Planted the first bed of peas in my garden today with some lettuce and spinach sharing the space and set up a solar coldframe in which I planted cucumber, kale and rocket salad seeds. A few more beet seeds are planted outside around the bottles which act as heat storage for the solar coldframe, green water filled plastic bottles to the North, clear water filled bottles to the South. The water holds the solar heat into the night and modifies the temperature under the clear plastic bottle with its bottom cut off that sits in the center of the circle of recycled bottles.
This little video on Recycled Solar explains how to make a three toned tuned solar cloche from recycled plastic bottles. Been using the solar coldframe/cloche/hotcap for years. Wish I could figure out how to embed the actual video in this dkos posting.
Recycled Solar
Take the label off a clear plastic 2 liter
soda/pop/tonic bottle.
Cut the bottom off the bottle.
Plant a seed.
Press the edge of the bottomless bottle
into the soil around it.
The bottomless bottle is now a cloche or hot cap,
allowing earlier planting.
Open the bottomless bottle's bottle top
for warm days and close
it
for cold nights.
Take the labels off a few more
clear plastic 2 liter soda/pop/tonic bottles.
Fill them with water
and surround the bottomless bottle cloche hot cap.
Tie a string around this circle
and pull it tight.
During the day, the bottles of water
get warm
and stay warmer longer at night.
This recycled solar cloche
can take a month off planting season.
If you have green
plastic 2 liter soda/pop/tonic bottles,
place them on the North side
of the solar circle.
The darker the bottle
the hotter the water gets
in the sunlight.
This is a two tone solar cloche.
Take some silver paint
and paint the backs of
the green bottles
to reflect
light back
into the system
and you have a
three tone tuned
solar
cloche.
I built one once
for Candide's garden.