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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/

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

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!

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/

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!

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

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/

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

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!

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

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!

This is our step by step process for transplanting onion starts from a seeding tray into 606 jumbo inserts. Everything we do, from beginning to end when transplanting our onions in our indoor growing space. We grow hundreds of our own garden starts, from seed, every year! Please visit us at FrostyGarden.com for basic to advanced cold climate gardening tips, growing guides, subarctic gardening techniques and other cold climate focused growing articles.

It's finally starting to warm up this season here at Frosty Garden. This video covers how we transition our plants from our indoor growing spaces into our conditioned greenhouse. We touch on all the related topics to this, including our greenhouse heating, hardening off and general outdoor conditions we're looking for. We also touch on our goals for getting started in our gardens, weather permitting! We are excited to finally have some of our plants growing under the sun, as intended! We will keep our seedlings in our greenhouse for the next month or so, until we're ready to transplant into our gardens. In case you're looking for a deeper dive into any of these topics, we have an extensive website on cold climate gardening at https://FrostyGarden.com. Topics covered in this video- How we built our greenhouse: https://frostygarden.com/topics/building-the-ana-white-gambrel-greenhouse/ Sealing our greenhouse: https://frostygarden.com/topics/sealing-a-greenhouse-with-uv-plastic-to-improve-performance/ How we get our plants outside sooner: https://frostygarden.com/topics/pushing-limits-raising-garden-starts-in-subarctic/ Hardening off: https://frostygarden.com/topics/hardening-off-schedule-for-indoor-grown-seedlings/

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/

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/

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.

A walkthrough of our greenhouse heating system. We talk about what we had to do to get our greenhouse "heating ready," the tools we use to make it happen and the conditions we've found suitable to heat against. Also, the most common question is answered, how much does it cost to heat? This greenhouse has been the most valuable thing we've built in our cold climate gardening efforts. The upgrades we discuss took it up another level entirely. If you're interested in pursuing a heated greenhouse, we hope this helps offer you some things to think about and some experience that you might also be able to replicate. Please visit us at https://FrostyGarden.com , we have an extensive number of cold climate gardening articles across many growing disciplines and topics!

With 8 weeks to our last frost, things are really starting to pick up around here at Frosty Garden. We are starting to go through the "slog" of transplanting and massive seeding schedules. We are still fighting snowfall and cold temperatures here, but this is definitely the thick of our sowing and transplanting season. It still doesn't "feel" like gardening season, but we are getting close! We are getting better at editing videos, but are still relatively new to the process! Please go easy on us! The best way to improve at something is to do something!

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!

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!

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

We are seven weeks to last frost here, with no signs of spring in sight. We are still getting into the negatives, might as well be winter still. We know it's going to change, soon and fast, though, and we are looking forward to it! In this video, we take you along for some of our northern chores & general homestead activities. Seven weeks to last frost is an incredibly intensive seeding schedule, with most of our brassicas due to be sown. We hope that you enjoy some of the new skillsets we've practiced with this video. We are still brand new film makers, learning the ropes of video production and editing. As always, we have a ton of content ready for you at FrostyGarden.com!

This video discusses our hardening off processes, probably the most important thing you need to do if you grow plants from seed! We discuss the importance of hardening off plants in cold climates and also share our precise hardening off schedule, based on decades of experience. We're trying a different format for this video, more of a talking head type of approach. We're still experimenting with video delivery concepts and ways to tell a story and provide educational content. Feel free to engage us with your comments and questions, we love talking plants with other cold climate gardeners! You can visit us at FrostyGarden.com, where we have an extensive number of cold climate gardening articles for your reading pleasure! You can also find us on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest!

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!

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.