Of Wood Chips, Hugelkultur, and Burlap Bags

Wood chips as a source of wood for hugelkultur

Hugelkultur is a technique that I’ve been experimenting with for a few years. Basically, the idea is to bury wood under soil and then plant things on top of it all. This system provides a few advantages:

• The wood acts like a sponge, retaining moisture that is then available to plants and other soil life.
• As the wood decomposes, it increases the organic matter content of the soil.

As far as I know, hugelkultur is traditionally performed using larger pieces of wood, such as branches and logs. But I wondered if using wood chips would also work. After all, they’re wood too.

I combined the wood chips hugelkultur idea with another idea: the burlap bag garden planter. I’m not the first person to talk about wood chips in hugelkultur or burlap bags planters. But I haven’t found anything else on the internet combining these two ideas.

In my YouTube video below, you can see how I constructed these planters.

How will these burlap bag planters fare?

This is my first time experimenting with wood chips in hugelkultur OR with burlap bag planters, to say nothing of combining the two. Here are some things that I’m curious to find out as this experiment continues:

• How long will the burlap hold up? After all, burlap is biodegradable. I wonder if the planters will make it through a full season without falling apart. If they do survive the season, I wonder how many more seasons they will last.
  
  
• How long will it take the wood chips to decompose? Since the wood chips are smaller than logs, I imagine that the wood chips will decompose relatively quickly. Again, I wonder how this will play out over the course of this season–and possibly future seasons.
  
  
• How often will the planters need to be watered? As I mentioned earlier, one reason for doing hugelkultur is to help with moisture retention. As a result, one should not have to water as much as if using only soil. As I showed in the YouTube video, I thoroughly soaked the wood chips with water before putting soil on top, so the wood chips are well saturated to start. On the other hand, the wood chips could also lose water more quickly than if they were buried underground because the sides of the burlap planters are breathable. I wonder how all this will affect my watering needs.
  
  
• Will the roots be able to penetrate deep enough? The soil layer is only a few inches deep in these planters, and the wood chip layer is deeper than the soil layer. I wonder how the roots of the tomato, pepper, and basil that I planted will fare in this type of environment.

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!