Early season gardening - cold frame

Gardeners all, whether your garden is big or small or even lacking, everyone has room for a cold frame.  Nothing extends your gardening season more than a cold frame.  TPP likes these small cold frames because they can be easily moved, easily sited in a sunny location.  It works well to use a potting soil mix in planting boxes because they warm up faster than the soil beneath.  Here's a cold frame with bibb lettuce just a week after the seedlings were planted, and the nights have been freezing, but the days just above freezing.  The other inhabitants are some parsley, both curly and flat, and some mesclun mix.  With a cold frame you'll be harvesting salad before your regular garden hardly gets going.  This cold frame is sited on top of a sunny herb garden, and it will be gone before it's time to plant real warm weather herbs like basil, so now you get another crop from this space.  But why stop there?  Use your patio or the edge of your driveway or a porch roof (if you can reach the cold frame out of a window.  Almost everyone has room for this type of gardening.  Still make certain that you only grow cool weather crops: lettuce, spinach, mesclun, green onions, baby bok choi. 

Cold frame or solar hot box?

Growing up in upstate NY, every serious gardener had one or more cold frames.  No more economical way to extend your gardening season is available than a cold frame.  These good old boys never bought cold frames, they built them.   Cold frames were what everyone did with old storm windows.  If someone was seen installing fancy new-fangled al-you-min-eeum storm windows, one of the good old boys would pull up in their old pickup and cart away the old storm windows.  The name "cold frame" correctly tells you that there was no heating element used in a cold frame.  It's simply a solar heated box that provides a bit of protection from frosts and cold nights.  Maybe cold frames would be more appealing, and better understood, if they were called solar hot boxes.  The crops that work best are those that are pretty cold hardy, crops that do well in early spring anyways; the cold frame just extends the season.  My usual cold frame inmates are lettuces and spinach grown in window boxes.  The trick is to thin them ruthlessly enough  to prevent competition; remember they sell baby greens for premium prices, so think of it as harvesting.  Here's the basic rule: lettuce seedlings 2" tall should be 2" apart; 4" tall seedlings should be 4" apart, and 8" will allow lettuces to grow to full size.  Green onions are another very easy early crop.  You can raise a lot of them in a small space.  Lettuce seedlings are also started for later transplanting.  In the fall baby bok choi is a favorite often remaining in the cold frame awaiting our pleasure until late November.  People often seem surprised that cold frames really work, but actually over heating in a solar hot box is a potential problem on any sunny day, and they need to be propped open to let some of the heat escape.  In the spring, plants are grown in boxes using a potting mix; the garden soil beneath just stays too cold.  So that will be today's main activity planting spinach, diverse  lettuces, and some romaine and bibb lettuce plantlets.  This will give us salad greens ready for eating at just about the time people without a cold frame will be planting their seeds. 

Naked truth about sex, gardening, religion, and politics in American government

In this day of binging and googling, buzzwords in a title can greatly affect the number of hits upon your blog or published article, but who would stoop to such a low and deceptive device? Since botany is in one of the little traveled back waters of biology, and most of biology isn’t trendy enough to matter to the media, it would appear that the Phactor has never used one of these academically trendy buzz words in any title of any published article. He did publish ‘the best pun ever used as a title” (according to one reviewer) and it attracted a great deal of attention to a small, but quite clever, bit of research, so buzzwords appears to work, but by now you should have realized that you are a data point in an experiment. We’ll report back to see if the traffic on this article is affected by the gratuitous use of buzzwords in the title. Which buzz word do you think will have the greatest impact? Take the poll; you're part of the experiment anyways.

Enhancing diversity, hope, and anticipation

A total of 273 plants flowering in our gardens in a single season is pretty good, but now is the time to prime the pump so to speak for next season. This is being accomplished by planting some new spring bulbs. One in particular puzzled the Phactor for several years; a small early flowering bulb with pale blue on white flowers looking a bit like a pale flowered squill, but many flowered on a small raceme like a hyacinth. Further they had somewhat dilated stamen filaments like another spring liliaceous bulb Chionodoxa, glory of the snow. The only place these flowers had been observed was in a neighbor's front lawn planted there by owners long past, and this being an historic neighborhood and all such surprises are not uncommon, and by and large most of us do not have the primal urge to dig them out. But lacking any means of systematically identifying such plants, there being no guide to exotic spring flowers, they remained a mystery until happening upon Puschkinia scilloides var. libanotica alba, and of course, it's supposedly related to both Scilla and Chionodoxa. Ta da! Unfortunately no image exists in my garden files; but wait until spring. Now we only have to find 26 more to push us to the 300 plants flowering thresh hold, but still there are some young shrubs that might come through for us in the coming year. And is this not the way of the gardener? Always looking to the coming season with hope and anticipation, sort of like being a Cubs fan but with a much better record of success. Don't you just once want a political candidate to say, "Gardening is my favorite passtime, and I wish to use my position to enhance the lot of gardeners everywhere by passing a universal mulch plan." Unfortunately what we get is insubstantial compost, especially here in Lincolnland. But more thoughts on this will have to wait for a less sunny day. Today we garden with optimism.

An official beginning to spring

It's official! Spring is here! The Phytophactor doesn't much care for the calendar designations of the seasons. What matters is what the garden and gardener do. While taking my morning coffee, spring was declared because the witch hazel (Hamamelis) out beside the garage was in full , cheerful yellow flower. Witch hazels will bloom reliably when every other shrub is nothing more than bare naked twigs, some in the late fall (November) and some in the spring (March). This year the witch hazel even beat the snowdrops for first to bloom. Another witch hazel variety beat this shrub by a week or more, but it's a young plant and only had a couple of flowers after the rabbits pruned it so thoroughly during the winter. Witch hazels also have nice fall color and the grow well in shady areas.

Not to be out done, the Phactor planted spinach, lettuce, and mustard salad greens in boxes that went into the cold frame greenhouse. Any time the daytime temperatures are at or above freezing, cold tolerant plants will grow quite nicely in a cold frame heated only by trapping solar energy. This is a great way to extend the salad season by two months a year (spring and fall). So come on people, what are you waiting for? Spring is here!