6 AM and it is 2 degrees above zero. I came downstairs to stoke the wood stove and decided to take advantage of the deep quiet of early morning and have a little time to myself. Logs are popping and groaning in the fire and the old dog is warming his aching bones on the heated floor just in front of the stove door. His long list of healed injuries are apparent in the stiffness of his gait in the cold. Winter is hard on him.

Yesterday it was 19°F when I got up and the high temperature of the day was 25°F. It was the first day since last spring where we did not warm up above freezing even in the bright sunshine. The lower arc of the sun just hits the top third of the garden this time of year and it has lost its warming power even at full strength with nary a cloud in sight. The nights have been pretty chilly this week, in the 20s, and the lower garden started freezing up, and not thawing out during the day, this past week. In mid September to mid October we lose significant day length as well as the amount of above freezing hours you can work with the ground outside. Each day the amount of time the ground is workable shrinks until you finally get a day like yesterday when it does not thaw at all.

It took just two days of cold for the ground to form a frozen crust. The puddles are solid ice and the water buckets for the animals all need to be filled daily. or several times a day for the pigs who like to tip theirs over. Imps. The small ponds are freezing up and the lake will not be far behind. The annual fall rush can be defined as working like a madwoman outside up until this day when I finally have to throw in the towel and be done with the garden until next spring. You just never know when it will happen. There have been years when I have looked around and stated “I will hate myself in the spring” because far too little prep was accomplished when the ground froze by the first week of October. In spring, there is an even narrower window to get everything in the ground for our short growing season and the more prep you do in the fall, the better. This year despite the extra hours spent indoors with homeschool, the garden is actually looking pretty good. Sure, I would love to have done more but it is not a total disaster. A lot has been accomplished in this last two weeks of fall.

The cold hardy plants still in the garden, the cabbages, leeks, Brussels sprouts, and kale, were harvested and brought to the house. My son ran the big woody plants through the chipper/mulcher for composting and my daughter helped harvest. The voles have taken up residence in force this fall so I am removing plant debris from the garden to the compost pile so there are not as many places for them to hide. Hopefully an ermine or pine marten will pass through and clear some out.

• 

• 

I crimped the cover crop row of barley and alfalfa down with an old poplar board so the plants would protect the bed over the winter.

• 

• 

And I discovered a surprise at the end of the row. Last year in 2019, rosemary and thyme were planted in this bed and a thyme plant survived the winter, survived weeding and planting, and survived being neglected all summer. What a hardy plant! I probably should have dug it up and saved it or left it be but I was in a hurry so I harvested it and moved on.

• 

• 

We moved the sandbags off the silage tarp that had been on unused weedy lower beds since it was shipped up here this summer and I drug the giant black tarp to a new position for winter. I had had an order in for two more tarps in the hopes of covering the majority of the beds for the winter but the order was postponed until spring as apparently the factory where the tarps are made had delays due to the hurricanes. My thought, or hope, is that when the sun melts back the snow in the spring and all the cold hardy native plants begin to grow, that the section on the tarp will warm, the weed seeds will germinate, and then they will die of light deprivation by the time the ground is thawed and dry enough for me to get in there and start planting. I am always impressed by the plants that can start growing when the soil just thaws a half inch at a time during the day and refreezes at night. I do not like making the time to weed out all these plants before seeding.

I am not a big fan of utilizing a lot of plastic, however, these reusable tarps can provide an enormous amount of saved time in the market garden through clever use. You can rapidly break down cover crops in the heat of summer, protect uncovered soil, and burn off the top layer of the weed bank in the top of your soil (I need this the most!). Nearly half of my garden is thick in native perennial horsetail and I am hoping a few years of occultation with the tarps will help me control this plant that takes far too long to weed using traditional methods (and then grows right back). When I moved the silage tarp last week I was treated to a lovely sight, weed free garden beds. So far so good. With our short season and cooler temperatures, the tarps will be less effective than on lower 48 farms, but I am excited to have this tool in my toolbox.

