My dearest friend brought in the first snowball of the season today. (Note: “Today” meaning Oct. 18, when I started writing this but got sidetracked.)
He had no intention of tossing it at me. Wise man.
“I just thought it was funny that I could make a snowball,” he said.
DF was also glad that he’d (mostly) finished putting the garden to bed. All that’s left is to thin out a few rows of raspberries, a task I want to observe. If I have to do it for him some year, or even if I simply want to help, I won’t accidentally kill any healthy specimens.
And healthy specimens they were: We froze about 30 quarts, I made about 16 jars of jam and his grandchildren romped through the rows, eating as many as they could hold. Which is, of course, one reason we do this: We want those kids to know where food comes from, other than Safeway.
I’d every intention of writing this article in late summer as “A walk through the garden.” I even took pictures. Due to various Reasons the article never materialized.
When I looked at the tiny white flakes falling to cover grass and the beds, I decided to go ahead with the piece. I wanted to see those summer pictures again, both as a reminder of what was and what will come again next year.
Besides, I’ve had such fun reactions about previous garden articles – from Alaska junkies and garden fiends alike – that I decided to download those photos and share them.
And finally, I’m doing it.
In a pickle
I’d already written about the cucumbers that turned into porn stars seemingly overnight. It was the first time we’d tried growing English cukes – specifically, the Chelsea Prize variety from the wonderful seed provider Renee’s Garden – and were very pleased with the results. Some of the cucumbers weighed almost two pounds, and the flesh was so sweet and crisp it was almost like eating melons.
(Note: As a Renee’s Garden affiliate, I may receive a fee if readers buy seeds using my link.)
Unsliced, that heart-shaped tomato fascinated DF’s younger granddaughter. It fascinated her even more when I turned it upside-down and pointed out, “Now it looks like a butt.” (Pro tip: Where 4-year-olds are concerned, you can never use the word “butt” too often.)
Both his grandchildren love to eat fresh English cucumbers, so every visit included a trip to the greenhouse. At one point I couldn’t resist shoehorning in a public service announcement about the need to protect ourselves during the pandemic:
Besides: If you have googly eyes, why not use them? These were frugal googly eyes (froogly?) that I got for free from a member of my Buy Nothing group. The same batch of bulgy peepers helped me create the staring tomato in the illustration (another picture that made his grandkids laugh).
Another variety we tried was the Endeavor pickling cucumber, also from Renee’s Garden. We tended to let these grow a bit too big, because it was so fun to watch them gain weight.
Ultimately DF turned them into multiple jars of refrigerator pickles. We like the crispness so we decided not to seal them in a water bath. So far they’ve maintained their crunch.
Weird carrots
The most fun carrots to grow are rainbow carrots, which have done well for us in the past (even though the colors fade during canning). This year we didn’t have any rainbow varieties – just a partial envelope of a stubby variety whose name neither of us can recall, and another variety that we also can’t remember.
The stubby carrots made a stand but the others keeled over. Eventually DF went out looking for replacement seeds – and found out that a lot of non-gardeners were getting their hands in the dirt this year. He couldn’t find anything except a variety called Black Nebula, an heirloom variety billed as “one of the darkest carrots available from skin to core.”
Apparently it’s so dark that some people use it for dye. A look at DF’s hands shows why this is so:
As we chopped both the orange and purple carrots up for canning, we amused ourselves by thinking that maybe they’d stay purple even after being canned. We were right:
When we finish a jar of these carrots, we use the canning liquid for the boiling bag. That’s made for some interesting-looking broth.
A bunch of the Black Nebula carrots came out looking like octopi, or maybe the Martian invaders from “The War of the Worlds.” His granddaughters were spooked by the shapes, and I can’t blame them.
Crazy tomato people
He says some people are crazy cat people, but that we are crazy tomato people. I have no trouble admitting that, being a Jersey girl and all.
This year we grew only a few varieties, and went heavy on the heirlooms: Most of our greenhouse pots were Black Prince and Cherokee Purple. As were a couple of outside beds: It got so crowded in the greenhouse, foliage-wise, that we feared fungus would develop. Some tomato plants were put into the ground and we crossed our fingers that they’d survive, given that we weren’t using floating row covers.
