Raising Hundreds Of Garden Starts From Seed Indoors (Part 2 - Plug To Transplant)
Hello again, everyone! This is part two of our growing from seed series! In this video, we cover everything from the initial seedling transplant all the way up to the point where we have a plant that can be put into our gardens!
We grow well over a thousand plants, from seed, indoors every season. This video covers all the important things that we're paying attention to. From the actual mechanics of transplanting, watering our plants, how we harden them off to our strategies that we use to planting our gardens into a cold climate. Between part one and this video, it covers pretty much every aspect of our growing from seed process!
Again, we want to stress that we have to grow indoors out of necessity. In the subarctic, we have negative temperatures and feet of snow when we need to start our gardens. Things are definitely easier and more lenient in warmer climates!
There are many ways to go about raising plants, this is just our demonstration of how we do it. We have learned a lot of things growing as many plants, with as much diversity, as we do. Some of our techniques are aimed at our levels of production, but they should be relevant to any grower that is interested in growing from seed.
It's a lot of work growing from seed! But, we find it worth it for the cost savings as well as the ability to grow plants that rival commercial greenhouse quality. We do consider it a somewhat "medium to advanced" gardening technique, but its achievable by anyone!
We hope that you find this video to be another valuable addition to our channel! As always, if you have any thoughts, comments or questions - we welcome you to put those down below!
Oh, and sorry for the delay! I had planned on getting this one out much sooner, but ran into some serious computer problems that prevented me from finishing this video. Glad to have that fixed, which allows me to focus on other topics now!
We truly thank you all for your support, likes and spending your time with us. We never imagined we'd get so much support, so it's truly been wonderful.
As always, we have a ton of cold climate gardening info at https://FrostyGarden.com
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Links & Stuff you might want to know more about!
If you didn't watch part one, you can find it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0btEnsy5EcY
We mentioned our article on temperature tolerances of plants, here's everything you might want to know!
https://frostygarden.com/topics/demystifying-cold-hardy-frost-tolerant-sensitive-and-warm-loving-garden-plants/
Our essential overview of growing from seed indoors:
https://frostygarden.com/topics/grow-garden-starts-indoors-cold-climates/
Our seed germination & plant raising process:
https://frostygarden.com/topics/inside-subarctic-indoor-seed-germination-techniques/
Hardening off:
https://frostygarden.com/topics/hardening-off-schedule-for-indoor-grown-seedlings/
Getting your plants outdoors, well before that last frost!
https://frostygarden.com/topics/pushing-limits-raising-garden-starts-in-subarctic/
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Family Scale Food Production In Extreme Cold Climates (Lecture Series)
We've given this presentation a few times in several cities and towns across Alaska. We figured that the content would be useful to our broader audience, so we decided to record it! This was our presentation given to the Anchorage Gardening Club in March of 2024.
We like to describe this lecture as basically a synthesis of our understanding when it comes to family scale food production in extreme cold climates. We cover a number of different topics.
It starts with the foundation, plant temperature tolerance and various things we can learn about plants from that. We then dive into climate, weather, first/last frosts, microclimates and all the complicated environmental factors that go into gardening successfully in colder climates. We then cover a number of general cold climate gardening techniques and methods you can use. From there, we discuss the techniques that we use, basically covering our specific growing methods and philosophies. We wrap everything up with a few tips and tricks for both beginner and advanced gardeners.
This is an hour long presentation. So, feel free to get comfortable and kick back for a bit, should you enjoy the topic. We understand this isn't the average "fast moving, flashy cut" thing most people want to watch on a video platform. That's OK by us. We do think it is a valuable addition to our channel and that some of our viewers may enjoy it. We are marching to our own drum here and not necessarily trying to fit into the algorithm.
As we mention in the intro to the video, we did cut the Q&A at the end for the sake of time. We do invite you to ask any questions that you might have down in the comment section and we'd be happy to discuss things further.
In case it's not entirely obvious, our efforts with Frosty Garden go well beyond just producing videos. We are trying to be active in various cold climate growing communities and focus on many different aspects of cold climate gardening education. We are multi-faceted, trying to meet various people how they would prefer to be met.
For the record, I do know I say "umm" and "right" a lot. I don't have the patience to hyper-edit things, especially on an hour long video. Thanks for understanding!
As always, we have a ton of cold climate gardening articles out there, waiting for you. We cover all the kinds of things we talk about in this video and many, many more!
https://FrostyGarden.com
If you do sit through this video, we honestly can't thank you enough. We deeply appreciate your support of our channel and we hope you gained something from our efforts!
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Growing Hundreds Of Garden Starts From Seed Indoors (Part 1 | Seed To Germination)
This has been one of those landmark videos that we've been wanting to make since we started making videos for our channel. And that is covering the process we use to grow over a thousand garden starts from seed to garden transplant, indoors, every single growing season.
