Organic Gardening Magazine

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A cloche with class

You can’t have too many cloches at the ends of the season… but where looks matter, the cost can be prohibitive. Toby Buckland turns his hand to making his own.

I’ve gathered quite a collection of cloches. On my allotment I have a plastic mini-polytunnel for covering my early carrots, as well as half a dozen sheets of glass that lean against each other to form open-ended tents, ideal for giving pumpkins a flying start in spring.

Then, on my propagating bench at home, I’ve a set of plastic bells modelled on the original glass versions from France (cloche means ‘bell’ in French). I use these to cover seeds of things such as morning glory which need warmth and humidity to germinate.

Despite this veritable embarrassment of cloches, I discovered last winter that I needed another one, big enough to cover the seedlings of my Echium pininana – a tender borage-like plant that puts on leaves in its first year and, if it comes through the winter, sends up 3m (10ft) spikes of blue flowers the following summer. The one-year-old seedlings are big, so my cloche needed to be much larger than the ones I had already, plus it had to be good-looking because it would be so prominent in winter when most flowers go to ground. So, as beauty and size cost, I decided to make my own.

As for so many garden projects, the ideal place to source economical and interesting materials is the recycling centre. They always have timber a-plenty for sale, as well as old windows – often with interesting circular shapes. I picked up a pair of 50cm (20in) diameter round metal windows and all the wood used in this project for a bargain basement £15! That’s brilliant value when you consider that a small Victorian replica cloche costs upwards of £100.

My garden is designed around a series of circles so a circular window suited me, but if you fancy a square design or can only find a rectangular window, the basic building technique – using a palisade of timber to support a window frame – is the same. For square or rectangular windows pretty much any thickness of timber is fine for the sides, but for circular frames choose planks that are 11¼2 to 2cm (3¼4in) thick and a maximum of 10cm (4in) wide – any bigger and they won’t follow the curve of the window frame.

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