A huge weight has been lifted from my shoulders. Yesterday I butchered the last 5 Australorp cockerels. Over the past weeks of intermittent butchering I have gone from 63 fowl to 25. I now have 8 established Australorp layers, 13 Australorp pullets, 2 easter egger pullets and 2 Bourbon red turkey hens. Who knew 25 birds could feel like such a manageable amount! It is a long weekend, fall break, for the kids and we woke naturally today, late. No alarms, no crowing, and best of all, no butchering to do today. (Well, not really. I am canning some sockeye salmon but it had already been processed into fillets and frozen so does not really count!) The older layers and the turkeys will not go to freezer camp until late October so I have a nice break ahead.

We are in peak fall color in the Chitina River Valley. Our whole world is touched with gold. The kids and I went through a Bob Ross tv show phase last year. As I gaze at the gold flecked, burgundy, and evergreen colored mountains, I think of his fan shaped paintbrush adding some color here and there to highlight the ridges. We are in a living painting.

The growing season is winding down and many of the plants look a little tired after a long season of intense heat and now chilly nighttime temps. The work in the garden is not over yet however! Fall is the best time to prep your garden for a successful growing season next year. As the vegetables are removed from your garden beds, remove and burn any diseased plant material. This includes the roots balls and soil of any brassica plant (cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, etc…) that are infested with root maggots (small white wigglies or orange brown pupae each about the size of a fat grain of rice.) After removing the roots turn the soil over a few times  which will both expose the pupae to the surface where birds will eat them and bury them too deep for them to emerge in the spring reducing the amount on the goldilocks zone. Compost all the healthy plant material. I use a chipper/mulcher to grind up the thick stalks of plants (like broccoli) to help them break down faster. It is a noisy few hours on the machine but much nicer compost next year! And if you must till, till in the fall. It is good pest management, especially for root maggots. And the soil biome will have more time to reorganize itself to be ready for spring than spring tillage allows.

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I thought the sweet peas had died when we had our first hard frost on August 19. But there are new blooms with their strong floral scent at the garden gate. A big treat for the end of the season.

Even though you are tired of weeding…weed all your garden beds! Remove any seeding annual weeds with a bag and burn them. Compost any non seeding, non rhizome spreading weed. Or feed them to your chickens. It is still pretty dry out so I have been bagging up weeds to burn when it rains again. And after weeding, spread last years compost over your beds. If you have leaves, mulch your beds with leaves to feed your earthworms. When the snow melts next spring your beds will be ready to go. 

Now…it is time to take my own advice! Lots to do before the ground freezes.

Till next week!

This week, on Monday, I wrote and submitted the following letter/article to the Copper River Record.

“The Kenny Lake School Nutrition program began several years ago as a way to give our kids a made-from-scratch meal once a week using locally grown and harvested foods when possible. This program is 100% volunteer based and run with donated dollars from our fundraisers and community requests. We accept donated food in the form of (unopened) pantry staples, fresh garden harvest, and moose and caribou quarters. All donations must be coordinated ahead of time with either myself or Sarah Nelson. Sarah, from the Strelna community like myself, heads up the organizing and cooking and reliably gives her time each week to plan and prepare a delicious meal for students and staff. The program works best with two volunteers each week to assist her with meal prep, serving students, and clean up. And we need YOU to volunteer. It does not have to be every week…even once every school year would be a huge help. The kids are super appreciative of the delicious hot meals and it is a great way to give a little to your community. Please contact Sarah to sign up as a helper this fall.

This week Wood Frog Farm is sharing carrots and onions from the garden for the first meal of the year. Do you have something in your garden to share? Email Sarah or I to coordinate how much and a time to bring them to the school. Are you hunting this year and want to share with our youth? We accept whole quarters as close to the time of harvest as possible. We have the facilities at the school to age the meat and it legally must be processed in the school’s DEC approved kitchen for us to feed it to our kids. Are you on the roster for the roadkill program? Consider donating some meat to us if you get a bonanza at some point this winter.

I know everyone is busy with their own projects, careers, and filling the freezers for the winter but if we all give a little bit, be it time, money, game meat, or vegetables, we can continue to provide our kids with a delicious healthy meal every week. Thank you in advance!”

It has been a busy week in addition to meetings at the school and working out how we are going to fund our nutrition program and our end of the year scholarships. Another 14 chickens have been butchered. I harvested our first ever Blacktail watermelon that grew in an outside low tunnel.

We had rain and clouds and cold nights. I slept through one of the most spectacular aurora displays of the Copper basin ever. I tore all the roma tomato and cucumber plants out of the greenhouse and planted white turnip, brassica greens, and lettuce starts in the newly opened up space.

I pruned the cherry tomatoes and spread the pepper pots out in the greenhouse. The peppers are starting to ripen. We have two cayennes starting to turn red and sweet peppers turning red too. The sweet peppers made a delicious addition to a veggie tray I brought to a BBQ with friends.

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It is the time of year when I have to have a fire in the greenhouse every night and get up in the middle of the night to add more wood. I like the season extension of operating the woodstove but not the disruption to my sleep. Also last winter, I did not put up the two cords of wood the greenhouse uses annually so I am spending precious time scavenging wood to use. This works out in the long run as I am burning a lot of crap wood that needed to be cleaned up anyway but the wood collecting and splitting meanwhile takes up precious daytime.

We are losing daylight like crazy. The sun sets today at 8:47 PM and will be dark by 9:30. I have found myself having to use the truck headlights to do some chores at the end of some busy days when I have run out of time. But after some rain, the weather cleared and the last few days have been dead calm at the lake. It has been just beautiful with the willows, poplars, and aspens turning gold.

I am so tired by the end of the day. And I have been so busy elsewhere I have not been working in the veggie garden. That is my goal for this next week. I can only hope the weather holds!

Till next week…