T-minus 19 days till April 15th. 19 days till our honeybees arrive. 22 days till April 18th, the day we get about 20 to 25 trees removed from the front of our property by BlackHawk Works, a local company that has expertise in taking down trees in tricky locations. The tree removal will help us with our future potential project; solar panels which will allow our house to be a
Between the rose hips we have in our freezer from a year past, the wild blueberries that were just gifted to us from a wonderful friend, and a bag of rhubarb that was gifted to us from yet another wonderful friend, we have a lot of fruit and vegetables to use up, especially before that birch sap goes into the freezer next month! For more on that click on my
Cornus canadensis.Cornus canadensis is a slow-growing herbaceous subshrub growing 10–20 cm tall, generally forming a carpet-like mat. The above-ground shoots rise from slender creeping rhizomes that are placed 2.5–7.5 cm deep in the soil, and form clonal colonies under trees. The vertically produced above-ground stems are slender and unbranched. The leaves are oppositely arranged on the stem, but are clustered with six leaves that often seem to be in a whorl because the internodes are compressed. The leafy
We have been blessed on our property with a large amount of silver birch trees so this Spring time we intend to use some of them.Some will be used in making birch beer for my husband, which I’ll write about later, and some will go into making birch syrup. In the coming years I might make birch wine as well for use in cooking but for now I’ve got more
I’ve often told newer gardeners that the best thing to do is watch your yard, really watch it for a full season to get a good idea of where the sun is at any given time of the day, where the water collects and lays stagnant most often, which areas are drier, and so on. So, following my own advice, last year that is precisely what I did. Now
A long time ago, when we lived in Maryland actually, in military housing, I badly wanted honeybees. I felt like it would be the perfect addition to my backyard garden. And of course, that was a no go since military housing said “No you may not have domesticated honey bees in your backyard“. So I shelved that idea until we had a house with some land. Land that we could
I’ve been a gardener since in my early twenties. Yes, I was a novice but we have to start somewhere right? I started by killing mint and basil. I did try to grow them, but they constantly died. A couple of years later, I figured out what I was doing wrong, what the heck was the small spidery pest that was attacking (and killing) my bonsai, why was my mint
We’ve had a pretty earth shattering winter. The past two years, since moving back here to Fairbanks, Alaska our goal has been to expand our garden. To finally have some land to do with what we would like. Two years ago we looked at a fixer upper, but alas, it was not meant to be. After much struggling to make it work, to purchase that house, it fell through. We
Its officially week three into our safe planting time and we’re now harvesting baby kale greens, rapini (or also called Broccoli Rabe which is pronounced raab), some lettuce, arugula, micro greens and oddly enough, mustard greens which were from last year. They obviously reseeded themselves. As of today I harvested our first two radishes, and wow, surprise, no sign of root maggots! Little victories! Our tomatoes, bell peppers, cucumbers
So now here we are, in the middle of our second spring back in Fairbanks, Alaska after a reasonably mild winter. In late March we started our seeds, mostly tomatoes, a mixture of beans and a few herbs. This, I knew going into it, would be challenging since we would be going on a weeklong vacation in May. Trying to keep little seedlings going for a week without any attention
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