Hide your bird feeders from bears now

The first is to stop feeding birds. Its not that the birds will necessarily be harmed if you continue to feed them, but the bears are waking up and they will make a beeline to those rich-in-fat, sunflower seeds that have been sustaining your avian friends all winter. Bears can be very grumpy when they wake up and the last thing you want is to be responsible for creating a nuisance bear. It costs money to ship these out of the area, which the Alaska Department of Fish & Game does. Far too often they return. If they do, they are history and you will be to blame.

So, be sure to get the feeders down. Clean them (Clorox or Oxyclean?) and put them away. It is also important to put away any extra seed you may have stored outside. That container you have the seed in is probably no match for a grumpy, hungry bear. You don't want to find out, in any case, so store it where it is safe and sound. The garage, incidentally, is not the best place if you ever leave the door open. A spring bear checking out the workbench has surprised more than one of us.

Second, it is very important that potatoes for this year's crop be limited to "Certified Seed Potatoes." My friend Bill Campbell, a world-renowned expert who is in charge of things potato out at the state's Plant Material Center in Palmer, sent along a flyer with all the reasons this should be a mandatory practice here in Alaska. The bottom line is that tubers that are not "Certified Seed Potatoes" -- and note that includes tubers you saved from last year's harvest -- have a very good chance of harboring pathogens and should not be purchased or used.

In short if you use non-certified seed potatoes, you run a great chance of infecting your soil so that even if you do use certified potatoes in the future, your soil will already be infected. As Bill will tell you, and he knows, once your soil is infected with a pathogen, it can be very difficult to control.

In a post oil era, it very well might be potatoes that help pay the way up here. Alaska is blessed with a pretty much disease free environment when it comes to spuds and for this reason, the Chinese are interested in our seed potatoes. Let's not ruin things for our farmers by using old and non-certified potatoes in our gardens.

Next, don't walk around in your yard until things dry out. Doing so will compact the wet soil and this has all sorts of negative consequences, not only for the soil but the beneficial critters that make up your yard's soil food web.

The first thing that is damaged is the critical fungal network that riddles the soil in your lawn. This network is vital to the lawn's health, providing nutrients to plants and building and maintaining soil structure. This advice applies to the vegetable gardens as well as the flowe rbeds. Walking around in these creates even more of an anaerobic environment in the soil. This will lead to problems later in the season.

Simply wait before you wander around. That is the best advice. You will have all spring to clean up and to get your hands in soil. The only possible excuse for walking in a damp yard is to go out and put a five-gallon bucket or a cardboard box over your rhubarb plants to speed up the crop.

Finally, it is time to get out there and start doing the nursery circuit. They are all open and when it comes to Alaskan gardening, it really is true that the early bird gets the worm. Besides, nurseries are a great place to learn.

If you are new to the area, you may not know south central Alaska has the finest nursery establishments in the country. Even if you have been here a while, you may not know where all of the local nurseries are located. There is a wonderful map published by some terrific local gardeners that you can pick up at many nurseries. If you haven't seen it, why not print one out by going to GardenSnapsMap.com/anch2011.html. It is free but would be well worth paying for even if it wasn't.

Jeff Lowenfels is America's longest running garden columnist and author of "Teaming With Microbes: The Organic Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web." He can be reached at jeff@gardener.com