COLDFRAMES 39 



broad shelf under a window that will allow of the 

 boxes being drawn away from the glass, are more 

 convenient to handle, and like a hotbed, several kinds 

 of seeds may be sown in a single box providing they 

 have similar requirements of heat, moisture and air. 

 A box fashioned after the manner of a hotbed — high 

 in the rear and low in front and supplied with a glass 

 — ^makes a miniature greenhouse, will be found very 

 satisfactory and can be easily constructed by any 

 one handy with saw and hammer. 



Codfish boxes and shallow cigar boxes make excel- 

 lent flats for the finer class of seeds — carnations, 

 heliotropes, begonias, cinerarias, gloxinias, cyclamen, 

 all may be grown successfully in these. A few holes 

 should be made in the bottom of the flats to furnish 

 drainage and these should be covered with bits of 

 glass or shard and a little fine sphagum moss scat- 

 tered over the bottom of the box for drainage before 

 putting in the soil. The best soil for flats is a compost 

 of good garden loam or fibrous soil from the bottom 

 of sods, mixed with a little leaf mold and clean 

 white sand, thoroughly incorporated; with this the 

 larger flats should be filled to within an inch of the 

 top, the smaller flats to a half inch. The earth must 

 be settled evenly and pressed off level with a bit of 

 board or anything handy-^a paper weight is a good 

 tool to use. Such fine seed as begonias, gloxinias and 

 the like should be sifted as thinly as possible over the 



