Anna: Raising trees out of wet soil with mounds

This wet summer has
proven to me that tree
mounds are even
more essential than I'd thought in the high-groundwater area of
the forest garden.  We have five baby
figs ready to
go in the ground...or, rather, above it...so I've been figuring
out the easiest way to produce good soil that will stay high and
dry.



My current method is a modified
kill-mulch/hugelkultur mound.  I lay down a sheet of
cardboard as a weed barrier, layer on three or four
wheelbarrow-loads of weeds from the garden, and toss in any punky
firewood I find lying around.  In a year or so, I could plant
into that as-is, but since I want to plant sooner, I make a
depression in the middle, pour a baby tree out of its pot with all
of the soil intact around its root ball, then add a bucket of
horse manure around the edges of the potting soil.  I top it
all off with a straw mulch, and I'm done...for now.



The trees will be
able to grow into the partially-composted manure nearly right
away, and will reach the woodier organic matter around the time it
starts to decompose.  I suspect the weeds will rot down to
become just an inch or two of humus, but hopefully the addition of
punky wood will keep figs out of the groundwater longer. 
I'll continue adding either hugelkultur
or weed donuts
around the plants, though, to give the plants dryish ground to
grow into over the years.



Last year, figs
proved themselves to be one of our easiest and most productive
fruit trees, so it's good to have some new varieties join the
club.  I'll let you know if Black Mission and Dwarf can
survive our winters with
protection like
Chicago Hardy and Celeste did.  Stay tuned for details next
spring (and for ripe figs in a month or so --- the photo above is
from last August).

The Avian Aqua Miser is a POOP-free
solution to chicken manure in your flock's drinking water.