In 2016 we decided to build a hugelkultur bed - a mound filled with wood and topped with soil - in order to have somewhere for the plants that hated having their feet in solid clay but I didn't have room for in the vegetable garden, principally raspberry canes. The mound would have a north side (for the raspberries) and and a south side, where I intended to grow globe artichokes. The spot we chose is at the bottom of a gentle slope and has water running through it during the winter and after summer storms. It is also the spot where we were storing our uncut fire wood and as a result had a huge amount of rubbish wood that had begun to rot beyond use.

After removing the good wood and putting the gash to one side we measured out the size of the bed 3x2m approx, a size chosen because most of the wood we had was no longer than 3m. We then dug a hole in the clay to a depth of about half a metre - this is in to solid clay, the idea being that the base would hold moisture.

We filled the hole with big logs
     
topped them off with all the wood debris from clearing the log pile 
   
mostly to fill in the gaps, and then added a big layer of smaller poles
   
next went on a layer of horse manure 
   
Before we topped it off with the topsoil removed when we dug the hole. The finished mound
   
and seen from the other side of the meadow 
     
We duly planted raspberries along the back side and I used the front for various things - tomatoes, pumpkins, flowers. But I have to say that nothing thrived on the front, mostly because there were so many rodents and slugs living in the gaps in the timber! Three years ago I planted a peach tree, some strawberry plants and a rhubarb crown - all but the tree have vanished! So now it is just full of raspberries on one side and blackcurrants on the other. Five years after construction the mound is completley flat and I have to top up the soil to prevent the roots of the peach tree becoming exposed.
   
It hasn't really achieved what I wanted and was hard work to create; I also thought the mound would last longer. On the other hand this is the only bit of the productive garden that never gets watered.

This is some heavy (about 80kg each , apparently) duty recycling.

     

That’s a fairly big boot for comparison. I was going to stack 3 or 4 of them to make a planter. 

If anyone has any other ideas, just shout! Only found out I was getting some of them half hour ago 

Hello folks

I seem to have few issues with germination from my unheated propagators however my heated one isn't yielding much at all.

I appreciate there are a number of factors however my question is around watering, what's the score, do I make sure the soil is always moist?

These are amazing little harmless and incredibly cute creatures. Yet another species being driven to extinction because of us, the human race.  
I thought maybe some of you maybe interested. Knowing how much you all love and respect our native wildlife.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t realise how bad things were until I read the below link. 

https://www.pangolins.org/

I have been experimenting with using herbs and spices from my spice rack in a pan of water on top of the woodburner. I peeled an orange and added some Cinnamon but got very little aroma from it. I tried Rosemary from the garden and it did work but for a limited time.
I am now thinking of using an essential oil but don't know what 'flavour' to use. There appear to be hundreds on the go. Has anyone got any tips and recommendations for summat that won't be too overpowering?

TVM in advance.

In an idle moment I tried to imagine my garden drawn as squares on graph paper. A sort of Square Foot/Yard grid covering the entire garden where there were no curved lines, only squares
I've seen all the neat plans where beds are perfect rectangles and that's easy to imagine but, no matter how I imagined it, all I could turn mine into was a Crossword, where black squares were paths and white squares were beds.

What game would you play in yours? Chess/draughts, snakes and ladders, Monopoly..............

Answers on a postcard to...............

Maybe its just because I am a tight git, or maybe its because I can't be bothered to buy any more .Or possibly I have got my re-use /recycle head on.
The aluminium disposable pie dishes are now washed out and re-used for future pies. Am I alone in this or has it just dawned on me only that its an environmentally friendly thing to do. They could also be used as bird scarers on a string?

What else are they good for?

I find grafted tomatoes do a lot better in the greenhouse soil than on their own roots. Last year, only 8 plants took out of about 15 I grafted. I think I was too optimistic regarding the germination rate of the rootstock. I sowed seed on the 3rd March but didn't get the first ripe tomatoes till mid July probably and had only 3kg off these 8 by mid August while 9 not grafted in a small greenhouse had yielded 18kg by the same date. So last year it looks like grafting set the plants back about 3 to 4 weeks. One of the 8, an orange banana, didn't do at all well but I lost the bottom 4 trusses to slugs which seem to really like plum tomatoes.

So this year I will probably sow the seeds about the 21st Feb. along with peppers, chillies and aubergines. I'll sow a few peppers, chillies and aubergines tomorrow as they are slower growing than tomatoes and, if I have any rootstocks spare, I'll try grafting some of these onto  tomato rootstocks to see if it helps them as well.

As an experiment, I'll plant some Roma VF where I know tomatoes do not thrive in the greenhouse s they are supposed to have some resistance to soil diseases. If they do OK, I would then try using them as a rootstock.

So one job tomorrow is checking I've still got enough silicone grafting clips. I bought 50 a couple of years ago. Hopefully not too many are lost as not likely available in time due to covid ordering restrictions.

Are there any F1 seeds that you always grow and couldn't manage without? 

I don't buy F1 seeds from choice - but sometimes they appear as a freebie on a magazine or in a job lot of seeds. There seem to be a lot of Cucumbers/Courgettes/Tomatoes that are F1. I've given away all my F1 tomato seeds but need to weed through the rest. 

My aim is to only grow plants from seeds that have been saved by me, from a seed swap or bought from ethical companies like Real Seeds or Franchi and to ignore the "big boys".

Last year I used a large wood burner in the greenhouse but using it took a lot of wood and I felt that it was getting more difficult to provide wood for it, so I removed it, I had intended to use an electric heater, but with the temperatures we have been having over the past several weeks makes it too costly, but I also have a small pot bellied burner, which I could run to make the greenhouse a bit more comfortable to work in, but wondering what others would recommend doing