Growing Food for the Year | Gardening in Alaska

[Music] do [Music] [Music] [Music] good morning it is may 6th we've got a nice cup of coffee here that we're enjoying and we are right at i think under 17 hours of daylight yes so this time of year is when things really pick up at least for us up here in alaska because we have a really short kind of project season and we're pretty much in that project season right now we have some partially broken down horse manure behind us we're replenishing our high tunnel rows they're really dry the material in there because it is a high tunnel doesn't get rain and we also just kind of want to add some compost to them we're also going to be picking up some top soil later today and adding that too so we are going to get to work cheers hey we can use a wheelbarrow this time right put it in there so come on in the high tunnel it is already kind of jam-packed uh we're gonna have to obviously rearrange some of these little plants because we need to put manure on top of all these rows and then we're gonna extend those rows so we're gonna kind of have to do some shifting in here but i wanted to show you our one little tomato plant spent the night in the greenhouse last night successfully ariel's been trying to figure out when we can leave these things out in the greenhouse and actually plant them and we've sacrificed a few tomatoes i think two or three have stayed out here and they didn't make it but last night the weather said it got down to 35 degrees fahrenheit and this little tomato is looking great so should just be a few more days till we're able to plant the tomatoes and i believe they're going to be going in this row right here pretty cool there's a worm in there it looks i don't really know if it's a nightcrawler or not it's a big one the worms that eric and i have in our garden aren't usually this big but pretty cool i'm a big fan of worms if you didn't know the gravel makes for good aeration maybe three on the ones that are surprised pepper's not here what's your favorite color honey i don't know i like green and blue the same i just when i think i love one i think i like actually the color green one but i think i like my favorite color video is chrome you want to go in at that angle yeah just put it back then go back my own no it is gonna fall i think here perfect [Music] too [Music] so this is our compost pile and it's not very pretty right now it's an assortment of just everything we put out here we virtually compost everything from our house meat dairy you know all the vegetable scraps so it all comes in here we've got our chicken coop the the poultry litter with the bedding we've got some old horse manure just various manures honestly some spent barley that we got last year and we also have some top soil so it's just kind of a real big mess right now um but eventually this will break down it takes a little while and then we can use it in our own garden that's where we're going to be unloading the horse manure for the time being so it is breaking down decently um i think some of this stuff's actually usable we don't we didn't kind of aerate this you know we don't have a tractor or anything so we don't really flip it and then all the rain we got last season kind of like spread out the compost pile so i think what we're gonna do sometime this year is build like more of a contained compost pile but we're gonna unload the rest of that manure we still have one more row to do in the greenhouse but there's so many little starts in there that we didn't want to bring them outside so what we're going to do is we're going to unload all the manure we're going to go pick up our load of topsoil hopefully they're open and then we're just going to use the wheelbarrow from here to transfer the manure over the high tunnel and then we're also going to add some of the um topsoil but this manure is great we're gonna have a nice big compost pile after we get this all unloaded pretty good stuff that's all that's awesome eating old chicken six months old chicken put you in the dirt square around whichever i need gloves oh this is some nice stuff i can't believe he did this in one bucket this was one bucket i know anymore what if i take them from you on this side i keep breaking the leaves on these ones i know you're so you're giant i've broken like every single one oh my gosh hello okay we gotta hold the plants moved over and i got composting here so we're gonna do the compost on this tomato row and then we're going to do the top soil on top [Music] ah that should be plenty deep i'll just dig down real quick when we plant that all right we finished replenishing the raised rose in our high tunnel and adding some of the amendment the compost got it all raked in and added some extra to the outside rows that's awesome because i like to cram a lot of plants in here as you already may know we built this thing two years ago in the springtime and this whole area was really just like gravel um not not really very fertile soil so we brought in a lot of dirt a lot of compost topsoil all that stuff and we did layers so we did lots of layers of green and brown we had some straw i'm a big fan of straw we used timothy and compost we had some spent grains we were using some spent barley and there was there's other things we added in there too but we did lots of layers and that's what we planted in and it's just been breaking down over the years in the fall and the spring we usually like to add some more stuff to it i kind of like to make sure it's really has a lot of nutrients for the plants the only issue i have kind of found with the high tunnel is that it stays really dry in here even though i water so it does take a while for all of that stuff to break down because it stays pretty dry so we are going to be watering this stuff in really really well in my opinion we've been gardening for a few years and i really like using this type of i guess gardening style because there's all this stuff that breaks down and although it's not all the nutrients aren't yet available to the plants it brings in just mass amount of bugs so you have a lot of bugs you have a lot of things going on in the soil and i feel like that creates really really