After enjoying a delicious winter salad fresh from a friend’s garden around a week ago, Kate and I decided to bite the bullet and install our first cold frame here in Kansas. I nosed around the barn some, but discovered that we didn’t have the bits and pieces to make a nice looking, easy to use and easy to move cold frame. As luck would have it, the FarmTek catalog was on top of one of the piles on my desk. Seeing it motivated me to search for cold frames on the FarmTek website.
After a bit of research, and discussion, Kate and I settled on one of FarmTek’s Flip-Top ClearSpan cold frames, because it comes with everything included in a kit, even the baseboards. The FarmTek Flip-Top consists of a semi-rigid mini-hoop house attached to a frame that’s built of 50 year lifespan lumber. I like this lumber because it is made with recycled plastic. We chose the 4-foot-by-12-foot model and placed the order.
Ordering the Cold Frame
FarmTek’s online ordering process is easy and the communication is excellent. Because of its size and weight, the cold frame kit has to be shipped by freight truck. The freight company and FarmTek communicated with us about that process, and it all went smoothly. I met the semi-trailer tractor driver at our farm last Friday at 4:45 PM and we had him on his way back to Salina, Kansas by 5.
Even if you don’t have a forklift (we don’t either, darnit), don’t be afraid to order something that needs to travel by freight truck. If the item is a single piece that weighs more than about 200 pounds, unloading by hand will be difficult, but more often than not, your shipment consists of several pieces, each of which can be easily unloaded by hand. This was the case with the cold frame, we broke the pallet down on the back of the truck — no single piece weighed more than 50 pounds.
I went to work on the FarmTek cold frame first thing on Saturday morning. Actually, the first thing I did was thoroughly till the spot where we intended to place the cold frame. The kit included all fasteners and other small parts in labeled bags; their labels matched those in the instruction booklet perfectly. Some screws required specialized driving bits — those were also included in the kit. The only tools I needed for the project were my Kawasaki cordless drill and conventional circular saw Kawasaki cordless drill and conventional circular saw, a hammer, heavy shear (for cutting plastic) and Vise-Grip pliers. I needed the pliers to extract a screw after I stripped its head.
Building the FarmTek Cold Frame
The first steps to assembling the FarmTek cold frame included cutting and attaching the plastic lumber base-frame pieces together using stainless screws and special brackets designed just for that purpose. Next, I put the 2-piece arched-pipe rafters together using a self-drilling TekScrew to secure them. The end rafters where then assembled to the hoop structure’s pipe end-frame using PVC brackets and TekScrews. This probably took me an hour and a half total, including all the time I spent with the assembly manual and measuring twice so I could cut once.
After admiring my handiwork for a minute over a cup of coffee, I cut the end panels from the large roll of corrugated plastic material included in the FarmTek cold frame kit. I cut these pieces a little oversized, attached them to the end frames with TekScrews and special washers. Once fastened, I trimmed the plastic with my sheet metal shears. The next step was to install the remaining rafters. These fit into sliding PVC brackets that I had installed on the front and rear pipe frames before I attached them to the end frames. These steps took another hour or so to accomplish.
Kate and I built a 24-foot-by-72-foot, double-layer plastic covered greenhouse on our farm in South Dakota quite a few years ago. That experience taught me that installing the greenhouse film required patience and a fresh mind. So I called it quits on the cold frame for the day after determining that getting the corrugated plastic spliced and installed would be somewhat arduous. I saved that task and the other finishing touches on the FarmTek cold frame for the next morning.
We had no problem sliding the cold frame’s roofing material into the H-channels, but it was pretty much impossible for us move that entire piece to the pipe frame, and get it attached without having the 4 foot piece and 8 foot piece at least partially separate. We tried a few different tacks, and then it hit me. Why not run some screws through the H-channel to attach it to the two corrugated plastic pieces. I wish I had thought of that earlier, it would have saved us about an hour of trial and error. Splicing is only required on FarmTek Flip-Top cold frames longer than 8 feet.
With the two pieces of cold frame cover firmly connected, the three of us easily positioned the material on the hoop frame. Kate and Becca held it in place while I attached the corrugated plastic to the hoop frame with TekScrews and washers. This process took about 40 minutes, and I would gladly assemble another 12-foot FarmTek cold frame now that I know how to get the cover splice to survive installation. For a brief moment, I was kicking myself for going with the 12-footer instead of the 8-footer.
The final steps included attaching 2 metal brackets to the rear of the base frame to lock the frame’s “hinge” in place and installing the two support legs on the front of the pipe frame. The finishing touch came in the form of attaching two woven straps to the ends of the pipe frame and the base frame … to keep the cover from tipping all the way back.
Kate and I really like the FarmTek Flip-Top cold frame and are considering the addition of another smaller frame for the herb garden. Now all we need is for this unseemly arctic blast to head back north so we can begin experimenting with our new FarmTek cold frame.
Hank Will raises hair sheep, heritage cattle and many varieties of open-pollinated corn with his wife, Karen, on their rural Osage County, Kansas farm. His home life made a perfect complement for his former professional life as editor in chief at GRIT and Capper’s Farmer magazines.
