Build a Hoop House!

Building one of these things is pretty straight forward.  If you have even the least bit of carpentry experience you and a friend could easily build one like the one Randy and I built in a couple evenings.  It can easily extend your growing season by 5 weeks, and will make warm sunny days about 8 degrees C warmer inside.

We built the 6' X 12' hoop house last week beside the one we are already using on Colleen's property.  Up here in this area of the Yukon, we are in USDA Hardiness Zone 2a (east coast equivalent would be in areas of northeastern Ontario or northern Quebec).  It's crazy to think of the difference in climate mountains make around here - on the Alaskan side of the St. Elias Mountains (about 300km south of here, on the Alaskan coast) is Zone 7b (equivilant to central Texas, or Georgia).

Anyways, USDA Hardiness Zones are used to determine what varieties of plants can grow region to region.  Zone 2a means that only plants that can withstand winter temperatures of -42.8 - 45.5 C will usually survive here.  Yes, it does (I've been told..) get that cold up here in the winter.  As such, Whitehorse (capital of the Yukon) has an average of 75 frost free days per year.  To put that in perspective, Toronto has an average of 150, whereas New Orleans has 300.

Using a hoop house is kind of like moving a piece of your land hundreds of kilometres south, into a different Hardiness Zone where there are more frost free days.  Up here in the Yukon and interior Alaska, the combination of daylight (FYI, tomorrow is the Solstice.  The sun will rise at 3:20am and set at 11:38pm) and using a hoop house makes for a delicious combo.

Supplies you will need are:

2'X4's to make the frame

1" tubing which make the hoops
(which are fitted into 2X4 frame by using a big drill bit)

Plastic covering and thin pieces of wood
(placed over plastic and drilled into frame to keep plastic covering in place)

A door, nailed to the frame.  Voila. 

A few summer projects

This’ll be fun.

A couple of the hotel buildings, in the 1960s

I’ve been back up in the Yukon for a little over a month and have three more to go until the contract at the hotel I’m working at is complete.  My job up here is to landscape and maintain the grounds at the hotel (same one as last year).  The hotel has changed a fair bit over the years, but it still has a bit of a lodgey vibe from when it was called the Alas/Kon Border Lodge when it first opened in the 1960s.  It’s been here since then and takes up a decent piece of property with the grounds requiring a fair bit of work.

Last summer was my first season working this job and coming back for this season means I know what to expect and what I need to do to have fun with it.  I also now know the land up here a bit more, the climate, the town and friends from last year so I figured I’d use the resources that exist here, coupled with a few ideas of mine, and make my summer into a giant agricultural experiment.

Beaver Creek in the 1960s -
A few lines and dots in the Boreal forest
(not much has changed)

So I came prepared and have been laying the groundwork for a few summer projects.  Here’s what I have in town to work with:

1. 35 - 40 garden beds at the hotel with a
 liberal spending budget for the landscape.

2. Greenhouse and compost at Colleen’s place.

3. White River First Nation Community Garden

   with greenhouse, compost system and tiller.

4. Lots of junk.  Old barrels, tubes,
        old fooseball tables, etc.

5. Container gardens built on skids
at the back of the property

I’ll keep ya posted on progress.

"We want y’all to go to school, do the right thing, and ride y’all bikes”

My friend in Detroit posted this short doc on riding bikes in Detroit.  Oh, how I miss racing city busses on my bike in downtown Hamilton on a hot summer day.. Enjoy!

Detroit Bike City from Alex Gallegos on Vimeo.

May = winter, when world = climate change

Not even the old-timers in town have seen snow this late.  Sure, the north has long winters, but not this long.  Check the pics.

Raised beds out back

Lonely compost awaits being spread over warm soil

The Wangell-St. Elias Mountains from town

Migration complete! Back in the Yukon.

I checked the stats on my blog, and apparently for last month I had 78 pageviews from the US, while only 24 were from Canada.  Very few American's I talked to while living in New Orleans had any idea as to where the Yukon was, so I carefully labelled the map below, just for you guys!

I arrived back in Beaver Creek, Yukon yesterday.  There's still a foot of snow on the ground.  It's 9:30pm and the sun is still pretty high in the sky.  Today I got started on germinating seeds.  

Wearing three sweaters at once never felt so good.

(fyi - Everyone talks like this in Canada.  Everyone.)

Grow food, be part of the creation of a local food system AND make a living? Yes, such a thing IS possible..

Your typical high-end restaurant can be a really effective tool in creating a local food system.  They like their food fresh and want to be able to acquire more product whenever they need it.  

When growing food in the city, produce can be harvested, delivered and consumed all in the same afternoon.  

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It's a simple formula that many chefs and farmers are now using to recreate our food system:

In its practical sense, chefs who choose to purchase local product (as opposed to purchasing from a nation-wide food distribution company) can often rely more on their producers.  If they run out of a specialty product in the kitchen just before the dinner rush, they can more-easily acquire more of it.  Also, local product is basically as fresh as it gets.  No nation-wide food distribution company can trump that.

In its political sense, growing food to sell to restaurants, I think, is one of the best forms of protest.  Don't want to support companies which pollute water tables in Latin America and take advantage of countries who don't have as tight of environmental regulations regarding spraying a large (and by North American standards, illegal) amount of pesticides on sweet potatoes?  How about not wanting to support Kraft solely because (until you knew) you were never given the opportunity to consent to monetarily support the environmental/public health burden that is Monsanto?  

Growing a bit of our own food is a good start and enables us to decide what hidden environmental/social costs we do or do not want to buy into.  Growing food and selling it enables others to choose what they want to purchase.  

And regardless of politics and petroleum,  it just tastes better.

Here are some pics from a farm that I had a work-trade with in my neighbourhood.  They have three areas where they grow microgreens and a specialty salad and sell them to a bunch of restaurants.  They harvest twice a week.  Microgreens are delivered to the restaurants either the same day or the day after. They deliver to about twenty restaurants and have three full-time staff.  Wicked business.

Jim bragging about growing Mustards on less than an inch of soil.

Mustards growing on sidewalk. 

The salad harvest.  Wild flowers and various native and non-native greens.  

Anyone can grow microgreens in any environment on any surface

Use cinder blocks, bricks, ice cube trays, old drawers, or anything else you can think of and try it out.