Feed animals. Water garden. Remove weeds. Harvest and process. Sleep and then repeat. Summer is more than half over here in the north and harvest season has been added to the last of the succession planting and (the ever ongoing) garden maintenance.

What a funky year! A facebook memory popped up yesterday with a picture of 10 pounds of harvested green beans. Last year we had incredible heat, wildfire smoke, and the strawberry season was nearly over when right now ours is just beginning. (Click here to read about mid July last year and see those green beans, strawberries and more.) This year the beans have just begun flowering.

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The zucchini have finally started producing.

They are delicious but in classic 2020 fashion they are also bizarre. Many of the female flowers are doubles and growing fruit like siamese twins. Some fruit that are supposed to be straight are curved. And one fully formed fruit also had an additional flower about to bloom.

In the greenhouse the cucumbers have started producing daily harvests and my son is happy to consume them all as his daily veg (we make him share.)

It might be a pipe dream to hope to finish any winter squash in the garden this year but several pumpkins and kuris have set recently and I will wish for late, late frosts.

The sunflowers and nasturtiums in the ground have languished this year but in the big flower pots they are blooming. It is always a good idea to hedge your bets and have many different growing styles in Alaska (or anywhere really) as you never know what the weather will throw at you.

It has been a good year for native pollinators. While spring blooms have faded, the yarrow, clover, fireweed and more is in full flower. The afternoon air positively hums with bumble bees, hover flies, wasps, hornets, and this week I saw a gorgeous hummingbird moth on the raspberry flowers. Alas no photo though I chased it around for a while trying.

Our latest big addition to the farm is pigs! We chose not to drive to town to get spring pigs due to March lockdowns and with the uncertainty did not think ahead to get on an April or May list. With covid-19, nearly everyone was concerned about their food safety and bought up seeds and livestock and in April and May every piglet was spoken for. So when I had the chance to purchase some late pigs locally, I jumped at the chance.

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I love having pigs here! So far they have settled in well and are busy eating weeds, kitchen scraps, and barley.

We also were gifted a young rooster named Razzle, though I often call him Rascal too. He is a character. The mature hens have not really accepted him and boss him around. He is much quicker and easily keeps out of their way. Raised by kids, he is very friendly and runs up to me every time I show up at the garden, perches on my arm, lets me carry him around, and insists on 4 wheeler rides. Razzle cracks me up!

Some animals gained and sadly one duck lost this week. One of our Ancona ducklings died unexpectedly. Fine in the afternoon and gone at bedtime with no external explanation. Sylvia and I buried her in between irises in the perennial garden so her body can give to the blooms that bring all of us joy every year. So it goes on the farm, a daily connection with life and death.

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We tried to see the comet Neowise this week and stayed up late several times in the hope the sky would be clear and the night would be dark enough but no luck, yet. At least our sunsets are gorgeous.

And like the horses, I am taking breaks as I can to remember to enjoy this season as it passes by in a blink.

This time of year it is hard to remember to take a break and just be. There is so much to do that you can discover that weeks have passed by in the blink of an eye. We finally had some hot weather and the kids have been swimming. In fact, there was a mermaid sighting in the lake this week.

After a very windy beginning of July when I looked up from chores to discover the lake was still, Conner and I seized the opportunity to go for a quick outing.

Every so often we experience dead calm on the lake and the reflections are magnificent. The lake was extraordinarily clear as well and I spotted 5 rainbow trout over 12 inches long and a small school of small ones only a few inches long darting in and out of sunken branches. The bright sunlight and clear water combined to make some fascinating images of logs disappearing into the depths.

Conner wants a submarine to explore the rest of the lake now. I think I am content staying on the surface.

