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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wood Frog Farm: A Boreal Forest Family Adventure 