The Garden, 2014, part 1 of ?

This post is long overdue. We started the garden early this year. Unlike last year, it was not wet. Last frost in late may, maybe around May 15th. Very favorable. First job is to fork up the soil. Some people use a tiller for this. This is essential for new rows, but for old rows I think  it is too violent. I use the old-fashioned spading fork. Then I spread manure, bought at Lowe's because I cannot generate enough compost. The  Alaska climate is, as we all know, very harsh. The   growing season is short -- and so is the composting season. My compost grows very slowly!  Anyway, the manure is mixed in. By hand. The result is nice, neat rows. No weeds, yet.

Then we put in the transplants. These have been sitting in the windowsills since early March.

I always cloche my transplants.Now cloche is a French word; it means "bell". The French, and later all European countries, used glass mini-greenhouses to get an early start on their veggies. These resembled bells; hence their name. Nobody makes them anymore; but on the other hand  there is an unlimited supply of transparent plastic, in my case old fruit juice containers. I run them through a bandsaw and slice off tops and bottoms. This protects the plants. I have seen frost on June 6! These pix were taken late May. If there had been a frost, my transplants probably would survive. They seem to like the cloches. It is almost time to remove their trainer wheels :). I always think I have far too many cloches, but I either break even or have too few. Drink more apple juice, JRC!

The rest of my stuff I start from seeds. I use my trusty Earthways seeder. I will have to do a post on this marvellous device. I was concentrating on what I was doing and did not get any pictures. Shame on me. The seeder saves days of handwork.

As I write some of the seeds are coming up. And I have been weeding already; dockweed is your deadly enemy. If you want to learn more about these techniques go read Eliot Coleman's books. He gardens in Maine, and that is almost as bad as Alaska.

Spring is here. Well, maybe not so much

It has been an extremely long winter. Then again, human memory for climate is short. Perhaps 30 years. I had a professor, long ago. Dr Helmut Landsberg. Prof. Landsberg had actually studied the human memory for meteorological events, such as hurricanes, floods, and even seasonal changes. That's whence I got the thirty year thing. We have a very selective filter, and anything intergenerational escapes it.

But this has been the slowest spring I have seen since I came to Alaska in 1999. Today I did a photo-op on our spring. First thing I did was go out to the garden. It is traditional in Alaska to plant on Memorial day. Not so much, this year. So I did a photo-op on it.

 First thing I did was to go to the garden. First, you can see the snow still on the ground in the background. Second, the garden is muck. I sank in 3 cm. No way I am planting this weekend. What fell effects this may have on my internal economy remains to be seen. Short growing season!
 

 Next we have the driveway. It is clear, but you see that snow patches linger on. Substantial snow patches. Bummer! I have never seen that much snow on the ground this late. Onwards.

Basargin loop, on which I live -- and have to maintain -- is a morass. It can be passed with 4x4 but is very iffy. But there is worse. There is the Basargin Road tank trap, a photo of which appears below.

At least we will have no Panzers coming through any time soon. The tank trap is impassable -- absolutely impassable-- by any vehicle  with less than 30 cm ground clearance.  Holes too deep. This excludes poor Vicky Vitara from making the passage. Notice that the villagers have dumped scrap wood all over the place in a futile attempt to improve things.  Notice the low-clearance car prudently parked on the Goat farm property. Neil is no fool! The only solution I can see is to corduroy the tank trap. One would cut logs to road width and put them down in close contact. This is a major undertaking. It involves chain saws and a lot of backbreaking manual labor, putting the logs in close contact. It is easier to let Ma Nature do the work and dry it out.  That is not happening with any speed.

However, this week I abandoned clocks and did some bicycle repair work.  I now have two functional bikes. This winter, the machine shed collapsed on one of my bikes (the best one, of course) and turned the rear wheel into a pretzel. I salvaged the axle and put it on my second bike, which had a broken axle. So not all a loss, and I am learning a lot about bicycle repair. More later, of course. I hope.

              

The garden grows apace

The gardening season in Alaska is extremely short. End of May to somewhere in September. When the lower 48 is planting, we have snow on the ground. But there is a compensating factor. We have an enormous amount of sunlight. When it's dark in say, Iowa, we can still get around at midnight without a flashlight. So what we do is plant stuff that grows very, very, quickly. This year we planted (for instance) turnips from transplants. My daughter did the actual transplanting. She gets the Golden Turnip Medal.

