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"Conversations with Alaska Gardeners" is your gateway to exploring the vibrant world of gardening in Juneau, Alaska, where the wilderness of towering mountains and the vast blue sea meet. This podcast series brings to life the unique challenges and unmatched rewards of gardening in the rugged yet beautiful terrain of The Last Frontier. Join us as we celebrate the passion and resilience of Juneau's gardening community, sharing insights, tips, and stories from those who thrive amidst the challenges of Alaskan gardening.
Conversations with Alaskan Gardeners is your gateway to exploring the vibrant world of gardening here in Juneau. Join us as we celebrate the passion and resilience of Juneau's gardening community, sharing insights, tips, and stories from the experts. Here's Margaret Tharp and David Lundrum of Landscape Alaska on KIN
Speaker 2:Well, morning, Juneau. Good morning, Douglas. Good morning, everybody that can hear the sound of our voices. The value that is right. If you can if you can be happy going out in your garden today, you are really a true gardener.
Speaker 2:There's no doubt about it.
Speaker 3:Well, I'm not a true gardener,
Speaker 2:I guess. Looking around the nursery this morning was quite a show. Yeah. It's like been
Speaker 4:blown apart.
Speaker 2:Everything's blown apart. Yes.
Speaker 3:And
Speaker 4:This was my supposed
Speaker 3:to last for several days through the weekend.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's what I hear too. I'm ready for it. Sorta ready for it.
Speaker 3:I'm gonna do something indoors.
Speaker 2:Oh, we're gonna start getting ready for the fall. Just cutting things back, getting things ready, getting them organized for winter storage, looking for what I have to prune. You know, a lot of what we're doing this time of year is cutting things back for people.
Speaker 3:House keeping.
Speaker 2:Getting their gardens ready for the winter. And in that case, those little tools I got from Tyler Reddell are just proving themselves to be invaluable. I love the interchangeable tools that go on the weed eater motor, you know, and the and the motor there's several sizes of motors, you can get to a smaller one that's that's lighter and easier to handle or or for heavier work like what we're doing in Douglas now. We use the heavier motor and the sickle bar pruner and cut those things right on down to the ground, going through the Astilbe patches and the and all the big bunches of perennials, cutting them up. Those tools from Tyler really prove their worth.
Speaker 2:And then after having used the big ones, go to the little ones and all the little fine work we have to do.
Speaker 3:And clean it up.
Speaker 2:Yep. It's really been a marvelous thing. Thanks a lot, Tyler Renal. You really changed my life bringing those tools into town. And
Speaker 3:And then not only that, you sell them to the people we garden for.
Speaker 2:Everyone people look at us using those tools and think, wow, that's just great. That little tiny chainsaw that you can put in your pocket.
Speaker 3:That we have three of.
Speaker 2:Uh-huh. Yes. Because they get used a lot a lot. Okay. Thank you ever so much, you guys at Tyler, and thanks for being such nice people to work with.
Speaker 2:So we've been also transplanting a few things, you know, getting ready for the next wave. It's still a good time for planting. It's still a good time for transplanting. And people are surprised when we transplant things and the process that we go through. Essentially oh, by the way, this is a call in show.
Speaker 2:If you want to ask any questions, you want to give some suggestions, you want to make any comments, 805861800. Gets right in here. You can text to that phone number also. So if you're going to transplant something, the first thing to realize is that you don't look at the plant when you start digging. Essentially, you dig a ring around it, leaving a column of earth in the center undisturbed.
Speaker 2:And that way, you're able to keep most of the root ball most of the root system intact. You can cut them as you go around them. You use a sharp shovel, you end up digging a trench around a column, and then you widen the trench to the outside so that you can can squat down and carve away at the bottom of the column. And then once you got the bottom of the column carved away, then you get your tarp and pull it in and pull it underneath the plant and lean the plant back into the tarp because you never want to pick it up by the stem or the trunk and have all that weight hanging on its roots. We pick up the tarp and move it like that.
Speaker 3:Have somebody help you.
Speaker 2:Oh yes. And sometimes it's four people, you know, and some of the plants we move, they're substantial enough. If we had two more people, it'd make it even easier.
Speaker 3:Uh-huh, exactly.
Speaker 2:And then but the real secret to transplanting stuff, have the hole dug before you dig up your plant. Have everything ready. Have the obstacles out of the way so it's going be a smooth, easy motion. The last thing you want to do is be holding things up with no place to put it down. That's really that makes you feel very foolish.
