I spent this past week mired in the weeds of life. Not literal weeds, though in truth there are many garden beds that need weeding and compost spreading before freeze up, but the weeds of my life: dishes, laundry, hauling water, yard clean up, homeschool etc… I just could not get on top of the basics that allow our life to run smoothly. I woke up utterly exhausted every morning. I had a really difficult time getting the kids ready and geared up for another school day. Day after day, I lay in bed totally unenthused about the tasks that lay ahead.

The weather is partly to blame. I have been experiencing two long drawn out gray weeks with hundreds of shades of blah spiced up only by strong winds that whip up white capped waves on the lake and ripped the beautiful golden leaves from the branches of the willow and aspens. I am having to run the generator to charge our batteries nearly every day as I have three freezers full of winter stores plugged in and with no sun, our solar panels are not adding much to our battery bank. The gray days are depressing. One gray cool day after another means soldiering on with the outside chores with zero cheer.

Fall is at once a brief interlude AND a couple months long descent into winter. The beautiful fall, when the mountains turn red and the river valleys with willow and aspen run golden, lasts a week or two in September. But for us, fall really begins at the end of July. The garden is at its peak production and we work like pack rats to put food away for winter knowing frost is a mere few weeks away. The first yellow leaves show up then and the greenery, only 3 months old, starts to look tired. There is no more hot weather in August though you might get some pretty nice days. Once September hits, it is an all out race to see how much you can get done before the ground freezes. Sometimes it snows in September, sometimes we have a long drawn out fall with days in the 50s and freezing night temps. This year though it is just cool and cloudy with not much rain so I still had to irrigate the garden! It is, however, pouring rain right now so I can cross irrigating the garlic bed off my list.

The transition to fall challenges the whole family. I have navigated the difficult adjustment each year of saying goodbye to my husband when he leaves to guide in the Brooks Range at the end of July and then comes back into our lives in October for the entirety of our relationship. My first year in Alaska was his first season working at hunt camp. That transition only became harder for me when he left behind kids as well. We are so busy when Tim leaves that adjusting to his departure only takes a few days. The children have grown up with this routine. All those difficult years with toddler and baby of telling nightly stories of Dad hunting in the mountains with his clients and repeating over and over again when Dad will come home, mean that the kids now know the routine and do not fret terribly over his absence. They miss him and they look forward to his return but they know what to expect. Adding back the other adult into the household while exciting and wonderful in most ways also brings with it the challenge of communication and negotiation of priorities. I struggle with this every year having made all the decisions on my own for the homestead for the previous two months.

But regardless, we are counting the days until Tim is finally home and I seem to have made it through my week of melancholia though the weather has not improved (at all). I am back at work with a decent attitude anyway. The past two weeks have mostly been yard clean up and organization of garden stuff. Somehow items did not get put back every time they were used (how on earth did that happen?) and it was time to put forth the effort to collect and properly store all the rakes and shovels, weeding equipment, totes and carts and other garden miscellany. This helped me organize my thoughts and priorities too as items were stacked away. And now if we get a snowstorm I will not be caught out entirely unprepared.

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The kids and I finished harvesting the potatoes two weeks ago. They have cured since the harvest under tarps to keep them from greening up and as of yesterday are now stored in crates under the house. It was a fabulous potato year and even with 86 pounds of vole damaged potatoes, there are over 500 pounds of perfect ones. We have enough for ourselves and to share and to sell some too which helps to cover the cost of the expensive double certified seed potatoes I buy in. Someday I will have a root cellar that will not freeze up and I will be able to save my own seed potatoes for growing the next year.

I had hoped to have the garlic planted in the ground by the end of September but with an extra challenging school week it did not happen until October 1. The garlic we harvested in August is fully cured and I cut it off the stalk and bagged it up for winter. From the 300 cloves we planted in the fall of 2019, we harvested over 24 pounds. It is hard to know exactly how much we actually grew as we have been eating it fresh, fermenting with it, and consuming the drying ones since July. But I weighed up 23 pounds 11 ounces of what we had on trays this week so it is safe to say we had a bit more than that. I put a garlic seed order in earlier this summer so I had 6 pounds of commercial garlic seed cloves come in the mail and I picked out 5 1/2 pounds of the biggest and best from my harvest to plant as well.

