Garden tour produces bumper crop of information

Just like the gardens they visited, the number of people in attendance grew as last Sunday's garden tour progressed. About 15 people showed up at first, but that number had sprung up to 22 by the end.

Five gardens were visited during the nearly four-hour tour, with participants - both garden owners and visitors - sharing ideas, cultivating techniques and educating each other on what grows and what doesn't.

The tour was presented by the community garden committee to give growing enthusiasts a chance to ask questions they might not otherwise get the chance to ask. Four home gardens of various sizes and one commercial garden were featured.

"I want to see what other people have in their gardens," said Margery Emde before the group set out for the first stop. "I've kind of started my own vegetable garden, but I also want to see what kind of vegetables they're growing outdoors, indoors in a greenhouse, what flowers they're growing, so I can incorporate flowers into my garden. In other words, I'm looking for ideas."

A caravan of amateur gardeners first traveled out Zimovia Highway, stopping at Mya DeLong's home to look inside her greenhouse. There, they found a plethora of produce in a relatively small space, including chard, celery, brussels sprouts and baby cucumbers among other veggies.

It was DeLong's first time growing brussels sprouts, which had large, bright green leaves. "Should I trim the leaves," she asked, taking advantage of the experience of others while she had it.

"This is what this (tour) is about, ideas and inspiration," she said.

From there, the tour traveled out to 11.2 Mile to the Two Sisters Garden. The sisters being Anna Kleinhofs and Dana Rowlett, who own adjoining properties.

Attendees were able to see how the sisters use a greenhouse and raised garden beds in conjunction to yield a variety of veggies. And there are chickens.

Though Kleinhofs has lived on the property for three years, she said she's raised chickens for about 10 years since they're good at pest and weed control, produce eggs and are sometimes dinner. She's lost chickens in the past to minks and martens, but a local dog helps ward off the predators, keeping the flock safe.

Perhaps the one stop most attendees talked about most was Oceanview Gardens, which has grown over the past three years, building three tunnels about 100 feet long each on what used to be the timber mill property.

"As you can tell, you can't grow in this," co-owner Laura Ballou said to the gathered crowd. "Below us are layers of sawdust and rock and more sawdust and more rock and then it's all capped off with what you see here. Everything we do here, we've been making from scratch from the beginning. When the hospital was dug out, all that soil that was hauled off, we paid to have some of it hauled here."

Ballou talked about the process of turning the inert soil into something that would give them the results they were looking for. That included using fish meal and bone meal, the process of composting and creating a type of charcoal-based nutrient. She went over her and husband Dwane's attempts to thwart porcupines and deer, ward off slugs and battle water runoff.

"It makes my deck (garden) feel kind of puny," said Kay Larson as she listened to Ballou's talk.

The tour headed back toward town but not before stopping at Bonnie Demerjian's home on Shoemaker Loop. In a short four years since moving into her place, she's cropped up all sorts of garden delights, from onions, cherries and gold nugget tomatoes.

After plenty of milling about Demerjian's garden, the group headed into town to Alice Rooney's place near the corner of Bennett Street and Zimovia Highway. Rooney was also in attendance for the rest of the tour.

"I got the property in 1990," she said. "It was a bare lot and I've been evolving it since then."

Among the things she's currently growing is a greenhouse full of sweet corn. However, Rooney admits she has a common lament with other gardeners in Wrangell.

"I have really bad luck with vegetables because of the slugs and deer," she said.