As winter receded, you surely noticed which parts of the yard came to life first — where the snow line fell back, the grass turned green and the earliest crocuses appeared.
South-facing slopes, naturally tilted to the sun’s rays, warm quickly. So do areas next to buildings, which absorb and hold heat. Over the years, free-standing stone or brick walls have been built in many parts of the world to create such even when there’s nothing for them to support, hide, enclose, or fence out.
Few of us can afford the extraordinary walled gardens once found on English estates. Some even had stoves built into the masonry so that tender fruit trees could be espaliered against them. But pore through old French gardening books and you’ll find a trick that even the average gardener might put to use. It’s a simple matter of sloping a bed so that it tilts at an angle up to 30 degrees.
The French call this an ados bed or a côtière. These days, ados in French (pronounced “ah-DOE”) is slang for “teenagers” (as in adolescents), but in horticulture it refers to a time-honored way to play a trick on winter. You make the sun’s rays reach the soil head-on, or at least more nearly perpendicular than the sun’s low winter angle allows. Even a slope of 12 or 15 degrees makes a difference.
You can incline a bed by mounding up south-facing ridges in your garden, alternating with valleys. You could also shore up those ridges with posts and planking as if they were tilted cold frames.
Our copy of the old French guide “Larousse Agricole” has an illustration of this. It also shows an earthen slope running along the base of a south-facing, heat-absorbing wall. All these methods enable plants to produce earlier, and to survive lower temperatures.
Recently an industrious gardener named Shaun Scott sent us photos of the ados garden he had constructed in Rhode Island.
First he built a free-standing, south-facing stone wall 54 inches tall, 23 feet long and 42 inches thick. Then he built up soil at the bottom to a slope of 12 degrees, and on that slope he set four cold frames, each 4 feet wide and 8 feet long.
“This thing rocks,” Shaun wrote. “It’s an absolute vegetable cash cow. Our food bill dropped 18 percent in Year One of the ados. Plus, it’s better food!” As the trees turned red and gold in fall, his cold frames glowed with healthy greens to be harvested later, even in snow.
Though Shaun’s heat-holding wall helped his garden’s success, it’s not something everyone might attempt. But he could also have just added soil to create the slope, then tapered it gradually down the backside, sown with a crop like white clover to prevent erosion.
— just a bottomless box set on the ground, topped with a framed glass or clear plastic lid, and vented to release excess heat. It’s built higher in back, to tilt the lid toward the sun. Tilting the ground beneath is such a simple and logical next step.
Damrosch is author of “The Four Season Farm Gardener’s Cookbook”; her website is www.fourseasonfarm.com.
