This is another gardening experiment I'm doing.  I read in Sally Jean Cunningham's book about a method of building soil that she adapted from an old German technique called the hugel method.  Hugel means "hill" in German.  I'm using a variation of what Sally did.  She put down newspaper 5 or 6 sheets thick.  Then she put a 6-12" layer of coarse material like brush and twigs.  Then she continued piling organic material on until she had a hill about 2 to 4 feet high and the length and width of her desired bed.

Instead of sheets of newspaper, I opened up the cardboard boxes we'd used to move in.  I chose those with very little ink and I removed all the tape and broke the seam and spread them flat.  

On top of that I put wood chips.  We had a large silver maple branch fall on our house this summer, and I put all the branchy leafy twiggy parts through the chipper shredder and spread that out on my cardboard.  I figured if brush and twigs was good, shredded was even better.  

Then on top of that I put grass clippings when we cut our grass all summer.  I let it sit like this for about three months.  Then last week my daughter put a couple of bales of straw on top of all of it.

Here's my experiment after the cardboard, wood chips, and grass clippings had settled out a little bit, and before adding the straw.  Sally says that, as in composting, you have the greatest efficiency with this method if your hugel is at least three feet wide, tall, and long.  My hugel is 15'x15' but was only six inches thick at best, and it's settled now to the point that it's flat.  So, we shall see what happens when I plant in it this spring.