With March comes the promise of spring. The days get longer, snow begins to melt, the frozen river begins to open up, and there is less need for the heater. Living off the grid in Western Alaska only magnifies our desire for fresh produce, so it’s time to plant seeds for the garden and to prepare for the long days of summer.
My seeds all come from Denali Seed Company, known as “America’s foremost authority on cool climate gardening,” because they have over 40 years of experience with the various climates of Alaska. We are considered zone 2a for plant hardiness in the Unalakleet area, but even that zone has quite a bit of variation. We are surrounded by hills and only eight miles east of the actual village of Unalakleet, which sits on the Bering Sea coast. The temperature at our cabin can be up to 15 degrees cooler in the winter or warmer in the summer than at the village. We also get a lot less wind. Because of this advantage, we should be able to grow some decent vegetables. However, we still have a very short growing season.
I learn a little more every year. The year before last was my first year with a greenhouse. I started everything too late, since the greenhouse wasn’t ready to use until the first week of June. I also learned that our garden soil was just too cold, resulting in almost a total loss for kale, radishes, beets, carrots, cabbage, and mustard greens. My solution was to build raised beds. After a lot of work incorporating organic soil boosters and fertilizers, I felt ready to try it again the next year.
We made the raised garden beds out of old 4-wheeler tires that my husband, Gregg, had stacked outside of his shop—they’d been thrown aside when folks had him install their new tires. After cutting the inner rims out of the top and bottom of the tires, they served as vegetable and flower planters in our garden space. Reading about soil-warming techniques I learned that living where we do, permafrost isn’t very far down and our soil stays pretty cold all summer, even with the long days of sunshine. Cold soil makes it nearly impossible to grow most vegetables. Even in the new raised beds, brussel sprouts, beets, turnips, and mustard greens just laughed at me last year. This year, I’ll be trying some new vegetable varieties, including improved dwarf Siberian kale, gourmet mesclun salad mix, BC-2 zucchini, and early prolific straightneck summer squash.
Last year, I decided that onions, cabbage, and carrots are a lost cause where I live, even in the greenhouse. We harvested only a handful of very small tomatoes before the season was over, so I’ve started those seeds, polar beauty and early Tanana, earlier this year, and will plan a way to keep the greenhouse warm longer into fall. The peppers acted the same as the tomatoes, but I’m not ready to give up on them yet, so I’ve planted three varieties this year: California wonder, new ace, and Hungarian yellow wax. My beit alpha cucumbers and provider bush beans did well in the greenhouse, so I will plant more of them this year. Zucchini also did well in pots outside last year, so I will try to plant some of those along with summer squash in the raised garden beds as well as in the pots.
The only vegetables I’ve found that thrive in our garden’s cold soil are peas of any sort and rhubarb. Because it takes a lot of peas to have enough to can, I will plant three varieties this year: freezonian, early frosty, and maestro. The peas can be planted directly into the garden soil as soon as the last freeze has come and gone. They’ll even withstand a light freeze here and there, so I love them!
Gregg also made several trellises out of Iron Dog and Iditarod trail marker stakes that he gathered along the river and cross country trail between here and the village. The trails get marked with stakes every 100 yards or so in March. When the river breaks up, the stakes end up at the bottom of the river or out in the Bering Sea, so I feel like we do our part to keep the environment clean by gathering them and reusing them. It’s also free wood that can be used in a variety of ways around our homestead. They make perfect trellises for climbing veggies like cucumbers, beans, peas, and zucchini, and I use them to stake my tomato and pepper plants.
The nearest greenhouse is in Anchorage, a 400-mile flight away, so I don’t have the luxury of buying seedlings, which means that even my herbs have to be started from seed. Cilantro, bouquet dill, and large leaf Italian basil are my favorites. I hope to use them in homemade salsa, pesto, and pickles that I will can this fall. We are still eating bread and butter pickles made with last year’s cucumbers, and pesto made with last year’s basil. I’ve also recently learned that most flowers from edible plants are also edible, so no more throwing away those tops that I pinch off. This year, they are going into summer salads!
