High tunnel: Part One

Our high tunnel arrived this past week! This picture shows some of the pieces, set up on the porch of Jeff’s shed. Ben stopped by the Gear Shed on Wednesday, and there it was – all on pallets after a long journey from Iowa. He’s been working double-time getting the watering system in place for both the tunnel & the upper house. There is a new 4,000 gallon cistern that is, as of today’s rain, collecting run-off water from the sauna roof. During the past 2 weeks or so I’ve come home from a day of sitting in front of a computer to see Ben, in a ditch. Sun shining, blue skies, dogs playing merrily….I said more than once – I WANT TO BE A DITCH DIGGER! Screw this ‘computer workin’ stuff. I need to be OUTSIDE. Although this may be ultimately true, I have learned that ditch digging is Hard. From the cistern, Ben has dug (with a little of my help, and a little help from a ridiculously tiny excavator) a trench that rounds the driveway, heads down the current garden (with a stop-off for a water spigot there), and then down straight into the east end of the high tunnel. YEAH! It’s not entirely done yet – there’s a little bit left to dig, but probably 80% of the water line is in.

Notice the mini-excavator.

So that was my Friday and part-of-Saturday. Susie, Ben’s mom, showed up Saturday mid-morning and we began the high tunnel assembly! It’s a long process that involves a lot of mud, shoveling, leveling, re-leveling, pounding, shoveling, etc etc. And did I mention mud? We are blessed with a foundation of clay here at 602 Shellfish. And while the topsoil is fantastically rich and dark and fertile, everything below it is….heavy. Clay. Muddy, slippery, heavy clay.

The tunnel, 30’ x 72’, is made of steel bents that are set into ground posts every 4’. On Saturday, Susie, Mike, Ben, and I set & leveled all of the ground posts, put together all of the bents, and then while Ben bulldozed some soil around I shoveled some more clay.

The site – Saturday morning prior to starting assembly.

19 bents, assembled, screwed together, and ready to go. After Ben finished cleaning out the tracks on the bulldozer we headed off to Starvin’ Marvin’s for dinner. Wicked classy joint – reminds me just a little of the York House of Pizza back home.

On Sunday morning, Ben went to pick up cedar for the ground boards and I headed out to do more digging in the clay. Steve, Susie, and Mikey joined in the fun and we started putting up the bents.

Our job site is not OSHA-approved. Thankfully the ground is VERY soft. I don’t know if I’ve ever been so muddy.

Back to the office job for me tomorrow, but we’ll continue working through the week and hopefully get ‘er all up by next weekend. And then…setting up beds!

Adventures in gardening

This spring, Ben and I performed a modest garden expansion – increasing our total growing space by about 100 square feet.  Clearing land is hard!  And there aren’t even any trees!  But fern hummocks are incredibly … one with the earth.  Even more so when they’re frozen in the middle.  With the old Montgomery Ward rototiller and a lot of hand work we cleared the western portion of the upper garden space.  While Ben was gone one day I turned it into a circular-plot, with four corners and keyhole paths. 

Looking east:

Earlier this year we had signed up for a high tunnel through a NRCS program (check out the website here).  So as we went into this growing season I had a lot of thoughts running through my head of potential CSA plans for the future (CSA = Community Supported Agriculture.  my favorite one, from college, can be checked out here).  Since then we’ve been approved for participation in the 3 year high tunnel program, ordered one, and sometime in the next month we’ll be setting up a 30’ x 72’ structure to the south east of our current garden.  Yeehaw!  I have some ideas floating around for growing culinary herbs & cut flowers next year – I’ll keep updating and at some point maybe have a separate site!  Any names for this new small farm?!

But back to this year and our garden.  The only major failure was the cauliflower.  The purples all bolted, but were really tasty eaten more like broccoli.  I started the artichokes too late and they are doing their first-year perennial thing now.  Which means no artichoke will form until next year, if they make it that long.  I’m going to mulch ‘em up good and see if any are able to overwinter.  I may bring a couple in and under the house to see if they survive that.  Next year artichokes will be started early (February) and will be put in the high tunnel.  Mmm….I love artichokes.

