The long-overdue Chitina IN PICTURES!

Chitina

Copper River at 5am

I caught a fish!  The Darlin' Man helps me pull it in (with the
ridiculously heavy steel pipe of a pole I was using)

There was a water fall across the way.
The river is full of glacial silt.

Fishin'

Then it got chillier, and I kept fishin'.
I may have fallen asleep in this position.

My Ma on the point just upriver.

Me and the Darlin' Man.

When the sun came out!

Clucking Blossom VIII

Cluck Cluck Bloom y'all!

where  the sun always shines and everything is always free: music, love, art, food, and dancin'.  There was lots of dancin'

The festival

Clucking Blossom successfully celebrated its eighth year in true Blossom fashion this year, with music, hippies, art, and dancing.  Clucking Blossom is a free community festival every year, and this year my Darlin' Man was one of the main organizers.  He's been working on this project for months, fundraising and planning, and after a last minute craziness of Borough sound ordinances and event insurance, he (they) pulled it off phenomenally!  You'll see pictures of the ArtWalk below, its something he started a few years ago, and every year he stays up most of the night the night before hanging art in the trees, and then most of the night the night after taking it down.  Oh yeah, and his band performed as one of the closing acts. 

I had a great time, but more importantly, I'm so proud of him and the fruits of all his hard work.

Art Walk entrance

These flowers actually made me do a double take.  I was like,
what kind of Georgia transplant is actually blooming already?

Books above the path.

Floppy Disks installation

Little'un being swung around by dad.

Hooping.

This is how an acoustic band performs at an outdoor music festival.
Inside a tight group of audience, who sings along, so the vocals can
be heard by all.
Local Band = Feeding Frenzy.

spring wood violets along the art walk.

Why they call it the land of the midnight sun...
Photo taken at 11:30 pm

Fire Dancing to the Phineas Gauge.
That's my darlin'man up there on stage rappin'.

juggling fire

Fire hooping

AK fire tribe ladies being amazing with hoops.

Happy Beltaine

The first of may.  Beltaine.  May Day.  A day of celebration of life renewing, the flowers of spring.
I noticed today that the birch trees and also the lilac by my mother's front door were starting to bud, beginning new leaves for the coming season.  Also?  It snowed.
Snowed.  As in cold air and light flakes and an overcast sky.  Last week, it was so warm I left doors and windows open- deciding I would rather the fresh air and scents of warming earth than the safety from the mosquitoes.
On the bright side, hopefully the late frost and snow will have killed off a generation or two mosquitoes and we'll have a bit of a reprieve at the beginning of the bug season.  On the less bright side, I left my tray of calendula starts out on the porch too long (ok, I forgot about them and they were out all night) the other day, and so now most of my very vigorously promising starts are no longer.  Fortunately, this was about a day before the echinacea seeds started sprouting, so they're okay.

Happy May Day!  May you grow into the year ahead with much creativity and joy!

Sugaring : part 1

Sunday, the Darlin'Man put in 19 taps, bought used at Alaska Feed.  There is a section of birch forest at one end of our property that wants to be a pasture.  We need a few cords of wood for this winter, and the next.  And the next.  Beautiful, that.  How needs intersect and mirror eachother.  Create abundance. 
So we decided that we'd tap the trees, harvest the gift of their lifeblood before chopping down and harvesting the gift of their bodies for fuel.  This serves a two-fold purpose:  we get sap to sugar down, and it also keeps the wood drier.  Apparently Russian peasants decimated huge swathes of birch forest across northern Eurasia by over-zealously tapping the trees, taking more sap than the tree could spare.  We are trying to do just this, intentionally.  This way, there'll be less moisture needing to be cured out of the firewood.  So some trees have two taps, and one even has three.

Our running tally so far:
Sunday: 8 gallons
Monday: 12 gallons
Tuesday 12 gallons
Today?

Come to find out, it takes 80-100 gallons of sap for a gallon of syrup, compared to a mere 40 gallons of sap from the maple trees I grew up with in Maine.
I did boil down a couple pot-fuls and got about a cup of syrup.  I wasn't too careful though, and it scorched, turning dark brown.  You can taste the hint of burn, but it is intensely sweet goodness.
I found on HeyWhat'sForDinnerMom's blog, that she had the brilliant idea of evaporating down the sap into syrup with a crockpot.  So wer're trying that.  The stovetop method took WAY too much propane, it was worth it just to try and to see, but is certainly in no way sustainable.  The brilliance of the crockpot method (for me) is that, due to my magic house the energy to run the crockpot during the day while we're gone is literally falling out of the sky.  We'll see how that experiment turns out.


We've got plans laid, in various stages of completion, for birch wine and a couple of birch and birch based ales.  I'll tell you all about it.

We're also drinking sap.  Alot.
Since Sunday, I think I must have drunk a gallon of sap.  Birch sap is suppoed to be an amazing spring tonic, full of micro-nutrients and minerals that are just what the body needs after a long winter.  It tastes like faintly sweet water, and feels so good and so healthful to my body.  It is a constant intention of mine to drink more water, and these past few days I have succeeded in doing so.  It really does make a difference in how my body feels, and how it functions.  


Birch Sap Resources:

HeyWhat'sForDinnerMom  (She's also linked at PunkDomestics)

Taste of the Wild :Recipes!

FrontierFreedom

and The Birch Boy

My Magic House

Darlin'Man checked the generator this weekend.  Last week, the generator ran for one hour.

One HOUR.

We used electricity at our normal rate.  It's a fairly low rate, but its not like we changed our behaviors last week, or went away or anything.  The heat tape (a main energy sink in the winter) isn't plugged it.

And it was sunny.  I swear, solar electricity is magic.

Keepin' Warm

The temperature is now back up in the zero to 5 below range, and it feels so warm!  We had a about a week where cars and generators froze, with temps of 35 to 55 below. 

Way to cold.

The house did pretty well, considering.  The woodstove kept the downstairs warm, and under covers even the upstairs was lovely.  The back rooms were freezing, and I didn't even attempt to sit still at the loom, but when its that cold, kitchen and hearth are all you really need.

The generator froze twice and wouldn't start, but each time, darlin' man was able to get it running again with help from the propane heater.

There was alot of this:

and of this:

going on!

Weeks like this with temperatures so cold really and really remind you just how dependant you are on energy, whether from wood burning, or the generator and monitor and cars that run on fossil fuels.

Weeks like this make me want to stay home with the fire, and not leave.

Last weekend, along with the ridculous cold, we had ice fog so intense you couldn't see headlights across an intersection.  The radio was giving periodic warnings about how air quality is not advised for the young, pregnant or elderly.  Ice fog is something that only happens at super cold temps, when the moisture in the air crystalizes into fog.  It is compounded by pollution - car exhaust, power plant emissions, woodstove and heater exhausts - it all gets trapped by the cold density of the air and the fog and gets worse.  It is like breathing soup.

Sometimes when I've driving the 40 minutes home from work, I wonder if we wouldn't have made a better choice by finding somewhere closer into town.  If the commuter gas makes up for the eventual food production.  But then a week of ice fog I would NEVER want my future children breathing reminds me that that is another, super potent reason why we live outside of the populated areas.  There was no ice fog at our house, only crystal clear air that burned with chill as you breathed it, and made the stars shine brighter and look both closer and farther away.



luscious food