First signs of spring

After a week of warm weather, we received 1.5 inches of snow yesterday and last night.  There is still about 12 inches of snow on the ground and it is slowly melting.  A look at our earliest budding plant, a Ben Sarek black currant, revealed that buds are starting to elongate and turn green. The timing of bud break on this plant is right on schedule.  However, most everything else is still under the snow and far from leafing out.  We are expecting average temperatures this month and next, so not much should happen for a few more weeks.
  We have lots of plants arriving over the next five weeks - kind of like Christmas in spring!  We will also be busy preparing for the upcoming plant sale.  Dates and times will be posted here and on our website, along with the varieties that we will have available.  Currently there are 31 trays planted, with another 18 or so to be planted next weekend.  That's a lot of seedlings!!!

Website updated!

We updated our website (www.solitudespringsfarm.com) this morning to include the presentation and materials from yesterday's workshop.  Sorry, the peony presentation is proprietary and not available.
Over a dozen people attended yesterday's workshop to hear Marji Illingworth (North Pole Peonies) share her recommendations for the best peony varieties to plant in the flower garden and how to care for them.  We followed this with a discussion on how to raise seedlings for the summer garden.  As usual, we ran out of time, so next year we will probably rent the facility for the day and throw in a few more presentations per requests from this year's attendees.
  It looks like we will start selling plants May 23 and continue selling on Saturdays only for four weekends.
  This week we got a taste of breakup with afternoon temperatures in the lower 40s.  We may be walking in and out beginning next weekend.  This is a little early, but not much.  If breakup goes fairly quickly, we will have no trouble getting the plants out for the plant sale in May.
  We ordered quite a few (hundreds) of grape cuttings this year and are busy callusing them and potting them up.  We also decided to delve into growing figs, but those may take some serious effort to get to produce anything.  Having had fresh figs before, I am sure the effort will be well worth it!  Mail order plants will start arriving late next month.  Better get some pots ready!
  Not much in the way of pictures lately, but here is one from earlier this month when I was digging out of a few feet of new snow.  There is a drift along the right side of the road.  The depression toward the left of center is from snowmachiners and dog mushing teams staying away from the drift.  As we have cleared more and more trees, we have noticed lots of drifting.  Looks like snow fences will need to be erected to keep the drifts out of the road.

The sun is out and it is time to get to work.

Oops!

It appears that I goofed when I scheduled this year's gardening workshop.  It is on Saturday this year, not Sunday (as in years past).  I printed up a number of flyers that list the day as Sunday, March 21st, when it should be Saturday, March 21st.

See you all on Saturday!

4th Annual Gardening Workshop Coming Up!

We have secured the Ken Kunkel Community Center for our fourth annual gardening workshop on March 21st from 3:15pm to 6 pm.  Topics will include growing peonies, raising seedlings, raised beds, greenhouses and row covers.  Marji Illingworth of North Pole Peonies has graciously offered to lead our discussion on growing peonies, whether it is for personal or commercial purposes.  In addition, we will be providing pots, potting soil and seeds for each family to plant a few seeds to take home.  We will also be revisiting past presentations on what to grow and how to extend our short season and provide the heat that some of our favorite vegetables need to produce reliably in the Interior.  The workshop is free.  Come enjoy visions of summer regardless of what the weather is like outside!

Our First Farm Video

We've joined the "YouTube" community and have posted our first short video!  Something ate our summer video (don't know where it went), so we recorded another one yesterday and finally got it posted today. Granted, there is not a lot to see with most everything under the snow, but we'll make more videos as the year progresses.  We are heading into our first real cold snap of the winter and may see -30F (-35C) overnight.
  Thoughts are on the upcoming 4th Annual Gardening Workshop, which we have tentatively set for March 21st.  We'll start around 3:15pm and run until 5 or 6pm.  The tentative agenda includes starting plants from seed and raising peonies - for personal enjoyment or commercially.  As usual, there will be door prizes.  If you have other suggestions, feel free to "comment".
  We are also working on updating and revamping the website.  This will take a little time, but a post will be made here when all is done.
  We will leave you with a sunset.  It was taken on January 3, 2015 of Mt. Foraker (right of center) just after sunset (Denali is on the left).  This was taken from our driveway and the time was actually 2:45pm.

3,000th Page Hit!!!

Today around 11am, we received our 3,000th page hit!  That is 1,000 page hits since mid-March.  We will be updating the blog soon with information on our final blackberry count, a summer synopsis and plans for next year.  We're also in the process of updating the website with new information and the results of this summer's trials. We'll leave you with two pictures of "best friends."  No, the second picture was not staged.

Blackberries continue to ripen . . . inside!

  Just tasted our first Silvan blackberry this morning.  Another WOW!  Tasted strongly like boysenberry, but quite sweet, like the pancake syrup. Definitely worth keeping.  Unfortunately, this year it flowered July 15 (3 weeks after Wild Treasure, Siskiyou and Tayberry).  However, it appears to be somewhat frost tolerant and ripens well inside once the berries have turned red.

Both Silvan and Tayberry survived our first (and very early) frost of 29F on August 30th.  August 31st brought a low of 28F.  We saw the first snowflakes on September 3rd, but no snow accumulated.  Our wet weather (around 14 inches from June 22 through September 23) left for a few weeks early in September, but has returned. The first measurable snowfall came (0.5 inches) on September 23rd. Four more inches fell on September 30th and it is snowing today, with another 4 inches expected.  We had hoped to put row cover over the most promising blackberries and Tayberries before the first snowfall, but didn't get all of them.  We will try to cover the remainder this weekend.

  We had planned to dig trenches and put all pots in the trenches over the winter.  However, the early snow has hampered efforts to get a backhoe up here, so we will be putting plants under the house again this winter.  Not ideal, but the best we can do.  The grapes and potted blackberries will be covered with plastic and straw under the hoop house frame (which discourages mama moose from trampling them) as we have done in the last few winters.  It seems to work okay.

  Speaking of grapes, our brief (104 frost free days) and cool summer didn't help much in grape production.  We were, however, surprised to find a small cluster of Seneca grapes pretty close to edible on September 23rd.  Rather than being hard as a rock, they were sort of crunchy-soft and had a fairly typical grape flavor.  They were a bit tart (acid hadn't dropped yet) and not very sweet (low sugar).  This was quite a change from last year, which was longer and warmer.  Perhaps they are adjusting - and we modified our cultural practices to include both cluster thinning and berry thinning, so there was much less to ripen.  Nothing else was close to ripe when the temperature dropped to 23F on Sept. 24th.

  Looking ahead to next summer, we have one Wild Treasure blackberry vine with one 10ft long cane and several 5-6 ft long canes.  Since the first flowers on each lateral to bloom are likely to ripen even in a cool year, we should have significantly more berries next year (this year we got 15 berries off of a total of 3 ft of cane).  I hope the Agribon-50 floating row cover that we put over Wild Treasure mid-September will help protect the canes through the winter and early spring.  We have already seen some dieback from the frosts on the Wild Treasure laterals, but with the snow cover, they should be better insulated.

  We are also looking forward to more Tayberries next year.  This year, they were hit hard by Lygus bugs that stunted their growth.  Keeping those bugs under control will be the plan next spring.  Our two Tayberry plants have long (4-7 ft) canes on them right now and with protection, hopefully most of these canes will survive the winter.

  We started to make an introductory video about the farm last month.  When the schedule gets a little less hectic, we hope to put it up on YouTube.  We will post here and on our website when that happens.

  In the meantime, we continue to watch the snow fall outside and our blackberries ripen inside.  What a treat!