A COLDFRAME IS WARM, UNLESS IT’S…
A Fourth Dimension for the Garden
A “coldframe” is one of a few ways to add a new dimension — time — to gardening. Especially, for me, vegetable gardening. It inserts time where time does not exist. Instead of my gardening season screeching to a stop with a hard freeze sometime in late November or early December, a coldframe extends it a few weeks, possibly even more. And it can do the same thing at the beginning of the season, getting plants going and harvested sooner. (Multidimensional vegetable gardening is covered more thoroughly in my book Weedless Gardening.)
At its most primitive, a coldframe is nothing more than a clear plastic or glass topped box set directly on the ground, functioning in the garden as a miniature greenhouse. My simplest coldframe was made from four pieces of scrap pine boards notched together into a three-foot by six-foot rectangle. The covering was quarter-inch plexiglass whose previous incarnation was that of a floor runner beneath office chairs.
My most elaborate coldframe was a purchased structure, looking much like a miniature barn with a double-wall, polycarbonate plastic roof that folded open or closed along tracks in the eaves. Read more
SLEEP, MY FIGS
Optimizing Winter for a Fig Plant
For those of us who grow figs in cold climates, where winter lows reliably plummet below 10 degrees Fahrenheit, this time of year brings some nervous expectation. You want the buds to pop out and start growing, but not too, too soon.
Awakening!
Except for maritime climates, such as in the Pacific Northwest, where winters are what I term “coldish” rather than “cold,” figs need some sort of protection in truly cold winter climates. The challenge in maritime climates is using variety choice, pruning, and site selection to get fruit to ripen in the relatively cool summers. In these climates fig buds gradually unfold usually in synch with the gradual warming weather in spring.
Not so for protected figs in truly cold winter climates, whether plants are in a pot or in the ground, wrapped or buried. For directions here, allow me to excerpt my recent book, Growing Figs in Cold Climates: Read more
FINDING MY ROOTS
Elbow Room and Food
What’s happening in the soil beneath your potted plants? Over time, roots fill up the pot so there’s little more room left for them to grow. And nutrients get sucked out of the soil or washed out by water.
I keep my potted plants hale and hardy with periodic repotting. This also gives me a look at the roots, which I always find interesting. (It was one area of my research when I worked for Cornell University.) If I see roots are pressed around the outside of the rootball, especially if traveling around and around it, they’re telling me they want out. A plant might also indicate its roots need more elbow room by looking like it’s ready to topple over. More subtle signs are potting soil that dries out very quickly, a plant hardly growing, or roots attempting escape out a pot’s drainage holes.
Rapidly growing plants need repotting yearly, especially when they are young; older plants and slow growers can get by with being repotting every two or three years. Some plants hardly ever need repotting, such as — looking around my collection — my amaryllis (Hippeastrum), bay laurel, hardy cyclamen, jade plant, aloe, and cactus.
Amaryllis & Sammy
I wait to repot my ponytail palm until its bulbous base breaks open the pot it’s growing in; this happens about every 15 years. Same goes for my clivia.
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