Moisture, mushrooms, mosquitoes

We've had a very damp and cool few days. So much so that I'm beginning to worry about a repeat of the tomato disaster of 2008 for the plants in the lower vegetable garden. In the greenhouse, though, the tomatoes are fine and in the morning they gather moisture in attractive droplets at the points of their leaves.

This morning I found a new type of mushroom. (New to me, that is.) It is really tiny - you can see by the size of the blade of grass that the fruiting bodies are not more than about an inch/2cm tall and about a quarter to half an inch/0.5-1cm in diameter. I've had a browse around fungus-identification websites but haven't seen a photo resembling these yet.

They were hard to photograph - small things always are. I had to fiddle around with the manual settings on my camera and keep very still to get these shots. Not easy when you're crouching in a damp, shady spot which is also an ideal habitat for hungry mosquitoes...

2013's experiments

This year I'm growing two crops that are completely new to me. The first is sweet potatoes, which I hadn't realised could be successfully planted here. Sweet potatoes need hot summers and are good at withstanding drought, which should mean they're going to do well if this summer is anything like last year's. They aren't keen on alkaline soils, which might have put me off if I hadn't heard from a friend that his did really well in our lime-rich area last year.

I ordered two different varieties from Mapple Farm in New Brunswick: Ginseng Red (brown skin, orange flesh) and Travis (white skin, white flesh). To test out the best growing conditions for them, I've planted half in the upper vegetable garden, where it's a bit drier, and half in the lower garden. Those ones are in a trench of worm compost made from kitchen waste, which is more acidic than the regular soil.

We're surrounded here by vineyards as the County continues to establish itself as Canada's Burgundy. But up to now, the only grapes growing on our property were wild ones and this year I decided that this situation should not be allowed to continue. I bought a table grape (Sovereign Coronation). Mike helped me dig a hole for it next to the fence on the eastern side of the upper vegetable garden.

And three days later he ran it over with the lawnmower.

And I was left with this sorry looking stump.

I know that grapes can handle fairly severe pruning. But this looked a bit terminal to me.

Yesterday I noticed signs of life - distinct buds forming on the remains of the plant. Perhaps we will get some grapes this year after all. Maybe I should put a tomato cage around it, just to avoid future tractor-related tragedies.

Early harvest

Food is starting to come in big handfuls. Today I've gathered asparagus and rhubarb from the garden. The greenhouse is yielding snap peas, garlic scapes and dill.* The Tuscan/dinosaur kale plants survived the winter in there, too. A few of them went to seed in the spring, but the others didn't and those are now delivering respectable quantities of fresh kale.

I froze the dill, blanched and froze the kale and peas, cooked the rhubarb and froze half of it and turned the garlic scapes into pesto. This is the work of moments - just blend together half a cup of flaked almonds, three-quarters of a cup of olive oil, ten garlic scapes, a squeeze of lemon juice and about 50g cheese (Parmesan if you have it - I didn't and used Cheddar). Again, I froze half of that.

Can you tell I've made a resolution to make better use of my freezer space this year? I always freeze loads of tomatoes every August and September, but I'm not usually so well-organised with everything else. I'm not sure how long this hyper-efficiency is going to last, but at least I've made a start!

*It's called 'dill-weed' for a reason, I've discovered...

Working with the weather

Sometimes it makes perfect sense for me to put food on the table by sitting in front of a computer all day. Other days, it makes much more sense for me to put food on the table by, you know, growing food.

Today was one of those days where I give fervent thanks for the ability to work from home and do both. The weather satellite picture showed a band of rain slowly making its way towards us from Toronto and I had three box-loads of tomato plants which really needed to be put in the ground. I mobilised Mike and before breakfast we had spread chicken manure over one of the long beds in the upper part of the barnyard and planted 62 tomato plants.

Then I was back at my computer, working and watching the rain arrive and stay for most of the afternoon. When I went out in the early evening the tomatoes had been well watered into their new locations and I had time to gather up cut grass and mulch the whole area.

I still need to put some stakes in the bed, but at least the hardest part has been done.

In the greenhouse, my early crop of lettuces are beginning to go to seed. I like the tenaciousness of this one, growing out sideways between the planks of one of the raised beds.

The beans are just starting to emerge from the soil outside. It's been full-on with planting and sowing in the last few weeks, but nearly everything is in the ground, thank goodness. Now it's just the weeding to worry about!

Glimpses of the distant past

Europeans in North America tend to focus on the history of the continent since Europeans arrived, glossing over the people and civilisations that were here beforehand. A blog post entitled 'What if people told European history like they told Native American history' sums up the problem rather neatly. I hope that particular tide is on the turn, now, but there is still a lot to learn about the people who used to live here.

