Picking and pickling a peck of peppers (or two)

I had to look it up, but a peck of peppers is a quarter of a bushel, or around 10 pounds. The word "frost" has been bandied about in the weather forecast, so I thought it might be a good idea to pick the peppers. The warm September has made up for a coolish summer and the plants were heavy with fruit. 

I picked the jalapeños yesterday (3.5kg) and the sweet peppers today (6.5kg). A grand total of 10kg, or 22 pounds. 

 I sliced all the jalapeños and pickled about half of them using brine and the hot-water canning method...

... and open froze the rest.  Once frozen, I packed them into a single large plastic freezer bag, so I can just remove handfuls as and when I need some.

The sweet peppers were a mix of Antohi, Golden Marconi and Cubanelles.

I* washed them, cut off the tops, halved and deseeded them, then cooked them with the cut side down under the broiler/grill for seven minutes, until the skins were blackened. I found doing around twelve peppers in each batch worked well.

 Then I put them in a covered plastic tub to cool down, before removing the skins and packing them into glass jars. Then I added water with a little salt in it to the jars and pressure canned them for 35 minutes.

 Six kilos of fresh peppers ended up as three one-kilo/quart jars of processed fruit.

*Child#2 took over this job half way through and this speeded up the process dramatically. I definitely recommend getting a friend or family member involved with jobs like this!

Ashes to ashes

The Emerald Ash Borer beetle is munching its way towards us from southwestern Ontario. On Friday I was talking to an arborist who works to the west of Toronto. He told me that he is spending nearly all his time now cutting down dead ash trees.

Since most of our area of woodland is ash, I spend a lot of time thinking about how this pest is going to impact our landscape when it arrives here. At this time of year, when the ash trees have lost their leaves, I wander through the woods to see what other deciduous trees there are: they're easier to spot when the ash are bare. We have some birch and oak trees, but very few compared to all the ash.

On the bright side, we won't be short of firewood in the future, but I think I'd rather have the living trees.

It has been a spectacular Fall this year. Some years the colours are over in a flash, but this year they seem to have lasted for weeks.

Changing colours

Autumn brings its usual changes to the scenery: morning mists and gorgeous reds and oranges.

And for us, it generally brings a dearth of eggs in the henhouse, as the chickens take a well-earned rest from laying. I've been getting one, two or zero eggs each day in the last week or two.

Today's egg harvest was two, and it wasn't until I'd got into the kitchen that I noticed one of them was not the usual Buff Orpington palish brown.

The new hens have started laying! Well, one has, anyway. The eggs either side of the bluey-green Ameraucana one are the normal range of colours that we get from the Buffs. In the dimness of the barn the Ameraucana egg looked a lot like the paler Buff eggs.

I'm very pleased that the new hens are beginning to lay. From being a position of scarcity, I suspect that very soon we might be in the position of being over-egged!

Bright berries

Oh dear, over a month since my last post? It's been a busy one, I must say, but I hadn't realised it had been that long. 

I got home from a short trip back to the UK on Tuesday. The difference in the scenery between there and here at the moment is stark. Here there are very few leaves left on the trees and the main colour is from dogwood branches and the occasional bright berry. Over there, a mild October has meant that most of the trees still have their leaves - and there are still roses in flower!

I noticed the berries on this tall shrub at the edge of the highway as we drove to Toronto last week and was pleased to find some on a local road here today. I've tried without success to identify the plant - if you know what it is, please comment! I don't think I've seen it before and the berries are a beautifully bright orange.

OK, answering my own question here, but I think this plant might be Winterberry (Ilex verticillata). It's certainly well-named!

Seasonal confusion

This morning was very autumnal - lots of heavy dew and spiders' webs losing their effectiveness everywhere.

But in amongst all the signs of the end of summer were some completely contradictory ones. Some of the trees which suffered so much in the dry spell are now putting forth leaves of a decidedly Spring green. Here's a mature European buckthorn with new leaves alongside this year's fruit:

And these are very young ash trees, showing new leaves next to the ones damaged in July:

This renewed growth is very similar to what's happening with my cabbage plants. This is the first year I've seen it happen.

Dream scenes

Just recently I've been having a lot of dreams where I'm taking photographs. Seems odd - my mind conjuring up a scene and then trying to record it. I'm obviously taking too many, though, because the other night, the batteries in my dream camera ran out...

I don't know if the dreams mean that I'm taking too many photos in my waking hours, or too few, but I woke to the promise of a misty dawn, the sort of weather that usually provides great photo opportunities and I was up like a shot, heading to the lake to see what it looked like.

Quite lovely, of course, but the water in the air transforms even the most workaday views: the silos and the stubble of the corn in next door's field:

Our big barn:

And a tuft of Canada thistle caught in the chicken-wire fence:

That time of year...

...when the harvest is gathered in...

...when chickens lose their feathers...

...when leaves begin to change...

... and when I'm back to wearing jeans and my three-season boots.

Catching up

Nearly three weeks is a long time to be away. The garden has changed considerably, with two frosty mornings in my absence. The outside tomato plants which I'd left green and fruiting are now brown and dead and the basil plants are blackened skeletons. Other vegetables are still going strong: there's a fair broccoli crop and the spinach is looking fantastic.

The new chickens are now as big as last year's hatch, but they're not yet laying. The feathers of the older hens look quite faded in comparison to the younger ones:

There has been an excellent crop of shaggy ink-cap mushrooms in the orchard, although I've missed the peak of production. We did manage to gather enough for the three adults to have a pleasant supper of mushrooms-on-toast last night. This year, with the losses to the May frost, we've actually picked more mushrooms from the orchard than we have fruit!

