Hello everyone, Its #GardenIsShe2020, and I just wanted to share some information about The Alaska Botanical Garden, located in Anchorage, Alaska! The Alaska Botanical Garden is a living museum- meaning it showcases gardens and natural Alaskan landscapes in a educational and sustainable way. They grow botanical gardens, showcase ice sculptures and workshops, natural artist opportunities, garden journalism workshops, gardening conferences, membership and donation opportunities, children’s gardening summer camps, distance and in-person learning, botanical trails, horticulture, volunteer opportunities, beginners gardening programs, online shops, weekly guides, and moose and bears awareness, along Read More …
Tag: Anchorage
Putting into Practice What I learned in the Alaska Master Gardener Online Class–What Worked and What Didn’t?
This piece will hopefully capture a bit of how the 2020 summer gardening season went. This time around, we went into the season armed with information from the Master Gardener Course taken online at UAF in 2019. What good is new knowledge if you don’t use it? Better yet, if you try something new, it is always useful to actually observe and write down what you did and how it worked out. As of today, the only thing still in the ground here in Anchorage is a 37-gallon trash can Read More …
Gooseberries – Paying Attention to Pruning
This post is more or less an object lesson in pruning (or the lack thereof). In some ways, a cautionary tale, as I have some (a bunch) work to do after breakup next spring. I got interested in gooseberries perhaps a decade ago, once again based on Jeff Lowenfels former radio show. We ordered four of them that seemed to be robust in the gardens of south Anchorage from a nursery in the Lower 48 and put them into the garden–two Hinnomaki Red and two Hinnomaki Yellow gooseberries. The Alaska Read More …
Growing Yacon in Anchorage
I ran across yacon in 2014 in a column by Jeff Lowenfels. He recommended it as a handsome plant that produces sweet tubers at the end of the growing season. We decided to give it a try one year and have done it every year since. The plant itself goes by several names: yacon, Bolivian sunroot, Peruvian ground apple and occasionally “yacon strawberry.’ The plant itself is related to sunflowers, dahlias, Jerusalem artichokes and other similar plants. It generally looks similar to a sunflower and grows up to 7 -8 Read More …
Tropical Alaska: Growing Indoor Tropical Plants in Anchorage
It’s October and the birch and cottonwood leaves color the ground yellow outside, while the annual flowers planted around Anchorage have been pulled up. The termination dust has already frosted the peaks of the Chugach Front Range, and it won’t be long before winter arrives. So what is a plant enthusiast to do during the dark and cold winters in south-central Alaska? One solution is to visit the Mann Leiser Memorial Greenhouse in Anchorage. Operated by the Municipality of Anchorage from 8:00 am to 3:30 pm daily, the two adjoining Read More …