I always forget the intensity of August. With my husband working remotely in August and September, all the homestead chores fall on my shoulders: hauling water, vehicle and generator maintenance, occasional grocery shopping at the local store (an hour away). Three of my son’s classes have started and I am overseeing his education this year. In two weeks more classes (all at home this year) will start for both kids. I am responsible for cooking and cleaning or supervising the kids doing these things. I can count on one hand the times we have eaten a meal prepared by someone outside our household since March (yup, 4 times). The last time I remember going to a restaurant was in December when I was in Anchorage with my sister-in-law Christmas shopping. I make an often repeated, and not very funny joke, that I have made all my kids lives when we come inside after a long day and still have to make dinner “let’s order Chinese food.” (The nearest Chinese restaurant is over 120 miles away.)

In the garden it is full on harvest season. I am harvesting to make meals we eat each day, harvesting to sell, and harvesting to process food for the winter. Harvest times are determined by when the plants are ready, at peak maturity. Just 12 hours can change a crop from perfect to over mature. Strawberries and raspberries need to be picked daily and frozen or voles or the sparrows eat the ripe ones.

I often plan on harvesting and processing in the same day and then beat myself up mentally when I go to bed with buckets of harvested produce under the house. There are only so many hours in the day. But slowly cases of jars are filling on the pantry shelves of smoked salmon and dilly beans. And bags of broccoli, green beans, napa cabbage, raspberries, and strawberries are in the freezer. The cold and damp nights have started delicate cucumber and beans plants to molding. They will not last much longer. On the other hand, the carrots are just starting.

The fall flowers are blooming and knowing a frost can happen in the next three weeks or so I try to enjoy them as much as possible. Sunflowers, sweet peas, and snapdragons are my favorite. By the vegetable garden gate, last years snapdragons seeded themselves and I have new flower color combinations. And my scarlet runner beans started blooming this week as well.

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The popcorn I started this spring has not had a hot enough summer to produce. They are just leafy stalks, even the three in the greenhouse.

I have to do lists everywhere. There is so much to do that I make a new one every morning of what must be done before it becomes a lost cause. I weed when plants are about to burst with seed but don’t have time for maintenance weeding. Other projects have been put on the “fall” list for when I might have more time: finishing the fence, painting the shed, tearing down the old pig pen. Conner and I crimped down the buckwheat covercrop in a spare few moments this week, hopefully in time to keep it from seeding too. Crimping a cover crop in flower should kill it, leaving a layer of mulch on the soil over the winter to protect it.

And I have to remember to stop and have fun summer moments with the kids whenever possible.

It is not a terrible thing to be surrounded by bounty but it can be stressful. I don’t want to waste the food we will need to get us through this winter.

I need to get back to it. A harvest for a McCarthy restaurant is on the top of this mornings to do list.

Till next time, happy gardening!

I grew up in New England where August was the last lazy month before school started. Hot and muggy days that was perfect for going to the beach to catch a breeze off the Atlantic ocean or reading a book in the shade all day. 20 years after I left Maine, I still have the thought in my head that August is the peak of summer before sliding into a long fall of apple picking and pumpkin filled fields. But in Alaska? The end of July is a transition into fall. The willows and poplars along the road that burst into bright spring green growth in May and then progressed to a deep summer green in June have now faded to a tired greenish brown hue and some, gasp!, are already turning yellow. My mind (even after 18 years of this same schedule of events) is finding it hard to comprehend that though it is not yet August, we are on the cusp of autumn. There are other signs too. The garden is in full production and I need to spend more time processing produce for winter consumption than actual gardening these days. But what really indicates the change in season for us is the mobilizing of our hunting outfit as Tim prepares to head north with the horses for two months of guiding for dall sheep, moose, and bear in the Brooks Range (some 600 miles north of us). He left this week with the horses and while a lot of stress and extra chores left with him, we miss the horses a lot (and Tim too). Sylvia and I rode nearly everyday for the last two weeks to soak up as much horse time as possible.

