PLEASE NOTICE: Spring 2007~Update on the tree fuchsias started in 2004! You won't want to miss this!
ALSO: My NEW Greenhouse: Lots of information on running a greenhouse year round in Alaska.
Hello and welcome to my garden pages. I hope you can find something
interesting enough to maybe give it a try. Gardening is good for the soul. It is
stress free and relaxing. Well, mostly stress free. You have to deal with the bugs
and the weather. But, as I end a day of work, I find it relaxing to visit with my
plants. Yes, even plants enjoy company and music. :-)
Of course there are all the old time favorites which we have all tried
at some time or another. I have decided to talk about and show the ones that I enjoy
and find different. These would be the Cactus and Succulents, and a few others. I
enjoy trying different things with plants. I have trained fuchsias into trees,
braided different colors into tree shapes. This makes for an pleasing array of
colors.
I have also grafted the potato and the tomato stems together, which
makes a plant that produces tomatoes on the top of plant, while under ground you are
getting potatoes. This can be done because the two plants are in the same family.
This can be a fun project for the whole family to try.
These are but a few of the plants I have found that do well for me in
Alaska. Yes, some you have to replant each spring such as the marigolds, asylum,
living stone daisies, canary bird vine, sweet peas and nasturtiums. Then there are
some that will come back for you each year getting bigger and more beautiful each
year such as the bleeding hearts, fiddle head ferns, Siberian Iris, Iceland poppies,
day lilies, comfrey and pansies to name but a few.
Then you have the ones that you either winter over yourself (if you are
lucky enough to have your own greenhouse) or you take them to your local nursery to
be wintered over. The most noted ones being begonias, fuchsias and the geraniums both
Ivy and zonal. In Anchorage, when June 1st comes around the whole town is in rich
color overnight. The reason is that all plants are started much sooner than normal
(because of our short growing season) it makes it necessary to start all plants
sooner, so by the time we can put plants outside without danger of frost killing
them, we have an instant garden full of color to be enjoyed.
If you are interested in learning how to made your own Tree Fuchsias,
I will be adding a page on this. Step by step just like I do to make my tree fuchsias.
I hope you will enjoy working with me on this. Tree Fuchsias are hard to find in Alaska,
and if you find them, they cost quite a bit. So, if you enjoy growing and working with
plants, you will enjoy this.
Then there are a few of us that enjoy playing with and collecting the
more unusual plants such as cactus & succulents. I had at one time quite a large
collection of these very different plants. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder says
it all when it come to these plants. Either you like them or you don't. I have been
working on collecting once again these wonderful plants.
Then there is a spot for the very different plants like the angel trumpets
, which my sister introduced me to in Texas while there for a visit. She got a start
from one of her neighbors of the white one. I believe the plant comes from Mexico.
In Texas it can die back to the ground and return in the spring. I planted one of
these at my mom's house in Arkansas. It died back in the winter and returned in the
spring. She also fell in love with this plant. The flowers on this plant are quite
large and trumpet shaped and have a very sweet smell. When lots of these flowers open
at the same time, the sweet smell they give off can make you sick. This, of
course is if the plant is allowed to grow in the outdoors naturally. Which means the
plant can have over 50 blooms open at a time. Given the fact that I grow mine in a pot
and inside for the most part, the most blooms I have had at a time on one plant was
about 6 to 8. I have trained the plant into a tree shape. It is doing very well now
and about five foot tall. I since have learned the name of the plant is called
"Datura". They come in many different colors and some are double flowers. I have the
white one along with a yellow one I grew from seed, I also have a salmon colored one.
I did have a pink one while in Arkansas.
And then we have vegetable gardening. This is a real trip for the average
gardener. I tried raising a garden a few years ago, dumb me, heehee. I thought "dig up
a spot and plant the seeds and sit back and wait for it to grow. ha ha. Nothing came
up. Later learned that a raised garden bed is the way to go up here. The sun heats
the soil better. Due to the "perma frost" layer in ground, which is with us all the
time, most things don't do well by just planting in ground as you would in the
lower 48. You either have to live in a "micro zone", spots around state that get
warmer than others, or do the raised garden bed. This works well. The next year I
had a very nice garden. Of course some plants like the tomato like to be covered in
plastic to keep the heat that they need to grow and develop or use your greenhouse
as I did.
If you would like to view some of these plants I have talked about above,
you can view them by clicking on the box below. I hope you have enjoyed your
visit.
