Cold Frame Gardening

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cold frame greenhouseDuring these short days of December, January and February take advantage of every mild day to give your garden cold frame a thorough ventilation. Plants with green leaves are never really dormant unless the temperature drops to freezing.

Pansies and sweet violets should be flowering now, provided the temperature is right. Remove blooms instead of allowing them to decay on the plants. Whenever feasible, stir the soil, especially if you have to give water. If violets seem tardy in flowering, don’t be concerned. They’ll pick up in January, when the sun gets higher, if the temperature can be kept at 40° to 45°. In a lower temperature, flowering will be delayed until around March.

By now you should be picking lettuce, Chinese cabbage and cress, the current problem with them being to keep the temperature above freezing. Little further development can be expected from these crops, nor is it advisable to try to carry them through winter. Cress and radishes will go to seed as soon as spring growth begins.

If the wooden frame greenhouse is used principally for carrying plants through the winter which are liable to damage outdoors, that’s another story. Simply cover cold frames over with hay or straw and leave them. Allow snow coverings to remain. In addition to pansies, biennials carried over in this way include English daisies, forget-me-nots and Canterbury bells. Perennials carried over include chrysanthemums and red-hot-pokers (kniphofia).
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The gardening cold frame design offers yet another possibility for usefulness… the propagation of trees and shrubs by means of hardwood cuttings. These are cuttings taken after leaf fall and after plant tissue has been subject to several frosts. The list of plants suitable for propagation by hardwood cuttings is extensive. It includes the mockorange, butterfly-bush, privet, chaste-tree (vitex) , rose-of-Sharon, willow, deutzia, weigela, false-spires (sorbaria), jetbead, flowering quince, hydrangea, tamarisk and many others. Currants, grapes and gooseberries are propagated by this method also.

Although the garden cold frame is ideal for this method of propagation, you may run into the problem of needing the frame in early spring for raising seedlings before it’s possible to transplant the cuttings to the garden. But the project fits in very well if you don’t plan to use the frame for seedlings before March.