GardenFork – Eclectic DIY

Tag: cold frame

The Mini Greenhouse Repair Fail

You’ve probably seen one or three of my mini greenhouse plans videos. The most recent one talks about the complete fail of the plastic cover in the middle of winter. Here are the photos that show my attempt at repair before the complete breakdown of the covering.

My big mistake 4 months prior to the fail was to put screws through the top of the PVC pipes, and then lay plastic sheeting over the screw heads. Who knew that the metal screw head would eventually puncture through the plastic, starting as all holes do, small.

Prior to the small hole caused by the screw, all was good in the mini greenhouse. These rosemary plants had over-wintered well. Not so well after the plastic ripped though.

My attempt at repair was to use packing tape over the screw head and the splitting plastic. I knew it was not a 100% guaranteed repair, as it was cold out when I applied the tape. I don’t think other tape would have worked either. The glue on tape is not cold friendly.

That small hole grew through the winter, with the weight of heavy wet snow, and lots of wind. Then we had even more wind and that caused the complete tearing of the mini greenhouse cover. Darn. It sat for a while before I was ready to walk over and deal with it. Besides, there was still 18″ of snow on the ground. I knew all the plants inside the hoop house were toast.

Going forward I will use UV rated greenhouse plastic, I’ve seen some that is reinforced with netting in the plastic. AND I will screw the screws into the PVC starting underneath it, through the wood crossbeam, then into the pipe. If you have some old storm windows on hand, you can make a neat cold frame with them.

In the meantime, check the video where we walk through the fail:

May 3, 2017
DIY Cold Frame From A Recycled Window – GF Video
Build this DIY Cold Frame with a window your neighbor is throwing out. I see windows out for the trash all the time, I could probably have built a whole greenhouse already! I like this home made cold frame for starting and growing salad greens, as they don’t get too tall, perfect for this rig. Watch the video:

Tips for building the DIY Cold Frame
- A wood frame window works best, but use what you’ve got, or what you’ve found.
- Be sure to prime and paint all surfaces.
- Install a thermatic vent to keep it from over heating.
Our cold frame has a thermatic vent built into the plan, so you don’t have to manually vent the cold frame greenhouse, you can buy one of these vents at a home improvement store. Buy the vent here.

What I also like here is we are recycling materials to build DIY cold frame. You can find old windows somewhere in your town, someone is most likely replacing their windows, and they will put out the old ones for trash pickup. Or check yard sales, or your own garage attic or barn, its very possible there is a window or two sitting there that you can use for this cold frame plan. Also consider using scrap plywood for this, it doesn’t have to look like fine furniture, its for the vegetable garden after all.

Be sure to paint the cold frame with primer and an outdoor latex paint, you may also want to wrap the edges of the plywood that touch the soil with duct tape to keep moisture from wicking up into the plywood. You could also use old garden hose to protect the wood. Slice open the hose along its length and slip the bottom of the cold frame into the slot in the garden hose.

If you want to extend your growing season, check out the books below, they are the ones we use!

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March 8, 2016
Cheap Cold Frame How To – DIY GF Video
Here’s a cheap cold frame you can make out of scrap lumber and a window. In this video I’ll show you how to build the cold frame in a few hours. With this rig, you can do some winter gardening, and of course we have some videos on that, the links are at the end of this post.

Some enhancements I’ve done with we made the video:
- I painted the cold frame with outdoor latex paint, 2-3 coats is good, as plywood does not like to get wet, you know.
- I split open some old garden house and slipped it on the bottom of the cold frame to keep the wood out of the dirt.
- I’ve grown vegetables in winter for several years. Neat.
I’m betting you can find enough scrap lumber to make this a recycle or freecycle project. The wood doesn’t have to be finish grade, and one of my pieces was warped, but it worked anyway. The hinges I had laying around, and the only thing I had to buy was the thermal vent.

What grows well in a cold frame? I grow cold hard salad greens and kale. Kale will grow in snow. I’ve dug it out of the garden and its still green in February. You can buy winter salad green mixes from the seed companies. Mache is a neat green that not many people grow, the seeds are kinda tiny.

