28 March 2008
Two-lips
27 March 2008
Spring green
We're beginning to see the end of winter outside, too. As the photo below of the northern shore of Prince Edward County shows, the Bay of Quinte was still frozen and snowy when we came back over the Norris Whitney bridge from Belleville on Easter Monday. But yesterday afternoon when I came over the Skyway Bridge from Deseronto, there was a fair bit of water visible in the middle of the bay, which hadn't been there in the morning (well, it was there of course, but you couldn't see it!).
22 March 2008
First sowing
While the kids were at their swimming lesson we did the usual mad dash round the library and supermarket in Picton, followed by a trip to a garden centre. This is a small business, comprising three or four polytunnels and a small barn which houses the shop. The shop had a sign by the till saying "We're in the greenhouse, come and find us!". This is fairly common for businesses here, which are often small family concerns run out of the owners' homes. This style of doing business took us a bit of getting used to - there isn't always an obvious 'shop front' to go to, for example.
I've just looked at the ingredients and it's 70-80% Canadian sphagnum peat moss. Cue feelings of guilt about destruction of peat bogs, followed by superficial internet research, which seems to suggest that there are an awful lot of peat bogs in Canada:
...more than 270,000,000 acres, 25% of the world's supply, of which our industry harvests on less than 40,000 acres, or one acre in 6,000.
According to the Canadian Sphagnum Peat Moss Association, anyway. They harvest the stuff, so they might be just a teensy bit biased. Not sure now whether I should be feeling guilty or not. Maybe I should make myself a hair shirt out of sphagnum moss to be on the safe side.
Anyway, we hooked the propagator up to one of the voltage regulators we had to buy to save getting all new electrical appliances, so that works fine. Now I couldn't resist starting some seeds. What did I sow, you may or may not be asking. Red tomatoes in this batch - Riesentraube (an heirloom grape-style) and Amish Paste (another heirloom plant, ideal for tomato sauces). I think of the propagator as an incubator or intensive care unit, so once they're up I'll replace them with peppers, chillies or aubergines and get a little production line going.
Golden moon
21 March 2008
Hot and cold
The snow was much easier to walk on - yesterday it had the texture of slightly melted sorbet, but today it was crispy and hard. Here's Mike standing next to the footprints I'd made the day before:
It was so pleasant to walk on that we crossed the hayfield for the first time in months. Well, actually we'd never walked across the field diagonally before, just in the mown strip around the edges. It was cold, but beautiful.
We'd been gone so long that the buns had grown quite significantly - allow me a small moment of domestic-goddessy pride:
20 March 2008
Moon-planting
"Plant potatoes on Good Friday" was something that came up a lot. Well, that might be possible in the UK, but I'm blowed if I'm going to dig through the snow to do that here. I wondered if this tradition might be related to the moon phases - since Easter Sunday is the first Sunday following the full moon after the Spring Equinox. But after reading up on the matter, advice about moon-planting of potatoes seems contradictory: a New York Times article from 1991 makes this point too. So maybe I won't bother waiting for a full moon and will go by the soil temperature instead!
I had no idea how many seed potatoes to order, so have probably ordered either far too many or far too few - time will tell.
18 March 2008
Spring?
09 March 2008
Comfort food
Aftermath of a 36-hour snowstorm
This was how our driveway was looking first thing this morning:
...before Mike got to work with the tractor and snow-blower attachment:
The front path and steps had to be done with a shovel and it was quite a good workout (though I realise now that I was doing it all wrong).
The new composter is looking a bit buried, too:
07 March 2008
Talking garbage
I've been composting all the vegetable waste we produce in two plastic compost bins that were here when we arrived, but it seems this isn't that common a practice here. Recently the County advertised in the local paper, asking people to apply for a rotating composter as part of a County-wide trial. I've always fancied one of those, so I applied and was thrilled to find out the other week that I had been selected to take part, along with 19 other households around the County (75 applications had been received in all). Last night there was a meeting about the trial and I got to collect my new toy.
There were some interesting talks, including one from Doug Parker, who farms on an organically-certified farm in South Marysburgh. It was great to listen to someone who is so passionate about compost (which, by the way, is mainly pronounced to rhyme with 'post' around here). He had even brought some of his compost along for everyone to examine. Then two representatives of the manufacturers described the features of the composter. It's supposed to be pest-proof (which is good, as we had a rat living in our compost bin in Sale for a while), although they had heard of one installation in Vermont which was regularly played with by a bear.
06 March 2008
"Winter from Hell"
Apparently there's another big storm heading in for Saturday, so all the families heading off for a Spring Break holiday abroad might have problems leaving the country this weekend. They don't have an Easter holiday here, just Good Friday and Easter Monday off, and the (inappropriately named) Spring Break, which is all of next week. So they won't be getting a lot of 'instructional time' this month, one way or another.
Image from QuintanaRoo on Flickr.
03 March 2008
The one with the big clock
"You're from England, right?" asked one of the children at lunch time yesterday. "Is that the one with the Eiffel Tower, or the one with the big clock?"
01 March 2008
The tyranny of party bags
Postscript: The girls were all delightful and behaved beautifully. I might have to revise my feelings about birthday treats - or maybe 10/11 year olds are just more mature than smaller kids. Their class teacher and her two daughters ended up seeing the movie at the same time us, which may have been an added incentive for good behaviour, I suppose!