Category: Regions of Alaska

Growing Currants in Alaska

 

My favorite berries are blueberries (wild Alaskan ones of course!) and raspberries, but I have a special place in my heart for currants  as well. Like many Americans, currants aren’t a mainstay. I first heard about currants from my grandma who lived in Anchorage. She was fanatic about them and currant jelly specifically. But I didn’t really appreciate them until later in life when I took a berry class from Dr. Pat Holloway. Importantly, I learned to identify them. This is an important first step in identifying any wild berry, particularly if there is a poisonous berry that is the similar color (there is and it is bane berry!). Wild currants can also be mistaken for high bush cranberries. Unlike high bush cranberries and lowbush cranberries which are too tart for me to want to eat  fresh and high bush too seedy, I like fresh currants. I also like them made into syrup and jelly as well. You can make currant jam but it’s not easy! I prefer eating red currants fresh to black currants because their skin is much thicker. However, black currants have even higher antioxidant levels and vitamin C levels than red currants.

There are six species of black and red currants that are native to Alaska. Searching Ribes in plants.usda.gov via the Alaska State search will bring up all the species of Ribes in Alaska, including gooseberries. I’ve never seen them in quantity enough to pick many in the wild, but that may change along with the climate. In the wild, I find currants in the understory of forested areas, and so unlike many berries that prefer full sun, you can grow currants in partial shade.

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Growing Raspberries in Alaska

 

Most gardeners I know tend to be fairly haphazard with their raspberry patches and that may include myself. And you can be because they tend to spread on their own (much more than you might want in some cases) and come back year after year without too much effort. However, with some forethought to the soil, attention to variety you’re planting, and regular pruning, you can maximize the quality and production of your raspberry patch.

red raspberries up close

Raspberries are personally one of my favorite berries to eat fresh or frozen. Although American red raspberries (Rubus idaeus L.) grow wild throughout Alaska, they can be annoyingly small and wormy, although their intense taste does compensate somewhat for these drawbacks. But in my backyard, I’d rather grow larger, more productive cultivars of raspberries. Raspberries also meet most of the criteria I have when choosing what to grow: they are a high dollar item, best fresh, highly perishable, can be eaten without cooking, can be harvested successively, and are something my family will eat as much of as I can grow. As with strawberries, there is a lot to learn about how to maximize production.

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How does your garden grow? Through the seasons in an Alaska garden.

 

This year, I decided to document my garden through the seasons. One of the incredible things about gardening in Alaska is how your garden transforms overnight. It’s magical, amazing, and perhaps why I love gardening. Only this summer Things. Did. Not. Grow. Until July. But then there were some pleasant surprises. 

August 11, 2023: Herbs and nasturtiums are thriving.

Here is how my garden grew this summer. . .

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Bump Up Your Strawberry Production

 

There are never enough strawberries in our patch — I think my kids and my neighbor’s kids would agree!

I am not the only one who is figuring out how to grow strawberries successfully in Alaska. One of the top posts on my blog, It Grows in Alaska, is Untangling the Mysteries of Growing Strawberries in Alaska. To figure what I can do to bump up my strawberry production, I interviewed Andy Harper, a local strawberry farmer (Highlands of Alaska Farms) as well as University of Minnesota researchers who have studied annual strawberry production using a low tunnel system.

strawberries in a box
Photo by Andy Harper.

Andy has a half acre of strawberries in production this year. Some of those plants are research plants. He said he started the farm because, “I love berries, I lived in the UK and Scotland, they love black currants, I love those. I met Papa [Meunier] and he had everything. All different types of berries. I just loved berries. So I decided I wanted to do berry farming. Strawberries are the only ones I can make money on the first year.”

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Gardening in Ruby, Alaska

 
Full length shot of Evelyn sarten in mud boots.
Evelyn Sarten in her garden. Photo by Molly Cerridwen.

Evelyn Sarten and her late husband Ed (Dwight) have gardened in Ruby, Alaska, for a quarter of a century. Evelyn, who was raised on the land on a Native American reservation in Taos, New Mexico, estimates she grows about 30% of her food. 

She was taught to live with the land and she’s always grown her own food. Their garden in Ruby is characterized by innovation and making do with what is available. For instance, their chicken coop fence was constructed from an old couch frame, old bed frames, and leftover fencing from the school. Now her one remaining chicken lives in her Arctic entryway.

In addition to growing her own large garden, she also works for the Native Village of Ruby as the natural resources and agriculture program director, helping others in Ruby garden as well. With Evelyn, I and the Tribes Extension Program (www.uaf.edu/ces/tribes) sent out vegetable and flower seeds and organized gardening and plant foraging workshops at the school. We also purchased and built a raised bed garden for the school.

