I’m gonna recap an experience I had doing permaculture on a site in the Pacific Northwest this last summer, where there were some trees that needed to be thinned out.
And I was able to with a saws-all, a battery powered saws-all, reciprocating saw I was able to use the system of cutting out a lower notch and then above that lower notch that is directionally pointed in the area or in the direction that you want to eat to fall. angling that notch in the direction you want the tree to fall, and then slightly above that notch, cutting a straight line so that as you get closer to that center of the gravity of that tree, it'll start to fall in the direction you want it to fall based on that negative space that was pulled out of that notch.
The front side is the side facing the direction you want it to fall. That's where you cut the notch out. And then above that, on the backside, perfectly lined up so that the center of that cut out notch is also the center of the straight lateral cut that's going into the back, slightly above that notch.
Then you get it to fall exactly where you want it to fall, it breaks off clean. It's far less dangerous. And I was happy to be able to do this without a chainsaw, because they were relatively thin trees, so I was able to fell a number with that saw using that system, get them to go exactly where I want to safely, and then cut down the branches off the trunk and use them for hugel culture. Burying them in a garden bed with a dug out core, and filling that with rotting wood, and putting in some of those fresh branches to have a diversity of wood material to break down under the soil, and then filling that with earth.
I use the sections of the trunk of the tree to make logs of various widths, going from the thinner at the top down to the lower, the larger towards the base of the trunk, and then positioning them to create a raised garden bed wall system, where the walls of the raised garden bed were the cut pieces of the logs.
And the lengths of them were for four by eight beds approximately, and some were bigger some were slightly smaller.
But let's just say, for the sake of argument, that's a four by eight kind of bed, there are reasons for that to be useful in a lot of scenarios.
They’re called double reach. If it's four foot wide, then you can reach in 2 ft. from either side. And you could just make that a four foot square. Or if you have the space, the eight foot can be convenient as well.
So I was able to cut those logs at 4 ft, or 8 ft, and then actually make them taper upwards so that they would start out a bit longer and then be shorter as they go up to kind of create almost a step pyramid.
If you create the longer, lower, the first course of those logs, you set them in place, fill them with soil or compost.
And for me, this was on top of the grade where the wood material was buried, making that sunken hugel kulture.
But make the first course with those cut log pieces, fill that with compost, and then the next course is gonna be like a step pyramid that's gonna be slightly smaller, and it's gonna be dropped on top of the compost, so slightly inward, and then fill that up, and then the effect is that it has more has the structural integrity it needs.
I'm not an architect, but I intuitively understand from dry stacking, what's called urbanite, dry stacking stones, that if they have something to rest on, like the soil that is underneath the part of them that's not supported by the previous course that you can push it about halfway across.
Again you have that step pyramid effect. So that was the simplest zero cost, doing the forest a favor by thinning it out as needed, using on site materials.
And it'll degrade, I mean, it'll biodegrade. It'll compost in place over time, but depending on the climate. You should get at least a few seasons out of it, if not longer, depending on the climate.
But you also get the fungal activity. And already, after a few months of having established these beds, there was wild, awesome fungus activity going on.
Mushrooms hung out of it. So that could be a system that gets inoculated and strategically planted with culinary crops of fungi.
So I love the idea of not going and buying finished lumber, worrying if it's treated, certainly not using things like railroad ties or other chemically laced materials, and certainly not using plastic, which is inherently an environmental atrocity and an aesthetic atrocity.
So the aesthetic beauty of basically a log cabin, raised bed garden and a series of them, it was very gorgeous, aesthetically. I was happy to know it's gonna biodegrade slowly over time and eventually be replaced.
But I also planted flax around the base just to prevent the soil that had been stirred up from eroding.
I happen to have a ton of flax seeds, so that's what I used. But ideally I would plant things more like creeping thyme, or more of a ground cover type of crop, because the mortar, if you will, in those courses of those logs, that was just bare soil, bare native soil. So obviously you start watering it, or it rains, that's gonna wash away.
The logs are not gonna roll away necessarily overnight, but I prefer that they be packed in well with that soil, and that soil be packed in and preserved with living mulch, with the root systems holding the soil in place, and then the growth of that living mulch, or green manure.
But whatever is planted in the cracks between logs and what would look like kind of mortar in that sense that is held together by the roots, and then it's protected from water and rain by the living mulch of greens that are growing above it.
So that's just accelerating than what a natural process would be, because a log is gonna have moss growing.
You're just recreating that system by design, then you have that whole system to plant in.
And I planted all kinds of stuff in those beds. So I'm thrilled to say I've made beds with all kinds of different materials, and this was the most rewarding experience.
I had been aware of the possibility of it for quite a while. I've done similar things to it with sort of scrounging scrap materials, mostly different types of lumber. But the difference between the aesthetics and the vibe and the feeling, the experience of a log versus some finished lumber, for me it's night and day. I will take the log 10 out of 10 times unless the lumber cannot be avoided.
There are all kinds of different ways that you can build with logs. You can use logs to build amazing structures that don't require nails, don't require hardware or any manufactured.
If you had just nothing but a hand saw and I guess a set of chisels, you could probably do it all by hand.
But for me, I would cheat with the saws-all and get the job done.
But I'm very happy with it, very proud of it. And if I needed to run wires through it to secure it better, that was what I figured I would do, but they seemed to hold up so well, just with the gravity and the architecture of it, that unless there was maybe some kind of major flood or storm where they they could be pushed apart.
I think the better strategy, precautionary principle would be to get them in place as they were stacked in that manner, and then use a drill to create small holes going through them, and then give them sort of braces, wire them together with some gauge of wire. Or even rope, or even twine, or some kind of lashing of natural material.
Just something to give them extra strength. Or you could also find ways to drive stakes in that would hold them in place with even more re-enforcement.
But with that said, I am very happy that experiment for me, the first time, it went well.
And I look forward to continuing that pattern because if I can help it, I don't wanna go back to lumber beds. Maybe it's bamboo, if that's what's the available, but I wanna stick with that pattern of unmachined materials.