They were surviving and thriving mid-September, when we picked all the fruit (ripe or not) and brought it indoors. The greenhouse tomatoes followed them a bit later, as it could still get fairly warm in there during the day. We ate the last ones around the first of December.
About those peppers in the photo: We have no idea what variety they are, as the seedlings were given to us. We saved the seed anyway. Although I’m not a huge pepper fan, they glowed like little suns in the greenhouse and in our kitchen. That particular photo was taken at about 7:40 a.m. on Oct 7 and you can see the window behind it is as dark as the inside of a brown cow. We’ll take all the sun, or all the sun substitutes, that we can get.
DF saves tomato seed, too, so we don’t have to buy it.
Fruits of the earth
Okay, technically rhubarb is a vegetable. I consider it a fruit. It’s hard to describe the flavor to those who’ve never eaten it: very tart, vaguely citrusy, delightful when turned into compote and stirred into homemade yogurt.
I canned probably 18 jars of the stuff, lightly sweetened. When a batch turned out too runny for my liking I strained it through a cloth-lined colander; we drank the sour juice as a tonic, in shot glasses, until I realized I could freeze it in ice-cube trays and add it to smoothies. (Used up the last of these around the first of December.)
This year DF tried his hand at making rhubarb fruit leather and was very pleased with the result. It will make a nice lightweight snack for when he’s skiing this winter. Our favorite part was when his younger granddaughter asked for a piece of “barbecue.” The word “rhubarb” was apparently too hard to remember. Close enough!
We tried a new (old) strawberry this year, an heirloom variety called Toklat. The starts came from an old-timer DF calls “the strawberry king,” because he knows everything there is to know about growing strawbs on the Last Frontier. In fact, he grew them commercially for a while.
We didn’t expect much from the Toklats, figuring that transplant shock would keep them from doing much. And we were correct, although the starts did bush-up very high (it’s a tall, tight variety vs. a sprawling one) and produced a few fruits starting in late summer.
The other strawberries were their usual showoffs:
That’s not a nickel, by the way. It’s a quarter.
A couple of small beds produced like gangbusters, which made us happy because we love to eat them fresh. We’d need to have a lot more berries for us to turn them into jam – and even then I probably wouldn’t, because they’re just so sweet and juicy. DF’s younger son, born and raised here, remarked that it was the first strawberry he’d ever eaten that was “red all the way through.”
As noted, we froze a ton of raspberries. That’s a good thing, because we eat a ton of raspberries. DF (and his granddaughters) like to eat them still-frozen and doused in sugar. I like putting them in my healthy smoothies, along with some of those rhubarb cubes (which I keep wanting to call “Rhubik’s Cubes.”)
About those jars of jam mentioned earlier: You don’t have to buy Sure-Jell or some other pectin product. Using a recipe from the National Center for Home Food Preservation, I cooked the berries to a certain temperature and they jelled fairly well. It’s a softer set than a pectin-made jam, but I actually prefer the product a little less rigid. With the last two batches I reduced the sugar by 1½ cups and was very pleased with the result; I’ll make them all that way next year, because the raspberry flavor is more intense.
Our pair of apple trees produced like gangbusters once more. The results:
- Eight bags’ worth of future pies, seasoned and frozen
- A few quart containers’ worth of dried apple rings (another lightweight and delicious snack that’s suitable for ski trips)
- Two quarts and nine pints of applesauce
- Multiple bottles of apple juice, which DF made using the apple cores
The red jars pictured with the applesauce hold pickled red cabbage (see below).
