Taking it slow

Life in lockdown is not so different from normal life for me. I don't have small children out of school to worry about and I can work from home with no great difficulty. With Mike and Child2 here with me, I don't feel particularly isolated, and I'm still in regular contact with my father and my aunt in England. We have plenty of space for a long walk with the dog (although he's getting on a bit and not as keen on a long walk as he once would have been...). I know we are luckier than a lot of people who are cooped up with less ability to get out in the fresh air.

What has changed is the pace of things. Not that my life Before was exactly a whirlwind of activity, but now I am not rushing to get out of the house before 7.30 to see my mother-in-law in her nursing home before going off to work, things feel much more leisurely. The library where I normally work was closed to staff from 23 March and I went in on the 24th to finish some jobs and pick up a few things (including the office orchid!). Working from home involves connecting to my desktop remotely and this can be a frustrating experience: there's a bit of a lag across the network and it feels like I am working in slow motion most of the time.

I think my brain is on a go-slow anyway, with a low-level background level of panic which actually reminds me of my state of mind back in May 2007, just before we left England for Canada. It's quite hard to concentrate on anything for any length of time: reading fiction seems beyond my capabilities at present, for example, and my sleep is disturbed. I feel unproductive as a result, but I am not going to beat myself up about that: if we can't make exceptions for ourselves in exceptional times, then when can we?

Outside of work, I'm focusing on watching the garden come back to life and getting comfort from the usual cycles of plants and wild birds. Humans might be making a mess of things, but Mother Nature is still doing her thing. Hope you are safe and well wherever you are reading this.

Strange times

Well, I haven't been doing a very good job of keeping this blog up to date, have I? My impression is that the coronavirus crisis is creating a new generation of bloggers as people are more and more confined to their own homes and finding that blogging is a good way of connecting with friends and family. I should probably do the same.

Things are moving fast: right now we have 1,329 reported cases of COVID-19 in Canada, with 377 in Ontario and 19 deaths. The public library I work inside was still open on 16 March, but closed to the public that evening. I closed the archives on the morning of the 16th, but have been continuing to go to work, as I can still be doing things like answering enquiries and digitizing archival materials while the building is closed.

 Not that people are really asking questions about archives at the moment, but that might change as this situation becomes the new normal. I'm fortunate in that I don't use public transit to get to work and I don't really interact with anyone while I'm there. I will probably start talking to myself, soon, though...

Restaurants and bars were shut down last week, and my impression is that people here are being fairly diligent about maintaining distances from each other and not doing too much in the way of panic-buying.

The nursing homes started restricting visiting hours and screening visitors on 2 March: they were taking people's temperatures and I could only go and see my mother-in-law on my way home from work instead of my usual routine of popping in twice a day. On 8 March that changed and all visitors were banned in order to protect the residents. My mother-in-law is not well enough to be aware of this change (😢), which is some comfort, I suppose, but it must be very hard for many families.

Meanwhile, I'm focusing on getting the garden going and appreciating the change of season. Yesterday I potted on all my eggplants and peppers. I have 58 plants in total, so we should be fairly self-sufficient in those this year, all going well!

Next weekend I will sow the tomatoes and in April I am expecting a delivery of fruit and nut trees and shrubs to regenerate the orchard. It's good to have something else to think about...

A severe summer

This was a screenshot from the Weather Network site last month:

It caught my attention, as 'severe' is not usually a word I'd associate with summer weather. But it has turned out to be an apt one for this season.

We are used to dealing with very dry summers, but this has been the worst one since we've been in Canada. At the height of the drought, on August 13th, I forced myself to take photographs of the vegetable garden. With barely enough water for the household, I had not been able to water the garden at all, and the plants were really suffering. In the whole of July we had 23mm of rain and the previous three months were also very dry (April 23mm, May 19mm, June 48mm).

The cabbage patch:

The squash plants:

The row of sunflowers next to the squash:

We got an inch of rain that day, followed by half an inch three days later and that was enough to start the plants growing again. It's still very dry, but the 48mm we received in August has made a huge difference to the garden.

This how the cabbage patch looks now:

And the sunflowers, with the squash behind them, are looking a bit healthier. Two of the squash plants died in the drought, but the others have recovered and I'm now picking patty pan squash. This week I will pick the first of the zucchini/courgettes. The only problem now is that the weeds are also enjoying the rain!

