fireweed – Lofty Minded in Alaska

Five-Acre Almanac: July Energy

Week 45

All week I’ve been wondering when and how I’m going to find the time to sit and write this post. Whenever I think there is going to be time, something else comes along that seems to be more urgent. The truth is that our days are packed right now and I suspect they will continue to be for the next several weeks. Our summers may be short in terms of calendar days, but those individual calendar days have an awful lot of daylight in them and Alaskans typically try to fit into three months more than what’s humanly possible.

It’s time for gardening and having guests. The strawberries are ripening and the salmon are running. Our window of time for harvesting clover, fireweed, yarrow, plantain, raspberry leaves, and pineapple weed has opened and we’re trying to get enough to fulfill the needs of our fledgling herb tea business while we can. We still have full time jobs too, and we still need to eat and sleep and clean the kitchen now and again.

If this blog is meant to be a reflection of our lives on these five acres, then this post will have to reflect the fullness of these July days. It will have to reflect the way we move from one task to the next and the way we’re propelled forward by the season’s energy.

We can do this for a while. We can tend our garden and forage for wild herbs. We can stay up late visiting with friends. We can harvest a gallon of strawberries a day and empty our herb drying rack and fill it up again. We can make a batch of kimchi so as to not waste the greens and radishes we grew. We can brew up a batch of berry wine to clear the freezer of last year’s fruit. We can go to bed late, sleep hard if we’re lucky, and wake up early to a new day full of new tasks.

One of this weekend’s tasks was preparing a space for a Quonset hut on the northwestern corner of our property. The structure has been on our neighbor’s property for about fifty years and is part of the homestead that is being cleaned up and cleared out. We’ve wanted a covered space in that area for a long time but have not been able to prioritize the expense, and so when our neighbor proposed using a big piece of equipment to lift it up and plop it down on our property it seemed like an opportunity too good to refuse. It will need a foundation and a new cover, but it’s got a sturdy metal frame. And it was a gift. It’s amazing how sometimes if we wait, the things we need will come our way.

A road will go in just above our property line sometime later this summer so a semi can come in to remove cars, school buses, boats, house trailers, a giant boiler the size of a small house, and piles and piles of stuff that the original homesteaders collected. They saw value and potential in most everything, but now it’s time for it all to move on. Watching our neighbor clear out sixty year’s worth of collected homestead treasures makes our ever-looming garage project seem minuscule in comparison.

We said goodbye to a birch tree that was felled in order to make way for the pending road. It wasn’t on our property but it’s a tree we drove and walked past almost every day and we admired it from our back window. Nobody was happy to see it go but it seems there wasn’t a way to save it. To console myself I asked permission to go visit a much older birch on the property that hopefully isn’t going anywhere any time soon. I didn’t know of its existence until just a few weeks ago, but it’s a beauty, perhaps a relative of the grandmother birch that resides at the center of our own five acres.

I don’t know how a tree witnesses the world and I don’t know how a tree remembers. But it feels to me like the old birch trees are the historians of this place. They’ve survived high winds, heavy snow loads and moose munchings. Spruce have grown, died, and rotted around them. People have drawn and redrawn property lines that determine who owns them. Countless birds have perched on their branches and squirrels and ermine have tucked themselves inside their cracks and crevices. Bears, wolves and coyotes have sauntered beneath them. Porcupines have climbed up their trunks to hide away for sleeping.

A couple of years ago I was perusing the Alaska Digital Archives and found a photo of Grewingk glacier that was taken sometime between 1896 and 1913. The ice reached all the way out into the bay at a depth that was a quarter of the way up the mountain. I suspect the old birch trees around here were already well on their way when those photos were taken.

On Sunday as heavy equipment and chainsaws made way for the new road, I found some solace in the presence of that old burled birch tree and for a few minutes I put all of our crazy July hustle aside to marvel over its long and storied existence. I didn’t stay beside it for long because there were berries to pick and tomatoes to water in the greenhouse. There were herbs to shuttle from the drying rack to the pantry and as much as I wanted to forget about the sink full of dirty dishes in the kitchen, it wouldn’t stop gnawing at me. Of course there was this overdue blog post I wanted to start writing too.

