BRISTOL BAY

Not technically about our little growing farm, but I wanted to send out an update that I have made it safely to Bristol Bay and am happily holed up at the leader creek fish plant in Naknek. The office ladies have been lovely, the weather warm, oysters on the porch for lunch, a cozy couch to sleep on. Hopefully I will head out to the f/v Whiskey Creek in the wee hours of tonight. I will read and sleep and knit until. No cell service and poor interneting from my phone, but its great so far!

One last post before I leave.

In 8 hours I will be heading for the shuttle to the SeaTac airport.
In 19 hours I will be boarding the flight to Anchorage.
In 29 hours I will be arriving in King Salmon.
And sometime after that, I will make my way first to the Leader Creek office, then onto a tender, then out to Nushigak, then on to the m/v Whiskey Creek with Tim and Joe and Woody.
And Tilly will have to be a very good dog while I'm away.

But what good timing to have my parents come just as I am leaving! Just in time to watch the chickens and sweet Puppy Tilly! In the few days of overlap we've had, we have been very busy with dinner guests and house work. First on our list of visitors were Heidi and Launi, the previous owners of our beautiful Honeymoon Bay house and the party responsible for all the outstanding landscaping and arboretum.

Heidi and family

Over grilled salmon on the sunny porch, they shared the stories of the house and let us love it through their eyes of 30 years here. We walked the gardens deadheading rhododendrons, learning the names of all the plants, and pointing out which ones should go. By the time we reached the cars, conversations lingered. We bought the house for the view and the buildings and the land without knowing it also came with such good friends and neighbors.

Launi and family

The following night, we kept our good hospitality flowing and had friends from long ago for dinner. About 15 years ago, Rhonda and Gordon moved from Juneau to Whidbey Island for the Waldorf Schools and peaceful gardening. With more potato salad and grilled salmon, we had yet another lovely evening visiting until dark threatened to impede their motorcycle ride home. In the morning, we stopped by their house to return items and got the full tour of their enchanted gardens and delightful goats and ducks and tiny dog.

 Grandpa and Gordon taking a turn churning the ice cream

I've just been looking back over my bloggy records and saw that Tilly had her first "run away" search training on April 13th! It has only been just over a month, and already Tilly can find a person hiding over 100 feet away in thick brush and then lead me back to them reliably! I am amazed at how quickly she picks up on new information and applies it, in a few short lessons going from chasing someone who runs away to being let out of the car and beginning searching for an unknown person in the woods somewhere, following my ques what areas to head towards. I generally do not know where the person is hiding other than a vague and increasingly large area to search, and my only indication of her successful find is the cues she gives me. She quickly follows scent back to the source, then after spending a few minutes evaluating that source with tail wagging, she races back to me and touches me to alert me to her find, then leads the way back through woods to the hiding volunteer. Even with deer popping out of the woods near by, she stays focused on her task until she's gotten her frisbee, stick, treats, and praise to end the game. She'll have three weeks off from training while I am gone fishing, but I have no doubt she will be right back at it when we return to training.

Rain, green rain

For three nights in a row and a fair amount of the connecting days, we had rain! Finally, water replenishing the well, replenishing the gardens, replenishing the grass and trees and chickens and all else! I was beginning to wonder how long it would be before the rain returned. After the rain comes and goes, and the sun returns, everything green leaps up - like the potatoes! They are now all a foot tall seemingly over night.

What else have we been up to? I assisted with my first real search! Because Tilly isn't up to snuff yet, she stayed home to avoid distracting, and because I'm not up to snuff yet, I got to help man the base camp, meaning hang out and eavesdrop on the radio chatter and run errands such as picking teams up from one area and delivering them to another, or going for pizza. All-in-all, not bad and free pizza is always good.

Back at home Tilly and I tried to walk all the way to Freeland along the beach and got to the next big point before there were a suspicious number of "no trespassing" signs and a house in view. Next time we will start from Freeland and walk back to see if that is the only problem house and thus worth sneaking past, or if it continues to get more crowded.

As we were walking the beach, I saw a medium critter bounce past at full speed, looking suspiciously like Tilly, but then a second critter even more like Tilly was bouncing right behind and I looked again to see the first critter was a Tilly-sized baby deer. "Tilly! Come!" and with that magic word, her head and body snapped around and continued full speed but changed the trajectory for straight to my feet, coming to a skidding halt for praise. Far more than I expected from my little rebel!

On other projects, I've got the pig barn almost finished. Now we need the roof, and the attachable run area and we will be all set for Oliver, the 11lb micro-pig. This barn also suitable for use with new mother hens and clutches of chicks or sick birds needing isolation.

Crafts On Whidbey held the first official crafting class! Which turned out to be my friend Cassidy and I hanging out and having a lot of fun chatting and felting. No complaints there, though making $50 while hanging out would have been a plus.

Mom and Dad come tomorrow, Uncle Joel leaves today, but MOST EXCITING OF ALL: I am going to join Tim and Joe and Woody up on the m/v Whiskey Creek commercial fishing in Bristol Bay, the edge of the Bearing Sea! I AM SO EXCITED. I am excited to see my husband again, and I am excited for the challenge, for work to be proud of! And the pay check will be quite nice.

