Fair Weather, Planting and Flower Beds

The last two weeks have been incredibly busy with planting and watering and selling our flower baskets and getting my flowers planted. This broken arm has been an annoyance, but it hasn't slowed me down on too many things, but typing at this computer is pretty uncomfortable or perhaps I'd just rather be planting than writing right now. The weather has been gorgeous and the gardens are really growing! The corn is about 24" tall already and the peas are about 6" tall. Yesterday we noticed zucchini blossoms so in a week or so we will eat our first zucchinis and the first of the radishes and green onions will be in our salad this Sunday. I just love it when we add the first fresh veggies to our salads!
Last week we planted turnips, more peas, carrots, spinach, green onions, and beets from seed. With this amazing sunshine, they jumped up in just a few days! We have managed to keep them wet, but the rain of the last two days was a welcome sight for all the Valley farmers. The potatoes we planted two weeks ago are springing up and all the transplanted kohlrabi, broccoli, lettuces, cabbage, chard and cauliflower are growing happily. Of course, the weeds are happy too, so we are doing our first weeding as well. Tomorrow we put up our electric moose fence and hope it does the trick of keeping the moose out again this year. Last year it proved successful, but moose are pretty hard to stop and I have little faith in two stands of two-inch electric tape when they are up against a full grown moose!
I am in the process of planting my flower gardens. It is the planting I love the best. I wake up about 4:00 am every morning and force myself to try to fall back to sleep until 5;30. Then I practically leap out of bed so I can get to my flower beds. I do love my flowers and I always want to do them all myself. No one around here fights me for the job, at least no one joins me outside at 5:30! I plant eleven flower beds of various shapes and sizes. I have some perennials and I love lots of annuals. I have planted five of the beds and tomorrow I plan to get most of the rest planted. I will have Rachel help me post some pictures (I am technology challenged ).
My good friend Arthur Keyes of Glacier Valley Farm is taking some rhubarb and hebs we harvested today into the Saturday markets in Anchorage tomorrow. We have already harvested about 85# of rhubarb from the ten plants at my mother's garden and it is just barely June! We sure can grow rhubarb in Alaska!

A Shout Out From Utah!

Hello Everyone,
I miss you all and I especially miss Alaska.  I can't wait for the summer, it just can't come soon enough!
Although I won't be involved in the managerial part of the business, I promise I'll be around and I plan to help my mom out with the especially fun parts of work- like updating the blog, plowing, and maybe occasionally going to the market.

Anyway, I have a lot of homework to do, so I don't have long to post.  I thought I'd just let you know about a few more mentions of our business in the news.  First of all, you can check out Future CEO Stars magazine to read an article about the business that I wrote after I won the NFIB award.  It's on page 12:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/25929346/January-2010-Issue.  There's also a Teacher's Guide to this magazine that I found online.  It was fun to look at how teachers can use my article to teach kids about entrepreneurship.  One of the optinos was for people to write me a letter...either teachers aren't using my article, or kids aren't doing their assignments, because I have gotten no mail from them! :)

Also- Mom's been in the news for her involvement with the Alaska Rhubarb movement.  Check her out here: http://www.alaskadispatch.com/dispatches/news/4112-will-rhubarb-have-its-day and here: http://www.globalfoodcollaborative.com/articles/lets-talk-rhubarb-.html.  I do have to point out in the second article, there are no pictures of rhubarb.  What's labeled as rhubarb is actually swiss chard...just so no one thinks we  made that mistake!

Well I'm off, I've got a lot to do.  For those of you who may not have heard, I'm running as Alaska's candidate for National FFA Office at the National FFA Convention in October.  I'm very excited, but it takes a lot of studying, so I'm hard at work doing that.   If you'd like to keep up with what I'm doing to prepare, including my fun ag tours and experiences here in the lower 48, you can visit my new blog at www.rachelsadventuresinag.blogspot.com.  Have a fantastic FFA week everyone!