Alaska News

Jeff Lowenfels: End of season round-up

Questions and more questions. They keep on coming. I will leave out the ones about weather, and there are lots, because my guess is as good as yours. Still, it is clear that we are enjoying it and we deserve to. Alaska: It is our turn now.

First, the other day I was asked if I still believe in compost tea. The answer is an unequivocal "yes." The basis of all gardens and landscapes should be the soil food web. This is what is responsible for releasing the nutrients that plants consume. Compost, compost teas, mulches and, at the right times, mycorrhizal fungi are all part of the system.

This is a great time to apply compost and compost teas. The warmth means that the microbes in them will be active and doing their thing. Let's hope the warm weather stays around for a longer than expected time. Even if it doesn't, the soil food web life you apply goes dormant and will return next spring.

Next, this is a great time to have your soils tested if you have not done so in a while or if you had it tested and now want to see if your fertilizer regime is on track. It is easy and does not cost much. If you don't test, you cannot possibly know what your soil needs. The reason to test now is so that you can make corrections as you put gardens to bed; it takes time for supplements to break down.

You can go local or use the Web to find a testing system that you like and meets your needs. If you are organic, look for testing labs that do those kinds of tests. I like Kinsey Ag. There is a lot about testing on their site.

If you are a betting gardener, go ahead and let your tomatoes continue to flower. If you think we are going to have a traditional frost around September 15 (which is a really old tradition), then perhaps it is time to pick off any new flowers that form so the plant can concentrate on producing the very best fruit from the flowers that already exist. Pull off suckers, too. Of course, we could have frost two weeks later, in which case you could wait two or more weeks. The bet is between you and El Nino.

Cannabis plants grown outdoors need less than 12 hours to flower. That means it is "bag time" if you don't plan on bringing yours indoors. This is a lot of work. You put a black plastic bag on the plant so that it gets at least 13 hours of darkness. Slugs love to glide up into the dark, warm plastic, so beware.

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Yes, you can transplant lilies of the valley now. When you dig them up, you will see why they spread so nicely. You can replant clumps or individuals. They will bloom next year.

And, yes, this is a fine time to prune hedges. They have enough time to heal and branch before they go dormant for the winter. The rule, however, is to put down the clippers and step back often. Take a look at what you have done before you ruin the look. Don't worry, however. Hedge plants always grow back.

Speaking of trimming hedges, you might want to try and root some of the cuttings. It is isn't often that someone shows The Lord of The Roots a new gardening trick, but a friend brought over a few new gooseberries a couple of weeks back. Each was nicely packaged with its stem stuck into a potato. She said she heard you could root roses that way and figured the gooseberries might work as well.

I think she is right! The starch from the potato is a great plant food. I would roll the stems in the appropriate mycorrhizal fungi (look it up, but most probably ecto types). Give it a try. At the very least, I know it is a great transport system!

Once again, I plead with you to harvest (and to bring some of your bounty to Bean's, one of the Alaska Food Banks or a needy neighbor or friend). Herbs, in particular, need harvesting. How do you know when something needs to be harvested? You know what things are supposed to look like because you buy them fresh at the store. Don 't let things go to rot and waste.

I get clobbered by irate readers (the nerve!) when I mention applying Plantskydd, the emulsified blood meal that repels moose (so far) after the first frost. It is too cold then and the stuff is too sticky to easily work with. So, here it is. Buy it. Apply it when there isn't cold weather and when it isn't going to rain for 36 hours and be done with it for six months. Hopefully, by the time kit wears off, the moose will simply have a habit of avoiding your yard.

Finally, when I first wrote to start harvesting a couple of weeks ago, I didn't mean potatoes. Well, you can grab a few of the "new" potatoes from a hill or two, but you will have much bigger and certainly much sweeter spuds if you wait until after they flower and, even longer, after the first couple of frosts. Instead, continue to hill yours with soil, compost, dry grass clippings or leaves.

Jeff’s Alaska Garden Calendar

ALPAR-ABG garden pot recycling day: Aug. 22. Alaska Botanical Garden. Sort all plastic pots into two groups: No. 2 HDPE only and Nos. 5 and 6 as well as unmarked pots. Please shake out or rinse loose soil. Drop-off is also available at Faltz Nursery during regular business hours up to Aug. 22.

Jeff Lowenfels

Jeff Lowenfels has written a weekly gardening column for the ADN for more than 45 years. His columns won the 2022 gold medal at the Garden Communicators International conference. He is the author of a series of books on organic gardening available at Amazon and elsewhere. He co-hosts the "Teaming With Microbes" podcast.

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