Get and Early Gardening Start with Milk Jug Cloches

[IrateCitizen]

One of the things I like most about permaculture is the way it forces you to become more creative, because you want to make do with a much lower level of required resources than the rest of society. I think that this part is a natural fit for me, seeing as how my wife and I always loved to go “dumpster diving” for the stuff that other people set out — even before I had ever heard of permaculture! In this post I’m going to share a contraption for getting warm weather plants in the ground a few weeks before you normally could out of materials you can find in your recyclables or trash. I know it works because I used it last year with success — hopefully it helps you out as well.

Last week I listened to an excellent episode of The Survival Podcast with Jack Spirko on starting seeds. I highly recommend it — Jack provides a lot of great information for people on any level. However, he did not mention the cloche as a season extender — and it has proven to be a great one for well over 100 years. As far as function goes, it’s basically a cold frame for one plant. The original garden cloches were large inverted glass jars, such as the ones shown below:

(PICTURE SHOWN IN ORIGINAL ARTICLE)

I’m admittedly way too cheap to spend the kind of money it would cost to get glass cloches, and I’m also pretty sure I’d break them. But I do like the concept of them. I made some out of milk jugs a few years ago that pretty much looked like these after they were in place:

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[NV Whino]

1. I've been doing this for several years

Works reasonably well.