Sometimes you work hard but no matter how you try, forward progress is elusive.

I spent Thursday morning in front of the computer completing some correspondence and writing my weekly blog post. Of which I neglected to save a draft of the working document. It was a chaotic morning in the household and somehow I did something to my mousepad that swiped away my browser and when I brought word press back up, the blog post draft was gone. Lesson learned: hit save draft all the time. I made a few stilted attempts to recreate what I had written but it was gone, from the draft and from my head. Oh well, some days are like that… But I had to get outside and get some physical work done after that. Spending one more minute on the computer was just too frustrating!

Late last Friday we were headed home from the Kenny Lake School graduation parade (we could not attend the graduation in person but watched it online while in the school parking lot and then did a drive by congratulations). We were treated to a magical wildlife moment on the McCarthy Road. We live near the Copper River herd of plains bison. Wood bison are native to Alaska but these guys were introduced here 70 years ago. They mostly live on park and native lands and can be seen along the Copper River and Kotsina bluffs or down on the river bed at spring calving time. For years now, bison have wandered across the Kotsina River using the McCarthy Road to travel to the 5 mile bluffs for the food they like to eat there bringing them into close proximity of humans. I like them better across the river. They are beautiful but very, very dangerous and while they have never come onto our own land, several years ago one spent months wandering through our neighborhood. I do not wish to bump into a bison on the way to the garden. We see them occasionally while driving to and from town. There have been a few almost incidences on the road over the years. I have been charged by one when it was in the middle of the road and I startled it as I drove around the corner and had to slam on my brakes. And then hit the gas to pass it as it charged. And one attempted to head butt our Subaru with the school bus carpool as the car drove by. But this particular bison was calm and content to graze the fresh grass while we watched from the truck.

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I have rediscovered my gardening muscles this week. Every morning I feel each one with a new awareness. During the sub arctic winter I do not spend a lot of time repeatedly bending over or lifting heavy shovelfuls of soil, pushing wheelbarrows or carrying heavy trays around. Once I get going, I can work all day but each morning starts out with some extra time warming up. Garden yoga is kicking my butt.

I prepped and planted the pea bed last Saturday. Two 50 foot rows of oregon giant flat peas and two 50 foot rows of sugar snaps. They are not up yet but it was good to finally get something in the ground!

I also had a tray of brassica greens and other miscellany that was supposed to be planted for spring eating. Before break up, I had planned on moving the greenhouse north by 6 or 7 feet, away from the continually subsiding low spot of melting permafrost in the perennial garden. But the shed project happened first and though the progress of moving the shed across the yard, skirting it, and organizing it (I can actually find my stuff!) has been fantastic, the wood shed addition has not yet been built onto the storage shed. Rounds of unsplit firewood is in a pile behind the greenhouse effectively shelving the “moving the greenhouse” project for the spring. The greenhouse was frozen to the ground anyway. I had planned on modifying the south greenhouse bed, once outside of the moved greenhouse, into a cold frame for early and late greens. The greenhouse is packed full of starts so my overgrown tray of early greens could not go in there and instead of feeding them to the chickens I decided to plant them out in the main garden and see what happens. So far they have survived. I planted some arugula, radish, and turnip seed at the same time.

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I was prepping carrot beds when I touched base with the post office to let them know I had live plants coming in the mail only to discover the plants had already arrived the day before. Off I went to town to collect the plants and Conner and I spent the afternoon digging holes, adding compost, and watering in the new white and red currants, honey berries, and a jostaberry. Four of the five perennial beds are now complete with plants. The fifth bed is a blank canvas. I really do not know what I want to plant there.

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The currants and honey berries already in residence are flowering. They are not showy blooms but beautiful none the less.

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On my way back from the post office I spied this tenacious dandelion. Dandelions might be non native but I love them anyway. First one of the year and it grew on a desolate bluff.

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And the cotton woods are developing their catkin seed pods. Soon there will be cotton fluff seeds floating around everywhere.

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The last several years I have missed the coltsfoot flowers. I have not been able to figure out if the native plants did not put up flower stalks or if I was just so immersed in my own things that I did not notice them. But this year I keep seeing them everywhere. Coltsfoot is a valuable herbal remedy for lung conditions. I am happy to see them this year.

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In the main garden I am weeding and sifting compost and prepping beds for planting. It is the daily garden grind right now and I am behind on planting as the soil and weather conditions have not exactly lined up to make bed prep easy.

In the yard in front of the house there is a section where nothing grows as the area is devoid of soil. I had the idea to build some potato boxes with the kids. I had some non certified potatoes I don’t want to put in the garden, some old poplar boards and 2 by 2s that have been used and reused in the garden and are nearly at the end of their life (but not quite), and some soil that once the potatoes beds are done for the year can be raked out to improve the front lawn. The kids decided they were not interested in potato boxes at all but Tim and I spent an evening modifying the plan to efficiently use the materials we had available and ended up with two 2 by 4 boxes. The idea behind a potato box is that all season long you attach additional boards to the box as the plants grow up and keep adding soil and mulch. At the end of the season you unscrew the boards and pull out an entire box worth of potatoes. We’ll see if it works. If nothing else, it will improve the front lawn and be something to talk about all summer.

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It is time to get back outside and back to bed prep and hopefully planting…have a good week!

Just a short few weeks into wet and chilly spring weather Alaska decided “enough of this nonsense” and with a week of 70°, summer weather has arrived. The soil is drying out, the swallows are fighting over nesting spots, and the yard is ice free for the first time since October.