More outdoor veggies
Our dehydrator got a real workout this year, producing gallon bags of:
- Quinoa leaves (once you have quinoa you will always have quinoa because it volunteers like mad)
- Asian greens, whose provenance I do not know; we save seeds every year and strew them here and there (they’re also prolific volunteers)
- Purple Moon kale, a gorgeous plant and very tasty (it, too, was from Renee’s Garden)
- Celery leaves (the stalks got chopped and frozen)
- Purple cabbage leaves (the tough understory leaves, that is; these dry nicely and, crumbled, will soften up in soups and stews)
Shredded, that cabbage made a simple and amazingly good pickle. We found a bonehead-simple recipe online (vinegar, water, sugar, mixed pickling spices) and canned a bunch of pints and quarts. It’s a zippy side dish on a dark, cold winter day and also very good on hamburgers. We filled a half-pint jar for DF’s mom, who at almost 93 doesn’t have a huge appetite. She consumed the cabbage within a couple of days.
Right up until he started digging, DF had despaired of getting any potatoes this year. The plants didn’t show a single flower, which can be a harbinger of no-spud days to come. Not this time, though:
He was delighted to find any at all. Some of these russets were hearty indeed, weighing a pound or more (and yep, that’s another quarter):
One thing Alaska does produce well is the humble potato. We have almost no pests and no diseases, and the near-endless sun combined with mild summer temperatures encourage bumper crops – even if they don’t flower, apparently.
DF insists on buying Alaska seed potatoes, both to support the local economy and to have a consistently good product. My favorite local potato name: Idita-Red.
You win some, you lose some
Not everything did well. Unusually strong winds on several occasions snapped some of the pea stalks, resulting in a greatly reduced crop. We ate a few fresh, and froze only two quarts. That’s depressing, because the Super Sugar Snap peas (another Renee’s Garden variety) were marvelous. We will definitely grow these again. A couple of pea beds were taken up by a variety called Alaska, but local pride aside, I enjoyed the Super Sugar Snap peas more.
The edamame, whose cultivar is un-originally called “Edamame,” didn’t flourish, possibly because of that wind and an often-cool summer. But the pods it did produce were quite tasty. We had enough for one shared snack with DF’s granddaughters, who relish the stuff. As did I: They reminded me of fresh lima beans, another South Jersey passion. (The shells went into the boiling bag, as did the peapods.)
This year was also the first time DF was ever able to grow onions, a Renee’s Garden variety called Golden Sweet. They did well in that they survived, but they struggled. We ate them with gratitude, and dried their chopped stalks in the dehydrator for use on baked potatoes. This winter DF plans to research what makes a good onion soil, and try again next year.
The hard-necked garlic did splendidly, though. He bought the seed bulbs from the Alaska Botanical Garden gift shop last fall and planted them with prayers. We enjoyed watching them grow from little sprouts to tall, swan-neck-and-beaked plants that ultimately turned pretzel-shaped.
We diced up these “scapes” in stir-fries and other dishes. Some of the garlic cloves we roasted and ate with DF’s amazing rustic bread, but we saved most of it for next year’s garden.
The same friend who gave us the pepper seedlings also gave us a Japanese pumpkin (aka kombucha squash). This plant, and the other pumpkins we started from seed, did very badly indeed. The few fruits that emerged died before reaching the size of golf balls. Some years are just not pumpkin years. But we’ll try again.
As for the spinach and the red and green lettuces: They were enjoyed all summer and that was that. I respect spinach too much to freeze it.
Readers: How did your garden grow?
Related reading:
I love reading about your garden and life in Alaska. The stories of your resourcefulness remind me of reading “Little House on the Prairie” or “Little Women”, both favorites of mine. Using whatever you have, not wasting anything, being creative and never shying away from work, to name a few themes. Your writing always challenges me to be a better steward of what I have and inspires me to try a little harder (not in a stressful way, in a good way :). Thank you for taking the time to share your garden adventures with us!
Thanks for your kind wishes! And yeah, we’re striving for zero waste if we can swing it.
Wow! So many fruits and veggies. I had slw AZ ys thought ALaska was too cold to grow much. Do you prefer water bath or pressure canning?
We can grow a lot of cool-weather stuff but the hot crops — cukes, tomatoes, peppers — do best in a greenhouse.
In theory I prefer water-bath canning because it’s faster. Some of the things we preserve need pressure-canning, however.
