It’s spring in Nunavut! For most of you ‘southerners’ south of 60, it has already been spring for many weeks now (if not months) but up in the ‘Vut it’s only really started to feel like spring in the last few weeks – ‘spring’ being T-shirt weather. Mind you – in late April when the sun started coming back and we were getting -15ºC temperatures, I may have celebrated the good weather by hanging out on my deck in a tank top. Nevertheless.
As you can see, the sea ice is already starting to break up, and the snow in town is almost completely gone. This means of course that its greenhouse season! I started planting a few seeds about a month ago, but I didn’t have the best batch of seeds and lot of them never took, so I don’t have many plants started just yet.
Thankfully, our Arctic greenhouse has just gotten to a point where it’s not going below 0ºC at night, and it gets up to +50ºC during the day some days (if we don’t keep the vents open), so it’s perfect for growing!
Our growing season is fairly short up here, so I’ll be choosing quick growing plants this year. I managed to get some carrots, green onions, beans, basil, and mint started early on, and will hopefully get a bunch more carrots, peas, herbs (tarragon, garlic chives, thyme, purple basil, and coriander) sprouting in the next few weeks.
Early on this spring, before the greenhouse was ready for use, I noticed two plants (see below) sprouting out of a pile of dry soil. It had been sitting there all winter, with no moisture and at frequently -50ºC temperatures. I’m not sure what they are – though I suspect they’re weeds of some sort that got into the potting soil I bought from the south. I put them into little pots to see what they might grow into – out of curiosity more than anything – but I figure if they were able to go through the Arctic winter we just had, and spring to life with no help at all, they deserve a chance to thrive.
If anyone has an idea of what type of plants they are, please comment below. I’m not very familiar with southern weeds.
