A Calendar for Cold Frame Planting

We’ve blogged about year-round gardening using cold frames in several posts. They include The Many Benefits of Using a Cold Frame, Our Hundred Mile Diet, Greens for Winter Harvest, How to Build a Cold Frame, and Cold Frames for Extended Season Gardening. These posts give some background to cold frame usage. This post is our schedule for planting. Other growing zones must be adjusted for differences in climate. 

Getting the cold frames ready for planting.

During the summer the cold frame areas are used for quick-growing crops. This year, one was dedicated to basil and another to cilantro which have already been harvested. In others, spinach and parsley will be taken out in mid-September, and kale and kohlrabi will be removed at the beginning of October. Radicchio, peas and lettuce take up a frame space that will be repurposed at the end of October. Doing this keeps all of our garden spaces in use, instead of saving the cold frame spaces exclusively for fall planting.   

Here's our planting schedule for this coming winter's cold frame planting. Each plant is given a one-window section of a cold frame, about 2 feet x 2-1/2 feet. One cold frame usually consists of two of these windows. 

End of August:  60-day Le Grand mache is planted- this is a long season mache. A shorter season type will be planted later (see Mid-October). The Le Grand mache will be used in salads about the time the summer garden is finishing up. 

Mid-September: Lettuce and claytonia will be planted. Our lettuce plantings are continuous, both in and out of the cold frames. At this time of year all lettuce seeding is done within a cold frame.  

Beginning of October: Spinach will be planted.  

Mid-October: The Verte de Cambria mache (the 45-day short season mache) will be planted.

End of October: One section of cold frame remains to be planted. Here, both types of mache will be seeded for late winter to early spring usage in hopes of harvesting fresh greens into March. 

By planting our winter garden on this schedule, our harvest will keep going through spring, until about time for the early garden crops. -G.H.