Later, in my kitchen, I stood over the clean counter tops and looked out the back window at the space where the road is going to be built and where the birch tree used to be. I looked at the Quonset hut that’s now on our property and it hit me that for as long as we live here our list of things to do is going to keep growing longer. We’re never going to reach a point of having everything done because for every one thing we accomplish there are at least three more added to the queue.

As is often the case these days, I was too tired for writing at the end of the day so instead I made myself a cup of tea and sat for a few minutes before going to bed. Never in my younger years would I have predicted that one day I’d be thrilled about acquiring an old Quonset hut. I never knew that I’d find such satisfaction in growing garden vegetables or foraging for herbs. And I never imagined that I’d feel closest to God next to an old birch tree. But here I am, tired and happy.

Five-Acre Almanac: Fireweed #1

Week 8

When it comes to writing about fireweed, I’m not sure where to start. I could start by trying to describe how in this part of Alaska it colors the hillsides in magenta from mid July through the end of August. Or I could start with how it looks right now out our back window with its rust colored leaves alongside the green of the lilac bush and the yellow of the cottonwood trees.

I could start with the week in early summer when I caught a cold and couldn’t go to work for a few days. On my days at home I collected a few of last year’s fireweed stalks that were still standing and peeled the outermost layer of their stems and worked them until I had a fine golden fiber that I made into cordage. Or I could start with the tea we’ve started making out of fermented fireweed leaves.

It makes the most sense though to start with soil. Everything starts with soil it seems, but even the soil needs to start somewhere.

Growing up in Colorado I wasn’t familiar with fireweed, and the first time I learned about it was in 1988 when I was fighting fires in Yellowstone. The other woman on my 20-person crew told me how it was one of the first plants to come up on charred ground after a forest fire. At the time I didn’t know what it looked like, but I appreciated the role it played in bringing a place back to life after so much destruction. And I liked that its name and its purpose went together so nicely.

When we first moved to Alaska and lived in Eagle River I asked a neighbor what the tall plant on the side of the road was. She told me it was fireweed and that I’d need to be vigilant about pulling it out of the flower beds on the side of my house or it would take over. Then I had a baby and was anything but vigilant about the flower beds and the fireweed took over.

Now we live in a place that’s surrounded by well established fireweed colonies. This time of year when its seeds are dispersed with the wind, it lands on any exposed soil and settles in and readies itself for sprouting after the snow is gone. It spreads under the soil too, with rhizomes, and sends up delectable shoots that we collect sometimes to add to our spring greens. Its a plant that’s tenacious in its purpose and it would reclaim the space we’ve carved out for our garden in no time at all if we didn’t work to keep it back.

Two years ago a fire raged through the Cooper Landing area further north on the Kenai Peninsula, and twice this summer I drove past and witnessed the fireweed doing its job. In early July the ground under the charred trees was covered with short fireweed plants in full bloom. The second time I drove through in late August it was a sunny day and the cottony seeds were already drifting around in the breeze. It hadn’t grown tall and it had to complete its reproduction cycle with limited support from the soil, but it did it.

Soon it will all get knocked down by snow and all those plant parts will decompose into the ash. In the spring there will be organic matter for the new batch of seeds, and because there will be a bit more for those seeds to take root in next year than there was this year, those plants may be able to grow a little taller and last a little longer, and the cycle will repeat itself.

A few years ago we started raking fireweed stalks along with other dried plant material in the spring and keeping it piled up beside our compost pile. We layered it in as we added kitchen scraps and grass clippings and whatever other green material got tossed in. In the spring we’d sift the compost and add it to our garden beds.

Two summers ago when it was so hot and the fires were burning up north, we struggled to keep our garden watered. We don’t have a water source other than a well on our property and without any precipitation our rain barrels were empty. In addition to water being scarce, our soil lacked structure and the water drained right through. All of the compost we’d gone through the trouble of sifting wasn’t doing us a lot of good.

