We have all been there. Every gardener or plant enthusiast on this planet once grew their very first garden or plant at some point.
Being a green thumb had nothing to do with it. If you set your mind to growing some plants, you can grow plants.
These are some of our top tips and tricks for cold climate gardening and gardening in general. We want to see you succeed with your garden, so we freely share the things we’ve learned through trial and error over the years.
While gardening in the subarctic does take a certain level of region specific techniques for success, it’s not all that different from gardening in any other cold climate place. We have a very unique growing season where our summers are ideal for a lot of different vegetables!
General Gardening Tips
- Start small. If you’re starting out on your first garden, avoid the temptation to over-do it. Starting too large of a garden is the number one cause of new gardener’s failure. Grow each year as you feel comfortable taking on the work.
- Understand the growing season, or first and last frost dates. This is your growing season and it determines what you can and can’t grow. We have detailed these concepts for Alaska.
- Don’t fall for fool’s spring! Temperatures will “suddenly” warm up in the spring. It’s tempting to get gardening when that happens. Many new gardeners lose their ENTIRE garden to low temperatures from planting too early. The safest thing to do is plant after your last frost date!
- Diversify what you are growing among different varieties. Growing different varieties of the same plant can offer you harvests over a longer period of time. Additionally, if a problem affects one variety, it may not affect all of your plants, so it helps for productivity.
- Grow flowers! Flowers offer many benefits to your garden. Flowers will attract pollinators (flies and bees) that will help pollinate your plants such as tomatoes, squash and cucumbers which is essential for successful fruiting.
Growing From Seed Tips
- Growing gardens from seed is a gardening skill that you will need to develop. It’s a bit more complicated than just putting seeds in dirt. You will find it much easier to if you don’t jump into both gardening and raising plants from seed. We recommend buying plants for at least your first garden or two.
- A good initial introduction to seed germination are direct sows. Many things can be grown this way. For example, try spinach, lettuce, mustards, bok choy, carrots, radish, peas and beans!
- Use a seed schedule for your area! If you plant all your seeds at once, you will soon have an out of control jungle. A seed schedule ensures your garden starts grow to the appropriate size for transplanting in your garden!
- Read your seed packets! Don’t know how to grow something? Practically every packet of seeds comes with its very own manual right on the back of the packet. It will usually have a lot of helpful information on germinating the seed and growing the plant.
- Resist growing too much! If you grow from seed, it’s really easy to over-do it. Try to figure out what you need ahead of time. Think about how much room you have and grow what you need. Don’t be afraid to cull plants you won’t be able to grow. We know it’s hard!
- Buy grow lights! If you are growing your own seeds indoors, do yourself a favor and budget grow lights. Available light in a windowsill in not sufficient. We recommend investing into the best quality lights you can afford. In high energy cost areas, LED is king!
- Only raise one plant in one space, unless you KNOW otherwise. It’s fairly commonplace to plant 2-3 seeds when you’re seeding, to ensure you get germination. If more than one seed germinates, pick the best of the best and remove any others. It’s what’s best for the plant. We know it’s hard to kill them, but it’s what is BEST for your garden!
- Be gentle with your seedlings! When your plants are young seedlings, use a spray bottle of water to give them a fine spray of necessary moisture. This will disturb the soil less and will help the seedlings to establish good, strong roots.
- Always harden off your plants! If you are raising your own garden starts, you will need to introduce them to the sun gradually or they will die. This process is called hardening off.
Garden Preparation Tips
- Grow what you like to eat! There’s no sense in growing things that you don’t enjoy eating. If you grow what you enjoy eating, your garden will work for you and you will enjoy it more.
- Grow things that are easy to preserve! Some veggies such as winter squash, potatoes, onions, storage tomatoes and garlic can easily be stored for months at around average room temperatures.
- Tilling your soil is generally a good idea when you first establish a garden. Your first year, you should try to till deeply so your plants will have a healthy space to grow into. Subsequent years, however, you want to avoid deep tilling as it will destroy important soil structure and microbe habitats. If you decide to till each year, try to only do about 3-5 inches.
- Compost is a very beneficial additive for your garden as it will add natural nutrients for your plants to feed on throughout the season. Manure is not compost (yet), it should be well composted before adding to your garden. You can practice both hot and cold composting in Interior Alaska to make your own compost from your garden, food scraps and other organic materials.
