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Pre-Season Plantings
On this page, find how to extend your growing season by starting seeds indoors late in winter or early in spring, including:
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- Where to begin?
- Indoor seed plantings, cold frames, and greenhouses.
- How to add months to the growing season in your climate and region.
- The importance of hardening transplants grown indoors.
- Frost and cool night protection measures.
Extending Your Garden Season
Though chilly winds still blow outdoors and snow or frost remains a hazard for your vegetable garden, begin to plant early with our pre-season and early-starts planting techniques.
Plant Indoors
The simplest of these early spring techniques is planting indoors, where shirtsleeve temperatures are common [see Starting Plants Indoors].
Greenhouses and Cold Frames
Outdoors, a greenhouse or a cold frame will trap the sun’s heat and keep frost from harming tender seedlings.
Both greenhouses and cold frames have panels of glass or plastic to efficiently permit both visible light and warming infrared rays to pass through to the plants and soil within, where the light is absorbed.
Glass is opaque to the longer wavelengths of radiant heat energy, so the temperature inside either type of structure will rise quickly whenever light falls on it.
Cold frames are better insulated than greenhouses, because they are open-bottomed boxes that are buried deeply within the soil, sometimes within a layer of straw that helps hold their heat. Oftentimes, they are placed over a bed of green manure, which generates warmth as it decomposes.
Adding Months to Your Gardening Season
Using early-start techniques can extend the growing season by more than 2 months in regions where long winters and cool springs and autumns are the common.
Combined with protection for your vegetables in autumn by use of covers during frosty evenings, these methods allow plants to ripen to harvest.
The difference can add enough time so you can plant, rear and pick most slow-to-mature vegetables.
Find more information on early-start and season-extension techniques by clicking on these links:
Cloches, Hot Caps and Covers
When temperatures outdoors have moderated but frost is still probable, protection offered by cloches, hot caps, floating row covers, or other coverings that are made of clear glass, waxed paper, or sheet plastic film can protect your tender seedlings [see Hardening Transplants].
Working on much the same principles as those for a greenhouse, these keep both air and soil warm for the growing plants, retaining moisture as a bonus.
Install those made of waterproof film or glass high enough to keep their sides from making contact with the plants’ foliage. This air gap insulates and separates the covering from the plants, preventing water from condensing on their leaves. Touching the cold glass and condensation can cause fungal disease infections.