Spring is also the time to take stock of, and start cleaning out, our freezer. We have a freezer in town, at Gregg’s small engine repair shop, where we store mostly meat (caribou, moose, and salmon), cheese, and berries that I’ve picked both on the tundra and in our own raspberry patch. By April, our freezer is running pretty low. Any berries left from last year get made into pancakes, muffins, or dessert bars, and I make jelly from juice that I strain off of the berries after they thaw, instead of straining it down the sink. I hate to throw anything away. Sometimes, I even add a little dried lavender that a retiring teacher gave to me after clearing out her kitchen pantry. After making lavender tea, I mix it with the blueberry juice to create an absolutely delightful jelly! Straight lavender jelly tastes similar to fireweed jelly, quite a treat!
Unfortunately, I have yet to successfully grow my own lavender. However, I do grow other types of edible flowers for medicinal and canning purposes. Bachelor buttons make a delicious, pinkish-purple jelly that tastes like strawberries, and calendula makes a golden-colored jelly that has a citrusy taste. I also harvest wild dandelions in May to make an amazing honey-flavored jelly. Just remember to pick dandelions that are not near a road or neighborhood that might contain toxins from exhaust fumes or pesticides. Thankfully, we have fields and fields of them, miles away from civilization of any sort. Of course, the same rule applies to fireweed, which makes a beautiful deep pink-purple jelly with a taste that hints of rose petals, but fireweed won’t be ready to pick until July.
I also always order a package of Alaska Wild Garden Mix flower seeds because it’s fun to see what pops up in our planters on the deck—daisies, poppies, columbines, and more. Finally, as a daisy-lover, I always plant an abundance of showy, Livingstone daisies in the planters alongside the stairwell from the river.
Getting the seeds planted is the easy part. After we haul several buckets of dirt and a couple of armfuls of seedling trays along with a trowel, garden gloves, and fertilizer up the stairs from the greenhouse to the cabin, I cover the kitchen table, to which we have added the extra leaf, with parchment paper and I’m ready to begin. Once the seeds are planted, one tray at a time, they get watered with a whiskey bottle because the inner cap enables the perfect amount of dribble to water the seeds without moving them. Meanwhile, Gregg has installed our seedling shelf above the couch. I plant and plant and plant until the shelf, the window sill, and half of the dining table are covered and I have to stop. Planting seeds the last week of March means that they will be ready to transfer to the greenhouse by the time they need to be repotted the first of May.
When May rolls around, my next project is to head down to the greenhouse to heavily soak all of the soil in my pots. The dirt is extremely dry from sitting all winter and needs a couple of days of loving care before my little seedlings can be transplanted into them. We’ll be past hard freezes, and the days will be amazingly long—at least 16 hours of daylight and gaining almost an hour every week.
Since we live off-grid, all of the water for these plants has to be hauled up from the river to our greenhouse and cabin. Once the river breaks up, we can use our portable, electric water pump, and no longer have to haul water up 40-some steps in 5-gallon buckets weighing 40 pounds a piece. It’s surprising how two garden hoses, a 100-foot length of extension cord, and a small, $100 pump can feel like such a luxury. With these items we are able to fill a 30-gallon trash can with water just steps from our front door.
I’m counting on these veggies and herbs to not only provide us with a year’s worth of food, but also to give me a little extra to sell at our community Saturday markets—I already have people asking about them. Perhaps I’ll just hang a sign out down by the river and have folks stop by here to get the produce fresh out of the greenhouse to take with them to their fish camps! That’ll be a first out here, for sure!
With March comes the promise of spring. The days get longer, snow begins to melt, the frozen river begins to open up, and there is less need for the heater. Living off the grid in Western Alaska only magnifies our desire for fresh produce, so it’s time to plant seeds for the garden and to prepare for the long days of summer.
