this method through an unbiased lens, but with Dr. Chalker-Scott’s signature ‘myth busting’ lens very much in place.  

Weeds & Sinkholes

For instance, Dr. Chalker-Scott states that they can be weedy, but didn’t counterpoint with the fact that most patches of temperate land (save desert ecosystems & poisoned soil) are quickly colonized by opportunistic flora – particularly disturbed soils. The perception of ‘weediness’ may be as a result of hügelkultur’s frequent association with permaculture enthusiasts, who in my experience, embrace the wild and wooly look.  I don’t.

She points out that they will sink with time and therefore aren’t advisable for small trees (just as the original authors wrote), but does not mention that soil can be added, and that allowing a hügelkultur to settle for a period of time — perhaps seasons or years with cover crops — can help with structural inconsistencies whilst building soils.  A wider width (mine is up to 20 feet in places) also mitigates the justified concern a gardener might feel over planting a tree on a short and skinny mound.  These are adaptations that bear mentioning.

I have several small trees (Hammelis spp., Prunus mume, Salix spp.) that went into my hügelkultur as tiny whips and have built a strong root system over time with very few additions of compost or mulch on my part.  I have no doubt that air pockets are formed as larger material finally breaks down, but I also have moles, voles and now, apparently, rabbits – I am no stranger to air pockets.

Uhh…we’re not managing commercial cow manure

Later Dr. Chalker-Scott implies that residential hügelkultur nutrient run off might be a problem – as it is with commercial compost runoff, then cites a Cornell paper on managing industrial feedstock farm compost piles to add weight to her words. That’s more than a little naughty. Most people don’t read works cited, but are easily impressed by the presence of the citations themselves (Willburn et. al. 2025).   

Also naughty – the act of using a citation Laffoon (2016) to define the word hügelkultur as it pertains to permaculture, instead of mentioning that the actual point of this undergraduate thesis project (granted honors college graduate distinction from University of Western Kentucky) was not to define a term, but to test the hypothesis that hügelkultur might improve moisture-holding capacity of soils by conducting preliminary and formal studies.

Those statistically significant [positive] results also bear mentioning I would think. It may not be a peer-reviewed study, but it was advisor-reviewed, and it’s an interesting result.  And it’s certainly been my anecdotal experience – and that of others.

Mound away! Just do it the peer-reviewed way.

Dr. Chalker-Scott ends her analysis by suggesting that building soil mounds is a more sustainable, preferable, peer-reviewed, substitute.  I do not understand how moving huge amounts of soil from one area to another, destroying soil structure and requiring heavy machinery (not to mention riling up a dormant seed bank), is more sustainable than using the organic waste you have to carefully create new structure, but answers in the comments below please.

I enjoy Dr. Chalker-Scott’s work and have two of her books, but I must question the need for this publication, which admits that there is no evidence hügelkultur is good or bad…but it’s probably bad soooo how ’bout we just don’t? 

And watching it subsequently used to end a discussion, because — ‘Science!’, made me particularly salty. Intelligent people do not wish to be considered by their peers to be anti-science. It has become commonplace to use that term as a trump card; and faced with a reputation-altering binary choice in matters more nuanced, smart people stay silent and simply stop questioning.

Which is — profoundly and ironically — anti-science.

For me, the proof is in the pudding, and my personal hügelkultur pudding is moist, rich and highly calorific.  I’d build another one tomorrow if I had more help around here to plant it, peer-reviewed or not. – MW

Someone Needs to Tell My Hügelkultur It’s Not-Peer Reviewed. originally appeared on GardenRant on January 25, 2025.

The post Someone Needs to Tell My Hügelkultur It’s Not-Peer Reviewed. appeared first on GardenRant.

* This article was originally published here

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