We just did six quarts of turkey in broth from a 49-cents-per-pound turkey. It’s a somewhat greasy job but now we have the makings of 12 turkey pot pies, stroganoffs or stews. Nice to have shelf-stable protein on hand.
We are calling this pumpkin summer. I got 12 or 13 pumpkins. Only one rotted; I quickly scooped that mess up so that I did not have a yard full of pumpkins next year. The ones that crossed the fence belong to the neighbor and her three kids. I think they got 14 from the same patch that originated in my yard. I used either 2 or 4 seeds. They also had another 14 unexpectedly on their front lawn from carved pumpkins from last fall that they did not dispose of and left to rot on the edge of their front lawn.
Most of the tomato plants froze in the week after Mother’s Day frosts over three days. One plant did well. One potted plant did so so and then died. Red cherry tomatoes did well; I did not remember planting them, except for one volunteer plant found on the parking pad, that I transplanted. Maybe birds dropped the seeds, or they were contamination from some other seeds.
Yellow, small pear shaped ones that I planted from cheap seed did wonderful in 2 areas of the yard and in the pots. Plenty to eat all summer. Enough to make a few batches of spaghetti sauce along the way and some to add to soups. Not enough to can, but I do have enough left from the last two summers to last us through this winter.
Cucumbers did well until the end of the summer/beginning of fall when something got into the leaves and then rotted the vines; same thing as the watermelon leaf rot – no watermelons.
Basil did wonderful; I would plant that just for the smell. It does better in the ground rather than pots, and will often reseed for next year.
3 green pepper plants have provided so much this time around. Some I left on the vine until they turned red so that I did not need to pay $4 a lb. for them. Now have a freezer full of cut, chopped peppers mixed with the yellow and orange ones from the grocery store.
Pinto beans in a pot did not much, and too much work for the few I got. Got one red beet which was for the neighbor. Thought there were 4 but don’t know what happened to the other 3. Onions as usual did not grow. Only a handful of small potatoes. Nothing usable from the lettuce, but it did look pretty while growing. One extremely hot day and it was dead.
One broccoli plant in the front flower garden did OK. Then the cabbage worms got to it and stunted the growth. Then they got to my old rose bush out front.
Some mums from last year came up in the spring, but only one came back in the fall this time. Tulips came up. Some flowers from last Easter came back up. Two peach colored baby rose bushes bloomed; they were part of a four plant rescue. The other two were given to a friend. Each time the roses bloomed they were a different color.
It was a great crop considering we had the late frosts in May and the hottest July on record. Now need to decide what I will plant this spring and summer; might just continue to use existing seeds and purchase marigolds again.
Lettuce grows like gangbusters here because there’s near-nonstop light but very little heat. We eat the stuff for months. Then DF, being DF, cuts up the lettuce stalk and puts it into the boiling bag.
I wish we could grow watermelons.
I live in the Garden State, so we are known for our Jersey tomatoes. Well….it was so unbelievably hot this summer that the fruit would not set, and the tomatoes and peppers didn’t produce until mid-September. Fortunately, we got a late frost, so we did have a bumper crop until mid-October. I don’t can, but I blanch, peel and freeze those extra tomatoes and store them in a large chest freezer for winter soups and stews. The skins and stems are saved in a baggie in the freezer until I have enough, then I boil them down and strain to produce the most lovely tomato sauce one can imagine. Next, I dry the skins in my oven and make tomato salt to add to soups, stews eggs, or whatever might benefit from a little flavor boost. Anything left visits the compost bin.
DH and I love hot peppers, so we freeze some for the winter to add to dishes, and then pickle the rest. A heap of these on our “Sunday football nachos” is just the best!
My spring crop of snap peas, garden peas, and beets were champs.
Hardneck garlic (I grow Rocambole) was predictably lovely, and I chop and freeze the scapes to add to soups and stews all winter. I save some of the cloves and replant them every year.
My summer squash was a big, fat, fail, as those vine borers kept destroying my crops. I can usually keep up with cutting them out, and reburying the stems, but nope…..
Winter squash took over the world. I compost, so there were random plants popping up from last years’ crops, and I just went with it. I have a huge box of unexpected butternut, spaghetti, and honeynut squash that will last until spring.
