Disclaimer: The end of this blog post contains photos of dead caribou. Whether wild harvested or grown on the farm, killing and then processing the animals is how we provide our family with protein.

The past three weeks have been full on winter with mornings of as cold as -27°F, snow, and ice on the lake that has now frozen thick enough to walk and ski on. The lake froze over on the night of October 22.

The pace of life in our household has slowed down from hectic, exhausting frenzy to more manageable school and chore filled days.

Hauling water to the pigs is my least favorite chore these days. We do not usually keep pigs into the time of year of subzero temps. It is on the to do list to butcher them but we have been waiting for a warm weather window for the process. I have been piling up large mounds of straw for them to burrow under and bringing them warm water twice a day. I used the 4 wheeler and trailer until it became too cold for the machine to start. A few days into hand sledding buckets of water through fresh snow all the way to the pigs, my husband got out my tundra snow machine for me to use.

They seem happy especially when eating pumpkin guts.

I finally had the time to get 20 pounds of frozen whole tomatoes from the freezer. I processed them into pizza sauce for our homemade pizzas, which we make on Friday movie nights. (Anyone else watching the Mandalorian every Friday?)

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I baked some pumpkins for pie because when it is cold having the oven on is a really good thing!

I peeled and fermented a quart of garlic cloves to use when the fresh supply runs out. The fresh cloves start to grow, which degrades the eating quality, by January or February. I usually ferment, freeze, and dry cloves so that we have garden garlic to use year round but I have not made time to processing the majority of the harvest yet.

Fall/early winter butchering season has begun in earnest. While processing meat can happen any time of year (trout from winter ice fishing, spring black bear, midsummer meat chickens, late summer grouse etc…), the majority of our protein comes from the meat we grow on the farm and wild harvest during the state hunting seasons in the fall. I started eating meat again the winter before I moved to Alaska. For over 5 years, starting in my late teens, I first gave up factory farmed red meat, then ate a vegetarian diet and then tried out over a year of consuming only vegan foods. I had tried to align my beliefs of anti animal cruelty with my diet. I was living in Bozeman, Montana in 2001 working temp construction jobs in below freezing temperatures to make the rent and save enough money to get back home to New England, when I was invited through friends of friends to the home of a rancher’s son. He cooked up the largest platter of steaks I had ever seen and somehow after all those meat free years, it felt like time. I still remember how that steak tasted with its perfectly grilled outside, tender pink center, and the crisp fat of the grass fed open range beef. My mouth waters just thinking about it. Over the next several years I learned more about farmers who ethically raise animals in humane conditions, homesteaders who raise their own animals for consumption, and subsistence fishing and hunts for rural Alaskans who provide part (or most) of their diet with harvests of animals from the land and sea. 18 years in Alaska now, I have supported small farmers who ethically raise meat animals as well as hunted small game, processed big game harvested at hunting camp and by my family, and butchered our own farm raised pigs and chickens. Consuming meat again benefited my physical health and increased my mental clarity. It is emotionally difficult for me to harvest animals but I think it should be difficult, taking a life should hold weight. Our children have been raised knowing where their food comes from and that to feed ourselves, to thrive physically with a healthy diet, plants and animals have lost their lives. I think this connection, this understanding, is important too.

The subsistence Nelchina herd caribou hunt opened on October 21 and C, S and T tried but were not successful on their first attempt. C and T headed back up a week later and connected with two young bulls, perfect for eating. It was allowable this year to harvest cows without calves but we do not like to take future breeders from the herd even though the cow meat is the most delicious. It was really cold so they loaded them up in the truck gutted but whole. We spent all of Halloween day with caribou in the house while T and C and S first skinned, then separated the carcasses into tenderloins and backstops, leg quarters and ribs while I cleaned, cubed, and made burger with the neck and scrap meats. Butchering days are long because you can not stop until the job is done especially when it is sub zero outside. But it is worthwhile work breaking carcasses down and being part of the transformation from whole animal to frozen packets of meats that will make delicious meals all winter and spring.

I aged the meat under the house for several days before we froze the whole quarters to cut with our meat band saw. It is much easier to cut frozen meat into nice steaks and roasts with the saw. The next step is to butcher our pigs so we can make caribou/pork fresh sausages. Yum! Homemade sausages and sauerkraut are our “fast food” dinners when I have neglected to make a dinner plan and we need something quick at the end of a long day. I miss that meal option on the years we do not raise pigs.

This winter I have set a goal to get out and walk or ski everyday regardless of weather and cold temps. I do not make it everyday, especially on long butchering days, but I keep trying! I went for my first ski on the lake November 4th and was treated to an incredible viewing of a sundog. It looked like this when I was half way around the lake.

And then it looked like this when I got back to the house when the sun slipped behind the Chugach. Sundogs are a sign of a change in weather. Our short window of sunlight on winter days is even shorter when the sun spends its last hour behind the mountains. Only 6 weeks left until the shortest day and then we will be gaining daylight again!

Best wishes from my farm to yours.

6 AM and it is 2 degrees above zero. I came downstairs to stoke the wood stove and decided to take advantage of the deep quiet of early morning and have a little time to myself. Logs are popping and groaning in the fire and the old dog is warming his aching bones on the heated floor just in front of the stove door. His long list of healed injuries are apparent in the stiffness of his gait in the cold. Winter is hard on him.

