This is the long, detailed version of an article that I contributed to my wife's blog (Loving Our Guts).
A while back, I was cleaning out some old lumber under our back deck and ran across a nice big sheet of 1/4 inch thick glass. In the spirit of The Big Clean-Up
(a favorite of mine from my childhood and arguably a factor in my hoarding instinct), I decided to build a cold frame so that we could garden into early winter and start again in the very early spring (actually, I'm giving January a shot for a starting point this year). In this post, I'll describe the process with lots of pictures and lessons learned along the way.
(a favorite of mine from my childhood and arguably a factor in my hoarding instinct), I decided to build a cold frame so that we could garden into early winter and start again in the very early spring (actually, I'm giving January a shot for a starting point this year). In this post, I'll describe the process with lots of pictures and lessons learned along the way.Since I like flashback, I'll start with the final result:
First off, I figured I should attempt a bit of research. I procured Building & Using Cold Frames: Garden Way Publishing Bulletin A-39
(the Kindle Edition will save you 79 cents off the budget busting $3.95 list price) and skimmed an article on Mother Earth News on the topic. I'm enough of a guy that I wanted to forge my own path, so I decided to make my own plans. So armed with a decent recollection of my high school wood shop class, I set out to design my cold frame. You may wonder how I arrived at my design. I used the following design parameters:
