Master Gardener Ed Buyarski provides some tips for care of okra plants and tool maintenance. A garden tool workshop starts 3 p.m. this Saturday at the Douglas Library.
Food
Wrangell pizza shop owner gets $25,000 grant for aeroponic farming
Dixie Booker hopes to eventually build a 2,000-square-foot greenhouse with more than 100 aeroponic towers to grow year-round produce for the community.
A ‘floating fillet’: Rice farmers grow bugs to replenish California’s salmon
Insect-rich floodplain water once supported the threatened fish, but it has been diverted. The project’s end goal is to improve the likelihood that Chinook survive the trek to the ocean and back.
Mixing science with traditional knowledge, researchers hope to get seal oil on the menu
There’s a traditional foods movement happening in Alaska. Dieticians, administrators, and others are trying to get more wild foods like moose, berries, and beach greens into health care facilities and schools. But there’s one food that elders really, really want, and they aren’t allowed to have: seal oil.
To feed elders, traditional foods take untraditional route
Most people in northwest Alaska grew up eating traditional foods, like caribou, seal, and different kinds of fish. But as they aged and moved into long-term care facilities, those foods were no longer regularly available to them because of federal food safety regulations. A team in Kotzebue is changing that.
Alaska’s Medicaid and public assistance backlog is 20,000 people deep
The House Finance Committee voted in favor of hiring 41 people to reduce the backlog. “The morale in that department is not good,” said Rep. Les Gara, D-Anchorage.