How many weeds in a garden?

As I have remarked before, while (some) vegetables grow to enormous proportions in Alaska, so do the weeds. So weeding is a constant chore. All my weeds wind up on the compost pile so nothing goes to waste. Composting, by the way, has its own Alaska twists; I must post on that sometime. Anyway, the results of the last weeding went into the Darthcartt, my homemade garden cart. Here are the results.
Now this is after the weeds had a week to compactify, as the String Theorists in Physics say. I weeded today and filled the cart brimful. The Darthcartt is one meter square exactly. The sides are perhaps 30 cm. So maybe a third of a cubic meter. That's an awful lot of weeds. Just for a comparison, a cubic meter of water weights a tonne (that's a metric ton, for the metrically challenged; close enough to the Avoirdupois ton for practical purposes). Of course weeds are not as dense as water; good thing too or I would break even the sturdy Darthcartt. Today I pulled some turnips. They were enormous. I'll report on them soon.

Splitting hairs, er, wood

Once you have cut your firewood, you still have to split it. If you have to do this by hand, with a maul, as I have done many times in the past, this is no mean feat. It is a lot of work to split with a maul. Fortunately, as previously posted (try searching for the "splitter" label) my ever-loving children gave my an electric splitter for my birthday. A supremely useful gift. It is all a question of age. I can swing a maul and so can my son. But it is a lot of work! It is much easier to load the wood chunks into the Darthcartt and push them over to the splitteria.
John is loading up logs into the Darthcatt, prior to splitting. It is but a few meters to the splitter.
Then you stack it in the woodshed and that's it. It is still a workout, but not as bad as it could be. I am eternally grateful to John for doing this task. We have really left it late, and John is working on a load of wood that I actually bought as a pis aller -- worst case -- when I thought we couldn't do the woodshed and the wood after a month or more of illness. However, I think that wood is like gold. The more wood in the woodshed, the more independent you are of the price of oil, the absurd vagaries of politicians, and the world in general. I have cut at least as much wood as I bought, and that is a great comfort. The woodstove has been paid off -- it was paid off last year, in fact -- and the only trouble with it is, you tend to fall asleep in front of the wood fire. That's a lot more than you can say about your oil or gas furnace. To say nothing about electric.

Making hay, er, compost

Once one has scythed down the bizarre mixture of grass, weeds, clover, and aspirant alder trees that live on my property, there remains the question of what to do with it. This is really simple: we feed the compost heap with the "hay" we have just made. Much easier than real haymaking. Why, as Eliot Coleman points out in his book The New Organic Gardner, bother with manure? Cut the hay, bypass the cow, dump it on the compost heap. The heap acts like a cow and digests it. No mess, no smell. And if you're like me and don't want a cow in the first place, it's a winner. Spoiled hay? So much the better! Speeds up digestion.

So we take the bull rake and march down the windrow:
For some reason (probably so much fireweed in the mix) I get cigar-shaped results. No matter, works fine. Pick up the cigars and dump them in the Darthcartt:
And off to the compost pile we go. On a nice day, it's fun. If it's raining, not so much, but we must take the weather as we find it. The payoff is here:
Radishes and turnips! All is well on the farm. Radishes will grow where other vegs fear to tread. Love them!