Swans and geese have been flying over regularly heading southeast. I love to hear the honking and have an excuse to stop laboring and look for the flocks. Sometimes they are way up in the sky and sometimes skimming the treetops but always a happy sight to see.

• 

• 

The sky spit snow on Thursday, the first flakes I have seen this season. Every few hours the sky would open up and a short burst of flurries would come down. It all melted right away in Strelna but made the outdoor work damp and chilly.

My daughter and I have been working all week on prepping the topmost 4 garden beds that have my low tunnel hoops.

If nothing else, I wanted those beds ready to go in spring for early greens. I kept the plastic up for a while which kept the soil warmer than it would have been otherwise allowing us to weed and broad fork later than if I hadn’t. It was chilly work but we did it, finally finishing yesterday evening even with the soil frozen an inch on top. Luckily all we had left to do the last day was spread compost on 150 square feet, one half of one bed. The beds were weeded and then spread with compost and broad forked. I had hoped to spread even more compost on other beds but that will have to wait for spring.

I still have at least 4 to do lists going. Now that I can turn my back on the main garden, I need to focus on mixing seed starting soil (a challenge with these temps) and getting the greenhouse prepped for spring starts. I should be able to work on it for a while as long as we do not get a large amount of snow. I can see light at the end of the tunnel though. Soon there will be more moments like the one now where I have time to watch the sky begin to lighten, to contemplate life with a cat on my lap (typing is a little challenging in this scenario…), and feel cozy by the wood stove.

Even though the sun will not be above the horizon for another half hour (sunrise is 8:28 this morning), it is light enough now to see frost covered trees on the other side of the lake.

The browns of Octobers changed overnight to shimmering silver. How beautiful.

Best wishes from my farm to yours.

I spent this past week mired in the weeds of life. Not literal weeds, though in truth there are many garden beds that need weeding and compost spreading before freeze up, but the weeds of my life: dishes, laundry, hauling water, yard clean up, homeschool etc… I just could not get on top of the basics that allow our life to run smoothly. I woke up utterly exhausted every morning. I had a really difficult time getting the kids ready and geared up for another school day. Day after day, I lay in bed totally unenthused about the tasks that lay ahead.

The weather is partly to blame. I have been experiencing two long drawn out gray weeks with hundreds of shades of blah spiced up only by strong winds that whip up white capped waves on the lake and ripped the beautiful golden leaves from the branches of the willow and aspens. I am having to run the generator to charge our batteries nearly every day as I have three freezers full of winter stores plugged in and with no sun, our solar panels are not adding much to our battery bank. The gray days are depressing. One gray cool day after another means soldiering on with the outside chores with zero cheer.

Fall is at once a brief interlude AND a couple months long descent into winter. The beautiful fall, when the mountains turn red and the river valleys with willow and aspen run golden, lasts a week or two in September. But for us, fall really begins at the end of July. The garden is at its peak production and we work like pack rats to put food away for winter knowing frost is a mere few weeks away. The first yellow leaves show up then and the greenery, only 3 months old, starts to look tired. There is no more hot weather in August though you might get some pretty nice days. Once September hits, it is an all out race to see how much you can get done before the ground freezes. Sometimes it snows in September, sometimes we have a long drawn out fall with days in the 50s and freezing night temps. This year though it is just cool and cloudy with not much rain so I still had to irrigate the garden! It is, however, pouring rain right now so I can cross irrigating the garlic bed off my list.

