Harvest Season is Upon Us

As always the summer just flew by and we are in a frenzy tying all up our loose ends in town and harvesting the garden. There’s no way around it for anyone who has a big garden – it’s either take care of the crop and do something with it when it’s ready,  or let it rot and freeze. It’s there for the taking, but it all takes time and sometimes it’s not convenient when something needs to be addressed.

Tyler took the boat down to Chitina to dipnet salmon while the kids and I were down in Minnesota for my brothers wedding and kicked off the start to a great harvest summer for us. We all met back in Fairbanks with good memories and a freezer full of fish. We eat fish about every other day in the summer time. I grill it, make chowder, salmon patties (like a fish burger), and put it in curry. A lot of people fillet their reds and then vacuum pack the individual fillets. A few years ago we tried something new that at first sight seemed a bit lazy, but isn’t in the end and really improves the longevity and taste of the fish. Tyler scrubs the fish with vinegar and water to de-slime it a bit, then we wrap it in cellophane and butcher paper. The fish are left completely whole, heads on, ungutted and everything. The skin of the fish acts as natures best vac pac and no air ever reaches any part of the meat. The down side is we have to fillet a fish every time we eat it. It doesn’t take long to fillet the fish though and it’s definitely worth the taste. There’s no need to gut them either, I just fillet them from the back and cut the meat right off the back of the ribcage. We’ve eaten 3 year-old fish this way and the meat is still ruby red and it’s very hard to tell it’s an old fish, whereas the vaccuum packed fillets get freezer burned pretty easily and tend to go bad pretty fast. When oxygen gets to it the meat starts to get a real fishy taste and up here you see posts on Facebook marketplace all the time from people giving their freezer burnt fish away to dog mushers because the vacuum pack seals fail and they’re making room to go fishing again.

Before Tyler left for the NTA Convention in Escanaba I worked hard at finishing this Arctic ground squirrel vest for him. The squirrels were all harvested by a good friend of ours who passed away the winter of ’21. It’s a good memory piece. Pat had one made for himself once and would wear it to the local Alaska Trapper Association events. I will always remember him flirtatiously asking if I wanted to pet his vest. Now Tyler has a vest made of Pat’s squirrels. This was a real patchwork labor of love and, we hope, a fitting tribute to our late friend.

While Tyler was away at the convention I stayed on to care for the chickens, dogs and garden. The broccoli was going full force that week. I use a varietal of broccoli called Apollo. It’s the kind that has a somewhat mediocre size main head but produces copious amounts of beautiful spears after the main head is harvested. We’ll have broccoli coming for a solid two months. Blaze loves to eat broccoli so we eat a lot of it fresh with meals in the summer. I steam the excess we can’t eat for about 5-10 minutes, cut it into thinner, bite-size pieces and then dehydrate it on the lowest setting for about 24 hours. It’s good paired with rice in the winter or added to my curry. A cheesy broccoli-grouse soup is good too.

It was a exceptionally good berry season here in Northern Alaska. We took a drive with the kids and got on a good spot. The first time we went out we forgot our pickers and there were bushes with big clusters of large berries. We brought home 6 gallons our first time out. We couldn’t stop thinking about all the berries we’d left behind and returned the next weekend armed with our rakes and slayed it, picking 16 gallons in just over 6 hours! It was fun this year. Though I miss having a baby on my back it was also really enjoyable to watch the kids play and even help us pick. They love being in the woods and have endless patience for berry picking. It’s a real peaceful, feel good activity to do with a family.

Once August hits the cabbages are ready to start harvesting and we need to make sauerkraut. We eat a lot of kraut in our house. Its like a pickle to us. We eat it on meat, salads and put it on boiled potatoes with yogurt. We put together 12 gallons of kraut this year. Half for town and half for the woods. I use kosher salt.  I like to ferment the kraut for 4 – 5 weeks which means we have to get it going early so I can get it ready and in the freezer before we leave. We like to put it in the freezer because we can’t keep canning jars in our house when we leave because we let our cabin freeze up and any glass containers of things explode and shatter. Kraut is better in the freezer anyway because it retains all its healthy living probiotic bacteria that is lost in the canning process. Also it doesn’t get as soggy. Kraut that you freeze still has a nice squeaky crunch to it after you thaw it. I pack it in plastic containers that we save from mayo and peanut butter and the like. I pack it tight into the container and put about an inch of the juices on top and put it in the freezer right away. Sometimes the layer on the top has some freezer burned scum that needs culled after thawing but overall it’s a good method to put up the kraut. The other half of the kraut supply goes to the trapline and I’ll watch it carefully until freeze-up and then it gets packaged in quart bags out there and stored outside in nature’s deep freeze. I hold back 8 to10 large tightly packed heads of purple cabbage to put in our root cellar dug below the floor of our cabin. We make delicious slaws and eat it once or twice a week all fall. There’s no finer fall feast than fresh moose steak and a pile of crunchy slaw on the side. A few of the larger green heads we dice up and dehydrate to use in soups and such later in the winter. We grow and eat about 50 to 60 cabbages a year.

