One Hundred Dollars a Month

Hello! My husband, Christopher, and I (Shannon) live in Fairbanks, Alaska. We actually just met October 2012 and married this July, and this is a story of our first garden together.

Most of the pictures here are his handiwork. Here in Alaska, we must start many of our plants inside, sometimes months ahead of time. Temperatures dip to 55 below zero, and winter lasts into May. Also, we have more darkness than light until summer. We don’t have a lot of space in our house (less than 1000 sq. ft.). Thus, we placed our “starts” in our bedroom under grow lights. Christopher already had this set up.

Before I knew him, I only used window sills. We started everything from seed except for some flowers. We started in smaller, more typical six-pack type containers we both already had. We eat a lot of yogurt, and used these containers and others left for free at the transfer station (along with other improvised containers) for planters later on.

Eventually, we ran out of space in this indoor greenhouse. So, starts ended up transplanted several times and then took over our living room. We had pumpkins growing up our curtains! We (read: I) ‘may’ have gotten a little carried away with the pumpkins this year and planted them a bit early (February – early April likely would have been fine).

We were starting to get a little crowded and crazy from all the plants. We do have a small pop up greenhouse, but it is pretty small and unheated. We couldn’t put plants in it until the danger of frost had passed. Once they were outside, our living room felt HUGE!

The house we live in is the house I had before I met Christopher, and it had three planting beds: two on the above-ground septic tank (the house is on permafrost), and one “sunken canoe.” I had built a fourth bed at the end of the last growing season (August) out of scrap lumber, but didn’t plant anything in it.

Thus, we decided to expand. We (read: Christopher) used scrap lumber and tires scavenged from one of Fairbanks’ transfer stations. We planted carrots from seed early, and you can see we covered them with plastic to help keep in moisture. Our water situation here is typical for Fairbanks but might surprise others “Outside” (term used to refer to outside of Alaska).

We have a 1500 gallon insulated above ground tank and a truck comes to deliver water at about 10 cents/gallon. Otherwise, we can haul our own water or collect it in rain barrels. We do/did the latter two options for obvious reasons until the very end of summer when we both got really busy.

For a while our yard looked like a construction site. This drove me crazy. Keep in mind; most of our plants are still inside. We did this construction in May, and it was still freezing at night.

We did not have enough time or energy (did I mention we got married in July?) to make as many beds as we wanted. So, our tomatoes ended up staying in pots, as did our peppers. We built a hoop house for our peppers to help control moisture and keep the heat up. Next year, we plan on building a bed for our pepper plants.

We will likely also build a new bed for potatoes. We used most of the flowers we grew for wedding decorations (outdoor wedding at a friend’s house). We also grew herbs on our deck and I window sills. The rock walkway leading up to the tires (containing French Cinderella pumpkin plants) were scavenged from the property and from the (dirt) road. Eventually, our garden grew and grew.

Did I mention we also raised meat chickens? We bought 20 “black boiler” chicks. This property came with this pre-build dog condo/chicken coop thing with its own fenced-in yard. You can see our coop (and our very own pallet compost bin) in one of these pictures. The hanging feeder pictured below was made of an old hub cap I had picked up in the woods a while ago for some unknown hoarding reason and a stove pipe from a friend.

Black broilers are not the most “fast growing” or largest chicken variety (not the type that reaches adulthood in 6 weeks). We’ve heard this is a variety commonly raised in Europe for sale in stores. They were fed good feed, lots of veggie scraps, and weeds. They eventually ate all the fireweed (wildflowers growing in one of the pictures) growing in their pen.

We slaughtered them ourselves at 10 weeks. Some of the chickens were a little smaller than we wanted (slightly larger than a Cornish hen), but we were ready to be done with chickens, as we had traveling to do. You can see the contraption we made for this task in one of our garden pictures (from scrap wood, and I found one of the traffic cones). We rented a chicken plucker machine for $20 from someone on Craigslist to ease the task. They taste great!

If we are in this house next year (we may move so we can expand our family), we will insulate the coop so we can keep layers year-round. Of course, we will use blueboard insulation we already have (came from Christopher’s old property).

We had a hard frost in late August. Luckily, we had harvested all the sensitive plants before then (except for a bunch of green tomatoes that are now in a freezer).I must say, I am so thankful to have found a man that loves to garden and “homestead” as much as me.

We have blanched, frozen, and canned all this bounty (that we haven’t shared). We also have moose and 40 Copper River “reds” (sockeye) salmon we harvested in a freezer. I’m slightly obsessed with berry- picking, so we also have 15 gallons of wild blueberries, as well as a few gallons each of wild cranberries and raspberries. Alaska is a bountiful place if you know how to harvest her resources (responsibly, of course!).

~Shannon from Fairbanks, Alaska.

A big THANK YOU to everyone who has sent in their photographs and stories. I hope by sharing other peoples pictures and stories here on One Hundred Dollars a Month we can all have a rock star garden this summer. Keep them coming!

~Mavis

If you would like to have your garden, chicken coop or something you’ve made featured on One Hundred Dollars a Month, here’s what I’m looking for:

• Your Garden Pictures and Tips – I’d especially like to see your garden set ups, growing areas, and know if you are starting seeds indoors this year. If so,  show me some picture of how you are going about it.
• Your Chicken and Chicken Related Stories – Coops, Chicks, Hen’s, Roosters, Eggs, you name it. If it clucks, send us some pictures to share with the world.
• Cool Arts & Crafts – Made from your very own hands with detailed {and well photographed} pictures and instructions.
• Your pictures and stories about your pets. The more pictures and details the better.
• Garage Sale, Thrift Store and Dumpster Diving pictures and the stories behind the treasures you found including how much you paid for them.

If I feature your pictures and the stories behind them on One Hundred Dollars a Month, I will send you a $20.00 gift card to the greatest store in the world: Amazon.com.

Go  HERE for the official rules.