I’m in Northern California in an extremely hot climate. For years, I’ve wanted to start a large vegetable garden, but for some reason, it creates a lot of anxiety and indecision, and I end up doing nothing. I’m hoping to get this figured out once and for all.
We no longer have chickens, but the large pile on the far left is from their yard. It’s a couple years of chicken manure, pine needles and leaves being turned over by them. The pile also has a couple truckloads of aging horse manure from several months ago. I combined everything together last month.
The two piles on the right, One I’ve been breaking open as of today, is a mixture of oak and pine wood chips. It’s probably more pine than oak.
I’m not sure how I’m going to be doing my garden, but I thought I should go ahead and combine the chicken manure and horse manure pile with the wood chips. It’s my understanding all of that material combined together will encourage everything to break down nicely for soil.
The materials were all free, which is exactly what I can afford. What I thought I would do is start layering everything together and sort out the bigger branches. The deep inside of the wood pile has areas that are bone dry. So I figured I’d leave everything just a few feet deep and spread open so that it can get nicely saturated with rain, and then pile it back together to encourage internal heat.
I’m not sure if hugelkultur is an effective gardening method in a hot climate, but that’s kind of what I have in mind. I was also thinking of creating vegetable gardens in a couple different areas on my property. It would all have to be fenced because of deer. Money is a problem so that’s been a big thing holding me back.
I’d sure welcome some feedback on all of this. Thank you!
submitted by /u/ShastaMeadow
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