It's been nice to pull some fresh vegetables each day from the garden for lunch or dinner.
We've been eating a little bit of everything, as things become ready to pick.
Fresh salsa, peppers, squash, cucumbers, celery, cooked beets and a big bucket full of lettuce, swiss chard, spinach, beet greens and kale.
This little guy made a return to the backyard this week. He must have a burrow nearby, probably on the bluff.
The antlers from Grayson's caribou now adorn the table on the deck. He wants to mount them on the entrance to Dino's doghouse, so when Dino sticks his head out of the doghouse, he'll unknowingly have antlers!
Our wildflower patch came in nicely. We sowed wildflowers here, between the greenhouse and the road, to cover the area I disturbed with the skid-steer last year repairing the earthquake damage to the bluff.
Everything was coming along nicely, this pic from earlier this week. But yesterday and this morning, we had moose visitors (after-moose pics of damage to the garden included at the bottom of this blog).
Kale, lettuce, beets, Swiss chard and spinach.
It's been nice to see so many ripening tomatoes. They are delicious. They're not huge, but in Alaska, growing any ripe tomato is a treat.
Our seven outdoor pumpkin plants produced 14 pumpkins, but now the plants are dying back and the pumpkins are ripening before they've reached full size. Will have to go back and check the variety to see if this is normal, or if we had issues with bugs or other damage to the plants. Aphids were thick earlier this year, and maybe weakened the plants. These will still make good pie pumpkins.
A handful of ears of corn so far. Not sure if there's enough warm days left for them to reach maturity or not.
And loads of pickling cucumbers to put the dill to good use. We found that the pumpkin, squash and cucumbers all did best when started in the greenhouse, then brought outside and transplanted into the ground. Next year the greenhouse will start with lots of plants, but will end up with just tomatoes and peppers to maturity - everything else will eventually be transplanted outside, and we likely won't try corn, watermelon or okra again, they just didn't do well here.
Our raspberry transplants are producing. We've had a bit of a magpie issue, though. A group of rowdy magpies spent a week at the house cleaning us out of our raspberries, all of our strawberries and all of our cherries from the new cherry trees. It's said to be bad luck in Alaska to harm a gray jay, magpie or raven. They are the 'camp robbers' that kept the 'sourdoughs' (miners and trappers) company in years past. So next year we'll have to find a benign way to protect the berries from the birds.
These wild daisies came up as volunteers along our bluff trail, and now line our walkway up to the garden.
Another view of the wildflower patch.
Busy bumblebees in the sunflower.
It's still salmon season, so on the weekends I'm trekking down to the creek to land a few sockeye. Coho salmon will be showing up next weekend.
Compost pile is breaking down nicely, and I've started a second pile that I hope to get at least marginally broken down before winter starts.
Here's a video of one of the moose that found our garden this week.
So, here's the moose damage. Between the last two days, they made off with most of our cabbage....
About 2/3 of our kale (which they could reach by extending their head through the barrier wall - but they didn't cross over the barrier or knock it down) yesterday....
And the rest of the kale this morning.
And nearly all of our beet greens, both in the raised beds and in-ground beds, but left the beets untouched in the ground.
They ate all the greens from the Brussels sprouts, but left the developing sprouts on the stalk. Not sure if those sprouts will continue to develop or not, but we'll see.
And they finished off our broccoli for us. We had harvested most of the usable broccoli from these, but the plants were trying to produce more before season's end, until the moose came by.
Our plan is to expand the in-ground beds next year, and expand the barrier and incorporate a hot-wire fence. We had hoped to avoid the hot wire fence, but we knew we might need it.
We'll also plant smarter, keeping the items the moose like in the hardest-to-reach beds, like the beets, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kale and cabbage, and the things they don't seem to eat like carrots, onions, cucumber and squash (and of course potatoes) can stay outside the fence.
Honestly, we went longer without moose damage than we expected. This year has been more of an experiment, and now we know which items need to be inside the barrier/hot wire fence, and I guess we have some well-fed moose around the house for someone's moose hunt (we didn't draw a moose tag this year, so unless a rare spike/fork or huge 50+ inch bull shows up, which is rare here, we don't plan to harvest a moose this year).
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