Wood Frog Farm: A Boreal Forest Family Adventure

Last Thursday and Friday, I spread compost, broad forked 50 linear feet of bed and planted the garlic for next year. It is the latest in the season that I have ever planted so it will be interesting to see how it survives. I planted 3 rows across the bed and the cloves 6 inches apart along the row. This year I used a bulb planter to remove a 2 1/2 inch disk of soil where I placed the garlic clove and then filled in with screened compost.

It worked really well, faster than planting with the dibble. When finished planting, I covered the bed with about a foot of straw.

I have been trying to do some sort of garden clean up everyday so my next project was to take the 15 gallon pots down to the compost and make a potting soil pile. But when I dumped the pots out, to my mounting horror, I discovered hundreds of perfect, opaque eggs on the straw/soil at the bottom of each pot. After doing a bit of research, they were identified as slug eggs.

I brought all the pots back down to the gravel area behind the greenhouse that they came out of and ran the weed burner over the ground where potentially some eggs could have fallen. And thus began a slug war…

All of a sudden I saw slugs everywhere in the greenhouse. How I had missed them before is a mystery. I have been going through and picking them off the plants, walls, floor, everyday. Today I got 9. Somedays I have gotten 18 or more. I have been burning them in the wood stove to make sure they can not escape. I have raked and run the weed burner over the gravel floor and need to do it again. And it is on the to do list to remove all the remaining plants from the greenhouse. I will burn the foliage and also run the weed burner over the tops of the beds to kill as many hidden slugs and eggs as possible.

Why the major freak out? (Because believe me I have been freaking out. I have even had elaborate dreams where someone was attempting to sabotage my gardens by planting slug eggs and I am trying to gather the eggs but they just keep multiplying.)

Slugs are not a normal thing here. I have had a garden in the same spot since 2004. And in the 17 years I have lived here I have seen less than 5 slugs. Sure, if you travel a hundred miles south to the coast there are (native and nonnative) slugs but not here. Until now. In trying to research this new (to me) pest, I have discovered very little information specific to Alaska. I can not even discover what species of slug I have. More research is needed!

Munching away happily on the turnip foliage in the greenhouse.

Today’s weather belongs in a british gothic novel. All colors are washed out to grey, there is spitting rain, and a howling wind. I woke up early, 45 minutes before the alarm, and quickly built a cheery fire to warm the house and bolster the spirits during a shoulder season where it is too cold and wet to enjoy outside chores and too warm (above freezing) to ignore the fact that outside chores could and should be done before it freezes for real.

I had big plans this morning to process the kale that thawed yesterday in the main garden and was subsequently harvested before it could freeze again. But some days just do not go as planned. The house water pump made the distinctive noise that lets me know that we are out of water in the 500 gallon tank under the house when I tried to fill the sinks with hot water to do the morning dishes. And so getting ready to haul water became my top priority. While warming up the water truck, after pulling out the water trailer to hook to the water truck, I went down to feed the 4 horses. Cassidy, Jet, Dixie, and Betty are here temporarily while we pull off their shoes, have a vet check and their teeth floated, and make up ads for the 3 older ones that we are going to sell so that we can purchase three or 4 new two year olds in the spring. But Dixie had a goopy eye so instead of hauling water, I brewed some calendula tea (a good herbal eyewash) and wiped away all the gunk and dribbled in as much of the eyewash as I could. She does not seem to be in any pain and the flesh is not hot so I will just keep an eye on it and wash it out a few times as day. Poor girl. We don’t usually have the horses here this time of year. It has been nice to have the fuzzy beasts around and they have been helping with yard chores. All the grass around the house has been nicely trimmed. I even let Betty into the perennial garden to trim up the grass paths.

There is a horse in the garden! Betty did a great job and did not step off the path way once.

Tater and I are now holed up in the water truck as the rain comes down and we wait for the tank to fill. It smells like wet dog and wet carhartts in here. Laptops are a pretty keen invention as I can work on my weekly writing in the truck while pumping water. It would be excellent multitasking if I did not have to keep stopping to unclog the pump of the leaves flowing downstream…

Pumping drinking water from the creek in the rain.

The same pump is now moving the water into the house tank. While that is going, I have been hauling firewood for the house, taking in the laundry from the line (dry this morning but not dry now), and digging up the dahlia tubers to dry for a few days before storing for winter. The rain is steady now and I decided to do inside chores for the rest of the day.

There is plenty to do in the house. Kale to process.

Cabbage to process.

Cabbages suspended under the floor of the house.

Peppers to process.

We have been eating peppers like crazy but it is time to get these put up before they get soft.

Onions to trim, sort, and bag.

Delicious onions that finally dried down.

Now that the day is almost over, it is time to get started!

Till next week. 🙂

It has been a chilly week with lots of rain storms. Several nights this week, I lay in bed listening to the rain pound on the metal roof. When the weather clears temporarily, the air is cold and damp. Snow is creeping down the mountain sides and we scrambled to get the rest of the potatoes out of the garden.

Even with regular irrigation and excellent, early top growth, the potato crop yielded only about half of what we produced last year. My son and I had disassembled all the low tunnels and we pulled one large sheet of plastic over the potato beds to keep the soil from freezing and getting rained on.

The kids were a huge help and we dug all the potatoes over the weekend. The only downside to the chore was the voracious cloud of small black insects. I wore sunglasses to keep them out of my eyes and the kids used the two head nets. But I ate quite a few of them and one flew in my ear. Obviously we need another head net!

We all had tired backs with the digging and hauling by the time we were done

Once the potatoes were out of the ground, they had to be rinsed and air dried before re-crating them and putting under the house.

Taters rinsed, air dried, and stored under the house

Our end of the season harvest total of 288 pounds (after eating out of the patch for two months and removing any damaged ones) were approximately as follows:

15 pounds of peanut/banana fingerlings
39 pounds Pontiac Red
87 pounds French Fingerlings
17 pounds Raspberry
26 pounds of Russets
16 pounds of Purple Vikings
88 pounds German Butterball

While it seems like a lot of potatoes, it is merely enough for the family and not enough to sell. I usually like to sell enough to at least pay for the seed potatoes. Oh well, not this year!

There are still leeks and cabbage in the garden but only because I am out of canning jars and freezer space. I am trying to figure out what I can do with them to hold them until we make a supply run to Anchorage.

The cover crops have made it through the light September frosts and are still growing, albeit slowly. I am in the process of cutting the barley grass down so it will break down faster over the winter and spring for next years planting.