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Hi, I'm Heidi Rader.
I'm with UAF Cooperative Extension Service,
and I'm here today at the Southeast Alaska Farmers
Summit in Petersburg with David and Connor Lendrum.
They're with Landscape Alaska and have
a plant nursery in Juneau, Alaska, so we're
going to talk a little bit about their business,
and what they grow, and any tips for possible new greenhouse
owners here in Alaska.
So, what got you excited about growing plants and starting
a nursery?
Oh, I personally grew up in this business
since I was a small child.
My mother had an organic u-pick farm in California,
and I went to work in a nursery when I was 14,
and I've done that kind of work for all my life.
And I had a ranch in the mountains in Ecuador
when I rode--
I raised green onion plants there.
And I came back to the United States
and, through some evolutions, ended up back in Portland,
met a woman.
We spent the summer in Elfin Cove.
And as we were leaving, we looked around and she said,
boy, I think they need a nursery here.
And I said, well, if they really wanted a nursery,
they'd probably have one by now.
But the image never left her, so a couple of years later, there
we were in Juneau, Alaska setting up our own nursery
business.
Wow.
What a story.
[LAUGHS]
How it goes.
And I would say many, many folks in small villages or towns
would like a nursery, and it's a great service
to have a nursery because you want
to get those plants started early,
and it's not the easiest thing to do.
A lot of places--
say a small town has a desire for 20
rose bushes in the summer.
They don't have the capacity to have all that happening,
but they can call me up and say, you
know, we'd like to have that, so I'll
add that to my product list the next year, and then
the following season, send it out on a small plane.
What is the most popular thing you sell?
By far, the most popular thing is Bleeding Hearts.
Oh, interesting.
You know, both for young gardeners beginning in
and for more established people, people looking back
at their traditional homes, Bleeding Hearts is the winner,
hands down.
A lot of what we do is in the more kind
of commercial landscaping work, too, and in that case,
we try to fit the stuff into the surrounding environment.
So a lot of what we do also requires small native plant
propagules.
So there's a big chunk of that, too.
So for remediation type work?
If you want to have your dental clinic, when you buy the land
and scrape everything away and build your building there,
it's not hospitable, so you have to put something back there,
and you have to arrange the soils
and put back some-- so some kind of berry bushes and small trees
and things like that.
And my mother, the landscape architect
in the business, her master's thesis
was about saving that native ground cover after land
has been cleared for construction
and then reintegrating it into the design
landscape around the building.
So we also do that where, instead of all that beautiful,
like musk egg and Devil's Club and blueberry just getting
thrown into a pile to decompose, gets healed back
into the land with maybe a few more plants added,
a few deliberate rock placings, and then
it's almost this cultivation and care of the natural landscape
that you have sort of damaged in order to have your development.
Oh, that's great.
And another thing about that is a lot
of those native landscapes, they're 2,000 years old,
you know?
So she's able to cut them up with a chainsaw,
pick them up with an excavator, put them on a truck,
take them over, and lay them back down again
and have it start back up again.
It's pretty impressive.
That is.
And that's-- I've read about that type of landscaping,
and it's just so much more resilient than going
in and planting annuals or that type of thing, too.
Absolutely.
And plus, it-- you might think it's
going to be exactly the same as it was when it lays down,
but you've picked it up from a particular environment
and laid it down in another environment,
it's going to adapt to that.
Right.
There were things that were perhaps
dormant in that soil mass, are going to come up
and come back into fruition.
And it's an ecosystem, so it's a lot more resilient.
And undisturbed.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Right.
And that means that you don't have
to worry about imported plants that
can't handle the local pests or weather or anything like that.
And like he was talking about, the existing
but dormant plants in that disturbed plant
area, the landscape does get disturbed naturally,
and there are plants that have evolved to respond and thrive
when there's disturbances-- like things
that pop back right after a fire, for example.
And so sometimes this whole other side of the ground
comes out after you shake it up a bit.
Another nice thing about that, too,
is when those pieces are put together,
like pieces of a pattern, there's
no place for invasive plants to get started.
So one of the big problems with commercial landscaping
is managing all-- because you've taken away everything,
and the things that are going to naturally reoccur
are going to be mostly weedy kind of invasive species that
are difficult to manage.
So if you put it all back into native sod,
it's not going to happen.
So is that a big portion of your business?
Depends year by year.
That's the one that we always love.
Yeah.
