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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 KINY.
Speaker 2:Good morning. Conversation with Alaskan gardeners back on the air. It's springtime and delightful. I'm sorry Margaret can't be with us this morning. Our son Connor is here with me instead, and we'll be going on talking about landscaping and gardening.
Speaker 2:This is a call in show, which is all over Southeast Alaska and the phone number here is (800) 586-1800. Is that correct?
Speaker 3:Yep. (907) 586-1800.
Speaker 2:9 0 7 5 8 6 1 8 No more 800 number. Okay, so call us up, have a conversation, give me some questions, talk to me, invite me to see something beautiful growing in your yard, ask us questions about anything having to do with landscape and horticulture and gardening. The history of gardening in Southeast Alaska, that's been our passion for the last forty five years. Margaret and I moved to Juneau, there weren't lawns in the valley. There was, you know, the only landscape there was in the valley was the McDonald's burgers.
Speaker 2:So things have really really changed and now there's no street you can drive down in Juneau Alaska that doesn't have things planted from landscape Alaska, Juneau's original landscape nursery. So, Khanh, thank you so much for coming and joining me. I know that this came as a surprise to you, but I'm just delighted to have you here.
Speaker 3:Oh, not at all. I'm really, really glad to be back. It's not my first time here behind the mic with you. It's it's been a while, but it's always fun being here. I have so many childhood memories of coming to the radio station and listening to you and mom run the show.
Speaker 3:And so, yeah, I'm really glad to be covering for my mom, Margaret, today. She's unable to join us. But it is springtime here in Juneau, Alaska. Skunk cabbage is coming up. Skunk cabbage.
Speaker 2:Aren't they just lovely?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Absolutely. All the birds are singing. You can still see snow on the mountains, but that doesn't mean that down here at water level, life isn't booming.
Speaker 2:And they always remind me of fingers reaching up out of the ground. Those skunk cabbages with that bright golden green color to them. It makes me think of, you know, the enamel on your fingernails Oh. Being all shiny and green Right. Reaching up like that and reaching for the sunlight.
Speaker 2:Oh, hello. We have a call. Good morning. Are you there?
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh, hi. Conversations. What can I do for you?
Speaker 5:Hi. I live in Portland, Oregon, and I just put some grass seed on my already grassed lawn. And I was wondering if I have to put topsoil on top or if it will there's a chance it will grow if
Speaker 4:I don't put top soil on top?
Speaker 2:Well, there's a couple things happening. Good morning, Lizzie. Good morning.
Speaker 3:Good morning, Lizzie.
Speaker 6:It's good
Speaker 7:to hear your voice.
Speaker 4:Good morning.
Speaker 2:Okay. And a couple of things are happening. One is that when there are sparse places in your lawn, you're trying to reseed it. You have to rake it pretty vigorously so you can actually see soil. Grass seed needs to be in contact with the dirt.
Speaker 2:Can't sit on top of the old dead grass and grow. And so when you put it down and you put it and make it in contact with the soil and you give it just a little bit of fertilizer and a little bit of lime, I mean a really little tiny bit, and then you cover it up with something that's gonna keep it moist. It doesn't have to be topsoil, it can be peat moss, it can be sawdust, it can be compost, but something has to stay there to keep the grass seed moist. Once the grass seed absorbs water and starts to do that physiological change, all its stored starch turns into actively growing material. And so it needs to stay moist or it will die then.
Speaker 2:And also there's all those predators, all those birds and they have got their eyes open looking for seed. And if they see it and they can get it, they will. So yes, you want to cover it up with something only like a sixteenth or an eighth of an inch is necessary. And Okay. Thanks for the call.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Thank you for the call.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Not only that.
Speaker 4:Thank you.
Speaker 2:You know that, we're both gonna sing happy birthday to Cole.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We absolutely love right now.
Speaker 7:You ready? Okay. Yeah. Ready? Happy birthday to you.
Speaker 7:Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Cole. Happy birthday to you.
Speaker 2:Alright. Thanks for the call.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much for calling. We love you guys and we miss you so much. Thank you for calling. It's really good to hear from you.
Speaker 2:How cool is that? That's, there's another call. Oh, good morning. Conversations. Hi.
Speaker 2:Hi.
Speaker 4:Good morning.
Speaker 2:Good morning.
Speaker 4:Guys are seeing you here. Station, your volume is so low. I can barely hear you guys.
Speaker 2:Oh, we'll have to have the control man turn us up louder.
Speaker 4:For two weeks. Do something with your volume. We like to hear the station too.
Speaker 2:Okay. Where are you calling from?
