Warming Up With a Cold Frame

For this being a blog about farming, we haven't actually done much farming yet on our urban homestead. Part of that is just the unfortunate timing of finding our dream house/lot at the end of fall. We hurried to put in a garlic bed, but since then we've just been waiting and planning. Well, this "false spring" weather we've been having finally kicked our butts into action. So this weekend we built our first cold frame.

Folk wisdom in Iowa holds that you plant your cold-hardy crops a few weeks before the last frost, typically sometime in April. That felt like way too long to wait, but luckily there are ways to extend the growing season. We already knew about some of the more complicated ones, like greenhouses and high tunnels, but only recently discovered how easily we could build a similar structure for our raised beds.

A cold frame works on the same principles as a greenhouse; it shelters the plants and uses clear panels to let in sunlight and trap heat. In this sense it truly is solar powered - you don't need to add any external heat source to see a double-digit temperature increase inside the box. Combined with our recently obtained $5 windowpanes from the ReStore, this project was just too tempting to resist!

We started by building a wooden box. We've already done this several times with our raised garden beds. But this one needed to have a slight angle to it. Cold frames are designed to face South to capture as much sunlight as possible, so the Southerly side is about 4 inches shorter than the North. We cut the front and back to length, then made a long diagonal cut along the sides to taper from 4 to 8 inches in height. Since our three windows wouldn't cover our desired 4x8 raised bed, we also cut a few boards to fill in the empty spaces. All laid out, it looked like this:

We used a few screws in each corner to build our perimeter. As-is, the angle of the sides doesn't match up with the vertical boards of the front and back very well, so our windows wouldn't have a good snug fit. The best way to have the windows sit flush is to build the perimeter on a flat surface as we did here, then flip it over so the angles match perfectly. For more on this, and on cold frames in general, check out the very informative Four-Season Harvest by Eliot Coleman. We followed his plans almost exactly here, and are thrilled with our results.

The spacers we used aren't structural, so we just tacked them in with a few nails at each end. We needed them because we built the cold frame to match our "standard" raised bed size, even though we didn't have eight feet of windows. We had enough glass to cover most of the cold frame, so we knew the wooden spacers wouldn't have too much of a shading effect. As the sun travels across the sky, these small shadows will be cast on different parts of the bed, so there should be plenty of light for all the plants.

From here it was simple to place the cold frame on top of one of our garden beds, and insert the windowpanes. The cold frame isn't attached to the bed, so we'll be able to move it around the garden to whichever area needs extra heat. Early on, that means we can start spinach and radishes a few weeks ahead of schedule. Once they're established, we can move the frame to get a jump start on tomatoes and peppers. Then in the fall, we can repeat with greens or move on to root vegetables. It should be useful virtually the whole season long!

We put in the cold frame this afternoon, and a few short hours later it was already 15 degrees warmer inside the frame than it was outside. Our particular cold frame might need a few tweaks to really amp that up. At the moment it overhangs the front and back of the garden bed, just because of the height of the windows. That's a route for warm air to escape, so we'll probably try to add some boards to close the gaps. The cold frame should make a big difference in our garden, and it only took us about a day to build. Now if we can find more inexpensive windows, we might just need to build a few more of these!

Reuse, Recycle, ReStore

We moved into our new house about 4 months ago, and little by little we're figuring out just where everything will go and how we'll use each room.  But one area of the house currently has a purpose that is still entirely temporary. For the past several weeks, the basement has been a chicken coop construction zone, complete with sawdust, power tools, and stacks of repurposed lumber.

Neither of us can claim to have much experience with carpentry, but as we are constantly telling ourselves, "I don't think the chickens will care." So maybe each wall won't be perfectly straight because some of the old playset boards are a little warped or cracked, but they can still be useful. And just because we didn't want a backyard playset, doesn't mean that all of the boards are ready for the landfill.

With that in mind, we decided to check out the Greater Des Moines Habitat for Humanity's ReStore a couple of weeks ago.  The ReStore is stocked with a random collection of building materials that have been donated to Habitat for Humanity. When they recieve these donations, they first try to put them to use in the homes that they build. But sometimes they get donations that aren't quite what they need, and those items end up at the ReStore. The ReStore sells to the public, and uses the money to help support Habitat for Humanity's efforts to provide homes to people in need. There are ReStore outlets located in many major cities throughout the United States and Canada.

