Here's how we built a greenhouse in interior Alaska!
We have been aspiring gardeners for 7 years. In 2020, we harvested 250lbs of potatoes and shared that bounty with family & friends. In 2021, the local vole population skyrocketed and we were unable to harvest any potatoes or produce. Our greenhouse will enable us to extend our growing season, shelter produce from pests AND grow a wider variety of vegetables. Because of our location in Interior Alaska, we cannot plant outdoors until early-June and harvest mid-August. A greenhouse will extend our season in both directions. We plan to grow peppers, lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, squash, cucumbers, zucchini, broccoli, etc. in the greenhouse and continue planting in our potato field, if the voles cooperate.
On May 12, 2023 we began construction on our new greenhouse thanks to the funds from an Alaska Department of Agriculture micro-grants for food security. I mostly helped with smaller projects to bring our MacIver Family Greenhouse to life, and my husband Dakota did most of the labor, with the help of friends as mentioned below. And of course, our girls were on deck to help along the way!
To begin, we borrowed a tractor from a family member and removed our previous garden posts and wire and leveled the area for a cement pour. On May 21, several friends came over to help us pour cement! We purchased cement elements and used a mixer we already had to pour the cement ourselves, saving a lot of money. Friends came and helped which also kept costs down. We poured a 16 by 20 cement foundation. By May 26, we had framed in walls for the greenhouse! We purchased all the lumbar for the walls which were 8 high. Dakota’s sister also came to help frame our building. By June 4, all the walls were framed in and the roof was also framed.
On June 4, we worked together as a family (myself, Dakota and our three young daughters ages 6, 4 and 1) to water seal and stain all the boards before adding the walls and roof. The girls genuinely loved helping so much! Leah called the greenhouse our "summer house".
On June 9, we got the greenhouse roofing on. We used plywood to wrap around the bottom part of the walls, and stained those. June 10 & 11 we added the greenhouse roofing to the sides of the greenhouse. The bottom half of the walls are plywood, the top half greenhouse roofing to allow even more sunlight into our space! By June 16, we constructed windows to help add ventilation to our greenhouse as it gets hot. Windows were constructed between the framing boards with extra lumber and greenhouse roofing so that when the windows are pulled in, they are flush with the walls, can be pushed up and outwards and held with a lever that is propped up on the wall. These windows served us well as it got HOT during July!
On June 23, we made great headway on the raised beds that were built into our greenhouse. They are built high enough to be flush with the plywood on the outside of the greenhouse, so that one can stand, and the raised beds are waist high, no bending over. The raised beds are about 18 inches deep, and we lined them with landscaping fabric to help improve the longevity of the boxes. The raised beds begin on one side of the building and wrap around the other side, excluding the door, obviously. Currently, there is a lot of room in the center that can be utilized in the future with another raised bed, or with potted plants, which is what we did this year.
On June 27, Dakota and I traveled to Fairbanks to purchase supplies for the greenhouse and most importantly, gardening soil. While we were in Fairbanks, we got a photo from a family member at home that showed our greenhouse had reached 108*F inside! This was one of our first warm days to see how hot the greenhouse had the potential of getting. On June 30, we worked as a family and filled all our raised beds with logs, sticks, and leaves from around our property. Even the baby enjoyed helping! This “raised bed lasagna” should help with future healthy soil as the leaves and sticks and logs will breakdown over time. We finished filling and prepping the raised beds on July 1. On July 2, we planted seeds!
We planted seeds in this order in our raised beds around the greenhouse: carrots, snap peas, zucchini, cucumber, corn, summer squash, green beans, lettuce, spinach, and potatoes. By July 10, we had plants sprouting! This was such an enjoyable project to do with our kiddos. My summer camera roll is positively FILLED with images of our girls peeking over the raised beds to see if any of their plants were growing. Every morning, especially those first few weeks, the girls would run out to see if anything had changed, and they were so delighted when it had. We also had broccoli, cauliflower, strawberries, and a small tomato plant in planters in the center of the greenhouse. These were starters given to us that we did not start from seed, so they began producing a little earlier.
On July 16, we added gutters directly underneath our roofline to catch rainwater in 5-gallon buckets below. Eventually, we would like some other sort of rain collection system, but for this summer it worked just fine. We purchased gutters, buckets and watering cans with this grant money. Our plants certainly liked the rainwater best! In my garden journal from over the summer, I noted we had a terrible hailstorm come through on July 24. Our greenhouse faired well, and we were certainly grateful all our plants were kept safely indoors.
All of our plants made great progress, especially for being planted from seed in early July. I noted that on August 1 our spinach had already bolted – it stopped producing and just raced for growth. I learned that it is a cold weather plant and because we had hot weather in July, and therefore a hot greenhouse, it was set up for failure. In the future, we will either wait to plant spinach, potentially grow it in the cooler, darker floor of the greenhouse, or grow it outside.
We got our first zucchini flower on August 7. We knew that you needed both a male and female zucchini flower to cross pollinate in order to provide fruit, but was so interesting to learn that the flowers only bloom for a few hours and then die!! Thankfully, weeks later, we had flowers in bloom at the same time and did end up with fruit.
We harvested our lettuce on August 14, about 6 weeks from when we initially planted it as seed. Our plants continued to grow throughout the season, and we harvested a majority of our produce on September 9. We let some of the colder weather plants grow in the greenhouse until we harvested everything on September 25.
Our harvest reports are as follows (also quantified below as pounds)
Strawberries – 12
Cherry Tomato – 5
Baby Carrots – 25
Carrots – 3lbs 5oz
Green Beans – 104
Snap Peas – 39
Lettuce – lots!
Zucchini – 6
Potatoes – 22 lbs
Cauliflower – 1
Summer Squash – 4
Overall, this greenhouse build was incredibly satisfying for our family. We did all of the work ourselves, with the help of friends and family, and it makes our food taste even that much sweeter. While we were able to harvest this summer, the true gift will be in the years to come when we can fully utilize our full growing season and have even more bounty.
It was a lot of work to build such a big greenhouse all on our own, but we would do it over again in a heartbeat. We traded one summer of intense work on the greenhouse for a lifetime of summers that we will benefit from having such a gorgeous place to grow our food. I highly recommend keeping a garden journal (we do this with a private Instagram account that I post to regularly) to be able to easily look back on and see what worked and what did not work each year. As we continued throughout our summer, we already were noting what we would do differently in future years. My other biggest thought throughout this project was what a blessing it was to do alongside our young children. They are in a stage where they are skeptical of trying new (or green!) foods and when they helped grow it themselves, they were much more eager to try.
To find out more about the Alaska Department of Agriculture Micro-Grants for Food Security, visit here.
Thanks for reading! And check back to see what we grow this summer!
-Kami
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