Speaker 6:Angoon.
Speaker 2:Oh, hello, Angoon. What a lovely location and perfect garden conditions. Thank you for calling. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Okay. Please turn your volume up. I love listening to you guys.
Speaker 2:I'm like, Albert, and
Speaker 4:I enjoyed listening to you guys.
Speaker 2:Alright. Thank you so much.
Speaker 3:That's really helpful.
Speaker 7:Thank you, dear.
Speaker 2:K. So we do a lot of interactive action with the communities around Southeast.
Speaker 7:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Because we send the material to all those Southeast communities from Yakutat to Sitka. Wow. And as a matter of fact, I'm packaging up lilacs to send to Cake this week.
Speaker 3:Oh great.
Speaker 2:And Tinker if you're listening to the radio I've got some really really beautiful shrubs for you with great big huge buds on them. So we'll send those out to you this week. And we're also we're sending stuff to ADAC. Woah. Woah.
Speaker 2:It's right. The very first time ever. Good morning, Conversations. Good morning.
Speaker 6:Good morning. Hi. I love your show. Do you know a climbing rose that will do well here in Alaska?
Speaker 2:You know, there there is actually a pretty good climbing rose developed by the Canadians and it's called, I believe it's called George Vancouver and I don't have any this year but if you send me an email to landscape alaska at gmail I'll see if I can get it added into one of my next shipments. It's a dark red single flower which means it's only got five petals on it, but generally the single flowers are much hardier than the others. And we've had them sporadically over the last twenty five years, and I know that in Juno there are half a dozen of them that are over eight feet tall.
Speaker 6:Oh, that is wonderful. And will they do well in Ketchikan also?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Even better in Ketchikan than here since you're so much warmer.
Speaker 6:Okay.
Speaker 2:Landscape Landscape at Gmail.
Speaker 6:No. I can't email you because I don't know the Internet and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:Okay. Well, why don't you give me your name?
Speaker 6:Okay. My name. Okay. I will. My name is Mary f Ginger Snap.
Speaker 2:I know you, Mary.
Speaker 6:Oh, you do? Oh.
Speaker 2:Yep. I
Speaker 6:don't think I ever met you.
Speaker 2:Well, I've talked to you on the phone before, Mary.
Speaker 6:Oh, yes. On the phone. Yes.
Speaker 2:Okay. Give me a phone number.
Speaker 6:My phone number is area code (907) 209-1965.
Speaker 2:Okay. I'll call you up.
Speaker 6:Okay. Thank you so much. Have a marvelous day.
Speaker 2:Oh, and the same to you. Thank you so much. Happy gardening.
Speaker 6:Okey dokey. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Okay. Roses are such a popular plant.
Speaker 3:It's true.
Speaker 2:Such an incredibly popular plant around here. And you know even in the the most remote areas and you look around and somebody's got some garden it's almost always going to be a rose.
Speaker 3:And
Speaker 2:there is a whole family of roses that are related to the Sitka Rose that all of them do really really well here. The Sitka rose is not really developed in Sitka, it's a native rose to Northern Japan. But there used to be an agricultural experiment station in Sitka until the early 40s and they had their job was to find stuff from all over the world that would do well in Southeast Alaska. And the roses from from Japan were one of the ones they chose, but then when they closed the experiment station down the guy that was running it, his name I think was Gregson, told the people in Sitka come on and pick them up because he had hundreds of them growing in the ground and they spread out and they grow all over. If you go to Sitka and look at the Pioneer home, they have a hedge of this kind of rose all the way around it and they're you know, it's the kind of rose that spreads underground.
Speaker 2:It's got
Speaker 3:They're happy and they're flowering. The rosehips they have at the end of their lives are just so nice. Take them off. What I like to do is dry them in my oven and turn them into tea. Really great, sort of like bittersweet, not super strong, but lots of vitamin C, really delicious.
Speaker 2:Lots and lots of vitamin c and you can tell that everybody, every animal that has its eye on them eats them. Everything eats them.
Speaker 3:Just like me.
Speaker 2:Yes. Just like you.
Speaker 3:They are kinda like little tomatoes.
Speaker 2:They look like tomatoes and they got that little star on the end of them. Mhmm. And they're if you pick them when they're fresh and ripe, they taste vaguely apple like.
Speaker 3:Oh, interesting.
Speaker 2:But they've got a rose aroma that rises over the apple flavor.
Speaker 3:Cool.
