While I dream of garden greenhouses, a coldframe will do me just fine

I thought I would have had a new coldframe by now, but the only new thing in the garden is a fox hole. It would be more polite of them to direct their exemplary digging skills towards where we’re excavating for new foundations, but so it goes.

I’m writing this, then, in the hope that it will spur me on to order one. I like to think that, one day, in a fantasy life, I might be a greenhouse person. I’d fill it up with pelargonium cuttings and orange blossom and hold tiny little lunch parties for one. Or maybe have a clever walk-through one like Mary Keen’s – genius for making sure you go in there, what with it being on the path. But I think of glasshouse life in the same way I think of one day learning Italian. It’s a nice idea, but unlikely to happen.

Coldframes, however, I can get on board with. A coldframe, crucially, is not a mini greenhouse, despite what it may look like. The clue is in the name: coldframes are cold – like many brunch deals, they are bottomless. Greenhouses, even small ones, are warmer as you can put heaters in them and they offer protection from the ground temperature.

Coldframes are useful for protecting plants from the cooler edges of early autumnal days. I like to use them as a designated hardy seedling hangout zone. Helpful if you don’t have a greenhouse but arguably more so if you don’t have windowsills, or don’t want to fill your home with tiny pots of soil. Plonked outside in a sunny spot, your seedlings will benefit from all that direct sunlight, even on a grey day, while being protected from birds and cats and foxes and the worst of the chill.

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I like filling a coldframe with hardy annuals, in particular poppies (usually in 9cm pots, as they don’t love being pricked out or even having their roots messed around with at all) and cornflowers. But mostly it’s about the sweet peas – two seeds pushed into empty loo-roll tubes if you’re feeling organised, or root trainers if you’re not – and beginning a process that has the same growth period as a human foetus. By the spring equinox I usually have a couple of dozen strong-rooted, muscular plants to plant out, which will offer me plenty of flowers to huff at my desk come June.

But you can also use your coldframe for pelargonium cuttings until it gets properly frosty outside – and now is a good time to take those too. Line it with bubble wrap for extra thermal protection.

As for which to buy, a flatpack job with plastic panels is a good start (the fancy metal ones are beautiful, but as long as the lid hinges and stays work, you’re fine). And for the curious on a budget, don’t underestimate the effectiveness of an upturned big plastic tub.

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