spring projects – Wood Frog Farm: A Boreal Forest Family Adventure

We are starting to sound like a broken record around here.

Will spring ever arrive?

While the sun is above the horizon for 14 hours and 19 minutes today and it is glaringly bright (even shining in the north windows in the mornings now), the temperature at 7:30 AM Alaska time was -21 degrees Fahrenheit. Did I mention it is almost mid April? I mean, sure, we all know that the summer season in Alaska is short and intense but usually winter does not stay through mid April. There is only a small amount of melt in evidence…a few patches on the plowed road that show through the snowpack, a widening of brown at the base of the spruce trees, the slow slide of snow and ice on shed roofs. But overall, it is still cold, we still have a lot of snow, and while I have tried very hard to be positive and accept that I have no control over the weather, with the howling windstorm two nights ago that shook our house and now the bitter cold of sub zero temperatures, I am over it. Time for spring already! I have plant starts that are not super happy with cabin window life and I have delayed starting any more the last several weeks as I am unsure at what point I will be able to fire up the greenhouse this year. Space inside is at a premium and I am running out of indoor room.

A tiny bit of the McCarthy Road is starting to melt out. But very, very slowly.

I have spent more time dreaming and planning with this winter weather. I want to finish our root cellar and build a passive solar seed starting house. I want to streamline and organize some of the ways my farm business operates so that it is more efficient, especially spring seed starting. I would like, after spending 19 years in Alaska doing the best I can with whatever materials I have, to make something from scratch, or with new materials, or with a real plan. Something that will be pretty, useful, and long lasting. It is a pipe dream. I don’t have any paying work lined up this summer and the farm barely pays for itself. But that does not stop the dreaming! In April I walk a couple of miles nearly every day on the McCarthy Road for our annual 30 miles in 30 days fundraiser for our local fire department. It is good motivation and a good time of year to watch our world transition to the summer season. Another perk is running into friends traveling the road, especially this year when we have been cloistered in our cabin, a world of only 4. Social distancing is easy when a truck pulls up and you can chat for a while from the side of the road. I love these spontaneous visits. You never know who you might run into! Last week I ran into a good friend of ours and we covered a lot catching up since the last time we had seen him: businesses stuff, weather, backcountry trips, homeschool, summer plans. While talking about the woes of trying to build out here with no money, no labor force, and few supplies, he told me this quote.

We have done so much for so long with so little that we can now do practically anything with nothing.
Anonymous

While attributed to arising in the U.S. military, I have never heard a quote that better described rural Alaskan living. This is true and I admire the ingenuity of the folks around me. Still, I dream of building something from a plan, from scratch, with all new materials. I can not help it. Luckily dreams are free!

The upside of an extended winter is that we have been able to enjoy the fun parts of the frozen season a bit longer this year. Last weekend we cut some firewood for the greenhouse and fished for a rainbow trout dinner at a nearby lake.

The weekend before that Tim and Sylvia went on a father/daughter fishing trip to Paxson Lake and caught 2 burbot and a lake trout. I have wanted to eat burbot for over 15 years and finally got the chance! It is the only cod with a fresh water habitat and having grown up on the Maine coast with the lore of Grand Banks cod fishing my whole childhood, I loved getting to try our Alaska version. They are extremely slow growing so you are not allowed to keep too many. We cooked a poor mans lobster recipe by dropping it into boiling salted and sweetened water. Then we ate the pieces dipped into butter. Yum!

Lake trout on the left and burbot on the right. Both were delicious! PC Tim Nelson

We still have plenty of snow to scoot the snowmobiles around and every few days the past few weeks, it has snowed a little bit more. Some years the snowmobiles have been put away for the season by now or are perched behind the house on the last clump of snow in the yard. We had an egg hunt for the homestead cousins last Sunday and several eggs got lost in the snow! It was hard to be clever with hiding brightly colored eggs in a primarily white landscape but we all had a lot of fun.

It has warmed up some, or should I say, we have had a few warm days. It is not the deep freeze of mid winter and the sun, when the wind is not blowing, is deliciously warm. It was warm enough to melt out the chicken coop which rapidly gets disgusting in the spring. All winter long the coop stays frozen and I sprinkle fresh straw over the accumulation of droppings. The layers of straw and poo get pretty deep by spring and it gets really wet in there when it starts to thaw out a winters worth of frost. It is pretty important for the health of the chickens and the cleanliness of the eggs to muck it out as soon as possible. I spent March 30th tackling that project.

