We are not in AK, but we are next-door neighbours and this is our first year of homesteading, so we are just beginning to set up this spring. BUT we live on land with our friends who have been homesteading/farming here for 9 years and I am constantly picking their brains, so I can share a little of what I've learned if you like.
We are just above the 62nd parallel and in a mountainous area with nearly if not exactly the same flora and fauna as the areas surrounding Anchorage. Although here, like there, the terrain can be so different within a short distance. The soil composition ten minutes down the highway is very different than here and the mountain to the north provides a heat sink that keeps this little area a few degrees warmer than the land across the highway and to either side of the mountain. So our experiences with homesteading can be somewhat different from people we know just ten minutes away along the same stretch of highway, and as I understand, it is similar in AK.
Our friends have kept or presently do keep chickens, goats, horses, cows, pigs, geese and turkeys. We only have 2 geese so far.
They have a farm dog too. And of course the most common livestock here is dogs since there are so many mushers and mushing is a regional passtime, sport or hobby for many. We don't keep dogs and won't have any but for the 'farm' and as pets.
They keep the livestock in a barn that they do not muck during the second half of the summer so that in the winter, the animals stay warm on the composting manure, which packs down and does not squish around or anything that gross. But when the thaw comes, the pig area does become pretty grotesque and my dp has had to hop on one leg while yanking out a stuck boot every now and then.
The chickens stopped laying only for about three weeks and have been back at it for six weeks again, so they must keep pretty warm. They stopped laying during the deep freeze which ranged from about -35 to -45 degrees. It can be a lot colder here some winters, like -50 to -60 but that asn't happened in a while according to life-timers, but even still, this winter has been very mild, relatively.
My friends do not winter turkeys because they die in this climate without heating, but the other birds that are not for meat are wintered in the barn with the pigs (and cows, horses and goats if they have them).
They slaughtered their goat and said that they should have had a few instead of just one because he really needed other goats. He would break out of the barn all the time to hang out with the dog or follow them around the farm because he was lonely.
They don't have a cow or horse presently, but there are other homesteaders here who do have dairy and meat cows and
lots of people who keep horses, or let them wander the wilderness as may be the case.... There are also a goat farm and an alpaca farm here. Sheep and rabbits also do well, but few people keep them.
Growing season is very short and variable, but with 24 hrs of sun (you'll be told that it is only 22, but it doesn't actually get dark during high summer ever. Those two hrs are like when the sun hides behind a mountain but s still lighting the sky, so it's like having teo hrs of shade, but not night or darkness at all.
Our friends work like maniacs during growing because everything grows super fast and they have to harvest until 3am quite frequently. The up side to this is that after a few years, you find that your body adjusts to this because at the other end of the year, you'll quasi-hibernate, or 'hole-up' as its called here. It just happens. Even town people find themselves up and visiting, doing things around town at all hrs of the "night" during the summer, so everyone lives this cycle.
It took me three years to get used to it, but now it just feels natural and its very invigorating after a long winter to be able to be out and about endlessly.
For produce, our friends grow nearly everything usually grown in Canada and without a greenhouse or hoops, but many do prefer to have hoops and/or greenhouses. We have the mountain here and that makes a huge difference. They grow tomatoes, beans, peas, lettuces, cruciferous veggies, berries, lambsquarters and chamomile which are both wild here, potatoes, oats, wheat, herbs, spinach (which they do keep in cold boxes actually- I forgot about those) carrots, beets, swiss chard, onions, some hard-squashes, etc... Berries and several other types of wild produce live on this land and elsewhere too. Wild rosehips are a regional favourite wild harvest. Yarrow is also very plentiful and very effective for mosquito repellent for the very short time they are around. Strawberries grow well here both wild and cultivated.
Our friends do not mono-crop and they use no synthetic anything on their farm. Everything is cyclical here, so compost happens directly in bins or through the livestock (the pigs are enjoying a diet fit for the kings of old presently as they receive our scrap bucket every second or third day filled with organic traditional food scraped from our dc's plates every day. We'll be eating a pig this year since we're feeding them so well, and that bucket of food scraps wasn't cheap, so we want to enjoy the nourishment a second time.
We are working toward self or communal sustenance, but right now we eat a lot of grocery store industrial organic and our meat comes from this farm and our butcher whose sources are other farms who free-range and pasture their livestock like here.
Overall, there are several types of lifestyles here and we tend toward a mixture of wild and domestic homestead. There are a lot of people like that here and in AK, so it isn't too hard to find like-minded people and to share resources, which is wonderful because in most parts of this country, doing this would mean a choice to live isolated from others. Here there is a community of empowered, diligent, and enthusiastic people doing it. This also keeps the regulations relatively lax and conducive to homesteading and bush-living, which in other areas has been made illegal or impossible for the regulations.
As far as I can tell, this is the sort of place that people either love or absolutely detest, and there is little in between. It's only the life-timers who have a middle ground, but here, the majority of the population is either here for some sort of gov't training and plans to return to their homes afterward or came on purpose to stay because they really love it. We have lots of people from overseas who came here to make lives and have succeeded beautifully. We came from the other side of the country, 4400kms from where we started.
There is an AK tribe and I sometimes lurk there for ideas. Many things are pretty interchangeable between there and here.