My seeds all come from Denali Seed Company, known as “America’s foremost authority on cool climate gardening,” because they have over 40 years of experience with the various climates of Alaska. We are considered zone 2a for plant hardiness in the Unalakleet area, but even that zone has quite a bit of variation. We are surrounded by hills and only eight miles east of the actual village of Unalakleet, which sits on the Bering Sea coast. The temperature at our cabin can be up to 15 degrees cooler in the winter or warmer in the summer than at the village. We also get a lot less wind. Because of this advantage, we should be able to grow some decent vegetables. However, we still have a very short growing season.
I learn a little more every year. The year before last was my first year with a greenhouse. I started everything too late, since the greenhouse wasn’t ready to use until the first week of June. I also learned that our garden soil was just too cold, resulting in almost a total loss for kale, radishes, beets, carrots, cabbage, and mustard greens. My solution was to build raised beds. After a lot of work incorporating organic soil boosters and fertilizers, I felt ready to try it again the next year.
We made the raised garden beds out of old 4-wheeler tires that my husband, Gregg, had stacked outside of his shop—they’d been thrown aside when folks had him install their new tires. After cutting the inner rims out of the top and bottom of the tires, they served as vegetable and flower planters in our garden space. Reading about soil-warming techniques I learned that living where we do, permafrost isn’t very far down and our soil stays pretty cold all summer, even with the long days of sunshine. Cold soil makes it nearly impossible to grow most vegetables. Even in the new raised beds, brussel sprouts, beets, turnips, and mustard greens just laughed at me last year. This year, I’ll be trying some new vegetable varieties, including improved dwarf Siberian kale, gourmet mesclun salad mix, BC-2 zucchini, and early prolific straightneck summer squash.
Last year, I decided that onions, cabbage, and carrots are a lost cause where I live, even in the greenhouse. We harvested only a handful of very small tomatoes before the season was over, so I’ve started those seeds, polar beauty and early Tanana, earlier this year, and will plan a way to keep the greenhouse warm longer into fall. The peppers acted the same as the tomatoes, but I’m not ready to give up on them yet, so I’ve planted three varieties this year: California wonder, new ace, and Hungarian yellow wax. My beit alpha cucumbers and provider bush beans did well in the greenhouse, so I will plant more of them this year. Zucchini also did well in pots outside last year, so I will try to plant some of those along with summer squash in the raised garden beds as well as in the pots.
The only vegetables I’ve found that thrive in our garden’s cold soil are peas of any sort and rhubarb. Because it takes a lot of peas to have enough to can, I will plant three varieties this year: freezonian, early frosty, and maestro. The peas can be planted directly into the garden soil as soon as the last freeze has come and gone. They’ll even withstand a light freeze here and there, so I love them!
Gregg also made several trellises out of Iron Dog and Iditarod trail marker stakes that he gathered along the river and cross country trail between here and the village. The trails get marked with stakes every 100 yards or so in March. When the river breaks up, the stakes end up at the bottom of the river or out in the Bering Sea, so I feel like we do our part to keep the environment clean by gathering them and reusing them. It’s also free wood that can be used in a variety of ways around our homestead. They make perfect trellises for climbing veggies like cucumbers, beans, peas, and zucchini, and I use them to stake my tomato and pepper plants.
The nearest greenhouse is in Anchorage, a 400-mile flight away, so I don’t have the luxury of buying seedlings, which means that even my herbs have to be started from seed. Cilantro, bouquet dill, and large leaf Italian basil are my favorites. I hope to use them in homemade salsa, pesto, and pickles that I will can this fall. We are still eating bread and butter pickles made with last year’s cucumbers, and pesto made with last year’s basil. I’ve also recently learned that most flowers from edible plants are also edible, so no more throwing away those tops that I pinch off. This year, they are going into summer salads!
