Gardening in Alaska : A summer of luck

Talk Dirt To Me

Do you love to make mud pies, grow a houseplant, eat veggies, or stop to smell the bouquet on your co-workers desk? Everyone enjoys a bit of green growing around him or her and then there are those that are passionate and needy when it comes to dabbling in the dirt. With this blog, we'll try to satisfy those needs and tell you about what's going on with the Anchorage gardening scene. You know, as I finally learned, it's all about the dirt.

Photographer and gardener Fran Durner (fdurner@adn.com) writes the blog.

Interactive Map

2008 Anchorage garden tour

Take an interactive tour of the gardens showing in Anchorage's garden tour, with photos and audio commentary from each gardener.

A summer of luck

Posted by talkdirt

Posted: October 9, 2008 - 2:40 pm

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tomatoes: A bountiful harvest. Photo by Elizabet Bluemink tomatoes: A bountiful harvest. Photo by Elizabet BlueminkBy Elizabeth Bluemink
Anchorage Daily News reporter (and gardener.)

I got lucky this summer.

While many of my vegetables planted outside did poorly, I grew plentiful tomatoes, cucumbers, squash and several varieties of basil in a brand-new greenhouse.

It cost about $900 to build from scratch last summer, using polycarbonate paneling, purchased lumber and salvaged decking material.

Because of our decision not to increase home energy costs, we built it as a passive solar greenhouse: lots of windows but no heating or fans.

Frankly, that decision worried me.

I marched out my starts in the spring, wondering if any of them would survive the cool nights and sizzling days.

To my surprise, by late summer, we have harvested hundreds of small to medium-sized tomatoes, most of them cold-tolerant varieties such as Stupice (excellent), Polar Star (not so great) and a delicious cherry variety called Sun Gold.

Thanks to the greenhouse, I enjoyed my best-ever basil harvest. My first-ever cucumber crop was excellent, too.

My secret weapon for running athe greenhouse: a cheap, digital high-low thermometer.

I used it daily to monitor overnight temperatures, daytime highs and other key weather fluctuations.

Based on the readings, I knew when and how often to throw open all the windows and the door and when to shut them.

But as I suspected, our lack of climate control created a multitude of problems.

I tried growing bell and jalapeno peppers.

No luck.

It was probably too chilly at night. The wet weather also made the small fruit susceptible to mold.

Every single pepper rotted while it was still tiny. (Except one stunted bell pepper, which I'm still monitoring.)

We built the greenhouse from scratch. Photo by Elizabet Bluemink.Mold also attacked the zucchini, and to a lesser extent, the cucumber, tomato and basil plants.

We tried using a solar-powered fan, but it wasn't big enough to move the air around.

Another problem: the tomato plants grew taller than the roof. Some days, I came home to find branches poking out the windows.

The last problem was more of an minor annoyance: we used rubber bins filled with water to store heat at night. But their lids accumulated stagnant pools of water that had to be emptied.

Maybe next year, all of us gardeners will get lucky and the weather will be sunny and warm.

Either way, we're planning to keep the greenhouse passive.

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