Monday morning and the kids were off to school. I had my second cup of coffee and watched a squirrel through the office window biting off spruce cones from a lakeside tree and toss them down onto the kayaks. Thump. Fling. Thump. One cone after another sailed through the air. We have a policy about squirrels in our yard. If they stay off the house, they do not get shot. One good squirrel will defend its territory and I would rather have just one than several fighting over the prime real estate. This one has been busy this week. There is always something in his mouth as he traverses back and forth across the yard. Plants, cones, and other food miscellany. It is a reminder (as if we needed one) that it is time to start squirreling things away for winter. Ducks have been flocking up and at least two pairs of swans have passed through, resting on the lake briefly. Our willows are fading from green to gold.

One week ago on August 19, we had our first hard frost. It was 26° outside when I got up at 6 AM and 33° in the greenhouse. Yikes! In just a few hours my garden went from a late summer lush green to frosty silver and then as the day progressed, wilted brown. My son and I had spent hours Sunday evening closing the low tunnels and spreading frost blankets but it was too cold for too long for the frost sensitive plants to make it. Fall is finally here (though it took me all week to come to terms with that fact.) The cold hardy plants that have endured the hot dry summer shook the cold off and still look beautiful but the beans and squash and potato tops are done for.

I have been selling produce this summer and eating it fresh and now it is time to get busy putting it up for our family to eat through the winter. But instead of getting serious about harvesting, yesterday we finished the honeyberry bed and planted the nursery stock I purchased this past spring.

(Never heard of honeyberries? Check out this link for more information: http://honeyberryusa.com/about-honeyberry.html I ordered many of my plants from these folks and they were lovely to communicate with and the plants that arrived were healthy.)

Lonicera caerulea are shrubs thought to have originated in Russia but grow in northern climates around the globe and are in the honeysuckle family. They produce an early, elongated, blue hued berry that contain more antioxidants than blueberries. I have wanted to grow honeyberries for years, ever since I first learned about them, but perennial space in the garden is just now becoming a reality. This project has been hanging over me since May, and while a priority project this year, so many other projects had to be completed before this one could be started that it was delayed. It is amazing how the few summer months can slip by so quickly and with well intentioned to do lists remaining undone. Now it is late August and the poor plants are just getting into the soil. They will survive as they have well over a month to develop additional root structure but their growth next year would have been even better with a stronger root system had they gone into the ground in June. The new space is a deep garden bed 3 feet wide and 75 feet long. I raised it with additional topsoil to about 4 inches above the pathway and added fish bone meal and my son watered the parched soil really well. The honeyberries were planted 5 feet apart with a bucket of compost each. I only had 12 and I have room for two more that I will order next spring. It will take a few years for them to start producing but I am looking forward to harvesting berries at home.

So far we have red, white, and black currants, red and golden raspberries, aronia berries, and now honeyberries planted in 4 of the 5 perennial beds that line the vegetable garden fencing. Progress! This year the three year old black currants are by far the best producers though the two year old red and white currants did pretty well considering they had been damaged by snowshoe hares.

The raspberries would have preferred irrigation with this dry summer but we still got a great crop. We planted the aronia berries this summer as an experiment and will see if they make it through the winter. After we finished planting and watering in the honeyberry plants yesterday, we mulched them with a truckload of last years cottonwood leaves. They will work on sending out new roots until the ground freezes.

I can check that project off the list (finally!) Time to get busy harvesting and processing the annual vegetable crops. The napa cabbages had an enormous amount of root maggot damage (they did not get beneficial nematodes in their soil this year) but several were still good or just had small damaged parts that were easy to trim off. I harvested all the good and bagged up the bad to burn later, including roots and some soil to remove the pupae from the garden bed. I will also fence off that area and put a few chickens in there to try and remove any lingering pupae. I should have pulled the entire crop when I first saw the damage but did not get to it and the root maggots prepared themselves for winter. As one of my biggest pests, I have to stay on top of the population as much as possible.

I chopped up, blanched (3 minutes in steam and then into ice water, drain, twirl in a lettuce spinner, pack into freezer bags), and froze the cabbages for winter soup. They are especially good with ramen. (I love the millet and rice ramen noodles by Lotus Foods that Costco carries.)

I also pulled the majority of the bigger onions. I need more space to dry them! An Alaska farm I follow on facebook, Chugach Farm, has a multi use sauna building where they cure onions and potatoes in the fall with wood heat. I love that idea. Wood Frog Farm needs a sauna!

My favorite part of this week was collecting worms, another project conceived last winter and not done till the last minute at the end of summer. The kids and I spent an afternoon helping our friends dig their potato harvest. The garden we were digging from has history stretching back 100 years when it was a part of a group of homesteads that grew hay, potatoes, wheat, and vegetables for the copper mining communities of McCarthy and Kennecott. I have helped out in that garden on and off for 12 years and it is full of healthy, overwintering earthworms. Earthworms are not native to Alaska (or North America if you want to get technical) and they are somewhat controversial when it comes to introducing them. But for a garden grown using organic methods they are pretty important as part of the soil biome. They move nutrients around the soil layers, break down nutrients so that they are bioavailable to plants, and aerate the soil. I do not know if these worms were first introduced by the homesteaders who cleared the land or by later landowners who gardened for themselves. I do know that these earthworms are survivors. My garden is surrounded by a compacted soil road that separates it from the Boreal Forest so I feel relatively confident that the earthworms will remain in the garden. While digging the potatoes last week, we collected worms and I spread them out under the plants in the perennial beds in my garden. Another step towards a healthy soil biome and farm generated fertility.

Till next week!