Once we had written the script for this video, it became clear this topic is considerable enough that we had to break it up into two individual parts. So, this part is about the equipment that we use, our indoor growing spaces and then everything we do from sowing up until the initial transplant. The next video on the topic will complete the subject and will include everything from the initial transplant from our seeding tray to an actual garden start we can put into our garden!
We will tell you, the thing that is challenging about growing from seed isn't the process that we lay out in this video. It's getting good at growing all the different types of plants out there. It's understanding how plants grow, what they need and when and various practices that will help them grow better. There is no way we could encompass all of that in a video, but we hope to shed more light with every article, post and video we make!
We want to reiterate that there are many ways to grow from seed. We have our ways, but they aren't the only way. There's lots of possible equipment, approaches and methods that one can use. After two decades of growing our own from seed in cold climates, this is where we've settled. We really like our process and we've been evolving it for a long time now. It works exceptionally well for us and gets us fantastic garden starts that rivals commercial quality in every way. And if you're in a similar situation, we hope you can take away a lot of information and insight from it!
One of the most valuable things we've come up with is determining a single methodology that we can use to grow from seed across a vast array of plant varieties. From the tall growing tomato to the vining cucumber, the spreading mint to the slow growing celery - we wanted a process that works for everything we grow. Inevitably, we've had to create some exceptions. But we do try to leverage the same process, equipment and overarching methodology across every single plant we grow. Where we've created exceptions, we've tried to minimize the impact of those exceptions on equipment and process.
We know we aren't perfect (or even good) video editors, but we are good growers. We hope that visualizing our process as much as we can is helpful for your learning efforts and that it contributes to your own growing skills.
We also know that we missed some things, but at a certain point, it's impossible for us to cover every detail or question people may have. As always, should you have any comments or questions, we welcome you to comment and we'll try our best to get back to you on it!
Thank you for checking us out & giving us a watch. If you've got one in you, we'd love it if you gave us a like & subscribe.
We'll link part 2 from here once we've completed it!
We mentioned a few resources that we have to offer on this topic! Feel free to check out our links on growing from seed:
The World's Most Comprehensive Northern Seed Sowing Schedule (USDA Zones 1 through 8!)
https://frostygarden.com/interior-alaska-seed-starting-schedule/
An Overview Of Starting Seeds Indoors:
https://frostygarden.com/topics/grow-garden-starts-indoors-cold-climates/
Our Indoor Seed Germination Techniques:
https://frostygarden.com/topics/inside-subarctic-indoor-seed-germination-techniques/
What Should You Be Planting In Cold Climate Gardens?
https://frostygarden.com/topics/what-to-plant-in-subarctic-garden/
And for everything else, our website is entirely dedicated to extreme northern growing information!
https://FrostyGarden.com
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Vegetable Variety Selection In Northern & Cold Climate Gardens
OK, you've asked us over and over again. The question always comes up about "what varieties do you grow?" And we've always been a bit cagey about it. Not because we're hiding anything, we talk about the varieties we grow all the time! The reason we don't make a list is really because we think about that question in a very different way than the people who are asking it.
As somewhat advanced gardeners, we think it's much more important to understand "why" you might select a particular variety. Over the years, we've seen how varieties can come and go. We've witnessed how a particular genetic might be super popular one season and then all of a sudden vanish from all seed houses on earth the next. What then? Practically every "variety list" we've ever laid eyes on is out of date with obsolete, unobtainable genetics. Or maybe you'd have to order from a dozen different seed houses to get everything.
Not just that, but in our cold climate growing research, we've learned that variety selection is really only important with certain types of plants. For the overwhelming majority of veggies out there, the variety you choose isn't going to make a bit of difference. So, if it looks good to you, grow it! Assuming you can learn to grow that plant, you'll likely have success.
But, we have been thinking about this question and how we might want to answer it. And we've figured out how we'll answer this question in a way that satisfies us. And hopefully it'll also satisfy you.
We picked the 10 veggies where variety selection is actually going to matter in cool, northern gardens. Instead of just giving you a list of varieties, we talk about the traits that we're looking for, some of the techniques we use and answer the "why" behind our variety selection process. The astute among you will note that we do show and tell you some of the actual varieties we use. And if you stick with us, we're bound to give away countless more "variety secrets" that we aren't really keeping.
We think approaching this question in this way will be much more informative and will set you up with the skill sets needed to select your own varieties. We don't really want to see a growing culture where everyone is doing the same thing. We want to learn from you, and you can learn from us. We will all benefit more this way. People really don't talk about this, but in a lot of ways, extreme northern gardening is really in its infancy compared to agriculture elsewhere. Most of our land's people were migratory hunter gatherer cultures not all that long ago. It's really important that we all experiment, try different things and figure out what works and what doesn't!