If you don’t get the auto vent, you will have to open up the frame on warm days. You will be surprised how hot it can get in a our cheap cold frame, even if it didn’t cost us any money to build.

The biggest problem with this rig is the glass. It can break. That tree limb could have landed anywhere, but it landed on top of your super cheap cold frame instead. I have replaced the glass once. Luckily I had some spare windows that I salvaged a piece of glass out of. You might try putting some screening over the glass to protect it. Just a thought.

Below are some suggested books for winter gardening, let me know your thoughts.

Watch all of our hoop house videos here.

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February 9, 2015
Cold Frame Gardening at BBG – DIY GF Video

Cold frame gardening can be done in the Northern climes, as we see at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. We made this winter gardening video at their demonstration garden in December. They were harvesting greens like arugula and mache. Watch the video and see for yourself. Below are some book recommendations for winter gardening.

The cold frame plans for this set are easy to build. The dimensions depend on the size of the windows. You may already have some windows, or a neighbor may be replacing their windows and you can grab a few of them. Or pick them up from a garage sale or look on the web for free stuff.

The cold frames in this video were built with 2×8 or 2×10 lumber, but you could use something less thick and it will be ok, i think. I like how they had the cold frames next to each other, so each frame helped insulate the one next to it. You could use scrap hinges off some old doors, its a ‘use what you got’ kind of project.

For cold frame gardening, its best to orient the cold frame so it faces south, if you are in the northern hemisphere. This cold frame is manually vented, meaning you vent them by opening them up and closing them yourself. You could install the thermatic vent we have used in our hoop house greenhouse plans if you like.

What to grow when gardening in winter? Cold tolerant plants, mainly salad greens work well. Several seed suppliers sell winter salad mixes, they will do well until it becomes just too cold. But then those plants will revive in early spring. Many times there is enough moisture in the ground to keep the plants watered, but keep an eye on them. If the cold frame gets too warm, the soil can dry out. And you’d be surprised at just how hot a cold frame can get in winter.

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February 9, 2015
PVC Cold Frame Hoop House #3 – DIY GF Video
Easy to build PVC Cold Frame Hoop House is a mini greenhouse that allows you to grow salad greens and cold tolerant vegetables into the winter, and get a head start on early spring planting. This hoop house is more resistant to heavy snow than our previous versions, listed below.

This is version 3.0 of our cold frame hoop house. What I like about this one is that it’s a taller than our previous cold frames, so you could start to grow tall plants like kale or start sunflowers earlier in the spring.

A couple things to keep in mind while you’re building this hoop house, especially if you are using this on raised beds. You want this hoop house to fit just inside the walls of your raised bed. I made this mistake when I made my first hoop house, I didn’t measure how wide my raised bed was and the cold frame didn’t fit exactly. Experience has once again taught me something. The frame fits just inside the wooden sides of the raised bed and it doesn’t have to have a super tight seal with the soil, you do want some air exchange in and out. What the hoop house is doing is moderating temperature. When it gets really cold outside, it’s going to be cold in there but it will extend your growing season.

Consider planting some cold tolerant greens in August, I like a salad green mix that sold by Fedco seeds. They have a fall and winter lettuce greens mix and that’s worked really well for me.

One thing I did not mention in the video is that where the plastic meets the plywood ends of your hoop house, the plywood can cause the plastic to tear and so you might want to put something soft around the edge of the plywood. If you have some old garden hose you could split the garden hose open and run that along the edge of the plywood and that would go a long way toward making the plastic such that it wouldn’t rip.

