Listen To Our Plea!
Thank you for considering the support of our efforts. We are very happy that we have earned your trust and admiration, enough to think that we are worth something!
Click the button below to begin the process. You can choose a one-time contribution or you can support us on a monthly or annual basis.
No matter what way you choose, we deeply appreciate your support & recognition!
If you’re not yet sure, please read on and we’ll discuss our expenses and the reasons why we need to fund raise.
Frosty Garden’s mission is to help create a free, public and accessible body of knowledge on extreme cold climate growing. We create this knowledge by practicing the effort, doing our best to pass on what we learn to our readers.
At this time, Frosty Garden does not technically “sell” anything. Our “product” is the information we share and any cost to you is entirely voluntary.
We are incredibly grateful to those of you that choose to support and encourage our efforts!
If you contribute to our efforts and would like us to send you some free stickers as a token of our appreciation, please put a comment in the transaction with your name & address, we read them! We’ll happily cover the postage! If you just want free stickers, follow the link above about our stickers!
Why Should You Contribute To FrostyGarden.com?
Ultimately, it’s up to you. Our content is 100% free, regardless of what you choose to do.
The truth is this…
We didn’t start this site to make money!
We saw the need to fill a gap for public, freely accessible extreme northern climate growing information. Expense, thus far, has always been a secondary factor.
Over the years as we’ve developed our site, pursued social media efforts and attracted more and more visitors, the demand for resources has continued to escalate.
Frankly, we did not foresee our “little hobby website” becoming a fixture on the internet, serving hundreds of thousands of visitors. All this requires more expensive web hosting resources to provide a quality experience.
In recent years, our operating costs have grown to a point where we were spending a considerable amount of money to support the Frosty Garden project. It’s not an obscene amount of money, but it has ventured well beyond what we’d consider to be “hobby money.”
Just like in our personal lives, many “web development things” have largely moved to subscription based models, requiring continual and unending investment. We don’t necessarily agree with it, but that’s just how it is.
We have also been investing into our YouTube channel and camera equipment to create higher end imagery to tell and show you our story. This all costs money and are expenses we’d not incur if we weren’t doing this Frosty Garden thing.
Eventually, to keep this up, we’ll need some sort of revenue stream to make things work. But, we wanted to do it fairly, while still remaining completely free.
Our minimum operating costs to run FrostyGarden.com are at least $500 dollars per year. That’s about $42 per month. It’s often much more! We largely bear those costs personally. We gladly do it, because we believe that contributing to the world freely makes it a better place.
We’d prefer if we can continue to do this whole thing voluntarily, by the graciousness of our most dedicated and supportive readers. Our goal is not profit as much as it is to achieve something that looks like sustainability.
Whether you help us cover a day, week or a month of our expenses, it’s all meaningful to us!
If we’ve helped you become a better gardener, surely that might be worth something to you?
Beyond our costs, we put hundreds of hours of work into FrostyGarden.com every single year. That doesn’t even include our gardening efforts!
From research, to technical “back end” stuff, to developing interesting stuff to write about and then actually writing about it – that all takes a LOT of time! So much time that we don’t even want to think of the “pennies per hour” we might actually be making.
Your contributions also allow us to do “fun things,” like offering you free stickers!
Your contributions help us remain ad-free and entirely absent of any affiliate linking programs! We want to be a site you can trust. Not one where you’re wondering if what we’re recommending is because someone paid us to do so! Everything we talk about and recommend is because we use it and bought it with our own money!
Plus, your contributions truly encourage us to further develop high quality content for you!
We can’t thank you enough for your interest in helping us to become an even better resource for every northern gardener!
You are a high quality human and we are grateful for your patronage! Sound good?
Is Frosty Garden Legit?
Frosty Garden is a fully registered business within the State of Alaska. We just don’t operate like most businesses do, as in, we’re not trying to sell you a product.