We know this video is long, it's our longest to date! And it's because this is a hard question to answer properly. But, we do hope you enjoy it! Let us know what you think!
We do mention some links in the video, so here you go!
If you're looking for this video in essentially written form, here's where you want to go:
https://frostygarden.com/topics/variety-selection-subarcitc-northern-gardens/
In our vegetable specific growing guides, we mention tons of specific varieties and get into the specific genetics, veggie by veggie. We offer a lot more options here:
https://frostygarden.com/topics/#growing-guides
And of course, we offer a vast array of cold climate gardening topics. Beginner to advanced, you're bound to find something that interests you!
https://FrostyGarden.com
# 0:00 Introduction
# 0:24 What We're Going To Do
# 1:06 Variety Usually Doesn't Matter
# 1:32 Cold Hardy Veggies Rule!
# 2:01 Variety Lists
# 2:41 Variety Selection Techniques
# 3:33 Additional Resources
# 3:51 Broccoli Varieties
# 5:05 Cauliflower Varieties
# 6:06 Brussels Sprouts Varieties
# 7:29 Artichoke Varieties
# 8:50 Bean Varieties
# 10:44 Onion Varieties
# 12:32 Tomato Varieties
# 15:25 Cucumber Varieties
# 17:43 Squash Varieties
# 20:17 Onion Varieties
# 22:34 Rolling Out
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Frosty Garden's Mid Winter Update & Happy New Year
Happy New Year, everyone!
We figured some of you might appreciate a mid-winter update from us, so here you are! We're deep into winter at this point, regularly experiencing negative temperatures and dealing with really short days. We obviously aren't doing much gardening these days, but thought some of you might appreciate hearing from us.
With the new year, we're starting to get excited about our upcoming growing season. Seed catalogs are starting to roll in and with winter solstice behind us, our days are getting longer by the day. While we still have a few more months before we can get started, the fact that it's now 2024 has us thinking about the future.
We also spent a bit of time in this video introducing ourselves. We realized we just kind of hit things running and figured that some of you might appreciate knowing a bit more about the humans behind our little Frosty Garden project. We've been at this effort since 2015, so we dive in a bit into our background and why we do it.
In this video, we also discuss the updated USDA zone maps that were released quite recently. Our area, Alaska, was a huge beneficiary of higher resolution data and much better overall data. If you want to know more about this, along with links of where you can get access to the maps, check out our article here: https://frostygarden.com/2023/11/19/usda-releases-2023-edition-of-usda-zone-maps/
Thanks for all of your support during our last growing season. We look forward to growing with you again in 2024!
As always, you can check out a bunch of our long form cold climate growing focused articles at https://FrostyGarden.com
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Reusing Container Garden Soil & Winter Soil Storage Techniques
As larger scale container gardeners, we often get the question about whether you can re-use your container garden soil from year to year. The short answer is, yes, absolutely you can re-use your container garden soil.
We've been re-using our container garden soil stock for nearly a decade at this point. The point of this video is to show you the various techniques we've used to solve both storage and some of the aspects of "soil renewal" that we practice.
So, if you've been wondering about this question, this video is right up your alley! Even if your container garden doesn't scale quite as large as ours, the techniques and methods that we talk about should hopefully spark some ideas for you! As we say in the video, the scale isn't what's important.
This effort saves us thousands of dollars every year, it's be totally impractical at our scale not to re-use our container garden soil. So, if you're looking for ways to save some money on container gardening, this is the number one thing that we'd suggest you implement!
If you're looking for how to source Geobin's, they can be purchased from Amazon or from the manufacturer: https://yardfullyproducts.com/product/geobin-composter/
As usual, we also have a full written article to accompany this topic, should you be looking to deep dive a little bit further:
https://frostygarden.com/topics/re-using-soil-in-container-gardens-year-after-year/
We hope that you enjoy this video. If you liked this content and would like to see us make more of it, those likes & subscribes really help us!
Oh, and thanks a ton to all 1,500 of you that have subscribed so far. You all are awesome and we appreciate your support!
We have a ton of cold climate gardening focused articles out there, waiting for you! Check us out at:
https://FrostyGarden.com
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Harvesting Strategy For Large Gardens In Cold Climates
We put a fair bit of thought and strategy into the general harvesting of our considerable garden. When you're growing in a cold climate, after that first frost date, your garden is always at potential risk of frost. This video talks about how we prioritize our harvests to ensure we get everything that we grow from our garden.
If you're looking for our article we discussed in the video, you can find it here:
https://frostygarden.com/topics/demystifying-cold-hardy-frost-tolerant-sensitive-and-warm-loving-garden-plants/
We have a pretty short growing season and an even shorter "fall" to work with. Sometimes we get a week, sometimes it's a month. There's no telling what the season will bring! But, inevitably, the snowfall and very cold temperatures will descend upon us. It's up to us to make sure our garden is fully harvested by then.
