Our latest project in our backyard consisted of installing a hügelkultur privacy berm along the perimeter of our property. There are many benefits a berm offers within the context of regenerative gardening and beautiful landscaping. I’m excited to share my latest project with you in hopes that it can inspire a greater understanding of garden ecology while showcasing that earth-healing practices can be implemented while creating a beautiful landscape.

Our Design Process

While our yard might appear to be located in some rural town at the foot of scenic mountains, it’s quite the contrary. Homes, apartments, strip malls, schools, gas stations, and busy roads alike lie just beyond our fence line. We live in the heart of bustling suburbia, but we want our land to offer a charming bucolic escape. If you’ve spent anytime on my blog you know that my work always comes back to blending form and function - it must be beautiful and it must be practical. My design intention with this project was to lay the groundwork, literally, to establish privacy and a pleasant backyard experience through creating scale while also implementing earth-healing gardening practices.

Privacy

We value privacy, so we wanted our yard to offer us respite even within our busy surroundings. Our neighbors' yards are also unsightly so we want to replace the view of junkyards and neglected fields with soothing scenes. Considering my intention to grow a large regenerative kitchen garden in the backyard I know I needed to leave ample space for sunlight. In order for us to achieve both we decided that planting trees around the perimeter of our property would provide a green privacy barrier plus the proper amount of sunlight and shade in the right places. As the trees mature they’ll also act as sound barriers from the city around us and create a stabilized micro-climate within our backyard. (Check out how we planted the berm.)

Scale + The Garden Experience

Why didn’t we begin planting trees right away in flat ground - why install a berm? There are many reasons and this is where I get excited about implementing regenerative gardening practices in combination with design elements in an urban landscape. A 3-4 foot tall berm raises the level of trees immediately, effectively making the trees seem bigger than they actually are. This impact of scale provides a comforting and relaxing experience for the garden goer, much like we experience when we’re walking in a towering forest. The berm also encloses the yard in a barrier which helps create a microclimate. The grounds within the berm is more easily protected from wind, moisture loss, and extreme temperature fluctuations, while also encouraging insects and animals to inhabit the environment. To get right to the point - we’re creating a self-sustaining ecosystem and an experiential garden.

Regenerative Gardening

Why didn’t we create the berm solely with dirt? Enter, the concept of hügelkultur. Hügelkultur translates to “mound culture” in german. It’s a horticultural technique where mounds constructed of wood material, such as felled trees and other compostable biomass, are used to create raised planting beds. It’s been practiced in Germany and Eastern European societies for hundreds of years, and only just recently is this technique being revitalized as an important sustainable solution in modern regenerative gardens.

Some of the incredible regenerative benefits of hügelkultur include the mounds ability to sequester carbon on site by burying debris and woody material in the ground. As you know we felled several dead trees in the spring, so this was the perfect way to recycle them. A hügelkultur berm also retains moisture on site through rainwater capture and thermal mass. It improves soil health due to an increase of nutrients from the decaying wood and the subsequent increase of mycorrhizal fungi and other organisms in the soil food web. In short, a berm filled with wood and other organic materials greatly enhances habitat value. The beautiful thing about a hügelkultur berm is that it can easily be created for raised vegetable garden beds as well as ornamental landscapes.

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How a Hügelkultur Berm Works

High quality soil and compost that is full of life, such as bacteria and mycorrhizae (fungi organisms), feeds on the wood material (decomposing it) and reproduces in the process. Very quickly that process begins to attract other organisms like earthworms, nematodes, beetles and millions more. The combination of all of these organic materials and living organisms creates an incredibly healthy soil ecosystem loaded with micro and macro nutrients, all of which enable plants, trees, and all other organisms to thrive in a self-sustaining habitat. In turn, the thriving plants capture Co2 from the atmosphere and sequester it in the soil to be used as food. Laid at the backdrop of our serious climate crisis, this natural process becomes a vitally important earth-healing practice that many more people need to implement in their own landscapes.

How We Built the Hügelkultur Berm

After felling our unwanted trees in the spring we layered them along our border. All the trunks, branches and small broken bits were laid down starting with the largest pieces on the bottom. We saved the dead pine for firewood, but used the live elm wood for the berm. In effect we were building one long compost pile. Any wood ash and charcoal from the branches we burned also went into the berm. Grasses were cut and placed on top, too.

Once the base was prepared we made a significant financial investment of high quality soil, compost, and mulch. It is a 50-50 blend of top soil and compost which is key because only material that is already full of life will break down the wood - dirt will not. To cover the length of our backyard perimeter plus extra for the garden and back half of the yard we had 64 cubic yards of soil, and 13 cubic yards of mulch delivered. We rented a Kubota tractor with a scoop and began to fill in the berm.

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It was a long, hot, and dirty day! While my husband operated the tractor I raked the soil into the berm to level it out then subsequently sprayed it with water to help the soil settle. I was careful not to make the side walls too steep because I don’t want it to erode. With the help of a family friend the three of us filled in the berm then top dressed it with 3 inches of wood mulch. I cannot stress enough how important mulching is in regenerative gardening. Mulch will prevent erosion, suppress weeds, retain moisture longer and feed the soil as it breaks down in a few years. It would be a shame to invest so much into building the berm, only to have it erode or become overrun with weeds.

After the berm was installed, we began distributing the soil around the garden rows, then I sowed clover instead of a grass lawn. The native soil back there was so compacted and depleted that in order for anything to grow other than weeds it needed 3-4 inches of fresh high-quality soil layered on top. My next project will be to seed the ground around the garden with a cover crop lawn alternative. As you’ve probably noticed, I cut down the cover crop buckwheat in the regenerative kitchen garden. The pumpkins are thriving and coming into color which is transforming the landscape back here once again. I’ll be sharing an update on the kitchen garden very soon too. We also hope to be planting the berm this fall, of which you can bet I’ll share my mind and design process as well.

We have a lot of work still ahead of us, but I’m so pleased with how much we’ve already improved this land since acquiring it last December. Doing this hard work of regenerating the land is a challenge yet also immensely rewarding. Without a doubt this investment will pay us back, our community, and the earth tenfold. I’m so glad you’re here for our journey.