Speaker 3:Well, also when you go to plant something, look ahead fifteen years. How big is it going to be? Do you really want it in that place? Because, you know, the last thing you really want to do is have to dig up something that's fifteen years old and move it to some other spot. I mean, yes, you can do it.
Speaker 3:But who wants to?
Speaker 2:I know. Like like I say, it's a cute little spirea, and it's gonna look really great right next to the deck. Well, five years later, you have to move your chair over because there's no room on the deck. The plant has grown up so big and large and spread out so happily and it looks so pretty. Really, you don't want to have to move it.
Speaker 3:Exactly.
Speaker 2:And also you don't want to have to keep pruning it back as heavily as you have to. There is that about pruning something back real heavily. It makes it want it to grow back twice as big.
Speaker 3:Uh-huh. Well, you know, and I think about things like roses. The roses that live here are really thorny and difficult. And yes, you can dig them up and move them, but they're not easy.
Speaker 2:They're not easy to dig up, they're not easy to reestablish, but they're tough.
Speaker 3:They are.
Speaker 2:Also those kind of talked about, those rugosa roses, they really do spread out. We're working in a yard in Douglas, and it's been, I don't know, twenty years since the roses were planted there, and they've taken over an area easily three times as big as the the area or four times as big as the area
Speaker 3:that Because they send out runners.
Speaker 2:And the runners are out into the other parts of the garden. And so as you're cutting down the astilbes, there are a whole bunch of rose bushes there that they're to be.
Speaker 3:We have to eradicate.
Speaker 2:We have to dig them up, get rid of them. It's always always excitement in the yard. I gotta say though, I really admire those rose bushes. I think they're admirable performers. I love the aroma they get, and they just look so sturdy and happy.
Speaker 2:That's what you call the Sitka Rose. Sitka Rose is the species Brugosa, and they are persistent. And like Margaret says, they send out runners and they spread. They're originally from the beachfront in Northern Japan, and they grow in the sand there. So they're all adapted for doing that kind of stuff.
Speaker 3:Well, this garden's at least thirty years old.
Speaker 2:At least thirty years
Speaker 3:That we're working in.
Speaker 2:So fall colors are beginning to show up.
Speaker 3:A lot came on this week. My Japanese maples. It's like the light bulb got turned on.
Speaker 2:Margaret has a pair of Japanese maples that are over a 100 years old that we've moved. Every time we've moved the nursery, we moved the maple trees. That means they've been dug up and transplanted six, seven times now.
Speaker 4:Well, when I was up there this week, I saw you have a couple. And didn't you say you just put Japanese maples on sale with your birthday sale extension?
Speaker 2:As matter of fact, I put the the most fantastic Japanese maples we've got on sale in the last couple days. The first one is Munn's Moonrise, and that's a cross between a Japanese maple and a Korean maple. And the Korean maple is tough and strong and bigger than the Japanese maples. It'll get to be 15 or 20 feet. And the color changing on them is spectacular.
Speaker 2:On the month's moonrise, it's a different color every week. They come out flaming red in the very earliest Flaming, part of the flaming red. The very first leaves come out a bright, bright red. And then as they mature, they go gold and then green. And so the young growth is always red on the outside of the tree, and the main body is gold and green.
Speaker 2:So it's like a golden green glowing mass with a red nimbus around the outside of it. And as it as it draws on to ape to autumn, the gold is going to fade into the orange, and it's going to be pumpkin orange with a bright red edge in another 10. They're just a spectacular tree. And there's two of them.
Speaker 4:Right? Because I was up there and I saw some I We saw them
Speaker 2:sold one. Okay. Okay. But it's a you know, the guy that hybridized is a friend of ours, and has been for a long time. So we've had access to this tree.
Speaker 2:We've probably planted, I don't know, 50 of them in June in the last ten years, and half of those last year alone. And they they look great. You can pick them out right now because they glow. You drive down the road. That's that's one of the things that stands right out at your eye, that glowing Munn's moonrise golden color.
Speaker 2:Yummy. Is the
Speaker 4:reason you don't see or I didn't see those in Anchorage much because of the moose destroying most of the trees? Is that what?
Speaker 2:It's so much colder in Anchorage. Okay. You know, it's a whole another climate zone colder. So if we're four, they're three, you know, and so their palate is much more limited. Okay.
Speaker 2:I was I heard on the radio though that they're having their weed pull this weekend for the invasive species and they're advertising it as a singles meat. I thought that's a great idea. Let's go out and pull some weeds, do some good, meet some like minded people, have a good time eradicating Dig up a friend. That's right. Okay.
