Every year that we’ve gardened here in Interior Alaska, we’ve gained more knowledge about just how far you can push cold climate gardening.
Any time you push the boundaries, though, there is bound to be a push back.
We’re going to talk about some of the methods we use to push the limits, but also ensure we protect our gardens against frosts and our cold climate.
Raising Garden Starts In One Of The Harshest Environments
One of the things we wanted to learn this year was just how far we could push our environment for raising garden starts. We wanted to get our garden starts outside earlier than we ever have in order to maximize our precious indoor garden space.
We are fortunate to have a really nice indoor gardening space. This has simply been one of our financial priorities as our gardens provide a good portion of the food we eat every year. That said, no matter how much you invest, your indoor garden space will always be limited.
We wanted to explore techniques that we could use to increase the overall capacity of our indoor garden. Also, we were interested in leveraging our climate to the maximum extent possible.
This post is the culmination of much of that research.
Understand Cold Hardy Versus Frost Sensitive Plants
We’ve extensively discussed this before, but it’s vital for the cold climate gardener to know which plants will tolerate colder temperatures and those that won’t. When you know which plants can tolerate what temperatures, it allows you to get some of your plants outside much earlier than others.
For most cold hardy and frost tolerant plants, we are allowing our plants outside up to six weeks before last frost. During these six weeks, we are closely watching temperatures and the expected weather forecasts. When temperatures dip into the mid-30’s, we are certain to bring even the cold hardy plants back inside. However, above that, they can sit outside day and night once they’ve been hardened off.
For frost intolerant plants, we are much more careful. These won’t be placed outside until temperatures are around 45 degrees or more. Once your frost sensitive plants are fairly well established, you can push that down to about 40 degrees. As with the former example, we bring out plants back inside when evening temperatures are expected to be anywhere in the 30’s.
The one exception is those warm loving plants. We don’t even think about keeping these outside unless the temperatures are expected to be above 50 degrees. If evening temperatures are expected to dip below 50 degrees, these plants are escorted back inside for the evening. You simply can’t push these too far in our cold climate.
Organize Your Plants By Their Cold Tolerance
With the above knowledge, we recommend organizing your plants by their cold tolerance. We use the 1020 tray system and suitable inserts or pots that allow us to do this easily.
We try to aim for a single tray to have plants of only one type of cold tolerance. This will allow you to treat all of those plants appropriately without having to re-organize them every time. This organization also helps you prioritize which plants you will harden off before others.
An additional organization technique that is helpful is to organize by general plant maturity. More mature plants will fare better at cooler temperatures than less mature plants. Again, this allows you to easily treat a single tray of plants in a similar fashion.
This can be a little bit challenging to keep track of as your grow room reaches capacity. We solved this by purchasing a different color of 1020 tray that allows us to quickly and easily identify our frost tolerant plants. While we know what our plants look like, this is also acts as a bit of a fail safe for us. (Are there any black trays outside? Bring those in!)
Watch What Your Plants Are Telling You
We aren’t some kooky plant whisperers here. That said, plants will tell you that they don’t like something by exhibiting visible symptoms.
When a plant is stressed out by cold temperatures, it will tell you by the way it looks. When you see the signs of stress, you are probably pushing things too much.
With cold hardy plants, we know that they will show some signs of stress as soon as they are exposed to particularly cool temperatures. However, we’ve also seen them bounce back quite well despite this. There’s a point where too much is too much, so treat your plants well and they will reward you.
The point is don’t push things too far. If your plants are showing some signs of cold stress, bring them back inside for a day or so. Let them warm back up, recover, and then perhaps try again on a bit nicer of a day.
Pushing The Boundaries Of Cold Tolerance
If you’re a new gardener, we don’t recommend pushing the limits. It’s more important for you to be successful your first few seasons.
You might have noticed that, this year, we started the process of hardening off some of our cold hardy plants in mid April. A full six weeks before last frost!
