Lean to cold frame
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A cold frame brings summery warmth to your garden throughout the year, even as the cool days of fall turn to the cold days of winter. The simple apparatus, often made of glass and wood, locks in the sparse sunny rays to keep crops warm while protecting them from the harsh winter winds. When they are set up properly, cold frames can provide you with fresh crops even during the darkest winter days.
“If there were a Nobel Prize for the coolest tool in gardening, it would be the cold frame,” Eliot Coleman, owner of Four Seasons Farms and writer of “The New Organic Grower,” said. “One layer of covered glass moves the covered area into a climate zone about 500 miles to the south.”
What is a cold frame?
A cold frame is essentially a miniature greenhouse — a bottomless box with a clear lid that captures sunlight to insulate plants and warm the soil.
It’s different from a greenhouse in one key way. “Unless you’re awful short, you can’t stand up in a cold frame,” Coleman joked, “but they’re both doing the same thing.”
You can make your own cold frame by fitting an old storm window over
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A cold Frame gives you many more options for growing crops . . .
Growing From The Ground
If you intend to plant directly into the soil, then it’s best to prepare the ground prior to placing your cold frame. Ideally dig down to a depth of 12-18 inches, mixing in a good amount of organic matter to create a nutrient rich environment for your plants. Once your frame is in place, if you intend to leave it in the same situation all year round, after a couple of years you will need to repeat this process of digging in organic matter to replenish the soil.
Food and Water
If growing from the ground, if you’ve added organic matter as described above, then extra food will not be necessary. In regards to watering, depending on the weather and what you are growing will affect how often you need to water – it’s often a matter of experimenting a little at the start of the season until you can judge the amount of watering required.
Ventilation and Shading
For good ventilation throughout the warmer, sunny days, you can leave the lights open – hinged top cold frames often have brac
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Our greenhouse is full of flats of seedlings. Today is warm and sunny. At last! The soil is still too wet to till, but we are feeling more optimistic. The forecast still has possibilities of rain Tuesday night (only about 0.1″) and snow Friday night (less than an inch). Soon we will start moving flats from the greenhouse to our cold frames so the plants can harden off in preparation for transplanting in the raised beds. Usually we would have done this earlier, but it has been cold.
Our greenhouse construction is a masonry north wall and double-paned glass windows and insulated walls. Until last winter we didn’t use any additional heating, just the sun. But we now use an electric heater with the thermostat set so heat comes on if the temperature drops below 45F. We decided our seedlings are too precious to risk freezing them, and the weather is more extreme. We also put row cover over the seedling flats if the night temperature could fall below 18F outdoors. Once we have frost tender plants outside the plastic tent (which has a heat mat), we put row cover over those
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