frostygarden

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!

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

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

Our second livestream event this year. We spend a bit of time covering our general operations, the status of our garden and what we've been up to. From there, we launched into the Q&A portion of our livestream. It was information packed, we even went over on time a bit! Thanks so much for being a part of our community. We hope we throw in a ton of gardening know-how that you can learn from. Next livestream will be some time in early June, you can find them on our Facebook channel. (@frostygardens) Also, this week's video suffered a bit of data loss, so we're just going to skip it and move into our next video that we had planned. Sorry about that, freak issue with transferring over data to our NAS. As always, you can check out a ton of cold-climate gardening content on our website at https://FrostyGarden.com!

Our very first livestream, ever! We are starting to do monthly livestreams with our followers, a good opportunity for our viewers to ask questions and get more information about growing food! Please forgive us as we are new to the livestream world, we'll try to get better at them. Overall, though, we are happy that our first livestream went relatively smoothly. We appreciate the folks who stepped up to ask questions and all the support we received. Our next livestream will be either around the end of April or beginning of May. Date to be determined. Watch our blog or our Facebook channel for announcements. When we reference our website, it's https://frostygarden.com!