For this 8′ x 4′ cold frame I used:
- Two 2×3 8′ long studs
  Two 2×3 studs cut to 45″ long
  One 1×2 8′ stud, you could also use a 2×2
  4 metal angle iron brackets
  3 pieces of 1/2″ Schedule 40 PVC cut to 6′ long
  1 1/4″ and 1 5/8″ drywall screws
  Two pieces of 4’x4′ thin plywood. You could also cut down a 4’x8′ piece.
  3 or 4 mil plastic, i used a roll of 10′ x 25′, which is enough for two hoop houses.
  Two thermatic vents, available here http://amzn.to/2Cg81fg
  Staple gun
Using the angle brackets, build a 4′ x 8′ wood frame, make sure the shorter pieces of 2×3 wood (the 45″ pieces) are inside of the larger pieces, so the outside dimensions are 48″ x 96″

I cut the plywood ends to match the arc of the pvc hoops. Take one of the hoops and curve it into the wood frame at the end of the frame, and use this to sketch the arc on the plywood ends, it does not have to be perfect.

My hoop house cold frame gardening has been greatly influenced by Eliot Coleman and Niki Jabour.

Four-Season Harvest The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener

Watch all of our hoop house videos here.
November 6, 2014
Hoop House Plan You Can Build

A PVC hoop house design by J.B. uses PVC pipe, plywood, & plastic to make a simple greenhouse. J.B. based this on our Hoop House Plan video, and made it taller for tall plants. Perfect for seed starting tomatoes or even corn.

Just wanted to drop you a line to say Thanks for your video’s on the hoop house. [Here’s a photo of] the hoop house I had built for our raised beds. I don’t have the vent in yet as I’m still waiting for it to get delivered. I did modify the design a bit. I made mine a bit higher to try and grow some taller plants and I used wood at both ends and ran a 2×3 spine down the middle and attached the hoops to it with the same C clamps. We had some winds the other night with a couple gusts to near 50MPH and it stood like a rock. Cant wait to get planting under it.

With this taller hoop house cold frame, it could blow over with high wind, but J.B. secured it with C clamps to the raised bed. You could also use spring clamps or tie it down with strong rope to some screw eyes on the raised beds.

I also like the trellis J.B. has built at the end of the raised bed using some leftover fence material.

I just put some kale and mustard transplants into our hoop house cold frame, i’m always amazed at how much warmer it is inside the hoop house cold frame vs. the outside temperature.

Below are some of our Simple Hoop House Cold Frame videos, Let us know your questions or thoughts in the comments below:

Click here to watch our How To Build a Hoop House Cold Frame Video

Click here to watch How to build a cold frame video.

April 15, 2013
Seed Starting in a Hoop House Cold Frame : DIY Video

Starting seeds in a hoop house cold frame is like putting a greenhouse on your vegetable bed. The hoop house warms the soil and then you drop seeds right into the soil. No transplanting or grow lights, no transplant shock. This is our cheap PVC hoop house that can be made with salvaged or recycled materials, and then you can grow vegetables in the hoop house. What I love is how the cold frame warms the soil to 15F above the ambient soil temperature.

Plants that do well for seed starting in a hoop house are those that are cold tolerant. What the cold frame offers is a warmer soil and air temperature, which aids in germination. Yes, peas can be planted in snow, but they germinate much better in slightly warmer soil, same for lettuces and cabbages like kale, just a bit warmer and they sprout better. For this video I put sugar snap pea seeds in and radish seeds. Radishes are one of those seeds that are kinda fail-safe, so you feel ok even if some of the other plants didn’t take as well.

We have several videos on how to build a hoop house cold frame and how to use a plastic greenhouse like this, here is the video of us building our first cheap hoop house. I think its key to have the thermally controlled vent, if it gets too hot, you might consider putting a vent on each end of the hoop house. The PVC we use in this cold frame could be salvaged or recycled from another project or job site. The plastic we use is 3 mil plastic from the hardware store. With care this plastic will last several years. In the middle of summer, I hang my hoop house on the back side of the woodshed, and the plastic stays in good shape for a few years.

Salad Greens Grow Really Well In A Hoop House

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April 9, 2013
Repair Of Our Hoop House Cold Frame : GF Video

Setting up our simple cheap hoop house greenhouse for seed starting. This PVC hoop house cold frame works well for us and it was easy to build, here is the video of us building our the hoop house. The hoop house greenhouse allows you to get a head start on planting vegetables and seed starting. We started this in February to start warming the soil. This can be made for free if you find some scrap leftover lumber and PVC pipe. This plan uses short lengths of PVC pipe, which you may find laying around your yard, or your neighbor’s yard.

