Hi, I'm Heidi Rader I'm with the Cooperative Extension Service and the Tanana
Chiefs Conference. I'm here in the Alaska garden at the Georgeson Botanical
Garden at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and today I'm gonna talk about
what grows in Alaska depending on where you live. So, Alaska is a big state. We're
the biggest state in the U.S., about twice as big as Texas and we've got a
lot of different growing regions here in Alaska. You're probably familiar with the
USDA Plant Hardiness zone map. That's a good starting point but all of that, all
of that determines is just your average minimum temperature. So it's particularly
useful for perennials, you know, will they survive the winter. But it doesn't tell
you a lot about your actual growing season. So things you want to think about
with your actual growing season is how much precipitation do you get? Is it
very windy? What are your average temperatures in
the summer? Do they get pretty hot? Were they pretty mild? Also the length of your
growing season is really important. You know, when is your last frost in the
spring? When is your first frost in the fall? And do you get any midseason frost?
Also what about your day length? Do you get 24 hours sunlight like here in
interior or or in northern Alaska? Or are they a little bit shorter like down in
southeast Alaska? So here in interior Alaska where we are you know we get very
hot days. Right now it's about up in the mid-80s and has been for the last week.
We don't generally get a lot of rain but sometimes we have rainy summers. We have
pretty harsh winters and generally not a lot of wind. But if you're in Southeast
Alaska, you're gonna get a lot more rain, a lot more wind, the temperatures are
gonna get quite as hot during the day. The days are not as long but your your
winters are more mild and your growing seasons are longer as well. So that
means you can grow more perennials and more berries and possibly more fruit
varieties as well. You know, Northwest Alaska, you've got some of the coastal
conditions as well as colder temperatures, so you have quite a few
challenges up further north in the Arctic. You're probably gonna have to
grow most things in a high tunnel to be successful because you might get
midseason frost, and the growing season is so short. And of course you're gonna
have very long days. So when you're deciding what to grow in Alaska first
think about, you know, your growing conditions of your region. You also want
to think about microclimates. So even within a given community, you might have
a lot of variation in in your growing conditions. So here in Fairbanks for
example, up in the hills, it gets quite a bit warmer and stays warmer in the
winter. While in the valleys you might even get some midseason frosts and
it tends to be quite a bit colder in the winter. You could even have some
micro climates on your own garden or farm. So you could have an area that's a
little bit shadier, a little bit wetter, a sunny area, or a drier area. You
could also have variations in soils and your soil conditions.
Another microclimate might be right next to your house and in a foundation
planting. So I planted tulips right next to my house last year and and they did
quite well, but when I planted them in a bed further from my house, they didn't
survive because it gets quite a bit colder. There, so that's an example of
a microclimate. And so in general, in addition to
thinking about the growing conditions of your region. You also want to think about
various types of crops. So in theory you can grow anything anywhere. Say in a
greenhouse or if you provide enough heat you could grow things like bananas or
coffee in a greenhouse if you did it all year and provided light. But that takes a
lot of energy, and so we want to grow things that are easy to grow. So here in
Alaska, cold season crops are going to be the easiest thing to grow and the
things that you don't have to add a lot of heat to or provide much season
extension for. So cold season crops are things in the broccoli
family like broccoli, kohlrabi, cabbage, collards, you know peas, carrots, those are
all cold season crops... potatoes. And then, within cold season crops you can divide
them up into frost hearty and semi-frost hardy.
So again the broccoli family – things in that family will be frost hardy while
things like beets or lettuce or potatoes they're semi-frost hardy. And that means
if you get a light frost, you know, you're gonna, you're gonna see some
damage on the plants. But things like kale, they'll actually survive with a
pretty hard frost. And even with a little bit of snow. So you can continue
harvesting in the winter a little bit into the the late fall and winter a
little bit with some things like that. Warm season crops on the other hand, like
squash or snap beans. Here we've got squash here. That's an example of a warm
season crop. And we've got a lot of different kinds of squash here. They
are definitely a warm season crop so they're going to benefit if you give
them a good start ahead of the season. And start them inside
and and then we use plastic mulch or a high tunnel. They will, they will
definitely benefit from that. They like temperatures between about 70 degrees
and 95 degrees. While cold season crops like temperatures between 70 and 75
degrees. They're not going to do much above 80 degrees. And in some cases that
can actually cause them to bolt or to go to seed. And so with your warm season
crops, they're not frost hardy at all. And so if you see a frost in the... in the
weather forecast, you know, cover them with frost cloth if you can or harvest
what you can because even a light frost can just devastate your warm season
crops. And so another thing to consider with when you're choosing what to grow,
you've got perennials which have a longer life cycle than one year, while an
annual has a lifecycle of one year. So a lot of perennials of course need to grow
year after year to produce. That's not always the case but in a lot of cases
they grow year after year. And so they need to be able to survive the winter
temperatures. So definitely consult your USDA Plant Hardiness zone for
perennials. For annuals, what you can do is look at the the days to maturity. So
things like corn for instance. Some varieties of corn will not reach
maturity in our short growing season, but you can always start things inside to
give them a head start and possibly help them reach maturity. But it still may
depend on having a warmer than normal summer. So that's a little bit about how
to choose what to grow here in Alaska depending on your where you live. I'm
Heidi Rader here with Cooperative Extension Service. In another video I'm
going to be talking about how to choose which varieties to grow here in Alaska.