We feel good about that.
Anytime you can.
Right.
Yeah.
That's great.
What are some of the other popular kind
of bread-and-butter crops that you sell at your greenhouse?
Southeast Alaska is a great place to grow rhododendrons,
and we made contact with some rhododendron growers
45 years ago and have been bringing
those particular species and varieties into Southeast
all this time.
Oh, OK.
All over Southeast?
All over Southeast.
So there are what they call cast iron hybrid rhododendrons.
And any town you go to, any town in Southeast,
you're going to drive down the street, there's going to be--
Nova Zembla rhododendrons are kind of raspberry red.
There's going to be English rose.
They're kind of a lavender pink.
And you're going to look at it and go,
oh, I've seen that before, and they are.
They're magnificently suited to this environment.
Another thing, too, that's really interesting about having
a retail nursery in Southeast Alaska
is that there are certain plants that are so established here,
even if they're not originally native here, that people have,
like, rhubarb, is in every town in Southeast Alaska,
and everyone has-- everyone who regularly cultivates and pulls
out, we'll eventually have way more rhododendrons-- or rhubarb
than they want.
And we have people who come to Landscape Alaska
and say like, hey, I potted all of this,
I don't have any room for it-- sell it.
So we also sell a lot of rhubarb to people
who don't have rhubarb in their yards
from people who have just dropped it off at our place
because they don't have the room,
they have enough that they can harvest every year,
and so there's also this other very cool community
element to it that's fun.
Another one that's really interesting,
Margaret developed a thing that she used kind of--
That's your wife?
Yes.
Margaret Tharp's her name, and she's a--
she developed a method of imitating the native landscape,
and that's finding plants that grow
kind of like the native musk egg kind of plants,
or slightly upland kind of plants,
and you can buy those from growers that specialize
in that kind of stuff.
So there are, for instance, there
is a variety of blueberry common from Nova Scotia to the Great
Lakes, and it spreads underground with rhizomes.
And if you plant that and get it started there,
pretty soon it'll make a blueberry thicket
that's a foot tall.
It's good for the native birds and pollinators.
They all love that.
It's a beautiful groundcover, and it's a fruiting
groundcover, and it's going to grow together and choke out
everything.
So this is a really desirable flower.
That's interesting.
And you sell that?
Sell it, contract for it, design for it-- yes.
And do you know the species name?
Vaccinium angustifolium.
OK.
Yes.
Interesting.
Creeping blueberries.
OK.
And there's another one that does that really well that's
native here, which is lingonberries, which
is called low bush cranberry.
Right.
And how big are those blueberries?
The blueberries themselves for that kind--
about that size.
Minuscule.
Kind of--
Interesting.
So it's more of a groundcover, is what you're--
If you ever go to the grocery store
and you see packages that say organic wild blueberries,
and you open them and look at them, that's what they are.
And they harvest them with a rake.
So they scrape them all off the plants
with this rake, and then separate the--
separate the leaves off of them.
But that's what they are.
They're kind of like ball bearing size.
OK.
All right.
Interesting.
Great.
Have to check those out.
What's my favorite?
I know you were going to ask.
[LAUGHS]
My favorite are the new hydrangeas
because they come into bloom from the latter part
of the summer, and they start blooming and pale green
and ripen through white, pink, and then to dark red,
and they're still in bloom when the snow comes.
Wow.
And they're a zone two plant.
You could have them in a pot on your porch.
I love that.
So what's your biggest challenge as a greenhouse
owner in Southeast Alaska?
Well--
Or challenges?
[LAUGHS]
The biggest, most recent one was the last couple
of years of incredible snowfall-- collapsing
greenhouses.
That was a very difficult thing to hit.
And the other one is that you--
we're in a really dynamic environment,
and last year, we got a double whammy.
We got two insect pests exploding
into the wild environment.
And so there you are with your crops,
and suddenly you have no idea what's going on.
And the sod-- the spruce tip moth and the hemlock elgin
both attack the conifer trees.
And so you can look out-- the conifer
trees are dying and mad, and it took a while
to figure out what was happening.
But that's also all back to move into anybody's cultivated crop,
and that's way beyond our control.
Mm-hmm.
Wow.
Also, long winters when the ground's frozen.
And since we're a landscape design installation business,
that's also a big challenge, just making sure that
in a relatively short season, you make enough business
to make it through the winter.
So what are your opening hours at the greenhouse?