My hoop house plans for this mini greenhouse are simple. Some 2x4s, some PVC pipe, and a piece of plywood. The thermal actuated vent keeps the hoop house from overheating. Link to buy the thermal greenhouse vents

I use 3 mil clear plastic from the hardware store, it lasts a few years with care. I hang our mini greenhouse on the back of a shed when i am not using it. To attach the plastic to it, I fold the plastic over on itself and use lots of staples. You could also use a piece of lath or thin wood to hold the plastic to the wood. For the ends, I staple the plastic to the plywood end with the thermal vent and then cut off the excess plastic. For the other end of the cold frame hoop house, I simply bunch up the plastic and staple it to the 2×4.

After a few days on your vegetable bed, this portable greenhouse will start warming the soil. Its amazing how warm it is inside the hoop house compared to the outside temperature. We have a video showing how a hoop house greenhouse can defrost your garden soil coming soon.

In the video, the plywood I used for the end of the greenhouse, OSB, is not the best kind of plywood for outdoor uses. Use a better piece of plywood and paint it with a few coats of latex paint, it will last much longer if its painted.

Click here to watch our How To Build a Hoop House Cold Frame Video

Click here to watch How to build a cold frame video.

Learn how to grow food year round, read Eliot Coleman’s Four Season Harvest book and Nikki Jabour’s Year Round Vegetable Gardener.

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Do you use a hoop house greenhouse? let us know comments or questions below:

April 2, 2013
Grow Vegetables in Winter with a Cold Frame : GF video

Cold frames have been used to grow vegetables in winter since glass was invented. Winter gardening is made possible with cold frames and hoop houses. Using a recycled window, we built a cold frame last year – see our how to build a cold frame video here – and had good success growing vegetables in the winter and starting plants early in the spring using the cold frame.

This year I took volunteer plants that had sprung up around the garden: Mustard Greens, Swiss Chard, Garlic, Chives, and parsley and transplanted these plants into the cold frame. These plants all do well in colder weather, so we’ll have some nice greens for salads in the middle of winter. How cool is that?

The key to using a cold frame to grow vegetables is controlling the temperature inside the cold frame. We use an automatic vent that has louvers that open at about 45F, letting hot air out of the cold frame. It is called a crawlspace vent at the hardware store. You can buy the automatic vent online here.

The recycled window we used is a single glaze, meaning it has only one sheet of glass, you can also use double glazed windows. As we say at GardenFork: Use what you got.

You can make a larger cold frame, aka a plastic hoop house greenhouse, by watching our hoop house video here.

Let us know your cold frame and hoop house tips and suggestions below, thx, eric.

November 13, 2012
Cold Frame & Hoop House How To With Nikki Jabbour : GF Radio 258

Learn how to build a cold frame and extend your growing season with Nikki Jabbour, author of The Year Round Vegetable Gardener. We talk with Nikki about how to use a cold frame to start plant early and keep your harvest going into winter, even in Canada! ( Nikki lives in Nova Scotia, Canada, btw )

Recycling stuff you were going to throw out into cloches is a big light bulb moment for Eric, and the fact that holes in your lettuce greens at a store or restaurant means that bugs were on them, and that is a good thing, meaning it probably wasn’t sprayed with insecticide, is the other lightbulb moment for Eric.

We talk about ways to extend your growing season without spending a lot of money on fancy greenhouses, in other words, how to grow vegetables in the snow. The cool thing about Niki’s outlook is that its based on her learning as you go method, much like gardenfork. Simple and easy, made out of recycled materials.

I’m interested in the idea of using newspaper hats as a simple cloche to protect plants for frost. stay tuned.

Read our review of The Year Round Vegetable Gardener here

Order Nikki’s book from Amazon here. (affiliate link)

Watch our how to build a hoop house video here.

Watch our how to build a cold frame video here.

