 So one question I often get asked is should I make a hoogle bed and The answer is well if you have this much wood probably yes, but you have to come back to always with permaculture What am I trying to do? What is my need and to not just randomly use resources to fulfill something that might actually not be doing anything that you want? It really much depends on not just what you have, but what you're trying to do So in permaculture there we have needs and we need to identify our needs and then we look around and see what resources We have to meet those needs now Hoogle beds have become popularized over the last few years particularly by a chap called sep holzer He uses them a lot and what we have to ask is what purpose are they serving in his system? And will they do the same for us is that what we need now? He lives at quite high altitude sort of 4,000 feet or so in the Austrian Lungau up in the mountains Where you get a lot of snow in the winter months? And he's doing crazy things like growing cherries and lemons at altitude because of the strategies He uses amongst other things terracing creating thermal mass and using ponds and water and so on and he has a lot of hoogle beds, so I Would say if you've got a lot of wood like this lying around that you're not using for anything else Then and you're wanting to grow food for instance, then a hoogle bed might be a useful strategy I certainly wouldn't be going looking in skips in urban areas for pallets to try and find something to make a whole bed with because Firstly the wood is the food for your plants and some pallets are heat treated Some are chemically treated and the last thing you want is to be putting chemicals into your garden and into your food, so Sepholzer when he gets new land he clears a lot of trees Which he uses for all kinds of things selling us timber making mushrooms Firewood all kinds of things and he has a lot left over so for him It's almost a waste disposal thing to dig a hole put a load of trees in and then to cover it over So yes a hoogle bed at its very basic level is hole in the ground full of wood and then you put the soil back on top It's a little bit more complex than that and The bigger the pieces of wood the longer they take to break down to the slower the release of the nutrients but there's also a thing about water holding as well, so trees hold moisture and Part of the process of breaking down also will take nitrogen from the soil in that may not be something you want So if that's a slower process because your logs are bigger Then that might be better than putting lots of small bits of wood in with more surface area In practice what tends to happen is you put some of each you put some bigger logs in and some smaller twigs and you get some short-term food for your plants and longer term food and certainly I know people who've made hoogle beds who said they're brilliant and they work really well for them But you have to keep coming back to the fact that You need wood and if you don't have wood then the chances are then it's perhaps not the best way of feeding your plants and Also that you need the right kind of wood. So should you make a hoogle bed? Well really ultimately it depends on Whether you have good wood lying around that you can't use for anything else and whether the problems that they're solving for The person who promotes them people like Sepholzer is actually what you're trying to do as well