Over the years, we have fully aligned our harvesting efforts based entirely upon the cold temperature tolerance of plants. This ensures we prioritize foods that will be damaged by frost. For more frost tolerant plants, we have a little bit more flexibility as these plants can easily survive the "cool, but not cold" temperatures we often see before winter sets in.
This strategy really helps us manage our time related to preservation. Growing a larger garden can definitely be challenging and harvest season brings a ton of work. Having a plan going in doesn't solve all the difficulties, but it does make things a little more manageable. Since adopting the ideas presented in this video, we have been able to preserve much more of our gardens.
Having a good harvest strategy also helps the gardener from becoming overwhelmed. It's easy to feel like there's simply "too much to do" when growing a large garden, but prioritizing things gives you a solid way to manage it.
We hope you enjoy our video and appreciate you stopping by to give us a watch!
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How To Freeze Your Harvest Properly | Near-Perfect Food Preservation!
This was another landmark video that we "for sure" wanted to get done this season! While we do practice the majority of various food preservation techniques out there every year, blanch and freeze has become our absolute go-to for a large portion of our garden.
We have an in-depth article on this topic that you might find helpful. It covers things like the timing a lot of other details that you might also find helpful if you're exploring this preservation technique more thoroughly:
https://frostygarden.com/topics/our-go-to-food-preservation-technique-blanch-freeze/
A lot of gardeners skip over the freezing preservation process, perhaps because of various stigmas surrounding it or issues they've had with storage longevity. This video addresses all of these issues and hopefully challenges any paradigms you might have around frozen foods.
We've been practicing blanch and freeze now for quite awhile, but only within the last five years or so has it become our "primary" preservation technique. The more we used the foods we were preserving this way and the amount of time we spend compared to other preservation methods squarely put this technique well ahead of others.
We hope our experience in this topic illustrates ways you can make the process much easier to perform it. We tried to show the things we have developed that speed things up and make this process an overall breeze, making it a far superior preservation technique.
As northern gardeners, freezing food makes a ton of sense for us. We keep our freezers outdoors (under cover, of course) and thus the outdoor temperatures over the winter greatly aid our ability to freeze food. In a lot of ways, we are working with our particular environment to assist us in the preservation process.
Also, my sincere apologies for the weird video aberrations in this video. I was trying a new neutral density filter and my test footage didn't do this. I think it has to do with exposure, I'm still learning (and trying to get better at) videography. As usual, when you try to learn how to do something better, it sometimes comes at a steep learning curve! (I'm also aware of one spelling mistake, a bad transition and an improper audio fade in this video, FWIW.)
If you liked this video, we'd love it if you gave us a like & a sub! We're slowly building a growing catalog of versatile content across cold climate gardening efforts and your support has inspired us to keep going!
Our growing season is quickly coming to an end here! We're not sure how much content we'll be able to produce in the next 2-3 weeks as we're game-on for a ton of harvesting and preservation. We might try to do a quick VLOG video or something like that. Winter sets in early here in Alaska, but there's still a little bit more time to enjoy!
As always, you can check us out at https://FrostyGarden.com where we have a ton of deep dive articles on cold climate gardening and other aspects of home scale food production!
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Honda FG110 Mini-Tiller | DIY Oil Change & Annual Service Maintenance
This isn't one of our typical videos. While this video is less focused on gardening, it's a very important topic to gardeners that are operating small engine machinery to help them with their gardens.
This video covers all of the annual maintenance tasks that are called for if you're operating a Honda FG110 Mini Tiller. This work is very important to conduct on a regular basis to keep your tiller in full, operating condition. From the oil change, to the air filter to servicing the transmission, we go through 100% of the service we perform on our tiller every year.
We don't plan to do many of these kinds of videos on equipment maintenance, despite maintaining a half dozen or more small engines in our fleet. This is kind of a one-off, since it's highly relevant to gardening and that's what this channel is about. That said, we do want to be "all encompassing" from the front-end of gardening to the back-end, and everything in between.
Even if you're not a mechanic, the maintenance on this unit is 100% within the grasp of anyone willing to try it. While there is a skill difference between growing things and working on things, they both deal with problem solving and getting things done. I am not a mechanic or even what I'd deem a "shade tree" mechanic. I just do the work that's necessary, follow instructions and try to save a lot of money through DIY whenever possible. It's not particularly difficult once you learn the basics and understand what you're looking at, which is exactly what we show you in this video.
We don't expect this video to be particularly popular. Instead, we aim for it to be helpful, fulfilling and targeted to those who also own a Honda FG110 tiller and might be interested in performing their own maintenance. That's something you'll learn about us. We march to our own drum, not necessarily the beat that video platforms or viewers may expect us to.
