Grow a real harvest where the season is short and the winters are long.
Earthkeep is cold-climate homesteading for hardiness zones 2–6 — greenhouses, seed-starting, and the frost-anchored planning most gardening advice quietly skips. Start with your free Zone Calendar, built for your zone’s actual season.
Most gardening advice wasn’t written for a winter like yours.
Generic planting charts assume a long, forgiving season. In zones 2–6, that’s how seedlings die. Earthkeep starts from the two dates that actually run a northern garden — your last spring frost and your first fall frost — and builds everything backward and forward from there.
Underneath it all is permaculture: working with your land instead of against it. That’s what cold climate homesteading really means here — leaning on greenhouses and season extension to bend a short season longer. Honest about what won’t grow at −35, and serious about what will.
Greenhouses & Season Extension
Bend a short season longer — cold frames, hoop houses, and the high-tech greenhouse growing most northern advice ignores.
Seed-Starting & Frost Planning
Start the right seeds at the right time, counted backward from your last frost. The timing that separates a harvest from a near-miss.
Food Forests & Perennials
Build a landscape that feeds you for decades — cold-hardy fruit, nut, and perennial systems designed for the north.
GREENHOUSE GUIDE & PLANNER
Go deeper than a calendar.
The Zone Calendar gets you planting on time. Our greenhouse planner helps you get every step right.
Earthkeep original · $29
The Canadian Greenhouse Planner
Enter your postal code and get your design temperature, degree-days, frost depth and winter sun angles — then a calculator that turns them into a heater size, a fuel bill, a bill of materials and an honest payback figure.
See what’s insideEvery place in Canada has a midwinter shadow multiplier. Multiply anything to your south by it and you know exactly where not to build.
The whole property, in the right order
The Short Season System
A cold-climate design manual for people whose ground freezes.
Mainstream permaculture was written where water is the binding constraint. In zones 2 to 5 it is heat and season length — and water can be stored while heat cannot. That single difference reorders the entire design sequence, and the order is what this teaches.
$99 CAD · introductory, rising to $149
354-page manual · 41-page workbook · 341-species database · 4 calculators
Every figure in it is sourced. Where the research is thin for zones 2 to 5, the manual says so rather than rounding the gap away.