Why bother with the effort involved in making a cold frame when it’s easier just to buy greens in the winter?
Many gardeners do and they must have good reasons for going to all the trouble of making one, keeping out the varmints, insulating them and opening them on hot days. I can think of a few reasons and I suspect there are more.
My main reason is that freshly-picked vegetables contain more nutrition than those that have been sitting on the shelf or in transit. The soil in which my plants grow contains rich compost and extra minerals and produces nutrient-dense plants that taste great (except for chickory that even slugs eschew).
I can grow different vegetables than are available commercially, like French Breakfast radishes and Winter Density lettuce. We can harvest them when they’re immature and tastier, an indication of their nutritional content; we can pick them shortly before we eat them and don’t need to store them so the cold frame becomes a storage unit of living vegetables.
Once the cold frame is up and running and seedlings continue to grow, it is easy to harvest the vegetables and replace them with your own grown seedlings. Since our cold frame is made from materials we already had, the only costs involve the minerals in the compost which in the amounts I use, are minimal. When I compare that to the increasing costs of bought vegetables, I think it’s worth the effort. Outdoor markets that sell local produce usually don’t open in the winter so the only stuff available to shoppers is what’s been shipped here.
Finally, it behooves us to retain the knowledge and skill involved in feeding ourselves during all the seasons, especially when we live in such a mild climate that lends itself to year-round gardening. We don’t even have too many swarms of annoying bugs to fend off when we garden, especially in the winter. I’ve read that some people who garden elsewhere often wear mosquito-repellent clothing and mesh veils when they garden, but I don’t tell any back easterners how great it is to garden out here or else the swarms we get will be the human kind.
Reliable sources say that if Vancouver Island was cut off from the mainland, we’d have at most, two days’ worth of food available. Those of us who garden won’t be scrambling for that last head of lettuce because we know how to grow our own. Right now I’ve got two radishes in the cold frame and a few lettuce and spinach seedling starters under lights that I hope to transfer to the cold frame in a couple of weeks. I’ll start some more this week.
Update: slugs have been eating my radishes so next time I’ll bite the bullet and use vermiculite or extra coir instead of leaves in the soil mix for the cold frame, because I think slug eggs came in with the leaves I added.
Please contact mary_lowther@yahoo.ca with questions and suggestions since I need all the help I can get.