Day before yesterday I was about my usual chore, weeding. If your plants can grow so can the weeds, so the chore is never-ending. Anyway I pulled off some weeds and beheld a turnip above ground! Large. I pulled it out and took it inside.
The knife blade in the picture is 25cm long, for a scale. With it is some Swiss Chard. Good stuff. Note to self: plant much more chard next year. Nice turnip, very tasty chard. Now today I completed some more weeding and found a lot more turnips.
I also watered the greenhouse. I have two small (and green) tomatoes. But I also found the largest zucchini I have ever grown. It is visible at the right of the picture. A monster. I have a lot of radishes, too, but I didn't pull any up today. Amazing. Chard and radishes can be seeded. Plant in May, ready in July! Cheers for chard and radishes.

On the debit side of the ledger, cabbage, cauliflower and broccoli seem slow-pokey this year. We shall hope, and make a few sacrifices to the Garden Gods. I am sure my neighbors would be highly offended if I suggested one of their goats might be a suitable sacrifice! Maybe I'll burn garbage instead. Two goals witn one burn.Got to get rid of garbage, after all.

Garden Update

We interrupt the sharpening thread to bring you news of the garden. For those of you who are not gardening fans, this must be just as boring as sharpening tools. But gardening is much more fundamental. It involves growing your own food. You see, we are all dependent on a very elaborate production and distribution systems to eat. Eating is the basic human activity. Without it we are dead. People simply go to the supermarket; an interesting term. Where did the food in Safeways come from? Neither you or I have the slightest idea. Even if you follow the precepts of health and avoid processed food, the cabbage you bought in Florida may well have been planted in California. Ridiculous? Not so much. It might actually be cheaper to grow it in Cal and ship it to Fla -- it fuel is cheap enough. And cheap is the name of the game. But if shipping costs rise, and fuel costs rise, then the whole system breaks down. Which is why I plant my garden. I wish, in a word, to be self-sufficient. But enough ranting. (Then again, it's my blog. I will occasionaly put in a rant. Else what's a blog for?)

Now gardening in Alaska is no mean feat. The growing season is extremely short. In Iowa they think of planting on March or April. Hah! In those months I have snow on the ground. But on the other hand, we have a lot of daylight. Just about 24/7. We must compensate. So we plant as early as we can. All a gamble. Most people (myself included) plant Memorial day, end of May, as you have seen from previous posts. I do a lot of transplanting. Stuff grows in my windowsills. I plant in March too. Only indoors!

This is today's picture. I put in the last transplants today, a bit late by my standards. But first I had to get rid of the weeds. An excruciating task. Now everything is in place. The radishes, the carrots.. . and so on. Now this brings up a point. Observe all the dandelions in the picture. Fortunately they are good to eat; they add spice to a salad (if young) and can otherwise be boiled up as a green. Roots are supposed to make a coffee substitute. The French jardins marechières (market gardens) used to grow them as a crop! But I have far too many of them. In suburban lawns, these things are regarded as pests. To me they are a potential resource. Another resource is the lovely wild rose:
You can make Rose Hip Tea out of them. Rich in Vitamin C. Do not neglect the lowly weed. Go read Euell Gibbon's books and see what you are missing.Mr. Gibbon's most famous book is Stalking the Wild Asparagus. There are other books. I no longer give citations, because if you Goooooogle on Euell Gibbons you will get all of them. Dear Suburbanite: do not sweat your dandelions. Eat them instead. You are actually growing an edible crop. But please, stay clear of pesticides. Pesticides are not good to eat at all.

A garden grows apace

This is definitely garden week. First, a few pictures of the transplant activity. These were taken by my son and sent to me. So they did not make it into the last post. Here my daughter is struggling with lettuce. She seems unconcerned.
And more transplanters at work:
Now we have to do the seed stuff. There are some plants I start from seed, namely carrots and radishes. For some reason I have bad luck with transplants. So I seed them. Seeding is not a photogenic activity. I use my trusty Earthways Seeder. Amazingly it has not acquired a name.
This is an amazing contraption. It uses plates, circular disks sort of like a Ferris wheel. It is, in fact, a seed Ferris wheel. The seed is put in a hopper, and takes a ride on the Ferris wheel. When it gets to the right place it is ejected rudely, and falls down a chute. Meanwhile, a plow-shaped thing has cut a furrow. The seed drops into the furrow. A chain dragging along covers the seed. This gadget saves hours of time and backbreaking manual labor. So I did my seeding in 15 minutes, all I had to do was push. There is a caveat: you have to use the right plates for whatever you are planting. And you must adjust the depth of the plow thingie. But it is a wonder.

