Oh what a year we have had!!! It was cold, dark and we were told to stay home for the most part all the time! This is a hard thing for Alaskans! Our daylight in the winter is very short - some places get no sun for months, my area gets only a couple hours of light a day. We NEED to be out in it. Sometimes, when we are busy as all get out, we leave home in the dark and come home in the dark and we dont see sun for days or weeks! We try to make up for it in the summer months when it is all outdoors and daylight all the time - literally 24 hours of light per day! We have to make the most of it!
June 17, 2021 10:58 pm Sunset touching the lake.
Our school was open for the whole year for in person learning, and we worked hard, HARD! We had some rough patches, but we survived and we also had some very great things happen! We are a combined Jr/Sr High school now so we have grades 6-12 at our school, and we have everyone in cozy like, tucked everywhere. Our Middle School was destroyed in the 2018 earthquake, and they are just now beginning to build a new school out here, the new one will become the High School. We are so excited!
The groundbreaking went great and we had lots of excited, happy people there! Equipment is on site and the beginnings have begun!
One of the other great things that happened this year is that one of our teachers, Mrs Wendy Bredberg, got a tree grant from the Alaska Department of Natural Resources, Community Forestry Program, so that we could add apple trees to our garden! It was a lot of work to make this happen, the paperwork seemed endless and we had to map the school garden while there was 4 feet of snow on it! It all worked out great though!
Our trees came from Fire Apple Orchards on Hollywood Road in Big Lake, and they have a wonderful orchards and gardens! Dan and Nancy Moore are the owners and are so knowledgeable. They are happy to share their knowledge and help to make sure your tree planting will be successful! The orchard is so large that they use the wheeler and trailer to haul the trees to my car - yes that is a GMC Acadia - my SUV - the "U" does stand for "Utility" after all! He thought it was hilarious that I was putting them in the car but our trees had blossoms to set fruit and I didn't want them to get blown off by the wind driving down the road.
This is one of the gates to the orchards. I love that is says "romance" above one of the rows. It was a fun job to pick up the trees! The trees we got are; Parkland, Westland, Battleford, Norland, Norkent, and September Ruby. We chose them for hardiness in our area, eating and cooking qualities.
Here they are safe and sound in the yard of the school garden. Waiting for it to get cooled down enough to plant them. And we have some holes to dig too! You can see the tanks from our water system to the left of the trees. We have to fill those about three times per summer. Huge thanks to the Bredberg family for that donation!
Here is Christy Way helping to measure the spaces for the trees. We planted as recommended about 10-12 feet apart. The area we are planting in is also used as a storage area right now for both the schools, so we have to be careful to plant where the orchard area won't be needed as a storage ground!
Huge shout out to the McRoberts family; Ryan, Ashlynn and Alayna, for coming to help dig the holes and bringing the Kubota for the assist! The area we are planting in is very rocky and graveley and it would have taken us 6 days to dig the 6 holes for the trees if we had to dig them with shovels and people! Life saver!
We used a mix of our soils that we have had donated - topsoil from Davis Constructors from when they put the turf down and took up the topsoil from under the football field, and composted horse manure donated by the Weber family and their friends! Great stuff to grow in!
We also used the "complete fertilizer" blend from Arctic Organics in the bottom of the holes when we watered in to plant the trees. We just had to go for it and choose the "coolest hot day". The trees were at risk of becoming too "hot in the pot" and being damaged by it. We also run the risk of damaging them if we plant when it is too hot - 6 of one I guess - We didn't have a day in sight of cooler weather any time soon so we had to go for it!
We planted on a separate day than the digging of the holes, with the help of a couple of kids who want to remain nameless; even though "working in the garden is cool Mrs. Humphreys"!
We showed the kids how to break apart the roots of the trees
so that they know they have been released from the pots. Apples tree roots are prone to grow the same
direction as they have been growing in the pots if they aren’t released this way
and they will strangle themselves.
