Potatoes in the Hugelkultur

Apologies for the lack of posts in recent months, life in general seems to get in the way of me taking time out to write on this, as I am also writing a new edition of my foraging book and was involved with the European Permaculture Convergence, which took place in Co. Wicklow this year and various other travels and projects.  Things are now finally settling down for winter and I have some time to spend some contemplative hours in the garden and gathering our harvests.

4 years ago, when we first moved into this place, we fished some old rotting wood out of the adjacent stream and decided to build a hugelkultur with it.  This essentially is a pile of wood topped by various organic materials and some soil (the soil came from excavating the nearby pond), and let it all slowly rot down, whilst growing stuff on it at the same time.  The first things we did plant were a perennial collard (which died off last winter, but not before producing enough seeds for new seedlings to now come up), some red Russian kale and some mint.  Then I kind of left it all to its own devices.  Now 4 years later it has shrunk to half its size and looks like this:

One of the more surprising yields we had on this is the potato.  I often hear people discussing foreign invasive weeds, to which I reply that my most invasive foreign weed is the potato.  Now I never actually planted any potatoes on the hugel, nor have I ever to my knowledge added compost which might have contained potato peel.  I do have a habit though, when I harvest potatoes and find teeny-weeny ones, or ones which have started rotting some, I kind of discard them by throwing them randomly over my shoulder, and some must have landed here.  Last year I already found some, but this year there were loads!

And look at how rich the soil now looks as the wood is practically rotted down and has become pure compost!  This was how much I had when I had investigated only half the mound:

Not bad considering I invested absolutely no work into this at all.  This year was really odd as well, as from mid-May to the end of July we had no rain, so the plants didn’t actually start growing until then!  Before that all you could see was nettles, hogweed, cleavers, dandelions and such like.  The mint in the meantime is taking over the northern corner of the hugel:

And the original red Russian kale keeps self sowing and giving us small yields every year amongst the nettles.  And all this with minimal input: no watering, no fertiliser, no digging, no real weeding, just going over it with a scythe twice a year.

In other more alarming news, the field next door to us appears to be invaded by giant moles!