OK, finally got DSL at home, so I can post the odd picture. This is what the Tundra Garden looks like in mid-June (which means the snow has been gone for less than a month. This is actually stage II of construction, which I haven't gotten to in the history yet, but it give a bit of an idea. It doesn't look anything like this at the moment.

It's -40F here at the moment, with essentially no wind. So no wind chill, but lots of ice fog. And no mail or papers since the ash from Augustine Volcano is disrupting flights from Anchorage.

Connectivity (or the lack thereof) at the Top of the World

Believe it or not, I started this blog from a hotel room in Cambridge, England.

Got home to find out that the wireless links I rely on for connectivity at home (and at work) were down. After much thrashing around by the IT guy, it became apparent that the "Arctic-grade" cables were not, unless you consider Homer, AK (weather not much worse than Seattle) the Arctic. Needless to say, nobody wanted to replace the pricy cables with more expensive junk, so.... After much dithering, it looks like DSL for the moment, and I've managed to slide in a post by dint of going to the main building and plugging in to the Ethernet cables. Not so good for keeping an office staffed, and all the Tundra Garden pictures I wanted to post are still on computers with no connectivity, but soon, soon.....

The TG itself is under a good bit of snow right now (it tends to develop a drift). The sun has come back, so I can get a picture soon.

Brief History of the Tundra Garden-Part 1.

Shortly after I moved to Barrow, I learned that there had once been a tundra garden outside our picture window. I was missing my garden in the Lower 48 (and what gardener doesn't like a challenge?) so I decided that this garden should be revived. No one remembered what it had been like, so I started from scratch.

It was clearly going to take some doing, as there was no soil, just a 5 foot deep gravel pad. I mentioned my plan to our next-door neighbor, and she had the summer maintenance people drop off some big slabs of tundra (like turf) next to the house. I manhandled them together to make a fairly small, rather irregular patch of ground. My neighbor was able to get the maintenance folks to bring some 12" x 12" sections I'd seen over, and I built a box to contain the tundra, and keep it from melting back into the pad.