Alaska Gardening News, Xmas 2005

Greetings!

Last Christmas and the New Year was memorable for a family bereavement of the aquatic kind. Yes, most of our our beloved koi died. David under the influence of Cabin Fever had spent his winter savings on the internet.... No it was not on one of those naughty sites, nor at Party Poker dot com, but at a Koi Auction site. Unfortunately, the new fish brought more than just their beauty, apparently, they brought with them a parasitic infection that quickly spread to all of our other fish.

On a lighter Christmas note Edith’s fastidious taste for unusual Christmas presents reached an all time high. Was it diamonds, furs, a new car that she wished for? No, all she wanted for Christmas was a paper shredder and she got one. David was woken early Christmas morning to the merry tune of Edith shredding old documents, then old newspapers. Even the Christmas wrapping paper met the same fate. The shredding celebration went on for days, and the odd night too.

As Edith shredded David studied. David needed more credits for his teaching re-certification which meant he spent Christmas taking a correspondence class in web design, and so the web site, Gardening, Alaskan Style was created. The web site can be found by searching on Google under Alaska gardening or by typing in the url, http://home.gci.net/~goodgame/ The site has a feature that records who looks at the site. Some of this years interesting visitors included the US Department of Justice(11 minutes), and over 500 Russians all trying to help each other translate the site from English to Russian. In the summer, the web site was mentioned in The Anchorage Daily News resulting in 500 hits in one day.

This summer the Goodgame Garden looked healthier than ever and Edith attributed this to having the whole garden sprayed regularly with organic fertilizer. The only downside to this for the few days after each spraying the whole garden smelled of dead fish.

David’s summer writing efforts for the Anchorage Daily News continue unabated, but not unedited. A 1,500 word article about garden gnomes and their habit of disappearing and going on little trips was published as 800 words. Only the Anchorage Daily News Features Editor knows what happened to the other 700 words. And talking of gnomes the Goodgame garden is now littered with 40 or so of them, well at least they don’t need feeding, nor are they prone to parasites. The gnomes do have a slight problem in that people are always trying to borrow them and take them away on trips. The other article David wrote was about machines that attract and devour mosquitoes. These machines resemble something out of War of the Worlds and are aptly named, Mosquito Magnets.

As we looked towards the fall we didn’t realize it would be just that. After one particularly windy night David noticed one of the large 50 foot Aspen trees was missing. Fortunately, the tree missed the house and the garden fence and was resting precariously on a spruce tree. Since the wind was still gusting, we thought the tree might come down at any minute so David was volunteered to go try to secure the tree to the spruce tree that it had landed on. There was David on the tree as it swayed from side to side trying to remember how to tie knots. Two hours later the a professional tree service safely cut down the tree, limb by limb.

Since David’s jeep was almost an antique David got a new car. A new Audi was purchased in Bellevue Washington and David diligently tracked its journey by barge to Alaska. The new car arrived on Friday, sat in the garage on Saturday. On Sunday, after the season’s first snow, within a block of the house, the new car was promptly crashed into. As one old Alaskan once said, “he who drives a new car after first snowfall is not wise”.

As a new year approaches, Edith is searching for more things to shred. Moreover, Edith is now a Master Gardener and she wonders will David be a senior Master Gardener by the time he finally finishes the course? Only another year will tell.

Merry Christmas

PS. To keep an eye on what we are up next summer go our gardening web site’s address,
Gardening, Alaska Style