 

I cheated in the carrot bed this year and planted seed tape! It was a nice sweet Nantes variety and the results made me so happy that I’m going to spend a little extra and buy seed tape every year now. The time savings to putting in the bed was tremendous. The germination nearly perfect. No washed away seeds. Minimal thinning. Huge sweet carrots. In years past I’ve used a lot of coated carrot seed to make the seeding a little easier. Carrots are tedious, such tiny seeds. I have friends that are local carrot farmers and they use pelleted seed because it’s the size of beet seeds that way and you can use it in a mechanical planter. I turned my bed, added compost, furrowed my rows and planted my tape with 650 carrots in 45 minutes. Pretty satisfying deal. We eat as many carrots as we want during the summer and in the week before trapline we pull them. We’ll put a share in a friends root cellar here in town for the winter. I’ll roast a bunch, then put them in the dehydrator and I will put together a small box layered in sawdust for keeping in the root cellar out at the trapline. Nothing beats giving the kids a crunchy carrot treat in the middle of winter.

I grow sugar snap peas, but just a few and we eat those fresh in the summer. I don’t bother trying to preserve them. I’ve tried blanching them and drying them. but it’s never nearly as satisfying as that fresh sweet crunch. I keep them picked and in the fridge in a sack. Nothing beats the summer heat like crunching on the cold sweet peas.

 

Zucchini is another plant I like to grow but never save for winter. I’ve tried to steam it and dry it but it doesn’t turn out appetizing to rehydrate and use again. I don’t bother putting it in the freezer here either. I have a friend that likes to make relish. I’ve been making noodles out of it and pairing it with pesto. I’ve made five batches of zucchini bread and I’ve been enjoying using a new julienne tool a friend from Idaho gifted to me and putting it in stir fry. Last night we had stir fried zucchini, carrots, broccoli and dall sheep meat.

I plant about 30 potato plants every year. Not a lot, just enough to enough to eat as we need them after they’re ready and I like to save the other half of the bed for a bucket in the root cellar of the trapline. I’ve tried to dry them but they are a major tedious pain in my view and it’s pretty easy to find affordable dried potatoes in stores. Potatoes are easy and fun to grow though and I wish we could afford the weight and space to bring more to the trapline with us, but we do have clear weight limitations and as least what we can bring offers some exciting variety. I like to roast them in the coals inside the woodstove.

I grow Snow Crown cauliflower. Not too many. We like it but it’s not our favorite. We eat some fresh, I put some in the Sauerkraut for tasty crunchy bits and I blanch and dry the rest in the dehydrator for winter. We do like to have a bit for the trapline.

I like to plant a few bush beans every year just for fun. I don’t save them. We just enjoy some of them fresh. This year I let the kids plant them all by themselves and they turned out great. I put them in container pots outside of the garden fence to save on space. I’ve never had moose try to eat bean plants before so it seemed safe but just a few nights ago a moose came along and ate up one of my pots of beans to nubs.

Beets are another plant that grows well in Alaska. We eat them as we want in the summer and I roast and dehydrate the rest for the trapline. They can be a pain to keep weeded and we haven’t bothered in a while as you can see in this photo.

We do a lot of kale. Its a nice hardy green. We make some salads with it in the summer and it is so easy to dehydrate. It’s kind of become a winter staple. I try to sneak a little bit of it into any meal I can just so we get our daily dose of greens through the long dark winter. It’s particularly good in curry and soup. To dry it we just layer it in the dehydrator on low and its ready to go in about 12 hours. No blanching before hand or anything. Some kale laden carb and moose are often what’s for dinner on the trapline. We do Winter Bor and Red Bor because of the large densely packed crimped leaves.

I always have a little chard around because it’s my very favorite salad green for it’s beauty and taste. I find that the Electric Lights variety does best here. All of the chards with the lighter colored stems seem to bolt on me but the red stems seem to bolt less. Next year I will thin out all of the plants that germinate that don’t have red stems.  I don’t usually dry it for winter. Tyler did do a batch this year though. We’ll see what I end up doing with it.