Next, the greenhouse. I transplanted the tomatoes and zucchini into GH 2.0.
The more I look at GH 2.0 the more I am convinced it is a Good Thing (TM) because it is structurally sound, zero cost (except for the plastic) and while all the greenhouses nailed together around here collapsed this winter, this one stood up. It wasn't covered, you see. It took John about 15 minutes to cover it, and that's what it takes to uncover it. So its snow load is zero. And now John covered it.
The temperature in this thing is amazing. Today was 15C but GH registered 31C. Tropical. Just what you want for the greenhouse crops. At night it falls, but it is (so far) always warmer than the outside, by at least 1C. I will admit it looks a little crude. A lot crude, in fact. But who cares? I don't. Wish I coul get clearer plastic, though.

OK, now the oats have to be sowed. So John took the tiller for a walk.
This is the oat field being tilled. Oats (grains, in fact) require a great many more square meters than veggies. We have to mechanize. Sometimes John looked a little concerned.
Nevertheless the whole thing was done in about 20 minutes. Another amazing contraption. Should you buy one, do buy a rear-tine tiller like this one. Front-tine tillers work, but they will take your teeth out along with the weeds and trash. Tomorrow I will sow my oats, wild or otherwise. Very tame, in fact. Saskatchewan oats. We have another amazing contraption for that. Stay tuned.

A garden grows, but you have to work for it

Up until May 17, if was below freezing every morning. After that it has been above 0C every day. Last frost? We don't know. But it is obvious that we had to do something about the garden. There was still snow on the ground when we went out last Monday.
This is a remnant from the huge berm made by snow coming off the roof. Anyway, we took spading fork in hand and went out to the garden.
The rows have to be spaded. Then some natural compost has to be added, and finally manure. It is not the spading that is difficult. It is extracting all dandelions! And they have very long roots, so I wind up bending over a lot, or crawling. Either way it is quite tiring! Above I am pulling one of the pesky varmints. Like vampires, they are hard to kill. They can, however, be eaten -- as long as you don't wait too long. Good in salads.
It is a good feeling, having a row done, but one is tired at the end of the day.

We will skip pictures of soil-building. We add "black dirt," my name for a pile of forest-floor organic matter where a bulldozer went. Likewise the add-manure step. I'm sure you can visualize it. Now on to the payoff. It is Memorial day weekend. This is the traditional planting date in Alaska. I'd like to start sooner, but this was out of the question with a severe winter. So I had some help, thank heavens. My daughter and her friend came up and helped. We did all the transplants.
There are a few more plants on my windowsill. They are a bit too young to be allowed to go out and play with the older boys and girls. But note the plastic cloches over anything that is liable to be lost to frost. I make these out of fruit juice containers by cutting off tops and bottoms. You could use glass jugs but it is much easier to make plastic ones. I can never have enough cloches.

It rained last night, saving me the trouble of watering. It rained all of today, too; no work possible. I have some seeding to do and the greenhouse. But the garden got off to a good start.

The gardener's revenge

A while back I wrote about the devastation in my garden caused by Cassius, the dropout moose. At the time I vowed that if I caught him at it, I would put some birdshot in his trousers. Well, perhaps there is a Fairy Godmother after all. Today I emerged from my afternoon shower and looked out the window. There was Cassius, noshing on my garden. I yelled at him out the window. Cassius, startled, retreated to the edge of the pasture. But no more. I went out, armed with a ski pole. I yelled. I threw rocks. I threw sticks. Replied Cassius "what are you so upset about, human? Didn't you plant this garden just for me? Shut up and let me gobble up the rest of your veggies. Resistance is futile!" You could just see the wheels going around in what passes for a moose mind.

