High Altitude Gardening, Part 2 - Cold Frames

Описание: This is the second installment in a series on gardening on the homestead. This week we will be talking about cold frames.

With a growing season of only 4-5 months, we need to do anything we can to lengthen that season. One way to do that is to install cold frames on our raised beds. The cold frames act like a mini greenhouse keeping the plants warm during the colder days and nights in the early spring. They also will keep the snow off of the tender plants if we get a later spring storm.

The cold frames that we are building are small enough to be easily removable but also strong enough to support a snow load of heavy spring snow. To cover one 4' by 12' bed was about $100 in material and we built them in a single day.

The design works really well. The snow the bed melted far faster than the surrounding snow. They supported about 12 inches of snow without a problem, but that did solve the question of vertical or horizontal bracing. They have worked so well that we will be planting some seedlings this week, nearly 1 1/2 months ahead of the rest of the garden.

Music in this video by Jason Shaw and is used by permission under the Attribution 3.0 United States license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...