Happy winter solstice, everyone! This is an important day for us far northerners, marking the time of year where we start to get our daylight back!
On this day, we get a mere 3 hours, 42 minutes of daylight. For those that haven’t experienced winter solstice at high latitudes, it’s basically like a simultaneous sunrise and sunset at the same time. In our case, we don’t even see the orb on these days as it is occluded by the southern Alaskan range, home for some of the tallest peaks in North America.
This is one of the more challenging things about living in the far north. It can be difficult for some to adapt to such short days as it offers such little time to enjoy the outdoors. We’ve found it helpful to anticipate and celebrate the solstice, giving us something to look forward to each year.
From here, the change towards 24 hours of daylight is surprisingly rapid. In just a month’s time, we’ll have doubled our daylight and will be achieving over 6 minutes of additional daylight every single day. By March, when we kick off our garden sowing, we’ll be pulling in over 12 hours of daylight. In a way, this time can be even more challenging as we’ll have so much daylight, but will still be deeply trapped in winter’s embrace.
While we do sometimes struggle with these extremes, they are also fascinating and truly interesting to experience. We look at it like it’s a seasonal Yin and a Yang, providing us with proper balance even among such wild extremities.
We hope that you all are enjoying the solstice and are as excited as we are for the constant march towards our next growing season! We find it hard to believe, but we are only two short months away from kicking off our 2025 garden!
