Regeneration with Hugels

“Regeneration with Hugels” is a subject near and dear to my heart. In this special Fall Equinox edition of “The Positive Fantastic” podcast, I interview integrated cannabis and vegetable farmer Josh Khankhanian about using hugelkultur in regenerative agriculture.

Josh has that twinkle in his eye when he talks about his farm and gardens. In all the time I’ve known him, he has been a devotee of the soil. He came to work on the farm where I lived and so fell in love with Mendocino County, that he decided to call this place home. Through a series of fortunate events, Josh and his wife Sandra moved onto land in the area, started Moongazer farm, and had twin boys bless their lives. I was a doula to Sandra as she gave birth, and I consider the Moongazer crew close family. 

After a catastrophic wildfire destroyed my neighborhood, there was a lot of clean up to do. I’ve moved back to the property where I lived when Josh and Sandra were our farm interns, and I’ve been faced with doing a lot of homesteading projects to get back to square one. Returning and rebuilding, I have been in a state of near constant recovery for the past several years. Basic shelter took time to find again. And now that I am living back on the land, I have been building hugelcultures non-stop in my free time. 

Why you might ask? Well, the first answer is because I love them. I learned about hugelkultur (or what we affectionately refer to as hugels & the alternative spelling hugelculture) a decade ago when someone who had just taken a class with Sepp Holzer, kinda a celebrity in hugelkultur, came to my farm. I liked what was described and being a renegade permaculturist, I built several hugles as an experiment, a pet project if you will.

Those hugels not only survived the fire, but many of the plants that I had cultivated on and around them made it through several years without irrigation or tending from me. Their roots dug in and the hugels created enough moisture to support them being dry farmed. Granted, my permaculture food forest is in a mostly shaded area and most of those plants were berries with thorns. Still, I was in awe. I’ve got nothing but props for hugels. 

As a farmer, when something works this good, you kinda gotta pause and ask yourself: why isn’t this more well known? So, the longer, more unabridged answer is that I believe this is a technology that needs to be put into the popular consciousness more. I think that hugels are a really amazing way to nourish the health of our burn scars by promoting a simple regenerative technique that simultaneously creates habitat for animals, fertility for the earth, and an opportunity for nature to make a comeback in trying times. And even for people without fire damage, hugels are a great technique to bring even more soil diversity and health to your backyards, gardens, and farms. 

Over the years lots of people have asked me about hugels as they’ve been growing steadily in popularity since I first heard about them. I wanted to put together this podcast to really dive head first into hugelkultur! We talk hugels for this whole podcast episode. The PSA for the episode (and really the whole interview) is about building hugels, understanding hugels, and loving up the hugel (which if you come to think about it, is really like a big ground altar to life). 

Suffice to say that huglecultures are a sustainable farming technique that transforms dead wood (which I have in ridiculous abundance) into soil. Regeneration with hugels is an unrealized potential solution for countless issues we’re currently facing with tree death from disease and fire. Also, they’re helpful for drought situations, sequestering carbon in the earth, and can be made by hand with minimal skill and minimal tool use. Josh has created an entire farm out of hugelkultur, and so he is the perfect person to join me on this podcast, speaking the glory of the noble, the humble, the fantastic hugle. 

Check out Josh’s hugel grown cannabis farm www.moongazerfarms.com

Or you can follow him and the fam @moongazerfarms on Instagram