Speaker 2:So what else is showing color in the fall? I mean, the roses are turning gold too, but azaleas, the deciduous azaleas. That's one of the real stars of this time of year. It's a it's kind of a nondescript green during the summertime, but as the nights get colder and the chlorophyll drops away, the incredibly red color comes out on those azaleas, and it's just beautiful. And, you know, even with no flowers on them, there's still the aroma of the azalea about it.
Speaker 2:It's just rich. It's not a it's not a sharp smell. It's a kind of a a rich, you know, if you could describe smell like you do sound, it's a rolling kind of a a rhythmic aroma. How about that?
Speaker 3:Sounds great, Dave.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I like it too. And the maples are turning. But what else is gonna turn color real soon are the Bevans geraniums. Bevans is one of my favorite kinds of geraniums.
Speaker 2:And it's a it's a stoloniferous kind, which means it's got a a stem that lays flat on the ground and runs and the leaves come off of that. And roots go down from the stem into the ground, but the there's no it doesn't look like there's any branches on it. It's just a big fat stem like a caterpillar that twists around and then the leaves stand up off of that and they're just beginning to turn and they get so incredibly red and they get so dense that the weeds can't get through them. It's really a workhorse of a plant.
Speaker 3:Are you gonna divide one of those?
Speaker 2:I think I'll divide one. Yeah. Uh-huh. We should have a dividing perennials workshop next Sunday.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You probably should before it snows.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And by way, it's not gonna snow for another at least another month.
Speaker 3:Knock on wood.
Speaker 2:Knock on wood is right.
Speaker 3:It's been
Speaker 2:a hot Hatcher Pass.
Speaker 3:It's been really cold here.
Speaker 2:It sure seems like it, doesn't it? Uh-huh. Well, I'm not expecting it to snow.
Speaker 3:I know.
Speaker 2:I'm disappointed before.
Speaker 3:It's exaggerating. Yes.
Speaker 2:I think I will. Yes. Okay. This is the first announcement, but we'll plan for it. Next Sunday, starting at noon, we'll have a dividing perennials workshop.
Speaker 2:And And singles mingle? Singles can mingle, but you can bring your kids too. It'll be a Perfect. It'll be a multigenerational family friendly event. But yeah.
Speaker 2:And we met at Landscape Alaska at a perennials dividing workshop, saw each other across the the clump of irises, our eyes met, romance ensued. I could see it now. Okay. And what else is going to start turning color are those big fleshy Bergenia leaves. Bergenia is a real, real old fashioned kind of a plant.
Speaker 2:You don't recognize it from its name, but when you look at it, you say, oh, yeah. My mom and grandmother have that in their yard.
Speaker 3:Isn't it classified as a saxophrag? It used
Speaker 2:to be called just a saxophrag, but it's it's related to them, but it's not one. Okay. And you you determine family relationships by the flower, how the flower is formed, where it comes from, and where the fertilization goes on when it finally does get fertilized. And Bergenia has that long stem that comes up with those bells on top of it. And they're they're bright pink mostly.
Speaker 2:The ones we have are dark red, but most of them are bright, bright pink. And the fleshy leaves stay on all winter long and they turn dark red, really seen against the snow. They're they're a very colorful combination. And then in the springtime, the oldest leaves kind of wither up and the new leaves come out growing in the bright green. And when I say fleshy, they're half an inch, three quarters of an inch thick the leaves are, and they're squishy.
Speaker 2:They look they look really, really primitive. Like, they might have been unchanged since the dinosaurs were munching on them.
Speaker 3:There you go.
Speaker 2:I like them. PJM rhododendrons are starting to turn color too. PJM is a particular kind of rhododendron, very different from most of the others, where most rhododendrons kind of spread out. This is a call in show. 805861800.
Speaker 2:Missing your opportunity here. Okay. Pretend I'm calling because I wanna circle back
Speaker 4:to something you said with aerial roots and tailing or trailings. And I remember being a kid and parents telling me to go pull all those horseradish out of the garden, and I went, uh-uh. I'm just gonna rototill it. Yeah. You And destroyed the entire garden, and there was just horseradish everywhere.
Speaker 2:That's exactly how it works. Somebody called me up the other day and said, would it hurt my rose bush to be planted in next to my horseradish? I said, I bet not. They look like they'd get along just fine. Both of them world conquering species, never gonna be destroyed.
Speaker 2:And you have no idea. Horseradish may be a beneficial companion. It may be, you know, all that aromatic kind of stuff originally was protection, you know, protection from the bugs, protection from the animals that are gonna eat it. And maybe that would help the the roses. Roses seem like they certainly attract a lot of pests.