I prepped the garlic bed on the 30th with my daughter and we weeded with head nets on to protects us from the biting gnats that plague us this time of year. The garlic is going in where the giant flat peas grew all summer. I cut the pea plants at the soil line leaving the roots in the ground after the first frost damaged the plants and remaining peas. Leaving the roots of any plants that have been growing is a good way to hold the soil structure together. In addition, these peas formed a symbiotic relationship with rhizobium bacteria and the roots are covered in nitrogen fixing nodules that will enrich the soil next season which is perfect for the garlic that needs a high fertility soil.

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After weeding we added two wheelbarrow loads of compost. The next day I broad forked the row to loosen but not invert the soil layers. Then the bed was raked smooth and I drew 4 evenly spaced lines with my bed rake markers. I used my wooden dibble made from an old tool handle to make 400 holes 6 inches apart and between 3 to 4 inches deep. My daughter and I planted the 400 garlic cloves keeping a careful log of what was planted where and then covered the bed with an additional wheelbarrow load of compost. All we need to do is water (the rain is doing it for me right now!) and add a thick layer of straw and the garlic will be be all set for the winter.

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In anticipation of meat coming home from hunt camp, I finally carved out the time to paint the shed and set up the freezers in their new home. Due to rainy weather, I still have not painted the trim around the door but the rest is done and it will feel great to cross this project off the list as it has been hanging over my head since we moved it across the yard this spring.

This weekend I have been working on some garden cleanup by taking plant remains to the compost pile and starting to harvest the leeks, fall cabbages, and remaining Brussels Sprouts. With any luck our warm fall weather will continue and I will get more spring prep work accomplished. Fingers Crossed!

Best wishes from my farm to yours 🍂

It is so quiet at 5:45 AM that all I can hear is the gentle hum of our inverter power system and the chewing of hay in the guinea pig cage. It is the second morning in a row where the ground is not covered in icy frost. We had 20°F for four mornings this past week. It rained yesterday on and off and when I saw stars this morning I thought for sure that it would be frozen solid out, a wet saturated icy mess. I have 15 gallon plant pots full of soil, tubs and totes, cleaning tables and tools, potato box pieces and buckets scattered in the yard. As much as I would like to clean and organize these items, it is a low priority project as I scurry to get as much food out of the garden as possible before the voles eat it or winter closes in. It is not frozen out though this morning, unexpectedly. Instead it is 45° and damp. Another fall day, thankfully not yet winter. There is so much to do.

Our household routine these past two weeks has been to get up and start classes by 9. While assisting/monitoring that, I process food in the kitchen which warms up the house and makes use of the hours waiting for the frost to melt off.

Once school is done for the day, or the kids can work independently, I go out to the garden to harvest more. We brought in the squash harvest after the first night that was cold enough to nip the plants under plastic tunnels, Sept 6th.

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I built two 8 foot by 3 foot cleaning tables to use to wash the harvest (as well as hold trays of garden starts in the spring). I have been meaning to do this for a few months and finally got to it when the carrot harvest started in earnest.

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It took longer than I would have liked to get the carrots out of the ground. I always over estimate what I am capable of accomplishing in a day, or a week. But finally I did get the last of them out of the ground on the 14th and with very little vole damage. The carrots were a little funny this year with perfectly normal carrots growing next to stunted runts. But the overall harvest was decent.

