Strawberry Fields Nursery Opens for the Season

Lorne and Elana White. Courtesy of Strawberry Fields NurseryKayla Desroches/KMXT

Kodiak has transitioned from a temperate, rainy winter into a similarly temperate, rainy spring, but there’s one sure sign of the change of season – Strawberry Fields Nursery is open.

Lorne and Elana White are two local experts in all things that grow, from flowers to root vegetables. The Whites explain they’ve been running the garden center since 1976. Though their nursery is in midtown on Mill Bay Road, they say they grow most of their bedding plants in Bells Flats.

Elana calls her husband a natural gardener, and explains how the nursery enriched his life.

“Lorne needed to have something he was doing that he was the boss of because he had started a new job and he was definitely the low man on the totem pole, and it was very good for his head to have this little business started, and it required a lot of time and a lot of help, and I just kinda got roped into it.”

Lorne says they both gardened as kids and later in life too.

“When we were going to school in Fairbanks, Elana had a garden that she started at the community gardens there, and it was a great source of food for us as students, because we were typical starving students at the time, and anything we could get was good.”

Lorne also has something rare in Alaska: apple trees. He says he mixes apple types, or “grafts” them.

“I’ve had some varieties of trees that were, well, I didn’t particularly like the taste of the apples, so I grafted on other types. I started with a yellow transparent. It was a good pie apple, an early apple, and was recommended for here, but I wasn’t really fond of just the apple sauce, so I grafted on a honey crisp apple onto that.”

Lorne says he also grafted a Siberian Crab apple with a State Fair apple, which is a big producer, and cultivates a few other apple types, including MacIntosh, Cortland, and Harold Red.

The Whites are a wealth of knowledge about all things plant-related, and KMXT took the opportunity to invite them onto Talk of the Rock to ask them some pressing questions.

KMXT’s Kayla Desroches asked about one popular vegetable on the island.

“If I were to be interested in growing rhubarb for the first time, what does is that like cycle like? What is particular to rhubarb?”

“Well, rhubarb is a heavy feeder of manure,” says Lorne. “If you have old composted manure it just loves that kind of thing, that kind of a soil. So, you need to have a good organic-based soil for rhubarb, and you can feed it a lot and it continues to grow really well. When rhubarb gets old, it needs to be split up because it tends to get woody, and so you can subdivide it and give some to your friends or expand your own bed that you have if you have rhubarb. People seem to prefer the redder variety, the redder stocks, that tend to be a little sweeter. Actually, the Russians had rhubarb here too, and there’s a lot of that around in different places. It tends to be a little greener than the red varieties.”

“If I plant it this summer, will it grow this summer?”

“Yeah, it’ll grow this summer, but you probably won’t get much production until the second year. It usually takes a season to go through it. It’s a perennial though, so it’ll come back year after year. The first year, you can’t expect much out of it because they’re just getting established and getting that tap root down to where it wants to be.”

Strawberry Fields is open for business and you can drop by the store for more advice about your crop of interest. And you can find the archived episode of Talk of the Rock with the Whites by following this link.

Check Also

Kodiak Fisheries Workgroup setting priorities and action items to help local fishers after four year hiatus

The Kodiak’s Fisheries Workgroup wants to host informational forums to speed along fish-related action items …

%d bloggers like this: