I have not heard the sound of raindrops since last fall. While winter took its sweet time showing up in 2019, once it arrived we did not experience any severe chinooks between December and early April. We had snow, cold weather, gray skies, clear days and a few warms ups above freezing but no midwinter rainstorms. I love the sound of rain. The raindrops pounding on the metal roof makes me want to curl up with a wood fire, a book, and hot tea.

On Easter morning I woke up suddenly when it was barely light out yet to the strange sounds of something scampering around on the roof. When I went downstairs and outside to investigate, I discovered it was Eve, the cat, who had climbed up the very tall ladder being used to install two more solar panels and found a new area to explore. She attracted the attention of the Great Horned owls with her behavior on the ladder this week but so far, she is still with us. Crazy cat.

Two days later I woke up at 4 AM on the 14th to more strange sounds on the roof, the first rainstorm of the year, though by the time I woke up again it had cleared off. And now today is the second of pounding rain this week. It is misty, cloudy, damp, and just altogether icky outside right now. Breakup is here in earnest.

Every footstep down to the chicken coop is precarious as your weight shifts, sinks, and slides on the softened snow. Small rivers run across the yard heading down hill to the slough to the north, the lake to the south, or the perennial garden (the low spot in the yard.) The drain pipe in the perennial garden has not yet thawed out and the quick change in weather means a lot of water has morphed from snow and ice to its liquid form rapidly.

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While this is an annual occurrence, there has never been this much water at once just below the greenhouse. In fact, the greenhouse itself is flooded for the first time.

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The kids motivated this week to carry out some Easter traditions. Saturday night they mixed dye, vinegar, and water and decorated farm fresh eggs.

The easter bunny brought us solid chocolate bunnies and jelly beans. What a treat!

We scrounged up a stack of quarters and the kids loaded up plastic eggs and taped organic lollipops to the plastic eggs. For the first time I can remember, I got to help hide eggs. The kids read books inside while Tim and I scurried around the yard, giggling. Usually on a typical year, I am making a family dinner and entertaining a passel of children while the men hide the eggs. I had so much fun hiding and then watching the kids find the eggs!

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We had a quiet Easter dinner with a delicious farm based meal. Farm raised roasted turkey, wild harvested lingonberry jam, the last of the 2019 potatoes: roasted french fingerlings, potato bread rolls and freshly grown sunflower micro greens dressed with a lemon vinaigrette.

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It would be hard to not feel grateful to be eating so well during these times. (Believe me, I would love to make a Costco run. I would love to eat an avocado. But we are doing pretty darn well without it.) And I feel grateful for our unlimited daily access to the out of doors, even if the weather is not the greatest. The lousy weather does allow for other projects though. I participated in a free webinar on building wash/pack sheds for the farm. And thanks to youtube instructions, reseated the ram on my laptop which is now working perfectly again. There were a fair amount of dust bunnies inside the MacBook (it is running much cooler now) so the computer spring cleaning/fixing was a super good thing!

I am falling behind on starting plants for the garden but I am not too worried about it because spring will be a bit later this year and the brassicas will get leggy quickly in this dim light. It is time to get the boards out of the greenhouse so I have a little more room to navigate. Will the ceiling project ever be finished? (Not if I don’t get to work on it. Where are my rubber boots again?)

More now than ever am I excited for spring, you know the late part of spring, with crocuses and dry soil and warm sunshine. It is coming. But for now, a few moments curled up by the fire sounds good.

Be well. Eat well. Take care.

Another week that passed in a blink. We had a windstorm, a snowstorm, and then two bluebird days in a row. (I am ignoring the fact that there is rain in our upcoming forecast). It was 8°F this morning when I looked at the thermometer at 7:30 AM. Brrr… Dark and cold go together in my mind. 8°F in midwinter is a warmup, a wonderful interlude of the perfect temperature for some winter activities. However, there is something about having all this light where my brain keeps thinking “isn’t it spring already?” I need to be more patient. Spring will arrive when it does. The signs are here even if it feels like it is coming at a glacial pace: increased sunlight, melting south slopes, and pussy willows.

The thing is though, even though this is a more typical spring where you can pretend that climate change is not really as bad as it actually is, for the Alaskan gardener a later spring can be really, really stressful. Everything is going to melt at once and there will be mud and you have to be patient because you can really muck up your garden if you muck around in it too early. Spring will explode all at once. There will be bumblebees, leaves unfurling, scented gentle breezes but will the gardener have time to take note? No way! Because prep and planting time will be compressed to a tiny window of flurried activity. Prep the beds, plant garden starts, stress about late frosts, plant more starts, plant seeds, collapse into bed dirty because you are too tired to shower, and THEN it is time to weed. The later winter encroaches on the growing season the more intense spring chores become as the chores do not ever decrease, just the time in which you have to do them. My gardening goals for the year reach a crescendo in late July when I realize that I have done all I can do for the year. Our season is that short. Spring will probably hit mid May this year. First killing frost for my garden is usually the last week of August. I have to schedule in time to stop and enjoy summer because there is just so much to be done and I don’t want to wake up in October and realize I forgot to have some fun too. We can not rely on long shoulder seasons in which to complete things. So, before all this starts, I am really enjoying this period of calm before summer and both dreading and anticipating the upcoming work.

This week was ushered in by a huge sundog. We had some intense winds and on Wednesday it snowed, and snowed, and snowed big fat flakes on a stiff breeze that made my daily walk more challenging. The snowflakes clung to my face, not quite freezing there, but very very wet. The wind is easier to bundle up against and created some gorgeous patterns in the snow.

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In the house the plant starts are beginning to take over. So far there has been only a small amount of cat damage (the biggest problem is if a small flying insect buzzes in the window and she goes careening after it.) I have extra trays going because I am trying to grow some freshies for us to eat now. And in the next two weeks hundreds more need to be started. Several days this week it was in the mid 30s outside and in the 70s in the greenhouse so I transported the trays out to the greenhouse for a few extra hours of sunlight. As it continues to warm up this will become a more frequent activity until it is finally warm enough to keep the plants in the greenhouse overnight with the wood stove going. It comes with the price of getting up at 2 AM to stoke the fire though.

The kids had been using the plastic tables I use for my plants for their school work. My daughter is doing work on the floor today until we come up with a new desk plan. Sometimes the plants have to come first!?! Besides it is a character building exercise and it will make for a wonderful story in 60 years: “When I was in 5th grade there was a worldwide pandemic and I lived in remote Alaska and could not leave our property and had to do my school work on the floor because my Mom’s garden starts were more important that having a school desk.” I am mostly kidding here. We will have a new desk set up for her to work on before the next school week begins. She just had to work on the floor for today.

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To grow sunflower and pea shoots you have to soak them overnight and then spread them on an inch of potting soil in a tray (I use compost, peat, and perlite.) Cover them with another tray and gently weight it down for three days while the seeds germinate. The weight helps the seeds send their roots down into the soil so the shoots will be anchored and grow quickly. Mist them with water several times a day. Take the lid off and place in the sunlight. The sunflower shoots are ready after about 7 days and the peas after 10 to 12 days. The sunflower sprouts are my favorite with a toothy texture and nutty flavor.

I transplanted the basil into baskets a few days ago. I am really excited about the purple basil. I started more seeds: holy basil and flowering basil. I forgot to freeze basil last year for our winter use (except for pesto) and I have been missing the strong scent and delicious flavor.

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I also started greens to interplant in the greenhouse to eat in May. They are for personal use so I did not get too upset that the cat knocked the covers off and disturbed the tiny seeds. They will still grow but will be mixed up. For fresh eating, it does not matter which variety is which.

