Home Grown and Locally Harvested

Eating a natural diet - food you grow, buy locally or harvest wild - doesn't doom you to flavorless gruel. This neck of the woods produces a menu that includes smoked salmon, moose steaks, clam chowder, all kinds of greens, hothouse tomatoes and peppers, cranberry sauce, potatoes and rhubarb pie, just to name a few.

I am not even close to being an expert on all the wild things a person could harvest around here, or all the incredible garden vegetables that grow in our short, wet summer. But I've been growing and harvesting more and more each season. All I know is that for the last couple of years, these sources have provided an ever-larger core of my family's meals.

Today's lunch, for example, was salmon salad sandwiches, made with home-made mayo (from eggs laid by our chickens) and relish from our zucchinis last summer, on home-made bread; a side of home-made sauerkraut from last year's cabbage crop; some home-made salsa (from store-bought tomatoes); and a big bag of Kettle corn chips. (I'm not some foodie zealot who won't eat packaged food; we just keep it to a minimum in our household.)

My wife bakes her own bread, some of the time, but we don't grow our own wheat – yet. There is some experimentation with grain harvesting here in the Kasilof area. The Ionia community on Cohoe Loop started researching the viability of growing barley, if I remember right, about 10 years ago. And Winter Greens, the local greenhouse, is all about testing northern seeds and crops from around the world right here in Kasilof.

That salmon in my sandwich was a Kasilof sockeye, that was either caught in a personal use dipnet last June on the northern beach of the river's mouth, or in a dipnet last July at the river mouth. We make sure to stock up on our personal use limit of salmon each summer, which is 55 fish for a family of four. We freeze a little, but mostly we smoke it or pressure cook it in pint jars so it can be used as salmon salad, salmon burgers, salmon loaf or some other concoction throughout the winter.

The Kasilof area provides a little of everything Alaska offers for natural sources of food: Besides salmon from the Kasilof River, there are clams from the beach, moose in the fall, as well as abundant cranberries, raspberries and some blueberries. And the soils and climate here are comparable to Palmer – the closest thing this northern state has to a farm belt. What you can't hunt, fish or harvest wild, you can grow in our short summer season in your back yard.

There's a lot we can't grow without a serious greenhouse, but there's plenty of hardy and good-for-you foods that grow well and store well.

The best summer crops for Kasilof are the typical winter crops most anywhere else in the United States. To name but a few: Carrots, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, shell peas, snow peas, potatoes, beets, lettuce of all kinds, chives and spinach, chives. Cilantro grows really well in our dirt here at home. Makes killer salsa later in the summer. Our 12-by-16 single-wall, unheated greenhouse does a serviceable job of producing tomatoes and several varieties of spicy and sweet peppers, as well as one zucchini plant and several pickling cucumber plants.

And then there's rhubarb. Would it be an Alaska home without rhubarb? The red-stalked variety we've got growing next to our south-facing wall started budding out of the soil in mid-April while it was still snowing. We should have our first fresh rhubarb pie by mid-May.

The point of all the weeding and watering each summer is not to stuff our faces with fresh greens for our three-month growing season. Rather, the point is to stock up on all those nutritious goodies, and store it all in some fashion so that the pesticide- and chemical-free, home-grown goodness is available all through the winter. We blanche (dip in boiling water) and freeze some vegetables, such as peas and spinach and carrots. We turn a lot of our cabbage into sauerkraut, which is a natural fermentation process that's real easy and dates back thousands of years. Our crawl space keeps cold during the winter and makes a passable root cellar, where we stock carrots packed in sand for a good three months after picking them in the fall.

The potatoes we plant each summer are known for staying dormant without sprouting for months, and we found our Yukon Golds, reds, purples and Swedish Peanut fingerlings harvested in September will last right through to the next spring.

We also do a lot of pickling for cucumbers, beets, tomatoes and some of the cabbage, turning it into varieties of relish. Damaged tomatoes can be boiled down into some killer spaghetti sauce that seals in wide mouth jars and stores really well, too.

And I'm learning more each summer about the art of smoking salmon, another practice that dates back thousands of years. I prefer cold smoked fish, which draws more moisture out of the strips of salmon that have been dipped in a sugar- and salt- brine, leaving the fish somewhat preserved, although not enough to be put up safely anywhere besides the freezer. My smoker (about the size and shape of a standard outhouse) is also getting pressed into service for making moose jerky.

For milk, we try to get it locally if possible. Friends with goats and cows are the best source of the real deal. Alaska law does not allow people to sell milk from home, but there are such things as goat- and cow-sharing farms, where folks buy a share in a goat, say, and the farmer produces the milk and gives them some.

Why do all this stuff when you can just run to the store and buy a bag of Doritos? It isn't about money so much. Sure, we might save a little bit of money, but there's also costs putting in a garden and a greenhouse, or buying a dipnet for fish or bullets and a gun for the hunt. There are so many other motives:

One reason we garden and process our meat as a family is partly physical - getting out in the dirt, or down to the beach, under the sunshine and working outside is good exercise. It is real work. And it is great for our children to see where food comes from. (For that matter, it is good for adults, too, to see the whole process through from beginning to end instead of only understanding food in a fragmentary way as a packaged thing found on a store shelf.) Our children get excited to eat what they pick, whether it's carrots from the ground or red salmon from a gillnet, which is what I enjoyed when I was growing up, too. And there are other reasons. We always harvest a little more than we really need, and typically have extra food to give away to friends and neighbors.

Also, locally produced food is the healthiest choice, whether you factor the effects of fossil-fueled transportation, or the nutrition of the food that is picked fresh locally and eaten right away. When you eat something that is found or grown right in your own neighborhood, you are also getting in touch with the very earth, or saltwater, next door, and its microscopic critters. For instance, there's a theory that locally produced honey helps buffer people from allergies because the bees employ local pollens to make the honey. That belief, and I subscribe to it, says local foods have immune-stimulating properties that help our bodies adapt to the environment where we live. How about them Chilean apples?

All this talk about food is getting me hungry. I'm headed to Rocky's for a cheeseburger special.