It is August in Alaska and everyone is busy and experiencing varying degrees of frustration with work, life, and weather. I would like to think that I am merely struggling to keep all the balls up in the air but the truth is more along the lines of all the balls are on the floor rolling around and every once in a while I can catch one! I have days where I am successful as a mom, or a gardener, or a housekeeper, or a landscaper, or hunting camp support for my husband, but never all in one day. There always seems to be some pressing issue that is waiting impatiently for my attention.

The harvest is full on and I never seem to be able to pick and process the vegetables in one day. The voice of all the cookbooks, podcasts, and online recipes keeps hammering away in my head: prepare while freshly picked! And yet days have ended with totes of food in the cold hole under the house still waiting. What has been on my mind this week is how on earth do I run a family and a small garden business in an efficient manner? There just does not seem to be enough time for work and sales in a community that is so spread out. The nearest farmer’s market is over an hour away. Selling in our nearest community with a population affluent enough to pay premium vegetable prices would require a day of harvest and prep here and a day away to deliver and that is just not possible at this point. On farm sales are great (and primarily what I am working with now) but harvesting with a customer in the garden is not ideal and often people come by in the heat of the day when the vegetables will wilt. The kids and I discussed them selling produce at the end of the driveway but we are on a wooded straight stretch where people really put their foot down and cruise past at 50 mph. Without good visibility, it just does not seem ideal (or safe.) I have some ideas to work on for next year but for now we are making do with our flawed system.

I have been freezing any picked berries to deal with later. I canned a batch of dill relish Sunday using pickling cucumbers that got a little bigger than desired for normal pickles. And I still have more waiting to become bread and butter pickles. I have a totes full of cauliflower and romanesco and a basket full of green beans. Will I ever catch up?

Some things have gone past their desirability in the garden and my son helped me run all of it through the mulcher and into the compost pile they go. At least all the nutrients are staying on the farm that way!

I had a few extra kids here this week and I came up with a brilliant afternoon activity. Everyone got a bucket and we formed a weed train. We wove up and down each garden row plucking the flowering chickweed, willowherb, strawberry spinach, plantain and lambsquarter. Nothing got missed with 8 eyes searching the rows. The kids were happy when it was time to swim instead; they were waning in enthusiasm by the time we reach the raspberries at the bottom of the garden. But we did it and while there are still many weeds, I gained a little breathing room by removing the ones about to seed and the chickens were happy to gobble up the bucketfuls of weeds.

Are you struggling with harvest too? One trick you can employ to hold your cabbage in the garden a while longer is to break some of the plants roots. You can grasp the head of the cabbage with one hand and turn it by one quarter. If you imagine your cabbage to be a clock, I hold the head at 9 and 3 and rotate my hands to 12 and 6.  Or take a flat shovel and insert it all the way into the ground angling towards the plants roots. The cabbages will not be able to take up too much water and split and usually you can get a few more weeks of field storage.

Another fun trick with early cabbages is to leave the root ball in the ground when you harvest the head. It will form several tiny cabbage heads that are perfect for fall salad.

I hope you are all successfully getting the harvest in and I hope to see everyone local this weekend at the Kenny Lake Fair!

Till next week!

Growing garlic in Alaska has its challenges. When I first moved here, I was told that you could not grow fall planted garlic in the interior and I did not try for years. In 2011, I grew some spring planted garlic that almost bulbed up and got eaten right away. And then in 2013, thanks to social media and online connections between gardeners in this big state, I learned of some hardy hard neck varieties and I have grown some ever since, for 6 seasons now. I experienced mostly successful years and some less than successful.

I wrote this last September (2018):

“I finished planting the seed garlic in the chilly rain today after working in some stellar September weather this past week. It took me longer than expected to turn the bean bed into a prepared 30 foot garlic bed with 250 pounds of compost, a quick broadforking, and freshly buried drip tape. Otherwise I could have finished before the weather turned! Garlic is a labor of love and because of its high cost and many needs (extra compost, extra nitrogen, extra weeding), I just grow it for personal use. On top of that, there is no guaranteed harvest. This year I experienced an unusually drastic garlic crop failure with only 8 plants coming up in the spring. But when it does thrive, there is nothing like the flavor and aroma of home grown garlic.” 

