a. How long should it take for this heating process to run it's course?

b. Being as it has been 10 days since I began this process and the straw is cool to the touch is it safe to plant vegetable seedlings at this point?

c. Should I give it more time to heat up and cool down and if so should I stop the ammonium nitrate or keep applying it?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time.

And a Google search pulls up several links to info on how-to do it and I linked a set of step-by-step videos below and I hope they are of help.

Just a guess on my part but I would suspect, from what I have read, that your bales are too fresh since partially decomposed bales is what is called for. But it looks like you could still hollow out the core and fill it with potting soil for planting.

Hope this helps.

Dave

I asked through the summer how it was going, and she said the seeds sprouted, but they weren't doing well. By the end of summer, she declared it a total disaster and a waste of effort (not to mention not getting much in the way of crops). She said something hatched and the bales were surrounded by clouds of some kind of small flying insects.

She said she would never do it that way again.

Then I googled 'bale garden failure', and got lots of hits agreeing with her view. Below is one of them.

Sue