Digging in

Expert gardener offers class at community college

Itching to get into the garden?

Amy Grisak has some ideas that can get gardeners digging into the ground now.

"Right now your peas and carrots can go in, if your ground's not too muddy," she advises. "They'll take some frost."

Grisak brings her extensive background and bountiful enthusiasm about gardening in the Flathead to a course available through the continuing education division at Flathead Valley Community College.

Within the next couple of weeks, she said gardeners can plant spinach and mustard greens with confidence. Mustard greens taste great on a sandwich, Grisak said.

A veteran of 25 years in the dirt, Grisak has spent 15 of those fighting and winning the cold-climate battles that befuddle many an aspiring grower.

"As a result, I'm referenced in the Reader's Digest book 'Ask the Experts' on gardening in Mountain zones," she said.

Students can enroll through Monday in her course, "Gardening in the Flathead Valley," scheduled from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. every other Wednesday from April 12 to Aug. 16.

The course covers the basics of sustainable vegetable gardening in the valley.

"We'll cover seed starting and suitable varieties," she said.

The course then moves through getting a jump on the season, organic gardening methods, using the harvest and even participating in the Northwest Montana Fair to celebrate the season's bounty.

Grisak grows award-winning peas and peppers, and she has the blue ribbons to prove it.

Grisak said she gets her garden growing on about April 15.

This year, she has lettuce that she started on her windowsill ready to plant in her homemade cold frame. Lettuce grows so fast in the cold frame, Grisak said, that she can harvest some leaves within about two weeks.

"I'm going to teach students how to make one," she said.

Grisak also will share such tried-and-true methods as keeping a solar umbrella over her plants throughout the season to outsmart those Fourth of July frosts.

"It creates a mini greenhouse over your plants," she said. "It also keeps out the deer and bugs."

She also recommends walls of water for starting tomatoes early and keeping them toasty. Grisak said she has planted as many as eight weeks early and had tomatoes survive snowstorms within these water walls.

She began her education in gardening at age 10 in Ohio when a local woman who ran an herb-growing business "took her under her wing." Since then, Grisak has read voraciously and applied what she learned.

"I read, then see what I can kill," she said with a laugh.

Grisak uses her gardens in Kalispell as testing grounds for new varieties and products that she features in articles she writes for publications such as Sunset, Fine Garden, Montana Living and Mary Englebreit's Home Companion.

She also writes for Sinra, a Japanese publication, Northwest Travel, Outdoor Life, National Parks and many others. Most recently, she completed a piece for Hobby Farms on stretching seasons called "Every Trick in the Book."

Those tricks pay off in reduced grocery bills.

"My husband and I strive to produce as much of our own food as possible between the garden, small orchard and bee hives," she said.

Grisak said they both enjoy "putting up food" throughout the season.

During the 1990s, the instructor operated Shady Side Herb Farm in Coram. Readers may remember her annual garden celebration, during which she invited the public to tour her gardens and sample foods created from herbs and edible flowers.

"In our largest year, we estimated close to 500 people attended the single-day event," she said.

Because of Coram's glacial till, Grisak built 220 raised beds out of the native stone, filling them with 14 dump-truck loads of topsoil from Creston. She started more than 6,000 plants each spring in her greenhouses to fill the beds with herbs, flowers and vegetables.

Since moving to Kalispell, Grisak greets spring with no less enthusiasm while planting on a smaller scale.

"By the end of winter, I'm dying," she said with a laugh.

Grisak's class provides the tools to help like-minded residents scratch their gardening itch early.

For information about her class, call the Flathead Valley Community College Continuing Education Center at 756-3832.

Reporter Candace Chase may be reached at 758-4436 or by e-mail at cchase@dailyinterlake.com.