You Bet Your Garden

What can you do with the stump that’s left behind after a dead tree is cut down? On this week’s You Bet Your Garden we’ll discuss whether the best answer involves Hügelkultur—or oysters! Plus your fabulous phone calls.

We moved into a new home last April and, as you often suggest, just took the first year to see what was going on naturally in the yard. The only real action we took was to change an existing flower bed into our new blueberry patch (thanks for that recent Question of the Week on blueberries!) and have a dangerously old cottonwood tree taken down.

There’s a big stump from the cottonwood left in the middle of an old flower bed. I remembered your radio show’s episode on Hügelkultur and went back to read the article on it at your A to Z archives. That specific question was about a tree that had fallen, but I only have the stump left. Once it gets decaying (I’m thinking about introducing edible mushrooms to accelerate this), can I “Hügelkultur” the stump and grow some shade loving perennials in that bed?

—Britt in Grand Rapids, MI
Stumped? Advice lies ahead »