Funny, I am halfway through Gaia's Garden myself. The previous book I read was "How to Grow More Vegetables", which was basically "straight lines, double dig and compost" blown out to 200 pages with a ton of self promotion for the author's company (with, to be fair, some useful data tables); I like the "no till, patterns and compost" approach of Gaia's Garden far better (and in fact just spent the morning laying out the borders of a keyhole-ish vegetable garden (horse manure, soil/compost mix, and hay inbound.)

Speaking of (sort of) self promotion, have you checked out r/seedswap? I've spammed r/gardening a couple times with it. Hoping it'll gain some more traction, but there are already some good trades in there.

Paul seems to have a lot of zeal. I feel kind of bad for him receiving the smack down recently, as he seemingly means well (although definitely comes off as a dick periodically). Rocket mass stoves are neat too (as well as hugelkultur) but the way he tells it they are without problems and are the essential answer to any heating need. (That said I may experiment with one when I get around to building a wood fired hot tub...which is pretty far down the list.)

Cheers (& thanks for the link to this site).

Conceptually I like the idea of hugelkultur swales (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UO303KfdBBU) more than beds. It seems like a good sheet mulch would have most of the benefits of a hugelkultur raised bed, and my large scale raised beds build this year will be exactly that.

That said I made a miniature hugelkultur bed last spring, which I just dug up yesterday. The plants in it (watermelons, zucchini) did terribly, due to a) crappy drought and less than adequate irrigation; b) a month following the drought in which we got somewhere in the region 24" of rain; c) fairly low quality lowes soil which compacted easily. Imagine my surprise yesterday then when I scooped off the most beautiful, worm filled black soil that I've ever seen, and further that the wood underneath had decayed into soft, spongy water retention _machines_. It makes me think that had I left the bed in place that it might have worked quite a bit better in year two.