Yarducopia

Once you’ve nibbled the remaining (romaine-ing?) greens from your garden, its time to put it to bed for winter. First, I like to ‘chop and drop’ the stocks and leftover leaves – anything above ground can easily be cut by a machette or snippers/scissors. No need to pull roots. In fact,I think of roots as…

Strong Towns founder Chuck Marohn writes about how local food production can strengthen a community. We have no slack in this food system, yet almost all of us depend on it to survive. Local food is the easiest and most immediately profitable way for a community to build its resiliency. Nearly every community in North…

Spruce bark beetle continue to damage and kill spruce trees around the Anchorage bowl and across Southcentral Alaska. The question often asked is, what if anything can one do about it? Or perhaps, what SHOULDN’T we do about it. Many commercial companies use pesticide sprays and root drenches that contain carbaryl, a chemical known to…

Some of you may have heard about the harvest and recipe book I created for all veggie starts that Yarducopia offered during the 2017 season! A shorter version is being distributed at garden visits and events, but I am including a longer version with more advanced recipes on the blog for your viewing, harvesting, and…

Flowers aren’t just for show, they’re also delicious and useful! Borage: Borage flowers taste as nice as they look. They’re a little sweet and taste like cucumber, and are delicious on their own or as a salad garnish. I personally can’t help but eat a few whenever I’m out in the garden. The entire blossom…

Yarducopia was invited by the Native Village of Port Heiden this spring to help them start a garden.  Exciting things are happening in the community!  They have recently acquired a reindeer herd, chickens, meat rabbits, and pigs.  They have constructed a fish processing plant, and the community has taken charge of their own PCB remediation…

It’s slug season! With organic gardening, pests are going to happen, and two that have shown their little pesky faces this season are slugs and root maggots. You may recognize the familiar munching of slugs, leaving holes in your leafy greens. There are a few methods to deterring slugs. First is Sluggo, which is a…

Trying to eat local in Alaska?  What do you do about protein?  How do you eat in the winter?  If you are trying to eat in line with your conscience, are you trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions resulting from food production and transport?  Are you trying to preserve and improve the health of soil?…

We here with Yarducopia normally build 100 sf sheet mulch (or ‘Lasagna’) style gardens for our participants.  Sometimes we do other things, and sometimes our builds don’t exactly follow this recipe, but sheet mulching is one of the best ways to turn old lawn into a new, productive garden quickly.  Here is a photo essay of…

 Back before it got too frozen, I picked up a load of composted horse manure for starting sheet mulch beds in the spring.  It looked like good stuff – black and steamy, some sticks and gravel but nothing that couldn’t be sifted out if I was that picky.  But tickling the back of my mind…

First, figure out how big your garden is or will be.  Starting small – 100 sf or less, is good.  Also decide what you are going to grow.  If you are a new gardener, start with what everyone else grows if you want to be successful, but don’t forget that gardening is a great chance…