I came home from delivering carrots in McCarthy last Saturday evening and brought the greenhouse harvest and all the plants in pots into the house. I was out of the 22 inch length greenhouse wood and while I could have used the shorter house wood, we are low on that too. We moved our shed this spring and have yet to build the new wood shed that attaches to the front of the storage shed. We did not cut our usual four cords of wood last spring either because we were thinking ahead so that we would not have to move it twice or because with covid and schooling at home it just did not happen. I am not the biggest fan of going into the winter without our stockpile of wood split and stacked but at least the kids will get PE credit helping us get wood in late fall/early winter. When I get up at 2 AM to stoke the greenhouse fire, I often can not fall back asleep. These days with the kids schooling at home, I need all the patience I can get. Better sleep outweighed keeping the cucumbers and tomatoes going a little longer and so, the greenhouse was shut down for the year. There is some arugula and radish seeded in there which may or may not do anything depending on how cold October is this year. So now in addition to trays of drying onions and bundles of herbs and flowers, we have pots of peppers and trays of tomatoes finishing ripening. My peppers did badly this year after what looked like a beautiful start this spring. The slugs, regardless of picking them off every day or so, did a number on them. I diced all the small green peppers and froze them. I mourned the lack of jalapeños (slug favorite). And I have resigned myself to sharing our limited space with 5 big pots of ripening cayenne and Hungarian wax peppers.

We have taken a few breaks from school and the farm, for our sanity. I have learned this fall that having a weekend, or at least one day a week, without any school work is necessary for me. I need the break from organizing and overseeing. We drove to Thompson pass on the 6th and picked blueberries for a few hours. The leaves were just coming into peak colors and the drive towards Valdez was spectacular. We did not get more than 3/4 gallon of berries but there was much gallivanting around on the open hillsides. It is good to get away sometimes.

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Last Saturday we hit the road again to deliver 160 pounds of carrots to McCarthy locals. After all the carrots were all picked up we spent the afternoon at the toe of the Kennicott Glacier with friends, listening to rocks slide off the ice to crash into the water, throwing rocks in ourselves, and scrambling up at least one hill on the moraine. I don’t spend much time in McCarthy anymore but it was my first home when I moved to Alaska. The day could not have been better. The warm sun shone down on us and the bugs were few and far between. We hardly saw another soul, a rarity in the now extremely popular town. The aspen and willow and birch were at peak color and this year there was a lot of gorgeous orange-red in addition to the many hues of gold in the leaves.

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I bought myself a present on Amazon this month. I have been struggling with carrying heavy totes of harvest repeatedly down my long garden rows. When I saw this garden cart in the back of my friend’s pickup in August, I knew I had to have one too. I know it is ecologically unsustainable to use Amazon but still, it feels like a miracle when something you need is delivered to the Post Office and I only have to drive 13 miles, instead of 250 to get it. This gorilla cart measures 22 inches from the outer wheels so theoretically fits down my 24 inch paths. It can hold up to 600 pounds and is not nearly as tippy as my wheelbarrow. I put it together yesterday as soon as we got home from the post office and even though it was time to start dinner, I took it for a test drive and harvested two crates of potatoes. I am in love (and my back is very thankful too).

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I have been chipping away at the potato harvest. The voles are hitting it hard and I spent several hours yesterday morning experimenting with processing potatoes to freeze to make use of the pounds of potatoes that are nibbled on one end but still good on the other. I made hash browns by shredding potatoes, blanching them in boiling water for three minutes and then transferring them to ice water. After draining and pressing on a cookie sheet with a dish towel to remove excess water, I divided them into portions and put in the freezer. I also steamed potato chunks for ten to twelve minutes before dunking in ice water and then twirling in the salad spinner for freezer home fries and roasted potatoes. I want to make some frozen steak fries too when I harvest the German Butterball and remaining Kennebec. The potatoes too far gone to use are boiled for the pigs. The good harvest is drying/curing in the back room for a day or so and then will be stored under the house. It is an abundant harvest this year and I hope to have it completely out of the ground this weekend so I can start to work on garden clean up before everything freezes.

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The sun is up now and it is time to really start the day. I feel pretty darn lucky to be able to look up from the keyboard and out the window to see the sun striking the mountains.

Best wishes from my farm to yours.