After a delightful walk round the woodland at Nostell Priory this morning
including watching the ducks waddle across the ice on the top of a lake
I came home to find a thaw had taken place in the garden.
It therefore seemed fitting to continue enjoying the sunshine by doing some tidying up.
Months ago, I noticed a hole in the hugelbed I had built using pine wood for the blueberry bush. This hasn’t happened to any of the other beds full of wood and I am wondering if an animal has buried its way in.
Not wanting to disturb the bed, I simply covered up the hole with soil and will wait to see what happens next. In any case, I doubt I will be moving the blueberry bush to this new home in the next twelve months. The soil on top is too thin to plant a bush with substantial roots – the wood needs to decompose quite considerably, I would think, first.
So, I’ll keep the blueberry bush where it is for now and think about a Plan B.
Growing out of chaos 
That ‘Is’ unusual, but what would create a burrow like that? o.o
Good question!
Very smart of you to wait for the hugelbed to break down. I did the opposite, and the mortality of blueberry bushes kept accumulating until I just decided to wait. I have learned since that the carbon of fresh wood binds up lots of the nitrogen in the soil, among other reasons it didn’t work out well.
On the other hand, I have built a large hugelbed using big, long dead, standing trees that were ready to fall on my planting, covering them with a thick layer of soil on top, and the hill gave fantastic growth the same year. I wrote about the plants on it here if you’re interested in the details.
https://mortaltree.wordpress.com/2013/10/14/roots-as-of-now/
Thanks, I will read your post. The soil in my garden is only a thin layer, hence the thin layer over the wood and therefore in part why I am building the beds. Hopefully, it will work out in the end!
That hole may just have been on top of a void… It doesn’t look like it was dug out.
With luck it won’t be anything bad.
Good to get your verdict! I think the branches must have collapsed and
That’s not to say it WON’T be a mouse or something. But I don’t think it would do too much damage to the bed. Nothing that you couldn’t fix quickly enough.
As long as it’s not a rat, eh!
then one has become misaligned due to the weight of soil or something. Other beds have partially collapsed but the branches haven’t poked through the surface.