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Endless summer days

Harvest Week 3

Sun Flowers with Rainbow Chard behind..



Jamy.



Peas



Onions



The bulk of our crops here on the farm are started in the greenhouse. Since these "starts" are then transplanted into the field, we are able to use this green thin plastic row-cover we call R.I.T. The beds are first amended, then the row cover is put in place. We are able to use less water and weeding time is much less, since the cover holds in heat and moisture, and blocks most weeks. The chick weed and common reed grass do find their way out of most of the openings. The weeding though, is much more manageable.



Fennel



Rainbow Chard




A lot of our field is directly seeded in weekly and biweekly schedules. Some of the things we are seeding now are Arugula (above), Greens mix, Radishes, Turnips, Spinach, Tat Soi, Mustard greens, Cilantro, and others. These with the exception some, like Spinach and Cilantro, the beds are then covered with a pillowy row cover to protect from pests.



Beets, a major winter crop for Alaskans, will store in root cellers long past the ground has frozen still for the winter, giving a wonderful red treat for the fresh food deprived winters.

Beet seedlings, are also directly seeded in the field. These are root crops and will take the entire growing season up here to develop their root, we know as the beet. Since, like the Carrots, they are directly seeded, we get to spend a lot of time weeding the rows.


Chick Weed Invasion.
You can clearly see the "L" that has not been weeded, compared to what has. Chick weed up here in this Alaskan sun seems to grow inches a day.




Me - The photographer seldom seen - Walking through the forest over to the carrot field.




These baby Carrots are directly seeded into the ground. Anyone who has grown carrots understands the problem of weeding. The weeds grow faster than carrot sprouts, so timing is everything. Palmer Alaska has a desert climate, so first we had to irrigate the field to get the weed seeds to germinate. After letting them grow a few weeks, we then flamed the field and than seeded. Normally you would then wait until a few days before the carrots break ground and flame once more. This way you wont kill off the carrots, but you will get a last minute weeding done. Its amazing how many chickweed sprouts can appear in just a week.

Unfortunitly we wernt able to get that last flaming in after the seeds were sown this year, and weeds have been abound. Nevertheless, we are keeping them down. Saving lives, one tiny carrot at a time.


Carrot Seedlings



Seedlings next to the one inch wide Drip Irrigation Tape.



Lindsay weeding at the carrot field.





Potatoes- staple crop - more on these to come...

Summer!

Life on the farm has been ever changing. We have gone from ice to thaw, to mud to spring, and now summer, we are seeing new things everyday. Things have been happening fast, the entire spring season seemed to only last a few weeks. We have been experiencing determined mosquitoes, the birth of ducks, and even the passing on of a goat.

We just finished our first week of the CSA (community supported agriculture) subscription season. From what everyone has been saying, this is when everything at the farm becomes full speed. We harvest, pack, and drop off at pickup locations, weekly produce subscriptions for 150 families all over Alaska. Mostly they are in the mat-su valley, and Anchorage, some are flown out of the Palmer airport by bush plane.

This week also marks the start of the Arctic Organics’ own market. Every Friday at 5, with most of us still in the field harvesting for the Saturday market in Anchorage, River and Sarah open up the garage for people from the community to get the first pickings of the weekly harvest – talk about farm fresh! This week was the first and market. The first harvest was fairly small and we did not want to sell out of produce before the Saturday Anchorage market, so it wasn’t advertised, except to regular friends of the farm. Fabian made and sold some of his amazing cookies for 75 cents a cookie, an amazing bargain for these cookies! The garden is catching up quickly and this week we should have enough to fill both markets. People say the Friday markets here on the farm become a bit of a frenzy, I’ll have to wait and see.















The field is fully planted and it is starting to take shape. We just had our first spinach harvest, some leaves larger than my hand, impressive. Also our 2nd week of Pac Choi harvest, along with other leafy greens like, Mizuna –a mustard green, Aruglua, and mixed greens. The Garlic is reaching well a foot and a half tall. All the squash are flowering. Tomatoes have been producing, and some pepper plants have miniature versions of their final crop. We have just planted the perennial herb garden and should find it filling out over the next few weeks. Today a seeding of 130 trays was done; most of them are the next round of salad greens. They will sprout in a few days and be in the greenhouse for about a month before being transplanted into the field.

