build a cold storage unit into a hugelkultur bed?

My son and I are building a new hugelkulture bed East of our house this fall (if we can get that tractor running). When we finished cutting up our firewood we found several punky logs and we have a lot of bark and rotty bits of aspen wood and some aspen cordwood that we can put into this bed, we'll scrape off the sod to invert on top, put on compost, shredded leaves and grass clippings from this falls mowings, and whatever soil we can come up with (mostly clay here and have lots of clay piles but it doesn't work so well on these beds)..

but I was just reading a few threads on cold storage and was thinking, would it be possible to build some cold storage in the midst of this bed when I build it..really no spare $ available so it would have to be something we could do with salvage..hmmm..maybe a barrel buried in it?? sideways?? just a thought.

so I need some input here..what suggestions do you have..we'll begin building it this week if the tractor starts (probably just low on deisel)

I like the idea. I have a wrecked cooler and will bury it in my next one. Experimenting is fun stuff!

Hi! Newbie to the whole permie thing here.
What an interesting idea...

Just got 100+ bales of old hay to start building HKs. My plan is to stack the old wood in the center and stack bales 3 high to sort of pen in the leaves etc.
My concern with the cold storage in the bed would be the heat that is generated from the composting. However, it might not be enough to keep it from being plenty cool. We are always trying to make anything we do serve more than one purpose, so I love the idea.
Let us know how it goes!

hmmm Jill that is a good point I hadn't considered..also..it turned out that when my son started working on the hugel bed there were things that changed bigtime.

first, he needed sod so I let him have the layer of sod off the top for his front lawn..that being gone left 1' plus deep of rich black topsoil that we found under the sod, and it was way too gorgeous to bury under all those logs..so we scooped it out and piled it to the side..there was a layer of white sand under the black topsoil and then clay under that..after digging about 18" deep we hit the water table..so a bit of water began seeping in.

so

we put a few dozen logs in that area..which brought the level so far back up to "ground level"...we are still attempting to decide what and if we will be burying more stuff before putting the black dirt back over the top and leaves and grass clilppings..etc..

this is where we are sitting with our new experiement..but being deepr than planned we haven't put any cold storage inside of it at this point..and are thinking that it might heat up too much if we did, so we may not.