I would say May 1st.
May 1st, and we finish up around Halloween.
OK.
So no houseplants or hydroponics going on in the winter.
Not for us.
No, that's way-- way too large an investment and too much
labor.
Are you able to take off and travel in the winter?
Well, remember, I work for the university,
so I'm pretty much there.
Right.
But occasionally, we do go and look around.
Yeah.
[LAUGHS] What advice would you give to someone starting out
in the greenhouse business, or what have you-- what would
you have told your younger self?
Had I paid more attention when I started,
I really would have focused on the propagation
of native plants.
Oh, OK.
I tried several times to get it going,
but couldn't get the funds organized for it.
But now, 40 years later, there's a market for it,
and had we developed the whole stream by then,
I think that would be a really viable business alternative.
Interesting.
Instead of hunting through all the plant
catalogs of all the growers in Canada or the Pacific
Northwest, and then looking for things that can live here
and then experimenting-- because sometimes you order things
and you're like, we're really finding out
if it can live here and be viable versus propagating
and breeding and getting to know the local varieties better.
Would be cool.
Mm-hmm.
And also, there's the other thing
about this kind of environment is all around the world.
You know, there are places in northern Europe,
there are places of high altitudes in Asia,
and there are places in Latin America that
have similar kinds of climates.
And looking and seeing places and seeing what's
growing there would be a real--
not just fun thing, but really, really useful.
And do you continue to experiment each year with new?
About 20 new things a year.
OK.
What are you excited to try this year?
There's a creeping anemone--
it's anemone nervosa, and it blooms real, real early,
and it's common on the Eastern part of Canada.
And it's a white groundcover that
would be about 8 inches tall, would bloom here end of April,
beginning of May.
Beautiful.
Yeah, I think it would be really, really nice.
And you could put that with crocus flowers
and let that make a nice early spring groundcover.
And do you sell many bulbs, like tulips, or?
We did at one time, but now it's become a promotion
item for civic groups.
So rather than being competition,
we encourage and support that.
OK.
Great.
I like them, you know?
I think bulb crops are a fascinating thing.
Yeah.
Well, is there anything else you'd
like to tell us about your greenhouse?
Well, you know, there are native rhododendron here,
and they grow as a sub shrub.
And there's even a rhododendron that grows out
in Glacier Bay that grows as an underground stem
and grows up, puts its stem up, and puts a flower up
every year, you know?
And if somebody was really interested,
they could delve that into quite a valuable crop, I believe.
Interesting.
So maybe some interested young person's going to do that.
Cool.
I'd also like to say that we are beginning
our first online store for Landscape Alaska.
So if you do live in Southeast Alaska
and you don't have a nursery in your town,
watch LandscapeAlaska.com, and we're
going to start shipping out plants
to communities that don't have access to one
in walking distance.
All over Southeast or statewide?
Just Southeast.
OK.
Yeah.
Great.
Although, if somebody wanted one from someplace else, I'm sure
we could arrange it.
But that's our focus, is on Southeast-- things
that are going to work in our communities.
Do you have a good selection of berries and fruit trees?
We have an OK selection of fruit trees.
We usually get a couple apple trees in every year;
crabapple trees, those aren't really for eating;
some cherry trees-- but we have started selling honey berries,
and I love the honey berries.
They're incredible.
They're like-- the fruit's about an inch and a half long,
it's almost like a bean pod shape, it's really sweet,
almost with like a Concord grape texture--
like a nice, thick, jelly texture--
and they're really delicious.
And we also sell a good selection
of gooseberries and currants.
So we have a wider selection of better fruit producing shrubs
than we do trees that we do have a few every year.
Yeah, because that can be really tricky to find greenhouses
that will ship, and then to find the right varieties, too.
So that's a--
Fruiting shrubs are a great thing for us
here because they're incredibly productive.
But even though if the wild animals come and eat them,
they're not going to break them up like they
do with an apple or a tree or a cherry tree.
Well, thank you so much for sharing all this information
about Landscape Alaska.
And it sounds like you're a wealth of knowledge,
so check them out--
Landscape Alaska.
And we have a radio show on Saturday mornings--
OK, and what's the name of that?
--during the whole growing season.
Conversations with Alaskan Gardeners.
It's on AM 800, and it comes out of Juneau.
OK.
Awesome.
Thank you so much for the time.
Thank you so much.
A great pleasure.
Thank you.
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