Cloches

Thursday 7 January 2010

So just to be clear, when Nicholas talks about 'bits of plastic', I've been looking at ways of getting an early start on sowing. We want to aim wherever possible at having two sowings of vegetables in the same space in one year.

We missed the really good weather last October for planting overwintering garlic and broad beans, mainly because the raised bed wasn't ready in time. November was a complete wash-out, cold and day after day of rain so we didn't take the risk of planting garlic sets only from them to rot away. Both of these crops can be planted in February, but the challenge is to get the ground into a condition that will kick start germination and then speed things along enough so that both crops can be harvested by the end of May to make room for the vegetable next sowing.

To help get the ground ready we have covered the raised bed with a double layer of cheap plastic dust sheets. The aim here is to give the bed chance to dry out a little earlier. Since we put these sheets down we have had three weeks of heavy rain and snow, so at the moment it looks like we're boxing clever.

As we're aiming to plant and sow these direct in February, to make sure we don't come a cropper on further bad weather I'm aim to make or source some good quality barn cloches to offer protection through to March. The research I've done to date has given me two ideas.

One idea is to make these cloches from scratch using custom-cut 10mm polycarbonate sheets. These would be cut into 1500mm x 300mm strips, with two of these strip being attached to wooden frames in a tent shape with two end pieces. Cost to produce two of these will be about £80 for the polycarbonate and wood.

The alternative is to buy pre-made cloches. The best looking and most reasonably priced are from the posh cloche company. Very cool name. Doesn't give the flexibility in size, but we could support two 1250mm rows for £75 and would save a lot of time.

Image coutesy of the Posh Cloche Company.

Came across this chaps blog about making his own cloches in my research - really fancy having ago at making old-school Chase Barn Cloches one day. My granddad also used to use these when he had his big veg patch. They disappeared years ago though; pity.