Reclaiming Dead Soil through Hugelkultur

We have a problem. Most of the land we live on (even in rural communities) is barren. That means the soil can't support life without massive injections of imported petro-chemical fertilizer's, irrigation, and mechanical labor. Worse, it takes years to reclaim dead soil.

A home or community with dead soil (as essential first step to building a productive landscape), won't help y0u survive an economic winter. So, here's a trick that may help out, but you need to start earlier than latter.

It's called Hugelkultur (it's from a brilliant german permaculture engineer called Sepp Holzer, although he started doing this well before the permaculture brand emerged). Simply, it's soil on top of a bed of rotten wood. There are lots of very informative and quirky instructional materials on the Web about it (from vids on YouTube to discussion pages). Also, Sepp has a great book that includes this and more.

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