The Garden Under Glass

CHAPTER XXX THE AMATEUR'S FRAME Value of a Frame I have on frequent occasions drawn the attention of amateurs and small growers to the great value of a cold frame in a garden. For the purpose of furnishing plants for the outside garden, be they flowers or vegetables, a frame is almost as useful (relatively to its size) as a green-house. Certainly I would consider it a very great viola-tion of the laws of economy to try to manage a garden without a frame. Let us recapitulate the many purposes to which a cold frame—that is, an ordinary wooden frame— may be put. It can be placed on a hotbed for the purpose of sowing seeds and rooting cuttings, for growing cucumbers and melons and for forcing seakale, rhubarb, asparagus, lettuces, carrots, radishes. It may be used for growing potatoes, dwarf beans, turnips, beetroot; for forwarding onions, cabbages, cauliflowers, leeks, celery, tomatoes, peas, broad beans, runner beans; for sweet-peas and the general run of bedding plants. It may be employed in the autumn for rooting cuttings of violas, pentstemons, antirrhinums, calceolarias, marguerites and fuchsias ; or for plunging bulbs in pots, strawberries for forcing, carnations for planting out, also Canterbury belis and campanulas grown for the green-house ; for cuttings of hardy shrubs and roses, and for all kinds of hardy plants grown along in pots for planting in the rockery and herbaceous border in spring. 281