I woke this morning to rain pounding on metal roofing, a sound that I love. I lay in bed listening and thinking about all the times I have heard and been comforted by the sound of rain. I had the bedroom on the top floor of my childhood home with skylights; I lived in the loft of a barn while working on an Appalachian hill farm in North Carolina (the first time I lived under a “tin” roof); in rural Alaska, almost all of us have small cabins with metal roofs. This rain is washing away spruce pollen and river silt from our green metal roof. It has been dry and the dust has been thick this spring. Even with an early thaw, ground level green up has been delayed due to lack of moisture. My 9 year old said to me this morning “Mama, I am glad it is raining because now everything will turn green.”

Hard rain is also a good thing for my family this time of year because I will spend a few hours inside catching up on neglected housework. I have been using the shovel and wheelbarrow in the garden for the last several days (all day long…) repairing beds that frost heaved and building the new ones I did not finish last fall. I ache all over. When I come inside at 5 to start dinner I have no energy remaining to tidy up, scrub, fold. I have been falling into bed right after tucking the kids in and sleeping deeply. When I first heard the rain I felt frustration that I would not finish building the potato beds today but my body piped up with a mini celebration “No shoveling today!” And I can put off finishing the irrigation system to the big garden as the perennials and garlic are being watered for me!

Other than endless digging and raking, the only other project this week was making tree swallow houses. The swallows arrived last week and I spent Friday afternoon making two houses for the tall garden posts in the perennial garden. I found some old pine boards in the shed that we used as shelving in the kitchen years ago. They were pretty stained and dirty from previous use but with a little sanding the wood cleaned up beautifully. I was going to use a simple swallow/bluebird pattern I found online but my husband wanted a pitch roof so he quickly designed a little house that easily separates from the base for annual cleaning. He helped me measure the pieces out and make the angled cuts and I sanded the wood, nailed the pieces together, and oiled it with linseed.

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I guess we did a good job because the swallows were fighting over the houses all weekend.

I planted over 500 bean seeds for the green bean tunnel on Tuesday after making another double batch of seed starting soil (I really thought 8 batches would be enough!). The white plastic Costco tables we bought for our wedding reception nearly 15 years ago have found yet another purpose. It turns out you can press out 900 1 1/2 inch blocks or 540 2 inch blocks on the 6 foot tables. As I am out of trays, this was a rather delightful discovery. The greenhouse is absolutely bursting with plant starts and it is hard to maneuver in there. I will be starting to harden off the brassica, liliaceae, and flowers this next week in anticipation of planting out Memorial day weekend.

Junkos, white and gold crowned sparrows, and robins are constantly hopping through the yard this week. Yesterday a pair of pacific loons cruised by our dock and we spotted a group of five scaups further out. I had a brief glimpse of a brown bird of prey diving for fish from the air and suspect it was an osprey but it flew off before I could observe more identifying features though the wing angle and dive was pretty distinctive. A varied thrush passed through this morning and I was wondering where all the tree swallows went in the rain when an entire flock burst out over the lake from the branches of a spruce tree on the shore. A pair of goldeneyes and a pair of mallards have been fighting over the end of our dock in the evenings. It is the best supper entertainment! The mallards have waddled through our lower yard several times looking for a good place to nest though with all the activity they have moved on. Immature and mature bald eagles have been hunting trout regularly. I watched one successfully snatch up a rainbow with its talons a few days ago. It is always a thrilling moment when one of the huge birds lands in our trees next to the lake to scout for fish.

Eve has had two near misses this month. A goshawk and a great horned owl had to be interrupted in their hunts for her. I have never seen such a puffed up cat outside of cartoons! She is terribly interested in all the small bird activity so I have been keeping her inside as much as possible and letting her out only in the middle of the day when she can not use shadows to her hunting advantage. She has caught and eaten every spider and flying insect that dares buzz around our windows and spends much of her time catching bugs outside. I had no idea cats were such bug eaters!

Last night as I did a garden walk through, putting tools away in case it rained, I stopped and listened to a new noise. It was the beautiful sound of tiny quaking aspen leaves shivering in the light breeze.

Well, it is still pouring rain. Time to put on the latest Science Friday podcast and get some housework done so I will be caught up and ready to get back to it in the garden when the rain stops.

