Home Garden Companion

Ilona's Garden Journal

Cold Frame Survival

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My Handyman built this deck


My husband has been fascinated by survival techniques (goaded by dire economic predictions and concerns from our last power outage during Ike).

He is finally coming into homesteading interests as it pertains to the garden. This used to be solely my domain. I dug, tilled, planted, and maintained the gardens -and everything in between the garden growing season in the yard; but now, just in time to offset my physical deficits, comes my husbands interest in developing gardening skillz.

We were talking about becoming serious in our vegetable garden this year, and as I went over the salient points we discussed cold frames. Once upon a time I had one, made out of recycled materials including old glass windows. Time and children demolished it. Plus I didn’t have one of those handy dandy, automatic openers.

Well… I think it is time to build another one and have come across easy direction via a video. So Handyman, this one is for you:
Martha Stewart shows you how to build a cold frame

Tags: homesteading,

About Ilona Erwin

I was a garden blog pioneer, and began writing on this blog in 2003. Before that I had begun a garden website that has been at its own domain since 2006, Ilona's Garden.

I still love writing, gardening, and art after all these years, although travel and grandchildren have become a big part of my life, now.

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. tina says

    That is a great looking compost bin they created. I liked that the water would slide off and that automatic window opener. You and your husband will have great fun gardening together.

  3. Ilona says

    Hmmm, a compost bin next to it would provide some heat…. and growing things in compost would produce quite the results don’t you think? Do we have something here? a hybrid compost bin/coldframe outfit for beside the garage?

  4. TC says

    Of course we’d have to make ours about ten times bigger than the one Martha and Barb put together. That is if we ever decided to build one.

    (You mentioned twittering in a comment on my blog; I’ve been giving it some thought but still don’t quite get it.)

  6. Ilona says

    WS- too bad you can’t pull of something like “The School of Rock”-but that only happens in movies… but think of the possibilities: Field trips to Mr. Stratz’s house to build cold frames, learn garden techniques, like WEEDING and DITCH DIGGING 101. Advanced leaf raking

    TC- think about twittering- I get lots of ideas and entertainment from it 🙂 You don’t have to get it to try it out, which is one of the great things about it: learn as you go along.

  8. nancybond says

    I’ve thought about building a tiny cold frame on one end of the balcony this spring — hubby has access to (free) sheets of Lexan which I think would work perfectly. These instructions are great!