Good morning Internet! Gray and raining too hard for a garden walk, but a couple people asked about my brush pile bed, and since I took photos yesterday, let’s talk about that!

First, a word about brush piles. If you have property with enough space, this is probably the single easiest thing you can do for wildlife. Everything loves a brush pile. You dump all those twigs and cut branches and you walk away.

The diversity of animals that will make use of them is huge. Small mammals, reptiles, amphibians, some birds, insects and decomposers to feed the lot. Great stuff. There’s like five on Dogskull.

All that being said, obviously the HOA does not approve, and if you live somewhere that isn’t a swamp, you gotta know about your local fire regs. (Me, I get forty inches of rain a year, my problem with a brush pile is usually keeping it from rotting down too fast.)

There is an American obsession with burning brush piles that I do not quite understand, but never mind that. Here at Wombathaus, where I usually only generate a garden worth of trimmings, I keep three small ones going, front and back.

I had a big one but it filled up with pine needles and grew vines and now it’s just part of the woods. This is the nice thing about humid climates.

Anyway. When we cleared the space for the front garden, we took down some trees and branches and that created a lot more brush. I dragged it into a semicircle around the garden clearing, with the thought of maybe using it as the basis for a bed someday.

Now, there is a type of raised bed called hugelkultur. You can google it, it’s pretty cool. It’s logs and big branches overlaid with dirt and sod. The wood decomposes and breaks down, feeding the dirt.

All the graphics are very neat and involve nicely cut chunks of wood in even lengths. To which I say—good for you! But here at Wombathaus, we are all about scruffy and functional, so I built a brush pile bed.

I started by dragging brush into the rough shape I wanted and then stomped on it a few times.

Tossed some cardboard in on the bottom too, because I had it lying around.

Using the biggest cut branches, I built up a border. Yes, these will rot eventually. No, I’m not worried about it right now.

(I actually built a small version a few months back in part of this space, but since I had all this sheep poop, I decided to get ambitious with the rest of it.)

Bring in the waste hay/sheep poop! It stinks! It’s a messy job! I found muck in my eyebrows afterward!

You may have to shove some of the poop down into the gaps in the wood. Do this as needed, but don’t get too obsessed. Gaps and hollows are fine. Desirable, even. They hold air and water.

Your ultimate goal here is a bed that stays about as damp as a wrung out sponge at all times. Moist, well-drained soil! Every plant tag on earth says the plant does best in moist, well-drained soil. No shit. I’d probably grow in that too.

Now, sheep poop will not be ready for planting for awhile. It’s all funky nitrogen and ammonia and...well...shit. This is a long term process. I don’t aim to use the beds until next year.

So I got to work spreading. This is a very long, narrow bed in back of the existing garden space. I don’t really know how much sunlight it will get. Part sun seems most likely, all things considered. I tossed cardboard on top of the poop in a few places.

As you can see, this is not going to get me on the cover of House Beautiful. I want to be clear, this is gonna be scruffy looking. Your neighbors are not going to come over to compliment you on your use of rustic materials. They are gonna ask if the woods barfed in your garden.

Anyway! After you have dumped your first layer, soak it. I am fortunate, we are having a major rain today. When that first layer is down, add the next! What do you add next? Well, what’ve you got?

I mean, don’t stress about sourcing the finest artisanal soil ingredients here. Dump the compost heap you forgot to turn and the leftover stuff from the chicken coop and that half bag of ancient seed starting mix in the garage that you’re never gonna use.

You can make things super complicated if you want and fret about your green to brown ratios and whatnot. It’s harmless enough and keeps the mind occupied. Me, I tend to figure that what plants want is water, poop, and something they can get their roots into.

The next layer here will be the remains of that load of composted cow manure, not because of a special secret recipe but because I want to clear the manure out so the mulch guys can drop more mulch in that spot in the driveway.

Other parts of the bed to be got chicken bedding, sawdust mixed with sheep poop, the enormous stems of Virginia fanpetals from when I cut back the stuff in the garden...you get the idea. Look up lasagna gardening if you want more info.

Soak it all down again. Water makes it work.

When you’re done, throw a load of mulch over the whole business and walk away.

Here is the tiny bed I created in a convenient chunk of the brush pile early this spring. It gets cucumbers and beans. (I also scattered beet seed, but beets are always a crapshoot here, so I don’t expect much.)

“But Ursula!” you say. “Won’t the dirt be full of weird twigs and sticks that haven’t broken down?” Yep, sure will. The plants won’t mind. This probably isn’t where you want to plant gallons of gardenias with big root balls that you need to clear space for.

“Wouldn’t it be much more efficient if you did X, Y, or Z?” Probably. Look, I’m not an engineer, I just throw stuff in piles. You tweak this however you see fit!

“Won’t your edging logs rot and break down?” Oh yeah, like mad. It’s great. After a couple seasons, depending on the species, those logs are a mess. Remove any that aren’t loadbearing. Toss to chickens. Put in cinderblocks or something.

(Chickens think rotten logs are the best things ever.)

By the time you need to do that, you’ll have had the bed for awhile and you can go “okay, it needs to expand here,” or “I don’t actually use it much so I’ll plant ferns” or “it needs to be eight inches deeper” and you can mess around with changes and edging materials.

I suspect that the back of the bed will eventually too shady for stuff like tomatoes. I will therefore maybe end up with a line of blueberries or something. Or I’ll find the tree branches blocking the best light and take a lopper to them.

Half of stuff like this is just figuring out what the garden wants to be and doing that.

Anyway. I have in fact done this before, although not with such high quality sheep poop, and it does work. You do get the occasional stick that will just never break down—boxwood was annoying for that—and eventually you get tired of looking at it and yank it out. Otherwise, works

I’ve got about a third of the horseshoe around the front veggie garden started. I keep tossing clippings onto the other two thirds, and eventually I’ll get around to them, too, although those are much shadier and I suspect I really will plant ferns.

And that’s it! It’s not magic, it’s just a scruff pile of stuff in a convenient place.