I transferred the wormery from the garage to the basement, to protect the worms from the frost. They'd converted two trays of kitchen waste into crumbly black compost, which I've added to one of the greenhouse beds. Mike and Child#2 put three tractor-loads of wood into the garage, ready for the days of wood-fires.

In England, the trees were still mainly green. Here, the ash trees have lost all their leaves. The only deciduous trees with leaves still attached in our little bit of wood are the oaks. And we only have two of those, so it's looking pretty bare. Considering that the temperature in both countries is similar at this time of year (and that we're further south here, and therefore get more daylight), it's quite a striking difference.

Lake-cloud

The lake had its own blanket of mist, first thing this morning, forcing me out with my camera again.It was impossible to see to the other side, at first.

Away from the water, all was crisp and clear. The maple trees are beginning to show their autumn colours, tucked amongst summer's green:

By the time I got back to my starting point, the lake-cloud was thinning and the southern shore was just beginning to appear:

Oranges

Was compelled to stop driving twice in the last two days in order to record some of the glorious colours of the season. The trees above are on Burr Road in Prince Edward County, next to the cemetery there. The pumpkin patch below is just south of Highway 401 near Trenton.

Before the Fall

Nothing says 'Fall' to me as much as the sight of squashes and pumpkins. Of course I'm still thinking of the season itself as 'Autumn', but the way that these fruit are used here as decorations is sufficiently different to the way things are done in the UK to make the North American word the one that comes to mind when I admire my gourd, squash and pumpkin harvest.

I've just gone to the Oxford English Dictionary, to find that the word Fall was used in Britain, in the past, to describe the season. It originally appeared as a phrase: 'Fall of the leaf'. Which is rather lovely, don't you think?

Where in the world...

...am I tonight?

Well, here's a visual clue:


You may already be guessing that I'm not in rural Ontario.

I'm on another of my intermittent city jaunts and, as usual, am mostly taking pictures of plant life. At home all the leaves have left the trees (and it even snowed a bit this morning), but here there are still some leaves attached to branches, although there are plenty more blowing about in a blustery breeze and coating the ground of the big park in the centre of the city:


This next view of this park probably gives my location away:


Yes, it's Central Park. Which somehow is a lot more rugged and wild-looking than I was expecting it to be. I've never been to New York before, but you see the city so often as a backdrop to films and news reports that it is instantly familiar. I'm trying to be cool about being here, but there's a small part of my brain that keeps jumping up and down excitedly and shouting out "I'm in New York, I'm in NEW YORK!".

It really is a fleeting visit - I'll be going back tomorrow - so I won't have time to do the proper touristy things. I did go past the American Museum of Natural History this afternoon, so here's a picture of one of the two festive dinosaurs outside it, for my son, who was very jealous that I'd be near the set of Night at the Museum.

Although, to be honest, I wasn't at all sure about the fact that the dinosaurs were holding a wreath each. It didn't seem like a likely activity for a pair of, well what are they, iguanodons? I suppose they were herbivores, but still...

Leaf mould and Dan Tat

The leaves are falling so fast from the ash trees that it looks like a snowstorm. I really need to get out there and start raking them up. The leaves I put into the leaf store I made last year decomposed beautifully and have now been put around the asparagus plants as a mulch, freeing up the container for this year's supply.

First, however, I had to make Hallowe'en treats for the school bash tomorrow. This task has been complicated by the need to make the treats relevant to my daughter's recent project on Canada's trading partners (exciting, eh?). Her chosen (or allocated, not sure which) country was China, so we spent some time the other night doing internet research to try and work out whether there was a Chinese treat that we could easily make and that would keep for 24 hours.

To my surprise, it turns out that egg tarts ('custard tarts' in Britain) have become a traditional Chinese treat. In Chinese they are known as Dan Tat (蛋撻). I found a straight-forward-looking recipe and got baking. They are usually served hot, but I hope the children at the kids' school won't be aware of that!

Tunnel of gold

New England seems to have taken possession of the "see our lovely leaves" travel market. I've heard a number of British people express a desire to see New England in the Fall - some of whom, I'm fairly sure, have only a vague idea of where New England actually is. Well, if it's gorgeous autumn colours you're after, then you can spread your travel net a bit wider than just the northeast corner of the USA. It's been a spectacular autumn across eastern Canada too.

I took the picture on my drive home from Deseronto this afternoon. I wasn't actually driving at the time, I feel I should point out. I stopped the car and hopped out to take the picture. I'm just trying to imagine doing that on a drive home along the A56 to Sale from my old work in Manchester. Not that there was anything particularly attractive to photograph on that route. But I would have been lynched by the other drivers if I'd tried, that's for sure.

This is one of our neighbour's maple trees. Glorious.

Nitid nightshade

I've featured these Bittersweet Nightshade (Solanum dulcamara) berries on the blog before (once last October when they were covered in ice by our first frost). I like the way that the berries mature at different rates, giving these lovely clusters of autumnal colour. They seem almost luminous with the sun shining through them.

Rain Fall

Most of the guttering went up yesterday: just waiting for the last downpipes and the diverter that will stop the cistern overflowing (although that seems like a distant possibility at the moment!). We've had 9.2mm of rain so far today, so the water collected from barn roof has been replenishing the cistern in the house, which is up to 8 inches of water again. Mike fixed the leaky loo today too.

The Toyota garage fitted a new tyre to the car yesterday and Mike took a taxi into Belleville this morning to pick it up, so we're mobile again.

The nature columnist in the local papers was explaining this week that the Fall colours have been disappointing this year due to the dry and hot conditions during September. The big ash tree in our front garden (dubbed 'Giganto' by the kids) turned yellow very suddenly just this week, but many of the trees lost their leaves early because of the drought conditions. The maples have been pretty magnificent though, so if this is a disappointing year, I can imagine that a good one will be breathtaking.