Ash again...

A sad day today as we watched three tree surgeons take down the big ash tree at the rear of the house. It was very close to the property and with the advance of the Emerald Ash Borer through Ontario, it seemed sensible to anticipate the inevitable and remove the whole tree rather than just the branches which were overhanging the house.

I didn't envy the three arborists their job, but they were very methodical about it, with the lower limbs going first, and then the upper ones.

Until all that was left was the central trunk to come down.

There is an impressive amount of burnable wood left for Mike to cut into smaller lengths for the fire.

I counted the rings in the lower part of the trunk and I think the tree was 64 years old. Our house was built in the early 1970s, so the tree was already 20 years old then. 

It's amazing how much lighter it is in the house with the tree down, even with no leaves on it!

Relentless winter

I suspect that the first week in January is probably too early to be getting fed up of winter weather. We haven't had a full thaw since before Christmas, so the layer of ice that fell in the pre-Christmas ice storm is still there, and every so often the weather warms up enough to melt the snow on top of it, but never enough to melt that underlying layer of ice. Which makes walking outside tricky.

The children have not gone back to school yet as the last two days have been extremely cold and windy. Today we've had snow all day with 30mph/50km/h winds, visibility has been pretty low at times. You can see from the trees that the wind has pasted the west-facing trunks with snow.

Temperatures at the end of last week were around -25°C/-13°F. It's a bit warmer this week, but with the wind, it doesn't really feel it! We've been using the kids' toboggans (and the kids!) to bring wood for the fires down from the barns.

We don't rely on the fires now in the way we did in our first winter here, as the geothermal heating copes pretty well in averagely cold temperatures, but warmly glowing logs are a very welcome sight once the temperature dips below about -15°C/5°F!

Ice storm

We have had two day's worth of rain, which wouldn't have been a problem except that the air temperatures were below freezing, so it formed a lethal layer of ice over everything and has caused a lot of damage to trees and to power lines.

Our power went out yesterday afternoon and still isn't back sixteen hours later. We're running off our solar panel-powered backup batteries, but as there's no sunshine around today we're using as little of it as possible - just keeping the fridge and water pump going, and non-turnoffable things like the smoke alarms. And the woodstove in the kitchen is coming in handy for making hot drinks and keeping us all warm!

Yesterday the ice formed a layer about half an inch/1cm thick over the snow, which made walking pretty difficult - almost impossible in places. I found that my snow shoes were the best way of getting around.

Overnight, some of the precipitation turned to snow, which has made it much easier to walk outside this morning. I hope it has made life a bit easier for the crews working to clear the roads and reconnect the power lines.

It looks like the worst of the storm is over for now. Not an experience I'd want to repeat too often.

I did manage to (inexpertly) ice the Christmas cake yesterday. Seems I chose an apt design!

Chestnuts roasting*

There aren't that many stores that sell chestnuts here, so when I see them I can't resist the temptation. I have fond family memories of Dad roasting chestnuts in an old biscuit tin over an open fire and everyone burning their fingers as they cracked off the outer layers of the nuts to get at the sweet brain-shaped meat within.

 I hadn't tried cooking them on the wood-burning stove before, but it worked fine: it took longer than the directly-over-the-flame method (about 20 minutes, turning the chestnuts occasionally) but there's less chance of burning them, this way.

And in considerably less than 20 minutes, all that was left was the furry, woody debris.

*Apologies if you have Nat King Cole crooning in your head for the rest of the day.

Summer in winter

I enjoy making meals which use a combination of fresh and preserved local food. Today I did that with a braised lamb shank recipe. The lamb was from our meat CSA scheme and has been in the freezer since it was delivered in the summer. I've also used a jar of the tomatoes I preserved in August (even though we do still have some fresh ones).

The remaining ingredients are more seasonal: garlic, onions, carrots, swede/rutabaga and rosemary.

After browning the meat in an ovenproof dish, I cooked the chopped vegetables in butter for five minutes or so and then added the jar of tomatoes, some white wine and some stock. The lamb shanks were added back into the pan, which was covered, brought to the boil and then transferred to a 300°F/150°C oven for three hours. I served it with mashed potato and braised red cabbage.

And if that wasn't enough to fill the house with lovely smells, I also used the woodstove to dry some orange slices for use as Christmas decorations. I tried this last year and managed to burn some of the slices slightly. This time I've mastered the technique - the rack on top of the roasting pan keeps the slices sufficiently far away from the heat of the stove to let them dry more gently.

I love the way they look when they're finished: like small pieces of stained glass. A promise of summer.

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.

Thaw

There hasn't been much snow to thaw, but what there is has been slowly disappearing over the last few days. The weather is quite different from last winter's, when there wasn't a thaw in January and the mean temperature (-9°C) was a full two degrees below the long-term average.

I took this photo at the fence near the cattle grid about a year ago:

Here's the same view today. Not quite so pretty.