We have a man made pond that was dug out a few years ago. It holds all the water for irrigating the field. We ran it dry, on a Friday. It took 2 of us the better part of a whole after noon of running 3-inch fire hose from the farm down to a creek, about 1000’ away. The Beans have the water rights to the creek, and as long as it keeps flowing through a culvert just downstream from where we pump we can take all we need. The pump ran all weekend, with the hose pushing water through it with enough pressure to make it solid enough to stand on without giving an inch. By the end of Sunday it was full again. A lot of water! We will have to fill it at least 2 more times this summer.

The weather has been full of personality. It has been a very cool, cloudy, spring, and the garden is a few weeks behind a normal year. The past few weeks have been full of clouds, but when the sun breaks, it turns days into deep hot endless sun. It is often in the 50’s in the shade and just feet later, approaching 80 degrees in the sun. After full day of afternoon sun the shade feels incredible.

My girlfriend Jamy has been here for a few weeks now. We are sharing the “Beach Bungalow” in the corner of the field. We call this corner of the garden the beach. A lot of the rows that are directly seeded in the field are covered with row cover, a thin white fabric to protect the plants from insects. The fabric has several feet of extra width so as things grow; the plants just loft the cover up with them. When the wind is blowing it looks like waves breaking on a dirt sea. It’s a perfect place to be, tucked away in the far corner of the farm. It has been great having her here. We have been busy making the place our own, and cooking a lot of delicious meals.

We mostly hear birds. They sing day and night this time of year, or I should say all day, being things don’t get dark. They have been on of the small things that can bother a good nights rest. We are used to hearing the birds singing in the morning. Often I will hear them at say – 2 or 3 in the morning, and my brain things it’s morning. All in all sleeping has not been a problem. I am usually getting my 8 hours just fine. The sun takes a lot out of you when it shines for 14-15-16 hours a day. When it’s not the sun, usually the daily farm work has been good medicine for sleeplessness.



Fresh Pasta for the potluck



Potluck Frenzy

some native friends

farm life

The Moose are finding a lot of fresh greens to eat down in the woods that surround the farm. This one, a bull has just the beginnings of this years antlers. They drop, and grow new ones each year.



I have found the tractor path through the woods to the carrot field to be very handsome this time of year, with lots of fresh ferns, horsetails and grasses.



Oak Ferns form blankets of green, covering the once barren forest floor around the fields. The ferns can be crushed and used as a mosquito repellent and it is also said to sooth mosquito bites. I have yet to try either.


Cow Moose with her twin babys, outside the carrot field.



Campsite up the base of Matanuska.



Potlucks on the front porch of the farmhouse never disappoint.





It has been a wonderful time to see the fresh life of this growing season groing up through the dried up remains of last year.



Carrot Field, 1/2 planted, the other will be tilled and seeded with a annual rye. This is done to get nutrients like nitrogen back into the soil. They will be cut and tilled into the field several times throughout the summer.


Daveen reading outside her cabin.



Midnight walks, the moose and I.



Pioneer Peak at "night."

June Brings Life.

One of the Moose to make its way into the field did little damage except this spinach stomping.



Garlic growing up nicely. This was the only thing that was planted last fall. They overwinter in the ground as bulbs and were the first thing in garden to break ground after the thaw.



Baby Leeks



All of the squash are planted in rows in the field and then covered with hoops with a plastic cover, mini greenhouses. They like it hot.



We currently have 8-10, 100ish foot beds planted with squashes.




Potato Field, the right 1/2 was just seeded with a cover crop, after i took this photo.


Pac Choi - Growing up.



2 weeks later, the Pac Choi is ready to harvest.



Beans on the left, or maybe they are peas, either way, they will be fun to watch.




This is a photo of a 3/4 inch header pipe. These run along the north ends of all the beds, and feed all the drip tape. They are a common sight for me, i repair then often,

I have spent the better part of the past 6 weeks working on getting all the irrigation together. Each row has 2, drip tape lines the run the entire length of the beds. I think of this farm as small, but when i add up all the feet of drip tape it makes it seem a little bit bigger, we have around 115 rows in the main garden, with most rows being about 300 feet. With 2 lines for every row, plus 16 rows of carrots in the carrot field, I will have moved singlehandedly over 2 miles of drip tape.