Spring is also the time to take stock of, and start cleaning out, our freezer. We have a freezer in town, at Gregg’s small engine repair shop, where we store mostly meat (caribou, moose, and salmon), cheese, and berries that I’ve picked both on the tundra and in our own raspberry patch. By April, our freezer is running pretty low. Any berries left from last year get made into pancakes, muffins, or dessert bars, and I make jelly from juice that I strain off of the berries after they thaw, instead of straining it down the sink. I hate to throw anything away. Sometimes, I even add a little dried lavender that a retiring teacher gave to me after clearing out her kitchen pantry. After making lavender tea, I mix it with the blueberry juice to create an absolutely delightful jelly! Straight lavender jelly tastes similar to fireweed jelly, quite a treat!
Unfortunately, I have yet to successfully grow my own lavender. However, I do grow other types of edible flowers for medicinal and canning purposes. Bachelor buttons make a delicious, pinkish-purple jelly that tastes like strawberries, and calendula makes a golden-colored jelly that has a citrusy taste. I also harvest wild dandelions in May to make an amazing honey-flavored jelly. Just remember to pick dandelions that are not near a road or neighborhood that might contain toxins from exhaust fumes or pesticides. Thankfully, we have fields and fields of them, miles away from civilization of any sort. Of course, the same rule applies to fireweed, which makes a beautiful deep pink-purple jelly with a taste that hints of rose petals, but fireweed won’t be ready to pick until July.
I also always order a package of Alaska Wild Garden Mix flower seeds because it’s fun to see what pops up in our planters on the deck—daisies, poppies, columbines, and more. Finally, as a daisy-lover, I always plant an abundance of showy, Livingstone daisies in the planters alongside the stairwell from the river.
Getting the seeds planted is the easy part. After we haul several buckets of dirt and a couple of armfuls of seedling trays along with a trowel, garden gloves, and fertilizer up the stairs from the greenhouse to the cabin, I cover the kitchen table, to which we have added the extra leaf, with parchment paper and I’m ready to begin. Once the seeds are planted, one tray at a time, they get watered with a whiskey bottle because the inner cap enables the perfect amount of dribble to water the seeds without moving them. Meanwhile, Gregg has installed our seedling shelf above the couch. I plant and plant and plant until the shelf, the window sill, and half of the dining table are covered and I have to stop. Planting seeds the last week of March means that they will be ready to transfer to the greenhouse by the time they need to be repotted the first of May.
When May rolls around, my next project is to head down to the greenhouse to heavily soak all of the soil in my pots. The dirt is extremely dry from sitting all winter and needs a couple of days of loving care before my little seedlings can be transplanted into them. We’ll be past hard freezes, and the days will be amazingly long—at least 16 hours of daylight and gaining almost an hour every week.
Since we live off-grid, all of the water for these plants has to be hauled up from the river to our greenhouse and cabin. Once the river breaks up, we can use our portable, electric water pump, and no longer have to haul water up 40-some steps in 5-gallon buckets weighing 40 pounds a piece. It’s surprising how two garden hoses, a 100-foot length of extension cord, and a small, $100 pump can feel like such a luxury. With these items we are able to fill a 30-gallon trash can with water just steps from our front door.
I’m counting on these veggies and herbs to not only provide us with a year’s worth of food, but also to give me a little extra to sell at our community Saturday markets—I already have people asking about them. Perhaps I’ll just hang a sign out down by the river and have folks stop by here to get the produce fresh out of the greenhouse to take with them to their fish camps! That’ll be a first out here, for sure!
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Living in their 30-year-old, 400 sf, offgrid cabin on the Unalakleet River, eight miles inland from the Bering Sea in Western Alaska, Kathy and her husband, Gregg, do things the old-fashioned way, with hard work and a smile. With only a small generator to turn on as needed (for internet and machine sewing!), they rely heavily on tradition—handwashing dishes and clothes in river water warmed on the stove, growing and preserving their own vegetables from seed, fishing and hunting for all of their meat, showering under a bucket on the porch, and selling homemade goods at teh local, village market and online at www.etsy.com/shope/CrookedCabinGifts. www.livingthedream-kathy.blogspot.com
