Gardening in Southeast Alaska
Don Busse’s greenhouse, Prince of Wales Island, Southeast Alaska
It’s mid February in Southeast Alaska and it feels like Spring is just around the corner. On my runs, I’m seeing early buds that will likely be stymied by the coming snow storm. I’m well aware this is the most cliché time to write about garden planning so I’ll try to avoid pretending I know anything useful about gardening and refrain from giving you many useful tips or tricks. I have never gardened in Southeast Alaska.
However, since I can remember, my dad has been planting a garden in the backyard of the suburban house I grew up in outside Boston. My most vivid memories of the garden are of throwing rotten tomatoes with the neighborhood kids, of beans climbing up the swing set, and of tossing Dollar Store hand grenades left over from my brother’s birthday party at rabbits that inevitably got through the fence. (No rabbits were harmed, the plastic grenades just made loud noises). Of the produce, I mostly remember fat stringy beans, watery yellow summer squash, and bitter unidentified greens. I always wished we could plant watermelons and corn and basically anything that we weren’t growing, but my dad was ruthlessly practical when it came to the garden and the focus was on vegetables that grew well in our climate without much watering, fertilizing or maintenance.
Regardless of my dad’s early attempts to make gardening bland and boring, it is difficult to snuff out the joy found in age-tinted memories of digging in the dirt and watching a seed grow into a recognizable vegetable. So ever since Jeff and I bought our new lot in Ketchikan I’ve been considering and re-considering the best locations for garden beds, perennials and fruit trees not just for the enjoyment, but also a little bit out of necessity.
It’s a lot harder to get fresh food when you live on an island in Southeast Alaska. When I lived in Wyoming I kept a small garden, and while it may have been healthier than industrially produced food, I’m not sure it was much cheaper than what I would have gotten in the grocery store. In Ketchikan though, I’m motivated to garden by the lure of much higher quality garden foods at a lower price than what you can find at the store.
When you mention gardening in Ketchikan or google gardening in Southeast Alaska, most of the information will lament how difficult it is to garden in Southeast. I don’t know if it’s a strategy to manage expectations or self-reassurance, but everyone wants to tell you gardening is hard. Like hunters not-so-casually specifying that, indeed, they only hunt public land, usually many, many miles into the backcountry, where the weather conditions are hot and dry and the moon is full and the animals are mostly only active at night. And you begin to wonder if these pursuits are about procuring food or demonstrating superiority or challenging yourself against whatever nature throws at you and hoping to be pleasantly surprised.
Naturally, when I lived in Laramie, Wyoming, I was told it was a hard place to garden. We had a short growing season, poor soils, hail storms and tornadoes, and any number of pests. But now that I live in Ketchikan, everyone tells me this is the hardest place to garden. Cold, poor, acidic soils, rapid fluctuations in weather conditions and rainy, cool summers as well as bear and deer are all a challenge. I don’t doubt that gardening has a unique set of challenges anywhere.
Abby’s garden in Laramie, Wyoming.
While Ketchikan is cool and rainy year-round, it is also one of the greenest places I have ever seen. There are foraging opportunities from April to October. If you knew how hard we tried to grow blueberries when I was a kid, and how much we cherished each single berry that we harvested, you might appreciate the abundance that grows wild here. There are also rumors that you can find feral potatoes on islands in Southeast from old Native fish camps and stories of early settlers planting gardens in April before heading out for a season of fishing and returning to unmaintained, yet usable produce at the end of the summer. I can’t confirm if these things are true, but they do suggest that contrary to popular opinion, there are lots of things that will grow in Ketchikan.
Maybe it’s not that it’s hard to have a garden, it’s just hard to have a garden filled with what you want.
Gardening in Southeast Alaska, by the Juneau Garden Club is the best real resource I’ve found. Hot tip - if you ask the lady who owns Northshore Gardens in Ketchikan about good gardening information she will offer to lend you her personal copy on the condition you promise to return it, or it is also available from the Ketchikan Public Library if you prefer more official borrowing set ups. The past few weeks I’ve also been scouring the internet for information on gardening in Southeast but most of the information is relatively generic.
1) Grow things that are suitable to your climate. You can find a list recommended for Southeast here, mostly cool season vegetables including leafy greens and roots. There are ever increasing catalogs of vegetables available to home growers so I’m pretty excited just to grow some leafy greens that we don’t get in the stores here.
2) Find or create a good growing microclimate. Gardening resources across the country recommend sunny and south facing areas and raised beds or rows that warm faster and drain quickly, keeping the soils warm and hospitable to plants. This is really just common sense at this point. If you’re really committed to growing warm season vegetables in Southeast, you have to find a way to increase the heat and maybe lengthen the season – dark plastic with holes cut to insert zucchini plants, covered beds or hoop houses for beans or squash or of course a greenhouse is the gold standard for tomatoes, cucumbers and squashes. All of these things have tradeoffs between resource and time investment and the ability to grow vegetables that really shouldn’t grow here. I’m not sure it's worth it to grow an abundance of tomatoes or cucumbers for canning or pickling when canned goods are easily shipped on the barge, so we’ll probably garden a few seasons before we decide how much infrastructure we want to build.
3) Build good soils. This is perhaps the most unique aspect of growing in Southeast. If you don’t want to buy new soil every year, you have to learn how to build your own soil. The heavy rains in Southeast endlessly leach nutrients and minerals, so most people add abundant fertilizer each year. Here’s a recent video on building soils for gardening on the cheap. In short, many people swear by salmon carcasses and seaweed. Just make sure it is completely buried or else it can attract bears. Of course many people are skeptical, and will assure you that salmon will without doubt draw bears and other pests. There’s also the odd person that will chime in that you use salmon to fertilize because it draws bears and they are a natural rototiller and will mix up your garden beds for you. You have to assume this is a joke except that it is Alaska and it takes all types.
4) Pest control. Deer, bear and birds can be a nuisance, as well as slugs and your typical root maggots and aphids and lower 48 pests. A lot of people fence or cover gardens and there’s a range of organic deterrents that are easily google-able for insects. We’re considering an electric fence because it won’t block any views, is easy to put up and take down while we figure out where we want things, is surprisingly affordable, and will hopefully keep the bears out of the apple trees in a few years. (I don’t know if it will really work for bears but that will be future Jeff’s problem. Worst case scenario we’ll have a bear viewing deck).
One of Abby’s Laramie harvests in 2021.
While some approaches are more suspect than others, how you garden and why you garden are personal choices and the only way to figure out what works for you is to try.
We won’t actually be planting much this year because we’ll be in the process of building our house and I’ve got a summer gig as a soil scientist over on Prince of Wales Island this summer, so we’ll be staying with Jeff’s mom. But I do have ambitions to get both ornamental and fruit trees established on our property. I’m also hoping to transplant some rhubarb and raspberries from Jeff’s childhood home on Prince of Wales. The rhubarb came with his parents when they moved up from Colorado and we’re real suckers for that kind of family history.
I garden mostly because it makes more sense to grow things than to buy them at the store. So that means we’ll be starting with cool season vegetables and berries. I guess you could call my dad’s ruthlessly practical approach to gardening inspirational.
