How To Build A Hotbed For Your Winter Garden

When attempting to garden during the winter months, you often need special structures to help protect your plants from the cold weather. In previous posts, we have looked at how to build a straw bale garden, how to build a cold frame raised bed and even how to build a wood pallet greenhouse. Those all work great, but this year I decided to try something new. In today’s post we’ll take a look at how to build a hotbed for your garden.

These are the winter gardening hacks, that help to keep me sane and actively gardening throughout the year. Although you can use other materials such as straw bales and scrap wood, I chose to use bricks for my hotbed. Apparently, like stone and concrete they have the ability to store heat and then release it slowly when temperatures start dropping. For the manure I opted for chicken manure as we have plenty of it readily available from our coop, although traditionally these types of beds used horse manure.

Here’s What You’ll Need:

reclaimed bricks
wood chips
compost
chicken or horse manure
straw
old glass window pane
stone (optional)
reclaimed concrete (optional)
old plastic containers, troughs or baths (optional)
straw bales (optional)
reclaimed timber (optional)
natural wood or logs (optional)
reclaimed polycarbonate sheeting (optional)
plastic row cover or mini plastic polytunnel or greenhouse (optional)

The type of material you use to build the sides of your hotbed, usually determines it’s size. Ideally in order for your hot bed to be able to generate the required heat, you want the hotbed to be between 2.5 to 4 feet high, that’s not including the top growing medium layer. When using bricks, stone or concrete there is no need for mortar simply dry stack them to build up your sides.

With the outside structure completed, you can then add alternating thin layers of wood chips, manure and dried leaves. These organic materials need to be compressed down gently to about 2 to 3 feet high, in order to maximize their heat generation. For the growing layer you want to mix the compost and soil at a ratio of 1:1 to end up with a layer about 8 to 12 inches deep. All that’s left to do is to cover your hotbed and wait at least a week for it to warm up before planting your seeds.

You can follow step by step instructions on the Rural Sprout blog, here…

How To Make A Hotbed Instructions

You can watch the video below on Hotbeds, an old way to raise young plants…