Great pics John.
I’ve been using hugelkultur ideas, but with my limited space my beds/mounds aren’t very raised. But the practice has led I think to great soil building and the plants and trees are thriving. I’d love to be able to have an actual mound.
Murky: Can you send one of his cousins my way? 
my hugulculture bed is on a smaller scale, and with a bit of bokashi composting thrown in, to help acidify this part of our yard. Intent though was primarily influenced by cost and by convenience, and not necessarily for scientific reasons, as i was skimping on having to buy bags of soil mixes.
dumping into the elevated planter whatever scattered litter or eyesore i could gather in the yard: sawdust/lumber shards/tree branches, weeds, kitchen refuse, cat poo, and even dead pigeons/rabbits…
even told my folks to dump my naked corpse there when my finite existence attains its conclusion…
Great idea jujubemulberry,
Are you continually buying bokashi or are you stretching it out and making your own? I have been intrigued by it for years but the prospect of continually having to buy a patented recipe drove me away so far. Does it smell bad?
Thansk,
John S
PDX OR
nothing really fancy re: reasons behind my ‘cheapo’ bokashi approach, as they are merely of economy, of convenience, and to minimize putting foodstuff into the trashbin, to avoid it getting smelly specially during summer. What could be smelly trash is instead used as valuable fertilizer and soil acidifier, as our desert soil is quite alkaline. Thus said, i really don’t have the budget for patented recipe’s.
with an elevated planter, i wouldn’t have to dig(vegas’ caliche earth is very hard), and could just dump it there, and cover with leaf litter/grass clippings, and it’s done with. The tiny leaves of mesquite trees and bermuda grass make awesome mulch-cover to seal the stench in.
Yes, I think keeping that nutrient cycling going on keeps the health of the system going. I know organic growers just say, “Keep organic material/compost in the soil and that’s it”. I think you have to go much deeper. By planting mixed fruit trees, the leaves that naturally fall will have different microbiology in them and they will naturally feed the fungi, ciliates, flagellates, etc, and that process is what provides the nutrition in the soil. Organic material and microbiology in the soil is like fiber and probiotics in your gut: they keep it healthy. There’s an ancient Chinese saying. “A bad farmer grows weeds. A good farmer grows crops. A great farmer grows soil.” WE’ve been depleting the soil for hundreds of years and we have to start turning it around and regenerating it. In the fall, I usually pick up bags of unrelated leaves from shade trees as I’m coming home from work. I’ve moved the % of organic material in the soil up to 10% which is apparently optimal.
Here are some pictures of some mason bee homes I’ve made. They are native, but we’ve chopped down a lot of prairies and forests, so I think making these has greatly improved my fruit set. They are extremely efficient fruit pollinators and they don’t really bite humans, but they don’t have honey. There is a guy who makes a newsletter and his company is called Crown Bees. First is the old school mason bee house.
His research has shown that these first ones don’t fill up as much, they can get infested easily and they’re really hard to clean, and they are hard to protect.
You can see how the second one is so much more filled up with mason bees, which are expensive to buy. Unfortunately, sometimes birds will sit just outside them in the spring and wait for the bees to wake up so they can eat them.
This one solves the problem. Birds don’t want to be around netting. The bees can easily fly out of there because they’re so much smaller.
Like a lot of things in permaculture, it’s a slow solution. The bees fill up every year, but slowly. The soil improves a little bit every year, but tremendously. It’s a system that takes a bit of effort to build, but it’s easy and fun to maintain. Most people don’t want to figure out how to do some type of exercise they’ll enjoy, and they don’t want to figure out how to prepare vegetables so they’ll taste good. They want a pill. These kinds of systems use the principles of nature instead of a magic pill.
John S
PDX OR
Withe the teasel stems what do you do between years?
Sorry, Murky,
I was in Montana at a innovative permaculture center without real access to typing on the internet.
Normally, teasel is so common around here that I just start to see it with its distinctive flower head, and I can just gather it from natural places around my house. It is considered an invasive weed. I am turning invasive weeds into habitat for crucial native pollinating species.
A couple of years ago, I realized that in bringing the stems to my house, I had imported the seed as well as the stems, and now I am growing teasel in my yard. I have since decided to cut of the seed heads before bringing the stems to my yard.
I can find an abundance of teasel each year almost everywhere. I think you already know what it looks like, but if someone on this list doesn’t recognize it, you can just look it up on images, google or otherwise. Of course you can grow it in your yard if you’ve got the space. Grabbing a seed head from alternate years would ensure a crop from this biennial plant.
John S
PDX OR
I’m trying to see if this will show videos I made about mason bees.
John S
Here’s a link to my mason bee video showing how I get water to the bees without them drowning and it shows a picture of how I make the bee homes.
JOhn S
PDX OR
John, I just found this thread. Thanks for posting, lots of great photos and ideas. Any big changes in the way you do things since this post?
i havent seen his posts in a few years.
I’ve been posting regularly, Steve, and I’ve seen many of your posts during that time. I also post on permies.com and Home Orchard Society.
No big changes since then, disc4tw. I don’t have to create so many mason bee tubes because I break branches of my fruit trees every year because I get such excellent fruit set.
John S
PDX OR
Hello
This is just what I do. Your mileage might vary. I planted a 1/2 acre wildflower meadow. I have all the bees I need now. All kinds of species too
That’s 3/8ths of an acre more than my whole property currently 
But yes we do have some beds that are majority native wildflowers. It helps a lot to keep the rest of things balanced. Anyone buy from American Meadows? - #21 by disc4tw
I bought my seed from Michigan Wildflower farm. I have been happy. I have lots of weeds though including lots of invasive thistly species. Doesn’t matter to the bees. They like thistle
I don’t have anywhere near that much land, period, either. But I do keep native and non-native wildflowers mixed in. It helps with pollination and invites parasitic wasps on the apple maggot. I also only spray non-toxic substances like compost tea.
JOhn S
PDX OR
i dont have a meadow but ive interplanted pollinator mixes from tractor supply in amongst my fruit and nut trees and bushes. ill plant some more this spring untill its all filled it. i have a steep ditch along the road that was hair raising to mow. i killed it off with herbicide then planted it with wildflower mix , lupines and crown vetch. looks very nice 2 years later and my neighbor’s comment on it when they walk by. i was giving fertilizer but now the lupines and vetch are doing it for me. ive also been seeding my lawn with dutch clover which the bumbles really love. planted some Himalayan pink dandelions last spring around the edges of plots. they are short compared to the native ones. rareseeds.com has them.
Do you plant any chicory?
Bees love it early in the morning. (And BlueBerry loves to eat it for supper / beans & taters.