Alaska

Garden 2025: The ag grant year.

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The peas are still flowering and (slowly) filling up pods, the tomatoes are still reddening in the greenhouse, and, weirdly, our strawberry plants have a ton of new blossoms and a few ripe specimens. Yet I consider summer officially gone, because I’ve finished up the state agriculture grant.

I had until Sept. 30 to create a report on:

  • How much I spent ($1,950.53 out of a possible $2,250)
  • How much food we grew (372 pounds)
  • How much food we preserved (258 pounds)
  • How many direct beneficiaries of the garden (DF and me)
  • How many indirect ones (119 – relatives, friends, residents at a family shelter, and all the people to whom we gave seeds and plant starts)

The ag grant people pleaded with us to turn in reports before Sept. 30 if possible. I sent mine (along with a photo of the garden and a list of receipts) on Sept. 15. It took a lot longer than I thought it would to whip this report into shape, but now I can finally relax.

About time, too. It was a busier spring/summer than usual, because advertising and coordinating pickup of all those seeds and starts took way more time than I’d imagined. Of course, that was because most of the people who stopped by also got a garden tour. Yes, I like to show off our little paradise. Sue me.

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The rhubarb tattoo.

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It’s been all rhubarb, all the time lately. That’s not the only reason I haven’t been posting, but gardening in general and rhubarb in particular are a big part of my recent radio silence.

I’ve boiled a ton of the stuff into compote, which is a several-step process:

  • Chop and simmer in a small amount of water, then roughly smash with a potato masher.
  • Drain the slurry through a cloth-lined colander.
  • Puree the result in a blender to remove any stringiness.
  • Can it in pint jars (eight of them so far).

The liquid that drained out was used in smoothies. DF also mixed it with rhubarb simple syrup (more on that in a minute) and ginger ale.

I diced and froze 27 cups of rhubarb, which will become nine cakes in the year to come. That is a lot of dicing, and resulted in the rhubarb tattoo mentioned above:

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Easter tomatoes.

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Despite what the president says, egg prices have not dropped by 87 percent. They’re still so costly that some folks suggested dyeing potatoes instead of eggs for Easter.

We didn’t dye anything this year, but on Easter we did enjoy a couple of brightly colored roundish objects: fresh tomatoes.

They were from plants that DF wintered over in the basement and brought upstairs about six weeks ago. Life wasn’t easy for them with temps at 40-something degrees, even with six to eight hours of artificial light per day. Yet they somehow put out flowers and started forming teeny-tiny fruits, along with a couple of volunteer marigolds that have us mystified.

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Giveaway: Alaskan artisan chocolate.

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Why should kids have all the fun at Easter? To even the playing field, I’m giving away some more of those lovely Chugach Chocolates.

The company is a “bean-to-bar” chocolatier in our neighborhood, specializing in dark chocolate. It features some interesting flavor combos, including but not limited to Alaskan kelp and cayenne and Alaskan birch syrup toffee. One of their current limited editions is dark chocolate with spruce tip/lingonberry marshmallows. Not making that up!

You can see why their slogan is “traditionally made for the modern mouth” – if someone had offered me kelp chocolate 50 years ago, I would have run screaming from the room. But it’s pretty tasty stuff.

Here’s a look at what’s up for grabs – winner’s choice:

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Doesn’t feel like Christmas.

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We’re in the midst of one of those awful winter thaws, with temperatures in the low to mid-30s and even some rain at times. Blech. I hate these things because of how slippery the roads and sidewalks get. Thank goodness for my Icebugs; haven’t had a fall yet despite surfaces that my late dad inelegantly described as “slicker than snot on a doorknob.” (As an Amazon affiliate, I may receive a small fee for items bought through my links.)

Lousy weather + seasonal affective disorder are probably two of the reasons why I haven’t set up my small tree. It just doesn’t feel like Christmas this year. Yet gray skies aren’t totally to blame: Post-election anxiety has been kicking my butt.

How in the world did this guy get elected again? Every time he opens his mouth, I flinch and wonder what fresh hell will emerge. Don’t get me started on the folks who work with him.

I may lose readers for making these statements. But it’s how I feel about this con man.

Back to Christmas, though: DF has been practicing holiday carols on the piano, to prepare for an extended family get-together. Hearing songs like “The First Noel,” “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” and “Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella” do make me smile.

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I’m officially old.