Speaker 2:Very, very cool. Another thing about them is they turn that beautiful red color in the
Speaker 3:autumn. Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Red and then gold, and the combination of the red and gold on the leaves is so pretty. Like treasure. Yes, exactly, like treasure. That's not the only roses, you know, the Canadians have been focused on roses for a long time. They've even got a whole experimental breeding program on them and they have released maybe 30 or 40 really good roses that do pretty well around here, you know, pretty pretty well.
Speaker 2:If you look around in people's yards you see odd colors of pink and lavender and there's white ones and there's even a yellow one. Well that's pretty good, I like that. And there was somebody who built a home in Bonnie Brae who was a rose fancier and built it specifically to grow roses in.
Speaker 3:Not much fancier than a rose.
Speaker 2:Not much fancier. The home was like a, had a courtyard in the middle of it, a glass over courtyard. Wow. And all the rooms looked into that area and that was meant to grow roses on. Oh my gosh.
Speaker 2:It was stunning. And I think they've sold it a couple of times since then, I don't think that no longer is true, but going and visiting them and seeing all those abundant roses growing inside the building was stunning. Well, Landscape Alaska is a boutique nursery. We've moved around Southeast moved around Juneau, you know, in the last forty five years we've had probably six locations. And we finally bought a place on the Back Loop Road.
Speaker 2:And if you Google us up or look on the internet and look at our website you'll see how to get there. We're gonna be start opening next week, next weekend. The first load of nursery stock is coming in this week.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. For you locals, it's right there at the top of Goat Hill. It's not too hard to find. It is up a long, steep, straight driveway. But if you follow your instincts, you will find up there tons of fresh, beautiful plants, over winter plants that we are bringing out of hibernation.
Speaker 3:We're getting in new shipments. We've got giant trees. We've got berry bushes. We got pines. We got it all.
Speaker 2:Yes. That's right. And some beautiful rhododendron. Really, really beautiful rhododendron.
Speaker 3:Always. Always rhododendrons. I I mean, I know it can't possibly be true, but sometimes it feels like every rhododendron in town came from landscape Alaska.
Speaker 2:Well you know I feel a lot like that too. I know it can't be true but I do know that we bought out of the same field of rhododendron for over thirty years And I can identify those plants, I know what they look like and how they grow, and they're they're the big old fashioned kind of rhododendrons. And if you drive down, look around in your neighborhood and you see those big healthy dark green rhododendrons that are growing to be probably anywhere from three to six feet tall now, there's a real good chance those came from the hennies, who were the people who grew the rhododendrons.
Speaker 3:So when you say an old fashioned rhododendron, what does a new fashioned rhododendron look like?
Speaker 1:Well,
Speaker 2:the old fashioned ones are ones that are bred from the native species in North America and the native species in the Himalaya. And pretty much the northern Europeans, particularly the British, bred those two together and created a class of rhododendrons called cast iron hybrids. And they are hardy to zone three, which is, you know, minus 40, and they grow vigorously and strong and they get pretty good size and the colors are mostly in the purples and pinks and reds and whites. And the leaves are big, the plants are big, they're like they're derived from forest trees And in modern times people have looked for smaller varieties and they've looked further afield to find the breeding stock. And the modern hybrids that we've really gotten excited about come from the islands in Northern Japan again.
Speaker 2:This is called Yakusa Mena and these are a variety now so all those kinds of rhododendrons grew in kind of forested situations, both the North American varieties and the Northern European varieties and the Himalayan varieties. But the ones in Northern Japan grow on a long spit that sticks out into the ocean that has no forest cover. And they grow like a sub shrub kind of hunkering down in the tremendous winter blasts in the face of the glaciers and and right on the beach. And so they are incredibly tough and gnarly and they don't get very big. They have big flowers, they have big leaves, but they don't make they don't make a big shrub.
Speaker 2:Sure. So ones that are 25 or 30 years old might be three feet tall, four feet tall. A real good place to look at them that anybody can drive by is around the sign at the Wells Fargo bank in the valley. Got it. And that's a kind that we planted there, I don't know, twenty years ago.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. And they bloom prodigiously, absolutely prodigiously, and they change colors. Once that they start blooming they change color.
Speaker 3:So we just have about ten minutes left on the show. So if you're listening and you are, like, on the fence about whether or not you wanna call and ask your questions, now is a great time to call in and do so. And I also just wanna take another second to wish my little brother Cole a happy birthday. It is his birthday today and we miss him a lot and Cole you are just one of the best men I'll ever know and I love you a lot.
Speaker 2:We are so thrilled, that's right. And that I'm sure that that birthday wish comes from all your friends here in Juneau too, Cole.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. It's a local holiday. For those of you who don't know, today's Cole Lindstrom Day here in Cholasta. That's a joke. Don't cite me.