This tiller has been great for us, we use it every single season. It's been with us for quite a few years now, on account of us servicing the unit on a regular basis. It's a very important tool in our gardening assets, so we want to do everything possible to keep it well maintained.
As always, you can visit us at https://FrostyGarden.com for a wide range of cold-climate focused growing articles and other growing focused topics.
Thanks, as always, for watching. If you think we've earned it, we'd love it if you gave us a like & subscribe.
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Fixing 8 Common Problems With Container Gardens
Container gardening is an awesome growing method, especially for us cold climate growers, but it's not without its issues. We picked the 8 most common issues container gardeners will face and how we solved exactly those issues!
Container gardens are often looked at as being an "easy" gardening solution, so it can throw many gardeners off when they develop a number of issues that are directly caused by having your garden in containers. We tried to provide our best guidance, based on decades of growing food in containers.
Once we solved all the issues with container gardening, the method has generally been one of our "go-to" growing techniques. Although we do practice other methods from traditional to non-traditional, our container gardens are always a source of inspiration for us and hopefully you all.
Since we grow in the subarctic, one of the main things we focus on in our "public" gardening practice is various variety trials. Container gardens are almost always one of the growing methods we use to test those varieties.
We grow a ton of food in containers. A non-comprehensive list of what we grow in them includes:
Tomatoes, peppers, herbs, beans, corn, artichokes and quite a few others!
We've tried some new things in this video that we haven't practiced previously, that's part of the deal with us becoming better at video editing.
Thanks a ton for watching & supporting us! We've received a tremendous amount of support from you all and we are extremely grateful for it!
We mention a couple of our other videos in this one, so here they are:
Our full container garden setup:
https://rumble.com/v2ym48u-container-gardening-done-right-off-grid-centrally-irrigated-grobuckets.html
Water soluble vs. Granular Fertilizers:
https://rumble.com/v32fkp2-more-important-than-fertilizer-water-soluble-vs.-granular-plant-fertilizers.html
You can check out our "OG" content at https://FrostyGarden.com. We've been writing content, focused on subarctic food growing, for nearly eight years now! There's a ton of stuff you can learn there, whether you're a cold climate gardener or not!
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More Important Than Fertilizer | Water Soluble vs. Granular Plant Fertilizers
The more we have gardened, especially in an extreme northern climate, the more we have come to appreciate the different types of plant fertilizers out there. You might be wondering which kind of fertilizer you should use, or maybe if one is "better" than the other.
These are our thoughts on the topic of water soluble and granular fertilizers. We've found it to be a little more nuanced than "what's better" and use them for their strengths. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of them in depth, so as to help you decide what's right for you.
We hope this is a fairly in depth coverage of the topic, but with a flair of our personal experience thrown in. We hope that it helps you think more deeply about the topic of plant fertilizers and maybe expands your personal choices.
We've been operating the subarctic gardening focused blog https://FrostyGarden.com since 2015. We have tons of cold climate focused articles there, you're bound to learn something new!
As always, if you have any questions, do feel free to comment and we'll get back to you when we can. Cheers & thanks for watching!
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Summer In A Glass - The Basil Mojito
One of the main keys to growing basil well is to regularly top your plants. If you do this, the basil will continue to grow, providing ample supply throughout your growing season. This drink is one of our "keys" to making exactly that happen, providing us a regular use of our basil throughout the season.
This has become one of our most anticipated mixed drink cocktails we make out of our gardens every year. While we do make plenty of traditional mint based mojitos too, our basil recipe is the hands down winner for us.
As mentioned, Thai basil is our absolute favorite type that we put into this cocktail, but there's a ton of room for other experimentation. Regular Genovese (sweet) basil is always really good, too. We usually grow two types of basil, Genovese and one of the 150 other types of basil out there every year.
We've been pursuing these "garden cocktails" for years and have a whole line up of that we can make. If this video takes off, we might make a few more of them.
Also, we're trying to get a few of these "quick, one take" videos into our lineup to see how they do. We only have about 90 to 110 days to make our gardening content, so it'd help both you and us if our viewers are open to "less edited" content that's easy for us to put out there. We know we live in a highly edited world, but since we're a new channel, we're experimenting a little bit, too.
Hope you enjoy! Let us know if you have any variations on this drink or if you give it a go yourself!
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Our Subarctic Community Garden Walkthrough, Midnight Sun Grown!
Something a little different, this is a full walkthrough of our 1,700 square foot community garden this year. This is our eighth season in this plot, we're quickly approaching the first decade that we've worked this soil!
