A Gardeners Forum Forums General Discussion The Food Garden Forum New Cold Frame

I just scored 6 or 8 old windows from a quilt shop that I went to yesterday. I saw them sitting on the porch and I asked if they had plans for them. The answer was no, so I took them. Now I'm going to build a nice cold frame out of them all! Just need to figure out if I want to make them into a cabinet style frame or low frame. I think I can fit more stuff in a low frame that has windows all lined up in a row. ....just need to figure out what exactly I'll put in them now!

Would a cold frame keep things growing all through one of our winters?? Planting zone 5b...the frames would get about 8-9 hours of sun in the winter.

I'm thinking they could keep cool season crops going for you in the winter. Like salad stuffs, onions etc. If it is tall enough then cole crops like cabbages, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, etc.
Congrats!

I finally got the windows to the house....there are 9 of them! Hubs saw the windows against the side of the garage when he came home from work last night and asked about them and then said he'd build the frames for me!! So I told him I'd like to basically line them up all the way against the fence on the north side of the yard which is the same side that the vertical garden is going to be on. I'm going to dig up the grass where the frames are going to go and will put in ages manure along with new soil and am going to plant seeds directly into the ground in the frames. As the plants grow and the weather gets nicer, I can just leave the tops (windows) completely open.

Tomorrow I'm planning on scraping the old paint off of the windows and will take a look at all of the old caulking around the glass itself. I'll most likely end up re-caulking it all just to make sure we don't have any glass falling out of the old frames. These windows are soo old, they are actually held together with wooden pins instead of nails or tacks of any kind!

Sounds really lovely, Jenn. Manure brings along its own heat too. Good luck with it all. And pictures please.

Does aged manure still have heat??

depends on how aged! For my soil I used 10 yr old buffalo manure, (becasue I could get it by the pick-up load for free) it was not hot, but still tested good for nutrients

You are right, really. I was just thinking of the cold frame I saw in a magazine once somewhere where they dug down fairly deep and had a good layer of manure just for the heat benefits. It was probably fairly green manure and I was reading this back in the 70's. A long time to retain details.
But part of my memory was always trying to 'use' that heat to actually warm a house or something without the gases nvolved.

It's certainly going to be somewhat of an experiment with them this year. They will probably get plenty hot....they will be in full sun for at least 8 hours of the day because of where I'm putting them. My other cold frame was the same way and even when it was very very cold outside, I had to have it cracked open because of the amount of sun that it got.

My grandfather always used cold frames to start cabbage and turnips, I had no luck...I 'cooked' my seedlings

Yeah, it's very easy to do that. I'm going to have some thermometers inside of them so I can see how hot it is inside of the frames.