Starting Berries in Winter

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 …

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 …

Berries of Northwest Alaska

As the sun begins to set in August, and us “northerners” finally experience some darkness, the berries of northwest Alaska begin to flourish. The sun sets for about 5 hours now, which is both good and bad. Good, because the berries we gather near the coast are able to turn on the afterburners, so to speak, in terms of growing. They soak up the sun during the day, and rest at night, similar to those of us who are busy all summer long. Bad, because it marks our end of Read More …