Other yummy things grown: swiss chard, beets, buttercrunch lettuce, mizuna, carrots, snap peas, chamomile, nasturtiums, cabbage, brussels sprouts (a near-failure), cabbage, broccoli, garlic (hm…should have been planted in the fall – also going to see if they overwinter), onions, leeks (a very wee harvest), potatoes (red, purple, yukon gold, and shepody), strawberries, mint, parsely, sage, thyme, dill, mustard greens, lavender, cilantro, and chives.  Inside we had 8 tomato plants, rosemary, and chili peppers! Oh – and heaps of basil.  Basil loves our house, it’s fantastic!

Some photos from the year:

Three beds (including the snap peas and their trellis) and the compost

The brassicas – cauliflowers, brussels sprouts, cabbages, and broccolis.  With a few marigolds in a terribly weak effort to stave off the root maggots!  (we used row cover for the first month or so of their lives)

Potatoes, leeks, onions, garlics, brassicas.  Further up = raspberry canes, cistern, tools, chair.

Livingston daisies … so pretty!ColumbinesDaisies & nasturtiums

Onions and leeks, before and after.  The onion harvest was pretty substantial – I braided them all into bunches and they should last us at least 2 months I think.  The leek harvest was wee … you’re seein’ it all in that there picture.  They all went to potato leek soup – very yummy.

  The beet harvest was similarly wee.  We had 2 varieties – chioggia and another kind.  They were sooo beautiful!  I pickled them, despite only making a total of 6 half-pint jars.  Again – super tasty!

Mom came and helped harvest! We dug 2 boxes of potatoes, harvested the rest of the buttercrunch lettuce for caeser salads, a couple of carrots to munch on, and a head of cabbage for mom to take home for soup.

     

I’ve dried a bunch of chamomile and mint for tea this winter. 

And a beautiful bouquet that Katie & Blaine brought by on their last night in Homer.  They grew a smattering of lovely flowers, including this one bright sunflower!  We’ll miss them heaps down here, but I’m looking forward to a Fairbanks visit in the coming spring.

Good Ol' Fashioned Whale Move

Last week, up past my eyeballs in work, Ben calls me and asks if I want to join them to go move a whale.  "Excuse me?" I ask.  He explains with few details that there's a 27 foot dead gray whale near Charlie & Debbie's on the beach.  NMFS checked it out, suggested it get moved, indicated that someone else would have to do that since it apparently wasn't too high on their priority list.  So there ya have it, the boys geared up for an old fashioned whale move. 

I was late (SORRY!), but we left the harbor at high tide with Josiah, Brad, Ben and I on his boat, Charlie and Elias on their boat, and Brian and some other folks on theirs.  It was a veritable armada, with three skiffs heroically speeding down the spit on a mission.

I couldn't quite figure out if there was a plan of sorts, and come to find out it was a true cowboy mission - Move the Whale was the long and the short of it. 

I was impressed that Charlie had worked at low tide to affix lines and buoys to the whale, which was now back in the water but still grounded.  There was a small crew of onlookers, including Amanda, Calais, and Debbie.  And the newspaper!  The Whale Move would be recorded for posterity it seemed, and not just by me.

Ben, Josiah, and Brad acted fast - moving in, grabbing a line, hooking up to it with a bridle off the stern, and heading out to sea.  Charlie and Bryan were still back there, working against the wind to try and get lined out and lined up in the same direction.

Unfortunately, easier said than done.  Charlie & Elias got real up-close and personal with the whale as Charlie worked to untangle lines from their prop.

Bryan was still going in the wrong direction, having a difficult time coming about.

We kept on moving, and with the help of Charlie & Elias got the whale off the beach and floating free.  We towed her about a mile or so west, heading out of the Bay.  And then tide her to a rock.  Yep.  Tied to a rock.  I mentioned that stretch of beach was one of my favorite places to run...Ben suggested I stick to the low tide line. 

 

Every now and then we'd get a whiff of the whale -- whoohee it was fairly strong.  I was thankful for Charlie's pre-mission work getting the lines on it.

  The final resting place.  Hopefully.  But if she comes loose and makes a move, I think it's safe to say there's a crew of now experienced whale movers available in town.  How many communities can rest easy with that knowledge?!