Speaker 2:So fall cleanup, cutting things down to the ground, giving them their last fertilization if it's something that can take it now, and you want to give them something that's moderately soft in terms of fertilizer, not much nitrogen. Nitrogen is going make it have a bunch of green growth and you know, this is the wrong time of year for that. So fertilizer like eight thirty two sixteen would be just dandy. Twelve twelve twelve is okay, but you want to stay away from that forty five zero zero. That's just the wrong end of the sec spectrum for us now.
Speaker 2:We're doing our last applications of the nematodes, and the nematodes are to attack the larvae of some disastrous beetles. Beetles that whose larvae eat the root systems. And so the nematodes are so small that you can't see them. Yeah. They're invisible to the naked eye, where the grub from the beetle is half an inch long.
Speaker 2:So you can certainly see those, but you can't see the attacking nematodes. But the nematodes get mixed into water and poured around the plant, and they go down around the root system hunting for these grubs and attack them.
Speaker 4:Hey. Wait a minute. I'm having flashbacks to comic books. This sounds like sea sea this sounds like sea monkeys. A sea monkey family.
Speaker 4:No. I'm kidding. Because I was up there and talked to Cordova, and she gave me a little bit and said, put it in a mason jar, what, one teaspoon, some water mix, and that's one dose. Is that right?
Speaker 2:Yep. That's one dose. Okay. And and that's probably 5,000,000 in your little little half a teaspoon dose. It's not just
Speaker 4:The Sea Monkey family. It's a subdivision. You go.
Speaker 2:I'm also pruning this time of year. I'm pruning stuff that's that's gotten damaged during the season or damaged during the wintertime. And, the homeowner, wrapped it in duct tape or, tied it up with string saying, I hope it's gonna be okay. It rarely is. It turns out that that if something splits, you might get it to to the bark to grow back around it, but the wood's never gonna grow back together.
Speaker 2:So it's it's vulnerable at that stage and vulnerable to splitting again and tearing further. You're miles and miles ahead to choose whichever is the dominant, more easily saved portion and cut the other one off and cut it off cleanly and let it heal up as well as you can. When you cut things off on a tree or a shrub, you look back from where where you're gonna cut it, and you look back and you see what is growing out of the main stem and how close it is. Generally, you want to cut back to a bud that's usually right above a leaf, and the direction that bud is pointing on the stem is the direction the new branch will take. So you can prune away from the center and prune out to the outside, so it always has that open bowl shape, which is really what most of the ornamental and fruit bearing plants, that's what they want.
Speaker 2:They want to be able to get light into the middle of the plant and have a strong support system. And the way to do that, of course, is to force it to, you know. So you take your young tree when you buy it at the nursery, and they have been pruned to look like a miniature version of a big tree so that they're gonna be able to be sold. They've got a bunch of branches on them and a short little trunk, and you think about, okay. So fifteen years from now, what what's gonna what this tree is gonna look like.
Speaker 2:Well, fifteen years from now, you're gonna want it to have a taller trunk. You're gonna have a bee so that you can walk underneath it. You wanna have a bee so that you can mow your grass underneath it. So none of those branches that you see on the tree now are gonna stay. All those are gonna go away before it achieves its mature size and shape.
Speaker 2:So you're going to look ahead and say, okay, what I really need now is to maintain the upright growth of my central spar. The central trunk is one main line of trunk that goes up, so you gradually prune the lower branches off as the tree gets taller and then you're able to get around it.
Speaker 3:How about with currants? All those currants we have in pots that have really tall leaders, but you really when you plant them in the ground, are they gonna branch out more?
Speaker 2:Not just branch. They're gonna branch out more.
Speaker 3:But
Speaker 2:mean But what they're gonna do is the root system's gonna spread Right. And more branches are gonna come up out of the ground. Mhmm. And you can sell tell it when you look at them because right around the edge of the can, it's got little tiny leaves coming up out of the ground. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:The bread the roots went out and ran into a wall and their response is, beep.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Head up.
Speaker 3:That's what
Speaker 2:I thought. Uh-huh. And and boy, currants really bore a lot of fruit this year. Yeah. Tremendous amount.
Speaker 2:And if you haven't tasted a black currant, you're in for a real surprise. It's it's kind of it's got kind of a musky aroma, but it's got a really, really sweet flavor to it. I like them. I and but not as much as I like the gooseberries. I'm a gooseberry fanatic.
Speaker 2:And the gooseberries we have from Finland called hinomaki, they are just wonderful. Sweet like grapes.
