Dad’s Alaska

30 May 2020 Saturday It was a day of hard labor without the prison sentence. Summer and I worked on the new garden plot. I finished bringing in the dirt needed to level the area. Summer raked the dirt out after I used the tractor to level it. After that I brought in the last of the top soil. This only took about an hour and a half.

The end of the dirt moving became the beginning of the rototilling. This was the hardest part of the day. I would run the tiller for a few minutes and then hit something that would stop the tiller. There were rocks, sticks, bits of metal and all of them would hang in the tines and stop the tiller dead in its’ tracks. When the rocks didn’t stop the tiller it would simply run over the top and not turn the dirt.

Some but not all of the rocks thrown out of the garden plot

The tilling took almost 4 hours because of all of the debris and dozens of stops to dig hidden rocks from under the dirt or remove them from the tines of the tiller. The task was so tiring that we quit early.

Summer piled up the raised bed for the potatoes and I started attaching boards across the bottom of the posts. It is starting to look as if we may have another vicious animal to deal with. Snowshoes hares are starting to appear after having been in decline for a number of years. They are voracious eaters of garden vegetables. Like the ducks, chickens and geese they have plenty of green stuff to eat but they still prefer to eat your garden. The boards at the bottom of the fence will, hopefully, keep these critters out. They aren’t much bigger that your average Cottontail rabbit but they have cycles where the population explodes. I’ve been told by long time residents that there are times when there can be dozens of them all over your property. Dan told me that he walked his 5 acres and shot 5 of them in less than 30 minutes. He eats them so he was just stocking up his freezer. He said he could have killed 20 or more on the same walk. They ate his garden so he ate some of them.