Explorations: Sheep Creek

It's a trip that Ben's talked about for a long time - heading up over the mountains from Bradley Lake and down into the Sheep Creek valley.  Hike up, packraft out.  Explore and adventure.  We couldn't find anyone who had been overland in that area, or anyone to give us good recon info on the Sheep Creek.  So in mid-July, Ben, Jeff, Ian and I set out to the head of the Bay to do some exploring for 5 days.

The head of the Bay is remarkably shallow at low tide.  Ian was a good bow-lookout to help pole the boat around in a foot of water.  We ended up leaving the boat on the east end of Bear Cove ... a good couple of miles from the "start point" of our trip.

It took about 2 hours to hike over to the road, across the mudflats and little bays.  The Bradley Road is a big, gravel, maintained road in the middle of nowhere.  In the late 1980s a dam was built at the outlet of a natural lake, high up in the mountains.  This road, which is 8.5 miles from the powerhouse at the Bay to the dam itself, is used by HEA workers to access the dam.  It's also a great way to get above treeline! 

The plant manager happened to arrive up there shortly after we did and gave us a fantastic impromptu tour of the place.  It's fantastic infrastructure deep in the mountains; the power that is generated primarily goes up to the Railbelt.  Check out this site from GVEA for a little more info on the Bradley Lake Hydroelectric Project.

We camped below the spillway that night, and the next day set out into the uncharted territory.  It was SUMMER!  No kidding.  Those of you who have been spoiled, or tortured, with hot weather and unrelenting sun might not appreciate this.  But it has not been above 60 degrees all that much here this summer.  And rain.  It's rained a lot.  We're all a little grumpy, and more than a little Vitamin D-deprived.  It took 2 more days of navigating to reach Sheep Creek.  We got up to 4,200 ft of elevation, and ended up about 1.5 miles below the glacier that feeds the Sheep at 550 ft.  We saw 5 black bears and expansive beautiful mountains, glaciers, rock and snow. 

Once we had crested the highest elevation of our trip and started down, we stopped to have lunch and discuss our plan for descent.  We had made it above the Sheep Creek Valley ... now just to get down.

Here's from our lunch spot.  The lake is the glacier lake that is the head of the Sheep Creek, which you can just see the start of.  The trick was to get down in an area where we wouldn't encounter un-traversable cliffs.  We were fantastically lucky (with the help of some maps!) and made it down with little problem. 

Here's sunset at our campsite down on the river.  I didn't take too  many pictures after this.  Mostly because I was fairly terrified the better part of the following day...the river was a bit higher and faster and bigger than I was hoping for.  Ian took lots of shots during the trip, including the river portion.  He, Ben, and Jeff took good care of me - Ben was my personal hero and helped to portage my boat (which had a 50 pound backpack tied to it) many times across rocky bars to get around scary water/rocks.  I cried, we portaged, we ran some water, I cried some more  :)  We all portaged for several hours around a long steep narrow canyon that couldn't really be scouted or trusted to be run.  The boys would every now and then scurry over to the edge to peer over and admire the view.  While I do now feel regret for not having joined them, I know that there was no other choice for me at that time.  The trail was steep, and holding onto a tree with sweaty palms and a racing heart was about all I could manage! (aside from a little bit of crying)  I'm sure Karen doesn't read this blog, but if you do - I thought several times of our spring break trip on the AT in Maine - heading up the icy mountains and similar feelings of terror striking me.  I have been blessed with patient, kind, and wonderful people in my life in these trying times!

Shortly after the canyon, the river mellowed out into Class II water with only some Class III bits, the Class IV was all behind us.  Like flipping a switch I decided I was NOT going to sell my raft, my dry suit, my paddle, etc. and that I did indeed love packrafting!!!  By the time we set up camp the river had slowed to Class I, we were wet and tired, and dinner was sounding very good. 

The next day was a slooooow paddle/slog back to the boat, which was still ~8 or 9 miles away.  It was a beautiful foggy/misty morning, clearing into a lovely afternoon.

After getting back to the boat, and stuffing our faces with ginger cookies that someone had stashed, I checked my messages and got one from my brother.  He had made his way down to Homer and stayed that entire next week.  We need to plan some explorations, or maybe a very tame cabin trip, for Labor Day weekend when he's hopefully back down here on his way to Maine.