Now, the real work begins! We have started our container gardens for the year! Of all our gardens, this one takes the most labor to put together, but it also requires the least labor to maintain over the growing season. Once we get it going, it requires very minimal labor input to keep it running.
We garden in containers for a very good reason. In our extreme cold climate, containers allow our soils to warm up very quickly, which translates directly to growing performance. The longer we’ve grown in the north, the more that we’ve come to realize that increased soil temperatures are far more important than the ambient air temperatures.
As practiced growers, we could grow things any way we want. You’ll see us work the ground and work raised beds. Just like with those techniques, container gardening is an important growing technique we use across our gardens. There’s a link down in the comments if you want to know more about our thought process behind our techniques.
This garden usually takes us at least 3 to 4 days to put together. It’s a lot of labor intensive work. From putting the soil into all the containers, getting them into place to hooking them up to our irrigation systems. Pretty much every year, we complain about how hard it is to setup, but then we marvel at how easy it is to take care of the rest of the season.
For the bulk of our food focused gardens, we use sub irrigation container growing techniques. This is basically an irrigation technique where the water is at the bottom of the container and it wicks into the soil, keeping a nice, even moisture level. Specifically, we use a product called GroBuckets, which is a kit that turns a standard 5 gallon bucket into a sub irrigated container. They are absolutely awesome. The bad news is, since we’ve been such public proponents of them, they no longer ship free to Alaska. Which is a major bummer, but we still think they’re worth it.
The real reason we use this technique is due to its water efficiency. Since we’re effectively off the water grid, we need to conserve every bit of water we can. This technique allows us to effectively use over 99% of the water we apply to the gardens that use it. Not just that, but its much more immune to drought and many other problems that plague container gardens.
There are DIY versions of this kind of growing technique. If you’re looking for one, search for “DIY Alaska Grow Buckets” and you’ll stumble into Jim Lister out of Wasilla. The primary reason we didn’t go this way was because we needed 100+ growing containers. DIY is great, we practice it all the time. But, sometimes it doesn’t scale well and it ended up cheaper and less labor intensive for us to go the route we did.
We’ll be talking more about our container gardening efforts through the next few days, there’s much more to say! But, we’re excited to get started on them for the year. We are getting closer to having our gardens fully established for the season!
