Pop's Garden

For those of you who are interested in gardening, I will blog a bit on how the garden grows.  Although my name isn’t Mary, I am sometimes quite contrary J.  (insert chuckle here).  The garden is named “Pop’s Garden”, so maybe a man named Pop started it.  I’m not sure.  Our plot measures approximately 47 ft by 47 ft.  I think anyway. I measured one side for a gardening project (more on that a little farther down) and it was 47 ft. It looks square-ish.  The soil here is quite sandy and drains well.  It is also a temperate rainforest, so the ground is quite moist.  There are many horses that traverse all over camp and they leave their mark well, so we have a lot of manure to work with.  I don’t have a lot of experience with compost aside from reading about it and purchasing bagged compost for our garden last year, so I was going on assumption when I went around and scooped up horse poop to mix into the soil.  We put about 4 wheelbarrows full in, flung it around the garden, and tilled the entire plot.  There was also a pile of dirt that had very rich soil (perhaps an old compost pile?), so we got the backhoe in and gathered a few scoops of that to till in as well.

With the soil prepared, I planned the organization of the garden and which plants to plant.  I researched and discussed with gardeners here what grows well in southeast Alaska and when to begin planting some of these crops.  You see, with Kansas gardening in my mind, this feels incredibly late to begin a garden.  But we’re still getting nights in the 30’s, so frost is a bit of a danger.  I discovered that some things I’m most familiar with in Kansas do not grow well here.  Like corn, cucumbers, peppers, and sometimes tomatoes.  One man told me that some years tomatoes do really well and others they don’t have enough heat to even start blooming.  Plants that do well here are root crops (potatoes, carrots, radishes, etc.).  They have grown peas, lettuce, and beets here with great success as well.  The idea with the garden is to be able to use most of these veggies in the salad bar at meals. I took all of that into consideration and came up with a list of plants to do:

·         Peas (the sugar snap kind)

·         Radishes

·         Carrots

·         Beets

·         Spinach

·         Lettuce (both romaine and iceburg)

·         Potatoes (little “finger”  potatoes and russet type)

·         Onions

·         Green beans

·         Basil (this will probably be done in containers)

·         Rhubarb (already established) – it is somewhat intermingled with this little plant here called “Indian Rhubarb”, which looks a little like rhubarb, yet has the effect of poison ivy when touched.  Except with more of a burn reaction than a rash.  And it reacts with sunlight apparently, so touching it on a sunny day is bad news.

·         Asparagus had already been planted by the winter caretakers

So far, the peas, beets, spinach, lettuce (about 1/3 to half is in so that we can continue planting and not get it all at once), and potatoes are in.  I received carrot, radish, and green bean seeds from a Juneau-based gardening project that gives seeds in exchange for information and pictures as to how they grew and how many people were fed with the seeds.

The biggest challenge that I have had to wrap my mind around is that I really don’t need to water this garden.  Since statistically it rains 2 out of every 3 days here, most people have an issue of too much water rather than not enough.  Being from Kansas, it’s pretty much completely opposite of the way we care for our gardens!  The past two weeks or so have been warm and sunny, so I was getting really nervous about not having watered the garden at all.  But I woke up to rain this morning and it has rained all day (no downpour by any means here, it’s just a misty, sprinkling kind of rain), so I feel a lot better about it. Even with a little dry spell, the soil is still moist an inch or so down.  It just felt so weird to plant seeds and not water them right away.

I’ll try to update about the adventure of Alaskan gardening and try to not kill all the plants.  I guess we’ll see if anything comes up!

Here is that Indian Rhubarb poking up through the middle of the rhubarb patch!  Sneaky thing, it is.