There has been chicken drama too this week. I did a midday egg check only to find puddles of blood in the run, coop, and nesting boxes. An australorp had lost the end of her toe and was bleeding profusely.

I tried golden seal first to stop the bleeding but resorted to ground up yarrow when it did not work. Yarrow is by far the most effective herbal blood clotter I have ever used. We use it fresh in the summer as a spit poultice and I am happy to report that it does just as well dried and stored in a jar. I ground it up in my spice grinder (an old coffee grinder) and in less than a half hour she was ready to go back to the other chickens.

The other chicken debacle was far too gruesome to photograph. Just two days later, on another egg check, I found a hen that had been brutally pecked. Perhaps the flock turned on her or perhaps she got injured on or by something first and then they pecked her (chickens can be brutal) but by the time I showed up her whole head was swollen and there was a large bleeding hole just behind her comb. Yarrow took care of the bleeding and golden seal to reduce the chance of infection but I was not sure she would make it through the night with such a severe injury. So far so good though. She is recuperating in a cage inside the coop and is eating and drinking and healing. Hopefully we will be able to reintroduce her into the flock in a week or so. And hopefully this is the last chicken incident this spring!

So…life is pretty good this week. The kids are doing well with their distance learning and I have been appreciating getting to see more of their work than I normally would (with so much online instead of paper coming home). Two weeks of distance learning down and it has become a routine now. The weather has been holding for some firewood hauling (not that I have helped this year as I have been kept busy at home but I see wood splitting and stacking in my future). And really my biggest challenge continues to be staying on task. I do very well on my own and get a lot done when left to my own devices. That is not the case when I am interrupted over and over again (not that the interruptions are malicious, it is just due to all of us being at home in a very small house). Oh to be a person who thrives in busy chaos! Does every life challenge have to be such a big obstacle learning experience for me?! I know I could be accomplishing more but I am having a hard time getting things done.

We are still eating well. Our local store in Chitina, the Wrangell View Store, has been amazing during this pandemic fulfilling weekly orders from Anchorage, sharing complete transparency with their sanitation and steps taken to reduce spreading covid-19, curbside pick up and deliveries to people in quarantine. So we have somewhere to get ketchup and milk and other small things as we run out. We have to meet the school bus every Friday to hand in school work and get the next assignments for the upcoming week and that is also the shopping time. And our freezers are holding out with frozen meat and vegetables. Last fall I thought I had put up far too many vegetables but now I am so happy that I did. I could use some help on what to do with the gallons of frozen leeks though. Suggestions anyone?

Running out of things is typical this time of year when we put up the bulk of our food the summer and fall previous. I have one small bag of french fingerling potatoes from the garden I saved to roast on Easter but otherwise all 275 pounds of last years harvest have been consumed. The fresh garlic has been gone for months though we have frozen, dried, and fermented garlic to keep us going. There is one winter squash left in the pantry that with any luck will still be good. Most sadly, this week we ate the last lacto fermented dill pickle. It was the best batch of 2019 and has the whole family craving cucumber season. Fermented pickles have a cloudy brine unlike vinegar pickles. They are full of beneficial microorganisms and taste delicious.

It is time to quit typing on the computer and enjoy the clear blue sky outside before the rain storms start. This week my beloved MacBook pro has been having issues. Perhaps the charging cord, perhaps an unseated ram (even after watching a youtube video I am still uncertain what that means). Often it will not start and beeps at me. I am a bit panicked as I was without my own computer for 15 years and it was a big deal for me to make the money to buy this one used. And I LOVE this silver laptop. (Or did until it decided to glitch.) More computer research is in my future and rainy days should be perfect for that. Computer trouble this week is my excuse this week for not publishing on time on Thursday.

Take care and be safe out in our beautiful wild world.

Both kids have been studying poetry this week. My daughter whipped out this haiku at breakfast this morning.

Go to Wood Frog Farm

It grows and sells vegetables

Go to Wood Frog Farm

Sylvia Nelson age 10