Here are pictures of the mound gardens I built. I need to restack the stones around the one in the front yard - but you get the idea. This started out as a lawn with a huge stump in it. I wasn't going to pay to have the stump dug out so I ended up making a huge stack of all the limbs and bushes I cut down over the year, added food scraps and leaves and whatever I had that was organic material and then bought 4 yards of humus and poured the humus over the pile. A year or so later the whole thing was disturbed when I had a gas line put in and that is when I built the stone wall around it.
You can see the mound sticking out at the left side of this picture. Again I stacked all the rough debris that wouldn't compost themselves over the winter and added organic materials and lots of wood chips and finally another load of humus. The mound was at least 14" high in the beginning and now it is less than 6". This is in my neighbor's yard and this year it has corn, cucumbers, beans, tomatoes, tomatillos, arugula, lettuce, lamb's quarters and I just pulled the garlic and put in pumpkins and a watermelon. I added 3 more feet to the end this spring.
This is basically the technique you are using, Dave - but on a smaller scale.
