April 4, 2019

March went out with gentle breezes and warm sunshine and April came in with cold wind, clouds, and a damp chill. Life as usual for April but with less snow than normal. It is still too frozen and sloppy in the main garden to do any work. Best to wait till May when you no longer do more harm than good with the ebullient spring fever all northern gardeners get with the return of the sun. But it IS time to really get going with the garden starts. Our cold soils and short growing season can be challenging with even the multitude of short season seeds on the market these days. But if you want to eat out of the garden before August or grow any long season crops, starting transplants is a must. This annual cycle is felt keenly in our household as it takes place in the center of our small home. It starts with thawing a tote of soil at the end of February. I need too many starts to purchase them (and purchased starts also bring disease and pests from elsewhere) and even purchasing soil in Alaska is prohibitively expensive when you consider how far I have to drive to get it (250 miles) and the high cost for the few organic options. Over the years I have learned that collecting my own materials and premixing my seed starting soil, then storing it in 27 gallon totes, greatly facilitates my ability to actually get plants going on time.

• 

• 

I mix my garden soil, compost, locally dug peat, and purchased perlite in the fall time with an old cement mixer.

So this year, seed starting has been business as usual. I collected materials throughout the 2018 summer and fall and in a mad scramble before freeze up, I mixed 8 totes of soil. In the last week of February, I brought a tote in to thaw out and I began starting the plants that need the longest grow time, onions and leeks. Business as usual except for one new addition to our family who is VERY interested in seed starting.

Eve was born on Halloween with the ground frozen and has spent her first winter in being too small to endure the cold outside. Therefore soil, as a previously unknown entity, is endlessly fascinating to her. She likes to dig in it, roll in it, taste it, play with piles of it. I admit that I feel the same way about soil. Still, when my plants are in said soil, I feel a little grumpy when I discover a newly dug tray or a plant that has been batted around on the floor or a window decorated by muddy paws when freshly watered soil became less interesting than a fluttering moth.

So the battle began…I purchased plastic lids, spread sticky tape everywhere, and firmly told her NO every time she jumped on the counter. She quickly learned she could pop the lids off by jumping on them. She hates the sticky tape and attacks it rather effectively whenever possible. And she lightly runs over the plastic lids as she enjoys the funny sound it makes. Long story short, the cat does whatever she wants. Giant sigh… Hopefully starting extras will allow enough to survive the first year of a kitten in the house.

One of the many lessons I have learned since moving to Alaska in 2002 is that certain materials do not fare well in the bitter cold. Plastic, especially the thin black 4 pack or 6 pack inserts seen in every commercial greenhouse, crack and shatter over the winter. I have a tenuous relationship with plastic. There are so many things made of plastic that improve my life substantially, like my greenhouse for instance. But I absolutely can not stand single use plastics. Hauling out waste, especially non recyclable waste, is not a happy task in rural Alaska. I wanted a better way to start my babies. Enter soil blocks into my life. Eliot Coleman has an excellent chapter on soil blocks in his iconic book “The New Organic Grower.” Originally published in 1989 and republished in 1995, this was the first garden book I ever purchased (circa 1996). He has a basic recipe for making your own soil and excellent instructions on creating blocks as well as their historical use in Europe. When the garden was small I was pretty good at recycling trays and inserts tossed out from commercial greenhouses and carefully reusing the ones I had. But finally my garden grew to the point were I needed more and more every year and I had less time to repair and sort the plastic stored through the winter. It took me over 15 years after first reading Eliot Coleman’s book to finally purchase my block makers from Johnny’s Selected Seeds. But once on my way I have never regretted my investment. I have been making my own blocks for over 7 years now.

Pressing out soils blocks is pretty simple. You moisten the soil evenly in a large tub. Press the metal block making tool into the soil and then release the blocks into your tray. Unless you are constantly putting your tool down to remove a kitten who is happily playing in your tub of soil, block making goes very quickly. These blocks firm up after a day and once the plants have outgrown them, they can be lifted up and popped into a larger container. No more plastic 6 packs and no transplant shock. Yay!

At the beginning of April, the trays of starts have taken over our south facing window counter and I have begun setting up plastic tables to hold the overflow even though the main bulk of starts are yet to be planted. At dinner time I shuffle a few trays out of the way so the kids have somewhere set down their plate to eat. The guinea pig cage in the kitchen has a handy top perfect for this purpose. On sunny days, the greenhouse warms up to the upper 70s and I have begun carting the plants across the yard for a few more hours of direct sun and warmth.