healthy soil for the plants the downside is it just takes a little bit longer to break down eric and i are just going to water the tomato road today because we are hoping to plant those in the next few days well it's that time of year where things are no longer freezing outside and it is time to hook up our little mini portable pressure tank so we can start watering the garden never trust a woman to do a man's job you could put fresh snow in the high tunnel in the winter and then it would melt and give moisture good slowly yeah yeah we're gonna leave our hose hooked up because it's gonna probably take a few days to sufficiently water the high tunnel next eric and i are making a raised bed out where our trees are we're gonna be planting some rhubarb i started this from seed a few months back very excited for this i was never really that interested in trying it but i think a lot of people convinced me and i wanted to try it so this is i think it's called glasskins probably not pronouncing that right perpetual and we're going to get this planted lady oh [Music] [Music] wow ah so beautiful back here [Applause] ugh yeah i'm thinking [Applause] isn't spring such a glorious time ready to plant our rhubarb eric built this nice little bed for us and we used some of the standing dead trees in the back forest it's white spruce and black spruce i think too made this cool little bed it's a little bit close to this fruit tree but these fruit trees don't actually get that big and we're going to be pruning them and keeping them kind of smaller in this miniature orchard the rhubarb from what i've read gets very big probably should be spaced a little bit further apart but i'm gonna plant two of them in here probably two feet apart and i don't even know if they're gonna overwinter they should over winter no problem but just because it's my first time with them i feel like i'm going to give two a shot and we'll see hopefully both of them over winter in here we put a lot of amendment organic matter in this bed and that's because these plants like that a lot they're really high fertilizer high nitrogen needs i think it's probably like 60 compost and 40 topsoil and then i'm going to add some of this granular it's an all-purpose fertilizer blend it's an organic blend that i buy and just we make it kind of blend them up so let me get my holes dug first thinking i want to plant one right here that's awesome all right we have a healthy dose of manure or compost on these plants and hopefully we can harvest from them not this year but next year uh we're moving along to this back row we put this in last year we've got some logs and then we did the layers again and we mulched it with a bunch of horse manure because we've got lots of perennials in here i planted tarragon bee balm catnip chives oregano a whole bunch of stuff and it looks like most of them are making their way coming back we've even got some comfrey and this year i decided to pick up some nursery plants we have lavender and that's because i have started this from seed twice it's very slow growing and it's extremely hard to get it to overwinter here in the first place so i wanted to start off with some bigger plants that way we have a better chance of them overwintering i'm gonna mulch them i think they're zone five but we've been able to get some zone five stuff here too over winter oregano is one of them that comes back very prolifically we already have regular chives here but i picked up some garlic chives and these also over winter so we're gonna be looking for some room for these i'm just kind of looking for where there aren't already plants i can pretty much tell because usually the plants kind of like left behind the plant material and these are two really they should be pretty hardy lavenders munstead and i don't know how to pronounce it starts with an h hide coat is the other one so i'm hoping they overwinter a lot of these things we've planted out here the perennials we started from seed so it's pretty cool to see them actually over winter in such a harsh climate but like i said with these ones i had to buy them from a nursery because i wasn't having any success so we're adding some wildflower seeds i mean primarily wildflower but also some other kinds of flowers and i'm really excited about this for our bees i think this is going to be really nice for them i know they go pretty far to forage but something a little closer for them and it's going to be nice to kind of fill in the little patches too it's about two to three weeks until our last frost but we have had some warmer weather so i feel like it's a good time to get these flowers planted i'm gonna lightly rake them in and then water them and keep them watered they may take a while to germinate we have already stratified these i had them in the freezer to help improve their germination look at this stunning cat's paws pulling these right out i'll just flip him on the ground i know i remember doing this whole imagine having a ranch [Music] hello yeah perfect mosquito my ears there's a can you feel the vibration of the ground there's like wood down there you can tell well i'm sure there's like roots no i'm just saying i remember that and i can feel it it's like it's hitting wood or something [Music] look at that perfectly closing gate we had a couple posts here that kind of got tweaked probably just from the frost and we also had a little piece of fencing that we had a little mishap with over the winter so we got new fencing put in we had to straighten that post over there we used the polaris to pull it straight packed it in with some more rocks some gravel the orchard's looking good next step we need to work on protecting the garden we got to get the electric fencing put up over the chicken coop this is the battery that we use for our electric fencing this is a 12-volt battery this is also one we use to light the chicken coop so we're gonna take this battery bring it over to the garden if you don't have electricity like us running a 12-volt electric fence system is it's pretty easy so we've got our charge controller this is meant to run off a battery it's a 12-volt system we've got our poly wire this is the actual electric fencing we have