Make your garden stand out
Cloches are an excellent means to achieve greater, earlier, faster and out-of-season production than by uncovered planting in open ground.
The effect is just like that of a greenhouse, with the difference that you take the greenhouse to the plants rather than the plants to the greenhouse.
They are ideal if you want large and continuous crops. Because our cast-iron cloches warm the soil beneath them, plants develop much more quickly and therefore put a piece of ground to optimum use by planting, say, two or three crops a season instead of one.
The word ‘cloche’ is French for a bell. A long time ago French market gardeners evolved a glass jar in the shape of a bell, which they used to speed up the growth of their plants. Cloches are of great value in the winter, for not only do they keep out the wet, but several degrees of frost too. They give ideal protection from wind, not only from the icy blasts of winter but also drying summer winds.
Elegant, useful and versatile. Cloches can be easily transported around the garden to cater to different plants in different seasons.
At one time they were used almost entirely for vegetables, but today they are popular for flowers too - annuals, perennials and shrubs. Cloches are used year round offering protection in the winter and are used with great success in the summer to grow melons and cucumbers, to ripen off onions and shallots and for taking cuttings of herbaceous flowers and shrubs.
A row of cloches being used to grow the rare Argentinian Zapallo del Tronco summer squash in Somerset, England
Gardeners who have not used cloches before cannot believe the difference they can make to germination, and in consequence to seed-saving. If the cloches are put into position 10 days or a fortnight before sowing the seed, the soil is warmed and the surface can be got down to an extraordinarily fine tilth and a much higher percentage of seed germination is then obtained. Because of the soil warming properties, seed sowing is possible in winter months.
An antique cloche in a walled garden in Cornwall