We have so far built about 600 square feet of raised beds on the property using old fence timbers that were laying around everywhere when we moved here.

In the spirit of sustainability, economy and with fire-mitigation in mind, we included as much scavenged branches and small sticks as we could find all over the property into the first material layer of our raised beds.

First we laid down landscape fabric, to keep the soil in place. Then we used cardboard layers scavenged from our move to slow runoff from our rainwater harvest irrigation and retain moisture. The workawayers and I dragged our heavy duty wagon ALL OVER the property, recovering discarded Christmas trees left by the prior owners, nearly rotten logs and branches, and newer dead wood. We kept this layer to about 8″ deep, and with branch and deadwood sizes up to about 4″ except for really well rotted stuff.

Then we collected the freshest horse manure possible from the pasture to fill in the gaps in that 8″ layer. I chose fresh manure in order to balance the nitrogen and carbon sources AND provide plenty of fresh organisms to speed the breakdown process. In this case I was going for more ready sources of nutrients than the long-term investment of true hugelkultur mounds.

On top of that, we added first soil, then extremely well-composted and aged horse manure, and finished with a layer of the best organic soil compost mixture I could find – making the beds overall about 16-20″ deep, depending on their position on the slope.

We have them all positioned in various combinations of part sun and shade- at this elevation, we can definitely get away with less direct sunlight than most gardens require, and positioning that way also helps conserve moisture.