Where Master Gardeners share their knowledge.
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 …
As the zombie apocalypse known as COVID-19 recedes into a not so distant and unpleasant memory, we make our way into spring and early summer. This year, I am armed with a modified toolkit due to the Alaska Master Gardener Online Course last fall. So, how have things gone so far? Goals I had several goals this spring in no particular order. These include Prune gooseberries, blueberries, and birch trees in the yard See if I can recover growable yacon from corms stored over the winter Change my soil mix Read More …
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 …