Get your growing season started even earlier with these frost protection strategies.
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Frost Protection Methods For Your Garden
Many of us gardeners get a little excited when a thaw arrives and the beginnings of a spring garden are just waiting to begin. The first shoots of sorrel or rhubarb might be peeking through the soil, surely we can start putting our plants out into the garden? In mild winter areas you might be sowing fava beans or broad beans, maybe sweet peas for cut flowers, sowing carrots, or early summer cabbages.
We want to be cautious of hard frosts that can still happen before our last frost date. If you don’t know when your last frost date is, you can use the Farmer’s Almanac tool online to check or do a search for your town and the average last spring frost date in your favorite search engine. A hard frost is where the frost penetrates the ground and freezes it again so the soil isn’t workable. If you have plants already in the ground, it might kill your early plants but there are a few things you can do as a gardener to help reduce the frost killing your plants.
Harden off your seedlings and transplants gradually over a period of time before transplanting them out.
Place them in a sheltered and protected location for gradually increasing amounts of time over at least 10 days to help your plants acclimate to life outside.
Don’t plant too early
This tip is probably not your favorite one to hear but it will help you avoid losing your seedlings and hard work. Sometimes it is better to wait a little longer until you start planting out. This is especially important if you don’t have frost protection.
Use some form of frost protection
Frost protection methods vary. They can be cheap and simple like cutting the bottom of a milk jug or gallon water bottle and placing it over the plant and pushing the bottle into the soil a bit. These not only help protect early seedlings in the ground from changes in temperature but can also reduce damage from early slugs, snails, weevils and other bugs that are hungry early in the season.
Your frost protection might be a bit more elaborate. Making hoops from metal or plastic pipe to use as supports for plastic sheeting or floating row cover or frost fleece works very well and you can cover a whole row or even a garden bed by using this method.
Related Post: How To MAke A Hoop House
A cold frame is where you can place your seedlings in seed trays or nursery pots to start hardening off. The plants have exposure to the air outside during the day then you close the lid on an evening to protect the plants from the colder temperatures during the night. Cold frames can be placed against a wall to make use of the radiant heat coming from the wall but it isn’t necessary. Cold frames can be made using reclaimed windows or doors, lumber, bricks, even straw bales, and plastic. You’re sure to find a cold frame plan that will work for your budget.
Related Post: How To Make A Cold Frame
There are some other tricks to help protect your plants from late frosts like using straw around your plants to help trap the warm air, and watering plants with very cold water first thing in the morning as freezing water slowly releases heat. You can fill plastic or glass bottles or jars with water and place them around your plants to help radiate the warmth from the sun during the night. I’ve seen these containers painted black to help absorb the heat from the sun.
You can also use a combination of these protection methods to help your plants keep warm and happy. For example, you could use the cut-off gallon jug method underneath the floating row cover or the painted water bottles inside a cold frame. You could combine cold frames with larger hoops to make a walk-in hoop house and experiment with year-round gardening. Each layer or frost protection you use is going to move the area inside the protection about a growing zone up so for example, I’m in zone 4 and I use some hoops and plastic over my veggies. I’ve moved those veggies to more of a zone 5 climate. Let’s say I put another set of smaller hoops underneath the ones there and I put another layer of plastic sheeting on there. Those same veggies are now in more of a zone 7 climate.
Your plants will be able to get established faster since the temperatures are more supportive for them to grow.
Experimenting with frost protection is definitely worthwhile especially if you are wanting to reduce the hunger gap or the time between the last harvest in fall and the first veg harvest in spring.
Dig In and Learn More
If this post has started ideas for your garden, be sure to check out these related posts and helpful books:
- The Ultimate Guide To Choosing The Right Seeds To Grow In Your Garden
- Thrifty Frost Protection
- Landrace Gardening: How To Adapt Your Garden Plants To Local Conditions
- Grow More Food In The Space You Have With Intensive Gardening
- Landrace Gardening: Food Security through Biodiversity and Promiscuous Pollination by Joseph Lofthouse
- Will Bonsall’s Essential Guide to Radical, Self-Reliant Gardening: Innovative Techniques for Growing Vegetables, Grains, and Perennial Food Crops with Minimal Fossil Fuel and Animal Inputs
- Multisowing Growing More Food In The Same Space
What are your tips for protecting plants from frost? Let me know over in the Facebook group
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