At this point, I saw red. Actually, in a crisis I never see red. I think quite coldly. Cassius needs to be taught a lesson. So I went inside. I broke open the box of #7 birdshot. I broke out my trusty double-barreled shotgun. As I recall, number sevens are BB-sized. Won't penetrate Cassius's thick hide, much less his skull. But he'll be stung. Out I went. The first thing to try is a wide shot. Usually this will do it. Even bears understand BOOM! But Cassius said, "Hey, human, why do you make so much noise?" Cassius, you are indeed a dropout. It may not even be your fault. Maybe mommy let you down. Or maybe, maybe, you are just retarded. However, I will not have my garden devastated. So I angled left. Cassius, meanwhile, was calmly eating some fireweed. Perfect. His size 100 stern was in clear view at about 50 meters. Put the bead on it (shotguns are not aimed, as a rifle is. You just point). Squeeze the other trigger. That fetched him! Cassius disappeared at the gallop. Perhaps he got the idea. Perhaps he didn't. If he didn't I have lots more birdshot. And next time I will get closer and hurt more. Of course Cassius prefers night-time feeding. Or should. But maybe he is, as I said, retarded.

At the end of the road there is the 30-30 Winchester and moose roasts. I hate to take that step. I prefer to live in harmony with the wildlife. Meanwhile there is the shotgun.
And there is my trusty double. It is on my bed, to remind me to clean it before I go to bed. I love doubles. If you can't do it in two shots you shouldn't be messing about with firearms. I did not take photographs of this episode in real time. That makes me an amateur blogger indeed. Sorry. I thought of the shotgun long before I remembered my camera.

Alaska law says that you may lawfully shoot any animal that is threatening your life or property. I suppose I could justify a fatal shot but I certainly hate to do so. Although it is a year's worth of meat. We will stick with birdshot. And, as a friend of mine said, the Russians might not be so scrupulous. You don't mess with Russians, as the Wehrmacht found out.

Disaster strikes the garden

This morning I arose early as usual. I went out to the garden to water. It has been a rather dry summer so far. To my horror, my broccoli had been eaten. Only the stalks remained.
Oh no, I thought. A Wascally Wabbit, as Elmer Fudd would say. But I grew up with Sherlock Holmes. We investigated further, and even Dr. Bumbling Watson could spot the culprit: a moose. Either that, or a species hitherto unknown to Science, the moose-footed rabbit. Large hoofprints all over the place. No -- it's a moose. Not only that: the vandal cleaned out all my beets, all my cabbage, all my chard, trampled my snap beans, gnawed on cauliflower (it may yet recover), and I am only fortunate that it seems to abhor leeks. It did put its size 125 hoofprints in my leek bed, however. And in various other places too.

Now moose usually mind their own business. They forage in the forest, and do not come around in the summer eating gardens. I know that in the lower 48 states, deer are a problem for crops. But moose are a moose of another color. I think I have an aberrant moose. In fact, I have seen him (or her) before. He/she was cast loose by mommy prematurely. Why? I cannot say. I even have a picture somewhere in this blog. Since I can't sex moose very well at a distance, let us assume "he" is the applicable pronoun. Very well, I have named him Cassius. This is because he has a "lean and hungry look" according to the Bard of Avon (Julius Caesar). Cassius is a dropout. He never learned to forage. Shame on mommy, except that maybe mommy met with an accident. So he is eating our gardens. I say "our" because today the battalion of Russian kids came by for their daily woodwork lessons, and informed me that Cassius has been around their gardens too, with disastrous results.

Now I would hate to do Cassius in. It is not yet, in spite of our dire economic situation, a matter of life and death. But my garden is devastated. So if I can catch Cassius at it, what I will do is put a load of #7 birdshot in his a..., er, trousers. With my trusty double shotgun. This might teach him a salutary lesson. If not, I am sure the village will break out the Kalashnikovs and that will be the end of Cassius.

I have tried to keep this light. But I am very upset. A family tradition is the end-of harvest Borscht. This requires beets and cabbage. Both are gone. It is impossible now to re-seed and re-grow. I am mulling over various plan B things. But it looks bleak for beets and cabbage. Not to mention chard, broccoli, and beans.

