Brief History of the Tundra Garden-Part 1.

Shortly after I moved to Barrow, I learned that there had once been a tundra garden outside our picture window. I was missing my garden in the Lower 48 (and what gardener doesn't like a challenge?) so I decided that this garden should be revived. No one remembered what it had been like, so I started from scratch.

It was clearly going to take some doing, as there was no soil, just a 5 foot deep gravel pad. I mentioned my plan to our next-door neighbor, and she had the summer maintenance people drop off some big slabs of tundra (like turf) next to the house. I manhandled them together to make a fairly small, rather irregular patch of ground. My neighbor was able to get the maintenance folks to bring some 12" x 12" sections I'd seen over, and I built a box to contain the tundra, and keep it from melting back into the pad.