Cold frame

We moved into our current home seven years ago having fallen in love with the one acre spread of trees and water. Looking less like the high desert of Boise and more like a small slice of transplanted rural England, we set into making our mid-70's home (baby blue inside and out) slightly more livable.

First on our radar was replacing the 30 year old

sliding aluminum door off the dining room. With the inexplicable Good Sam club sticker left on, I carried the massive Nixon era artifact off to a place behind our shed. I had plan.

This plan had to wait until about a month ago when we saw the first sign of the coming apocalypse foretold by the Mayan calender. Our local Fred Meyer had stopped carrying arugula. What was next we asked ourselves? No potable water? Gangs of mohawked marauders roaming the streets?

After a fairly successful foray into growing our own vegetable garden this season, we decided to build a cold frame to grow our own greens for the winter. It was time to pull out the old sliding door.

The idea was simple. The double paned glass was no longer efficient enough for the home but I reasoned that it would work well for a cold frame. I set to cleaning and deconstructing the slider and a half a day later I had something that looked less like a cold frame and more like a bomb shelter entrance. Never the less, I was pleased with the results and went inside to enjoy a victory dinner (including of course, an arugula salad).

An hour later I was standing outside looking at the ruined remains of my brilliant idea. Sometime over the course of the hour the glass had shattered into a gajillion pieces. For the benefit of my 5 year old son I decided not to burst into sobs and instead set my mind to figuring out how to fix it.

A few years back I had bought a greenhouse kit that, I'm still ashamed to admit, I was unable to put together. I blame it on instructions that were written in a Coptic-Mandarin hybrid. There were still hundreds of aluminum framing pieces and various sizes of hollow core polycarbonite sheets sitting around the garage. It was time to admit I was never going to put the kit together, so I took the various pieces and rebuilt the cold frame.

Now the cold frame looks like solar panels to our bomb shelter,but at least we'll have fresh spinach and arugula when the end comes.