There are some good hugel articles on the Permaculture site. We put leaves, fire wood size pieces of trees, dried grass, old vegetable plants, vegetable and fruit peelings and egg shells on our compost pile and make it a hugel the next year. Manure is recommended on the top of the pile. We have only used Black Kow so far and we grew some nice plants on our hugel.

I think it's a great method if you have the stuff, which you do. You are basically growing plants on a fungal mass. The threads of mycelium produced by wood-inhabiting fungi provide nitrogen as the tissues decay.

Two things:

1) the vegetable hair roots get into the wood. I had noticed that also with smaller chunks of wood buried in beds. If you worry about nitrogen, please notice that vegetables go out of their way to get into wood.

2) it is amazing how fine and broken down the soil becomes within a season. I think it is due to mycelium filaments, not readily visible by the human eye, running all over the place. This was tough clay, and the four logs (about 2.5 ft long and 5 inches wide) were placed as the sides of a square, yet the soil was finely tilled all the way to the center of the square. Each four logs was a newly planted fruit tree taken down by deer, so I was able to check this many times. No, it was not the tree roots which were small.

So out of curiousity, if I take the wood left over at the end of winter (that stuff in the back on the bottom has been in the shed too long) and bury it with a bit of the neighbor's horse compost, would that be hugelculture?

yep.

400 years and still humus -- was just reading and looking at photos of how the posts buried upright in a 2 1/2 foot deep trench to form the palisade wall at Jamestown was unearthed beginning in 1994. They found perfect log shaped areas of loam in the native clay.

wertach -- that's a cool story about the veggies on the pile (sorry about the divorce part, though) I hope your new pile works every bit as well as the first one did!

Do you know if it's okay to bury trees that have poison ivy vines growing on them?

Sorry, I really don't know if the poison ivy would hurt or not.

Maybe someone will come along with more knowledge!