Yesterday it was 19°F when I got up and the high temperature of the day was 25°F. It was the first day since last spring where we did not warm up above freezing even in the bright sunshine. The lower arc of the sun just hits the top third of the garden this time of year and it has lost its warming power even at full strength with nary a cloud in sight. The nights have been pretty chilly this week, in the 20s, and the lower garden started freezing up, and not thawing out during the day, this past week. In mid September to mid October we lose significant day length as well as the amount of above freezing hours you can work with the ground outside. Each day the amount of time the ground is workable shrinks until you finally get a day like yesterday when it does not thaw at all.

It took just two days of cold for the ground to form a frozen crust. The puddles are solid ice and the water buckets for the animals all need to be filled daily. or several times a day for the pigs who like to tip theirs over. Imps. The small ponds are freezing up and the lake will not be far behind. The annual fall rush can be defined as working like a madwoman outside up until this day when I finally have to throw in the towel and be done with the garden until next spring. You just never know when it will happen. There have been years when I have looked around and stated “I will hate myself in the spring” because far too little prep was accomplished when the ground froze by the first week of October. In spring, there is an even narrower window to get everything in the ground for our short growing season and the more prep you do in the fall, the better. This year despite the extra hours spent indoors with homeschool, the garden is actually looking pretty good. Sure, I would love to have done more but it is not a total disaster. A lot has been accomplished in this last two weeks of fall.

The cold hardy plants still in the garden, the cabbages, leeks, Brussels sprouts, and kale, were harvested and brought to the house. My son ran the big woody plants through the chipper/mulcher for composting and my daughter helped harvest. The voles have taken up residence in force this fall so I am removing plant debris from the garden to the compost pile so there are not as many places for them to hide. Hopefully an ermine or pine marten will pass through and clear some out.

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I crimped the cover crop row of barley and alfalfa down with an old poplar board so the plants would protect the bed over the winter.

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And I discovered a surprise at the end of the row. Last year in 2019, rosemary and thyme were planted in this bed and a thyme plant survived the winter, survived weeding and planting, and survived being neglected all summer. What a hardy plant! I probably should have dug it up and saved it or left it be but I was in a hurry so I harvested it and moved on.

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We moved the sandbags off the silage tarp that had been on unused weedy lower beds since it was shipped up here this summer and I drug the giant black tarp to a new position for winter. I had had an order in for two more tarps in the hopes of covering the majority of the beds for the winter but the order was postponed until spring as apparently the factory where the tarps are made had delays due to the hurricanes. My thought, or hope, is that when the sun melts back the snow in the spring and all the cold hardy native plants begin to grow, that the section on the tarp will warm, the weed seeds will germinate, and then they will die of light deprivation by the time the ground is thawed and dry enough for me to get in there and start planting. I am always impressed by the plants that can start growing when the soil just thaws a half inch at a time during the day and refreezes at night. I do not like making the time to weed out all these plants before seeding.

I am not a big fan of utilizing a lot of plastic, however, these reusable tarps can provide an enormous amount of saved time in the market garden through clever use. You can rapidly break down cover crops in the heat of summer, protect uncovered soil, and burn off the top layer of the weed bank in the top of your soil (I need this the most!). Nearly half of my garden is thick in native perennial horsetail and I am hoping a few years of occultation with the tarps will help me control this plant that takes far too long to weed using traditional methods (and then grows right back). When I moved the silage tarp last week I was treated to a lovely sight, weed free garden beds. So far so good. With our short season and cooler temperatures, the tarps will be less effective than on lower 48 farms, but I am excited to have this tool in my toolbox.

Swans and geese have been flying over regularly heading southeast. I love to hear the honking and have an excuse to stop laboring and look for the flocks. Sometimes they are way up in the sky and sometimes skimming the treetops but always a happy sight to see.

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The sky spit snow on Thursday, the first flakes I have seen this season. Every few hours the sky would open up and a short burst of flurries would come down. It all melted right away in Strelna but made the outdoor work damp and chilly.

My daughter and I have been working all week on prepping the topmost 4 garden beds that have my low tunnel hoops.

If nothing else, I wanted those beds ready to go in spring for early greens. I kept the plastic up for a while which kept the soil warmer than it would have been otherwise allowing us to weed and broad fork later than if I hadn’t. It was chilly work but we did it, finally finishing yesterday evening even with the soil frozen an inch on top. Luckily all we had left to do the last day was spread compost on 150 square feet, one half of one bed. The beds were weeded and then spread with compost and broad forked. I had hoped to spread even more compost on other beds but that will have to wait for spring.

I still have at least 4 to do lists going. Now that I can turn my back on the main garden, I need to focus on mixing seed starting soil (a challenge with these temps) and getting the greenhouse prepped for spring starts. I should be able to work on it for a while as long as we do not get a large amount of snow. I can see light at the end of the tunnel though. Soon there will be more moments like the one now where I have time to watch the sky begin to lighten, to contemplate life with a cat on my lap (typing is a little challenging in this scenario…), and feel cozy by the wood stove.

Even though the sun will not be above the horizon for another half hour (sunrise is 8:28 this morning), it is light enough now to see frost covered trees on the other side of the lake.

The browns of Octobers changed overnight to shimmering silver. How beautiful.

Best wishes from my farm to yours.