The chickens have enjoyed being out in the orchard and eating the grass that is now visible again. It makes a change for them from eating the hay that I'd lined their nest boxes with.

We've been watching Hugh's Chicken Run recently, a programme which focuses on the living standards of intensively-reared chickens and contrasts them with the way that a group of free-range birds are cared for. It's not easy to watch, but it is fascinating. I don't know how Canadian regulations for intensively farming chickens compare to UK ones, but I can't imagine that they're much better and I've never seen free-range birds in the supermarkets here.

Our wood supply seems to be holding up well, but that is probably because November was so mild (the mean temperature then was over 5°C, when usually it should be 0°C).

Becoming Canadian

This has got to be the quintessential Canadian scene. A group of people thoroughly enjoying themselves on a frozen lake on a winter's day.

I have absolutely no interest in watching professional hockey and have some deep (but relatively uninformed) reservations about the way that youngsters enter the professional game here (this news item left an abiding impression). But I was bursting with pride at seeing my own son holding a hockey stick for the first time and getting the hang of skating with the help of some really lovely people. I would not want to see him involved in playing for a 'proper' team, but can't think of anything better than seeing him enjoy being on the ice like he was today.

And if that wasn't pleasure enough, there were marshmallows, toasted over a fire built on the ice.

I love this country.

A family affair

After recent frankly poor performances by the weather, we've been treated to some Good Friday sunshine today. I decided to risk sowing some seeds in one of the long vegetable beds. In went peas, carrots, beetroot, pickling onions and broad beans. Child #2 helped me with the larger seeds. Here he is putting in the broad beans:
At one point he said "I didn't know gardening could be this much fun!". It would have been hard for him to find better words with which to swell my heart with motherly love.

As we worked, we were treated to periodic fly-pasts of huge groups (skeins, I suppose I should say) of Canada geese.


The photo doesn't do justice to the experience, as the noise these birds make as they go over is amazing. You can hear them coming a long time before they are visible in the sky. If you turn the sound up loud and play the video below, you will get some of the effect. With a little of one of our neighbours' chainsaws, too, for that authentic Canadian flavour.

Mike was bringing down some of the big logs he'd cut from fallen ash trees in the last few weeks. His mum decided that the log splitter looked like fun, so got going on getting the biggest ones split up. After doing about 20 she was very tired, but felt that she'd earned her lunch (obviously I wouldn't have let her have any if she'd only managed 19!).

Bottom-heat

I had a bit of a crisis in the tomato-seed-starting department, when I realised that the lovely new seed trays/flats that I'd bought here in Canada would not fit inside my purchased-in-England electric propagator. Which I had to buy a voltage transformer to get to work here. Is everything is bigger here (except for voltage), or is it that everything is smaller in England? I noticed that kitchen rolls in England looked tiny on my recent trip back.

Now that I'm aware of this seed-tray disparity, I'm using my smaller, English, trays for the seeds that need that extra bit of help from the propagator to get started. However, my large tray of mixed tomato seeds (seven different varieties!) had already been sown before I realised my problem.

Now you may have noticed from my earlier post today that we're back in winter at the moment. Consequently, we had lit the woodburning stove in the kitchen. Which has a large flat area on the top of it. I had a conversation with my aunt this afternoon in which the need for 'bottom-heat' for tomato seeds was mentioned. Later on it occurred to me that today I might be able to provide those seeds with the warmth that they really need.

Now obviously, putting the plastic seed tray directly on to a stove that is capable of boiling a kettle would be foolish, so I experimented with kitchen equipment until I came up with an arrangement which seemed to provide a reasonable level of warmth without creating a melting mess. At this point, the fire in the stove is not being added to, so the whole affair will be gradually cooling over the next few hours.


I will report back on whether this unorthodox arrangement has the desired effect.

Why I don't have chilblains this year

We didn't light the kitchen woodburner until January last year*, so I thought I'd compare the temperature recorded in the study for December last year to the December in 2007. (The study opens off the kitchen and is very close to the woodburning stove.) The difference is quite striking (the upper line is December 2008, the lower one December 2007):


We did turn on the old electric baseboard heater as December 2007 got colder, but even then the study was a couple of degrees colder than it was in 2008. There are clear peaks both year on Christmas Day - evidence of someone toiling over hot pans, perhaps!

*Not for reasons of masochism, I should point out, but because we had concerns over the safety of the stove. The January cold rather over-rode those fears...

Mystery object revealed

We moved our woodburning stove as part of the kitchen renovations. Here is how it looked on the first day we saw the house (April 07):


The cupboard to the right of the stove has been removed and the stove is now in its place. It seems that nothing about the original location of the stove was 'to code'. It didn't have enough non-combustible material in front of it, it was too close to the ceiling and the door and (worst of all) the chimney was for an oil furnace, not a wood stove. All those things are now fixed and the stove has a shiny new chimney, which now goes straight up instead of in the dog-leg that was required by its previous position.


