My garden

We moved our garden this year, over to the northwest corner of our property. This area gets a lot of sun, so it is almost ideal. The only problem is that it slopes down to the north, but it is a gradual enough slope that it doesn't appear to be a problem.

The biggest problem is the challenge of creating garden space from what was forest until last fall. The big stumps have mostly been pulled out, but the ground is compacted and full of tree roots. Our pulaski's have been getting lots of use this spring.

So far this year, we have lots of raspberries, 75 strawberry plants, 1 rhubarb, some onions and garlic, and lots of potatoes. We still need to create beds for carrots, peas, and whatever else takes our fancy. Beans, maybe. Or maybe we will try broccoli again.

We don't yet have a fence to keep the moose out, which is a potential problem. I lost all my broccoli to a moose last year.
Hopefully, we will get good yields this year, now that it can get plenty of water. I'm feeling hopeful.

- Posted from my iPhone

Wishing well

We have lived in our cabin for over two years. For all that time, we have had water issues. We did not have a well, and we certainly weren't hooked up to any city water. We have a 150 gallon water tank on the second floor of our cabin, and we have been getting water into it in two ways. For a while, we had been having a water truck come fill it up once a month. But mostly we have been filling up 7 gallon containers at the laundromat and hauling them. This is actually not an unusual thing in Alaska, but it is certainly a nuisance.

So, I was quite pleased to come home from work last night to see this:



This is a well truck, drilling a well on our property. They had to go down 120 feet, at a cost of about $5000, not counting the pump and the generator to run the pump, but we have good water. Our water is maybe a little hard, but not too bad, and it tastes good. Today, James has been working on installing the pump and everything else, so hopefully by tomorrow we will be able fill our tank without hauling water. Plus we will be able to water our garden without worrying about running out of water for the house. This is a really good thing.
This is the well:



and this is the pump:


The pump will go about 100 feet down the well. When we need to fill the tank, we will hook up a hose to the well, start the generator, and let it do it's job.

The pile of gravel you can see behind the well is what came out of the hole, which is a bonus. We will spread it on our driveway.

Pretty exciting stuff.

- Posted from my iPhone

I shouldn't have said anything...

About spring.




4" last night. And my little plants are already getting root bound in their little starting pots. Guess they will have longer to wait.

- Posted from my iPhone

Spring

I haven't written in quite a while, mostly because my life in the last several months has been almost exclusively work and sleep. This time of year in Alaska, it seems that people lose their minds. We have had a huge increase in reports of child abuse. Also, over the winter, I really didn't have much to write about. The garden was quiet, and covered in snow, and not much got done on the house itself. So the blog has been quiet.
But now the snow is melting, and the sun is shining. It got up to a sunny 45 degrees the other day, so I put on capri's and sandals. We have lots of tiny onions, leeks, and garlic growing in our south facing dining room window. James planted a few carrot tops, and they are getting leafy, and we are hoping that they will go to seed for next year.
We have lots of plans for this summer. We have about 5000 square feet of garden to get ready for planting as soon as the ground thaws. We want to put a fence around the garden, and an addition with bedrooms for the kids on the house. James is considering digging a well. And we need to build a chicken coop and rabbit hutch. It is probably too late to build it for chickens for this summer, but we can build it this summer for chicks next spring.
So it looks to be a busy summer. I'll keep you posted.


- Posted from my iPhone

Rare Gems

My favorite sock yarn comes from Blue Moon Fiber Arts (www.bluemoonfiberarts.com). At the end of last year, they sold for a short time what they call Rare Gems. It seems that it is leftover yarn that they overdye to make one of a kind skiens of yarn. They had them grouped into rough categories of earth, air, fire, and water. I ordered one of everything but earth, sight unseen. They are just beautiful. The picture is the skien of fire. It is quickly becoming a pair of socks, and I am totally loving it. You just can't go wrong with Blue Moon, even when you can't see what you are ordering.