In less happy news, I have to report that my entire flock of chickens (33 birds) were killed by a mink during July and August. I don't know if the dry weather was a contributory factor, but I suspect it might have been. Over the course of three weeks I fought a losing battle with this night-time killer. Every time I thought I'd managed to mink-proof the coop, it found a way through (they only need an inch) and killed one or more chickens. One night it killed eight. On the morning of August 8th I found the last seven chickens dead on the floor.

After eight years of keeping chickens I think I'm going to stop, for a while at least. I am really going to miss them, and their eggs (my birds had produced 15,000 eggs in the time I had them), but right now one less responsibility is probably a good thing. But yes, this summer has been severe indeed.

Killing frost

The good news is that the 20 greenhouse tomatoes are still going strong

It's a different story out in the barnyard, however. The weather took an unpleasant dip below freezing on Saturday May 23rd, leaving all the tomato plants looking like this at 7.00am:

And by the time the sun had warmed them up, they all looked like this:

This, dear reader, is a dying tomato. Today, all that's left of it is a sad little pile of brown.

I still had a few of my excess plants left, which I've been selling from my mini farm stand at the front of the house. In fact, a woman bought 30 dollars-worth on Saturday afternoon. She's a regular customer, so I couldn't say no, but my heart was breaking a little bit as I saw her leave with 70% of my remaining plants. This left me with just eight to replace the 40-odd I had lost.

I have sown some more, in a spirit of optimism, and have also pinched out side-shoots of some of the greenhouse plants, in the hope that they will root and be useful to fill some of the gaps.

I also discovered a couple of volunteer tomato seedlings growing in the pepper bed, so I have recruited them to the cause as well.

Then I remembered noticing some other stray tomatoes in the front garden: they must have grown from the worm compost I spread there in the spring. Sure enough, there was a respectable crop of baby tomato plants growing in among the flowers there. I dug them up and potted them into a seed tray. At this rate I will soon be over-run with tomato plants again. ;-)

Of course I have no idea what variety these little plants are, but they will all be from last year's fruit, so should all be heirloom types. I can't think of a better argument for growing heirloom plants and for home composting than this!

The frost was forecast - in a rather last-minute way - but the night before was very windy, so putting any sort of protection in place wasn't easy. I managed to cover up the corn and squash plants with plastic, but even with that layer, most of those died, too. They were only sown a week or two ago, so won't be as difficult to replace as the tomato plants.

The brassica plants survived the frost, but even they have suffered some damage - I think the temperature was more like -2°C/28°F than the 0°C/32°F that was (eventually) forecast. Ah well, lesson learned: wait until June to be safe.

Snowing and going

When I woke up today, it was snowing again, but only enough to turn the world completely white for a few hours ('English snow', I thought to myself). By lunchtime the morning coating had melted.

The day warmed up a bit more and now there is some serious melting of the big snow banks going on. The ditch on the western side of the farm is visible again for the first time in months as the drifts have collapsed into it.

And the gate is a bit more visible than it has been of late.

The softening snow brings new perils, however. This next picture is the deep hole my right leg descended into as I walked back from taking the two photos above. The hole that made me tumble forward, flat on my face.

With a pocket full of eggs.

Jelly

 Another first for me this year was getting a harvest from the two large wild grape vines that are on the farm. There's one just on the fence behind the chicken's barn and another right at the back of the farm, sprawling over a hedge.

The grapes are very small, about the size of a pea, but I thought I should make use of them somehow. On my first excursion I picked six pounds.

After all that picking my hands looked liked I'd been taking part in a massacre.

I also went into the orchard and harvested this year's apple crop. Only five pounds of apples, but better than nothing!

Most of them were from a tree called 'Lady', which is an old French variety which produces teeny tiny apples (fit for a lady's delicate hand. Sigh. I'm clearly no lady.). Here's a close up of a few 'Ladies' with a couple of the more normal-sized apples for comparison.

With all this Lilliputian fruit, the one thing I decided fairly early on was that I wasn't going to spend hours picking every grape off the stems and peeling and coring each of those tiny apples. Making jelly seemed like the obvious choice, as it involves straining the fruit after it has been cooked, so you don't need to worry about unwanted pips and stalks.

For my first attempt, I just used the grapes. It didn't go well. I got to the straining-the-juice part, balancing the hot cooked fruit in some repurposed hosiery over a big bucket:

Then, under a second later, the precariously-balanced colander collapsed into the bucket with an almighty splash, leaving my kitchen floor and cupboards as further evidence of a terrible, bloody crime. Since I was standing there with camera in my hand, I recorded the scene.

