Boy, It's Cold Out There!

We had our first arctic blast of the season last night when temperatures got down to 28 Fahrenheit for the first time. That was cold enough to put an end to my few surviving plants out in the garden. My cold frame, however, came through in great shape. You can check out my video of the building of a cold frame at Building a Cold Frame.

At 6AM this morning when it did hit 28 degrees, the temperature inside theCF was a toasty 45F. That’s warm enough for lettuce to survive. I looked it up and the optimum temperature range for this cold hardy crop is 45F to 65F so that is good news. Now mind you, I did have a blanket draped over the frame last night and that more than likely helped. The good news is that I don’t think we have many nights that get that cold even in January. We’ll just have to see won’t we?

A Sure Investment Bet

Is everything going to go to H@** in a hand basket this coming year? What’s going to happen to the value of the dollar? Is there some way to protect my shrinking saving account?

Thoughts like this got me to thinking about ways I could make ends meet this coming winter. One idea was actually poised by some expert I saw on a media show one afternoon. He stated that one way to protect the value of your money would be to stockpile food items now as a hedge against price increases in the future. He was referring to items with a long shelf life like canned goods, beans, pasta and such. If. For example you buy a can of corn for fifty cents now and food goes up an 20% or so by winter, then that’s the same as getting 20% interest on you savings since you will be consuming the food no matter what! By logical extension then, if you normally consume about $100 of only canned goods on any given month and then bought $600 worth of added can goods this month to be stored away to and used starting in April 2008 you will have at least broken even if prices remain stable. If, however, prices go up say 30% during the next six months then you have saved more real money than you could ever have done in any savings account. The only possible downside would be if prices in fact go down (not likely) in which case you have limited your liability by the small amount invested. On the other hand if prices continue to rise, by all means continue to purchase goods to put away for a rainy day.

For my part, after six months, I plan to do a report on my personal gain or loss. You can get a copy of this article along with the six month summary report (due in April 2009) on this site.

Cold Frames

If you’re like I am, sometime around January the first you get a hankering for fresh vegetables. The produce on the shelves at the local mart just doesn’t measure up. Its all be shipped in from distant places, often foreign countries and has the price tags to match. Now with all the upheaval in the financial markets and all, I have begun to wonder just how expensive everything may get. I’m in sticker shock already when I buy a head of lettuce. I mean isn’t iceberg lettuce mostly water?

So, that got me to thinking one afternoon when I came across an article concerning the building of cold frames. A cold frame is really nothing more than a wooden box with a lid that admits light. According to the article, you can grow all sorts of veggies outside it, even in the dead of winter! Hmm, I thought, maybe this is for me. I remembered that some years ago a friend had given me two old windows. She was going to throw them out and I’m the kind of guy that hates to waste anything so I took them off her hands and then they ended up in the crawlspace under my house for the next seven years. To my credit, I did remember I had them and I thought that do to their small size (23 x 36), they would be a great experiment to see if I could actually grow lettuce in the wintertime. (Note that the article also indicated that cold hardy crops like spinach, onions, radishes and even carrots could also be brought to maturity).

So, last month in October, I went about the construction of my very first cold Frame. (I also documented this effort for You Tube in case you are interested. You can see the video by typing in ‘Building a Cold Frame’ in the You Tube search area at www.youtube.com). My total construction time using just 2x4’s was under three hours including the time it took me to dig a pit and paint the frame. Since I had all the materials lying around the house, my only cost was the purchase of fresh Miracle Gro™ soil from Home Depot in Branson.

I now have a functional (I hope) cold frame and have planted ten Little Caesar romaine seeds in a seed starter pack sitting in my kitchen. From past experience, the seeds should germinate in about four days and then will take four to six weeks to reach transplant stage at which point I will place outside into the elements. That will put these guys out in early December weather where the average lows will be in the 30’s and 40’s. Romaine goes best between 45F and 65F so I am counting on the sun to warm the box during the day and the natural ability of the earth to insulate to keep things warm at night.

With any luck, I should have something ready for the table in early January 2009.