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I have a yard this year for the first time and I'm attempting various methods of building beds. For my first bed, I used double digging. But that was an insane amount of work and I'm not all that happy with the bed that resulted. I've been reading a lot of permaculture literature and they all suggest gradual bed construction through sheet mulching.

But I don't have that much organic matter readily available to me. About the only organic matter I have is a giant brush pile from a serious shrub trimming. The pile includes an entire box shrub, as well as trimmings of box shrub and yew. It also includes a large quantity of soft needle pine and tulip popular branches that came down in a storm.

I know pretty much all parts of a yew tree are toxic. Will that prevent it from working well in a hugelkultur? Will the toxin degrade or will it keep the yew from rotting and/or poison my soil microbes? Are there any woods that shouldn't be used for hugelkultur?

bstpierre
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Daniel Bingham
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1 Answers1

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Here are some notes on hugelkultur that mention woods you may want to avoid:

Woods to avoid or at least be aware of, see above for details:

  • cedar
  • camphor wood
  • black locust
  • black cherry
  • black walnut
  • pine
  • fir

There is some question about whether the toxins in the wood will break down and if so how long it takes.

I haven't seen yew specifically mentioned, but this thread raises similar concerns to yours. The bottom answer addresses this problem credibly, discussing the primary toxin taxane, and that it's unlikely to cause problems for plants.

You might experiment with your yew trimmings and see how it goes. I'd love to see an update here in a year's time...

bstpierre
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