Fall is coming to an end...

The geese and Sandhill Cranes are gathered at Creamer's Field for a stop before heading south.  The trees are nearly bare.  The woodshed is almost full.  The raised garden beds and greenhouse sit empty.  The frenzy of summer is coming to an end and our short fall too. 

 Fall is only about 3 weeks long, and every minute of it is planned to be ready for winter.  Even though we plan to spread woodcutting out over the summer, we don't,  and end up going every weekend until we have 6 cords.  There is the rush to get the garden and berries picked and preserved.  The furnace serviced, summers toys packed away or buried under the snow until spring, and the random projects... like the heater core my son's car needs.

As much as I adore the 24 hours of sunlight, flowers, gardening, and the absence of snow, the frenzied pace of summer is exhausting, and I love the slower pace of winter.   Shhhh don't tell anyone I said that.  Be sure you don't remind me of this post when I complain about -40 this winter.

Fall Is Here

Wow really my last post was in May?  That’s terrible.  I have a plan to get back on track.  Really this time I mean it!  Thank you for loyal followers sticking around, and for the new followers!

What have I been doing?  Well who knew that starting a business (um, yes, while working full time even though my husband is doing the bulk of the actual work) would take all my time?  Yeah, I know, any of you who have started a business probably could have told me that.  So wild rose cupcakes (and now cakes too) has continued all summer and now into the fall.  We have several orders scheduled for October getting us off to a good start as the Farmer’s Market season comes to an end.   

Here are some of our cupcakes

 

Here is my favorite cake I’ve made so far, a princess cake for a 4 year old, the doll was provided by the customer.

 

What else has been going on?  Well my sister got married and we had a lovely trip to Bellingham for the wedding, and to Oregon to visit family.  Yep we did the wedding cupcakes. 

The garden went totally crazy while we were gone. I really didn't give it the attention I should have this year, maybe because I knew we were going to be out of town during the prime picking time. So chickweed took over, many things bolted, it was kinda ugly.  We are busy digging potatoes, carrots and still need to get the last of the cabbage, kale and swiss chard from the garden before a hard freeze takes everything. 

Yes we are in full fall mode now, the hard frost is just around the corner...

There have been hard frosts near us, but so far it hasn't hit us.  My homegrown, misguided Delphinium finally decided to bloom?  

Finally my tomato update!  Yep we got tomatoes this year!  Ok so they aren't ripe, but there are definitely TOMATOES!  Ok, and so the ones I grew from seed died, and we bought these already started from Hawks Greenhouse, but whatever, we have tomatoes!!  We have taken the tomatoes from the green house and they are hanging in the garage to hopefully ripen.  How do you ripen your green tomatoes?

Our new layers (this is one of our two Delaware), we also have 3 new Ameraucana and they have started to lay cute little eggs.  We have yet to add a few of our older layers to the stew pot, but that will be coming before winter.

 

 

 

 

 

We have been adding to the woodpile, looking forward to our first fire of the year, but then again, that really means winter is coming, so we haven't got the stove going yet.

What's Going On Around Here

Ok, so I'm soooo far behind in my posting, that I'm going to do a picture post of what's going on.

In late March we went to san Antonio for a conference and enjoyed some 80 degree weather while we still had snow on the ground.  I came home April 1 to "break up"

The snow melted fairly quickly, but green up still didn't happen until mid May

Our older chickens are enjoying being out of their coop all day

Last weekend our Bronze Turkeys enjoyed moving from the garage to outdoors

We have a few replacement layers still in the garage, we have 4 Ameraucana and 2 Delaware.  Ameraucana have been our best layers all winter, we have never grown Delaware before.  We didn't hatch any, and we are not doing any chickens for meat this year.  (it refuses to quit writing in italics!)

The Rhubarb is coming up, no sign of the strawberries, apparently they didn't enjoy or -50 this winter.

The starts are being hardened off outdoors.  This could have happened much earlier and they should be in the ground already, but my life has been taken over by cupcakes!!!

Yep Wild Rose Cupcakes is still selling cupcakes at the Tanana Valley Farmers Market. 

The tomatoes did get moved out a couple weeks ago.  We did put some heating coils under the soil to keep it a bit warmer in there, with the intention of getting them out early May, but in reality we didn't need them because they didn't get moved out until mid May and it was plenty warm then.   They look great mostly because they were purchased from a greenhouse.  Mine managed to all die again this year after transplanting the first time.  I don't get it!

Pollinating with an electric toothbrush. 

Well that's a very quick update of the past 2 months!  This weekend our goal is to get the garden beds planted.

More Dog Mushing - Open North American Chapmpionship

March is my favorite month here in Fairbanks.  Not only are we getting around 12 hours of light, and warming up nicely, it's also a fun month.  We have the Ice Art Championship, dog mushing, and are treated with wonderful northern lights.  This weekend we managed to have all three, reminding me just why I love it here.

The Open North American Championship is a 3 day sprint race that starts in downtown Fairbanks.  I tried to find how long the trail is, but for some reason I could not. I also forgot my camera and was not able to snap photos of the race, but did grab a couple videos.

Second street is closed down, truckloads of snow are brought in and packed to make a trail for the start of the race.

There was a fur action, not something you see everyday...

