Garden for your life: Baby its cold outside.

Just get out and do it.

Welcome to my blog, Garden for Your Life! This site will be mostly about my garden, but you can build one just like it in your back yard too. It can be bigger or smaller, just get out and do it. You can do it for fun. Your can do it for your health. You can do it for fresh food in these troubled times. The point is to get out and do it for whatever reason that you need.

Over time I will cover topics like canning and preserving your harvest, soil and beds, bugs, what to plant and when, and much more.

I've been working on this garden on mine and improving on it for over five years now. I will continue doing that for many more. You can too, just get out and do it.

Ken

Saturday, January 14, 2017

Baby its cold outside.

It's freezing outside! OK, this is why I live in SE Texas. It's only freezing here for a couple of days, then our bi-polar weather is back to warm. But I grow all year around here. Some things like broccoli and cauliflower handle small freezes without any problems. Others like my herbs and lettuces not so well.

This was my Passion Fruit. Not much passion left.

Most would have been killed off with these two days of below freezing temperatures. So out come the cold frames. What is a cold frame? Think mini green house.

Whats left of a sage that I no longer need.

All my delicates under plastic

My cold frames are 3' wide and as long as six to eight feet depending on the bed that they are protecting. They are made of plywood on the ends, 2" by 2" cross supports. I then cover them with Plastic sheeting and that's held in place with 1" by 2" boards. All I have to do is place them on top of my beds. I start by cutting a 4' by 4' piece of plywood diagonally, which gives me four pieces. That is enough for two frames. My beds are three feet across, so I cut 6" off of each side to fit.

Next is the 2 by 2s for support adjusted to the length of the bed. On goes the sheeting with the 1 by 2's to hold it and I'm done.

So the freezing temps ended and we are heading back to the normal 60-70 degree days for a bit. Off go the frames and set aside. Nice to see how well they did. These were under a table covered in plastic.

These are my large potted herbs. They all did well. Note the large sage plant just like the one above that I left out.

This is my carrot (far) and my mixed parsley and cilantro bed.

My small potted herb bed. All did well except the tall plant on the bottom right.
The tall part, against the plastic, died but the leaves down low survived and it will regrow.
The empty pot was a globe basil that had died before the frost.