So yesterday I opened up the fridge and I realized something with this whole coronavirus thing going on.
I feel really good about where we are with our meat, our frozen protein. I feel really good about where we are with our staples.
The thing we’re lacking is our fresh vegetables and fruits, and we’re trying to cut back on the number of times we have to go into town to the grocery store.
So I decided that I really wanted to get our fresh veggies going as quickly as possible. And that’s when I decided that I should start planting some greens ASAP.
So it’s pretty nice here in Minnesota. You can see the grass is starting to green up right now. It’s actually like 56 degrees. Super exciting. It’s still getting pretty cold at night or at night though.
So tonight, I think it’s going to go down to like 29. But after that, our lows are going to be sticking above freezing for a little bit.
I have some old windowpanes that came out of the house when we remodeled it, and I’m going to put together some extremely basic cold frames.
So I’m looking around for stuff to build these out of and just basically prop up the glass so that I can have some cold frames to grow some very cold hardy greens, lettuces, kale, pac choi, that kind of stuff. And have some fresh veggies within a month.
I don’t really want to build anything super crazy because I do want to make them nice. I’ve got plywood. I’ve got a long 4×4. I’ve got a couple for about four I could use. We have a lot of extra hay so I could use some hay bales.
Okay. So what I think I’m going to do is I’m going to use hay bales along the back and it’s going to be angled down and then along the sides. Maybe I could use some of the extra plywoodish lumber I have.
Now let’s prepare the soil. All right, so we just went through the bed and ripped through it.
I’ve made sure that the soil is worked and ready and we have things that we’re going to plant. Pac choi, spinach and lettuce mix. All the fast growing things that love colder weather.
I have never planted lettuce mixed before, but it’s got to go in 2 to 4 inch bands and seeds roughly half inch apart, about 60 seeds.
I’m just going to sort of take some seeds and sprinkle them on these sort of rows that I created or bands and we’ll go from there.
Cover very lightly. All right. Like an eighth of an inch that eighth of an inch. Yep.
I think I just planted lettuce. Okay, moving on. All right. We are losing daylight fast. We just planted the last of the seeds, so now we’re going to just moisten them with the mist setting on a garden hose.
Make sure everything’s good. We’re going to put the cold front back together. And then tomorrow morning, when everything’s light again, I’ll show you how everything looks.
All right, so it’s the next day we have sunlight again. And I just wanted to show all of you the finished product here. So here is our little tiny cold frame setup.
This is what it turned out like. We have our four window panels coming across here. We have three hay bales along the back. And you can see how I have thought of setting up is with their strings towards us here.
So they’re on their side. That gave them a little bit extra height. And so I just thought that it gave the cold frames a better angle and a little bit more space inside. On the ends we have these wood boards propped up with some wood sticks, and on the side we also have a sandbag.
So it’s not the easiest thing to get into. I just fold down the wood panels and then fold up the glass windows and set them to the side to water and work in there. But it definitely works.
So there we have it. Cold frames, quick, easy and all use from scrap material that I could find around the farm.
We’ll see if they actually work. I will keep you posted, but hopefully only 30 or so days from now I’ll be eating fresh greens here without having to go to the grocery store.
