One of the interesting permaculture concepts we’ve been wanting to try is hugelkultur. We know some folks around here that utilize this technique and it is particularly well-suited to the very wet spring and early summer we had this year.
If you’ve never heard of Hugelkultur, it’s basically a raised gardening bed with a foundation of wood and other organic materials that slowly rot over time to provide nutrients, improve drought tolerance and so on. You can read more about them at the UK Permaculture site.
We don’t have a lot of woods on our property, just a bit around the edges and an outcropping at the back of our property. However, it’s pretty dense with a lot of downed wood, vines, shrubby material, etc. We really need some goats to clean it out. Anyway, there is enough good woody material even in the small area we have to use for a hugelkultur mound.
I made a quick video showing the initial foundation.