The reason we want to do this is that we strongly prefer our plants to be under the (free) sun whenever possible. The sun is much better at growing plants than anything we can use to simulate it. Getting (some) of our plants outside also frees up indoor space to grow other plants.
During the six weeks before last frost, we closely monitor the expected daily temperatures. Based on our knowledge of what plants can tolerate, we will leave our plants outside at any opportunity we can get. For much of the month before last frost, most of our cold tolerant plants have been entirely outside unless conditions are not suitable.
This does means we do a lot of shuffling of our plants during this time.
It can’t be stressed enough how careful we are when doing this. We have hyper local meteorological information available to us. Through a calibrated weather station in our backyard, we know exactly what the temperatures is where we keep our plants.
If there is at all a risk to our plants, we mitigate that risk by bringing them inside. If we have the slightest bit of uncertainty, we bring our plants inside. We are not interested in sacrificing our plants to try and get an “edge” on the growing season.
The Indoor Garden Shuffle
As we’ve mentioned, we are pushing the limits to allow us to grow more plants in a limited amount of space. We are intentionally oversubscribing the indoor growing space that we have. At some point, we don’t have enough room under artificial lighting to handle all the plants we have.
We manage this problem in a couple of different ways.
The first is by staggering our planting schedule slightly to ensure that our indoor grow rooms can generally keep up with indoor grow room demand.
We know exactly how much room we have and try to give some thought to what we’re going to need at a given time. This comes with practice and we modify our planting schedule based on what we learn about our space.
For example, we grow a lot of brassicas because they do very well in our climate and we love to eat them. But, we don’t plant all our brassicas at the same time because it would put too much demand on our grow room. We stagger our brassica plantings by a week each. For example, Brussels sprouts, then broccoli, then kale, then cabbage.
The second technique we leverage is that plants we are trying to get outdoors simply don’t get indoor lighting when we bring them back inside for weather reasons. We bring them outside in the morning, then just put them anywhere we have room in the late evenings. The kitchen counter or on top of the dryer is just fine.
With this technique you do run some risk. It’s a problem if we are in a position where outdoor temperatures are simply too low during the day AND we don’t have indoor space for them. In this case, any light will do. A day or two without high quality lighting isn’t going to severely impact your plants. If low temperatures come in for several days, we might alternate our plants under artificial lighting.
Having Two Indoor Growing Spaces Is Better Than One
One of the most helpful things we’ve done is having two separate indoor growing spaces. This allows us to organize our indoor growing space based on our immediate needs.
We use our indoor grow tent for seed starting and maintaining our warm weather crops practically all the way to transplant dates. This tent has very high quality indoor lighting that allows us to grow amazing garden starts. We also keep plants that we just up-potted in this tent to allow them a couple of days to recover.
Our second grow space is just a temporary table that we set up just for the purposes of the “indoor garden shuffle” mentioned above. It has quality lighting as well, but not quite as good as our indoor tent.
This second space allows very easy access to our plants as we are constantly bringing (most of) these plants indoors and outdoors on a regular basis. We think of this as our “hardening off” table, of sorts. If the weather outside is just not supportive of our plants being outside, they will stay on this table for that day. It’s also acts as our “overflow” space for when we have so many plants going that our grow tent just isn’t enough.
These two indoor grow spaces offer us something like a “production line” for our plants. It allows for us to have a fairly clear process on how plants will be processed through our grow rooms and eventually transitioned outside.
Plant In The Ground Only Once It’s Safe
In the interior of Alaska, our spring is usually devious. It’s very common during the month of May to get at least a few days where temperatures really get quite pleasant. It’s very tempting to start planting your garden at this point.
Don’t!
Fool’s Spring is very real in the subarctic. Despite these trends to spontaneously warm up in early to mid May, it’s extremely likely temperatures will dive back down into the low 30’s at some point.
