Weather for gardening?

Fairbanks Alaska has some of the most extreme [gardening?] weather in the world. 21 hours sunshine in June, giving rise to some of the most amazing vegetables but also winter weather with frost most nights for 4 months. This frost gets down to -40 degrees most years and -50 often enough for businesses and schools to have special procedures to deal with this.

We visited the Agricultural Experiment Station Fairbanks on a sunny day. We walked around in T shirt and shorts but underfoot is permafrost which by the early 1980's had melted down to 16 feet so we did not get cold feet. Our feet were OK we had to wonder about the plants roots.

The aim of the research is to find plants which will survive and thrive in the weather. They do not take any special steps to protect plants from the cold but they do have a problem that most other gardeners can ignore,
hungry moose.

Here are some pics of the gardens successes which include .





peonies.










The weather also has given rise to this shop.




tacky, tacky, tacky.




The town was called something boring but they changed their name to North Pole in hopes of attracting a toy manufacturer. Since then they get a lot of mail addressed to Santa Claus North Pole. He even has his own Zip Code [Post Code]