gardening fun

It's been a great year for gardens in southcentral Alaska. Sun, sun, and more sun, with just enough rain to keep things well watered. Just in time, our perennial beds have finally filled in, we started a rooftop vegetable garden, and I inoculated a few birch stumps with oyster mushroom mycelium this spring. Success all around!

Here are a few oyster mushrooms I'll be eating tonight, along with a rice pilaf and pink snapper. I'm stoked this worked! I was growing oyster mushrooms indoors last winter (a kit from fungi perfecti, super easy and mine produced plenty). I read that you could innoculate stumps and logs if you timed it right. We had to cut a few birch trees from our yard, so we waited two weeks (long enough for the tree's antifungal compounds to degrade, but hopefully not so long that another fungus moves in), then scored the stumps with a chainsaw and stuffed the oyster mushroom mycelium/straw mixture in. A few months later and they're starting to produce!

Here's a shot of our rooftop garden. I'm standing near the peak of our roof, looking down on our flat mudroom roof. The mudroom is around 10' by 10', and say 8-10 feet tall. Jon framed the outside of the roof like you would a wall, built 2' wide planter boxes for the sides and a patio for the center. We have a ladder up the back for access, and put in soaker hoses so that watering is as easy as turning on the hose by the driveway. The veggies are a little behind because we got them in the ground so late. By the time we built the boxes/patio and hauled up the soil it was early June, but that's ok. A good trial run for next year, and I think we'll get a few cabbages and zucchini out of it before freezeup. Bonus - no possible way our veggies can be eaten by moose! It's like they have a sixth sense, as soon as your veggies are ready to harvest it's almost guaranteed that a moose will come through and mow them down. No more free ride, moose! A great way to make use of the space, and further reducing the amount of impervious surface on our lot.

While I was up there, I snapped a shot of our backyard/pond/patio. You'll be happy to know the fish are all doing well. Have I mentioned how great it is to have a husband who does landscaping?

The gentians are in full bloom (Gentiana septemfida). They're little, but I love them. Especially how the buds have that spiraled look.

Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve

Believe it or not, I was lucky enough to have a paid work trip to Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve. It's an amazing place, one of the least visited units of our National Park system. The caldera in the center of the monument makes it pretty clear that Aniakchak is in the ring of fire - 6 miles wide and 2,500 feet deep, the caldera is what's left of a stratovolcano that blew its top around 3,000 years ago. Pretty darned impressive. The volcanic history of the area combined with tectonic uplift leaves some pretty neat geology. Depending on what portion of the monument you're in, you could find old glacial till, sedimentary layers, columnar volcanic rock, or vast barren cinder flats.

I'm not sure how well it shows up in the photo, but this is an area where Lindsay Flagstad (AKNHP ecologist and my field partner for the trip) and I saw these neat layers of sedimentary (horizontal layers) and volcanic (vertical columns) rock atop each other.

There were lots of neat volcanic features along the coast, near the mouths of the Aniakchak River and Plenty Bear Creek. Plenty of jutting columns, and even places where the intensive erosive forces along the coast wore away the rock into arches and caves.

There was another less catastrophic eruption in the early 1930s that sent ash and pyroclastic materials (imagine little molten rock blobs flying through the air) as far as 40 miles away. the ashfall buried plant communities, which are gradually on the comeback in portions of the park covered by ash. Check out these big, barren cinder flats, it was like walking on the moon.

Unfortunately, I don't have any great caldera photos. Lindsey and I did get up to the lip of the caldera, but the fog was so thick we couldn't see a thing. In fact, our helicopter landed downslope to take us back to camp and we actually had to play Marco Polo with our pilot to find him.

Here's a shot of a park service cabin Lindsey and I spent a week in. Pretty sweet. This is actually the view from the outhouse. There are lots of big coastal brown bears in this part of the park. One day, while I was in the outhouse, Lindsey came across one near the cabin. She hollered at him and he took off, which was good, but he came straight for the outhouse, which was very bad! It's never a good thing to hear your buddy yelling "hey, hey bear, get away from there!" while you're in a rickety little outhouse without a door, with your pants down. You can imagine the thoughts going through my head - boy will this be a humiliating obituary... so I started banging the heck out of the side of the outhouse with my trusty can of bear spray, which made such a ruckus Lindsey said the bear took off in a hurry. whew.

Can you see all the bear tracks? The beach was a bear superhighway!

and man, were they big!

We even went swimming once, here are my tracks out to the water and back to prove it!

And there were loads of cool plants. Leymis mollis, a beach rye, surrounded the cabin and held these neat beach dunes with little bits of beach pea (Lathyrus maritimus), Senecio pseudoarnica, Honkenya peploides, Mertensia maritima, and Cakile edentula.

and one of my favorites, the monkey flower (Mimulus guttatus)!

Working in the alpine environments was a trip, so many new plants! The first few plots were overwhelming, but once we figured out the difference between the Diapencia and Loiseleuria, we were on a roll... here's Lindsey, hard at work. This is basically what we were doing for our two weeks out.

We even found spotted ladyslipper orchids (Cypripedium guttatum), which aren't common in Alaska!

We did squeeze in a mini-packraft adventure. To cross the Aniakchak we managed to fit two people, two full packs, a shovel, and a shotgun in one Alpacka raft. We ferried across, worked upstream throughout the day, and then floated down to get back to our cabin. Things were going well until a sow and cub forced us to abandon our float, top our boots, and revert to packraft-as-sled mode for a while. Such is life. Definitely take bear spray if you're heading out this way!

We staged in Port Heiden (outside the monument) for a bit, and hiked out to the old village site on a day when it was too windy for the helicopter to fly. check this out - one of the old houses had slat boards plastered with 1929 newspapers. I liked the drawings from the fashion section.

So, yeah. A great trip, beautiful place, fun work, and great people. I can't think of a better way to spend a few weeks of my summer.

Inlet Photos

I did a bit of work in western Cook Inlet this summer. Flying over the inlet is one of my favorite things - all of the neat patterns in the mudflats!