Apples from Alaska!

This post also falls under gardening with your kids!  The apples below are on a tree at Snowfire Gardens (see my links for more information) and we have so much fun every year rounding up all the kids (even the grown ones) and doing harvest at Nana and Boopah's house (or Gramma and Grandpa as you may call yours)!

This tree is a Carroll apple and it produced that whole blue bushel tub full of apples - good eating apples too! Even in this crappy weather we had all summer here in Alaska the orchard had a banner year. My parents do have a ten foot tall fence to keep out the moose riff raff so their trees dont get trimmed the way ours at Wicked Raven do. There are a total of four families and includes six grand kids - four boys and two girls who come together at least one day a year and do a family harvest day at Snowfire. It is a great family bonding time as well as teaching too. This year besides apples we dug potatoes, dahlia bulbs, and harvested two kinds of Kale.

 Above Nana, Raeley and Devin harvest two kinds of potatoes, below, before the wash cycle!

With all the rain we had here in the Matanuska Valley the potatoes were a little harder to harvest - soil was very wet and heavy!  Lucky we have some strong youngsters (and energetic adults) to help!  Two of the kids didn't get to come to harvest day this year and boy were they salty pretzles about it!  The only saving grace was that we chose a sunny day - one of very few we had all summer!

 

The above is Kim picking from an apple-crab tree and we got another bushel from this tree.  This is a great way to teach the kids where their food comes from, how to take care of it (you absolutely cannot just drop apples into a bucket), and how long some things take to grow.  This orchard has been growing for about 12 years, and there are about 15 varieties of apple and apple crab trees.  Check the web site in the summer at www.snowfiregardens.com for garden tour schedule if you would like to see the orchards and gardens.  Its worth it!

Here at Wicked Raven Farm we have 7 varieties of apple and crabapple trees.  We have had only one tree produce thus far, however our orchard is only about three years old and regularly gets trimmed by a momma moose who comes with her calf each year.  We also have two varieties of grapes (yes they will grow here) and we have 3 varieties of cherry trees and we had enough for a pie last year!

Tune in to the next blog to see some of the fun things we do with apples!  Yum!