Three or four snowmobile sled loads later…

I love my chickens and their eggs but I also love the compost that their bedding breaks down into over the year.

The chickens always crack me up during this process. Every forkful of old bedding uncovers something new and exciting (for them). They scratch and peck while I maneuver the mostly still frozen bedding chunks through the doorway and into the sled. But they really get excited when the new straw is forked inside.

Happy girls to have fresh rye straw and extra room in the coop!

Just over a week ago we got a dozen Ancona duck eggs from Corbin Creek Farm in Valdez and put 11 of them in our new incubator (one was cracked).

An exciting mail day when the incubator and chick warmer arrived this late winter!

So far so good. When Sylvia and I candled them on the 7th, all 11 showed normal signs of development.

Fingers crossed for 11 ducklings to add to our duck flock of 3

While it is clear, cold, and brilliantly sunny today, our forecast is predicting a change in weather. A change, perhaps, in seasons. A chinook wind bringing rain and warmer temperatures should transition this frigid landscape into the wet, squishy, muddy mess that is usually April. Break up is not usually my favorite time of year but in all my 18 years of Alaska living, I have never looked forward to it quite this much! Bring on the mud. Bring on open water. Bring on the smell of earth waking after a long slumber. I have never been more ready than now for Spring!

Cold temps but longer days. I took this picture after 7 PM on March 27. Sun after 7!
Two weeks later and the snowpack looks much the same.

From my (still frozen) garden to yours, I wish you happy growing!

One end of this week would not recognize the other. We started with snow and ended with mud.

It has been rainy this month, far more spring rain than I can remember in years. All those raindrops made quick work of the snow in the open areas of the yard. The drain in the perennial garden started slowly working last week though there was so much melt water it filled the basin in front of the greenhouse, into the greenhouse, and spilled over the hill into the lake.

The garden drain flowing at full capacity

Every morning I would get up and peer out the east window to see if the drain had caught up with amount of water running in. At night the temperatures drop and the surfaces of the puddles freeze but the in ground drainpipe stays open and running.

Day after day the yard pond would be smaller in the morning but fill up again during the day. Last Saturday the pipe was running as fast as it could and the pond was at its fullest. It started shrinking bit by bit, each day, a little smaller. Then on Tuesday the small pond was there when I woke up and looked out the window. It was there when I worked on boards in the greenhouse all day until I finished up and was heading out and realized that the rest of the soil above the pipe had thawed out and the pond was gone. It took a whole week to go from flooded greenhouse/garden to a pond-less garden…Tuesday to Tuesday.

I had hopped the fence and raked the leaves off the perennial beds before the pond drained. I could not find straw last fall to mulch the plants so used poplar leaves I had planned to compost. The problem with mulch in Alaska is that while it protects the plant roots throughout the very cold winter, it delays the soil from thawing out in the spring. This means twice the work…putting it down in the fall and then taking it back off in the spring. With straw, it is pretty easy to lift and rake but wet matted leaves are no fun at all. After the pond drained, I forked all the leaf piles into the 4 wheeler cart and transferred them to the compost pile. When it dries out some more, the garden will need another raking but it looks pretty good.

And there are chives and comfrey poking up already.

With the warmer weather the squirrels are twitterpated and chasing each other all around the yard. My son decided to go hunting with his bb gun and quickly bagged 4 which he and his Dad skinned. Red squirrels are pretty small but they carved off the 4 quarters and soaked them overnight in salt water. We baked them slowly in cream of mushroom soup and they made a delicious meal. The connection between taking a life and using it to sustain ours is a life lesson that I consider imperative for our children to learn as they grow. If they kill it, they eat it. Even if it was not exactly I had in mind for dinner.

I oscillate between reminding myself to be grateful for all the benefits our lifestyle give us especially during these days of social isolation and feeling frustrated at being pulled in so many different directions with so many spring projects. The days go by too quickly. And I have had more than one moment when I wished I was stuck in an apartment (alone) with nothing to do but read a book or watch tv.

