The wave of Grow it Yourself is breaking over Southeast Alaska, a flood of seed starting, indoor seedling gardens and raised bed building is filling the gardening airwaves and the basic question of “What to Grow” is on every tongue.
Our long cool days and relatively short growing season leads us to some obvious choices, relying on fruiting plants like tomatoes and peppers, both of which need protection here, is a long term process. The bulk of our food production is going to be based on plants with delicious leaves, stems, flower buds and even the flowers themselves.
Leafy vegetables are really good here, the light and day length blend to provide great growing conditions. All the salad vegetables; leafy non heading lettuces, parsley, green onions, beet greens, baby kales, Asian greens like mizuna, and the widely varied mixtures called Mesclun do well, and nothing grows so satisfyingly as celery, once you have eaten fresh celery you will realize what you have been missing all these years.
Easily picked and lightly steamed swiss chard, any of the kales, collards and turnip/mustard type greens, are also really great producers. Beet greens can be picked in several stages as the planting is thinned to 2-3 inches apart so the growing roots have enough space. An exciting companion to these familiar crops is French Sorrel, with its piquant taste and succulent texture, this slightly spicy perennial vegetable adds another dimension to our salads or following the French it makes a delicious clear soup.
Edible flowers and flower parts include the broccoli, cauliflower, and brussels sprouts, and they too become part of the harvest as they are thinned out to 18-24 inches apart. Young broccoli has become so popular that special varieties called broccolini that make small scattered buds in 55 days instead of big round heads in 85 days have become among the most desired vegetables.
Having said all this, there is no doubt that Juneau’s favorite crops are potatoes, peas and carrots.
Potatoes are an amazing plant, there are thousands of types of potatoes, all from the mountainous regions of South America. When I was young I lived in the highlands of Ecuador and bought my food in the street markets. The market for potatoes is half of the total market space, and the ladies in their derbies and shawls sit in their splendor surrounded by piles of spuds. They are pink, purple, red, white, or creamy, and range from tiny twisted fingerlings to enormous earth treasure tubers. They are treasures that have allowed farming populations to survive on small acreages all over the world.
We in Southeast Alaska are no different, the more exotic forms are treasured, but the bulk of the crop every year is the golden yellow Yukon Golds. Sweet and smooth, great as bakers or mashers, stir fried or sautéed, they fill the mouth and smooth the digestion.
A few pounds of seed potatoes become a winter’s supply in a single summer.
Peas are so similar that it is astounding; they are another staff of subsistence. A couple of handfuls of seeds will make sweet fresh peas all summer long, and remembering my childhood experiences in my mother’s organic you-pick farm, there are very few pleasures as direct as picking and eating fresh peas.
Last summer I saw a remarkable pea growing system in the Highlands above Juneau-Douglas High School. The gardeners had made a tunnel of concrete reinforcing wire with 4 inch squares, and planted peas along the outside. The peas covered the structure and the pea pods were dangling inside so the picker was just reaching up and gathering the pods. It was very cool.
All these nutritious crops can really be enhanced with fresh herbs, and we use as many as we can. Parsley, either the French Curly or the Flat Italian, are the most common, but there are a dozen more. Rosemary, oregano and thyme were originally the wild plants around the Mediterranean, they have become the basis for the flavor of many cultures, and we inherited them as part of our recipes. Cilantro, mints, green onions, and the parsleys are cooler climate crops, from further north, but we love them as well.
And there are always these local favorites; green onions, radishes, raspberies, Hinnomakki gooseberries, red and black currants, and all those delicious strawberries. What’s not to like?
Growing your own means fresh as it can be, and only picking what you will eat means no waste.
• David Lendrum and Margaret Tharp operate Landscape Alaska, a nursery and landscape business located on the Back Loop Road in Juneau. Visit their website at www.landscapealaska.com, or reach them at landscapealaska@gmail.com.
