Great big cold frames …

… and what they cost to renovate.

We inherited this when we ‘moved in’ to 201. And, next to our ‘Swiss Chalet’ shed, it’s been our favourite new toy. A cold frame – lovely!


We’re still not entirely sure what we’re going to do with it because we’ve never had one before. But we knew what we had to do to it, if you take my meaning.

It had to be painted, well repainted. The lids had to be rehung but before that, they had to be repaired and the glass had to be cleaned. There should have been a central strut supporting the cold frame but there wasn’t so it had bowed both back to front, side to side and (annoyingly) both ends to middle. It wasn’t perceptible to the naked eye but when you tried to level it to the soil, you couldn’t, nothing was quite square, or true or flat.

By this time, I was starting to think our new toy was a blithering nuisance. So on Sunday, while I weeded the strawberry bed, Tony spent: the whole day, a tin of paint, several metres of weed-suppressing membrane and a couple of bags of gravel, creating this.



Much better. Now we only have to finish the lids and we’ll have a cold frame to be proud of.

But we’ve still got no idea what to do with it …

Labels: allotment-cold-frame, allotment-renovation, allotment-strawberry-bed