The Beauty and Benefits of Growing Rowan

Growing up in the Matanuska Susitna Valley, my folks always looked for ways to teach us how to be self sufficient.  We had a large garden, chickens, and at times ducks, geese, pigs and other farm animals.  It was always a struggle to make these things produce any produce!  When the garden was growing well, the pig would get out and eat all of the broccoli and cabbage items and spoon up everything they didnt eat with their goofy hooves.  Or, a moose and calf would get into the garden and eat everything in sight including figuring out how to dig up the carrots!  They would eat the fruit and trees, berries and bushes, and just about anything else in sight.  The bears even got into the chicken pen once and ate all of the chicken feed and a few chickens!

The only thing they wouldnt eat and still dont are the Rowan trees.  Also known as Mountain Ash, Rowan will grow just about anywhere, and in just about any type of soil!  As you may know - my soil is clay and sand for the most part, and I work hard to supplement every year and find ways to supplement the soil so I can get anything to grow.  The Rowan doesnt care!  It grows where ever the birds drop the seeds or anywhere that you plant it!  It has even survived in pots on the greenhouse patio here in Big Lake!  The moose will eat the berries but not the leaves.  The leaves and twigs have cyanide in them so they will kill the moose if they eat those parts.  Occasionally you will see a calf moose try to eat the twigs and leaves and that usually means they lost their momma early!

The flowers are beautiful and have a distinct aroma - I happen to love the smell but may people dont like the smell of these flowers.  They are lovely when the whole tree is covered with them.

The berries are wonderful as well and they can be used for a number of things.   Juice, jelly, tea, and dried for decorations.  It has been rumored that the wand that Harry Potter used was made of this type of ash!  It has a very interesting legacy as holding many magical properties. The birds love the berries, especially the Cedar Waxwings.  They come to the trees in November and December and feed on the berries.  It is so fun to watch the birds fluttering around the Rowans.  This tree is definitely a wildlife landscape tree to plant if for no other reason than the birds that it draws.

As you can see - even in winter with frost on them the leaves and berries are beautiful! This tree is very hardy and lives in Big Lake, Alaska where it has been -52 degrees before (probably colder but I'm pretty sure I had my head under the covers at that point)!  

(Photo credit for above photo used with permission from Ron Nicholl Photography)

If you don't have these locally that you can get yourself some from a number of sources.  I recently got some for the gardens at out local Rec Center from Cold Stream Farms  http://www.coldstreamfarm.net/c-56-ash.aspx  and they were a great resource - shipped at the right time, packed well and arrived healthy and hardy!  Prices were great and shipping wasn't astronomical either.

Grab a few and plant in a grouping. You wont be sorry, and your friends will want some as well!

Houston High and the Great Garden Harvest

Sorry folks - I thought I had already pushed the publish button on this one back in October!  Yikes!  Here it is a little late! 

Oh!  We had so much fun in the garden this summer!  Houston High and the Great Potato Project has come back to harvest again and this year we planted purple (blue) potatoes and they are wonderful!  They are even purple on the inside too!  We actually planted a few pounds of a few different varieties (Red 2 pounds, Yukon Golds 2 pounds, yellow finger 2 pounds, and blue/purple 2 pounds) for a total of 8 pounds of planted potatoes at the school garden.  If you remember from a previous blog we did tire plantings, raised bed planting, and we did pallet bin plantings, different varieties were spread throughout the garden in the different bins.  We went out with the kids to harvest and when we pulled the first tire bin open - behold the blues!  These potatoes are beautiful and we had great success with them too!  For our 8 pounds of planted potatoes we got 27 pounds 3 ounces of produce!  More than triple what we planted!

We had a civics class at the school that had to do some Community Service hours as part of a project they were doing for a grade and we had a number of them sign up to do garden work as their choice for completing those hours.  Some of the kids had never been in a garden before much less harvested their own food!  It was awesome so see how gently they began to dig carrots and then their excitement when an "actual carrot" came out of the soil!  

We grew the "Atomic Blend" carrot mix in our raised bed and the colors were so fun for the kids.  They didn't know carrots came in anything but orange!

This photo is fairly early in the season, by the time we harvested the carrots were about twice this size!

Spud diggers getting down and dirty!  With big smiles!

Even though we had grown potatoes last year, the kids were still stoked to be pulling those up and seeing how well they did - even in our poorest of growing medium!

A Culinary arts student dicing perfect potatoes for one of the classes in preparation for cooking them!

The Sun Gold tomatoes we planted in recycled tires were also a big hit - most of the kids thought you couldn't grow those outside here in Alaska!

 The tomatoes hung like grapes on the vines and they were perfect rounds and tasty!  Even through the windburn and some terrible weather over the summer the tomatoes thrived.  We were able to tie them up to the fence which makes the perimeter of the school as support.

This coming summer we are already gearing up to do a lot more - we will finish the hugelkulture beds and plant raspberries and strawberries, as well as out potatoes, carrots and tomatoes.  We will have some squash as well but will do more than one bin of carrots in our expansion.  We will have two apple trees that are hardy to Alaska, and we will have some Rhubarb as well to go along our fence with the tomatoes - maybe in tires - maybe not!  Stay tuned.....this season bigger and better!

I am terrified!

I am terrified!  I am terrified to let my son skate again after his shattered elbow even though it didn’t happen on the ice.  He is a thing of beauty to watch on skates but I am still terrified that he will break and we will be back to that fragile place where our whole family will be delicate, our skin will be tight, we will grit our teeth and have nightmares, and we will hear crying at night and wake to find that it is us crying.  I want nothing more than for the boy to be whole and live his dream.  I am terrified that he will not be able to play to his fullest potential.

I wrote that the day before my son Reed was to take the ice and try to be a hockey player again after 6 months, two surgeries, and a whole lot of physical therapy.   I need not have worried – at least not as much as I had been.  He took back to the ice like a fish to water and no one who sees him skate now can tell that he even had an injury.  He forgets that he had it sometimes even.  More often his coaches forget and once I even forgot and yelled at him to go harder – and then was ashamed at my rabid fan over decent mother actions!  He works so hard to make that work, and he still has some work to do.  I have had a few mothers ask "how could you let him do that knowing what can happen?"  I had to think long and hard about that for a while.  Sometimes I even though of excuses I could give as to why he shouldn't play again and stay home and safe and sound.  I had a pretty big list, and then I had an epiphany!  It would be so selfish of me to let him "dream big" - we have always told our kids to do that - and then to be so selfish as to try to keep him safe by not letting him try his dreams!  How could I let him drive a car, ride a 4 wheeler, or even go fishing in a boat?  People get hurt doing those things all the time!  So we let him go and try to live the dream!

Above photo shows the steel that came out of his arm.  5 plates and 32 screws.  The longest one is 4.5".  The steel had to be removed because even though the surgeon left room for him to grow - he outgrew the steel and wasn't able to progress in his physical therapy!

We had a rough day getting through that second surgery and a lot of friends (and cousins) came to help him get through.  Here he is fake punching his cousin right after coming out of the anesthesia in recovery.

And here he is playing Defense at the Olympic Oval in Vancouver B.C for a tournament!  Strong on that stick!

I still worry him to the point that he tells me to "stop clucking mom"!  Meaning I am acting like that mother hen clucking around the chicks!   I will probably always worry.  Now I know though that he is resilient, and he can survive things that I hope he never ever has to again!

Here's hoping that your new year is better than your best year and that all your people are safe and sound!