Thursday evening, the Homer Soil and Water Conservation District will be hosting an online Zoom seminar giving beginners some idea about what it takes to prepare for planting your first garden.
Monica Kopp, the District’s agriculture program coordinator, will be hosting the one-hour event, as well as a follow up Part Two next month. She was on KBBI’s Coffee Table Wednesday, talking with host Jay Barrett.
“We're going to do this in two sessions that are each an hour long, and that is not very much time to teach someone how to garden, but my goal with this, is really to introduce the concept and get people excited and motivated to try it and sort of overcome some of the barriers that they
might run into when learning about this stuff, because there is so much to learn. But, you don't have to know it all to start your first, so that's my goal. It's just, get people started. The first session will be where and what to plant, and then the second session will be more of, the how to, like actually breaking ground and maintenance watering and what kind of weeding you need to do and what kind of pests you might have to deal with,” Kopp said.
Soils in the Southern Kenai Peninsula tend to be more acidic, and often need balancing with fertilizers or other amendments.
“And so, we typically have to lime pretty heavily around here to get soils up to a pH that plants can uptake more of the beneficial nutrients. So, in the example of the aluminum, at more acid levels, plants can take up more of that aluminum, and it can cause problems with toxicity. Basically, they just are poisoned by taking up that aluminum. Boron is another example where at certain pHs it can, plants can take up too much Boron and actually suffer, and potentially die,” Kopp said.
Kopp said that having good sun on where you want to put your garden is a plus, but not having sunshine isn’t an insurmountable obstacle.
“Having a south-facing spot, a spot with south aspect is, is really great. That's gonna set you up for a lot of success, but you don't have to have a perfect spot. There's other stuff you can grow in less ideal spots, I lived in Fairbanks for a number of years and my landlords had a, a garden on a north facing slope with permafrost and they were able to grow cabbages and broccoli and all kinds of greens and were quite successful, but there were definitely certain things they could not grow, like squash and peppers and tomatoes,” Kopp said.
As for what grows best around here -- think: salad fixin’s.
“There's one specific plant family that a huge percentage of vegetables, that we get at the grocery store, and that we grow in our gardens come from, and that's the brassic KCA family, or the, the mustard family, and that includes your broccoli, cabbage, kale, mustard, Bok choy, just countless vegetables, and all of those are pretty well suited to cool climates. And so, they're gonna do quite well here, so I highly recommend leafy greens as sort of a starter, being like mustard greens, salad, baby salad mix and kale especially,” Kopp said.
Details for attending Kopp’s seminar tonight are available online at the Homer Soil and Water Conservation District’s website.