I can’t even explain why I barely got any cucumbers this year. Beans and carrots were also scarce, and these veggies are usually the easiest things to grow.
My rosemary and thyme will usually survive a mild winter, as I live near the coast and they’re pretty hardy. The kale is still hanging on, too. I envy those with greenhouses, but our tiny yard would not accommodate one.
Mmmmm….tomato salt. This Jersey Girl approves.
Yellow, small pear shaped ones-I think these are a heirloom variety which usually grow very well. But this year we only got a few which were still delicious and a few from our regular red tomatoes. Usually we have an abundance of tomatoes and they sometimes last into the fall, depending on the weather. We live in the San Diego area in CA.
Your short stubby carrots could be Nantes. I remember growing them long ago and they did much better than the longer carrots. I think I remember the name because it’s French and I loved my high-school French.
I loved your article! It’s amazing to see what you can grow in Alaska.
This year we grew a few herbs (basil, thyme) in a small garden tract along side tomatoes. Our rosemary plant is huge and we frequently use as much as we can manager from our large bush. Our tomatoes didn’t do so well, but I did get enough for a few batches of tomato sauce. There was some type of fungus we think.
My husband’s sister just purchased a small farm this year, and we are enjoying the previous owner’s green thumb. So many jalapenos! They have several pecan trees so we’re shelling pecans like mad (with special machinery for said purpose), and giving away large bags of pecans to the local community, and in the local blessing boxes.
I am glad you were able to post this article. I know it’s been a rough year for you. Thank you for sharing.
Donna, what a lovely tour of your garden!
I have tried a bit of straw bale gardening in the past, but the lot we rent has changed hands and it remains to be seen what the new owners will allow. Either way, I’ll continue to support our local farm stands and the farmer’s market. Nothing like enjoying delicious produce while helping support the local economy!
Thanks so much for sharing. We had a bumper lemon cuke and tomato crop here in South Jersey. I loved the Purple Cherokees, but it produced less than the others.
You got a lot of good produce this year. You and DF must spend a lot of time in the garden. I don’t think I could eat the carrots with how they looked! I have never seen such a carrot in my entire life.
I just made a goulash last night and used my garden tomatoes and it was a wonderful reminder of the summer. It will be back for sure! We had over 200 tomatoes off 8 plants and continued eating fresh until November 4th now it is on to the frozen variety. Still a better taste than store bought!
Have A Nice Day ~
Once the carrots were scrubbed free of those weird little hairy roots and then chopped and canned, it was easy to forget how they’d looked. They were pretty good fresh, too.
Once the garden is set up, it doesn’t take too much work. He’s assiduous about watering but that means turning on a semi-permanent sprinkler to get the raspberries and apples and then hooking up a second sprinkler between the raised beds. The greenhouse needs a couple of gulps a day when it’s “hot” out, but that’s actually fun because we get to visit the plants and see the leaps and bounds they’ve made since the previous day.
I would love a fresh tomato right now. Oh, well, at least we had it to remember.
I love rhubarb. When people who have never had it ask me what it tasted like, I tell them “lemonade” since it is tart and sweet at the same time.
I remember my dad dogearing the seed catalogs this time of year (like we did the Sear’s catalog before Christmas.) Planning a garden is hope. My father’s vegetable garden is limited now due to his health and an oak tree which has blocked the sun. He is still planning for next year. He saved seeds from a few favorites and will plant them in February.
When I was writing about gardening a lot for the newspaper, I used to joke that in January and February the seed catalogs were gardeners’ porn.
We could all use a little hope, and the miracle of a tiny seed turning into a bowl of tomatoes is a swell example.
Thanks for being such a consistent reader and commenter.
I loved you garden story. All the better that I can see the pictures in Dec.
Our garden gave us endless (seems that way some days) zucchini and yellow squash, beautiful scallions, lots of lettuce and peppers. The tomatoes are not growing well here and getting rot and fungus…too much humidity?
Show some pics of the greenhouse too.
Thanks for the taste of summer.