We figured you all might like an actual tour of one of our subarctic gardens, grown at just shy of 65N. This garden is technically in zone USDA zone 2A, experiencing -50F/-45C temperatures over winter. It's possible to perennialize a number of food bearing plants here, but we exclusively focus on growing annual, preservation focused and low maintenance foods here.
Community gardening can be challenging. Managing a garden that's not near to where you live has some unique challenges. Although we don't talk about it, much of what's going on here is deeply rooted in the concepts of permaculture. In regards to the zone concept within permaculture, this is conceptually like our "third" zone. Intensively grown, high density yet low upkeep. Our other, more intensive and more involved gardens are much closer to our home, whereas this garden is low maintenance and only requires visits every few days.
We've been community gardeners for a long time now, starting to approach two decades now. We enjoy providing guidance to our fellow cold climate growers and being a part of our local growing community. We have an awesome community garden (Fairbanks Community Garden, or FCG) and are honored to participate in the governing structure of it!
As always, if you have any questions, do put them down below. You can always find a ton more cold climate gardening focused information on our website, https://FrostyGarden.com
Thanks for watching and supporting us with your views!
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Basics Of Garden Fertilization | The Key To Great Gardens & Good Food Production
Of all the questions we field as public growers, plant fertilization and fertilizers is always one of the top questions we get. The topic of garden fertilization appears way more complex than it really is, but a lot of gardeners second guess themselves on the topic.
This video covers all the basic elements of garden fertilization and essentially defines the target that the gardener is trying to hit. It honestly doesn't really matter how you get there. Organic fertilizers, inorganic fertilizers, DIY fertilizers or off-the-shelf complete fertilizers. If you're not sure about what you're doing, this video provides you some solid guidance on the topic.
Since this topic is so large, it really has to be a multi-part video. We're planning two follow up videos that cover various aspects of fertilizers and fertilization, plus a third (our opinion) that's bound to knock the socks off the YouTube growing world!
We learned a long time ago that there's many ways to grow food and other plants, so we're not a "this is the only way to do it" type of channel. We provide the facts and let you figure it out from there. If you want to know what we do, we use a blend of organic and inorganic fertilizers, from granular to water soluble, depending on the application and need.
We have a ton of cold climate gardening focused content on our website, https://FrostyGarden.com
We have been wanting to cover this topic for a long time, but it's a tough one to do in writing as it'll end up being an encyclopedia. Our goal with this video was to present the very basic and most essential information when it comes to fertilization.
We hope you enjoy. Also, due to the number of comments about music in the background, we've omitted the music in this video. In my opinion, this draws way more attention to me than I'd like, but ultimately, we want to create content that you all want to watch! If we can substantiate a difference in uptake & popularity, we might go back. Also, if you have any comments on that, let us know.
Enjoy. Oh, and thanks a ton for all the support you folks are giving us. I have a feeling this is going to be our future in content creation.
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Container Gardening, Done Right | Off Grid Centrally Irrigated GroBuckets
The video that made me want to get into video! We get a lot of questions about our container gardening solution, as it's definitely uncommon, so hopefully this video does it justice. We grow well over a couple hundred plants in containers every year and this is how we do it.
Some people will likely find it interesting how we've scaled container gardening to a fairly large scale. We currently operate over 100 containers across our garden and it's essential in our cold climate gardening efforts. The biggest reason we use containers is to promote warmer soils and faster soil warmup times, a vital benefit when growing those warmer climate crops.
We grow a diverse set of plants in containers currently. All our warm weather stuff, including tomatoes, peppers, basil, corn and cucumbers see the biggest benefits, whether grown in the greenhouse or outdoors. We also grow beans, all of our herbs, production flowers (e.g. calendula) and usually at least one annual experiment every year. (This year's experiment is morenga!)
We were one of the first people in the world to centrally irrigate GroBuckets and we've kind of pioneered the path. Lots of people read our guide on the topic. So if you want more technical details and a build guide, you'll find it here:
https://frostygarden.com/topics/how-to-centrally-irrigate-your-grobucket-container-garden/
As always, you can find tons of cold climate gardening information, focusing on USDA zones 1 through 4 here:
https://FrostyGarden.com
Other relevant topics from our website?
Our Three Core Gardening Techniques:
https://frostygarden.com/topics/core-subarctic-gardening-techniques-growing-techniques-we-use/
Container Gardening & Family Scale Food Production:
https://frostygarden.com/topics/container-gardening-family-scale-food-production/
Sub Irrigated Containers, The Highway To Gardening Success:
https://frostygarden.com/topics/grobuckets-sub-irrigated-containers-off-grid-subarctic-gardening/
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How We Fixed Square Foot Gardening And Grow More Food, Intensively!
We are huge fans of intensive gardening and integrate a lot of square foot gardening practices into our growing efforts. That said, the square foot gardening technique, as written in Mel Bartholomew's book is not as good as it can be!
