Cold soil and hot compost: Southeast prepares for spring at Garden Conference

Gardeners from all over the region gathered in Haines this week for the Southeast Alaska Garden Conference. From those with only a season under their belts to those who have weathered decades of Southeast’s tough growing conditions, the weekend was an opportunity to swap ideas, get compost tips, and commiserate about slugs.

During the heart of February in Southeast Alaska, the idea of growing anything — let alone tomatoes, cantaloupes, or corn — could be dismissed as escapism.

But for more than 120 people from Whitehorse to Ketchikan who gathered for the Southeast Alaska Garden Conference in Haines, there’s no time to waste on naysayers: spring is coming, whether they’re ready or not.

And Darren Snyder, a presenter from the University of Alaska Fairbank’s Co-Operative Extension Program, knows it will take a lot of work to get ready.

“Plants will grow anywhere,” he said. “But the plants that we’re trying to grow are not from here. And they won’t just grow here. So, we need to be modifying our environment on a continuous basis in order to have the plants that we want to grow here, grow here.”

He described Southeast Alaska’s notorious challenges.

“We get our clouds, and we get our rain, and we get our snow and our ice fields. . .”

Snyder says the primary step to success is choosing plants that prosper in cold soil, little heat, and short growing seasons. But for some new gardeners, it’s not that simple. Tristan Sebens grew up in Haines.

“Root maggots. Holy crap. I am ready to totally give up on brassica,” he said. “These pernicious little bastards — these flies, they come down and they lay their eggs. We jumped through so many hoops last year, and they got in anyway, and again they totally ruined the crop. I never thought I could be that mad at an invertebrate.”

Sebens lives in Juneau now, but came home for the weekend to seek answers he couldn’t find elsewhere.

“People who have been growing vegetables in Alaska for twenty, thirty, forty years — they know an immense amount and you can save yourself a lot of trouble.”

For long-time growers, it’s also a chance to compare experiments. Kari Lundgren, who owns a commercial-sized greenhouse in Sitka, is looking to expand it.

“My mind exploded multiple times in the last two hours,” she said. “Very simple steps, that are affordable and sustainable, like making our own fish and seaweed tea. It would be golden, to support the microbes which do the hard work.”

And what are microbes?

To Jeff Lowenfels, the keynote speaker, that’s one of the most important questions the modern gardener should ask. After a lifetime of using synthetic fertilizers—

“To me, nitrogen was what the plants wanted, and it didn’t make a difference if it came from a manure, or if it came from a green or blue powder —”

—the death of one microscopic worm opened a new window of understanding into the soil.

“One day, a friend of mine sent me a picture of a nematode, which is a small microscopic worm, being strangled by a single fungal hyphae that was protecting a tomato root,” Lowenfels said. “The nematode was trying to get into the tomato root, the fungal hyphae prevented that from happening. There was a fungus protecting a plant!”

That realization led to a tremendous amount of research, three books, a 40-year newspaper column, and the honorific “Lord of the Roots.” Lowenfels is reshaping our understanding of how plants eat, and the microscopic communities that help them grow.

“We’re doing things, and have been doing things that destroy the soil, the soil structure, the nutrients in the soil, and the microbes in the soil, which cause the problems that gardeners try to fight,” he said.

His advice? Don’t rototill your soil: let those microbe communities be. Worms are good. Compost is king — and in Southeast, fish matter and seaweed are the crown jewels.

 

After a weekend of discussing food security and pests, microbes and micro-climates, spring no longer seems far away: it may actually be approaching too quickly for all that needs to be done.

 

Even so, it’s impossible not to daydream a little about what Southeast’s most successful gardeners are pulling off. Mardell Gunn was the conference’s organizing force, helping arrange home-cooked meals and homestays for participants. Listening to her talk about her garden is a bit like tripping into July.

“Kale, lettuce in general, broccoli’s pretty easy, cauliflower is a little bit tougher,” she said. “Cucumbers and tomatoes, in general, you have to grow them inside of a structure. There’s only a few of us who grow corn. I figured out how to stagger it so we get corn for about six to eight weeks in the summer.”

But even she’s got things to aspire to.

“The Sunshine girls are growing eggplant in a hoop house, so it can be done here,” she said. “They even grew cantaloupe.”
“Here?”
“Here!”

Hope springs eternal — even in cold soil.