A big thank you to Jean Ann Van Krevelen for introducing Niki to us, what fun.

June 18, 2012
The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener Book Review

I was looking forward to reading Nikki Jabbour’s The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener because my farming apprenticeship had a significant focus on season extension, as the farm is currently going into its twelfth month of continuous harvest. But we were growing in Virginia, whereas Ms. Jabbour has succeeded in maintaining a year-round garden in the more challenging Nova Scotian climate. Because of this, her book achieves its subtitle: How to Grow Your Own Food 365 Days a Year, No Matter Where You Live.

Listen to Nikki talk with Eric on GardenFork Radio here.

The book is chock full of information, from the basics (timing the seasons and intensive planting) to the complex (building structures to capture and maintain heat). It is comprehensive enough that a relative novice could start with The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener as a valuable resource. A more seasoned grower might be tempted to skip over some familiar-sounding sections, but I would urge you to read cover-to-cover as unique and useful tips are sprinkled throughout the entire text.

The chapter on winter gardening progresses from light protection (like row covers) to using an unheated greenhouse or building your own polytunnel, so a grower in any hardiness zone or variously sized growing space can find techniques to meet his or her needs. The plans to build your own cold frame or polytunnel are easy to follow and call for inexpensive materials. Plus, the chapter motived me with photos of lusciously green vegetables thriving alongside snow and ice.

Like many other gardening books, this one concludes with a crop index. Ms. Jabbour recommends specific cultivars based on cold or heat tolerance or days to maturity and includes an emphasis on vegetable varieties less talked about in other books; for example, Tatsoi has its own entry.

In short: I love this book. It’s a wonderful resource for year-round vegetable growing knowledge and inspiration. Now, if only I didn’t live in a studio apartment!

Order from Indie Bookstores here

Order from Amazon here. (affiliate links)

Grocery Gardening a new cooking gardening book that works

February 17, 2012
Hotbeds

A couple of weeks ago Eric and I were talking on Gardenfork Radio about his new DIY Cold Frames video, and I mentioned winter gardening in hotbeds. I’d seen some hotbeds in the garden in Colonial Williamsburg, where they still garden the way colonial people did.

3 feet deep and lined with bricks to hold and distribute the heat.

Hotbed are like Eric’s cold frames with glass on top and all, but deeper. Last weekend we went up to the Williamsburg Farmers Market for their big pre-Thanksgiving holiday market and I took some pictures of their hotbeds to show Gardenfork readers.

What makes hotbeds particularly attractive to the DIY organic gardener is that you get a twofer. First, you use the otherwise wasted heat of composting to get an early start on Spring. Second, you have fresh, finished compost to spread on your garden.

A hotbed needs to have a mass of at least 1 cubic yard to be effective. That’s because what you’re building is a compost pile and compost needs mass to really cook. So these beds are deep:

— It helps to line a deep hotbed with plastic sheeting or weed block fabric to aid in cleaning it out in the Spring.
— Layer in browns (cabon): dry leaves, leaf mold, spoiled hay and bedding from a stall.
— Layer in greens (nitrogen): kitchen waste, fresh manure.

Hotbeds are an excellent use for chicken manure as well as horse manure, which can be “seedy” in the compost otherwise. Cattle manure is good too.

If done right, enough heat will be generated to kill all seeds, worm eggs, and pathogens. In fact, hotbeds have been known to combust and smolder if too big. Obviously, you don’t put compost worms into a hotbed to help with the composting unless you want them to cook.

add 12 inches of rich growing soil onto the top of the fresh manure.

— Add about 12 inches of good soil for growing.

— Carefully manage your glass frames so that your plants don’t overheat.

Hotbeds are an ancient method of sprouting seeds and growing plants during the winter, Aristotle mentions the Egyptians using compost piles to sprout seedlings. Europeans imported hotbeds from Arab countries after the Crusades.

In fact, the colder and more sunless your winters, the more hotbeds will help you get an early start on the spring garden and bridge what was called in early colonial America the Starving Time, January to March, after harvest stores from the previous fall had run out but before plants would grow in the frozen fields.

