Here’s the garden after a few weeks. We still have some more weeding to do but it’s coming along nicely.

Summer is here and the bears are out. Very curious animals. This one looks like a circus bear walking on two legs and and seems very entertained with our decorative windmill. Might be cool to look at but they can be very dangerous and destructive. Hopefully he won’t come back.

It’s nice outside. The temps are in the 70’s. But it’s hard to get outdoors without getting eaten alive by mosquitos. I’d like to wear shorts but instead I have to wear a bug suit!

1:30am and this is how light it is outside still. It’s hard to get to bed at a reasonable hour. It doesn’t get real dark at night in the Alaska summertime!

The garden is doing well so far although a bear ran through it and knocked over the fence and destroyed a few bean plants and stepped on a few other plants as he ran through. We replanted some plants and added a few new ones. All in all pretty happy with how everything is doing.

Our neighborhood eagles are nesting still. They must be sitting on eggs. I wonder when they will hatch. Must be soon.

Jeff tilled the garden again and then made rows to plant in. We planted potatoes, cabbage, turnips, broccoli, beans and peas, fennel, swiss chard, kale – all things we’ve been pretty successful with in the past. Then I had a little room left so I tried some 55 day cucumber and some cauliflower. Oh and we tried beets again though we haven’t had much success in the past. I like to try new things every year and occasionally I find things that work well like fennel and kohlrabi. Plants have to grow pretty fast as we don’t have very long summers. I also planted lots of flower bulbs and sunflower seeds. The garden doesn’t look like much now but hopefully by the end of summer it will be lush with lots more than chickweed.

Chickweed in the garden is a constant problem. Here the garden is already covered in baby chickweed sprouting everywhere. We fight chickweed all summer long. It would completely take over the garden if we let it. It is edible. We could just grow chickweed and make our lives easy. It’s full of vitamins. We just never acquired a taste for it. So, the fight to keep chickweed out of the garden starts now.

Fiddle ferns are a nutritious, edible wild plant growing in Alaska. They are picked in the Spring when they first come up. You pick the little shoots just as they come out of the ground when they are just 2 to 5 inches tall and while they are still tightly curled and crisp. They snap right off when you pick them. Make sure to leave a few so that the plant will survive. Once they open up the ferns are no longer edible. You will notice that the fiddle ferns have a lot of brown on them that has to be cleaned off before you use them. Just run your fingers up and down along the stem and the brown will flake right off. I sauteed them with onions and other veggies and added them to the Fettuccine I made tonight.

We were greeted by our flag flying high over the river on Memorial Day. We hold in our hearts the many Americans that have given their lives in service of this flag.