The transition to fall challenges the whole family. I have navigated the difficult adjustment each year of saying goodbye to my husband when he leaves to guide in the Brooks Range at the end of July and then comes back into our lives in October for the entirety of our relationship. My first year in Alaska was his first season working at hunt camp. That transition only became harder for me when he left behind kids as well. We are so busy when Tim leaves that adjusting to his departure only takes a few days. The children have grown up with this routine. All those difficult years with toddler and baby of telling nightly stories of Dad hunting in the mountains with his clients and repeating over and over again when Dad will come home, mean that the kids now know the routine and do not fret terribly over his absence. They miss him and they look forward to his return but they know what to expect. Adding back the other adult into the household while exciting and wonderful in most ways also brings with it the challenge of communication and negotiation of priorities. I struggle with this every year having made all the decisions on my own for the homestead for the previous two months.

But regardless, we are counting the days until Tim is finally home and I seem to have made it through my week of melancholia though the weather has not improved (at all). I am back at work with a decent attitude anyway. The past two weeks have mostly been yard clean up and organization of garden stuff. Somehow items did not get put back every time they were used (how on earth did that happen?) and it was time to put forth the effort to collect and properly store all the rakes and shovels, weeding equipment, totes and carts and other garden miscellany. This helped me organize my thoughts and priorities too as items were stacked away. And now if we get a snowstorm I will not be caught out entirely unprepared.

• 

• 

The kids and I finished harvesting the potatoes two weeks ago. They have cured since the harvest under tarps to keep them from greening up and as of yesterday are now stored in crates under the house. It was a fabulous potato year and even with 86 pounds of vole damaged potatoes, there are over 500 pounds of perfect ones. We have enough for ourselves and to share and to sell some too which helps to cover the cost of the expensive double certified seed potatoes I buy in. Someday I will have a root cellar that will not freeze up and I will be able to save my own seed potatoes for growing the next year.

I had hoped to have the garlic planted in the ground by the end of September but with an extra challenging school week it did not happen until October 1. The garlic we harvested in August is fully cured and I cut it off the stalk and bagged it up for winter. From the 300 cloves we planted in the fall of 2019, we harvested over 24 pounds. It is hard to know exactly how much we actually grew as we have been eating it fresh, fermenting with it, and consuming the drying ones since July. But I weighed up 23 pounds 11 ounces of what we had on trays this week so it is safe to say we had a bit more than that. I put a garlic seed order in earlier this summer so I had 6 pounds of commercial garlic seed cloves come in the mail and I picked out 5 1/2 pounds of the biggest and best from my harvest to plant as well.

I prepped the garlic bed on the 30th with my daughter and we weeded with head nets on to protects us from the biting gnats that plague us this time of year. The garlic is going in where the giant flat peas grew all summer. I cut the pea plants at the soil line leaving the roots in the ground after the first frost damaged the plants and remaining peas. Leaving the roots of any plants that have been growing is a good way to hold the soil structure together. In addition, these peas formed a symbiotic relationship with rhizobium bacteria and the roots are covered in nitrogen fixing nodules that will enrich the soil next season which is perfect for the garlic that needs a high fertility soil.

• 

• 

After weeding we added two wheelbarrow loads of compost. The next day I broad forked the row to loosen but not invert the soil layers. Then the bed was raked smooth and I drew 4 evenly spaced lines with my bed rake markers. I used my wooden dibble made from an old tool handle to make 400 holes 6 inches apart and between 3 to 4 inches deep. My daughter and I planted the 400 garlic cloves keeping a careful log of what was planted where and then covered the bed with an additional wheelbarrow load of compost. All we need to do is water (the rain is doing it for me right now!) and add a thick layer of straw and the garlic will be be all set for the winter.

• 

• 

In anticipation of meat coming home from hunt camp, I finally carved out the time to paint the shed and set up the freezers in their new home. Due to rainy weather, I still have not painted the trim around the door but the rest is done and it will feel great to cross this project off the list as it has been hanging over my head since we moved it across the yard this spring.

This weekend I have been working on some garden cleanup by taking plant remains to the compost pile and starting to harvest the leeks, fall cabbages, and remaining Brussels Sprouts. With any luck our warm fall weather will continue and I will get more spring prep work accomplished. Fingers Crossed!

Best wishes from my farm to yours 🍂