Speaker 3:We still have some of them at the nursery. A lot of the currants went down to Montana Creek though.
Speaker 2:Being stored away for the winter. Uh-huh. Okay. Well, we're open today from ten till four, and all the things that I've put on sale for my big birthday sale are still on sale. It's everything that has been added to the list is still there and ready to go.
Speaker 2:So it's rhododendrons and snowmound spireas and perennials.
Speaker 3:Do you have roses?
Speaker 2:I don't have roses yet. I don't put roses on today. Anyway, you know, I have a
Speaker 4:lot of questions that normal gardeners would already know and I don't know anything. So, you help me quite a bit but in the fall season, I remember years ago talking to my wife saying, oh, we should do this and nope, you don't do that in the spring. It happens you do that in the fall. Since we're Yeah, in the fall definite seasonal tasks. What are the plants that they should be getting now, or taking care of, or planting now that because spring came, it's like, yeah, let's get one of those.
Speaker 4:Then we're told, no, don't do that till the fall.
Speaker 2:Well, this is a great time for planting shrubbery and small trees. Just a wonderful time. The soil's still plenty warm and there's moisture in the air. There's a the season is changing, so the plant is sending its energy from the growing tips at the top down to the root system, which is really a good time for moving them. And that means that new roots are being grown and starch is being translocated from up above, it being mined out of the leaves and stems and deposited down in the root system.
Speaker 2:And they they like it move being moved this time of year. And that lets them also get more established during the wintertime and then the early spring. So they don't have to have as big a water deficit as they do if you move them in the springtime. Okay. And, actually, plants are bags of water.
Speaker 2:Like us. We are too. That's right. But if you think about them like that, like, oh, it's a bag of water and the only way it can get water is to have it absorbed through the root hairs. And those are just the little tiny pieces that are at the very periphery of the root system.
Speaker 2:So when you dig something up, you've cut all that off and it has to grow new root hairs before it can absorb any moisture. And just like us, they can't live long without moisture. They can live a long time without fertilizer, but not much longer without without water. So they wanna grow it back as soon as they can. And when you transplant something or you plant something, you have to realize that the the plant doesn't absorb water from the surrounding soil until its roots actually grow out into it.
Speaker 2:It has to do that. So you it's up to you to keep it moist, make sure it stays well irrigated while you while it's going through its transitional period. And it's not so much that you bake your your watering basin at the edge of the hole. You make your watering basin inside the the hole at the edge of the root ball. That way, any water you get is directed into the root system itself.
Speaker 3:People don't have any idea what a watering basin is, David. It's such an old fashioned
Speaker 2:it's such
Speaker 3:an old fashioned thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You're right. I I you're right. They don't. And and most people are surprised to see it.
Speaker 2:But, you know, it's really it makes a world of difference.
Speaker 3:It's a mound that goes all the way around the root ball so that when you water it, the water goes down into the root ball and doesn't spread out over the surface of the ground like it would without it.
Speaker 2:Yep. The water just runs over the surface, it's not getting down to where the roots need it. Right. Okay. Well, that pretty much covers my list of topics for today.
Speaker 2:Come see us. Cordova will be there today. I'll be there. Landscape Alaska on the back loop road. We still don't have a sign on the street, but our mailbox is painted to look like rhododendron flowers, and you can pick it out easily.
Speaker 2:If you have any trouble, look at our website. There's pictures of our driveway on the website.
Speaker 4:Cleverly hidden just one mile north of the Hawk Bay Roundabout. Cleverly hidden. There you go.
Speaker 2:I
Speaker 3:like I like Harmony Heights.
Speaker 2:So this is Mark and Dave from Landscape Alaska. We're open today, we're open tomorrow, we're closed on Mondays, and every day through the week, it's ten till four, and come and see us. It's really a beautiful, beautiful site. And the view of the glacier out over the nursery, stunning. Absolutely stunning.
Speaker 2:So until next week, it's Mark and Dave from Landscape Alaska.
Speaker 4:Let's see if we see if we still have this caller. We got two lines lit up, so
Speaker 2:let's see. Okay. Somebody. Good morning.
Speaker 4:And let's
Speaker 2:Are you there?
Speaker 4:And hang on.
Speaker 2:Hello? Are you there? No. Lost Nope. They knew the show was closed.
Speaker 2:End of the show. We're over. Yep. Okay. And remember, happy gardening.
Speaker 1:Conversations with Alaskan Gardeners is your gateway to exploring the vibrant world of gardening here in Juneau. Join us as we celebrate the passion and resilience of Juneau's gardening community, sharing sites, tips, and stories from the experts.