A bit of success in the cold frame...

...but just a bit.

Last fall, my sweet husband built this cold frame for me:

(Doesn't the garden look naked now, without any plants in it?

I bet it's embarrassed to have it's nude photo
plastered up on a website like this.)

I attempted to plant some things early this spring but had minimal success. I'm not sure what's so different about growing in a cold frame - truly, just a wooden frame over the same dirt as the rest of the garden - but I can't get anything to sprout reliably in there!

This fall, I've at least managed to get started a decent crop of kale. And tons of radish greens.



Right - radish greens. That's what you get when you plant radishes and they don't actually form bulbs, but grow beautiful greens. Which aren't terribly useful.

The whole half of the cold frame that I planted in spinach was a flop - two plants out of a hoped-for forty came up. Two spinach plants might make one salad... for the toddler. There are also a couple of random heads of lettuce starting and a scant row of spring greens. (No one told them it's not spring, so they seem to be content in growing in the cool fall weather.)



It's too cold to plant anything now, I can't imagine anything would actually sprout. So I'll have to be content with what is already growing, and maybe read up on cold-frame planting for next year.

The good news: I harvested enough greens to supplement our salad tonight, along with a couple of small leeks. It's a satisfying thing to be harvesting food halfway into November, even if it's only a tiny bit!