Till next week!

The balsam poplar buds burst into leaf this week on the dry, south facing slopes of Bear Alley. There is a spring green haze over the mountains as the quaking aspen and willows get ready to leaf out and the birch leaves at the Strelna Creek cabin are bigger than a squirrels ear. Though folklore declares that it is time to plant when the leaves reach that size, I keep reminding myself to wait. Planting this early is just asking for unstable weather conditions. In early May it can pour rain, snow, or sleet, drop down to the teens or blow brutally and seriously compromise soil that is only thawed 6 to 8 inches down.

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I have been busy in the greenhouse and garden this week however. Transplants are continually seeded through this month.

The top half of my sloped garden is drained and dry enough to mess about in. Last year the garden clearing project had progressed enough to start putting in permanent fencing. By the time freeze up happened in October, T posts and 5 feet of woven wire fencing had been stretched around the north, east, south and over half the west side. The pig pen in 2018 jutted into the garden space and as we did not butcher until November, the fencing in the northwest corner had to wait. My long anticipated (and expensive) deer and rabbit fencing let me down over the winter. It is a graduated fencing with small holes at the bottom that progressively get bigger as the fence goes up. With a few feet of snow pack, the snowshoe hares passed through the larger squares up top with ease and nibbled my raspberries and currents all winter. @#$%&! So I had 600 feet of two inch chicken wire fencing hauled back from Anchorage last week and as soon as my new hog ring pilers arrive in the mail, I will attach the chicken wire to the rabbit fencing and hopefully be hare free. The irony of course is that snowshoe hares live in a boom/bust cycle that revolves approximately every 11 years. The hares have been booming for several years now. I have the feeling that as soon as I get the fencing done they will “bust” and I will not see a hare for years. Oh well…I will be ready for the next high cycle and in the mean time dogs will not be a problem.

I fired up the trusty old backhoe and spent Monday afternoon mucking about last years pig pen area. The guys moved the pen a few weeks ago when the ground was still frozen enough for the equipment to not sink but thawed enough to pry the logs up. But there was alot of piggy scented material left directly in the fence line so I used the hoe to scrape it all into a pile out of the way.

There were a few willow roots to pull and some soil leveling to be done before I could rototill, rake, and start fencing. Two T posts needed to be pounded in but the soil was too frozen to seat them properly so the fencing will have to be reattached in a permanent manner in a few weeks. The whole west line actually needs additional pounding down as the ground settled and sunk over the winter. But for now, there is a 5 foot fence all the way around the garden. I am stoked!

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Half the garlic bed is up. I feel like I just pulled the straw back from the frozen ground (but it was actually April 23) and they are already growing! Last year I had complete crop failure so I am pretty ecstatic to have so many up already. However, the piece of paper that logged down what was planted where and how many has been lost. (It might have been written on the brown paper bag the cloves were shipped in…) I dug through the garden records several times this spring but alas…what is what will be somewhat of a mystery.

The air is all atwitter with bird song as the summer residents keep arriving and start nest building. A large flock of swallows swooped over the lake yesterday morning eating bugs before moving on. Junkos and warblers flit about. The robins are collecting nest materials. Goldeneyes rest on our dock. And a pair of common loons arrived this week and have been cruising stately around during the day and thrilling us with their beautiful calls at night. Our nesting great horned owls are still in residence and as I have been working in the garden I have discovered several favorite areas to cough up their owl pellets. I keep finding furry lumps of rabbit bones and fur. Some were in the sandbox which is under some lovely quaking aspens the owls like to perch on. But the majority were in the open garden near the northwest corner. I should have collected them all together as it would have made an impressive pile! Channelling my inner Mr. McGregor, it makes me smile every time to think of the hares being eaten by the owls!

I guess I should move hooking up the irrigation system to the top of the to do list between the garlic growing and the perennials leafing out. Maybe after I get everything in the yard battened down. We have some weather headed our way with intense winds forecast for the weekend. We thought we were experiencing high winds already this week but we have an active weather warning for extreme winds. It really makes me appreciate the calm lake last night and this morning.

It has been 5 years this spring since I began the new garden project that was the start of Wood Frog Farm. Here is a photo from 2014 and one from today.

Till next week…happy gardening!

PS I still have lemon balm starts for sale. $5 each