End game in Greenhouse 2.0

In our last thrilling episode our greenhouse had the top cover on it. It is held down by a couple of logs and some stones in strategic locations. I want the coverings to come off easily, you see. That way, come fall, I can dismantle all but the frame if I want to do that. But we now have to enclose the ends. The ends are an uncomfortable arch shape. Offhand I cannot see an easy way to do this. So the idea was to build framing, then resort to my tried and not-so-true system: duct tape and staples. The duct tape keeps the staples from tearing out. Ok, the frame, not so difficult.
You are looking front to back. The front is of course different from the back. It needs a door. Got to get inside the greenhouse somehow. The verticals are all buried in holes. Horizontals are lashed. Not one piece of metal so far. The next step is to staple on the coverings. I reused the coverings from the old greenhouse, willy-nilly. On the back we have...
...duct tape to hold the staples -- otherwise they tend to tear out under wind stress. The still tear out. Too bad. Duct tape is cheap. So are staples. On the front we have a different system:
There is a "curtain" hanging from the center. That acts as a door. We need to get inside the greenhouse, of course. Not too elegant but it works. So I took my trusty remote thermometer and hung it in the greenhouse. I am truly amazed. This lashup (literally) is far better than my old greenhouse. With just a little sun it is about 5C better than outside temperature. With more sun it goes up to 10-15C better than ambient. I am stil trying to figure out why this is so. Greenhouses, contrary to popular belief, do not work because of the difference between visible and IR transmission. I will have more to say on this subject later. They work because they control convection. So there is something about the convection pattern in this greenhouse that makes it efficient. I will say something about this when I have it figured out. Meanwhile I transplanted tomatoes and zucchini in the GH. These guys are a bit shocked but seem to be recovering. Tense times. But perhaps this thing is really better than what I had before.

I am really sold on lashing for Alaska construction. Lashings give and take. Nails do not. And this greenhouse cost only the 6-mil visqueeen covering. I think I paid about $25 for the big roll. I used it for several previous incarnations of the greenhouse and there is still some left. And it was put together by one person with no mechanical aids, unless you count rope. I spent about $20 for rope. All in all, not a bad price.

Meteorology and the garden

The year 2010 has had very unusual weather conditions. It was wet, wet, and wetter all summer long, after about June 10. So now we have yet another unusual phenomenon: fall fog. Usually September is very wet (hence my haste to get the winter wood cut, see previous posts). But so far, what we have had in September is fog. Early in the month we got a high-pressure system overhead, most unusual. No wind, you see, in a high. The high has persisted until today. I note the barometer has fallen about 3 mb since yesterday. But the ground is sopping wet still. So the water turns to vapor and goes up into the air. At night the ground cools off, and so the water vapor condenses. No wind, as I said. Voila, fog. Today was really thick, so much that the Weather Service issued a "fog advisory." I find the terminology ridiculous, since "advisory" is an adjective and not a noun. Perhaps NWS (National Weather Service) needs the services of an "expert dialectician and grammarian" such as Prof. Henry Higgins. The NWS uses "warning" for "really serious stuff" and "advisory" for "be careful." Why they couldn't use "alert" instead of advisory is beyond me. End rant.

But visibility this morning was about 400m in good places and 100m in bad. Eventually the fog lifts as the sun evaporates it again, but today it didn't lift until about 3PM.

As I have said before, this has nothing to do with the so-called "Global Warming" fraud, but instead has everything to do with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, or PDO. The really interesting question is what causes the PDO. However, fog it is. It is so thick that it's like rain, you get wet going outside. The garden doesen't seem to mind.
The carrots at left are the best I have ever had, even though they are warped. There were even a few radishes lurking, so I pulled them. Garden almost at end. There are still the oats, the year's big experiment. In spite of all the rain, some of them have oated! Oats are supposed to grow well in Alaska. I am leaving them in the ground as late as possible while we still have sunlight. Pictures next time.

Midweek: firewood and beets

Fall is rushing in. Some of the birches -- the small ones -- have started to turn. So the prudent sourdough, defying skies the color of lead, must look to endgame in the garden and also to his firewood pile. It has been a very wet summer, as is (unfortunately -- sigh!) to be expected from the cold cycle of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, or PDO. I think I said it before, but it should be called PTO for Pacific Tridecadal Oscillation. Unfortunately this could be confused with the Power Take Off on your tractor. Maybe PDTO? Anyway, I went out to the garden, weeded (it never ends) and pulled some of the beets and all of the onions. The "new" part of the garden has, as I expected, not yielded well; it needs much more manure! However...
...what I got was good. Last year I simply forgot the beets. Before that, I pulled too late and the beets were huge, but not as tasty. Root crops are great in Alaska, rainy weather or no. Alas, the onions were a washout (literally). The raspberries are from a volunteer patch that came out of nowhere. I am encouraging them. They are spreading. We will have to watch them, but this is good. Cultivation is simple: don't scythe them or use the lawnmower near them! There will also be cauliflower; it was touch and go but the plants finally decided to cauliflate (a word I have just made up). Broccoli is weaker. Tomatoes, miserable. Oh well. The garden is in end-game mode, as I said:
The lettuce, front and left, is still edible even if it is running away. I dread the return to store-bought lettuce. I think the potatos are ready to dig.

