Category: Container Gardening

Starting Berries in Winter

Grace York

An Experiment It’s February in Alaska while the rest of country is gearing up for spring. You’re walking the aisles of your local big box store and admiring the berry starts that just came in! Outside it’s still cold and dark, bright snow gleaming back at you during the short daylight hours. These starts are still dormant, save for a few brave ones with green leaves beginning to break through buds on the canes of the raspberries. Below I’ve chronicled the results of my experiment inducing spring indoors and successfully Read More …

A Passion For Growing Potatoes in Alaska

Larry Opperman

Consider the humble potato. It’s not much to look at, yet millions of people have relied on it as a significant food source for thousands of years. One only has to look at Ireland to see the importance of the potato: In 1845, when a fungus-like infestation decimated the potato crop there, nearly a million people starved, and another million were forced to emigrate to escape starvation. Scholars believe the potato originated in the Andes Mountains of South America, and an estimated 5,000 varieties of potato now exist worldwide. Today, Read More …

The Upcycled Garden

Larry Opperman
Beds Filled With Soil & Topped With Compost

Many people love the joys that come with gardening.  Are you one of them?  Think about how many gardens you’ve seen in your life and what they looked like.  A little four foot by four-foot box, a 2000 square foot in ground garden with perfectly spaced rows, hydroponic setups, or raised beds perfectly lined up it looks like a surveyor laid out the beds.  Any way you look at it, people build their gardens to their satisfaction and that’s what makes every garden out there the right design.  If it Read More …

Growing an Indoor Edible Garden

Sarah Richards

When we moved into our house in October, I started itching to grow something. This is the first time I’ve owned my own little part of the earth, and that is about as tangible as life gets for a gardener. The weather was turning colder, and everyone around us was settling in for winter. Cutting wood is a more appropriate fall time activity in Alaska, or so my husband tells me, but I decided I was going to grow food in our tiny cabin. So, I did what I do Read More …

Gardening When You Don’t Have a Garden

ejnorris2

I really struggled to find a topic for this blog post. I wanted it to be something personal and relevant to my own gardening experiences. And that’s when I realized why it was so difficult for me to find a topic: I don’t have a garden and I am not a gardener. Not in the traditional sense. I live in an apartment in south-central Anchorage and my only slices of “land” are my east-facing deck and the counter space in my kitchen. I also travel extensively for work during the Read More …

Easy Blanching for Winter Feasting

Jenna Miller

The Wonders of Food Preservation As delicious as fresh produce straight from the garden can be, most of the time we hobby gardeners have too much to eat all at once, and we must choose what to do with the extra! Some give their surplus garden bounty away. The other day, a co-worker of mine offered to buy my extras from me. But the best choice in my mind is to preserve them for winter eating! There is nothing like the satisfaction of knowing I have a freezer full of Read More …

Adventure in Apartment Gardening: Containers for the Busy and Mildly Forgetful

sjump

What lead me to apartment gardening: I grew up having a garden, white picket fence and all. As I became an adult and ultimately ended up living in an apartment, I realized how much I missed having fresh fruits and vegetables at my fingertips. I also remembered how much better they tasted. Not just because they were fresh but because of the amount of pride I took in being able to enjoy the fruits of my labor. Where the apartment gardening began: So at 18, living in a small apartment Read More …

From Rubbish To Radishes

rkboettcher

Growing up in rural Missouri, I never imagined myself ever living in rural Alaska and though there are plenty of differences, my childhood experiences have certainly prepared me for, even made me well-suited to, living off the Alaska road system. I am the product of a Depression-era father and an East German Communist escapee mother which made for an interesting combination of conservatism and organic lifestyle that many long for these days. We reduced, reused and recycled out of necessity before it came into fashion and we were taught it Read More …