• 

• 

The perennial garden has been feeling the call of spring too with our early melt and warm temperatures. The snow and ice are completely gone in there. The bird feeder has been taken down with the first reports of bear sightings. Chives, rhubarb, horseradish, comfrey, iris and strawberries are all showing signs of growth this week.

• 

• 

• 

• 

What are we eating on the farm this week? Thank goodness for stored goodies in the pantry. Smoked salmon and pickled beets are a wonderful spring treat. The chives are nearly big enough to steal a few leaves but not quite.

What are we starting on the farm this week? Brussels sprouts, flowers, and greenhouse greens.

Till next week…Happy Planting!

March 27, 2019

It is not quite the end of March but both the weather and the landscape look like it could be the end of April. Break up is a month early this year. It was a low snow year for us and while we live on a lake and can supplement our gardens by pumping water through mainline tubing to irrigate the vegetable beds with drip tape, the boreal forest that surrounds us will suffer for lack of the slow snow melt penetrating the ground. Forest fire danger will be higher and the glacial silt that whips up when the ice leaves the rivers, that gritty substance we just refer to as the “DUST”, will be settling on everything. (Unless of course it rains all summer…always a possibility.)

Our yard is muddy and full of winter treasures. Dog poo and caribou bones predominate as wells as wrappers, dog sticks, plus plus blocks, nuts/bolts/washers, and a multitude of other bits and bobs have emerged from the melting piles. Amazing how much stuff falls out of pockets or car doors all winter and gets lost in the snow. This time of year I always have a baggy in my pocket to pick these items up.

Mud season. It is the worst kind of mud and will be for weeks with the ground still frozen solid several feet down. The cold nights freeze the surface but by mid afternoon the ice puddles are water, crusty hard ground is slop. The top few inches give you the experience of a satisfying squish before propelling you messily several feet away on the ice layer while you windmill your arms for balance. Step carefully! We have sold our souls for gravel over the past 16 years (difficult to procure and super expensive) and the parts of the driveway and pad that have it are wonderful. Growing up, I never knew that small rocks could bring so much happiness.

The greenhouse has thawed with the 50 degree daytime temps and smells like soil. It is a wonderful place to step into and breathe deep the fragrance of moist humus, compost, and decaying roots. The smell of soil is the best part about this time of year. In the winter all smells are muted by the cold air and the smothering snow blanket. The warm spring sun brings with it tepid air, melting snow and ice, and a multitude of smells some good (soil!) some bad (dog poo).

The perennial garden is flooded but each day sees the pond a little smaller in circumference. This space was my original vegetable garden here. We started building the first beds in 2004. Since then, this land has been warming up and the permafrost along our hill has melted. Even with annual additions of soil, compost, leaves, fill, manure, it continues to sink and has become the lowest part in the yard near my house. This used to really stress me out when it was my vegetable garden. And when I rebuilt it as part yard/part perennial garden and it flooded I was REALLY stressed out. The worst of the garden flooding occurred in September of 2015 and started with planted my fall garlic in the rain.

But it did not stop raining and the garden beds seen above were swimming in water. I panicked. A harvest from fall planted garlic is not reliable on a good year and going into winter with saturated soil was a no no so I stayed up late and dug a little ditch by hand. But it did not work…

The next day I started up the backhoe full of enthusiasm and gusto (I had learned the basics earlier in the season. Turn key, manipulate levers. Got it.). I shortly discovered that super wet soil after days of hard rain does not float a backhoe. Instead of ditching, I spend a day getting unstuck and eventually dug a ditch before freeze up from the side where I could not sink in.

This ditch stayed in place for over a year before we installed large rocks, gravel, drain pipe, and more gravel. (And a new fence on this side too because I had to cut the slab wood one down to get the backhoe out.) I hauled all these materials from the river, 12 miles away.

And the drain pipe had its first tried and true go around when the April 2018 thaw happened. We had experienced a two week December rainstorm in 2017 and a small pond had frozen over my perennials. I thought they were goners. But one April spring day I went to work with a pond in my yard and came home to a garden. Two days after the pond drained the rhubarb and chives were up.

So I have faith. My garden might look like this now:

But it will all drain soon. I can hardly wait to see the plants start growing. It is a time of year for deep breaths, patience and faith in renewal. Spring is here. Life will spring forth soon. Things are good 🙂

What are we eating on the farm this week? Nothing new at the moment. But we rediscovered the box of long pie pumpkins from last year in the pantry. Time to eat some pumpkin, Yum!

What are we starting this week?

Tomatos, ground cherries, and peppers