Here is the September Ruby tree with the apples on it! WooHoo! We did have a little yellowing of some leaves - probably transplant shock - but they seem to be recovering and didnt drop all the blossoms or fruit! We had four out of the 6 trees that will produce apples this year.
These photos are from just about two weeks ago around 4th of July. You can see the yellowing here, but also in the background that there are some clouds and that means it has cooled off a bit so the trees can recover. The tree above is Parkland, and it has about 40 apples on it. It will have to have some of the fruit culled off of it so that it will feed its roots too. If you let it set too many apples in the first year or two, it doesnt feed the root system enough to survive winters.
This is the Westland tree - "our little Westland". It is a younger tree than the others so no apples on it this year - I chose this one because I am familiar with it for its hardiness and good eating apples. I have one here at the farm also. The grey grid at the bottom of the photo is a stem protector.
This is the Norkent apple. It has one little apple on it that will be good eats when it is mature! We expect great things next season with all of these trees. You can see how the stem protectors work, they keep out the voles, rabbits and other critters that might want to eat the bark off and kill the tree! Some folks use a wire mesh as a stem protector but it is really difficult to cut and wrap; these ones are much more kid friendly.
Here is that Parkland a few weeks later when we know that all of these baby apples could turn into big apples, so it has come time to cull some off of it. This is the only tree we will have to cull this year - we had a little blossom drop on the other three; either from transplant stress or not getting pollinated well.
Here I am! Sad! Cutting off the smaller of the apples from the Parkland so we get good big apples on the tree and it will feeds its own roots too. The key is to take the smallest ones, and keep the biggest ones.
It is ideal accouding to Doug at Snowfire Gardens (my dad and a fruit tree expert), if the apples dont touch each other. It is one of my hardest things to do - culling the apples - I am a "but it wants to live" girl! I like to give credit for effort! But I have also killed a tree or two by letting it overproduce! That is a really, really sad thing!
Here they are! All planted and pretty! We have put wire fencing surrounds around them for right now. We arent able to fence the whole garden area right now- that is in the plan for when the school separates and the garden doesn't share space with storage connexes and other stuff. We have to have the surrounds to keep the moose from eating the trees down to the ground in the winter should they get into the campus fence- it happens more often than we like- even though we like to see the moose!
Due to the gravelly nature of the orchard area and the heat wave that we have been having, we are watering every other day to keep the trees healthy using the water tanks and gravity feed system. We have 450 feet of hose that we can attach to the spigots on the school, but it is so heavy it takes the football team to yeard it out and it really isnt fun for one person or even two to yard it out and water everything! We also have had great help from our Youth-360 kids and staff who are here 4 days a week and have been helping keep the water flowing on our plants and trees!
Hee is the resting bench in the orchard. I built it from a Pinterest project that I saw. You can see my version of it here so you can easily build your own!
We also have a beautiful garden planted here at the school with cabbage, tomatoes, Kale, potatoes, beans, fennell, rosemary, squash, pumpkins, and peppers! We had help from the McRoberts family and miss Sarah G who donated the peppers and helped plant and water!
This is our Fennel, with a few weeds and a couple of Rosemary plants that are in the very end of the bin. We will dig those up for the winter and bring them indoors.
Here is the cabbage with the carrots and radishes in the background. Cabbage has done wonderfully, and the radishes did well too but we have had a struggle with the carrot seed germination. It may have been because the spring was so cool - not sure - maybe by September they will turn into actual carrots - stay tuned!
Here is the Kale bin - we have about 4 different varieties here and I cannot wait to have some of the kale chips that I know the culinary arts class will make with them! I planted extra kale this year so I could make a little extra chips and have some for the freezer.
In case you missed it - see the information and recipes about kale chips here. They are a favorite!
I know this was a long one and I thank you for sticking with us for the whole thing! Stay tuned for the updates when we pick apples and harvest some of these yummies!
As we roll into a new fall and school year I hope you are blessed with bountiful harvests and good weather to glean it! Blessed be!