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Our lake, the smallest of the cluster of 4 lakes in this community, often loses its lake ice first. My son and I took the kayaks out on Saturday when the open water was a mere few feet wide channel along the shore. We made it around the cove and to the point before running into too much ice to continue. We were in the middle of chores and it was a great way to play hooky for a brief time. Back on shore and back to work, I mentioned that the ice appeared to be about 4 inches thick. A few hours later, the seemingly still intact ice sheet rapidly cracked out in the middle and shifted up against the shore. Good thing that didn’t happen while we were in the boats! The ice began disintegrating rapidly after that. By the next day, over half the lake was open water with mostly submerged ice sheets and the whole family was able to take a Mother’s Day cruise on the lake with the canoe and two kayaks in the still evening. Two pairs of swans were resting on the lake before continuing on with their migrations. A beaver was guarding its territory by the point and another was perched on the edge of a remaining ice sheet munching away on something. Ducks flew overhead and more paddled away from our noisy paddling. By Monday, the ice was gone. Open water at last.

Every year a few things happen as soon as the lake goes out. The loons arrive.

The kids go swimming in frigid water.

And the time to get the irrigation system up and running arrives. This year the process went so smoothly I am a little frightened! I hooked up the pump on Tuesday and had running water in the perennial garden all afternoon.

Yesterday I hooked everything up all the way to the vegetable garden and there were no leaks or sections needing to be replaced. I did however leave the mainline tubing ends open through the winter and though I have spent a fair amount of time searching I have yet to find the end caps. Once I do, the drip tape can be installed. I watered the garlic by hand and counted over 200 plants. I know I am a broken record here but I am so excited they made it through the winter!

I also did a mini side project with the unused triangular shaped section of soil outside the garden fence. I needed to get the tiller running for someone else to use and tested it out by shallow tilling this section. This area was where the new garden first began in 2014 and I have been trying to figure out a good use for it. Until I figure out a more permanent plan, I decided to plant it in a diverse cover crop mix to build the soil. I raked the area smooth and broadcast the seeds, then raked them in again and lightly covered with straw. The sparrows and the chickens delightedly scratched around for the seeds (the chickens were escapees and not supposed to be out) but hopefully most of the seeds made it and will grow a healthy soil cover. It is temporarily fenced in now so the chickens can no longer get in but there is nothing I can do about the sparrows.

In the garden, the black currants are leafing out.

And though the white and red currants sustained some pretty serious winter kill, there are prolific flower buds on the healthy sections.

Just about everything is starting to leaf out this week. Soon we will be awash in green.

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In addition to completing the finish work for the ceiling of the new room this week, I buttoned up some other projects this week that would have been better done over the winter. When I butchered the chickens last year, I broke down over half of the carcasses into legs, thighs and breasts to freeze the same cuts together. I stored all the backs, necks, and feet in a box in the freezer to turn into stock. I “rediscovered” this box when we moved the freezer to the back side of the shed in the new location. No time like the present to take care of a job that would have been far more pleasant on a cold and snowy day mid winter. I cleaned the big stainless steel turkey fryer pot and added all the bones, a generous splash of vinegar, a gallon bag of frozen leeks, the last of the frozen carrots, half of the remaining frozen celery, dried thyme, and simmered it for 24 hours.

After straining and cooling, then sticking in the freezer to solidify the fat that was then removed, I pressure canned the stock in quart jars so we can have shelf stable jarred stock for the summer. The pot yielded just over 12 quart jars of delicious, fragrant broth. Check that project off the winter list!

The other chore I was running late on was pruning the raspberry hedge. It is supposed to be done as soon as the snow is gone before the plants start growing. The snow took a while to leave the bottom of the garden this spring and then it was so muddy I did not want to muck up all the garden paths. The canes were already budding out when I finally got around to it this week. I spent Saturday afternoon with knees in the mud and trying to avoid getting too many thorns in my face and fingers.

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Hopefully I will get the irrigation down before this years growth begins in earnest. And with any luck, this will be the year I finally get the trellis up!

I found a wood frog hopping on the dry, dusty gravel pad on Saturday. I almost ran over the poor frog with the 4 wheeler… I scooped him up and Sylvia and I brought him down to “Sandpiper bog”, the marshy pond just before the lake. Though we are hearing the frogs through the night now, this was the first one we have seen hopping around.

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It is still too early to be harvesting much. I have spent a lot of time over the past two winters researching efficient ways to market garden and working on adapting that to our short season. If you are a one person show with a half acre to manage intensively, you have to be efficient! Thanks to all that research, I am able to point out in great detail just how inefficient my set up really is. Ha! But sometimes you just have to accept that what you have is what you have to work with. If I had a poly tunnel, and a seed starting house, and a paper pot transplanter then things would look pretty different around here. But what I have is a few south facing windows in our cabin, a small greenhouse built by Tim and I with the materials we had on hand, a large outdoor garden, and a family who takes priority over all of it. I have plenty of time to develop this into a market garden. For now, I need to strike a balance between working in the garden, working on subsistence projects (like putting up salmon when the season opens or spring bear if we get one), and family time. And staying calm while doing it (this part needs the most work…) It is frustrating though when I know I could be planting out more starts right now, if only I had had the room to start them last month. There are a few things we are enjoying out of the garden this week though.

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But the main highlight of the week is the sight and smell of the beautiful, blue-green water in front of our home. And the loons, ducks, and swans. And the frogs. And the leaves coming out. And the swallows fighting over the birdhouses. And the plants growing in the garden.

Hello summer! I am so glad you are finally here.