Last night I went to a fascinating talk by George Reid, who is making valiant efforts to identify the sites of early settlements in Prince Edward County. He is building upon the work of the Reverend Bowen P. Squire, who lived on the north shore of Lake Consecon in the 1950s. An article written by Squire about his findings is available online [PDF] and makes for interesting reading. Squire postulates that this area would have been an easily defensible place to create settlements in and he describes (and illustrates) the site he excavated on his property (which was just a little to the west of ours, I believe). The dam which formed Lake Consecon was built in 1806 - before that, the lake would have been a creek about half the width it is now.

George described how he and his co-investigators are using a combination of Google Earth's satellite imagery and local knowledge of archaeological finds to identify the sites of such settlements around the County's shores. This is one of the images George showed last night:

The image is from 2009 and the paler field on the middle right of the picture is the hayfield at the rear of our farm (with a triangle of woodland just beneath it). In our neighbours' fields on the left and in the centre you can see dark cross-hatching in one of the fields and some dark shapes which George told us represent an old settlement.

The people who lived here were of the Wendat nation (the people dubbed the Huron by French explorers) and George explained that their longhouse settlements were surrounded by palisades and that the whole village would have been moved to a new site periodically once nearby sources of wood for fuel had been exhausted. These villages may have been home to 2,000 people - raising the possibility that the population of the County may have been almost as high then as it is now (around 25,000 people).

The Wendat people lived in this area in the period up to around 1525, according to George, and may have been here for 2,000 years. They would have lived on eels and fish from the creek and Weller's Bay, the wild animals they hunted and the food they grew: corn, beans and squash. I was sowing corn and squash on Monday in a small ploughed-up part of the hayfield in that satellite image. I now wonder if 500 or 1,000 years ago a Wendat woman might have been doing exactly the same thing in exactly the same place.

May frost

This strawberry plant was touched by this morning's frost. The temperature dipped to about 1°C/34°F.

After a few years of frost damage to our fruit trees, I was concerned that we would have the same problem this year, even though the trees are far less advanced than they were in 2012, where the warm spring made them much more vulnerable to a frost. There is an interesting series of Critical Temperature Charts on the Colorado State University site which explain at which point the fruit is most likely to be damaged by frost. Generally, once the buds are fully opened, a temperature of -2°C/28°F will kill 10% of the flower buds, while -4°C/25°F will kill 90%. That's what happened last year, but we weren't close to that last night, so I'm hopeful.

The apricot tree flowered last week and there are embryonic apricots already visible:

The pear trees are fully in flower right now:
 

While the apples are at the stage known as 'full pink':

The only crop that was damaged was the asparagus: the visible spears won't be edible. Glad I harvested some for our lunch yesterday!

Crossing the line

The line I'm thinking of is the one that divides behaviour that is considered quite normal, and behaviour which is viewed as eccentric. The location of the line varies from person to person, of course, and I'm fairly sure that a lot of things I consider perfectly reasonable activities would definitely be on the other side of the eccentricity line for other people. Growing my own food, raising chickens, baking all my own bread, making granola, refusing to buy processed food - that sort of thing. But I crossed my own version of that line in recent months when I started making my own yog(h)urt. I don't know why that seems more eccentric than baking bread (and the two activities are now closely linked, as I'll explain in a minute), but it does. Somehow making yoghurt seems such a 1970s thing to do.

But it's so easy that I've become completely addicted to the process and always have a batch of home-made yoghurt in the fridge. I've delayed blogging about it because of my reservations about it being an odd sort of thing to do.

The initial stimulus for the activity involves another confession (you can see why I delayed writing this post). I'm really bad at throwing out man-made containers like jam jars and yoghurt pots. I have cupboards full of them and they do come in very handy at times, but I really don't need any more. When I read Mimi Spencer's book 101 Things To Do Before You Diet back in February and she explained how simple it was, I was inspired to give it a go. And now I've been re-using the same yoghurt pot for the last three months. Win!

I started out by ordering a sachet of yoghurt culture online. You can just buy a jar of plain active yoghurt as your starter culture and don't need to do this, but I didn't have any to hand at the time. Then you heat some milk to boiling point (I use 2% fat milk) and let it cool down to about 50°C/122°F (if you don't have a thermometer, I read somewhere that at this temperature you should be able to keep your finger in the milk for 20 seconds). Stir three tablespoons of the yoghurt into the warm milk and then pour it into a vacuum flask (at the start of the process I just fill the flask with milk to measure the quantity - hence the lack of precision in these instructions!). After a couple of hours the milk will have curdled and you can strain the yoghurt to remove the liquid whey and thicken it up. I use a sieve lined with a coffee filter paper or kitchen paper for this.

Here's the view from the side. You can see the whey underneath the sieve.

I use the whey as part of the liquid I add to my bread - which means that a yoghurt-making day is usually also a bread-making day. But I've also read that tomato plants really like the calcium in whey, so I might use it for that in the summer.

Tonight I'm planning to use the yoghurt to make naan bread and raita to accompany the curry we're having for supper. My stomach is already growling at the thought.

So, do you do anything that you feel crosses your personal eccentricity line? Or is it just me that worries about these things?