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Today is my birthday and I am officially old. Not because of my new age, but because of how I spent my day. Some highlights:

  • Ran errands
  • Dozed briefly in a comfortable chair
  • Paid a bill
  • Hand-washed my support hose
  • Made a plan to go to bed early (we’ll see how that pans out)

Relax: My day sounds a lot worse than it actually was. In fact, it’s been pretty great. For starters, there’s the obvious reason: I’m still on the right side of the grass.

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Harvest home.

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For the past few weeks DF has been practicing the music for an ecumenical service that will take place near Thanksgiving. The song that sticks in my head most is “Harvest Home,” an 1844 hymn*. This quatrain in particular applies:

Come, ye thankful people, come

Raise the song of harvest home;

All is safely gathered in,

Ere the winter storms begin.

No storms yet, but it was 29 degrees when I got up the other day. We are thankful that all is safely gathered in.

It was a somewhat dismal summer for the second year in a row, and gardens were more than a month late in ripening. Some things didn’t produce well, or at all; for example, a local tree expert posted on Facebook that he didn’t get a single cherry from his five trees.

We didn’t get that many cherries ourselves: 28, to be exact. Then again, this is only the second year the tree’s been in the ground. Popular fruit-tree wisdom holds that “the first year it sleeps, the second year it creeps and the third year it leaps.” However, I can’t hope for too much in 2025 because a moose got into the yard last week. It harried all three of our fruit trees before DF could scare it off the property by banging a hammer on a shovel.

This isn’t the moose that got into the yard, but I bet he knows the one who did.

Fortunately, we’d already harvested the apples the previous week. Moose can be real jerks.

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Strawberries are in season.

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Let me be clear: In no universe would I mix tomato paste with strawberries. I’m simply using the can to illustrate the size of some of this year’s fruit. Aren’t they lovely?

How I wish blogs could share aromas, because our house smells marvelous right now. We are eating all the strawberries we want – and we want a lot of them – yet still have leftovers. The question was, “How can we preserve them without freezing it or turning it into jam?” The answer was, “Dehydrate them.”

Thus far we’ve dried a quart of these little beauties (see below), which means we sliced and dried about four quarts. That sounds onerous, but it really wasn’t. DF and I sit across from each other at the table, slicing and chatting, until the dehydrator is full or until we run out of berries, whichever comes first. Some people sit around watching TV or playing board games. We slice berries.

Why do this? Because we want every berry to have had a reason to ripen. I have never tasted berries like these before, either in New Jersey (where we picked them ourselves) or from Seattle farm markets. They’re as sweet and tender as the memory of first love and, as DF’s younger son marveled, “They’re red all the way through!”

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Frühjahrsmüdigkeit.

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The German language has the best words. Kummerspeck (“grief bacon,” or the weight you put on from eating your feelings). Sehnsucht, or the deep and emotional craving for something far away or unattainable. And frühjahrsmüdigkeit, which I’ve been experiencing lately.

Frühjahrsmüdigkeit is translated as “spring lethargy,” the fatigue that some people feel in the springtime, particularly after a hard winter.

We’ve had two particularly crummy winters in a row, and a lousy spring/summer in 2023. For the most part, spring 2024 has been cold and cloudy.

Sure, we’ve had a few spectacularly sunny days – the kind that make me think, “I can live here despite the winters.” Mostly it’s been…frühjahrsmüdigkeit.

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The winter tomato.

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DF tried to winter over a trio of tomato plants last fall. He pruned them back severely and put them under a grow light in the basement, figuring the cool temperature would keep them from sprouting too much new growth.

The no-grow tactic worked a little too well. by winter solstice, one of the plants looked extremely sad and the others were bordering on despair. So he brought the best-looking one upstairs, along with the light, and set it next to our kitchen table.

The plan was to coax it back to life, not to create food just yet. That way he’d have a nice big plant to put in the greenhouse in late May to encourage the seedlings he’ll be starting this week. Meanwhile, the green encouraged us during this particularly snowy and cold winter.

When the plant showed signs of survival, we rejoiced; when it started putting out flowers, we laughed and pinched them off. No chance we were going to pollinate those blooms. The focus was surviving, not thriving. And survive it has, putting out loads of new growth and so many blossoms that we gave up pinching. It could bloom all it wanted, but we weren’t going to hand-pollinate any of them.

A week or so ago during dinner, DF did a double-take. “There’s a tomato,” he said.

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