The photo I shared on Wednesday was a view of the sky as seen through the new flue, before the stove and the lower part of the chimney were attached. I figured it would be my only chance to take that picture! I think 'the ms. s' was the closest, in that she guessed that I was looking up when I took it.

Imbolc/Candlemas/Groundhog Day

If Candlemas be cloud and snow
Winter will be gone and not come again

Sorry, was that supposed to rhyme? Or scan, even?

Anyway, the weather today looks promising if the legends about the first and second days of February are to be believed. Not a glimpse of the sun all today or yesterday. So the Gaelic goddess Cailleach is sleeping and any small burrowing creature silly enough to put its head out of its winter refuge will not have seen its shadow.

We're almost out of wood for the fires now, so it's interesting that the Gaelic legend is all about the goddess going off to get more firewood.

Stoker, Second Class

It was -15°C this morning, so we decided that we'd light the stove in the kitchen as well as the one in the living room. It's much bigger, so kicks out an impressive amount of heat. Both our smoke alarms went off as the dust on the top of the stove burnt off (can't think how it got there) - so at least we know they're working. It's possible to boil a kettle on the stove-top (if you're not in a huge hurry for a cuppa, that is), so there's the added benefit of having another cooking surface while we've got it alight. The only drawback is that with two fires going, you feel as though you're a bit of a slave to refuelling them.

Postscript: It turns out to be the perfect place to prove bread dough, too! Might have to go mad and buy a proper kettle though. This one was bought for a camping trip in 1990 and is a bit on the small side.

Gawd's truth

I knew we wouldn't be able to resist. And it did go down to five degrees centigrade last night, so we didn't feel too bad, lighting it. It's been pretty chilly today, too, so we relit it this morning and it's keeping the living room cosy: 21 degrees in there compared to only 18 in the study. Mmm, might have to move into there with the laptop soon.

Today work is due to start on replacing our roof with new asphalt shingles, so I thought I'd better do a 'before' picture. I've also had a particular request for a picture of the front of the house, so here it is (well, about half of it, anyway). So far the only sign of activity is the arrival of a big trailer to take away the old shingles, but apparently they'll work through the weekend, so by Monday we should have a water-tight roof that'll last for 30 years.

The guttering will have to be removed, which means that our water situation will temporarily get even worse, until the next gang of men come to put the new gutters on. Those will be bigger than the existing eavestroughs, and less leaky, so in the longer term we'll get more water through into the cistern.

Water and (predictably) fire

The mornings are becoming very autumnal now - stout shoes are required to avoid having soaking wet feet from the dew. Twice now there's been a coyote lurking in the hay field in the mornings when Mike has taken Toby for his morning walk. As we've found a couple of skulls of small carnivores - possibly foxes - in the field, Mike decided that the wisest thing to do was to put Toby back on the lead and take him home.

We still have a water shortage in the house, so Mike ordered two huge tanks (they hold around 6,000 litres (1550 US gallons) each) with the aim of filling them from the roof of the big barn. The tanks arrived when I was in the UK, so Mike had to roll them up to the barn by himself. He says he looked and felt like a dung beetle. The barn already has guttering on the south side of the roof which is about 4000 square feet (370 square metres), but some of the guttering was blocked and they all emptied onto a patch of concrete, which wasn't much use. So on Tuesday Mike unblocked the gutters and attached the ends to one of the big tanks . It's a bit jury-rigged at the moment, while we make sure it works.

Then we had to wait for some rain (a familiar activity by now), which finally arrived around midnight yesterday. We only had 2.6mm (a tenth of an inch), but that has given us 200 gallons in the first tank, which is great. Now we've just got to work out how to get the water from the barn down to the cistern in the house...

Our new wood-burning stove was installed today in the living room, where before we'd just had a fireplace with glass doors. It looks great and we're both keen to test it out, although the temperature doesn't really warrant lighting a fire yet. I wonder who will crack first.

Dealing with wood

Mike invested in a manual log splitter yesterday to help us deal with our poplar logs. It's a great device, somewhat similar to those ski machines you get in gyms (says she, never having been to a gym). With it I can actually split the logs - well, those that I can lift on to the cradle, that is. There's a wedge-shaped piece at the back that the log is forced against with a hydraulic ram, operated by pulling the two levers backwards and forward, until eventually the log cracks with a most satisfying noise. It's still fairly hard work, but you get a real sense of achievement with each log split, which I'm sure would be much more difficult to attain with a ski machine.

We've still got a fair number to do, but I don't think it'll take too long. I managed to create the little heap of split logs below in half an hour this afternoon.

We spent another hour or two today turning the top hamper from the poplars into wood chips with yet another new gadget for the tractor which was delivered by Mark the tractor guy this afternoon. This is a scarily efficient machine - it can take branches of poplar that are up to about three or four inches in diameter and it gobbles them down in seconds.We've got a huge heap of branches to deal with (behind the tractor here), so this is another job that will take a little while to complete. The chippings are being used to form the paths between the vegetable plots (I'm hoping the quackgrass won't like it).