getting ready for winter...

Winter is a big deal in Alaska. It starts the beginning of October, lasts until the beginning of April. It is cold, and dark. Last winter it was 30 below zero for two weeks. Fall comes early; we've already seen some yellow leaves. The fireweed is already blooming only at the top, which in local lore, means that snow will be here in 6 weeks. As a matter of fact, I had a fire going this evening, but only a small, quick one, just to take the chill off.

We heat only with wood. We have a wood stove in the middle of our cabin, and in the coldest part of the winter, it burns continuously. A few weeks ago, we finished filling up our wood shed. The roof slopes, and at the front of the shed, the roof is about as high as I can reach. Last year, we burned about 3/4 of the shed full of wood. All of the wood in our shed, James cut into stove length with the chain saw, and anything too big around he split by hand with an ax. I have not yet mastered the art of splitting wood, but I am learning. James did the cutting and splitting, and the rest of us, including Steven, picked it up from where ever on the property it was cut, put it in a wheelbarrow, hauled it to the shed, and stacked it. Realistically, besides James, only Ryan and I are strong enough to move a wheelbarrow of wood, but the kids are great for picking it up and putting it in the wheelbarrow. This is definitely a job for the entire family.

The other major necessary thing for winter preparation is cleaning the chimney. We have a chimney brush, which is much like the brushes used for cleaning rifles, only bigger. James and Ryan climbed up on the roof and cleaned the chimney, resulting in lots of screeching noises coming from the chimney, and a pile of black soot on the floor of the wood stove. The soot was then shoveled into our ash bucket and taken out to the compost pile. We also caulked the seams in the chimney pipe, and replaced the gasket around the door of the stove. Everything is in tip top shape.

So, the most basic and necessary part of winter prep is done, which gave me a huge feeling of relief. My family will stay warm.

easy come, easy go....

Just about a year ago, I was posting about my husband showing up with a brand new car. August 6, to be exact. One year and 5 days later, I am most likely saying goodbye to my little car.

At 12:15 this morning, I was on my way home from a quick trip to Ketchikan, and was only a mile and a half from home when a moose walked out into the road right in front of me. I was going about 55, and all I had time to do was think, "Oh CRAP!" before I hit it. It rolled up and over the car, luckily more on the passenger side, which was empty. With the way the windshield broke and the roof collapsed, it would have hurt if it had been on the driver's side.

The really scary part was that as I was driving down the road at 55 mph, with oncoming traffic in the other lane, my airbag deployed right in front of my face. I remember swatting at it, trying unsuccessfully to clear my vision, and focusing on making sure the car moved to the right. Since I couldn't see, my main goal was to NOT let the car go left, into the oncoming traffic. I was able to keep the car straight, and came to a stop on the shoulder of the road.

The moose was given to a charitable organization to be butchered, as is done with all moose roadkill here.

I suspect the car will be totalled. I have full coverage, but the insurance company will only pay resale value, so there will most likely be a gap between what they pay and what I owe. If they total it, we might take advantage of the cash for clunkers program, and trade in our 98 Durango that needs lots of work, and get another car. The problem is that the Mitsubishi dealership in Alaska closed, so we would have to do major car shopping. Yuck.

fireweed jelly

The other day, I made fireweed jelly. Fireweed runs rampant around southcentral Alaska, and we have lots of it on our property. Since last summer, I have wanted to make jelly with it, and I finally got around to it. Ryan and I picked two shopping bags full of fireweed blossom ends, which left no noticeable dent in our fireweed population. Then we picked all the blossoms off the stems:

Then rinsed them, put them in a pot with some water, and heated them until the blossoms lost their color, which only took a few minutes. Then strained the water, which then was actually fireweed juice. The fireweed juice was an ugly light yellowish brown, not at all what I expected.

To the fireweed juice, I added sugar and a little lemon juice. As soon as I added the lemon juice, the mixture turned a beautiful pinkish-purplish color, the color of the blossoms. Very interesting chemical reaction, I thought.

I then brought the mixture to a boil, added pectin, boiled for another minute, and poured into jars. Sealed the jars, and voila! fireweed jelly, 28 1/2 pint jars. This isn't the greatest picture, but the jelly is a beautiful rich clear pink color. And delicious!

I really enjoyed this experiment, because I was able to harvest something that grows wild and abundantly on my property, and turn it into something delicious for my family.

canoeing trip

This is a little behind the times, but last weekend we and another family we do a lot of stuff with went camping. We went to Tangle Lakes, which is about a 4 or 5 hour drive from our house, depending on how fast you go, and how bad traffic is. On Fourth of July weekend, with perfect weather, traffic was pretty bad, especially traffic of the rv variety. Motor homes go very slow on windy semi-mountainous roads, and you can only pass so many of them, since there are few truck lanes and the roads are, well, windy and semi-mountainous.

Traffic aside, the trip was wonderful. The campground was full, which we didn't mind, since we don't especially like the campground-that-looks-like-a-refugee-camp scene. We found a nice little lake on very rocky ground, so we could drive on it like driving on a gravel road, something we do every day anyway. No one else was camped on this lake, so we had it all to ourselves, the dogs could run around as much as they wanted(there were 5 of them, 2 of ours, and 3 of theirs), and so could the kids (6 of them, 3 of ours, and 3 of theirs).