- Posted from my iPhone

Not Long

Less than a year ago, we got a second dog, a malamute. There is a picture of him here:

http://lifeonthelastfrontier.blogspot.com/2009/03/monster.html

He was a dog we adopted from someone else without knowing him at all. He was a friendly dog, but he really didn't mesh well with us.
He was afraid of James, especially if he happened to have a tool or stick in his hand, making us speculate about what had happened to him before we got him.
We have almost 3 acres, plenty of room for a dog to run, but he would run too far. And he usually would not come when we called him.
With all of that, he was friendly, very pretty, and gentle with the kids. He seemed like he was bonding with us.
Yesterday morning before I left for work, I went to put him on his chain and he got away from me. I called him but he would not come to me, and took off running. He didn't come back right away, which is not unusual. By last night I was starting to worry, as it is well below zero.
James called me today to tell me the dog had been hit by a car. He was already dead when James found him.
The kids were sad, of course, but seem to be handling it well. We will all miss him. Goodbye, Strider.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Winter

Winter has arrived, a little late this year. This is the first year since we moved to Alaska that there was not snow on the ground by Halloween.

Snow finally came though, along with sub-zero temps. Night before last, it got down to -15. That's chilly, even for Alaska. For the last couple days, we have had the wood stove running nonstop.

Unfortunately, a couple days before it snowed, our kindling pile fell over, and it didn't get picked up. Now it is buried under 6 inches of snow. We know where it is though, and the snow hasn't melted any, so it hasn't gotten wet.

I am pretty much enjoying these first few winter days, and the kids have been having a blast in the snow. Steven came home crying today though because he sledded into a tree. He's back at it as I type.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

It's disgraceful...

Yesterday, President Obama gave a speech aimed at our school children. The text of it can be found here. It is completely non-partisan, not political in any way. He is simply encouraging students to do their best, and get an education.

Our President says to our kids,

"Now I’ve given a lot of speeches about education. And I’ve talked a lot about responsibility.
I’ve talked about your teachers’ responsibility for inspiring you, and pushing you to learn.
I’ve talked about your parents’ responsibility for making sure you stay on track, and get your homework done, and don’t spend every waking hour in front of the TV or with that Xbox.
I’ve talked a lot about your government’s responsibility for setting high standards, supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools that aren’t working where students aren’t getting the opportunities they deserve.
But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world – and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.
And that’s what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education. I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself."

I can't find anything in this that I don't want my children to hear. There is nothing partisan. Nothing subversive. I don't understand why people objected to this.

He also says:

"And even when you’re struggling, even when you’re discouraged, and you feel like other people have given up on you – don’t ever give up on yourself. Because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.
The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things got tough. It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.
It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other."

I can't find anything wrong with that either. As far as I can tell, there is no logical reason whatsoever for all the commotion about this speech.

And there has been a huge to-do about this speech. People talked about it on the news, threatened to keep their kids home from schools if the schools showed it, accused him of trying to start something akin to the Nazi Youth Corps. I think it would take more than a 20 minute speech to brainwash every kid in the country.

I found out last night that none of my kids saw his speech at school. I called the schools, and they report that their phones had been "ringing off the hook" with parents upset about their kids possibly watching the speech. One principal told me I was the only parent he received a call from supporting the kids watching the speech.

I am sorry, but I find this absolutely appalling. I don't give two figs whether Obama is Republican or Democrat, whether he has made mistakes in office (after all, no one is perfect) or any of that. He is THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. I think the fact that schools have opted to not show a speech made by the leader of our country to the children of our country is embarrassing, disrespectful, I don't know what.

I don't even know what to say, except that I am ashamed that we can behave this way.

socks

I really like knitting socks. For whatever reason, I decided the other day to sort out my sock yarn from my other yarn to see how many pairs of socks I can make. So, how many?

Well, in addition to the 4 or 5 pair that are on the needles at the moment, and all the socks I have already made, I could make 29 pairs of socks. That is a different pair of socks every day for a month. And what did I do during my break at work today?

Look on the internet at sock yarn.

my favorite? this stuff

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.