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We were so busy I neglected to write a blog post last week. It seems everyday the to do list gets longer and less gets crossed off. The garden and farm projects took a back seat while we researched and picked curriculum for the upcoming school year. Both kids are homeschooling this year for the first time and it was a steep learning curve to find good fits for two very different kids. Now that their Individual Learning Plans (ILPs) are completed and their curriculum has been ordered I can breathe a sigh of relief that at least we know what our school plan for the year is going to be. In addition to figuring out homeschool, a lot of my mental energy was consumed by Tim’s preparations for the hunting season. It takes a lot of time and planning for him to mobilize all the equipment and horses and we get swept up in the manic energy of it. I have to admit that though we miss him terribly for the two months he is gone, there is a sigh of relief when he finally takes off with the last load and we are left with a simplified agenda: garden, any lingering summer projects, school. It is one less iron in the fire anyway.

Tim brought a ton (40 bags) of Alaskan grown ground barley and crimped oats down from Delta on his way home to pick up the second load of horses. This is the first year I have had good covered storage to keep all the feed I need for the season and allowed us to purchase at bulk prices as well as piggy back on a paid business backhaul. It is a nice secure feeling to have the pig food stockpiled and know that we do not have to travel to purchase feed.

Earlier in July I spent some savings from my cancelled trip to France on a silage tarp for the garden that I ordered through the mail since I could not find a source in Alaska. While I am not a big fan of plastic, I am battling a persistent perennial native plant, horsetail, in part of the garden and I needed a tool to knock it back and maybe overtime eradicate it from the growing beds. A silage tarp is a big sheet of 5 mil plastic that is black on one side and white on the other. No light or water can pass through so it starves plants of the two things they need most. The tarp I purchased is 32 feet by 105 feet and you have to secure it with sandbags so I ordered some of those too. The kids and I spent a hot and sunny afternoon filling the sandbags with roadside sand and loading them into our old beat up water truck.

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I thought we had 50 but we actually had 100 and after filling and loading 75 bags (with an estimated fifty pounds of sand each) we did a quick tally of weight and realized the poor old half ton truck was terribly overloaded. We drove home VERY slowly.

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We laid the silage tarp out when we got home and placed the sandbags on the edges to keep it in place. When all was said and done we moved approximately 6000 pounds of sand in one day (moving the 75 bags twice). I am hoping using this new “tool” will help make garden maintenance easier in the future. We were all pretty sore after this project!

The garden is perking along even without much care these past two weeks other than opening and closing tunnels and turning on the irrigation when needed. The outside beds were treated to some deep watering from several steady rains and everything looks really good. While I do not know if the season will give us enough time for them to mature, the winter squash in the tunnels are growing rapidly.

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There are flowers blooming everywhere. Finally we are seeing results from all those flower seeds we started last spring.

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I have been digging up native yarrow plants and moving them along the northeast fence line to create a native pollinator border. It is nearly done and while it looks sparse now it should not take more than a year or two for the plants to fill in and provide copious July and August blooms for our native bees. You can also see some of the sweet peas climbing up the garden fence in this photo.

We are happily eating cucumbers every day. I started my first batch of lacto fermented pickles and need to start more.

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I harvested some fresh garlic for the pickles. It is not yet ready for harvest for curing for winter storage but perfectly fine for fresh eating or pickling.

Daily chores now include fertilizing the squash, picking peas, picking the green beans, as well as finding and killing slugs in the greenhouse on top of all the other “to dos”. I am hoping since I am aware of the slug problem this year that I can make a real difference on how many survive to maturity and lay eggs for next years crop. Squishing slugs is my least favorite chore but it needs to be done. It is amazing how much damage they do even when they are small. My pepper plants which are already struggling with this chilly year are an especial favorite of the slugs. I wonder if we will get peppers at all this year…I sure hope so.

Unexpectedly this week I received a message with a photo from some Kenny Lake friends who fly to McCarthy frequently. It was a photo of our farmstead from the air! What a treat to see the farm from a different perspective.

I have a lot of catching up to do this week: weeding, harvesting, fencing. It is time to make sure this bounty of vegetables does not go to waste!