In the garden, 2020 continues with her challenges. It has been a cold spring and with a fair amount of rain showers. I had flea beetle and cutworm pressure early on. And while the garden crops languished in their less than ideal weather, the native and imported weeds flourished. I have been waging a war on weeds lately. Having torn this garden space from virgin Boreal Forest, the clearing has done what all forests do after a catastrophic event. That is, it has attempted to heal itself by first becoming a meadow. Bare soil is hardly natural, at least for long. But bare soil is what I need as I transition this space into a permanent bed system and establish the plants that I want to benefit my family. And so, as weed seeds blow in from cottonwoods and willow, the native willow herb and shepherd purse and non native dandelion and plantain push up and begin to flower and I have been scurrying around removing those about to go to seed. Some can go right into the compost pile. Some go to the chickens. Those are the weeds without rhizomes or a developed seed head. Some weeds go to the horse pen where the horses snuffle through the pile eating the yummy bits and stomp the rest to oblivion. But the persistent horsetail, from the family Equisetaceae, is a menace to the gardener. While it is an amazing plant with an incredible history and unbelievable ability to survive, it takes an enormous amount of time to weed out. And it grows right back. I love it in the woods. And I have made my peace with it living in the perennial garden. But I can not grow and maintain the vegetable garden if it takes me an entire day to weed one 36 inch bed a mere 20 linear feet.

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I broke down this week and ordered a silage tarp. A silage tarp is a tool that has been increasing in popularity with market gardeners to prepare new ground, break down and kill covercrops, and create a stale seed bed. It is a thick layer of plastic, white on one side and black on the other, that blocks out any light while maintaining a moist and warm environment underneath. Seeds will germinate and then starve for light. Even persistent weeds can be killed or severely weakened by a season under the tarp. I have resisted using this technique for a few reasons.

1. I am not the biggest fan of plastic and use it as sparingly as possible (greenhouse/tunnel coverings only) in the garden especially in contact with the soil. (Even though I could get earlier warm weather crops by planting through plastic, I just do not like to do it.)

2. It is not cheap to ship a huge chunk of heavy plastic up to Alaska. In fact the shipping price was MORE than the price of the tarp. Sigh.

But I did it anyway. As a one woman weeder (believe me, I have tried every technique known to Moms to get the kids weeding and it never works out), I need this garden to be more efficient. I am not even up to half of the potential in this garden and weed pressure is the number one reason. I will let you know how it goes.

Running a week or two (or three) behind this year, regardless, the garden is starting to produce. The lettuces are beautiful. And I hilled the potatoes with straw. Hopefully the voles who have been absent from the garden so far (thanks to owls and hawks) do not find the excellent habitat I created.

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The greenhouse is perking along. It is extra slow as it can not get planted until all the garden starts are out. But it will not be long before we are swimming in cucumbers.

The swallows, warblers, robins, and sparrows have fledged and everyday there are small birds hopping around the yard chirping and flying in bursts as they find their wings. (I have been keeping the cat in as much as possible.) I think this might be my favorite part of summer when I see birds every time I look up.

The garlic has begun putting out scapes which means harvest is only a few weeks away.

And the ducks have moved down to the duck pen at the garden. No more moving them out for the day and into the house for the night.

No more daily duck bedding to clean from the stock tank in the house! (No stock tank in the house!) I planted a green manure mix in this fenced area this spring so the ducks have a forest of greenery to explore and eat.

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This is also the time of year that volunteers show up. Sadly, I do not mean hoards of strong young people clamoring to weed with me for free but plants that seeded themselves last year and pop up in unexpected places. Chamomile, calendula, and catnip all seeded happily in the back of the garden last year where they were neglected. (I blame the 10 year old unashamedly for this. All those plants were her entrepreneurial idea with which she did not follow through.) Chamomile and catnip have been forever relegated to the perennial garden where self seeding is not a problem. And the calendula was planted this year right next to the garden gate so I can keep the flowers harvested daily. But unexpectedly a thyme plant survived the winter so I left it and a few catnip to grow where they came up.

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Violas have popped up in the lawn, around the peonies, and in the flower pots.

The zucchini are just starting in the low tunnel.

And honeyberrys are turning purple though something keeps eating them before they get ripe.

We are on the cusp of harvest season. I will be weeding like crazy until harvest chores take over!