What Was Hugelkultur? The Self-Fertilizing And Self-Watering Garden Bed That Lasts 20 Years

In the late 1960s, in the Austrian Alps, a farmer named Sepp Holzer started doing something the local agricultural authorities had told him was impossible. He was growing food at fifteen hundred meters of elevation. On a steep, rocky mountainside in the Lungau region. He used no synthetic fertilizer, no irrigation system, and no tractor for tilling. And his cherries, his apricots, his vegetables, were outproducing the certified industrial farms in the valleys below. The technique he was using had a name. A German name. It had been written about in agricultural journals more than a century earlier, and then quietly pushed out of the record once a different, more profitable kind of farming took over.