I grow my favorite herbs every season to bring with to the trapline. I don’t put them in the dryer. I pull them by their roots and hang them upside down to dry. Writing this was actually a good reminder, haha, I should probably go out and get those hanging today. When the herbs are dried like this they retain most of their beautiful shape and color. I’ll put them in a large paper grocery sack to travel in the airplane with me and hang them back up in the kitchen at the trapline. Beautiful decoration and handy to throw into a meal. Parsley thyme and sage are my usual staples.

I planted a Tobacco plant outside the greenhouse this year to draw aphids away. and just to grow the plant for fun. We used to plant bell peppers to dry and bring with us to the trapline, but I haven’t planted any the last several years because the aphids are intensely drawn to peppers up here and they were winning over the usual remedies of neem oil, soap solution, ladybugs – you name it. A few peppers just weren’t worth having the whole green house infested with these nasty pests. Aphids seem to leave the tomatoes alone if the peppers aren’t in there with them.

We had a cool, slow spring this year. I direct seed peas, potatoes, and carrots mid may as soon as I can fork the beds. The northern Alaska tradition (zone 1) is to put the garden in on Memorial day weekend. Tyler is such a stickler for tradition I had to beg and plead with him not to put any plants out because there was a serious frost in the forecast on June 1st. Instead of planting we just prepared all of the beds that weekend, forking them and adding chicken manure compost. We kept all of the flats of veggie starts on a raised bed inside the greenhouse until the next weekend. Though we were prepared for it to frost on the night of June 1st we were blown away by the severity. The night before I casually walked down to the greenhouse and covered all of the plants with frost blankets. Though I have a lot of frost cloth, I just gave everything one layer. I felt good they were in a warm little greenhouse on raised beds off the ground and with the door covered up. The next morning I was shocked. It got down to 22 degrees on the night of JUNE 1st! I’m lucky we didn’t lose more than we did, but I did lose all my tomatoes on the outer edges of the flats. Half of my 60 beautiful tomato plants were limp and frozen. I was mourning them most of the day. I had already been painstakingly caring for them – seeding them, thinning them, up-potting them to 4” pots, fertilizing them for nearly 3 months!!! Well, at least my family is healthy and cared for, I thought, so I just moved on after a bit of grumpiness. I raise an heirloom variety of tomato called Stupice. They are amazing producers here in the North. I’ve tried other varieties but I’ve never seen anything grow like a Stupice does here in our very short growing season. This year I was gifted a few plants after my frost loss as well as buying a bit of variety from the local greenhouse, but these southern, slow growing varieties are just silly. There are three huge tomatoes on one plant that are still green today… or lots and lots of fruit but again, nothing going ripe. We are Zone 1!!!! Please don’t send me your cherished heirloom seeds, they just won’t work here, haha. I always save seeds from tomatoes of my most hardy plant for the next year. I love, love, love my Stupice.

I also grow cucumbers and basil in the green house. I love cucumbers in salad and I use basil in stir fries, curry and sometimes I make big batches of pesto and put it in the freezer where it lasts for a long time. I just put it in mason jars for portion size and get it out as needed. Tyler dried a bunch in the dehydrator for the trapline this year and that will be a treat.

I did something fun for myself this summer. I gave into a little mid-life crisis indulgence and had the gaps in my teeth covered with composite veneers. The technology has gotten really good on veneers and they printed my new teeth right in the office! haha. My gaps have always been annoying to me and I like that my smile just blends in now. If it had just been the center gap it wouldn’t have bothered me much, but I had gaps on both sides of my front teeth that made me feel like Sponge Bob’s sister, and even better, it was pretty affordable and Tyler didn’t grouse about it.

I tried to get my stuff sold that I sewed last winter though I still have a few trappers hats around I’d like to see disappear before we head out. The kids and I are headed out on the 20th. I’m definitely in town the wrong months of the year to be selling cold weather gear, but it manages to trickle out all the same. It’s really nice to have a lineup of guaranteed orders before I head out for the winter and then I get them all shipped out in March when I get back. I plan on sewing a bunch of 3-tailed marten hats this winter. It never fails that I get a few late fall emails from people hoping to get a Christmas gift put together and then we both miss out and I’m reading the email in March when I get in. It would be nice if I could work the holiday bazaar season, but my life just wouldn’t be the same if I wasn’t in the woods for the whole season. It’s so important to me to unplug and take a step back. During the first couple weeks of August I did take the time to sew together a pair of my beaver gauntlet mitts for a couple that came up on vacation, a fellow trapper and ice fisher from Michigan. I’ve taken most of the other items off the online inventory because I’m pretty much done for the season except final preparations for being on a trapline all winter. There are still a few skulls available.  Thank you everyone for keeping up with us and reading. Happy Halloween, Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! I hope to have some good stories to share in the spring.

These are the items I still have available, if anyone out there has interest, please send me an email at tyseldenfur@gmail.com