Hügelkultur Sundial Garden Build | 8 Raised Beds for Our Homestead
Welcome to our family homestead project! In this video, we’re starting our hügelkultur sundial garden — 8 beds radiating like a sundial, blending permaculture design, mandala gardening, and DIY homesteading.
Each bed is 161 sq. ft., for a total of 1,288.5 sq. ft. of growing space. We’re packing in over 724 cubic feet of organic matter per bed (that’s 5,800+ cubic feet total). This design helps us live with our climate, nourish our family with food, and build something meaningful together.
🌱 Why a Sundial Garden?
The sundial layout comes from mandala garden concepts introduced by permaculture founders Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. By arranging beds around a central point, we create microclimates. A center tree casts shade for the north/south beds, while the east/west beds soak up sun — letting each plant thrive in its ideal spot without scattering gardens all over the property.
🌳 Hügelkultur: Hill Culture Gardening
Hügelkultur (“hill culture”) is a German/Eastern European method of filling trenches with logs, branches, and organic matter, then covering them with soil. The result is a nutrient sponge that holds water, feeds soil life, and improves drought resistance. In our sloped garden site, hügelkultur also provides the bulk soil we need for leveling without hauling in thousands of pounds of dirt.
🪵 Using What the Land Provides
Our land requires tree thinning for fire prevention. Instead of wasting it, we’re using every log and branch in our beds. We also weave cut branches between stakes to form woven wood walls — natural barriers that hold soil, add structure, and eventually break down to feed the garden.
📏 Laying Out the Beds
We staked the garden center, measured out 8 equal beds, and left 2.5-foot paths between them. Stakes were leveled to match the base ground line so we could dig consistently and reuse the excavated soil for leveling and paths.
🧱 Building the Retaining Wall
Around the sundial, we’re creating a 3-foot-wide path supported by a stone retaining wall. Our land provides plenty of rock — we’re stacking it with a backward slope so it locks together and stays strong for years. Each layer gets backfilled with soil for stability.
🌿 Filling the Beds
Each trench gets packed with logs, sticks, and debris, then covered with soil and compost. The final raised beds will sit about 2.5 feet above ground, layered on top of the hügelkultur core. This mix creates long-term fertility and minimizes watering needs.
👩👩👧 Family Values
For us, this project is about more than gardening. We want our kids to learn hard work, patience, and confidence by helping with every step — from hauling branches to stacking rocks. Yes, it’s harder than buying prefab raised beds, but it’s building resilience, skills, and family connection.
🔄 Current Progress
So far we’ve:
Dug 5 of 8 hügelkultur beds
Filled 2 beds with organic matter
Built sections of the retaining wall
Started weaving branch walls
Next: finish the wall, fill all paths, and complete hügelkultur layers. Future plans include terracing around the sundial and (hopefully) drone footage for a full overhead view!
🌍 Why Permaculture Matters
Hügelkultur and permaculture help us work with nature instead of against it. By building soil, capturing water, and designing around microclimates, we’re growing food sustainably while creating a resilient homestead system.
🔎 Found Us By Searching?
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Hügelkultur beds
Sundial garden design
Mandala garden permaculture
DIY raised bed garden
Off grid homesteading
Organic gardening
Sustainable gardening in Colorado
This channel shares our journey through homesteading, DIY projects, permaculture, and off-grid family living.
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So for our first major project on the land is going to be our garden beds. We’re going to do eight hugulture garden beds arranged around a center point to form a sundial. Each garden bed is going to have 160 square ft of planting space. That means for the entire garden we’re going to have just shy of,300 square ft to nourish our family. And because we’re using Hugal culture in total, the garden’s going to have 5,800 cubic feet of dead organic matter underneath the whole thing. I know. I know. When you start doing the math, it sounds a little bit crazy, but it’s really important for us to live off the land. And not only off the land, but to live with this aid climate that we live in up in Colorado, it’s more than just about nourishing our family. It’s also about nourishing the value that comes with doing this kind of project as a family. [Music] So, Sundial Gardens grew out of the concept of Mandela Gardens, which started with the Palmer Culture founders uh back in the 1970s. Bill something and David something, smart guys, but uh they had the idea that gardens could radiate around a single point and they could work more with the land to facilitate smallcale yet sustainable gardens. The idea here is that from a single point, which for us will be a blue spruce tree because my wife just loves those things. You’re going to radiate out your garden beds. And we went a little bit further with that. And we aligned our paths perfectly with the compass. So right here, we’ve got perfectly north, perfectly south, east, west, and all the radials in between. We want our gardens to feel natural. not just like feel natural laid into the land, but each individual plant that we put within our garden to feel at home in its natural habitat. I also don’t want to scatter gardens all over the yard to make this happen. So, by using a tree in the middle, which is going to give sundirected shade to different sections of my garden at different sections of the day, I can create microclimates for those plants to feel as comfortable as possible. Before starting any project, I really like to start with the layout. So, we did the same thing with this one. We started with our stake in the middle and we made all of our measurements from there. We made sure that we got out the compass. We pulled lines from the compass for our north,southeast, west, and all of our diagonals. And then we also started staking in the corners of each of our garden beds along that path. Okay. Now, unfortunately, while we were doing the layout, we discovered that we’re not exactly working with even ground, but you never really are. So, we have a 48T span. That’s a 24 ft diameter to this garden. And from the top of the hill to the bottom of the hill, we dropped three and a half