Cold frames only buy you a couple of degrees. They are best for more cold tolerant plants like lettuce, spinach, etc. Sensitive plants like tomatoes and peppers do best with just planting them a bit later, in my experience.
I had trouble with growing peppers from seed until I got a heat mat.
With indoor starts it’s recommended to harden starts off outdoors for one week before planting, using a cold frame is useful for this i heard. Especially in colder climates. Its not about planting them sooner, I know thats partly another option.
The cold frame you don’t need to bring the plants in and out instead you leave them outside using the ground heat to keep it warm, which is more than a few degrees it thought? Maybe raised on a deck is what you’re thinking of?
Not where I live. Cold frames tend to overheat during the day, then lose too much heat at night. Even if you open them during the day.
I’m not saying they don’t work at all, I’m just saying I’ve not found the benefit for hot weather plants to be noticable. I just move them in and out during hardening, and make sure to not plant them until night time temps are high enough. That’s given me the best yield and least BER.
If you don’t harden before transplanting you might loose quite a bit of your crop. I am surprised that a cold frame would be good for hardening though. In my experience the sun intensity is more impactful than the changes in temperature. I put my starts under my kid’s trampoline for a week and the filtered sunlight it provides seems to be a good easy mode. No bringing plants in and out for progressively more and more time over a week
The guide I read is you still do it for a few hours first day and increase by an hour a day. So to do this you open and close the cold frame, while closed the conditions should be the same as being in front of a window, but when you open it you get the temp and wind. Difference being is colder over night and warmer during the day, which is part of Harding off too.
The trampoline is an interesting idea, but gives full heat and wind…. Now I need to do more reading it seems….
Oh, I see. I didn’t realize it would block so might light.
I’ve done all manner of hardening over the years. The trampoline method isn’t perfect, but it’s proven to be very hands off. My starts are under grow lights, so they’re not that leggy and don’t get impacted that heavily by the wind. They don’t seem to move from my 65 °F basement into a fairly similar outdoor temperature.
I think it’s one of those if it’s in a 4 hour window, don’t put it in the middle of the lawn for 12 hours kinda issue.
The issue is planting day can be a night time of 5c but tickling 30c during the day. It’s a crapshoot so the better the hardening I can do the less issues.
Iirc most of my issues have been with stuff that doesn’t like moving, the cucumbers and melons.
Thankfully we’re a bit warmer here so I can start bigger things straight in the soil. Not that it matters, my mellons and cucumbers tend to succumb to vibe borers. I’ll have to be a lot more diligent this season since they’ve gotten me the past two seasons :(
Voles got my cukes year one, but they didn’t make an appearance after (rest of the street filled in with houses is my guess).
I started my aero tomatoes at the wrong time to utilize my tent for my starts properly, lessons learned. Also almost missed the window on planting my starts, dealing with some stuff right now, but that’s life. Will just need to spend a little more at the ol HD.
The adventures of experimenting and life in general haha.
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