Hotbeds don’t have to be buried, either. The Romans had hotbeds on carts so that they could be moved under cover when it rained. In medieval Europe, hotbeds were frequently just dung heaps that people planted vegetables into over the winter.

Manage your hotbeds like a coldframe. Overheating is as dangerous to your plants as freezing.

But regardless of how you build your hotbed, proper timing is important. Few plants or seeds can tolerate the intense heat of an early hotbed. So start your hotbed a month or two before you plant. So plan to plant or seed on the backside of this period, when the hotbed is warm but not hot.

And remember, you have to manage the moisture content of your hotbed, just like a compost pile; neither too wet nor too dry.

And when you hear on the news that a place is a “hotbed of political activity” you’ll know what they’re full of. ;->

November 21, 2011
Late Winter Gardening & Apple Tree Pruning : DIY Video

An early spring tour of the vegetable garden, where Eric talks about using a hoop house cold frame to get an early start on spring vegetable plants, and how to grow sugar snap peas, plus some of eric’s thoughts on how to prune fruit trees like the old apple tree in the yard. Plus the Labrador Retrievers, of course.

In this video we talked about how to make a cold frame hoop house, and you can see that DIY video on our site here

Buy the thermatic vents here: http://amzn.to/2zG4WjC

To learn more about how to start seeds, make seed starting plant pots, seed starting, and growing plants in seed starting trays, watch our video How to start seeds video here.
What are you doing to get a head start on the growing season, what season extenders are you using? Let us know below:

April 12, 2011
Cold Frame Hoop House Plans and Update

Here are some hoop house plans and photos of the small hoop house we use for cold weather greens. We had a really warm weekend last week, so i pulled out the cold frame hoop house that we built in the How to make a hoop house cold frame video here. I put in a mix of salad greens and mesclun mix, place a wireless thermometer in, and left it to grow.

I’ve gotten many requests for plans for the cold frame hoop house, you can get more info on all our hoop house cold frame plans here. Below i’ll post a few key photos to guide you along. This Cold Frame Hoop House plan is perfect for our raised garden beds.

These hoop houses work really well with our raised vegetable beds. You can watch our How to Make Raised Garden Beds video on our site here.

build a frame that will fit in your garden bed with 2×4 lumber

use narrow diameter PVC to arch across the frame

use electrical pipe holders to secure pipe arches

cut a plywood end that matches the arc of your hoop house cold frame. cut out a hole for the thermatic vent in the plywood

attach the plywood to one end of cold frame

the view of the cold frame hoop house from inside.

The cold frame hoop house fits just inside the raised bed. nice.

If you want to learn more about growing vegetables year round read Eliot Coleman’s Four Season Harvest book and Nikki Jabour’s Year Round Vegetable Gardener.

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March 29, 2010
Winter Vegetable Gardening with cold frames GF Video

On Christmas Day we went out to the garden to take care of what we should have done in the fall. And we made a video about it. How unusual.

I’m a big fan of Eliot Coleman, and his book, The Four Season Harvest. Its full of a ton of information, one of the things that stuck with me is that South of France is on the same parallel, the 44th, as Eliot’s house in Maine. France grows vegetables in the winter, and we don’t. Or most of us don’t. Eliot does grow vegetables in winter. Check out his site here Eliot has a new book out on winter gardening, The Winter Harvest Handbook, which you can buy from your local bookstore or here.

I usually put a cold frame on one of our raised beds to grow cold hard greens in the late fall and early spring. I have yet to master Eliot’s methods of getting greens thru the winter. You can see our video on how to build a cold frame on this page of our site.

Watch this Gardenfork episode for more on plastic mulch, cold frames, and of course the Labradors.

December 29, 2009
Video: Cold Frame Plans from Brooklyn Botanic Garden

Last week we visited with Patty Hulse at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, who showed us the cold frames they built and use throughout the winter. Very nice. Thanks to my friend Tony, ( the man who knits ) for helping with the camera. An episode on knitting is in the works.

Greens growing in a cold frame at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden

December 15, 2006