Above: Georgeson Botanical Garden manager Katie DiCristina teaches members of Nanook Grown how to harvest a head of lettuce and other leafy greens in July 2020. UAF photos by JR Ancheta unless otherwise noted.
After serving 29 years in the U.S. Air Force, April Smurda retired last year with a goal of becoming a better gardener.
Last spring, she attended UAF Cooperative Extension Service classes on growing your own food. Smurda learned gardening basics, including the importance of growing the right vegetable variety for the long Interior daylight hours. The instructor, Fairbanks horticulture agent Julie Riley, met with her on several occasions to answer questions and direct her to other resources.
Smurda and her husband, Mark, built raised beds last year. This year, she’s growing carrots, potatoes, celery, beets, herbs, cucumbers, corn, peas and broccoli. She grew all of her transplants from seed, including 30 tomato plants housed in a mini hoop house she built. At Riley’s suggestion, she started attending master gardener meetings to network with like-minded gardeners.
“My goal is to grow as much food for my family as possible,” she said.
Interest in growing and preserving local foods has been increasing in Alaska for several years, but the coronavirus pandemic has touched off a new wave.
“People who have never gardened before want to know how to garden,” said Steve Brown, the agriculture and horticulture agent for the Matanuska-Susitna region. “They’re seeing empty shelves, and it scares them.”
Since the university halted in-person classes in March, Brown estimated he has helped 10,000 people with gardening questions individually or through his Zoom classes. Classes cover such topics as raising chickens, starting a garden and understanding soil science. The Zoom classes average 150-200 viewers. Gardeners from Australia, Japan and England tuned into his class on growing giant cabbages.
Midsummer, he was still answering at least a dozen questions every day on soil testing, seeds, fertilizers, plant diseases and other gardening methods, such as how frequently to water tomatoes. He’s had calls from Northwest Alaska on how to create gardening soil from local ingredients.
“When it’s a sunny day, the calls explode,” he said. “It’s been an exciting period to work through.”
Juneau agent Darren Snyder sees more interest in the community gardens, and he is also getting more calls and emails. He described the garden calls as mainly “beginners who want to try it out and give it a go” and others who want to grow more. Six hundred people registered for a Zoom gardening conference Extension co-sponsored this spring with the Southeast Master Gardeners Association, he said.
A more secure source
Interest in gardening and food preservation reflects a statewide desire for a more secure food system. Alaskans are used to disruptions in their food supply chain, whether caused by pandemic shortages, delayed cargo ships, earthquakes or even avalanches. Much of Alaska’s food arrives by container ship, but some comes by trucks over the Alaska Highway or air freight.
The state Division of Emergency Management estimates that, if the food supply chain was disrupted through an emergency or natural disaster, five to seven days of supplies would exist in the state.
Increasing the food security of Alaskans has been a major goal of the Cooperative Extension Service and the Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station since their early days. Lydia Fohn-Hansen ’59H*, who became Alaska’s first home economics agent in 1930, wrote bulletins about food preservation and distributed a newsletter with practical advice and information about preserving foods. A second agent, George Gasser ’55H*, worked with farmers and gardeners.
*H = honorary degree
Food preservation and food safety work is core to Extension. Last year, agents tested nearly 600 pressure canner gauges and taught 1,100 people how to preserve foods and about food safety.
Linda Tannehill has served as the health, home and family development agent in Soldotna for 27 years. Because so many people fish on the Kenai Peninsula, she gets many questions about processing fish, including emergency calls from people in the middle of canning sessions. In a regular (pre-COVID-19) year, she demonstrates safe canning at farmers markets and campgrounds.
She also tests 200-300 pressure canner gauges a year to see if they’re accurate. That’s important, she said, because “if it isn’t a high enough temperature, food could be under-processed.”
A longstanding effort
Alaska agricultural research started around 1900. The federal government established the first experiment station in Alaska at Sitka in 1898. Others followed, including the Fairbanks Experiment Station in 1906 and Matanuska in 1915. Land clearing began at the Fairbanks station in 1907, and the farm’s superintendent planted the first crops a year later — turnips, 32 varieties of potatoes from the Rampart station and strains of barley, oats and rye.
“The chief object at this station is to determine whether or not farming can be made to pay,” Charles Georgeson’s 1909 annual report said. Georgeson served as special agent in charge of the experiment stations, which were transferred to the university in 1931.
The Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station still conducts vegetable and grain variety trials at its Palmer and Fairbanks experiment farms. The goal is to find the best current varieties for farmers and gardeners to grow. With the changing climate, longer growing seasons and new varieties, recommendations may change.
UAF climate scientist Rick Thoman ’04 said weather records from the Fairbanks Experiment Farm show its growing season has lengthened three weeks since 1970. The 2019 summer also recorded the second-highest May-September growing degree-day total, a measure of accumulated warmth. “Alaska’s Changing Environment,” a report co-authored by Thoman and fellow UAF scientist John Walsh, notes that average temperatures statewide in Alaska are 3 to 4 degrees warmer than during the early and mid-20th century.
Because the summer weather can vary significantly from year to year, researchers test varieties over several years.
Heidi Rader ’06 and Glenna Gannon ’10 oversee vegetable variety trials at the Fairbanks and Matanuska experiment farms. Variety trials are essential in Alaska, Rader said. “Things grow differently here than in the Lower 48,” she added. “The seeds aren’t bred for here.”
Trials this summer will test nine varieties of winter squash in Fairbanks and Mat-Su and 11 varieties of corn in Fairbanks, vegetables that have been considered marginal in those locations. Trials in both locations will also include 24 varieties of beans, beets and carrots, and 16 varieties of spinach, to see if any are more resistant to bolting. In addition to yield, researchers evaluate vegetables for plant vigor, susceptibility to bolting, uniformity, pest and disease resistance, and taste.
Photo caption: UAF agronomist Mingchu Zhang examines wheat varieties grown in 2016 at the Fairbanks Experiment Farm. UAF photo by Jeff Fay.
Agronomist Mingchu Zhang is also continuing trials at both farms to determine whether growing spring wheat and other grains might be more feasible now. UAF researchers have developed several spring wheat varieties, most recently Ingal wheat in 1981, but most of the early-maturing varieties have had problems with “shattering,” where the grains fall off the plant before harvest.
Zhang is continuing to evaluate a hybrid developed by Washington State University that looks promising. It’s a cross between Ingal and a Canadian variety. He is also testing Ingal and five additional varieties from Saskatchewan, Manitoba, North Dakota and Indiana. Barley trials will include malting barley from Montana and North Dakota, and feed barley from Saskatchewan, experimental lines developed by Washington State and varieties from Sweden.
Helping the community
Both experiment farms help raise produce for their communities. Master gardeners and Grow Palmer donated plants that staff at the Matanuska Experiment Farm and Extension Center tend in a large garden plot and harvest. The produce is donated primarily through the Alaska Tilth program to Kids Kupboard, a nonprofit that works to end hunger in children. The center also partners with Alaska Pacific University and Alaska Tilth, which uses the farm’s greenhouse to grow food for food-insecure residents of the Mat-Su Valley. In, 2019, the farm donated more than 2.5 tons of produce.
The Georgeson Botanical Garden received funding this summer that allowed it to increase its donations of fresh produce and help the UAF Office of Sustainability double the number of students in its Nanook Grown program. Through the program, three UAF students are teaching 16 other university students how to garden. They planted eight raised-bed plots in the UAF community garden and three large plots at the farm’s botanical garden.
“This is one small way we can contribute to increasing resilience in our community.”
Sustainability coordinator Christi Kemper said the program is popular with students, who participate for a variety of reasons. A few had gardened before and wanted to become better gardeners. Others wanted to know how to start gardening, and one wanted an activity to involve her grandchildren.
The students hope to donate 1,000 pounds of food to the UAF Food Pantry, the Fairbanks Community Food Bank and Bread Line Inc., which operates the Stone Soup Cafe. They also appreciate another feature of the program — they get to take home some of what they grow.
“It’s a source of free food,” Kemper said.
Katie DiCristina, the Georgeson garden’s manager, said the funding helps support the Nanook Grown program and pays for a part-time harvest coordinator, who handles harvesting schedules for the students and contributions to the food programs.
By late July, contributions included rhubarb, berries and currants from the garden itself; beet greens, spinach and fennel from the vegetable variety trials; and produce grown by the students. The students donated kohlrabi, kale, lettuce, zucchini, chard and collards. By early August, 460 pounds of fresh produce had been contributed, with the heavier items, such as potatoes, to come.
DiCristina is happy to have the student program at the garden, which supports research, education and outreach.
“This is one small way we can contribute to increasing resilience in our community,” she said.