Cold Frame Gardening Success

Cold frame gardening allows you to get a jump on the growing season, and harvest more from your cold frame garden. Learn about cold frame designs and construction, garden irrigation systems, selecting crops and crop rotations. Building a cold frame garden will help your garden grow!

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by Flickr/concordbridge
Partial ventilation keeps the cold frame from excessive overheating.

Almost anyone can grow a good garden in the summertime. But what about harvesting crops in the middle of spring, when your neighbors are just beginning to turn over their own ground. Here in upstate New York, where we have frosts as late as May, I start eating from my garden in mid-April. How is this possible? A plastic-tunnel cold frame. With forethought and timely execution, you too can have a garden earlier than you ever thought possible.

Cold-Frame Designs and Construction

Siting the cold frame correctly is essential to success. On any piece of property, there is usually some far warmer area. This is the one you should seek out for the cold frame. But a good site alone will not allow most plants to survive cold nighttime temperatures. For that, you must create an artificial environment, one that will allow your seeds to germinate and your plants to prosper.

My introduction to such protection occurred when I lived in Spain many years ago. The government was encouraging small producers to raise early crops by setting up inexpensive tuneles de plastico in the late winter. Over the years, I have tried the tunnel and many more elaborate designs for protection of crops from the early-season cold. In considering a cold-frame design, you should apply the following criteria: One, it should be easy to build and made of standard materials. Two, it should be cheap. Three, it should be fast to put up and take down. And four, it should not only keep your plants warm, but it should keep them from getting too hot.

The following design meets all these criteria. The frame itself is made of 2-by-4s nailed together to make a bed 4 feet wide by 24 feet long. It is simply set on top of the prepared ground and staked down. As the level of the soil goes up over time, additional 2-by-4s can be toenailed into the lower layer to make the frame higher.

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