Planning for a Winter Harvest: Cold Frame Growing

“We throw on our coats and go out to the cold frames to pick a salad for dinner. The cold frames are glass-covered, bottomless wooden boxes,… lined up at the back of the garden along our gravel path, and a celebratory sight they are- as full of green bounty as the produce aisle at at the local market… While the snow sifts about us we get busy cutting enter leaves with small serrated knives, filling a towel-lined basket. Dressed with a good olive oil and a squirt of lemon, the salad will taste like renewal- a perfect accompaniment to the leek and potato soup simmering on the back of the stove.”(Coleman, Eliot. The Four Season Harvest. 1999. pp. 1-2.)

I first learned about cold frame gardening from Eliot Coleman’s book The Four Season Harvest, leant to me by my friend Sima of Sima’s Roots & Fruits. The idea that you could harvest leafy greens (not just woody kale) in the dead of winter was intriguing to me. Not being the biggest fan of the winter season, I never thought season extension could be done in our climate without adding heat. My friend Kara and I decided to give it a try, picking up some old windows and glass doors and building our own garden beds with attached windows. We put them in our respective yards (mine was on a rock face) added some soil, planted the seeds and then started the process of opening the window on warmer days, closing it at night, and watching what took place. It was totally an experiment, and I learned several things from my winter cold frame:

1. If you’re putting it on rock, it should be raised more and therefore have more soil to work with so it doesn’t freeze so easily
2. Depending on the design of the window, you might need to cover it with a sheet of greenhouse plastic so that ice doesn’t get stuck around it and prevent it from being opened
3. Plant your seeds early
4. I need a bigger one next year :)

I’ll be the first to say that although I love the earth and I love farms and gardens, I’m not the best gardener out there. Everything I do seems to end up being “an experiment” and I enjoy waiting and seeing what grows, whether I planted it or not. I’ve decided that I like a lot of the weeds around my house because they attract pollinators, so my food garden was a bit lacking this summer. But guess what. In a small enclosed space, you don’t really need to compete with weeds! So when my experiment resulted in me picking fresh arugula and spinach after all the plants around me had died, I was thrilled. The window really acted like a mini greenhouse, trapping the heat made created by the sun during the day. My window was about 18” wide and 24” long, so imagine what could be done with more space! I had heard from produce box customers that they’d like to learn more about gardening, and I figured that if I could make this work and it could bring so much joy to me, surely others could as well. 

So this summer, I worked with Kingston local Gordon Robinson to design and build a prototype 2x4’ cold frame growing box, deeper than mine last year, with a simpler window that shouldn’t freeze shut. I asked my friend Kara if she would come back from the farms & gardens where she has been working these past several years and lead a workshop for people wishing to learn about cold frames. And voila… here we are!

We are taking orders for Gordon’s cold frame boxes for a few more days (if you are interested, click here to learn more and place an order), and there’s plenty of time to sign up for Kara’s workshop on September 20th! It’s going to be held at the South End Community Garden in Rainbow Park in Saint John, and we’ll be donating the box we use the workshop to the organization People United in the Lower South End (PULSE) to use throughout the fall, winter and as long as they like! We are grateful to be able to host the workshop in such a central location and hope that having the cold frame available will spread the word to more people in our community about how to make good use of limited space for growing food. 

We hope you’ll join us! Click here for details and to sign up for the workshop!