Variations on a hot bed (and heat sources)

If you don't know, a hot bed is a raised bed or compost heap on top of which you put seedlings in trays or sow into a layer of growing medium.  The heat from the decomposing material keeps your seedlings warm.  This lets you start plants earlier outside.  French Intensive gardening does this with manure under a layer of soil in a cold frame.  Charles Dowding puts a large cubic compost pit of manure in his greenhouse and keeps his seedling trays on it in the cold months.

So, I saw this on YouTube:

She blew my mind!  She used straw bales with some rabbit manure on top, and regularly "charged" the biological activity by watering with manure teas!!  How convenient!!  How much less labor intensive than shoveling manure into a 4'x4'x4' framed space!! 

She compared it to another pile that was wood, wood chips, and manure.  She preferred the performance of the wood-based hot bed do the straw-based hot bed, but that's still less labor-intensive than a traditional manure-based hot bed.

But the concept of "charging" the bed to make it heat up again--brilliant!!  I wonder if you could manage the temperature that way.

Each method has its sweet spot, I'm sure. 

Like, in the French Intensive method, they spread out 10" of manure (1/3 hot fresh manure mixed with 2/3 older colder manure, to make it all heat up again) across the whole market garden.  Then they put older manure on top (maybe an inch or two) to insulate the manure underneath.  Then they lay the frames out, leaving only narrow walking paths between.  Then they fill in the frames with (I forget how many) inches of soil (fully composted manure and compost), and that's what they grow in.  No edible parts touch any fresh manure.

But the key takeaway from this video was the idea that you could finesse the temp of the medium by adding compost teas.  And if my compost is fungal-dominated, it would help the straw break down much faster and more completely.  I LOVE this!!

Oh, and later in the video, she has those water jackets around her squash and tomatoes, and they're sitting on the surface of the hot bed so the water probably stays warmer.  Awesome!

She has another amazing video that shows some tips and tricks that reduce labor in the garden.  For specific tips, listen starting at 1:44.

The way she talks about the heat benefits of closely-spacing plants (via broadcasting seeds) makes me think of these awesome photos from Pinterest.

With all of these techniques, I wonder if I could succession-plant and intercrop like Charles Dowding does to harvest things all year round and overlap the growing timelines of different veg, but do it without having to sow seeds in trays indoors.  What a time/money saver that would be!!