On the firewood front, I have never had so much wood since the stove was put in.
Five droob rows! Almost two full cords. And there is more waiting for Mr Jack, the Splitter. Jack has made all this possible. No matter what they tell you, it is much, much easier to use a power splitter than a maul. Now, understand me, I love to split wood with a maul. But it takes a day to get my eye in. Plus you need a good block. And the wood goes all over the place when you hit it. And your block rots. And lifting a nine-pound (four kilo) maul is no joke. No... Jack has made a huge difference in (to quote T.H. White in Mistress Masham's Repose) in my domestick Oeconomy. The O and the e in that last should be run together; don't know how to do that in Blogger. I have still had to use the maul on wood so gnarly that St. Peter himself would utter obscenities. But this is nature. And there is still this one birch on the power line right-of-way (PLRW) . It is jackstraws. When my neighbor decided to clear out his front yard, he used a gigantic machine with a power claw-like tentacle and hydraulic whatzis all over the place. The trees are piled up just like giant jackstraws on the PLRW. The logs are all connected. Most of them are Aspen. I'd much rather burn birch. The tractor could resolve the problem. instantly. So maybe it is time to investigate Lysander's starting problems. We shall see.

Midsummer Garden's dream

It has been raining, and then it has rained some more. This morning, the rain gauge registered 51 mm total. May not be much for the tropics, but is is quagmire for Alaska. This is supposed to be very good for the garden (it is also very good for the weeds, alas) but the garden is indeed prospering.
I put down some lovely weed-control stuff between rows. Potato row left, then letttuce, onions and such, then brassica row, and root crop far right. I cloched a bunch of stuff with my nonpatent fruit juice container cloches, Made a huge difference. A tailored greenhouse, in fact. Off picture, the strawberries are producing. Here's dinner ingredients a few days back:
Lettuce and strawberries, yum. Beautiful strawberries, sweet. Berries of all sorts seem to do well in Alaska.

We are in the "cold and wet" cycle of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Since the period seems to be 30-odd years, perhaps it should be "Pacific Tridecadal Oscillation," or PTO. But that is also the acronym for "Power Take-Off" one one's tractor. How confusing! Acronyms are the curse of modern languages, but even I have to admit they are sometimes useful. By the way, the sun was shining when I took the garden picture. Do not be misled by taking it for the norm in these PDO, or is that PTO-challenged times.

The coming of Chard

A momentous occasion today. It was raining in the morning, as usual these days, but it started to clear in the afternoon so out I went to the garden to pull weeds. I noticed that one of my seed-started radishes was pullable, and so was one of (in fact two of) the chards. So I duly pulled them:
The larger image will be off-focus. The new camera behaves differently from the old one -- you have to wait till it beeps before you depress the shutter fully, to allow autofocus to do its thing. Oh well. I had some of the radish and all of the chard with dinner. You treat it as spinach; I think it tastes better than spinach. One wonders at the audacity of supermarkets; they sell you blotter paper labeled "chard." Perhaps blotter paper is too tame a word for what they sell you.

My tomatos are not doing well. I am applying compost tea and hoping for a revival. It is difficult to grow tomatos in Alaska during cold phase of the NPO (North Pacific Oscillation, a 30-year or so cycle in temperature. What causes the NPO is a matter of speculation at this point.) It is hard enough in the warm cycles. On the other hand, I put cloches around the carrots and several have expressed a desire to be carrots a while longer. Win a few...

Cloches (from the French for "bell") are simply vaguely-cylindrical extra covers you put around plants. Sort of a personalized greenhouse. I make mine out of plastic fruit juice containers, thus getting recycle points. Cut the tops and bottoms off on the bandsaw, instant cloche. I have the jalapeños in the greenhouse cloched and some of the garlic cloched. It seems to help. Double cover, according to my bible (Eliot Coleman's The New Organic Gardener) works wonders.

Mary, Mary, quite contrary...

