A no till, 103 square foot, raised bed, Hugelkultur garden with worm towers.

[Kaleva]

As I mentioned in the previous thread, I have already dug a 3' wide X 36' long by 2 1/2' deep trench and had begun to fill it with branches and cardboard last fall. winter came very early and I wasn't able to complete the project and the trench is still filled with water so it's going to be a bit before I can get back to work on it.

In the meantime, I've been doing some thinking which is much easier to do then to dig a 3' wide X 36' long by 2 1/2' deep trench in clay soil.

Once the trench dries out, I'll fill it as compactly as I can with cut to fit small logs and branches from the brush pile while also shoveling in dirt to fill in gaps. When I have reached ground level, I'll lay out sheets of newspaper and cardboard over the filled in trench and about a foot or so past the edges.

With the remaining dirt I had previously dug out, I'll mix that with the contents of my two compost piles to cover an area 36' long X 3' wide X about 8" to 12" high with sloped sides. About nine 12 square foot gardening plots all in a row.

A combination Hugelkultur -JM Fortier raised garden row using Mel Bartholomew's plant spacing ideas if you will.

For the worm towers, I'll place five 5 gallon buckets evenly spaced, more or less, throughout the row. As a 5 gallon bucket is just under 12" in diameter, five of them will reduce the total square footage of the row to 103 square feet.

In the future, I may continue to use this method but instead of digging a 3' wide X 2 1/2" deep X 36' long trench, I'll dig out a 4' W X 4' L X 2 1/2 D bed for a 16 square foot raised bed.