I should have accepted that I was dealing with some bad jelly-making juju, but instead I persisted, boiling the juice with sugar and pectin. It never set properly: I now have several jars of a sort of runny wild grape syrup to show for all the hard work. It tastes alright and I think it will be OK on ice cream or pancakes, but it wasn't quite what I was hoping for. I think there was too much water in the mix and probably not enough pectin.

Unwilling to admit defeat, I tried again today, this time boiling down the apples and using their juice and the juice from another pound  or two of cooked grapes. I added more pectin than I did the first time and it seems to have worked - it's possible to turn the jars upside down without the jelly collapsing onto the lid, in any case.

Will I bother again another year? Probably: I really enjoy the process of harvesting wild food and I can see that turning the grapes and apples into jelly could become an autumnal ritual.

Maybe next year I'll manage it without the added ambiance of a ritual killing.

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.

Brassica massacre II

Yes! My first ever sequel post! And it's about brassicas! I can see you now, hunched forward on the edge of your seat with anticipation.

The July Dry left the cabbages, sprouts and swedes looking... well, looking pretty much like this, if the truth must be strictly adhered to.

The bed is in an elevated part of the garden and even with regular watering there seemed to be no way of saving these plants from the baking heat and unrelenting rainlessness of July. Consequently, I left it alone, leaving the weeds to have their way and giving it an occasional sad sideways glance as I walked past. If I had needed the space I would have got Mike to plough it over, but I didn't, so I just left it to get overgrown.

Last night I noticed that the sprout plants were somehow looking fairly good, in amongst the weeds and I decided perhaps I'd better weed at least that part of the bed.

Then I noticed new growth coming on some of the broccoli, swede and cabbage plants, too:

So perhaps this bed will not be a complete write-off, after all, this summer. Of course the downside of these discoveries is that I've had to spend the last hour getting rid of all those weeds...

The culprit

The fox was on the prowl again this morning, but we're keeping the remaining hens in their inner run, so this time he went away empty-bellied. He attacked again on Wednesday and this time we lost our rooster and four more hens. Now we're looking into getting some electric fencing for the orchard so that the chickens can continue to free-range more widely than they can at the moment. We're down to eleven hens and the three chicks now. I'm hoping one of the chicks is male, but it's still a bit too soon to tell.

And if that wasn't enough death for one week, we discovered a dead young rabbit at the back door this morning (this was before we saw the fox). I'm not sure if it was the dog or the cat or a combination of the two that were responsible. I hadn't been able to bring myself to turn our dead chickens into meat, but I didn't have any sort of emotional attachment to the rabbit, so thought I should have a go at gutting and skinning it. With the help of Ina's Highland Life blog and John Seymour's The New Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency I felt able to tackle the job.

The last time I did anything like this was in Biology, about a hundred years ago, when we dissected laboratory rats. The process actually wasn't too bad - the only problem is that the rabbit was so small that it won't even make a meal for one. I've put it in the freezer for now - maybe if we get a few more it might be worth turning them into a game pie!

Death and life

Yesterday we lost eight of the hens to (we think) a fox. We've lost one or two hens before, but this was the first time we've had a mass killing. The fox only ate one and a half of them - the rest were just killed for sport. We found them all around the orchard. Upsetting.

Mike had spent the afternoon building some more nest boxes for them. Seems like a waste, now. Were we tempting fate?

This morning we had a more pleasant surprise - we've had a broody hen sitting on five eggs for the last three weeks and today two of them hatched out.

Next time we let a broody incubate some eggs (next year), I'll put more eggs underneath her: apparently they can cope with up to 14 at a time.

Almond macaroons

I associate macaroons with Enid Blyton books and they're not something I've ever made before. But today I had two leftover egg whites and went hunting on the Internet for inspiration. David Lebovitz came to my rescue. I'm already a fan of his, thanks to his ice cream book The Perfect Scoop. He suggested macaroons as one way of using them up. I've always thought macaroons were made with desiccated coconut, which I don't much like, but a bit more hunting around brought up recipes for an almond variety, which sounded preferable.

There seem to be as many variations on the recipe online as there are recipes: oven temperature, method, quantities all seemed to be different in each version I read.

In the end I settled for an amalgam of several: as usual, opting for the most simple method and ingredients.

Ingredients

2 egg whites
1 cup ground almonds
¾ cup sugar
½ tsp almond extract (optional, I just happened to have some)

Whisk the egg whites to the soft peak stage. Gently fold in the almonds, sugar and almond extract (if using). Spoon the mixture into mounds onto a parchment-paper-lined baking sheet and bake at 400°F/200°C for 15 minutes. This quantity made 12 macaroons.