Speaker 3:Oh, we got a phone call coming in.
Speaker 2:Good morning, Conversations.
Speaker 8:Good morning. I was wondering if you're familiar with doctor Beal from Michigan State University's experiment with seeds.
Speaker 2:With seeds. Yeah. Doctor Beal, spell it.
Speaker 8:D e l a l. Hundred years ago, he buried seeds in jars with instructions not to dig them up for a hundred years and then dig them up and see if they grow. And I think they're now starting to dig those up and just wondering how that's turning out.
Speaker 2:This is Michigan State?
Speaker 8:Michigan State University, which I went to.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm not, but that sounds fascinating. What I do know is that they found seeds in the Egyptian pyramids that were in jars, that were lotus seeds. So these are seeds that are 4,000 years old, and they germinated and grew, and these plants are now in the Kew Gardens, and they are the kind of lotus that floats in the ground in the water, which was a sacred plant in the in the Egyptian times.
Speaker 8:Maybe that's where doctor Beal got the idea.
Speaker 2:I'm sure it floats around there. Thanks for your call, man. I appreciate it. I'm gonna look it up, I'm fascinated with this kind of stuff.
Speaker 8:Yeah. I am too.
Speaker 2:Well, sometime come up to my nursery and have a conversation with me as well some afternoon. Okay?
Speaker 8:Okay. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Great. So we're gonna be closed on Sundays and Mondays. No, no, we're gonna be we're gonna be closed on Mondays. We'll be the nursery will be open on Sundays, Saturday and Sundays. And if you have a particular interest in something, give me a call or send me an email, landscape alaskagmail, and if you look on the web, our website has a contact form on it that you can just put your questions into it, it'll come right to me.
Speaker 2:We respond to everything and we love to send stuff out all over Southeast Alaska. It's a it's kind of a calling upon us.
Speaker 3:You know, and speaking of, like, floating aquatic plants, I've always been really curious. The lilies that we have growing here, like, over in Oak Lake.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 3:They're not in a lot of places here, but, like, Oak Lake, Dredge Lake has some.
Speaker 2:Dredge Lake has it. Uh-huh.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I has there been any cultivation of those? Are are I mean, I assume those are native to here.
Speaker 2:They are. They're native here.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And so has there been any cultivation of those bringing them into, like, you know, private water features in your backyard or in
Speaker 2:your people who have done that. Uh-huh. They had to dig them out, of course it's got to root down in the mud.
Speaker 3:Right, which is going be hard. You've got to go down underwater.
Speaker 2:That's right. You have to go down and get it out of the muck. But they're incredibly tough, incredibly tough and really, really beautiful. The flowers don't last a long time.
Speaker 3:They're gorgeous though. Those bright yellow.
Speaker 2:Really gorgeous bright yellow flowers.
Speaker 3:One time I was at Oak Lake and I saw a beaver come over and swim over to where there was some lily leaves, grabbed one of the leaves, pulled it up onto a log, and then folded the leaf in half like a taco, and then just proceeded to rotate the folded leaf right in front of it, and just nibble along the edges, do that over and over again till
Speaker 2:it get the whole That's so cool.
Speaker 3:It was very cool. So maybe if you know, get on your galoshes or your scuba gear and go and dig up some wild water lilies, you might be able to attract some beavers to your backyard.
Speaker 2:And if you do that, be sure to let me know.
Speaker 3:Yeah. No kidding.
Speaker 2:I would be fascinated. That's great, Con. I love that. And you know the the native vegetation here in Southeast Alaska has a charm that we don't see anywhere else in the world. Right now, as a matter of fact, is one of the most beautiful times of the year with all those blueberry flowers.
Speaker 3:I love them. Like little lanterns.
Speaker 2:Like little pink lanterns, all of them beckoning too because a flower essentially is an advertisement, it's an inducement. Come to me, come to me, come to me, they want to be pollinated. They want to spread themselves around, they want to rejuvenate the rest of the world, they want to take over everything, and they're the most exciting thing you can imagine. And you know what we see is not what the insects see or the birds see. They've got another color spectrum.
Speaker 2:And if you look at the visions of what a bee sees when it looks at the flower, there are all these markings on it. They're like runway markings that direct it down into the center, into the calyx. And so it's like, yes please, come step right into my parlor.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. It's a bit it's like a big neon sign at a bar, you know, right here. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's right. Come on here.