James, Ryan, and Steven went fishing one day, and brought back 4 grayling, which were yummy cooked over the campfire. They say they caught and released many more, but no one in the other family likes fish, so they didn't want any to go to waste. (Our malamute ate all the fish parts that we didn't, and seemed to enjoy it tremendously.) We took the canoe out several times, and it was great. The lake we camped on fed into a larger lake. At the far end of the large lake, there was a beaver dam that we portaged across to a small stream that we followed until it got too shallow and rocky for the canoe. It was very pretty, and we found a beautiful spot that we could camp on if we wanted to load everything into the canoe the next time we go there.

We discovered that neither of our dogs particularly likes to swim, although one of the other dogs with us did and almost drowned because he followed behind the canoe for so long.

All in all, it was a great weekend, and very relaxing. This is the first time in a long time we have camped for enjoyment. Two summers ago, we camped on our property every weekend so that we could work on our house, and last summer we were tired of camping. It was great to be reminding that camping can be relaxing and enjoyable. We wore out the dogs and the kids:

first fruits

Had my first strawberries of the season last night, after the sun had been on them all day, warming them and making them juicy. Yummm.......

alaska's in the top 10! Whoohoo!

Except it's not something to be excited about:

Budget Nightmare: 10 Most Broke States

Basically, the Alaska state government gets close to 90% of its revenue from oil royalties and taxes. Not only is production decreasing steadily, but now the price of oil is much lower than it was last year.

Problem was, budget people forgot that even if the longterm trend in price of a commodity is up, it can always have dips, and if you make a budget without taking that into account, it will hurt.

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

mary, mary, quite contrary...

Well, my name isn't Mary, but I will show you how my garden grows. Everything is growing SO much better than last year. Our beds are quite rudimentary, hacked out of what was forest until sometime this spring. Hacked out by hand, I should point out, with nothing more than a couple of pulaski's, a couple of shovels, and some elbow grease. Mix it with some all natural fertilizer bought at the mill and feed (my compost isn't ready yet), and some wood ashes, give it some sun and some water, and here we are:




This is everything except the potatoes, strawberries, scallions, mint, and grapes. This does include two rows of raspberries, storage onions, lettuce, broccoli, swiss chard, peas and rhubarb. I know you can't see a lot of detail, but you can see how it had been part of the forest. It's kind of neat walking through the woods, past our campfire ring, and down a little path and suddenly instead of wildness, there are these neat little rows of edible things growing.

Here's the raspberries:

I got a late start on the peas, just planted them a week or so ago:


The storage onions:



Then, over in last year's beds, there are the potatoes and strawberries. The potato plants are much bigger than they ever got last year, and I am hoping the potatoes are as well. Last year we got lots of little potato marbles. We planted those marbles this year, and got:

And, last but not least, the strawberries, my favorite berry. The strawberries are out of control. Lots of nice, big, ripening berries, gazillions of runners everywhere:


I have to admit, although I love the strawberries the best, the thing I am most excited about, most hopeful over, and most anxiously awaiting harvest on, is the potatoes. Potatoes are a staple crop, and are nutritionally and calorie dense. If all else fails, potatoes will keep us alive. And with proper storage, will easily stay good until close to the next harvest. So I am hoping they produce this year. It is only my second year growing them, so I am certainly not counting my chickens before they hatch, but I am hoping I can get them mastered.

But, yeah, I really, really love strawberries.

a learning experience

These are parsnips. A yummy, white root vegetable very similar to carrots. They are from my garden. But they are in my compost bin. So what happened??? Well, last summer was terrible for growing. Nothing in my garden grew well last year. Well, we were happy to see our parsnips growing this spring, and were hoping that they would finally get to harvestable size....

NO! I was reading the other night in "The Backyard Homestead" by Marjorie Page, and came across a section regarding wintering vegetables over in the garden. I was reading with interest, and it said, regarding parsnips, "be sure to harvest before second growth begins, as they become poisonous at that time." Whoa! This was total news to me. So we promptly pulled all the parsnips up and put them in the compost pile.

This was sort of a learning experience for me. I am not an experienced vegetable gardener. I am just sort of going along, learning, seeing what works. I knew things like rhubarb leaves are toxic, and if potatoes are left in the sun, they become inedible. But I had no idea about this. And these sorts of things are IMPORTANT. This was something I really needed to know before feeding them to my family. I shudder to think what could have happened if I hadn't happened to pick this book up at Barnes and Noble last week.

I guess my point is that it is important when you are embarking on a new project, to learn what you can from other sources, and not do it all by personal experience. Otherwise, you are in for some personal experiences that are less than pleasant.

Happy Birthday Steven!

I know this is a little late, but on Wednesday, Steven turned six. And on Saturday, we had a party for him. We celebrated with a family that we hang out with a lot, and had cake, ice cream, presents, etc. I think he had a good time. My youngest is not a baby anymore. He's getting all grown up on me...

Disgusted...

Well, GM fell today, sortof. I hate to say this, but it needed to. I personally think this huge bailout of banks, investment and insurance companies, automakers, etc. is ridiculous, and should never have happened. To put the icing on the cake, GM declares bankruptcy today, and gets another $30 billion in bailout money. What a way to reward failure! And then it turns around and grabs it's retiree's pension plans. Is that legal? I don't think so.....

Two really good blog posts on the subject:
On a Tightrope Without a Net by Sharon Astyk, and
June 1 2009 2: The Rule of Law Revisited by Ilargi at the Automatic Earth

The second blog post includes Ilargi's comments, as well as the text and links to, many financial news articles. I encourage you to read these excellent posts. When you read this, you may find that those "green shoots" are a little less healthy than the mainstream media depicts.