My end result wasn't the classic smooth, domed macaroon you'd get if you piped the mixture. But the taste and chewy texture are wonderful. And you don't leave half the mixture behind in the piping bag.

My Internet browsing brought up the fact that macaroons have become a traditional Passover treat, which wasn't something I knew (and which I'm finding hard to reconcile with the Enid Blyton association I had before, if I'm honest). They're certainly very quick to make - so a perfect food for Passover (or any time - I'll definitely be making these again).

I'm glad the macaroons turned out well, because I used the yolks of the same eggs to make a hollandaise sauce. Which was a complete failure. Ho hum.

Nipped in the bud

This was as close as we got to a tree fruit crop this year. The lack of frost in April meant that the orchard trees were two weeks in advance of their usual flowering time. I took the picture of these apple blossoms on 30 April. On 11 May the temperature dipped to -1.7°C/28.9°F and we lost all of our nascent fruit apart from the cherries. I even took a picture of the frost on our neighbour's roof that morning, with the early lilac flowers behind it, little realising the damage it had done.

There will be no apricots, plums, greengages, apples or pears this year. And we're not the only ones: I noticed that the orchard where we bought the trees has had to cancel their heirloom apple festival this year as their apple crop has been severely limited by the same frost. It's been a bad year all round for our little orchard - three of the apple trees didn't survive the winter: Pumpkin Sweet, Fireside and Duchess.

I console myself with the thought that our remaining young trees can put their energy into new growth and increasing their strength for next year.

Disaster recovery (again)

If you were reading this blog back in January, you'll perhaps remember that I resolved to eschew supermarket drink cartons and snacks for the children's school packed lunches and, instead, provide home-made sweet snacks for them. I even got around to posting some of the recipes on the blog, too.

In August, with the new school year fast approaching, I decided to make a huge batch of chocolate chip muffins, which I would then store in batches in the freezer for use later in the year. Luckily, we had occasion to test them before September: we found that they tasted revolting. I had forgotten to add sugar and the overriding flavour was one of baking powder. Not very nice.

For nearly four months I've had this pile of carefully-wrapped muffins in a corner of the freezer, silently mocking me for my incompetence. Every so often Mike would say "What are you going to do with those muffins?", which didn't help at all.

Today I broadcast my problem on Twitter and got some useful responses:

• Crumble them and turn them into a steamed pudding
• Use them as the base of a trifle/tiramisu (three votes for this)
• Make them into something like a bread-and-butter pudding
• Mix them with a tin of over-syruppy cherries and then add to vanilla ice-cream

I've got so many minging muffins that I think all of these options will be used over the coming months (and if you've got further suggestions, please share them). I started tonight with the bread-and-butter pudding idea. I found a recipe (by a blogger who'd had a similar cake-related disaster) for Twice Baked Chocolate Cake, which I adapted for use with the muffins. I used just milk, rather than cream and milk and I obviously didn't leave out the sugar, as the blogger (Linda) suggests (not this time, anyway). I left the sugary custard mixture to soak into the muffin pieces for an hour so that they would suck up the sweetness and (I hoped) become edible again. The finished product wouldn't win any prizes in a 'most beautiful dessert' show, but it smelt wonderful. The original muffins, on the other hand, looked delicious, which goes to prove what I've always felt about food - looks aren't everything (or even anything).

I didn't tell the children what was in the dessert until they had both declared it "delicious". It was, too. It only used five muffins out of the sixty, so we will definitely be eating this again. Will have to try the trifle/tiramisu plan next...

A mouse ate my Christmas tree

The festive season is all about traditions, old and new. Becoming a parent means that you get to create customs for your new family and I went about this quite consciously when we had our first child. One thing I bought was a re-usable cloth Advent calendar in the form of a Christmas tree, which I thought would make a good leading-up-to-Christmas tradition for us to have, many years into the future.

This is how the calendar looked at Christmas 2005. You can see that there are small cloth decorations for each of the days before Christmas.

We've used it for ten years now and it is as popular with the children as I'd hoped it would be. I was consequently horrified this morning to find that it had been well and truly nibbled by a mouse. The middle section of the tree was ruined and the lower part of the numbered pouches that hold the ornaments had been badly damaged, with the figures 22 and 23 missing.