- Plan out your garden in advance. When you plan your garden out, it offers you time to consider companion planting and conflicts. Additionally, you will know how many plants you need to raise if you’re doing your own starts, or how many to buy when the time comes.
- Know your invasive species! Some common garden plants are considered invasive and you should be careful about planting them in your garden. Certain plants like mint, lemon balm, raspberries and amaranth can spread like crazy and soon can overtake other plants. It’s best to grow these items in pots or isolated beds where they will not interfere with other garden plants.
- Grow perennials! While most common plants grown in the garden are annuals, many perennials do well in interior Alaska. Things like strawberry, rhubarb, raspberries, chives and many other plants will produce year after year.
Cold-Climate Gardening Techniques
- Grow with a mind for your climate. Cool climate veggies will do really well in the interior of Alaska and other cold climates. If you enjoy them, plant broccoli, Brussels sprouts, spinach, lettuce & greens, potatoes, kale, collard greens and other cool weather crops.
- Get your plants off the ground. In cool climates, particularly here in Alaska, you will see better success if you use either raised beds or some sort of raised row for most crops. Raised beds don’t have to be complex or expensive, you can create narrow or wide rows of raised soil. Raising the soil allows the sun to warm the growing area more quickly, which means your roots will be warmer and allow the plant to grow more easily.
- Support your local nursery. While the big box stores may have good prices on plants, many are not intended for the subarctic extreme environment. Local nurseries almost exclusively sell plants that will do well in our cold climate.
- Permafrost spells trouble for gardening. If you are growing where permafrost is present, you will see some challenges. You may be able to get away with potatoes and some root vegetables, but that’s about it. It is worthwhile to consider building raised beds, growing in containers or use suspended raised beds!
- Mulching is a great idea! Mulching is basically the process of covering the ground around your intentionally grown plants. You can use weed fabric, IRT plastic, wood chips and other organic materials to mulch your plants!
- Consider a greenhouse. A greenhouse not required for subarctic gardening, but it can be very helpful. They are great for early season preparations and can greatly increase your production rates. These don’t have to be the large semi-permanent structures that most people think of. There are many DIY hoophouse plans out there which could be heated and cooled. You can also find relatively inexpensive plastic greenhouses that provide the same basic function at a fraction of the cost. They will last a year or a few, but eventually will degrade. These relatively inexpensive solutions can also be temperature controlled fairly easily as well.
That’s All We Wrote!
Having a good time? We have an ever growing list of insightful and helpful subarctic & cold climate gardening articles, waiting out there for you!
- Cold Climate Gardening Basics 👉
- Growing Your Garden From Seed Indoors 👉
- Advanced Cold Climate Gardening Techniques 👉
- Plant Specific Cold Climate Growing Guides 👉
- Subarctic Perennial Food Forests & Foraging 👉
- Indoor Garden Lighting & Grow Rooms 👉
- Greenhouses & Temperature Control 👉
- Harvesting & Food Preservation 👉
- Solving Cold Climate Garden Problems 👉
- 1 Minute Reads On Tons Of Garden Topics 👉
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Your website is great. I really like the post about food forest and 3 gardening techniques. Question: Have you had much experience with low tunnels? Also, the list of edible perennials didn’t have much in the vegetable category. Have you discovered any tasty veggies that work in a subarctic food forest?
Thanks for the kind comment! We have done a little bit with low tunnels in the past, but they have somewhat limited usefulness. (Mostly for small plants, only in the shoulder season.) We are retrofitting our raised beds with hoops this year, but it’s mostly for remay/frost cloth to deal with an onion maggot infestation we got last year. We may also outfit those hoops with a plastic cover for early/late season extension at some point. As for perennial veggies, it’s tough but there are a few! Chives, asparagus, rhubarb and horseradish are all hardy to zone 2/3. Sorrel is zone 4. Some mints are supposedly good to zone 3, but we’ve struggled to find one that survives. At some point, we want to look at using cold frames to try some zone 4/5 perennials. This technique works great at lower latitudes, but we don’t yet have any insight into subarctic performance. Hopefully that helps!