feet. So, we’re gonna have to address this level and come up with a plan for it. So, the answer to that plan that we came up with was hugulture. And hug culture literally means hill culture. It was used in more ancient medieval times by Germans and Eastern European peasants. And since we’re barely different than Eastern European peasants, I figured this would be perfect. So, the idea behind the whole thing is that you dig a hole in the ground. You fill it with a bunch of dead organic matter and then you put all the dirt right back on top of that and you basically grow your plants out of compost. Now, sure, as all this organic matter breaks down, it is going to become a nitrogen suck for probably about the first season. However, after that initial season, it’s going to turn into a nutrient sponge. It’s going to hold water. It’s going to have nutrients. It’s going to be more than enough nitrogen to fuel my gardens for years to come, which is going to help make it drought resistant to any future droughts, which we get a lot up here in our aid climate. And due to local zoning, I’m actually required to clear out brush like this. Anything close to the house that’s within 10 ft of each other, underbrush, dead branches, this is going to become the perfect bed of dead organic matter for my hugle culture garden beds. So now that we know we’re doing hugulture garden beds, we can come up with a plan for how we’re going to get the soil to level out all this land. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to dig down and do a partial inground partial outof ground bed. So we’re going to dig down 3 feet at the top of the garden. So, since we’re digging down three feet at the top of the garden bed, I’m obviously going to have to use that dirt and pile up three feet at the back of the gardens. So, what I’m going to do for that is I’m going to plot out each individual garden bed. And I plotted them out with these stakes. Each stake is roughly the height of where the final ground level will be. But that left us with a new problem. How do we keep this dirt from the path from spilling in past our stakes? And I tried a couple different things to figure this out. I’ve tried a couple of different methods here. I have some projects around the house. So, I had some leftovers and I tried to use plywood reinforced by whatever this is and some stakes and it just falls over repeatedly time and time again. And I mean, why should it fall down? That that’s not going to support anything. That’s not loadbearing. So, I tried a couple of different things and it turns out using sticks like this and just weaving them in and together ended up being the best solution. And it’s been easily able to hold dirt for at least as long as I need to hold the dirt until I fill up the actual garden beds with organic matter. So, I actually weave slowly as I’m filling up the dirt because these extra branches that end up getting stuck off onto the side kind of act as a geog grid to the dirt path which kind of sucks the whole thing together tells the dirt don’t go anywhere. And for some reason, they’re just not washing out while everything I try to make with the tarp and the cardboard and the stakes and the 2x4s breaks almost instantly. Now, the exterior of the garden, we want three feet of soil so that we can have a pathway to bring wheelbarrows and water the garden or whatever we need to do. So, obviously, we’re going to need some form of retaining wall. And that’s what we’ve got going on here. So, the retaining wall isn’t going to be perfectly straight up and down because we’re not going to have any kind of crazy system holding this together. Uh, it’s going to go down at its tallest at 3 1/2 ft. It’s going to start at 36 in away from the outside of our garden and it’s going to finish at 48 in. So, this slant that you see here will get more and more extreme as the area gets deeper and deeper. Now, we’re working on a budget, so I don’t exactly have money for a retaining wall, but lucky for us, our land provides everything we need to build that wall. The only difficulty will be is getting the rock up to the garden. If you’re wondering how I’m getting all of these over to the garden and into place, I don’t have anything to drag them with. So, it’s like CrossFit tire flipping time. So, I only get about seven or eight a day when I’m working. [Music] Did I Did I mention how much this sucks? [Music] As for the beds that we’ve already dug down to depth, you can see we’re already starting to fill it with organic matter. Now, what we need to do over time as this stuff dies is come in here and break it down because we want a nice compressed layer of dead sticks and wood and compost and whatever it’s going to be. So, we have to get in here and start doing manly stuff. [Music] Now, going back to the beginning, this is a lot of work and there are definitely easier ways to do everything that we’re trying to do out here. But for us, it’s kind of the cliche, the journey along the way. It’s not 100% about can we build the best gardens? Can we have the most efficiency? How soon can we start growing? It’s about doing the whole thing together as a family. I want each of my kids to have a job out here. I want them to build confidence. I want to give them work that’s hard enough to challenge them, but not so hard that they can’t complete it. So that when they do conquer that task, they have that feeling of ownership over it. And I want my whole family to feel ownership over the nourishment of our family. And as we’re working so hard to nourish our bodies, what we’re really doing is we’re nourishing our souls and we’re nourishing our family and we’re growing tighter and closer together. So we’ve already started filling two of the garden beds with organic matter. We’ve got five of them to the depth they need to be and we’ve got just the bariest tiniest bit of retaining wall going on right now. So, by the next time you see us, what we’re hoping to have is the retaining wall completed, each garden bed dug down to full depth, and we’ll be ready to start putting in some more dirt. This is a long-term project, so we’re not going to finish this overnight. And we are going to be doing multiple other projects in between. So hopefully by the next time you see us, it’s going to be something awesome and we’re going to be able to have fun with it. But in the meantime, I want to invite you to like and subscribe, follow my family as we’re just figuring things out. We’ve got no clue what’s going on, but we’re going to do it anyway.
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