A lot of newer growers fall into the trap of square foot gardening and think it's the solution for growing everything. That couldn't be further from the truth! In fact, it's a very poor technique for some plants and the smart grower will use alternative techniques to grow these things.
Over the many years we've practiced SFG and other intensive intensive gardening, this video discusses all of the major changes we've made to the technique as far as we practice it. In our opinion, we've improved on the practice and are finally quite happy with the food it produces in our gardens.
For a very detailed guide, including our full plant spacing guidelines, please check out this in-depth article:
https://frostygarden.com/topics/how-we-use-square-foot-gardening-and-intensive-planting/
As always, you can check out a ton of cold-climate focused growing information that we've produced at https://FrostyGarden.com!
In case you're curious, these are the plants we grow in our intensive, square foot gardens:
Radish
Beet
Rutabaga
Turnip
Carrot
Lettuce (leaf & head)
Spinach
Mustards
Bok Choy
Onion
Green Onion
Leek
Chard
Celery
Peas
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Our Off-Grid, Gravity Powered Centralized Rain Water Catchment System
This is a walkthrough of our off-grid, gravity based rain water catchment system that we use to water our homestead garden. We use passive energy systems (gravity) to automate the collection of rainwater, where we can then use active energy systems (electricity & mechanical) to distribute our rain water where it's needed.
We've been operating this system for a little more than five years now. It has seen multiple iterations and is not likely "fully" done. It's able to help us water our plants, container gardens and greenhouse for much of the season. We do occasionally have to supplement it with external water as we do live in a semi-dry area.
That's one of the reasons we eventually want to expand the size of and increase the capture efficiency of the system. This would allow for longer periods of drought survival and also larger garden space. Our current homestead gardens are largely water limited, more than anything else.
This is a topic we've wanted to talk about for a long time, but I've found it difficult (and long winded) to write about on our website https://FrostyGarden.com. It's much, much easier for us to just show you!
As always, you can check us out on https://FrostyGarden.com and our socials!
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Guaranteed Tomatoes: How & Why To Pollinate Tomatoes By Hand
This short video covers an essential step for tomato production that we regularly perform all season. We run into a surprising number of experienced gardeners that don't know about this!
If you've had troubles with "growing tomato flowers but not tomatoes" this is exactly what you need to be doing to help things along. Performing the techniques we show in this video will ensure you get a tomato on every single flower, as soon as possible.
As always, you can find a ton of cold climate gardening information at our website, https://FrostyGarden.com
Relevant Topics To This Video?
Growing Tomatoes In Cold Climates:
https://frostygarden.com/topics/growing-tomatoes-cold-climates-sub-arctic/
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Our Cold-Weather Planting Strategy for Successful Crops in a 1,700-Square-Foot Garden
In this video, we take you along for our initial planting session at our 1,700 square foot community garden. We grow 100% of our plants from seed ourselves.
Growing in an exceptionally cold climate, we generally have to be quite strategic about how we go about planting. We use a strategy of planting our cold hardy and frost tolerant crops first, then once we're confident there won't be any late frosts, move into our frost sensitive crops.
This saved our bacon (broccoli?) this year since we ended up getting a hard frost plus about 1/4 inch of snow just days after we transplanted.
Lots of other good tidbits in this video as well. We hope you enjoy!
As always, you can find tons of cold climate and subarctic focused growing information at https://FrostyGarden.com
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How We Prepare Our 1,700 Square Foot Community Garden
This week's video talks about how we prepare our 1,700 square foot community garden! We go through everything from removing the old plants, our general soil additions and also the practices we use for soil work and crop rotation.
This garden is super valuable to our northern growing strategy. It allows us to grow a ton of large plants, which produce a ton of food for us. While we do a little bit of fresh eating off of it, the overwhelming purpose is for short and long term preservation.
We grow a diverse number of brassicas (e.g. cauliflower, cabbage, broccoli, brussels sprouts, komatsuna and others) at this garden. This garden also supports our squash, which love to sprawl and take up a ton of space.
Shout out to any other FCG growers that see this, we look forward to growing with you again this year!
As always, you can find a ton of cold climate focused growing information at https://FrostyGarden.com. Relevant topics from our website include:
Raised Row Gardening:
https://frostygarden.com/topics/raised-row-gardening-techniques-within-interior-alaska/
Garden Mulch Essentials:
https://frostygarden.com/topics/garden-mulch-essentials/
Our Top 10 Advanced Cold Climate Gardening Tricks:
https://frostygarden.com/topics/10-cold-weather-gardening-tips/
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How To Replace Your Gorilla/Garden Cart Wheels In 5 Minutes!
We had to replace the wheels on our aging Gorilla cart this year, so we figured we'd put together a brief tutorial on the subject. We've replaced most of the pneumatic tires on our garden equipment with no-flat tires, it's definitely the way to go.
