Jasmine Budak
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (June 28/02) - Darwin Rudkevitch's career beautifying Yellowknife lawns and gardens started with a competition.

A friendly "best-looking lawn" contest with his neighbour blossomed Rudkevitch's gardening hobby into a fledging business.

Arctic Farmer Landscaping Services was born in 1990 and now the 20-person crew -- as well as Rudkevitch's mother, girlfriend and kids -- help make Yellowknife houses and institutions prettier.

The Arctic Farmer serves both residential and commercial clients like McDonald's, the Frontier Visitor's Centre, the hospital and most local schools.

Rudkevitch comes from a "green" family. He and his brothers helped their father out in a hydroponics nursery in the early 1970s.

"When we had to plant in the spring, the boys (brothers) would just grab the pack of seeds and throw them in the ground and take off," says Rudkevitch. "I was the one who read all the packages to figure out how they actually grew."

After 10 years as the Arctic Farmer, Rudkevitch says it's a joy and doesn't consider it work.

"I look forward to getting up in the morning, and at night I can't wait to get up to start work," he says.

"He used to hate it when his father would make him work in the garden, but now he loves it," says his mother Victoria.

Rudkevitch is enthusiastically involved in his business. You can usually find him on-site bantering with his crew with his hands fully immersed in the dirt.

The Arctic Farmer starts with a blank dirt palette where he lays mats of perfectly aligned thick sod. In consultation with his clients, he designs flowerbeds with an array of flora best suited to Yellowknife's inhospitable soils. It's tough to grow plants in this region, first because there's little of it, and if you find some it's quite acidic and home to few microorganisms which help to enrich soil.

"You can't just throw a seed down and expect it to grow," he says. "There's no nitrogen, potassium or phosphorous and it's super acidic."

Rudkevitch says the artistic part of his job is easy when customers know exactly what they want. He both implements designs planned by his clients and creates his own.

He's even put together a unique Chinese garden in which plants crawled up a steep rocky incline and were interspersed with buddha statues.

The Arctic Farmer crew created the trendy naturalized garden look at the legislative assembly. Natural gardens use mostly native plant species and decorative rocks to minimize garden maintenance and use of chemical pesticides. The key is to work with nature, making the garden a stable ecosystem on its own.

Rudkevitch says he sees the importance of natural gardens, but prefers other, more aesthetically pleasing gardens.

"I think we have enough 'au natural' in Yellowknife in the surrounding bush," he says. "You don't have to put it in your yard, you can walk in the bush to see it."