One project that has been on the back burner for over a year was moving the shed across the yard. We had been talking about it on and off for the past week but on Wednesday it still it seemed to come out of nowhere when the plan “we are moving the shed today” was announced. Tim aired up the backhoe tires and charged the batteries while I removed the boxes of glass canning jars and anything else that might break. The shed is built on two beams that acted as skids. Other than the tight squeeze between the septic pipes in the beginning (that was stressful!), the building slid smoothly up the hill and across the gravel pad to its new home. It will take a fair bit of work to get it reorganized (just kidding…it was not organized in the first place so it will take a ton of work to actually organize it) and build our new woodshed onto the south side. But when it is done it will be a much better set up. It was on a steep hill, the freezer porch was breaking and we did not want to have a walking path across the septic tank or leach field in the winter. Untouched snow acts as an insulator to the ground keeping our plumbing working through 40 below stretches. Our storage shed, with built on woodshed, was in place when we put the septic in between it and the house and it has not been the ideal set up with us tromping across the area all winter to access our stored items, freezers, and split wood. Being on flat ground and closer to the house will be much better in the long run especially for processing firewood (no more hauling split wood uphill!)

Dragging the shed with the backhoe. And a new wall and door for the shed as the original door was on the side now against the bank. Tim has been working hard!

There are other signs of spring emerging. The kids discovered their bikes this week when they thawed out of the ice and now I have companions on my walks who mock my slowness. The dry road is more fun for the kids and we do not have to kick them outside to play anymore.

The Copper River is open. No more ice dams.

And while the migratory birds seem to be taking their time this year (or maybe I just keep missing them…), there are some around. We saw a swan fly over the lake on the 14th. And today there were ducks in the roadside ponds. I am ready for more!

It rained again last night but now that the garden has drained and the yard is primarily free of ice and snow, I am not so worried about the extra moisture. After the extremely dry year last year, a wet spring is pretty darn nice. I am starting my brassica seeds today, just over a week late from my normal schedule.

With a later colder spring, a later planting should not matter in the long run. Young, healthy starts often catch up and surpass older starts. My other slower growing starts are doing well too. The cool spring means not getting out to the greenhouse every day. But it is warming up more every week.

The gardening and self sufficient lifestyle has been gaining in popularity in leaps and bounds over the last decade but no more so than right now in the midst of a pandemic. And the majority of the time this is super exciting to me. I love to mentor folks with their gardens. But this surge in interest can also lead to shortages. It means that it is harder or impossible to find the things we need on an annual basis. We wanted spring pigs but last month we did not travel to town because of stay at home orders even though technically we could have travelled for agriculture/food. And now there are no spring pigs to be had. I really, really wanted pigs this year and we are still looking for some but an already scarce market is now an empty market. I am worried that I will need more seeds and not be able to get them because of the overwhelming seed ordering that has occurred. My two most relied upon seed companies have both shut down to non commercial growers this month to catch up on orders and I have been unable to get some of the items I would like (most importantly a new wonder waterer wand for greenhouse watering and can not source elsewhere to Alaska).

I am tired this week. Physically tired from the spring outside work but also mentally tired of the pandemic, tired of the same chores everyday, tired of needing to be a positive cheerleader for school and kid chores, tired of not being able to get away for a bit and visit with a girlfriend. And I feel incredibly guilty feeling this way because we have everything we need plus access to the outside every single day. I have struggled this week to remember to be grateful for what we have. I have not been the best Mom. (Tim did almost ALL the schooling this week.) And I would definitely be fired if the housekeeper position was a paid job (the dishes and floor need to be cleaned and I just don’t want to). I thought getting out of the house and a small road trip would help me by participating in the weekly Friday outing to hand in school work, collect more school work, and pick up supplies. But the stress of grocery shopping, sanitizing, and talking to folks with an uncomfortable mask on just made things worse and I wish I had stayed at home. I am on the same page with the dwarf Grumpy today evidently. Sigh.

So I need to change my perspective and continue to work on being more positive. Salad greens are up in the greenhouse.

The frogs will start singing any night. The crocuses will be up soon (we looked today on the 5 mile bluffs but not a purple flower in sight). The lake will open up more and more. The weather will continue to warm. The mud will turn back into soil (as long as no one walks on it).

And there is basil growing.

So many good things and so many things to be grateful for. A sunny day would not hurt though…

Tag: spring projects

Spring?!?

Transformation