Now needlework is not something I can claim to be any good at. My mum had to invent a dentist's appointment for me when I was fourteen so that I could avoid the last dressmaking lesson of the year. I'd managed to completely ruin the blouse I was supposed to be making and couldn't face admitting it in front of the rest of the class. I've never enjoyed sewing since, so the prospect of making good this ruined tree did not appeal.

Luckily the ornaments were in fairly good shape, although the Noel heart at the bottom of this photo had been chewed upon and one of the others, a striped candy cane, had disappeared completely. Spookily, the candy cane was one of only two ornaments that represented something edible. This mouse was clearly smarter than the average rodent.

I was loth to throw the whole thing away and it did look as though it might be salvageable. There's me trying to lead a more self-sufficient and sustainable lifestyle, I thought. I should be able to do this, just on principle!

I cut the damaged middle section of the tree out and re-sewed the top to the lower half. It makes the tree look slightly squat, but at least it's in one piece again. The lower part was more tricky, as first I had to patch it with green cotton (taken from the back of the removed middle section) and then create a new red part for the pouches. Child #2 had an old red t-shirt of roughly the right colour, so I used that. I knew that I'd never get the numbers to look right, as I didn't have any white embroidery thread, so I used plain white cotton and they now look decidedly rustic:

At least it's now usable again. I just have to find a replacement for the stolen candy cane. I even managed to mend my broken heart:

I'm hoping that my amateurish repairs will become a new part of this particular Christmas tradition: "Do you remember the year when a mouse ate our Christmas tree?".

POSTSCRIPT: The morning after I wrote this I had an idea for a replacement for the candy cane ornament. Using the old red t-shirt again, half a tissue, a piece of velcro from an old pair of my son's shorts and a piece of ribbon from my (sparsely equipped) sewing box I came up with this:

Post-holiday harvest

It seems to be customary among vegetable-gardening bloggers to post images of the heaps of vegetables they've harvested after a break from their gardens. I feel compelled to join in with my contribution - here's today's swag:



The sharp-eyed reader may notice that there are some tomatoes in amongst the bounty. There may not be many more, unfortunately, as the majority of the tomato plants have not recovered from their earlier dowsing and are now dead or dying. The weather has not been kind: more rain fell while we were away and the lower vegetable garden is still under water. I had to throw all my Florence fennel plants onto the compost heap as they had rotted and died (shame they weren't Venetian fennel, eh?). The peppers are clinging on to life, but only just, and even the rhubarb is looking a bit sad. The contrast with last summer's drought is so extreme that I feel it is deliberate. Maybe next year we'll be shown the happy medium.

No, I don't think so either.

There were the usual overgrown gherkins and zucchini (is it OK if I just call them zucchini now? Calling them courgettes/zucchini is cumbersome.) and lots of beans. Before we went away I'd been picking the yellow wax ones, but now we've got the (green) Blue Lake bush beans and the first runner beans (Wisley Magic), too. All the beans went into the freezer this afternoon, except for a few of the Blue Lake ones which went (with cucumber and tomatoes) into a Salade Niçoise for supper.

The wet weather may have been lethal for some vegetables, but it has been great for the cucurbit family. I never used to like cucumbers much, but the Telegraph Improved variety that I've been harvesting taste wonderful - much sweeter and more flavourful than anything I've ever bought from a store. I always thought that the 'home-grown tastes so much better than shop-bought' hype was a bit over-stated, but it really is true with cucumbers.

The winter squash shown here are Small Wonder spaghetti squash (on the left) and two Winter Luxury pie pumpkins. I'm really proud of those (my first-ever winter squash) and am particularly pleased with them because they don't need processing immediately, unlike nearly everything else. The plants are enormous and look like something from outer space, the way they're spreading over the upper vegetable garden. Getting through them to pick the runner beans is a precision exercise.

Please don't take a picture

It's been a bad day for the poor tomatoes and peppers. The soil is still waterlogged after Saturday's ridiculous quantity of rain and these plants are suffering from a serious deficiency of oxygen to their roots. I noticed one plant looking a bit droopy yesterday, but today they all look like they're going to die. Not even the tomato hornworms would fancy them now.


I've pulled the water-conserving mulch (which seemed like such a good idea back in June) away from the stems to try and get more air to the roots and to assist in the drying-out process, but apart from that I don't think there's much I can do. The forecast for the rest of the rest of the week is for hot sunny days, so the soil might have a chance of drying out. Has anyone had tomato plants recover from this kind of situation, or should I start looking up green tomato recipes now?