Productive with little proof

Today was one of those days where I did a lot! There's just not much to show for it. For example, I spent the morning finishing Tim's double knit thick, fleece lined, hand spun wool hat and took it and a bag of other items to the post office to be packaged up and sent to Naknek, Alaska before his boat goes in the water on the 12th or 14th (never put a fishing boat in the water on Friday the 13th!). 

Once all that was done, I hauled the hose back up from the compost pile to the upper garden, finding I can wrap it around my whole lower parking area and still reach. The new seeds wont be up for at least another week, but our mulch pile has turned into a potato pile with green tops sticking up everywhere! Also the tomatoes are trucking along. I really need to get the starts out of the greenhouse and into the garden, though I'm running out of space up there.

While grandpa watered, I filled a wheelbarrow with weeds for the chickens, then collected a second wheelbarrow from my horribly neglected garden in the middle of our driveway turn around. Under all those horsetails, there is giant cilantro and miniature carrots that got pulled up with the horsetails. Also, the lettuce looks great in there, though tastes a bit bitter like dandelions.

I can stand in one spot and fill the wheelbarrow without making a significant impact. I have to tell myself I am collecting chicken food and not trying to save the garden or it would be hopelessly overwhelming. Perhaps if I collect several wheelbarrows of weeds every day for the chickens, we will someday be at a manageable level of weeds. My weeding was to feed the chickens, but also to stall myself waiting for sunset. Once the sun starts going down, the chickens become calm, docile, and sleepy which makes for the perfect time to mess with them (Tilly can confirm we like to take advantage of our sleepy pets). My other big accomplishment of the day besides knitting a had and relocating a hose was re-branding all the chicks!

Their blue baby leg bands were getting rather snug, so I methodically went through all the chicks and removed them, replacing all but four with the grown-up and official large yellow leg bands. The two marans that I want to keep - a rooster and hen, have feathered legs which seems uncomfortable with that leg band rubbing so I liberated them now while they are young and easy. I'm thinking if they are to be my breeding pair to populate the hen house with endless baby chicks and chocolatey brown eggs, perhaps they should have proper names: Henry and Henrietta? Hansel and Gretel? Bonny and Clyde? Andy and Annie? Barbi and Ken? Lucy and Ricky? Fred and Wilma? Barney and Betty? Popeye and Olive? Adam and Eve? Kermit and Mrs. Chicky? We need some votes. And since Tim isn't here...

So anyways, Mr. and Mrs. Chicken are infinitely identifiable with or without their leg bands as being particularly beautiful and feathery legged. The other two that have escaped the yellow badges of honor are "Little Chicken" who has such delicate and graceful features, that even when she is bigger than some of the others, her feet still slip right through the bands; and "Hospital Chicken" who is still rather small, but again, one of two "buff" colored chickens and one of two "lavender" colored chickens - these two also stand out in the crowd. It's mostly all the chickens who are shades of grey or "blue" who need the identifying, and to distinguish which of the white chickens is friendly ("Russia") and which one is the most skiddish thing ever ("Ukraine" - named for their baby markings and not their personalities).

So this is gross. One cocoon is really cool; watching the little caterpillar wrap itself up in a tiny home only to emerge much later as a moth - pretty amazing stuff. But coating every bit of green, brown, grey, black, red, blue, yellow, orange, purple, or white around... It's a bit much. Here they are taking advantage of the little spaces in the gate, and lining the trim around the barn...

And covering the undersides of the railings. I saw someones mailbox that was nearly inaccessible due to the little white clumps filling it. Hopefully the birds like the moths better than they liked the caterpillars.

And this little guy loves to gobble up the moths! My next Crafts On Whidbey class is going to be Felted Critters and Characters: needle felting animals and dolls. I figured I should make an example so the fiber-phobes out there could get an idea what it's all about.

Camora happy

The tent caterpillars are something from a horror movie. A really uneventful horror movie where people run off screaming into the night because a tent caterpillar fell out of a tree on to their head or is crawling up their leg and must be flicked away. They are thick on every surface, every plant, every railing, every foot of the now-orange street. There was even one on the floor of my bedroom, invading everywhere!

I have the sinking feeling that the black sand covering the landings of the stairs is actually droppings from all the tent caterpillars.

And even our large, handsome, hungry chickens won't eat those critters. They are beginning to form cocoons and hopefully the air will soon be full of fat happy birds gorging themselves on dull brown-gray moths.

 On the plus side, the tent caterpillars aren't the only thing appearing on the plants. There are a few ripe, juicy berries and a bounty of green ones soon to become something delicious. 

The stairs to the beach are a particularly appealing place for berry picking if you can reach over the tent caterpillars.

For a while I've been meaning to post a picture of my husbands handiwork on the point of the beach. With pieces of driftwood and washed up rope, Tim made a rather impressive slat-backed bench looking out at the waves which makes a lovely place to sit while the dogs run about all over the beach getting in trouble.

Up in the garden, the flowers continue to bloom, even pink poppies! Even without rain in what seems like a month, everything is still green and lush and alive and moist. It is an enchanted place here.

Grandpa finally got tired of hearing other people brag about their gardens and waiting for me to get motivated to plant all the beds I put so much work into digging and tilling. This morning he and I took the drawer of seeds up to the garden and Grandpa hoed littl vallys to be filled with seeds, tamped them down, and marked each row with a stick. We now have a garden filled with little perspective vegetables of every kind in all eight garden beds, plus the tomatoes and occasional eggplant running the length. Grandpa even found some cages so we could plant an entire bed of hot peppers for Tim