a very small solar panel this is just a 10 watt solar panel and we have just a small like lawnmower battery it's a 12 volt battery we don't need a charge controller because this little panel like i said it's only 10 watts so it's basically just like a trickle charge on this little battery it's not going to overcharge it okay we're juiced uh we're gonna run our polywire around the garden and then we do two strands we do one at five feet one at six feet to keep the moose out of the garden and then you know we'll run back around and then we'll hook up the little charge controller we'll test the wire make sure it's working better this takes a long time yes there we go let me go now hey i actually remember i was the one to roll it up this fall and it took me like two hours do you remember that it took me probably an hour all righty electric fencing is done around the garden we took down a little section of fencing right in front of the high tunnel just to make it easier to get in there with the snow blower we're going to put that back up real quick so the guard will be completely done then we're going to go over to the orchard we're going to string the electric fencing around there to also protect the trees from the moose and then we're going to hook it up make sure everything's working that takes a long time there you go heck yeah i know okay you everything is hooked up i'm gonna test the fence real quick and then we're heading inside for the night because we have a storm coming in here oh my gosh was that so strong because of the water because the ground oh my that was so in the ground it can um oh i felt that in my joints okay well it's working it was way stronger than normal i'm really glad you tested it not me [Music] [Music] [Music] we have a friend that joined us he's actually been here for a few days it's his fantail crane so i'm not sure if it's the same one that was here last year we had a younger one kind of hanging around here there's a little bit of a pond back there we've been feeding him he wants to eat the chicken food so that's what we've been feeding him um it's pretty funny not gonna lie we're gonna get started working out in the garden this morning [Music] [Laughter] [Music] ah while we repurposed some of our fencing our welded wire fencing from the orchard we've got our permanent p trellis here and i used to string some twine but it pretty much breaks every year so we've used this in the past and i think this is going to be perfect so so we finished pruning the raspberry bed we have four raspberry plants here they're on their third year they're doing really really good i'm really happy with them we went through and pruned the old canes also anything that was like scraggly or skinny they were getting really thick and i want them to have a lot of energy to put into their fruit this year we have three red raspberries and then we have a golden variety on the end we're gonna run this over to our compost pile and there's really not too much more we can do out here since there's still a lot of snow on the ground and the ground is frozen of course we're gonna head into the high tunnel and plant our tomatoes [Music] beautiful i got one more red we've got our tomato lineup ready this is always really hard for me to pick and choose between so many plants i ended up with i think 50 to 60 we're gonna try and get into this row and then we brought in two extra little pots that we're gonna put in the back it's about 16 maybe 18 varieties depends on which ones i want to plant i try to always pick the big stronger healthy plants but again there's usually just extras that don't get used this is our third year growing tomatoes here in alaska and i can't say i've been overly pleased with it because we when we used to grow them in oregon we had tomatoes all summer long absolutely delicious and here that's just not the case even in a high tunnel even with special varieties that are supposed to grow here so they do turn out really good i mean we're able to process them the flavor is just not there in my opinion so i'm still kind of troubleshooting with varieties which ones i really like and which ones ultimately do perform the best here i have these organized by determinate and indeterminate all of our determinants are this way and then i have just a few indeterminates at the end i found i'm switching over to determinate plants primarily because it's just easier for me to not get in here and have to prune them they do take up a little bit more space they're bushier but i think that those tend to be a better plant for growing here we're gonna get started on planting these i have to grab some fertilizer how's your soil is it dried or no a little bit way down in there i'm gonna stick in that that nova tag somewhere over there or wherever you want just to try and keep them semi great [Music] um so you know then [Music] we're just adding some granular fertilizer i really like down to earth i'm adding some bone meal i usually use fish bone meal but i'm using bone meal and then some other bio live it's like an all-purpose fertilizer i'm kind of going a little bit heavier on the phosphorus fertilizer because we already add so much compost we really have no shortage of nitrogen so i want to make sure that these plants get enough phosphorus so we can have lots of blooms and lots of fruit we're going to be burying these a little bit deeper because they grow roots along their stem that's not actually my real reasoning we have started them inside so they're a little bit leggy and tall so i'm just gonna do that beautiful we ended up with just under 60 tomatoes and got some cherries cherry tomatoes in the back pots you can probably tell things are pretty tight in here it was built that way because we have a little bit of a limited space and limited budget so this is a very high production high tunnel and we we cram everything in you know really high intensity and that way we don't have to worry about weeds as much and we get i mean i feel like we get the most food for the square footage those were really dry yeah do you ever get your onions or anything back here no i got a fertilizer all right our tomatoes spent the night out here first night in the actual