Another Friday blog post… this is getting to be a bad habit! It has been a busy week here at Wood Frog Farm. We have had a large amount of rain, cold nights and several brilliantly sunny days that end with storm cells racing across the mountains, whipping up winds and splattering rain before turning hot and sunny again between the squalls.

On Saturday our duck eggs in the incubator started pipping. I have never incubated eggs at home before. Now that we have six solar panels installed, which are keeping our battery bank topped off, we have an excess of power during the summer and running an incubator consistently is of no concern. When we were previously running a generator to charge our batteries, the system would frequently shut down which is not a good thing for hatching eggs. Our eggs from Corbin Creek Farm in Valdez were brought up to us by a mutual friend and we put the eggs in the incubator on Mother’s Day, May 10th. On May 18th, we candled the eggs for the first time and all seven showed signs of fertilization and growth though one was a bit off. We candled again on the 25th and six were developing on schedule (we pulled out the bad egg.)

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On June 7th, four hatched throughout the day. Sunday chores were frequently interrupted when another egg started “zipping” and we gathered around to watch the duckling emerge. It is a laborious process.

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One egg pipped in the small end of the shell which often means they do not have the room to turn and crack the egg shell in half (otherwise known as zipping though my daughter thought it should be “unzipping”) By Sunday night we knew that the two remaining ducklings were nearing exhaustion. After over 40 hours, there was no progress beyond the external pipping. Both their beaks stayed in the hole instead of inside the egg and they progressively grew weaker. It is very important to not assist hatching birds. There are two membranes inside the shell and the inner membrane is full of blood vessels. Part of the long hatching process is absorption of the blood in the vessels and the remaining yolk by the duckling. If you break that membrane, the duckling will bleed to death. We knew the ducklings would likely die overnight after struggling for two days to hatch and after more than 40 hours we hoped the membranes had done their thing. I found this article to be a fantastic guide to successfully assisting a difficult hatch. Tim assisted the duckling that had pipped in the narrow end of the shell by creating an artificial zip and the duckling hatched out and recovered quickly. I started to assist the 6th duckling and removed much of the hard shell. The outer membrane had completely dried but the inner membrane still contained blood vessels. The duckling was trapped in the rubbery membrane but was not able to hatch yet. We carefully cut slits in the outer membrane and put the duckling back in the incubator for the night hoping for the best but expecting the worst. Monday morning, the duckling was weak but had absorbed the remaining yoke and wiggled out of the membrane. A few hours later, you could not even tell there had been a difficult hatching.

And so, 6 bundles of cuteness are living in our house with us. They have already graduated from the standard tote to the 200 gallon stock tank. ‘Tis the season for ducklings. We saw our first wild ducklings with their Mama on the lake this week too.

In other homesteading news I processed our spring bear meat into burger and roasts this week.

Conner and I hauled two loads of peat from the roadside pit and mixed up enough peat, soil and compost to fill all our vegetable and flower pots.

I finished planting the greenhouse and all the pots on Sunday while waiting for the ducklings to hatch.

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I also planted and put up two cat tunnels in the garden for the squash plants with Conner’s help.

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We went on a family ride to move the horses to a new pasture.

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On our ride we were treated to a great view of Nelson Mountain (no relation).

I am still battling cutworms in the garden. Last year must have been a good one for the moths. I have been collecting them as I can and losing more plants every day. Such is the challenge of gardening…

The highlight of the week is definitely the new babies. I am so grateful to have these ducklings join us. Eve likes them too…

And as they are voracious slug eaters, or will be when they grow up, they will be quite useful with our new garden pest that migrated into our perennial garden two seasons ago. I am not very happy about the slug invasion. Ducklings are the answer!

I have spent a lot of time this week listening and thinking while in the garden. Garden chores are good for that. You can be in the garden and listen to the bumblebees, songbirds, and insects while you do chores. Or you can listen to podcasts and keep up with world events while weeding, which is what I do to distract myself from being impatient with (and disgusted by) the very weedy bits of the garden. The thing is though, what I am listening to this week is really hard to hear: the COVID 19 pandemic, racial injustice, and a divided country. I have so many thoughts swirling in my head about our country’s politics, healthcare, and food security. I am a white woman who has lived a life of privilege with a college education. I have freely made the choices that brought me to my life in rural Alaska on a small farm living a modern, hybrid, semi-subsistence lifestyle. And while I have experienced discrimination as a woman, it was never significant enough to alter my chosen path. My life here can be difficult. It is physically and mentally exhausting to raise a family in a land of extremes when Mother Nature or wildlife can take your life if you make a mistake. That challenge is part of what excites me about where I live. But I have no idea what it is like to live a life where it is other humans who threaten my ability to do what I want. I think the phrase on social media that caught my eye and strongly impacted my thoughts was “It is not enough to be non-racist. We must taken action and be anti-racist.” I am not sure how to make that happen yet in my context. I can connect with any human on a one on one but how do I become and how do I teach my children to be anti-racist? What action can we take? Right now I am listening to what life is like for the black and brown birdwatchers, nature lovers, and farmers in the United States because though we share the same country, we do not share the same experiences or the same freedoms that I often take for granted. I have a lot to think about.

On the farm it has been a week of weeding and planting and long days of repetitive labor. Sylvia and I planted over 900 onions…

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…and a lot of frisee and lettuces.

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Some of our horses came home for the next month and a half before heading north to work.

We had a hail storm in the middle of planting brassica starts.

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And cutworms seem to be abundant this year. The little buggers…I hope they do not kill too many of my plants!

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It is scary to put my nurtured starts out into the garden at the mercy of the weather, voles, and insects. There is so much potential and so much that could go wrong. That is part of what makes farming challenging.

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The garlic is looking gorgeous, however.

And the May day tree is flowering.

This week I have also been thinking a lot about small farms and their role in the food supply chain. Too many times I hear about or experience customers who want more choice, or perfect produce, or cheaper prices. Farming is hard. Producing food in our Alaskan climate is hard. It takes long days and constant thought about how to work with the natural systems. Dirty fingernails, dirty clothes, aching knees, and sore backs are often the only reward at the end of the day. There is a disconnect between food customers and farmers in our country. I hope that the current Covid-19 gardening trend of “victory gardens” accomplishes a couple of things: One, that more people are bit by the gardening bug and continue to produce a small amount of their own food every year. Two, that people experience and appreciate what it is like to attempt to grow food and how difficult it can be. I hope their experience transforms into an appreciation for what farmers do produce, especially your local, small, diverse farms. Community supported agriculture is one local food security model where customers purchase a subscription for food in the spring, paying upfront. It supports the farmer at a time when they are lean on cashflow. The customer also takes on some of the risk of the natural systems along with the farmer: potential crop failure due to storm, drought, pest. In return the customer receives a portion of the weekly harvest. CSAs have been waning in popularity over the past decade as the customer base wants more freedom of choice in their weekly groceries. Then came Covid-19 and CSAs have soared in popularity across the nation. All of a sudden folks are interested in local food and with grocery store shortages, the customer base is happy to get whatever is fresh. I hope that as we move through and past this global pandemic that this appreciation is not forgotten. I hope that customers continue to chose to spend their dollars at farmers markets, local markets, and with CSA subscriptions. I hope that folks realize that producing food is a labor of love.

In the farming world there is an expression: “the best fertilizer is a farmer’s footsteps.” It means that the best way to be a successful steward of the land is to keep your eyes and ears open constantly walking the fields and observing both good and bad areas and figuring out how to make it better. Perhaps listening and observing is the best way right now to be a steward of human needs too. I need to listen to the other human voices and their experiences. Listening is a start.