 |
| St. Francis knee deep in snow |
I’m being dragged into spring faster than I want to go. Because Dan is an apple grower, he gets calls from all the garden clubs to share his knowledge as a guest speaker. This year his talks started in January. How any one can be enthusiastic about growing apple trees in January I’ll never understand,but enthusiastic they are. On top of that, all the garden groups have conventions an symposiums. Dan goes to these as well. We get chirpy little emails like this one in February:
“Time is flying by and the daylight is getting longer. Are your thumbs turning green yet? Wanna play in the dirt? I know I do!”
Not I. I haven’t finished playing in the snow. Besides no one is going to be playing in the dirt for a while. The ground is still covered with snow. In the garden, St. Francis is still knee deep in it.
It doesn’t take long for the sun to separate Alaskans into two camps. Snow dancers and green thumbs. I’m a snow dancer. Old snow isn’t the best for a nice ski so snow dancers watch the weather every night hoping for a fresh dump. They ride around with “Think Snow” bumper stickers. Today is a good day for snow dancers. Four new inches.
The other camp is easy to pick out. They stop you in the grocery store parking lot with the snow falling down on their heads and ask if you started your seeds yet. I usually tell them I don’t want to think about seeds yet. I’m not finished with winter. They then give you the long list of seeds they have started. Often they are most proud of the brand new variety of something they have found which, more often than not, turns out to be something that won’t grow in Alaska.
Dan has a foot in each camp. He wants the snow to keep coming for awhile. Once its gone we can’t snow machine to the cabin. We have to walk. He still wants to ice fish. And there is the job of getting in the year’s supply of wood. You need a snowmachine for that. Snow is also good for the orchard. It keeps the tree roots insulated against prolonged cold.
But, as much as he’s with me in holding onto the snow, at the same time he’s got his seed catalogues dog-eared as he plans this years garden. And he’s been going to all the garden conventions which start as early as January. This year, Roger Swain came for the Alaska Botanical Garden convention and Dan made sure he didn’t miss him. He called on his way home, extra enthusiasm in his voice, describing the great conference I missed and added this guess what: Roger Swain is coming to dinner. I froze as visions of Roger Swain standing next to Marian Marsh on PBS’s Victory Garden came into my head. Roger’s praising some creation of fabulous cooking she just produced and doesn’t look like a person that will be indifferent to what he eats which my cooking often requires.
Before I can panic Dan says, “Don’t worry, he’s looking forward to caribou steak.”
Easy and delicious. To go with the steak I did roasted vegetables from our cold storage that we grew last season- potatoes, squash, parsnips- cut up and tossed in olive oil with a little rosemary. A friend, who is a fabulous cook brought a delicious salad along with applesauce cookies and apple butter made with port wine, all made from her apples. From our apples we had home pressed cider, apple wine and an apple pie with our keeper apples not the best as the apples are getting old, but they are our apples. Caribou sausage and salmon spread from the salmon we caught were the appetizers.
Roger was delighted with the lack of store bought food.
I know Dan was pleased. We use to watch Victory Garden on Public TV when Roger Swain was the host. There wasn’t a week that he didn’t have some morsel of insight we
appreciated. Then one week he was gone, replaced by someone who just didn’t have Roger’s gravitas who geared the show to suburban landscapers and not what Dan considers real horticulturists. Now here he was in our dinning room, telling agriculture war stories with Dan, debating the merits of apples no one has ever heard of, blown away by the fact that we don’t have apple pests and don’t have to use herbicides.
I succumbed for a while to the green thumb camp but today I have my wits back and I’m off to ski.