I woke up this morning to snow. It had stuck to the ground and to the vehicles. It wasn’t that heavy, and it’s gone now, but it was good to see.
First snow Fall 2011
Although apparently the official temperature in Barrow has not yet dropped below freezing, it clearly did out here. The pond (which was actually installed over Labor Day weekend, but the post somehow never got past draft form until earlier today) had a thin skin of ice.
Ice on the new pond
As I mentioned a while ago, the pond (AKA bathtub) had been badly damaged by a front-end loader. I had ordered a replacement plastic pond, but hadn’t found time to install it. Finally, Glenn & I got around to doing it today.
We were very lucky to get some help getting the old cast-iron bathtub out of the ground and moved aside from some fellows working by our house. Thanks guys! You saved us hours.
Glenn standing by the discarded bathtub pool
The replacement came in a box, and had to be unrolled. We let it “relax” inside, per instructions, & even heated it with a hair dryer to help the process. Unfortunately, it showed a tendency to curl back up when it was outside in the 40F temps we have. Since the pad is gravel and there already was a hole where I wanted to put it, it was impossible to dig a hold to conform to the pool outline (it came with templates & that would have been easy in a silt loam or clay), so the edges don’t look great. We weighted them, and will try mounding gravel up & over them.
Pool in place
…or the US, for that matter. Forget-me-nots are the Alaska state flower, and this is, without a doubt, the farthest north plant. I transplanted it from Point Hope years ago, and it is doing very well this year, with flowers a good 5 inches taller than ever before in Barrow (although still about 6 inches shorter than they were in Point Hope).
The farthest north forget-me-nots in Alaska
The TundraGarden has really greened-up in the past couple of weeks. It went from this:
Snow in the TG on June 15.
to this:
June 20
in the space of five days, while I was on a quick trip to upstate New York taking my daughter to spend part of the summer with her grandmother! The willows are green and the dwarf and Arctic buttercups are in full bloom.
Iridescent buttercups
And a good thing, too. There were a number of people who had been attending the Arctic Imperatives conference and were now touring the Arctic. They flew into Barrow and were given a bus tour. My husband was acting as tour guide, and must have mentioned the TG, since the participants demanded that the bus be detoured so they could see it. Apparently people were enthusiastic and many pictures were taken.
The garden is less than pretty at the moment, since it’s rather grey and snowing right now. So I though I’d put up a picture of one of the blossoms on the Christmas cactus that is blooming at the moment, taken the other night, backlit by midnight sun.
Cactus flower
The last bits of snow from last winter
The garden is finally snow-free. The snowbirds (snow buntings, but everyone here calls them snowbirds) & other small birds have been snacking on the seeds in the pods as they emerged through the snow. We feed the birds commercial seed, but it seems like they should be able to eat their normal diet. They seem to have finished what there was to eat, so it was time for clean-up. I spent a while this afternoon trimming dead stalks from Artemisias, Potentillas and Ranunculi, and things look much better. I put one of the pinwheels out again, too.
I also picked up the new plant markers project where I left it last fall. I’d written on markers with a Sharpie, and was then using a label maker to make tapes to put on that would be easier to read. The new markers are aluminum, and the ones that were out over the winter already had signs of corrosion from the salt air here. I had to use steel wool to smooth them before putting the labels on. We will have to see how long they last.
We had a lot of snow this past winter, and it has taken forever to melt. The drifting over the TG was different than usual, with a storm that cut a tunnel near the windows, so this year the main part of the garden is melting out before the pond.
The TundraGarden makes its appearance.
The dried grass & willow branches have been showing for a week or so, but now they are out and signs of green are starting to show up. The Artemisia arctica is just starting to send up shoots.
Artemisia arctica shoots.
I had gotten a set of three metal pinwheels, in hopes of putting one next to the ground for the house’s wiring, which for some reason the electrician planted in the garden. Possibly he thought the plants meant that there was actual ground there, as opposed to the gravel pad on which all of NARL sits, but really the whole garden is on top of the pad, so if that was crucial, the place still isn’t grounded.
Anyway, we’ve been having a big fall storm this weekend, with strong winds, and they pretty much destroyed the pinwheel. There was minor coastal flooding, but that didn’t affect the garden.
Remains of the fallen pinwheel.
The wheel part was held on by a round nut, which presumably came unscrewed and fell into the snow. I looked, but was unable to find it. It will show up when the snow melts, although that may not be until June.
The rod that hold the pinwheel is actually two pieces that screw together, and they were almost unscrewed, so it appears that it must have come unscrewed due to changes in wind direction rotating the wheel, but why the wheel came unscrewed isn’t clear…
I’ll have to put one of the others out, since they do hide the grounding rod, or at least distract from it.
