Family Scale Food Production In Extreme Cold Climates (Lecture Series)

We've given this presentation a few times in several cities and towns across Alaska. We figured that the content would be useful to our broader audience, so we decided to record it! This was our presentation given to the Anchorage Gardening Club in March of 2024.
We like to describe this lecture as basically a synthesis of our understanding when it comes to family scale food production in extreme cold climates. We cover a number of different topics.
It starts with the foundation, plant temperature tolerance and various things we can learn about plants from that. We then dive into climate, weather, first/last frosts, microclimates and all the complicated environmental factors that go into gardening successfully in colder climates. We then cover a number of general cold climate gardening techniques and methods you can use. From there, we discuss the techniques that we use, basically covering our specific growing methods and philosophies. We wrap everything up with a few tips and tricks for both beginner and advanced gardeners.
This is an hour long presentation. So, feel free to get comfortable and kick back for a bit, should you enjoy the topic. We understand this isn't the average "fast moving, flashy cut" thing most people want to watch on a video platform. That's OK by us. We do think it is a valuable addition to our channel and that some of our viewers may enjoy it. We are marching to our own drum here and not necessarily trying to fit into the algorithm.
As we mention in the intro to the video, we did cut the Q&A at the end for the sake of time. We do invite you to ask any questions that you might have down in the comment section and we'd be happy to discuss things further.
In case it's not entirely obvious, our efforts with Frosty Garden go well beyond just producing videos. We are trying to be active in various cold climate growing communities and focus on many different aspects of cold climate gardening education. We are multi-faceted, trying to meet various people how they would prefer to be met.
For the record, I do know I say "umm" and "right" a lot. I don't have the patience to hyper-edit things, especially on an hour long video. Thanks for understanding!
As always, we have a ton of cold climate gardening articles out there, waiting for you. We cover all the kinds of things we talk about in this video and many, many more!
FrostyGarden.com
If you do sit through this video, we honestly can't thank you enough. We deeply appreciate your support of our channel and we hope you gained something from our efforts!

[@cynthiamartinez2060]

Growing urban backyard in San Jose for the first time & going to try to over winter most of my garden for the month of hard freeze. My major concern was the month it's very cold and no green house....the trash bag trick is awesome! Thank you.

[@frostygarden907]

Depending on what you're overwintering, they may be able to tolerate it entirely unaided. (Albeit, they will grow slowly or not at all.) You can also switch your focus to colder climate veggies and you'll do great. Things like kale, broccoli, brussels sprouts, lettuce, radish and so forth prefer generally cool temperatures. Glad you found our lecture & other tips helpful!

[@caryhart9587]

This was great! I’d say I am an advanced home vegetable gardener, with a few decades experience of intensive gardening in a short-season high-desert climate, but I always realize I have a lot to learn and have much to ponder from other vegetable gardeners. Will you release your slide stack anytime soon? I would like to think more about a couple of your lists.

[@frostygarden907]

Hi there! Thanks for sitting through it, appreciate the kind comment. Appreciate the watch, have fun with your season! You can find the slide deck here: frostygarden.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Cold-Climate-Gardening_AGC.pdf