Building & Using Coldframes

With a cold frame you can stretch the growing season for salad greens up to three months in short season areas! This makes it well worth the $30 worth of materials and the day of work you will put into building your own cold frame. You will be repaid many times over in pleasure, pride, and just plain good eating. In this booklet, you'll not only find several different plans for building a cold frame, but also lots of information on using your cold frame for maximum benefit.

Softback. 32 pages. Storey Publishing. 1997.

This guide is especially useful for gardeners deciding where to place a cold frame, how to balance solar gain with ventilation, and which crops benefit from protected culture. Use its projects as a planning reference, then adapt dimensions, glazing, anchoring, and snow or wind loads to local conditions and available materials. Planting dates will still depend on climate and the cold frame’s actual temperature.

Browse more practical references in our Gardening Books collection.