August Rewind

8/31/2021

It's peak summer up in Hatcher Pass

As expected, August was full of projects and play!

At the beginning of the month, our daughter and I went up to Hatcher Pass for an afternoon to take in the views and hunt for some early blueberries. We were a bit early for the berries and came home essentially empty handed. The views, however, were splendid!
With August has come near daily rains, but the sun still shines through at least a few times each week. The air temperature has dropped noticeably and the breezes now feel as though they've just come from some distant ice field. It’s refreshing but still chilly. We made an agreement not to burn the wood stove until September. But, now that August is through and overnight temperatures are regularly in the low 40 degrees, we could be giving in and firing it up any day now.

The blueberries have many places to hide!

Wild daisies decorate the landscape on the farmstead.

Speaking of the wood stove, another thing we have been chipping away at is cutting and splitting our firewood supply. We have enough left over from last season to probably get us through December, so we'll need a bit more put away before the snow starts falling. As we get more established here, closing out our third summer, we are finding that for things like firewood we have a little less to do and more time to do it. Things have become more comfortable and enjoyable as timelines become more flexible. Suddenly, felling trees, pulling logs, and swinging an axe for a couple hours here and there is more like an opportunity for hiking, weight lifting, and aerobics than a list of chores. Do we sound Alaskan yet? Haha!

In the middle of the month our broiler chickens reached 8 weeks old, and that meant they were ready for the freezer. Our first chicken harvest was quite a memorable experience and an overall success! We started by harvesting just five of the birds on their 8 week birthday. This let us figure out the process and get a handle on what we were doing. Then, the next day we did the 21 remaining birds. We figure it took us about 30-45 minutes per bird to process them entirely - plucking the feathers being the longest, most tedious part of all! —We are seriously considering investing in a mechanical plucking machine for next season. Speeding up that one step could easily cut the entire processing time down to 5-10 minutes! The egg laying chickens in the coop next to the broilers were a little frazzled by the sudden disappearance of their 26 neighbors. They seem to have gotten over it though, something about chickens having a short memory, I can't remember.

An 8 week old Cornish Cross

Fresh chicken, pan-fried for dinner

Another project Pete has been working on is our greenhouse. Of course, this isn't an ordinary greenhouse. This greenhouse has a super insulated perimeter foundation and is kind of an experiment Pete is doing before we build a much bigger version later down the road. Since we are making it much more complicated than a typical greenhouse, it is also taking much longer to build. However, we are hopeful we will have it closed in and usable before the snow falls - check back next month to see if we make it!

We would love to have a late fall harvest of kale and other cold-hardy vegetables from our greenhouse, as our outdoor garden is coming to it's fanale - the beet, carrot, onion, and pea harvest! We won't have any large quantities of any one thing, since we didn't want to over-commit ourselves by planting too much seed. However, we did learn quite a lot and are ready to dive in next season when we will try to grow our largest garden yet; a large surplus which we will sell at our farm stand!

Our first nasturtium flower. These edible flowers will blossom much quicker in our greenhouse next year.

On the last weekend of the month we took an afternoon to show our daughter the biggest spectacle this side of the Wrangell Mountains: the Alaska State Fair! It was quite a busy place on a perfect afternoon and there were so many sights and sounds for a toddler to take in. Her favorite being the animals - she was delighted to see sheep, cows, and horses like from the pictures in her books. She also tried lots of neat foods and saw many pretty flowers. By the end she had fallen asleep in her stroller, letting us know it was time to go home.