Walking into the ReStore is like entering a hardware store crossed with a flea market. Everything's organized, but since the donations are so random, inventory totally varies over time. One week there might be pallets full of ceramic tiles and landscaping blocks; another visit might yield a glut of bathtubs. It's a bit of an adventure to see what might be in stock on any given day. Some of the items at the ReStore are salvaged from a previous home, and just waiting for someone to find a new purpose for them. But they also have lots of new materials, so if you have a project at your home, it's worth stopping by to browse around.  You never know what you might find.

We're trying to build the chicken coop inexpensively, and as we mentioned while building our compost bin, we like to find the worth in "worthless" things. We spent quite a bit of time strolling up and down the aisles, back and forth across the store. We didn't know exactly what we hoped to find, but a couple of interesting items made their way home with us.

When Stacia drew pictures of the chicken coop, she included a crossbuck style door, just to add a little country charm to the design. She wasn't really thinking that concept would come to life exactly as drawn, but as fate would have it, we stumbled upon the perfect door hiding in a stack of perfectly ordinary doors. It's not the prettiest color, but it's structurally solid, and cost us just twenty-five dollars.  With a fresh coat of paint it'll grace the front of our coop quite nicely.

And while we initially wanted to find windows for the coop, we happened upon three like the one pictured that will have a rather different destination. Coop windows need to slide open for ventilation, but once we saw the big, plain wood-framed windows with no screens, we knew they had to go into our cold frame. We'll certainly talk more about cold frames as we work on building ours, but in short they're mini-greenhouses used to extend the growing season. These simple panes are perfect for a cold frame, and they were only five bucks a pop.

We didn't find quite the right windows for the chicken coop that day, but with new donations coming in all the time, we'll be sure to stop by again. Maybe another time we'll find just the right windows to complete our chicken coop project.  Or maybe we'll stumble upon the raw materials (and inspiration) to build something else entirely. Whatever building supplies you might be looking for, a trip to the ReStore is a treasure hunt that's definitely worth checking out.

One Man's Trash...

The day that we moved our belongings out of our suburban condominium and into our new house, we were fortunate to have help from Stacia’s Mom.  She traveled down to Des Moines from the Minneapolis area and brought along a trailer to haul our bigger items across Des Moines.  We hauled all the furniture you'd figure we would have in a condo, plus a few other things that you might not expect.

Among the rest of our furniture, we loaded up a stack of four used shipping pallets.  These pallets had been collected from beside a dumpster, where they were likely bound for a landfill.  But we spotted them, and saw a new purpose in their future.  Stacia’s Mom didn’t even have to ask about the shipping pallets before we explained that they were to become our new compost bin.

Some parents might still be a bit confused after that explanation, but not ours. Both our families have had compost bins in their gardens since we were young, and they're definitely into the idea of creative recycling.  On top of that, Stacia's Mom is known for having plenty of “brilliantly crazy ideas” of her own.  If we had a plan to take something useless and create something of value, she was on board.

Just a few short days after our move-in we tackled the construction.  It was a pretty simple project, perfect for our level of woodworking skill.  We took our four shipping pallets (all approximately the same size), then added four L-shaped brackets, two hinges, a gate latch, and a caster.  We placed three of the pallets in a U-shape and used the brackets to hold them together.  The fourth pallet would serve as our gate, so we raised that a few inches off the ground to prevent it from dragging and attached it to one side of the U with our hinges.  We added the gate latch to the other side so that we could close it up.  The bin wasn’t quite rigid enough to hold the gate up, so we added a caster under the end of the pallet with the latch to stop it from sagging.  And here’s what we had created:

It had everything we needed in a compost bin.  It allowed us to contain a pile of decomposing material, provided needed air flow between the slats, and gave us an easy access through the "gate" to allow us to turn the pile.  We had just one problem; it was pretty ugly.  Go figure that a bunch of old shipping pallets don't exactly look like they came out of Better Homes and Gardens. So in an attempt to keep it from looking like something we snatched from a dumpster, we added a coat of paint.  And we were finished!

The color is just a bit more tropical pastel than we were expecting, but it lends a little brightness to the garden anyway. Now we’ll just fill it up with organic stuff and if all goes well, we’ll have rich compost to use in our garden next year.  It seems fitting to be turning what's essentially trash into a really useful material inside a bin that itself was saved from the landfill. We’ll keep you posted to see how it goes!