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Harvest Season

We spent Sunday morning foraging. Niki, Mo, Thing 1 & I. City Hall has some crab apple trees and an abundance of rosehips that we harvested for jelly making.

Loaded little crab apple tree.

While there we enjoyed each other’s company and solved all the world’s problems. We also enjoyed the flower beds and various different trees planted around the premises.

Dusty Miller in the Soldotna City Hall flower garden.

We found a large patch of wild roses and harvested a nice amount of rosehips. Thing 1 had a good time practicing plant identification for her Botany class.

We harvested enough crab apples for jelly, cider, sauce… You get the idea

Cut leaf weeping Birch.

Also enough to share with others. Part of the joy of wildcrafting is sharing with others.

Some ornamental foundation shrubs.
More flowers at City Hall.
Another bed relatively untouched by the frost.

We also had to harvest our own plants. Lil Bit planted several herbs for her Botany class last year. They did very well and we’ve enjoyed fresh basil, cilantro and parsley this summer.

Lil Bit’s parsley she grew from seed. Harvested to use in our matzo ball soup for Sukkot.

Alas, Old Man Winter is knocking at the door. Time to harvest as much as we can. Hoping for another cranberry picking soon. And a moose.

And afterwards we went for coffee.

#aklife #foraging #wildcrafting #bounty

We’ve Been Busy.

Where has the time gone? Between working snow removal (Dean) and running the sawmill for a month we’ve kept busy. A month ago we were riding snow machines and wearing the warm clothes. Now we’re digging drainage ditches, jumping on the trampoline and wearing summer attire.

Training the new guy.
Feels like summer.

Also last month I started experimenting with oyster mushroom cultivation and started my first tote of substrate. I had started with a grow kit from Home Depot. I grew one out last year and we enjoyed the ‘shrooms so much I thought why not grow more?

Growing kit.

I pulled a bit of the grow block off and used it to innoculate some straw and coffee grounds. I let it sit and grow mycelium until today when I checked it and I had pinning!! Woo hoo!

Lil baby oyster mushrooms!!

Can’t wait to eat them in about 10 days or so.

The kiddos set up the trampoline today, with some difficulty. But it’s up and ready for high energy kids. While we were out a large flock of sandhill cranes flew over chattering steadily. We’ve seen several geese flocks over the last few days but these were the first cranes. Summer is here.

Teamwork makes the dream work.

Dean has been in the boat every available moment. He’s so excited about the prospect of halibut fishing at will. To be honest, so am I. But I still do have a house that needs finishing…

Future mushroom bed.

The kids helped me prep our wine cap mushroom bed today. We raked it out, layered cardboard first, then straw. We added our spawn and then top coated it with sawdust. Over that I put some wood mulch to keep the sawdust in place.

Straw layer with spawn scattered about.

Next on the list is an outdoor oyster mushroom bed. Maybe next weekend? And I’ve got to get another tote started indoors. I’ve got pearl and phoenix varieties for indoors.

The Oldest has plans for gardening this year, so a few more raised beds and updating our current hillside beds.

Back to work on the rec cabin build tomorrow. Another day another dollar.

Enclosing the gables.

#aklife

#aksummer

#winterisover

Today’s Haul

Things are greening up quickly. Picked a few rhubarb stalks and some chives.

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Then the kids and I headed out to hunt some morels. They are quite abundant this year after last year’s fires.

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We picked a nice batch. I cleaned enough to whip up some creamy morel pasta. Oh yeah, it is good.

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Might have to have seconds… Is your mouth watering?

Maintenance

The Garden

The Garden

We went to the cabin on Saturday (7/20) to start preparing for Dad’s memorial and the family’s visit. Scott had been out and mowed around the cabin, down the drive, making it easier for us to get in. Dean spent the next couple of days mowing and weed-eating the rest of the yard, around the back of the garden/greenhouse and behind the cabin. I cut down the overgrown comfrey that was so large it branched out over the walk-way to the cabin. It’s in bloom now and the bees were really working! You could hear a constant buzz of them working the comfrey and chives. The kids started weeding in the garden. We got the new plants and the strawberries weeded. The seeds that the kids had planted last month were producing some really nice radishes. We harvested quite a few of those and ate them! We also had some more rhubarb out of the garden.

I spent a lot of time looking around at what needs to be done. Before winter sets in, we need to wire brush and sand the exterior logs and put a sealer on them. Some of the logs are starting to dry out too much and if they aren’t sealed soon, we could be looking at dry rot and that would be a disaster.

Since I wasn’t able to live out there this summer, and do the work that I had hoped to do, all of those chores are still in need of being done: finishing the outhouse, tearing the old porch off and building a deck on the front of the cabin. Caring for the garden, harvesting and putting up the produce, making rhubarb wine. Hopefully the weekends will stay open for me to be able to go out more frequently and get some of that work done. Dad’s friends are so good to plant/weed/work the garden and help keep the place looking “lived in”, I can’t express my gratitude sufficiently. Good people, that’s what they are. It is a lot of work.