This is the edge of the work, we have been marching east with the bed prep. This shows untreated, last years bed, and then the freshly tilled and amended bed on the right




Saturday, River Bean, was teaching his 13 year old son how to flame the beds. We do this in order to kill off any weeds. We first drip irrigate the fields for a couple weeks in order to germinate the weed seeds, it is very dry here this time of year. After the weeds come up we have a tractor mountain propaine flaming device that incinerates everything. Then the rows are seeded, in this case with carrots, and the drip tapes are placed back on. This way the carrots will germanate before any new weeds which lets us weed, naturally without the use of any chemicals.
The Right Way.

Poc Choi - the first plants in the garden this year.

Daveen holding the babies, the first plants in the garden this year.



There as been ongoing garden cleanup getting the beds ready.



Freshly layed I.R.T, a thin green plastic that well help keep pests out and sunlight and moister in. This is one of the ways the farm controls pests without using any chemicals, pesticides or herbicides. We are Toxin Free!




Once the plants are planted through holes in the IRT, we put up old pieces of moose fencing and then put clear plastic on top, creating small greenhouses.

Greenhouse Update 2

Tomatos

Lots of Basil

Fennel

Hanging flower baskets have been selling really well at the anchorage farmers market. I think everyone is eager to get some growing things in their houses again.

The Fields have been broken

We have started to move plants outside to harden off. Most will spend most of the week getting used to the colder air and strong UV light.


I have been pulling up all the T-tape the drip irrigation in the field. It all has to be pulled back so we can fertilize, add compost and then till the rows.

Patrick helping the compost along.

River Bean, tilling the first row of the season!

melting problems.

"Warm temperatures" (we're talking 50's) have helped everything melt fast.

16 inches of snow melted in just a few days, thanks to the sun shining now until around 10pm.

We needed to get the truck back into a field in the middle of the woods where we grow Carrots and Potatoes. The mud was looking like trouble.

Soon we were stuck, high-center stuck. So what to do, go get the tractor.

After quite a battle, we finally pushed 'er loose.

The typical Spruce.

Melting Day

I went for a hike up into the mountains behind the farm.

Greenhouse update 1

I am going to try to post a weekly greenhouse update. I hope it to be a chance to see everything grow, week to week. This is my second week on the farm now, and changes are already apparent. We spend most Mondays seeding new trays and by weeks end most have already given their first sprouts of life.

Tomato fruit from the tomato plants in the top of the greenhouse.

Hanging flower baskets will be one of the first things to be taken to the Anchorage Farmers market which starts this first Saturday in May.

Basil has been transplanted directly into the beds on the ground of the greenhouse.

Rows of Basil with some onions in between.

Up a latter brings you to gutters filled with lettuces.

This is our lovely shower, with these voyeur tomato plants.

The gangway at the top of the greenhouse.

Fresh Sprouts

Then there was snow.

16 inches of fresh heavy snow. Saturday morning. As I write this, things are dripping, and dropping, and melting quick, we hope.

The bunkhouse as the snow started Friday morning.

The interns and I spend the entire day mixing fertilizer. The snow started to fall soon after starting work which made things complicated as it cannot get wet. We mixed fishmeal, fish bone, green sand, and k-mag. They all come in 50 pound bags. We loaded them into a cement mixer and then into bags. The final bags weigh well over 100 pounds. We then moved the finished bags over to a storage area about 100 feet away. We made 70 batches. My rough estimate puts our total day at over 7000 pounds of fertilizer. It was very dusty, and VERY smelly. Fishmeal, and bone smell gets into everything. Dust masks were a must. We worked from 8am until 730pm. We decided to push through it all day so we didn't have to get fishy again, for the rest of the season! After we got done we headed into town to get showers and do laundry. (on the farm we have a solar shower in the greenhouse, not quite enough to get the fish smell off of the skin) When all was said and done, we were happy farmers.

The field - midmorning.

River aided us in getting off the farm to get into town to get showers by plowing the drive out of the farm with the tractor.

A few up the Matanuska River in the snow.

Firewood

Today was firewood day. The interns and River went up the sheep mountain to cut down some standing dead trees. They are very dry and are already being put to use in the wood stoves in the greenhouses to keep them warm at night. We also bucked up some large birch that were just cut down to make way for a new bike path! They were green and VERY heavy.

River and Allen hacking away at the downed birch.

Pile of dry spruce rounds, before i split them. Bees in the background.