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.

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.