Building the cold frame.

Anders made our cold frame this weekend. I am really excited to share the pictures with you all, I think he did a great job! I first want to tell you a little bit about why we built one...

I have to be honest, we really don't know exactly what we are doing with starting seeds, but we are making headway. We know we need a cold frame or a green house to put the seedlings in, because of our disaster last year.

Last year we planted tons of seeds and kept them in the only south facing window that we have in our home; our bedroom. It was not so great. It smelled of potting soil and was dusty for-ever in there, and it was gross. We don't have the biggest bedroom, so we were forever climbing around it to get into bed.

I didn't know a thing about planting seeds and "hardening them off" because I had never done it before. Neither Anders, nor I had ever grown up in a home where this was done. So, what do I do? When it is nice and warm out (I am not sure what the temperature was) and I think the plants are ready to be moved outside, I picked up all those seedlings that I had been watering diligently and set them out on our picnic table to get sunstroke and die. Yep, it was a fantastic start. I didn't know what the hell I had done wrong. I was rather heartbroken. I would walk by those plants everyday and water them and think, "what did I do wrong?", "how do I do this?!" Ah, the joys! I later found out there was this thing called "hardening off" or something like that. You harden them off by introducing them gradually to the light, air, and weather elements of the outdoors. Well duh Mandi! Jeesh. Sometimes we just don't think, do we? Well, I learned. It was the hard way, but it was real effective!

So this year we looked into cold frames a bit. I say "a bit" because that is the truth of it. When we ripped out our windows last fall I had the idea to save them all for a green house/cold frame, and for future buildings ie: Up-cycling them. So, here they sat for the entire winter. Just waiting for this day.

Nature's Acres Homestead Cold Frame © 2013.

Up-cycling. Why we do it.

We up-cycle stuff. A trendy word for recycling, re-using, taking donations, trading, what have you..we do it. No shame, it is the reality of starting up a homestead, a farm, a business. It is the way it goes. Start ups always have Large expense and limited to no income. You must keep costs low if you plan to stay out of the red. You can not spend a fortune on a new coop if you then have no money available to put chickens in it, right?! That is like buying a new house and having no money to furnish it..you are house poor.

Here is the last project we up-cycled the materials for last fall. Our newest building on the homestead; the big chicken coop. Maybe we should name it..thoughts?

Anders and I had been talking about our need for a bigger coop for a while, but it was going to be a fairly big project, and life is life....busy. Well, and budgeting in a coop when your home needs siding and we needed other things, is a tough sell. I was adamant, we WERE selling more eggs and meat birds next year, it was a divine message I received (sounds more convincing this way, no?)... and we were going to manifest it; no more waiting around, we do it Now. Anders was not such a fan, how in the world are we going to budget a 50 bird coop? Anders priced out what he thought it would cost to build that 50 bird coop you are looking at...and can you believe that his estimate was 1,200.00-$1,300.00! That just wasn't something we were willing to budget in for a coop to put the chickens in. So, crafty me, I get a thinkin', because when I want something, I make it happen. I had another divine inspiration my husband hates to love; we were going to Up-Cycle it. We were going to get as much of the materials for free as we could.

We weren't out asking everyone on the street for their stuff or anything weird like that. We just payed attention to what people wanted to get rid of, and if we could use it, we did. Anders works construction and I sent him off each day with me in the back of his head telling him to look for materials they would throw out that we could use. He began coming home with our old Volvo station wagon stuffed with old plywood (which had strategically placed square holes cut out of it), wood and other supplies that they typically just throw out. Then I asked him to spend some of his free time on Craigslist searching for other materials that we could use. Next thing you know, we are in Minneapolis with our trailer picking up tons of 2x4s from someones house; they were remodeling. The catch? The 2x4's were full of nails.

One man's trash is another man's treasure.