Cold Frame

Last March I built a cold frame, and I thought surely I'd put it into service in the garden quite promptly.  It didn't quite play out that way.

It's built out of 1"x4" and 2"x2" pine, an old storm window I found in my basement, and various bits of hardware from Home Depot.

Here's what it looked like
before I painted it:

Just-built cold frame, unpainted.

Since I built the cold frame out of plain old pine, I decided to paint it with exterior paint before putting it into service, which of course meant I had to take the lid back off again, remove the pane of glass, and paint all of the pieces separately.

The exterior is dark green (to look nice in the garden), and the interior is flat white to reflect maximum sunlight.

Katie helped with the painting, and with re-assembling the pieces.

I put weatherstripping around the edges to cut down on leaks and breezes (which also makes the lid close softly, so no worries about the class cracking if I drop the lid), and added a handle to make it easier to open.

Of course, Katie and Tiger Cat had to test it out before it went into the garden.
I started to worry that we'd never be allowed to take it outside.

Eventually, though, we were allowed to bring it out and put it into its new home in the garden.  The ground was frozen when I put it out there, but a lonely little lettuce looked as though it might still be alive.  I put a remote thermometer inside of it, and came back indoors.  The temperature dropped down to 33.9F, but even though it was cloudy, snowing, and apparently in the mid-20s, the temp inside rose back up to 35.4F before the afternoon shadows hit, and it started dropping again.

Katie and I started lettuce and spinach seeds yesterday, which I'm optimistically hoping will be able to go out into the cold frame later this month. I'm new to cold frames, however, so I'm only guessing about the timing of things at this point.