We almost always play it quite safe and wait until at least Memorial Day weekend to put our plants in the ground. This only applies to our cold hardy and frost tolerant plants, however. Also, we look at the 10 day forecast over this weekend to make sure dips into the low 30’s aren’t expected. In some years, the 10 day weather forecast looks really good almost two weeks before last frost. We sometimes consider planting our cold hardy plants out at this point.
For frost sensitive plants, we typically wait until our last frost date, at a minimum. Again, we check the 10 day forecast for unseasonable dips and will hold off if unseasonable dips are below 40 degrees are expected. If, however, the forecast looks good on Memorial Day weekend, we often push it and plant even our frost sensitive plants. (See below for our backup plan!)
For warm loving plants, these won’t see their permanent outdoor locations until at least two weeks after last frost. An unexpected frost will permanently impact these plants. Thus, we don’t take any chances. Evening temperatures must be consistently over 50 degrees for us to consider planting these types of plants.
Have A Backup Plan For Unexpected Frosts!
No matter what you do, if you’re planting your plants around last frost, someday you will experience a problem. We’ve seen snow well past our last frost date. We’ve seen more late frosts than should be expected from a “so called” average last frost.
Frost cloth is a valuable thing to have in your garden kit. It’s an insurance plan for when things don’t quite work out as planned. It will protect your plants against the unexpected frosts, should they occur.
We recommend having a roll of frost cloth for emergency purposes. This is sometimes called a floating row cover. If you don’t have actual frost cloth, a simple light colored sheet will offer similar protection.
If an unexpected snow or late frost is expected, priority should be given to cover your frost sensitive plants. These super late frosts are usually only expected over the evenings, so you’ll need to cover them in the early evening and remove the cloth once the danger has passed. You often don’t get much notice about these late frosts, so it always pays to keep an eye on the weather.
The application of frost cloth isn’t a super technical process. It’s just a matter of draping the frost cloth over the plants. You’re trying to protect from frost settling on the plant’s leaves. You don’t have to tuck the frost cloth in or even ensure that every possible avenue for frost is eliminated. Close enough is good enough in our experience.
Direct Sowed Vegetables Are A Safe Bet For Early Planting
Practically all direct sowed vegetables share a common trait. Almost all of them can generally be quite frost tolerant and often are cold hardy.
Additionally, some greens do well with direct sowing and will exhibit similar cold tolerance. Plants such as leaf lettuce, arugula, mizuna, and spinach are all fast growing greens that can be direct sowed.
If it works into your plan, you can often look at seeding most direct sowed vegetables up to two weeks prior to last frost. These seeds will germinate in cooler soils, but will only do so when conditions are right for them.
Once you get about two weeks to last frost, take a look at the 10 day forecast. If temperatures are expected to be above freezing for the considerable future, it’s safe to put your direct sows in the ground. It’s unlikely at this point that significant, hard frosts are going to occur at this point in time. If snow or freezing temperatures are predicted, however, hold off on your direct sow until this passes.
When you can get your direct sows into the ground a bit early, you’re adding time for them to mature more fully later in the season. These extra two weeks can often make a pretty good difference in getting an early harvest off plants such as peas, too.
Additionally, some of these vegetables don’t like summer’s warm temperatures. Plants such as radish, spinach and arugula have a limited window where they like to grow before warmer temperatures cause them to bolt. Consider succession planting these varieties in the very early season. Make hay while the sun’s shining, as it were!
Cold Climate Growing Is Challenging And Exciting!
The early gardening season is one of the most exciting times with so many things going on!
We are constantly learning how far we can push things and have been surprised by what we’ve been able to do. The subarctic is quite unique as you don’t have a gradual run-up from winter to summer. It’s far more immediate and you can take advantage of that in your gardening.
We hope that you’ve learned a thing or two about techniques you can use to increase your production, better utilize your growing space and deal with cold climate challenges.
If you have anything further to add on this topic, feel free to slap a comment down below!