The following winter we read up on the subject of retaining water in the soil and decided to switch up the way we garden. Since then we’ve become no-till gardening converts and we obsessively keep the soil covered. We often use fireweed as our mulch because it’s here and readily available. The new shoots that want to come up in our garden beds get broken off and incorporated into the mulch blend, and the dried stalks from previous summers act as straw.

With just that simple change in how we garden the soil’s improvement has been remarkable. A peek beneath the mulch reveals a whole decomposition party going on. Now instead of the worms doing their work several inches down, they’re right at the surface of the soil tilling it up, breaking down whatever we add, and creating a living structure that holds moisture and nutrients.

There are many ways to use fireweed and I’m excited to write more about this amazing plant in future posts, but it’s good to remember that its best gifts have little to do with how we use it and more to do with how it exists. It’s a thing of beauty in all its stages. It heals the damaged places. It works to make the world a better place, whether we’re paying attention or not.

Garden bed tucked in for winter with fireweed straw on top

Five-Acre Almanac: Looking Out

Week 2

We have a big view from our property. When we stand on the edge of our meadow we can see nearly all of Kachemak Bay. We see mountains and ice fields and islands. We see where the river from the Grewingk Glacier spills into the ocean and when the sun is right we can see the way the silty water moves and disperses with the tides. The lights of the Homer Spit jut out into the bay, reminding us that in the distance there is a whole busy world of harbor life,restaurants, and gift shops.

When we moved here twenty-some years ago we could enjoy our big view from the picture window in our living room, but that’s changed. Nowadays most of what we see when we look out our south-facing window is green, at least this time of year.

A vegetable garden is directly in front of our house beside a small lawn, beyond that is a semi-wild area of raspberries, roses, and alders. Just to the south of all of that are several spruce trees that survived a bark beetle infestation that swept through the lower Kenai Peninsula in the mid 1990s. These days to fully appreciate our big view we have to go outside and take a short stroll down one of the paths we’ve carved out of the green zone that’s grown up between our house and the meadow below.

When the spruce bark beetles came through and killed all the mature spruce trees in their wake, we treasured the young trees that survived. Now those that were just a few feet tall back then have grown to create their own forest ecosystem, right in our view. The obstruction doesn’t bother me as much as it bothers other people, partly because I know that the panorama is just a few yards away, and partly because the forest gives us privacy and a protective barrier from noise and wind. And I won’t lie, I’ve become attached to a few of those trees, which I suppose is what happens when you watch a thing grow for a couple of decades.

Fire safety is on our minds though, and it demands that we start thinning some of our trees. Identifying the ones that need to go isn’t easy. How do we preserve the privacy and protection that the trees provide and still open it up enough to keep our house safe if a fire were to sweep through? Which of our favorites can we keep? The spruce bark beetles didn’t discriminate between the mature trees. They killed them all. I appreciate that I can be a bit more selective.

A few of the spruce have grown tall in precarious places. Removing them is going to require some fancy chain saw work and good planning so they won’t fall on our chicken coop or our garden. Most importantly I want to protect he grandmother birch tree that grows in the center of our five acres. I don’t know how old it is, but it was old when the original homesteader first got here. It’s the heart of this place, and my heart would break in two if a spruce tree fell on it.

Last winter we dropped one of the more straight forward spruce trees, one that wouldn’t harm anything in its fall. Now it’s stacked and drying. Just that one tree going down made a difference in our view and the extra light from the cleared space is a noticeable change. More light is a good thing, for my psyche and for our gardens. I’m just hoping we can strike the right balance between open and protected.

These days I gaze out the back window more often than the front window. There aren’t any bodies of water or mountains to look at in that direction, but there’s a stand of cottonwood trees in the distance where a family of bald eagles has built a nest, and right now the fireweed is blooming. The prayer flags we hung on our pea fence earlier in the spring have faded but everything else is brilliant. The orange nasturtiums against the fireweed against the bright white yarrow against a backdrop of green is like a magnet. My eyes are drawn to all that color. It feels nourishing the way sun on my skin feels nourishing in April. I’m taking it in while I can and trying not to mourn its absence before it’s even gone.