Yesterday I took a little time to build a cold bed around one of our square foot gardens. The bed is planted with lettuce, collards, kale, turnip, kholarabi, and carrots. With any luck, we’ll be able to harvest the bed throughout the winter.
We had bought about twenty bales of straw from a local farmer at a great price. It took ten of them to surround the perimeter of the garden, and the plexiglass windows we used for the ceiling we got for free via Freecycle. The wood sticks and rocks we had laying around the garage.
Putting the bed together was a little bit tricky. Not only was the straw heavy and soaked from hours of the rain I worked in, but the bed has five lengths of iron rebar sticking out of the ground around the perimeter of the bed (we use the iron to support trellises during the warmer seasons).
The rebar made for setting the roof to be a little tricky. Hence the fact that some of the window panes are sitting kitty corner on top.
Almost immediately after I laid the roof down, the windows started to fog up from the underside (it was a very cold and windy day). With the first frost advisory of the season tonight, it’s good that we didn’t wait any longer to set it up.
We’ve already bought a wireless outdoor thermometer so we can watch the temperature inside. We’ll post more as the bed progresses.