Speaker 3:It's our last, like, five minutes or so of the show. Do you have any advice for your local gardeners getting, like, you know, enjoying their springtime? Is there anything they should be doing to prepare their garden for the rest
Speaker 2:of the season that's going Thank for asking me, I so appreciate that. One of the things that happens in people's gardens is that often it comes, the fall comes before you're really prepared. And yes, that's right, or else you're doing something else. And so you don't get around to cleaning up the perennial flowers in the garden, and you don't get up to cleaning the fallen leaves out. And the plant diseases, the fungal diseases, and the bacterial diseases overwinter in the fallen leaves.
Speaker 2:And so in the springtime when the rains come and they bash on the leaves that have the spores on them, they splash up onto the new growth and that's how a lot of those plant diseases are spread.
Speaker 3:I never thought about that. To think of like the cleaning up of the like detritus from the fall plants as sort of maybe this will be helpful to other gardeners to think of it as plant hygiene. It's like brushing your plant's teeth or cleaning up your cat's litter box, like you have to get that dead material out of there to prevent disease propagation.
Speaker 2:That's exactly right Conan. Interesting. So a lot of what we're doing this time of year is we're going through all the plant material that we've got or that our friends have or that our clients have and cleaning up the ground and cleaning up out all the fallen leaves, blowing stuff away, raking it up, making sure that it doesn't go this material does not go into a compost. This material goes into the garbage or burned. You know if you get it in the fall when it's still fresh, then all into the compost, that's great.
Speaker 2:But if you've let it go all winter long you don't want to put that material into your compost pit, you know, because it's of course it's got all those bugs in it.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. Okay. Also another thing I wanna do right here in the last couple of minutes, even though Margaret wasn't able to join us here today, I know she's listening and so I wanted to reach out and say we love you mom and we're sorry you weren't able to come on today and we're thinking about you, and we'll see you very soon.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Love you dear. And, I'm sure that all your friends around Southeast Alaska are saying the same thing. So we've got a couple minutes left? Oh good.
Speaker 2:So the favorite Southeast Alaskan shrub has been the lilac and the You know, people treasure their lilacs. And one of the things about lilacs that I hear often is I've got a nice big green shrub that doesn't bloom.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 2:And so one of the things that I have to always ask is who feeds it? And that's one of the critical things. If you had any barnyard animal that you would make a parallel to with a lilac, you'd look at a hog. It wants to eat, it wants to be fed. And so particularly something that's got a little bit of size on it, you're going to put fertilizer but not right up around the trunk, out around where the edges of the branches are, which is where the feeder part of the roots are.
Speaker 2:And so you're gonna put fertilizer out around there, when you want to fertilize a lilac or anything else that has blooms on it, you look at the fertilizer, it's got a three digit code, like eight, thirty two, 16, or ten, ten, 10. And the middle number is the one that controls flowering. So if you want a lilac
Speaker 3:to Middle number is the one that controls flowering.
Speaker 2:One that controls flowering, and so you want to make sure that you use a fertilizer that has a significant part in the middle. Don't use 10, you know, then you'll get plenty of leaves but you won't get any flowers.
Speaker 7:Got
Speaker 2:it. And they like lime. Lilacs love lime. And if you have, again, a big shrub and you want to get some blooms on it, and even if your lilac is already doing well and you want to make sure that it continues to do well, take a piece of rebar and go out in that same root zone and poke holes in the ground.
Speaker 6:Okay.
Speaker 2:You know, about two or three inches down, and then you spread the lime around and you rake it down in there because lime doesn't dissolve. Oh. It has to get filtered down into the soil. It's essentially ground up rocks.
Speaker 3:So it does dissolve just really slowly?
Speaker 2:It doesn't dissolve.
Speaker 3:Well, if it filters down
Speaker 2:particles filter down into the hole and get down into the dirt. Well actually you're right, it does dissolve but glacially slow.
Speaker 3:Right. Okay.
Speaker 2:Just like a lichen, you know, the things gradually, gradually, gradually gets out there. But controlling the soil pH around a lilac is really critical to it. And anybody who wants to talk to me about it later, don't have any hesitation. Lilacs are a big deal around here, particularly the Miss Kim dwarf Korean lilac, which is immune to lilac leaf miners and immune to many of the lilac diseases. So it's become the most popular lilac in Southeast Alaska.
Speaker 2:It's really a beautiful shrub and it turns bright purple in the autumn.
Speaker 3:And smells good.
Speaker 2:And smells good. That's right. So we're coming to the very end of our program. This is our last minute. If you have any further questions, landscape alaska at gmail and reach out to me.
Speaker 2:And until next week, we'll talk to you then. And this is Dave and Conner from Landscape Alaska wishing you all 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 insights, tips, and stories from the experts.