What is a coldframe? you may ask. Well, it's more or less a tiny greenhouse. A lot of people use them over the winter to grow fresh salad greens and such - it's a basic structure to provide season extension. We're using it to keep it warm enough for the crops I seeded - the soil is not warm enough for them yet, and the nights still get too cold for them to be outside, but they needed to be seeded now or we'd miss the boat! We were going to use some space in the true greenhouse of Anne Marie's friend Drew, but it was so crowded in there already that we didn't want to take up more of his space. Hence, a coldframe.
To build our coldframe for cheap, we went to ReSource Fort Collins and, with the help of our good friend BigFoot, bought a large used Ikea-style bookcase and a sliding glass shower door that fit over the front of the bookcase, in addition to some old moulding trim, which is going to be used to make some trellises for peas, beans, sunflowers, and tomatoes. The bookcase shelves and the accompanying support pegs were removable, except for one shelf. We had to saw that out of there, which proved to be fairly easy. Then we laid the bookcase down on its back (the cats loved that, of course, and had to explore).
Then, the seeding began. One at a time, I filled each of the flats with potting soil and wet it down very well. Then I double-checked which crops needed to be started, and seeded broccoli, eggplant, two varieties of bell peppers, hot peppers, cherry tomatoes, paste tomatoes, and slicing tomatoes. I hadn't really thought ahead very well, so I had to make some crop variety markers out of strips of a corrugated cardboard box. They'll absorb water and rot pretty quickly, so the plan is to buy some real markers today and replace the cardboard ones ASAP.
When everything was seeded, I arranged the flats in the bookcase/coldframe and placed the shower door on top. It was actually a little small...but I used my public school critical thinking and problem solving skills, and grabbed one of the shelves we'd taken out of the bookcase earlier. I stuck the shelf in the bookcase near one of the ends and replaced the shower door...and voilà! A fully functional coldframe. :)
Here's hoping the plants actually grow!
WOG out
