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While skiers and snowmobilers enjoy the long days of sunshine on the sea ice of Frobisher Bay, John Lamb steps into his brand new greenhouse and takes off his jacket.

Outdoors, the temperature hovers just a few degrees above zero, but sunshine drives the greenhouse effect to extremes. Inside, a thermometer records noon temperatures as high as 50 C - much too hot for plants.

At one end of a 15-metre-long tube, a greenhouse builder from Bradford, Ont., installs the ventilation system that will keep the greenhouse cool. In the meantime, Mr. Lamb and members from the Iqaluit Community Greenhouse Society are busy setting up boxes to grow vegetables.

The end of this month will see the official opening of treeless Iqaluit's first community gardening centre.

"It's kind of hard to imagine right now," says Mr. Lamb, the group's president, "but we hope by the end of the season, and our first harvest party, people will think it's kind of a neat thing."

Mr. Lamb isn't just a passionate gardener: He has a vision for this project. He wants to prove that you can grow vegetables in Arctic climates and hopes the greenhouse will become a blueprint for other northern greenhouse projects.

Locally grown vegetables could replace the aging, beat-up produce that is regularly flown into Nunavut's remote towns.

In Iqaluit, population 7,000 and growing, Mr. Lamb recognizes that the vegetables produced in the 90-square-metre greenhouse will be a drop in the bucket. But, he says, "you could have people, for the first time ever, getting really fresh produce."

To Inuit, the idea sounds exotic, but visitors to the Arctic have tried to import gardening since the 18th century. Traders and missionaries planted crude gardens of potatoes, onions, carrots, lettuce, turnips and radishes to supplement their diet.

In Iqaluit, several people grow lettuce, herbs and tomatoes in their kitchen windows or garden greenhouses. One woman grew 25 pounds of potatoes last summer.

Locally grown food is more than just nutritional, however. Greenhouse gardening could also be a small contribution toward improving Nunavut's abysmal environmental record.

Electricity in Nunavut comes from large generators that burn diesel fuel. In the brief period when the ocean is free of ice, ships deliver some cargo - such as the building materials and potting soil for this greenhouse - but urgent supplies, or those with an expiration date such as fresh carrots, come in by plane.

That makes this territory the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases per capita in Canada, the third-highest polluting country in the world.

The greenhouse was erected in late November, in time for it to be buried in snow for most of the winter. This May, Mr. Lamb opened the doors with a sigh of relief.

"I was quite worried about it blowing away," he said, recalling a February windstorm that reached speeds of 135 kilometres an hour. The greenhouse is one of the few Iqaluit structures built without pilings, or metal rods drilled several metres into the permafrost.

The biggest challenge is moderating Iqaluit's extremes of hot and cold, and light and dark.

To keep his plants alive during the brief but cold summer nights, he's set up a passive solar system. That is, about 20 plastic garbage cans filled with water. In the daytime, the water heats up, and in the evening, the heat dissipates to warm nearby plants.

Later on, he hopes to install a curtain system, to block out sunlight for part of the day.

The growing season this year will be short - the end of June until early September. Mr. Lamb expects to see the 80 or so gardeners plant fast-growing plants such as climbing peas, beans, lettuce and tomatoes in the plastic beds lined up on benches.

Gardeners have more room in large plastic tubs - the kind northerners carry luggage in - lined up in the centre of the greenhouse. Tomato growers will hang from the ceiling.

Vegetables are really the focus, but Mr. Lamb says there may be room for flowerboxes along the wall, and outside, where he plans to build a deck and picnic area.

"We hope it will be a place where people will want to come and hang out. Stop and smell the flowers, so to speak."

Mary Nashook loves the idea of a place where Iqalummiut can potter around in the garden. For several years, she's grown potatoes, carrots, parsnips, Alaskan peas and lettuce in a sunroom on her deck overlooking Frobisher Bay.

"If you want something fresh, you've got to do it yourself," Ms. Nashook says. "It's different than store-bought vegetables."

Jim Little, another Iqaluit gardener, can see positive spinoffs both for gardeners and for the community at large.

Last year, he ran a project that grew 800 zinnias, marigolds, pansies, violas and other flowers in a classroom at Iqaluit's young offenders correctional centre, using funding from suicide prevention programs.

On Mother's Day, they gave more than 200 of these flowers to moms through the churches.

"The neat thing is the sense of pride people take in growing things," he says.