Daily Express

Tasty names in the frame

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F THERE is one piece of kit that I would strongly recommend to any halfway keen vegetable grower it’s a cold frame. Now is the ideal time to buy one because the point of a cold frame is to grow out-of-season food crops.

Think of it as a knee-high greenhouse. You can use it right through the winter as a covered salad patch then follow on with an early spring crop of baby carrots, radish, spinach and lettuce.

At that point a lot of gardeners will reclaim their cold frame for hardening off trays of bedding plants but keen food producers can put dwarf French beans in weeks earlier than out in the open.

Or you could try cantaloupe melons – normally you would need a greenhouse but they will do very well trailing over the ground in a cold frame.

Depending which sort of cold frame you buy, it will set you back roughly £50 to £100.

But once you’ve splashed out you can use it productive­ly for years so it soon pays for itself.

To reap the benefits this winter set one up now. Choose a sunny, sheltered site with good, fertile soil, ideally close to an outdoor tap or water butt.

Dig the ground over, take out any weeds and work in some well-rotted organic matter and a dressing of fertiliser – blood, fish and bone is good. Then assemble the frame and position it on your prepared soil.

There are lots you can sow right now, such as autumn varieties of spinach and spring onions.

There are also oriental leaf crops such as mizuna, mibuna, mustard spinach and dwarf pak choi, together with any fast-growing mixed salad that is cut small as baby leaves.

The other big must-sow-now is lamb’s lettuce which produces crops of small tasty rosettes that can be cut and eaten any size from seedlings upwards. It’s reliable in any weather, far better than struggling to grow winter lettuces which are notoriousl­y fickle.

You can sow several batches of lamb’s lettuce between now and next spring so it’s productive too.

You could sow salad crops in regular rows then thin the seedlings out – this way it’s easy to run an onion hoe through to keep weeds down.

But to make the most of the space many people scatter a mixture of salad seeds all over the surface and just thin them out in stages, using the thinnings as baby leaves while the rest of the plants grow larger.

For this to work well, however, you need soil that’s fairly free of weed seeds. After sowing, water everything thoroughly.

During summer you don’t need to keep the cold frame lid on but as autumn progresses start closing it at night. When bad weather strikes, keep the lid closed all the time, opening it for ventilatio­n whenever conditions permit.

Just open up to cut your crops, keep clearing to refresh the soil and re-sow others in rotation.

It’s no wonder growers of my grandfathe­r’s generation swore by their cold frames. Once you’ve had one for a while you’ll wonder how you ever managed without.

WHEN FERTILISER COMES NATURALLY

 ?? Pictures: ALAMY ?? PRODUCTIVE: A cold frame is a small greenhouse for year-round crops
Pictures: ALAMY PRODUCTIVE: A cold frame is a small greenhouse for year-round crops

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