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Alaska Fruit Trees
Wed Jun 29, 2005
Listen in RealAudio 
Gardening in Alaska takes a combination of perseverance and luck. The extensive daylight can help nurture enormous cabbages and zucchini. But an early frost can devastate a harvest. And that's assuming the moose don't eat everything. If you think that gardening is an exercise in frustration, try cultivating fruit trees. As Amy Mayer reports, for the sub-Arctic growers, it's a labor of love.
The road that leads to Clair's Cultivations is lined with native birch, aspen and spruce trees. But turn into the driveway and you soon notice a boreal forest anomaly: 1800 fruit trees. When Clair Lammers was new in town, someone told the former Nebraska farm boy fruit trees wouldn't grow here. But he heard someone had apple trees and paid a visit.
I asked him to graft me up a couple apples and he said he would and he didn't, so I kind of got PO'ed at him and got a book at the library and it taught me how to graft and I grafted my own. For 20 years now he's joined root stock from hearty Siberian crabapples with edible fruit trees. Lammers says producing a tasty fruit is the perennial challenge. He's gotten some success with apples, but pears remain a mystery.
I can't raise a good pear. I get pears every year, but I don't think they're all that good.
Lammers is not alone. As a tractor is readied for mowing Walt Benesch's south-facing orchard, he says his pears are inedible.
They're mealy, they're sour, even the birds won't eat them.
He does get good apples, if unreliably. The short season and severe winters, the moose, the voles... many things make growing fruit in Alaska challenging. The motivation behind an orchard is part nostalgia, part aesthetic, as Walt Benesch explains.
I've always liked the possibility of just going out in the yard and getting wild plums or apples or cherries, so I tried to do it here.
That's Alaska gardener Walt Benesch. And I'm Amy Mayer in Fairbanks.
The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mt. Washington Observatory and is underwritten by the National Science Foundation. For more on Alaskan weather, go to our website at www.mountwashington.org.
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