With a cold frame, the garden season extends over all four seasons. Built with a little manual skill, the sheltered framework offers ideal conditions for the cultivation and cultivation of your ornamental and useful plants. This guide tells you how to properly plant a cold frame.

The cold frame can be planted as early as February

Preparatory work - This is how natural heating gets into the cold frame

With the following preparatory work, you create a perfect microclimate in the cold frame that allows it to be used almost all year round. The art lies in a balanced filling that acts as a natural heater. You need a mixture of horse manure and straw in equal parts and garden soil and compost in a ratio of 3:1. Here's how to do it right:

  • Dig a 40 cm deep pit in the cold frame
  • Pour the manure/straw mixture into the pit to a depth of 20 cm and tamp down
  • Spread the soil/compost mix over it as a 20 cm layer and work it into fine crumbs

Within a week after filling, a pleasant warmth developed in the cold frame. This results from the decomposition of the filling material by industrious microorganisms. If the light conditions improve from February/March, this year's gardening season can start, even if there is still snow.

Plant the cold frame correctly - tips for the schedule

A cold frame with natural heating offers a wide range of possible uses. Here you can grow early and winter vegetables, prefer young plants that need warmth or cultivate sensitive summer plants. The following schedule should serve as a suggestion for your individual planting:

  • February/March: Sowing radishes, iceberg lettuce, spinach and kohlrabi
  • April/May: Prepare cauliflower, pumpkin, runner beans and tomatoes for later planting out in the bed
  • June/July: Sowing broccoli, growing melons, peppers or aubergines
  • August/September: Sowing radishes, lamb's lettuce, radishes and leeks later
  • October/November: Grow and harvest winter vegetables, like kale and winter lettuce

Of course, the cold frame is not exclusively reserved for the cultivation of useful plants. Here, cold-sensitive flowers and perennials find ideal conditions to ensure a vital growth advantage after sowing before they are planted in the bed and on the balcony.

Efficient planting technology saves time and effort - this is how it works

The exemplary schedule shows how versatile you can use a cold frame for planting. To ensure that sowing, cultivation and transplanting run smoothly, in a time-saving and plant-friendly manner, the following cultivation technique has proven itself in practice:

  • Sow seeds in small single pots or multi-pot trays
  • Leave pre-grown or purchased young plants in the growing pot on the windowsill
  • Sink these vessels in the cold frame into the ground up to the rim

Seedlings and young plants benefit from the heat that prevails in the cold frame as a result of the uninterrupted rotting. Take the fully grown plants out of the ground together with the pots, so that you can only now pot them out and plant them outdoors. In the cold frame, the free space is used for new cultures.

tips

If obtaining horse manure or cow manure is a difficult task, you can install natural heating in your cold frame in another way. A mixture of equal parts autumn leaves and garden and kitchen waste, enriched with horn meal, develops a pleasant warmth within 2 weeks.

Category:

Garden design