No, there are no silver bells nor cockle-shells, but at least the garden has progressed beyond the trauma ward state. This happens every year. I transplant. Plants keel over. They will die! No -- it looks bad, but they will make it. If they don't, well, eugenics may have some justification.
There are really two sections to the garden: new and old. When I got the tiller, I doubled the size of the garden (and also the amount of weeding). You can see the division where the plastic juice containers (now water containers) are, at left. Also left is potato row, which is cycled every year -- crop rotation -- and you can just see the spuds coming up. Next row over at the front, lettuces. They looked like goners; but they have recovered. They have been de-cloched. The third row (left to right) is brassica row; we have cabbages (but no kings), broccoli, cauliflower, and such. The last row is root crop row, containing beets, parsnips, carrots, "and etcetera," as the King of Siam says in the musical.

We had a hot May -- I could have planted a week sooner. A posteriori guesses are disallowed in agriculture. We now have a cool and cloudy June. Just like last year. We are, after all, dependent on nature. We go, as Gene Logsdon says, at Nature's pace.

Meanwhile, the Goat Farm in the village is doing well:
There are four new kids on the block, or in the garth to be more accurate. They come up to the fence and wag their tails. "Meh, meh," they say. I suspect this means "feed me, feed me," in Goat 101. But they are cute. Amazingly, Goat Farm goats stay put. They do not escape. I suspect black magic. Never saw a goat that couldn't leap over a tiddly fence like that in the picture. Not these guys (or gals). Black magic. Dark side of the force. Darth Spader would be proud.

Zucchini Miracles

The garden has its beds, and I have started to (trans)plant. Before I started, for the record, it looked like this.
But the real stuff is happening in the greenhouse. May 26 shot:
At left the tomatoes. They had almost no transplant shock, which I attribute to the crossword puzzle pots. Middle, chiles; left zucchini. When I went to water today, I beheld junior zucchini, busily zucchining (or whatever it is that these veggies do).

The zucc in the middle is as long as my finger; if you look carefully there is another on the plant above. In fact two, and in fact again, all the plants have fruited. In May! This may be SOP for Iowa, but not for Alaska. I attribute it to the fact I started these guys early and moved them to individual big pots. Since my window space is limited, I can't do that for everyone.

Meanwhile, after a week of incessant transplanting, my garden looks like a trauma ward. Like Louie in Casablanca, my plants are shocked. Shocked! I keep my fingers crossed. It happens every year and I forget it the next. I water, but I have not yet resorted to the Dark Side of the Force. Obi-Farm approves.

Lettuce sallies forth

Gardening in Alaska is always a dilemma, when May 15 (the ides of May) rolls around. Should I plant now? What if there's a frost? From my records, the last frost is mid-may; but one year there was -0.1C on June 6. Bother! However, gardening is gambling. We can always seed. But the earlier you get the transplants in, the earlier you eat. So today (after much dithering) I got the lettuce transplants into the ground.
Hedging my bets, I cloched them. Cloche is the French word for bell. In the 1890's these (with glass bell-like jars) were common practice in Europe, an individual plant greenhouse, in fact. They have been superseded, largely, by row covers and hoophouses. Some people in Alaska, indeed, use big glass jugs with the bottoms cut off. But it is much easier to use plastic containers, top and bottom cut off. I collect these things. Almost any transparent container will do; but the labels have to come off. You can cut the 'tainers off with a knife, but I wait until I have a batch and then fire up the bandsaw. Much faster and neater. Later in the summer, I feel I am drowning in a sea of cloches. At this time of year I never have enough.

In the greenhouse we have tomatos and zucchini. Tomorrow, the jalapeños, I think, cloched and greenhoused for insurance. These need all the time that they can get to grow in these hostile conditions.

The garden addition has its beds. Forward the garden! And we have more planting to do in the ur-garden -- and ... I am completely worn out. Fortunately, this only happend once a year.

The Tomato Transplant Operation

The snow is gone, except for a few random patches that don't get much sun, such as the former glacier where the snow slides off the roof. So thoughts turn to agriculture. My windowsill is full of greens. But we have a major project: get the tomatos (or tomatoes, whatever the proper plural is. Strunk & White recommends adding -s and so I shall).

Whatever the grammar, we must get the tomatos out of their flats and into transplant pots. You can buy peat pots, of course. This is 180 degrees away from my George Dyson philosophy (never buy anything you can make, and never make anything you can find), so I make my own. I used to employ newspaper for the purpose. Unfortunately newpapers are now all largely colored, and the colored inks are poisonous. Fortunately, a kind friend always gives me, for Christmas, the New York Times daily crossword puzzle desk pad; best crossword in the nation. But that leaves me with a large number of pad leaves. Aha! Make pots out of them.
At left, the cardboard tube I use as a former. Wind the puzzle around the tube, press in the ends, tape it for safety, and voila! a pot. A finished pot immediately to the left of the tube. The flat (plastic tray, otherwise castoff from some food product) immediately to the left of the tube. Transplants at the center. Microshovel (see below) inside flat.