Last fall I planted Siberian, Romanian Red, Nootka Rose, Music, Chesnock Red, and a large garlic of unknown variety from my Mom’s garden in Maine. They all grew but other than my Mom’s variety and the Nootka Rose ( a soft neck grown on the Kenai peninsula), I have no idea what they are as I lost the notes I took when planting them. Such a bummer! The Nootka Rose I will not repeat as the bulbs were very small and the plants weak.

Here is how I do it. I order organic seed garlic from Filaree Garlic Farm in Washington when harvesting the previous years garlic and I am reminded that I need more to plant. Unlike in areas with longer seasons, I have found that the harvested garlic is not ready early enough to cure for a month before replanting. This year might be an exception as the garlic is about two weeks earlier than usual but it is not something you can count on. In addition, larger cloves make larger bulbs the next year and sometimes the harvest only produces medium to small cloves that are more suited to eating then planting.  After it arrives, I plant my garlic in mid September in the row that grew inoculated green beans during the summer. I add at least two inches of compost as well as fish bone meal to the soil and broad fork the row and rake the bed smooth. I bury the irrigation lines and rake the row again (at this point the compost has been well incorporated into the top several inches of soil.) I plant 3 rows (though Filaree’s instructions state you can plant 5 across a bed smaller than mine) 10 inches apart on my 36 inch wide bed. Garlic does not like to compete with weeds and with this spacing I can use my 7 inch collinear hoe all spring to keep the little weeds in check. The seed cloves are planted about 2 inches down (with the fat end of the bulb down first) and 6 inches apart. I use my leek dibble for this and drop the cloves in, cover them up, and mulch them with at least a foot of herbicide free barley straw.

When the garden starts to thaw out in April, I fork off about half the straw so the bed can thaw as well. All that straw will keep it frozen late into spring otherwise. By the end of April, I have all the straw off (I save it to mulch the cauliflower and broccoli) and they usually are up by the first or second week of May.

Garlic likes lots of nitrogen so I liquid feed with fish emulsion every two weeks (or rather that is what my calendar says to do; I probably actually fed them 3 times at the most this summer) and side dress with blood meal that gets incorporated while weeding with the hoe. When the scapes (young flower heads) form, I cut them off and chop them up to freeze in ice cube trays to season soup in the winter.

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Garlic scapes on the plant and chopped up for freezing

At this point you know you have 3 weeks to a month till harvest time. Choosing when to harvest is the hardest part for me. I start pulling a few bulbs at 3 weeks to use in pickles and see how well formed they are but usually wait a solid month after the scapes are up and cut before harvest. I dry the whole plants for a few days on racks and then hang them up for a month to finish drying. As we use our house to dry them, handling them twice prevents too much soil from coming inside on the roots. After a month of curing, I trim the roots and tops and store in a mesh bag. Hard neck garlic only stores for 4 to 5 months so I ferment in brine or honey or freeze it minced up if we still have any at the end of its storage life before it starts sprouting in the pantry. The 2020 season garlic order is in and will arrive in a few weeks. And I will replant some of my biggest bulbs this year as well.

A great online resource for growing garlic in Alaska is: https://www.uaf.edu/ces/garden/garlic/

The fireweed plant is traditionally used as a season indicator in Alaska. The tiny burgundy shoots are one of the first plants up in the spring and the blooms climb the stalk as the season progresses. With the intense heat and dry weather this year, the blooms are spent weeks early. Fireweed fluff is now floating seeds around the yard for next years plants. Perhaps winter will be early or perhaps this is just plant stress from the new weather patterns.

Last week I had the opportunity to fish the Copper River for sockeye from a gorgeous and powerful boat. It was a long day dip netting from the boat and then processing the fish but I came home with 30 filleted salmon to put in the freezer and over 100 carcasses to put in the compost. It feels good to be filling the freezers up again with our local bounty. Hooray for local protein!

August 5th was the midway point between the Vernal Equinox and Winter Solstice which also means I am halfway through my goal of writing a post once a week for these 40 weeks. (Only missed one week so far) Till next week…