Farming at 14

The best person I know loves her garden and yard. Rain or shine, sleet or snow its kept looking like the Anchorage Botanical garden. She loves to run the mower, I think its the therapy that comes from being able to change something so fast and entirely that she loves but she'll say its the exercise and love it all. Through the years she's mowed the top off our septic clean-out enough times to get it down to the level it should have been installed at to begin with. She's mowed the forrest, she's mowed the driveway and she's even mowed the boat launch. So let me tell you that if you have an avid mower in the family invest in the Honda Mower, those $100.00 Home Depot specials last a year around here.

Today was the first sunny day in a week so I got to look around as MP was gardening and I had to admit she has the place looking great. I wish I could take some credit but thats impossible, I don't do any of it...none. But I do have an eye for it, this fern jumped out at me, it looks like something you'd see on the island at Jurasic Park. The next pic is our vegetable garden with the required moose fence around it. We usually get some carrots and radishes and maybe a little cauliflower. MP has invented her own potato technique that I call 'towering spuds'. She grows them in a 5 gallon bucket and when the leaves get to the top she adds another bucket and continues to add dirt as they grow. Last year she went 3 buckets high and when its time to harvest you just dump the buckets....walla, patent pending.

In our greenhouse we have the usual tomatoes and cukes but every year MP has to try something exoctica. this year its tomatilla's and this cute little pumpkin thats got to go a ways to beat the 750 pound Alaska record. One thing we always have plenty of is cucumbers, if the rest of our lives were as successful as MP's cuke crop we (mmmm...she, I mean) could do secrets to life seminars and make a jillion. Cukes are one of those things that you can only do so much with. My favorite is a tart cuke salad made with sour cream, vinegar, shallots, a little dry mustard and a generous amount of the secret ingredient, dill. A few years ago I found a recipe for cold cucumber soup on epicurious.com. I went to the store and bought the heavy cream and all the ingredients...it stunk. So now we just eat them fresh sliced up on a plate with tomato, sweet onion and an avocado with a little olive oil drizzled on top and maybe a little Maytag brand Blue cheese. mmmmm.

Now the next pic is of our cherry tree that I did have something to do with. I had to go to Anchorage last spring to renew my coast guard license and while at Cosctco I spotted all the trees. I was focusing on a blueberry tree because I like blueberries of course when a guy gave me unsolicited advice. He said that if you want to impress your wife with something that will actually grow in the frozen north get this Cherry tree. So he picked one out for me. He was spot on, one year later its growing like a weed and has two cherries on it. Magic.

Thank you all for reading my blog, as I head towards 8000 reads I hope its made you smile as much as it has me. I know I promised to keep it positive so let me stray from that just a bit while I explain about my pictures. I had a great Canon Powershot camera that surprised and stunned me with the quality of pics I took. It died on the way back from Mexico and I replaced it with a Sony dsc-s2100...don't buy that camera. The current Consumer Guide has it rated dead last. I guess I should have read the reviews instead of being taken in by the cool orange color. I'll replace it with another Canon soon but in the meantime we'll all just have to imagine how pretty this or that really could be........Let your mind roam free.