 

A couple videos of the racers starting, sorry about the poor video

A dog pull, I'm not sure how much weight, but it was a sled of cement logs

It was a beautiful sunny day, and a fun way to spend the afternoon.  It used to be something my kids enjoyed with us, but being teenagers on spring break, they were barely climbing out of bed and didn't want to come.  However they were a little miffed that we stopped at the Fudge Pot and had drinks and snacks that they missed out on!

Here is a link to a news story that covered the race, it also has some nice pictures of a couple of the mushers http://newsminer.com/bookmark/17921822-Salcha-musher-in-position-for-first-Interior-Alaska-victory-in-ONAC-in-20-years

Ice Sculptures - At Ice Alaska

We spent the evening at Ice Alaska

Enjoying this year's sculptures

The kids enjoyed the ice slide

It's even more fun at night!

Smaller slides

Ice Tunnels

And beautiful sculptures.  Amazing what can be made from a single block of ice. 

I love how they light up at night

This awesome sculpture won first prize for the multi-block competition

And an ice top!

The web sitie is http://www.icealaska.com/

Yukon Quest Sled Dog Race

The quest starts downtown Fairbanks on the frozen Chena River

Today was the beginning of the Yukon Quest International Sled Dog race.  It is a 1000 mile race this year from Fairbanks to Whitehorse Yukon.  The start alternates each year, next year the race will begin in Whitehorse and end in Fairbanks.  I didn't actually go this year, I worked, but my husband and daughter spent a little time there this am.  It was a chilly start, -20 this am, not too nice for the spectators, but good for the mushers and dogs, being too warm is hard on them.  As my husband is not really into this blogging thing, he doesn't seem to see the need to bring the camera or snap pictures of everything to maybe blog later, so these pictures are from several years ago. 

These dogs sure can't wait to run!

The course follows the route of the historic 1890s Klondike gold rush, mail delivery, and transportation routes between Fairbanks, Dawson City and Whitehorse. Mushers pack up to 250 pounds of equipment and provisions for themselves and their dogs to survive between checkpoints. They are permitted to leave dogs at checkpoints and dog drops, but not to replace the.  The Sleds may not be replaced (without penalty) and mushers cannot accept help from non-racers except at Dawson City, the halfway mark. Ten checkpoints and four dog drops, some more than 200 miles  apart, lie along the trail.  Veterinarians are present at each to ensure the health and welfare of the dogs.  (Wikipedia) I've heard it is the hardest sled dog race.

One of the mushers, sorry I have no idea which year or which musher this is.

My son at a much younger age.  Clearly a much warmer year, since he's only wearing a sweat shirt

If you want to learn more about the race or would like to follow the results here is a link to the official web site  http://yukonquest.com/

What do we do when it's -50

This was snapped last Saturday night.   We were at the movies and I went out to start my car (out in the hall to start it with an autostart, not outside) 1/2 way through and checked the temp  I was just reading in the paper that this was the 5th coldest January in history with an average temperature of -26.9 degrees, 18 days -40 or colder and 9 of negative -30.  This was the coldest we got in Fairbanks, but other outlying areas hit -60 or colder.  And FYI the forecast on the picture lies, we remained at least -20-30 until this am, it has now warmed up to about -9 buy this evening. 

A reader asked what we do when it's this cold and do the kids still have school?  So for lack of anything else to post, I decided to make a post out of it.

Mostly life goes on as usual.  We still work, because it can be super cold for weeks.  Yes the kids still go to school.  School has only closed twice in the 13 years I've lived here, both were for freezing rain.  I think we may be the only place that closes for rain and never for snow or cold!  The biggest problems in the extreme cold is we get a layer of ice fog over the city, the colder it is the worse it is.  The coldest days were on Saturday and Sunday, and the ice fog was really severe.  I have heard that in the 70's the ice fog was so bad they did close schools, so maybe if it hadn't improved during the week they could have closed.   The theory is that parents will still need to go to work, leaving children home alone in potentially deadly weather conditions if they were to venture outside when they shouldn't, so it's generally considered safer to have them go.  When it's colder than -20, they do stay inside for recess.

Cars don't like this super cold.  I don't think I would drive long distances in it.  I've heard stories of people pumping gas in the -50 and the hose breaking over the weekend.  We have so many frozen cars waiting to be towed is a long wait.  Cars can freeze even though they are plugged with block, battery and oil pan heaters in cold like that.  Fan belts snap, hoses break, etc...  Both of our cars actually overheated in the -50, we think because the lines were freezing and not circulating like they should.   Homes and workplaces have outlets for their employees, but when you are out and about grocery shopping for example, there isn't a way to plug in.  When it was -50 we started the car about every 1-1.5 hours while we were out.  We did go to dinner and a movie to celebrate our anniversary and the restaurant was full.  So life just goes on.  

We burn wood and have an oil boiler.  However we did burn 250 gallons of oil in 2 weeks which is the most we've ever used, we are also going through much more firewood than usual (we also had a record setting cold spell in November too)  The house generally stays warm, and is very comfortable.  The dogs need to stay in a lot more and are constantly underfoot driving me crazy.  We kept the rabbits and chickens warm with just a heat lamp in their coop.  The coldest it got in there was 35 degrees. 

So that's what we do when it's -50 outside.  We also take tropical vacations, Hawaii is easy to get to and extremely popular destination for Alaskans in January and February.

Brrrrrr

I think this picture says it all!!!