Freeinalaska mentioned moving out into the middle of nowhere to live in Alaska... A good friend of mine owns an island off Alask and plans to move there and be self sufficient also he always talks about using green houses and heat lamps to raise food... but to me this seems counter productive... why spend money to pay a gas bill to run a generator to heat a green house instead of just buying food... it just doesn't seem like self sufficiency to me... Is there anywhere in alaska that a person can actually grow a garden out of doors to feed themself??
there are some places that they grow super large veggies due to the almost 24 hour light...i think they have world record cabbages or something...the season is short and i think they only grow the hardest veggies....but it is possible
You can do quite well growing food in the interior region of Alaska, both arctic and sub-arctic. The Matanuska Valley is highly agricultural, but has land taxes. Here in the sub-arctic interior we are able to grow a substantial amount of our food even with our short growing season. We do seed starts in a greenhouse or in the south facing windows of our house. With the return of the sunlight, about 14 hours now, we've had to heat the green house only a couple of times using only a bit of firewood (our low last Saturday was still -4F). Over the next two months the sunlight will increase to over 20 hours a day making up for the short season in terms of crop yield. We have had exceptional success with greens (lettuce and cabbage), pototoes, and carrots. Though the varieties of onions we grew last year were better than before, we haven't yet produced enough for the rest of the year. Tomotoes and peppers have done pretty well as long as we keep them in the greenhouse for those surprise July and August frosts. Our squashes have done reasonable well also. With the food we grew and canned, froze, or stored in the root cellar, the chickens we raised, and wild game (one moose) we were able to provide about 60 to 70% of our necessary food for the year off of our 10 acres. It is quite possible to become self sufficient up here. A friend of ours lives 70 miles north of the arctic circle and is pretty much growing and hunting all of his food. To grow a self sufficient yeild of crops a greenhouse is almost necessary to get things started, but you certainly don't need to run a generator to do it, and it really doesn't need to be much more that some plastic around some kind of frame. Every year we get closer and closer to feeding our selves off the land, all without grid power or any other public utilities.
Thats good to know. I certainly don't object to green houses. I may need to take a closer look at alaska.