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Gardening in the Wind

 

I grew up in Fairbanks and according to my memory, it was never windy. Without wind, 40 below zero is not that cold. Without wind, you can water your garden and it stays moist for the day. Without wind, plastic row covers do not blow away. You get the idea. I am not a huge fan of the wind. 

This spring, in addition to the wind, we had very dry (drought) conditions. I direct seed a large portion of my garden and the seeds need to be kept wet until they emerge. Keeping the seeds moist was really hard to do this spring because of the combination of hot, dry, windy weather. To keep the seeds moist, I used drip irrigation, covered the seedlings with Remay (frost cloth), and watered the seeds sometimes three times a day with a sprayer hose. Later in the summer, it is so much easier to keep a garden watered because the plants provide shade and they have roots.

blown over trees
The August 2022 windstorm blew over trees across a driveway near Fairbanks, AK. Photo by Julie Strickland.

Not only did the breeze seem to be a more constant companion this spring, there were also a couple of uncommonly intense windstorms in July and August. In Golden Valley Electric Association’s (GVEA) Ruralite magazine (September 2022), Josh Davis, the director of operations said, “The July wind storm was the worst storm we’ve had in my 18 years here.” He noted that the August windstorm was also pretty bad. 

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Gardening in the Aleutian Pribilof Island Region of Alaska

 

For this article, I interviewed two people who have gardened or farmed in the Aleutian Islands. Lily Stamm manages a geodesic dome greenhouse in Nikolski, Alaska, located on Umnak Island. Two domes were erected in 2003, one of which has since blown away. I also interviewed Michael Livingston, who homesteaded with his family in Cold Bay in the 1960s. You can watch the video of these interviews here. If you are a gardener or grower in the Aleutian and Pribilof Island region and are interested in sharing what you know, or photos and videos of your garden, please contact Heidi Rader at hbrader@alaska.edu.

lupine in the foreground, ocean and mountains in the background
Near Michael Livingston’s family’s homestead in Cold Bay. Photo by Michael Livingston.
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Flowering Vines

 

I like to grow edible plants. The rest of my family prefers flowers. One of my sisters is a peony farmer. And the other one lived in Jordan for years and was particularly fond of flowering vines. She wanted to know which ones grow here so that got me thinking: Which climbing flowers do thrive in Fairbanks?

I’m not talking about gushing flowers like bakopa, lobelia or creeping Jenny that flood baskets hung all over town. I’m talking about flowers that clamber from the ground up clutching on fences, trellises, tepees and pergolas.

Fast and easy to grow, the Black Eyed Susan vine comes in a rainbow of colors although orange and yellow are the most common. It can even be grown in a hanging basket.

Easiest and most trustworthy are canary bird and black-eyed Susan vines, sweet peas, scarlet runner beans, climbing nasturtiums and morning glories. Fairbanks researchers described Milky Way morning glory as a “vigorous, thick vine covered with blooms” that proffered a “very attractive display all summer” and “grew rapidly (covering) the trellis by midsummer.” Don’t bother with Cypress Vine, which did not flower at all in trials.

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Growing a Cut Flower Garden

 

A slew of research and attention has been given to peonies in recent years, but research on growing other cut flowers in Alaska has been limited in the last decade. To get an idea of which cut flowers are growing well in Fairbanks in recent years, I asked a few farmers about their go-to cut flowers for creating unique, locally grown bouquets. 

Caitlyn Huff with Arctic Blooms and Bouquets has loved flowers since she was a girl, but got into the flower farming business when she moved into a house in Fairbanks with 600 peonies. She grows flowers and arranges bouquets for weddings, the farmers market, a CSA, and bazaars (as dried flower arrangements). She loves the beauty and joy they bring people. 

buckets of dahlias and zinnias in a market display
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Growing Winter Squash and Pumpkins in Interior Alaska

 

Heidi and her two sisters holding large zucchini squash in their childhood garden with large sunflowers in the background.

My sisters and I (far left) reluctantly helping harvest more zucchini in our Fairbanks garden. Photo by Maggi Rader.

I grew up in Fairbanks eating much more zucchini than any kid should have to. Of course I never minded when it masqueraded as bread peppered with chocolate chips. These days, kids in Fairbanks are lucky–they also get to enjoy winter squash and pumpkins which is becoming a much more feasible crop across Alaska.

Indisputably, the most knowledgeable and experienced winter squash and pumpkin grower in Fairbanks is Virgil Severns. He has grown the crop for over 30 years with his wife Anne and recently published a pamphlet on the topic. I wondered what attracted him to the crop originally and he said, “The thing that got me started really, years ago, the experiment station and the plant materials center offered a bunch of seeds and so I got some of those seeds and I planted them and they did well so it got me started growing squash.”

The pamphlet explains which varieties will grow best in Interior Alaska and cautions that some types (acorn, butternut, delicata, and sweet dumpling) are sensitive to our long days and as a result, do not produce female flowers in time for the fruits to mature. Continue reading