Pretty simple job overall, but might be helpful for someone who's never done something like this before. We hope it helps you.
As always, you can find tons of cold climate gardening content at https://FrostyGarden.com
These are the wheels we purchased. They worked for us, but we can't guarantee what you might buy will fit your specific cart or that the listing will remain the same as the wheels we purchased! Amazon can be a bit shifty sometimes, so review things carefully!
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0991JTMQX
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Sowing & Transplanting Into Our Alaskan Raised Bed Garden
The time is here! After three months of work, seeding and preparing our garden plants, we are finally at the point where we can start phasing into the ground!
This is the first of our major gardens we plant every year. Our raised bed is primarily used for intensive growing of root vegetables, allium, leafy greens and celery. Our three other gardens handle all of our other crops that we grow and will be coming soon!
We are excited to be at this point and show you how we start our gardening process. The next two weeks will be super busy for us as we prep and plant the remainder of our garden. We can't wait for our first garden fresh salads, it's been too long.
As always, you can find a ton of cold climate gardening articles at https://FrostyGarden.com
SFG Gardening Jig: https://www.amazon.com/Seeding-Square-Perfectly-Vegetables-Conserves/dp/B00US8ESWK/
Relevant Topics From Our Website:
Plant Temperature Tolerance:
https://frostygarden.com/topics/demystifying-cold-hardy-frost-tolerant-sensitive-and-warm-loving-garden-plants/
Extreme Northern Gardening Tips:
https://frostygarden.com/topics/garden-tips-interior-alaska-climate/
How We Built Our Raised Beds:
https://frostygarden.com/topics/building-raised-beds-suitable-for-subarctic-climates-garden-threats/
Growing Onions In Cold Climates:
https://frostygarden.com/topics/growing-onions-in-cold-climates-the-subarctic/
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How We Prepare Our Raised Beds For Growing Intensively
This video is all about our early season raised bed treatments, everything that we do prior to putting plants into our raised beds. We typically conduct this process about a week prior to our first plantings.
We grow very intensively in these raised beds, so this practice shows you how we deal with the high nutrition requirements of that kind of planting method. We also talk about all of our general treatments and processes, continuing into irrigation and growing techniques.
This video touches on a lot of different subjects here, again this is one of those things that it's just easier for us to show you what we do than to write it all down!
We hope you find our illustrations helpful!
As always, you can find a ton of cold climate growing information at https://FrostyGarden.com! Some specific topics you might find interesting?
How We Built Our Raised Beds:
https://frostygarden.com/topics/building-raised-beds-suitable-for-subarctic-climates-garden-threats/
Building Raised Beds From Landscape Timbers:
https://frostygarden.com/topics/building-diy-raised-beds-from-landscape-timbers/
Our Core Subarctic Gardening Techniques:
https://frostygarden.com/topics/core-subarctic-gardening-techniques-growing-techniques-we-use/
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Wait, What? Green Onions Are Perennial Down To 33 Below Zero?
We had an interesting discovery happen in our raised beds, now as the snow is starting to recede. We were taken aback by an onion looking thing. Upon closer inspection and reviewing our plans from last year, we are pretty sure this is Allium Fistulosum. This particular variety, we think, is called Guardsman. This onion is in the family of Siberian Onions and it's apparent they can survive down to at least zone 3!
What a surprise for us. We will do some more experiments with this variety and make sure this is a repeatable result. Nonetheless, a cool discovery!
As always, you can visit us at https://FrostyGarden.com!
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How We Get Great Seedlings & Plant Observation Techniques
We take you along for one of our plant nursery rounds! This is everything that we are generally trying to observe with our plants as they are growing. Detecting problems with your plants is important, the earlier you detect them, the better! We perform frequent checks on our plants, usually daily, to make sure we catch any issues as soon as possible.
There's a bit to it and it involves much more than just watering your plants! Every visit we are generally trying to look for multiple things so we can develop appropriate plans to help our plants out.
This was one of the topics that drove us to producing YouTube videos for you all. This topic is somewhat difficult to write about, but much easier to just show you what you are looking for while we are doing it!
As always, you can find an extensive number of articles on the topics of cold climate growing at https://FrostyGarden.com
Relevant topics from our website to this video include:
Essential growing from seed: https://frostygarden.com/topics/grow-garden-starts-indoors-cold-climates/
Our germination process: https://frostygarden.com/topics/inside-subarctic-indoor-seed-germination-techniques/
Hardening off: https://frostygarden.com/topics/hardening-off-schedule-for-indoor-grown-seedlings/
Aggressive cold climate plant handling schedules: https://frostygarden.com/topics/pushing-limits-raising-garden-starts-in-subarctic/
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