You can buy pot formers from (among others) Lehman's Non-Electric Catalog, but why bother? Get a cardboard tube (paper towel roll, for instance).

Using a micro-shovel made from a piece of sheet metal castoff, carefully extract the plant from the flat, microshovel in some dirt, tamp it down with a chopstick, and you're done. Water it! This will start the decomposition of the paper. It will also rehydrate the plant and minimize shock. When it's time to plant, shove pot, plant and all right into the ground. I usually open up the bottom when I do this; less work for the plant.

Modern Industry will gladly sell you pots, tools, and seeds. I do buy the seeds. If you freeze seeds, you can use your leftovers next year; even if you don't you can reuse them for at least one year. Some of those tomatos are '08 vintage. I have not yet learned the art of letting X go to seed and then collecting X seeds. If you use hybrids, then you will not get away with gathering your own seeds. Hybrids, by definition, do not breed true.

Some people say they cannot have a garden because it is too expensive. I don't understand that attitude. Most of the things you need are in your kitchen garbage can! There is a blog out there called "Free Man's Garden" by a gentleman called Eleuthero. Unfortunately the blog has not been updated since 2007 or so. The photos have vanished. But Mr Eleuthero makes me look like a spendthrift. You can google it if you like; but without the photos it loses much of its value.

The ground is still wet. There is also frost 20 cm down. Can't work it. But today I spread manure (bought, unfortunately; but it's cheap) and compost (homemade) over the garden. Also the winter's ashes. Alaska soil is very acid; the ashes counteract that to some extent. I will also lime it.

Patched up the greenhouse -- thanks to some careful winterizing, it came through the winter almost intact. Now to wait. All gardeners and farmers must wait on the weather. Unless, of course, you own a heated greenhouse. Midas I am not; I too wait on the weather. It's a good time to clear brush, another post; but there is next winter's wood to get in. More things to do than there is time to do them!

Flashback: Garden 2009

Winter is here. There are 30cm (or a foot in gringo units) of snow on the ground, and more on the way. This is, after all, Alaska. So it might be fun to flash back to last year's garden. It reminds you that summer will come again. All part of living. If you like green all year round, move to the tropics. I grew up there, and I find it boring. Anyway, this is garden 1.3. Here it is, early summer ought-nine:
Note the radishes at my feet. As big as a potato. They should have been pulled earlier, but I'm not used to the idea of 30-day radishes. Also note the pretty purple-pink flowers in the background. That's fireweed. The leaves make a useful addition to salads. I was amazed to find that this grows in Finland, and I assume Norway and Sweden as well. Here are some turnips. The knife gives an idea of scale:
Not bad. Couldn't enter them in the state fair, but good eating! And we have cauliflower, broccoli, and another turnip. The secret of cauliflower is to tie up the outer leaves. This blanches the head, and keeps it solid. Who knew? My first attempts all went to seed.
Eventually late August comes; time to dig potatoes. My volunteer crew at work; my daughter and her friend:
And the final payoff:
This shot is posed! And composed. But the veggies are real. I'm dining off of them now. There is no comparison between store-bought and home-grown veggies. Different species. As Darth Spader might say, "my plans for agricultural domination are progressing."

Moose in the yard II

So I look out my living room window, and behold (and also lo, if you wish):
Two moose calves investigate my compost heap (which they did not think was very tasty) and the remains of the lettuce (which they gobbled up as if it were candy. Moose candy). Behind the mooselet on the left, you can see a lighter brown splotch. That is mommy Moose, Madame M as I have named her. Emma for short. Emma, being a sensible moose, is browsing on some twigs that I didn't get around to clearing this summer.

You can see her a little better here:

Eventually my smell must have wafted over to Emma because she came over:
So note, any naturalists reading the blog: moose calves like lettuce, even when frozen solid. You supermarket shoppers wouldn't touch it, but being a moose calf is a serious business. On the other hand, they turned up their noses at spinach and leeks, the last of the hardy crops. Emma knows that birch and alder are the menu for the coming winter.