You could maybe think of us like a media company or one of those “new fangled” social media companies.
But, instead of showing you annoying ads or making you pay to see our content, we’d rather just let you figure out the value equation on your own, according to your means.
If that means you generously support our efforts, we are grateful to experience your patronage. If that means you can’t help us now, but maybe later? We’re also grateful to you. If that means you just can’t, that’s OK too and we’re really glad to have you be a part of our effort!
While we do make small amounts of money from our social media efforts, the content we specialize in is not “globally interesting.” Our potential audience is quite small (gardeners in some of the least populated parts of the world) and thus we’re unlikely to achieve the notoriety needed to fund efforts like ours with this funding model alone.
Should you decide to contribute, your contribution will go to two people. We are the people “behind” this website and wherever else you see Frosty Garden.
We are Jeff & Kayde and we thank you for checking us out! We aren’t some big “mega” corporation looking for a handout. We’re a couple of people using our skills in growing, communication, writing, photography and general creativity that are creating public, free and (from what we’ve been told) pretty awesome resources on growing food in extreme cold climates!
Our “ultimate goal” is to make our efforts sustainable for both you and us on a completely voluntary basis.
Furthermore, our “big picture” here at Frosty Garden is to eventually shift the organization into a non-profit agency. One that aims to benefit northern growers and all northern agriculture through information, independent research, resources and consultation.
But, absent wealthy benefactors, this goal first requires proof of concept. What we are doing hasn’t really been done before.
Which means establishing the financial ability to afford basic things like licenses and the very thing it must do: Provide information. Essentially, it must prove it can establish a self-sustaining existence.
We aren’t yet there, but this is the goal we’re really aiming for. We believe we can make it work, but to get there, we also need you to help us prove it can be done.
We are putting in the hours and have the receipts to prove it.
Ready to help?
Why Not Use Sponsorships Or Advertisements?
This is a good and fair question. It is certainly popular these days for creators to be sponsored or to entirely rely on ad revenue.
Here’s the reality. We are small creators. Even if we tried, with all our might, we’re still pandering to the least populated regions on earth and the “most obscure” interests of northern gardening and general northern agriculture.
Many of the things we need to discuss, as far northern growers, are also irrelevant or controversial to the general gardening community as a whole.
A non-subarctic grower doesn’t need to know how to navigate an organic environment that operates at a snail’s pace. The average grower doesn’t need advice on how to achieve a bountiful harvest from a 90 day growing season.
But you do.
We’ll level with you. We’ve had many opportunities to establish sponsorships. But, the reality of the small creator is this means we’d be pitching you garbage that we know doesn’t work.
We don’t want to pretend that a “mental health service” is the right thing for you. When we actually believe that gardening is better for your overall mental health.
We believe in being authentic. We believe in doing right by you, as best we can. We aren’t interested in compromise.
We also don’t want to become the next biggest thing or some highly profitable creator organization. We think that would fundamentally change our objectives, mission and relationship with our readers.
Rather, we want to focus our efforts on extreme cold climate growing and quality information that will help you grow in these same areas.
On board?
Our “Target” Contributor
We’ll be frank.
If you’re living from paycheck to paycheck, or have limited income, we honestly don’t want your contribution. If you HAVE to grow your own food just to survive? We don’t want your money, no matter how much you might think we’ve earned it!
We’d rather contribute to your efforts, as much as we possibly can. We want to help you become a better grower, produce more and hopefully become more able to help others. That’s exactly why we do what we do.
There are some people that can and will help others to achieve good things that benefit many. They recognize it and do their best to help when they see other people trying their best to make the world a better place.
For us, that means publishing the most complete resource we can possibly make, for free, on growing food in challenging, cold climates. For some, that might also mean helping us do that.
That’s the space we’re trying to operate within in our efforts. It’s not lucrative or really even profitable. But, it’s really important for some, regardless of their financial disposition.
Thank you for adhering to our request.