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“We have the lights set up so that they’re on 14 hours a day so they have a kind of daytime in their barn,” Ms. Halpine said.

The hens are doing well and produce about eight eggs per day. The Halpines sell the eggs to neighbours, but they can’t keep up with demand.

That far north, fresh food in general is hard to come by. And it can be expensive. In the past, for about two months out of the year when ice roads were closed and the ferry couldn’t run, all food was flown in. During those times, the cost of a 4L bag of milk jumps to $18 from the regular $10, said Ms. Halpine, although with the Deh Cho Bridge opened in November, food prices may shift incrementally. Even when it can be driven in, store food is pricey and not always great quality.

“A lot of the salad that comes up into the grocery store, by the time it gets there it’s already brown,” said Sarah Reaburn, a member of the board of directors at the Inuvik Community Greenhouse. “It’s in the back of a truck being bumped around or it’s in a plane and flying up however many thousand feet and being exposed to all those temperature changes.”

Ms. Reaburn said the local community greenhouse, a converted hockey arena with a plastic roof, helps increase residents’ access to fresh produce. There are 74 plots at the greenhouse and about 100 community members garden there.

In communities like Inuvik, where even in the summer much of the ground is permafrost and where soil sometimes has to be trucked in from the south or combined with compost, gardeners rely on greenhouses or raised bed gardens to get around geographic realities. But along with the challenges of gardening in the land of the midnight sun, come rewards.