raised row in the soil and they look really good believe it or not it got to 29 degrees last night air temperature and these tomatoes can definitely handle the 30s they probably can't really handle 20s that's that's a little cold but i don't think it actually gets that cold in here even though that's what the gauge says there's a lot of warmth and moisture and we haven't had frost on the ground for a few nights it's early may so it's definitely early to be planting these our last frost could definitely be up until like early june but in the last three years that we've been here that hasn't happened so i'm kind of using my intuition and i can't predict the weather but it is saying it's going to be quite a bit warmer and i'm counting on that so we've got them in the ground again they're very hardened off or conditioned acclimated to these temperatures so they are fine we have no heating element in here but if something should happen where we were gonna drop into like a hard freeze we'd probably bring a heater out here and put a fan for the night i've saved the best for last we're gonna walk around now and show you all of the plants we have in here everything in here has been started from seed just so you know i've got a lot of flowers and herbs and brassicas cabbages broccoli some mustards baby bok choy a lot of little things growing here we've got our tomatoes behind us right across the row we have a lot of stuff that is just coming out here for daycare so peppers ground cherries tomatoes things like that we've got more broccoli cauliflower cabbages all that kind of stuff throughout kale this is auric i really like this stuff and just really a whole different various stages from really small to big just depending upon how quickly they matured i still have some seedling trays that we've started things in kohlrabi a bunch of mustards i just i say mustards but it's really a whole different variety of plants lettuces we have some lettuces popping up i try to stagger those so they're not all ready at the same time fennel same thing i staggered the fennel and some green onions let's head on down to the end more herbs cilantro we have a lot of cilantro and celeriac i'm really excited to try that that's a new one for me this year not that many herbs perennialized here so we start a lot of them every year sage is one of them times one of them parsley but they grow so fast in a year that that's pretty cool tarragon mint chives and oregano actually do perennialize pretty well here back here we have onions leek shallots and some brassicas that are bigger brussels sprouts i start those a lot earlier because they take longer to mature you really need like that 90 100 plus days of a growing season so they look pretty good the onions are looking really good this year they're getting fairly thick in their cups i'm pretty excited about that we've got hundreds and just more more plants ah we are starting we did os cabbage which is the giant cabbage if you've ever seen that no it's not going to be like the ones you take to the fair but i am growing them i'm hoping we're going to see how big we can get them pretty excited i started those early too got a whole bunch of celery and more flowers i'm notorious for like pushing the limits with gardening i like to really put things out here sooner than they should be this year a lot of things went really well i i really only killed a handful of plants and it was just a few of these flowers i brought out too early when we still had some colder temperatures this is nasturtium and dale then we've got more just various broccoli cauliflower spinach and some peas starting the peas are just starting to pop up we've got collards a whole bunch of more grains or brassicas i call them that um and mustards too last year we had a little bit of a problem with some of these that we put outside i'm gonna put these outside soon because they can tolerate the temperatures out there we're not planting them quite yet though we had a bug that i think was called a midge and i don't quite know what they do i think it's like a little fly and their babies eat like the growing point of the plant and so you don't realize it until they're older and you don't really see a cabbage forming so we had that happen to probably a dozen plants last year this is lovage another new one for me it should perennialize here i'm very excited for this one from what i've read one plant will probably be more than enough for us we still have a lot of our warmer crops inside squash basil cucumber corn i've got that stuff in there eggplants i'm wait until it's a little bit warmer until they can come out here we've been getting lots of requests for gardening and we promise more of that is coming up all of this takes us so much time and effort so we've been kind of preoccupied with that we like to save the really fun stuff planting and harvesting for you guys we're definitely going to be showing that but all we have to do today is just do some watering and fertilizing on top of using compost and some of our granular fertilizer that we've been using for a long time i really like that stuff we also like to use some liquid fertilizer i just supplement with that i don't use it very often i used to use age-old grow but up here we've been getting general organics and i'm using fish or biomarine it's like a fish fertilizer and some grow so nitrogen just to kind of help these plants get going and they've also been in these containers for a long time some of these plants are getting fertilizer and some of them are going to get just water [Music] you

Channel: Simple Living Alaska

Views: 301,688

Rating: 4.971118 out of 5

Keywords: off grid living, living in alaska, homestead alaska, tiny house alaska, off grid cabin, off grid in alaska, solar system alaska, cabin in alaska, homestead off grid, tiny dry cabin, solar off grid cabin, tiny cabin alaska, life in alaska, alaska outdoors, garden alaska, high tunnel garden, greenhouse alaska, gardening alaska, chickens alaska, raised rows garden, cold frame greenhouse, gardening cold climate, greenhouse tomatoes, solar fence garden, greenhouse garden

Id: VEjMGElKugQ

Length: 45min 42sec (2742 seconds)

Published: Mon May 10 2021