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.