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.

Spring progress report

It is beginning to get warm enough for me to get started on the Spring jobs. Looming largest in my thoughts was the need to empty the chicken enclosure of the accumulation of winter litter. But I couldn't do that until the chickens were willing to spend some time outside. They aren't happy about walking in the snow, so I needed most of the snow to be gone before I could contemplate the task.

Here's the orchard on March 26th:

Still fairly snowy: the Buff Orpingtons were willing to brave the conditions, but none of the other breeds fancied leaving the coop.

By yesterday most of the snow had gone and the birds were spending their time outside. Here they are this morning. There was a light scattering of snow overnight, but not enough to bother them.

It took two hours of shovelling to get the barn free of the woodchips and chicken detritus of the winter. And there was a rat's nest. With baby rats in it. I won't say any more about that...

The resulting chicken manure heap is huge! You can see that there's still quite a lot of snow behind it.

There are some signs of life in the greenhouse. These seedlings are coming up in the bed where I sowed peas. They're clearly not peas, but I'm hoping they are something edible, so I'll leave them for now.

It's suddenly a lot easier to walk up past the barns, with the snow going. There is still a lot of ice in places - this patch along the fence line is a good ten inches thick!

I was actually quite grateful for the continued cold weather, as our fridge went wrong on the 25th of March and was out of action for  a week. I put our cool box into service and stationed it on the porch. Fortunately the weather stayed at fridge temperature for the whole week, so we didn't have any problem keeping things cold.

It wasn't the most convenient location for a fridge, but having all the food out on the porch did turn out to be a very effective deterrent against snacking!

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.

Growth

I'm conscious that it's been a bit quiet on this blog for a few weeks. Mainly this is because this is such a busy time of year in the garden. I've been sowing and planting and weeding like a possessed thing - and the weeds are still winning.

We had some welcome rain on Tuesday. I didn't really get dry all day, but that was my fault for spending far too long trying to get photos of flowers bedecked with raindrops.

The greenhouse beds are mostly under control and producing tremendous quantities of dill, coriander/cilantro and lettuce leaves.

The potatoes popped up overnight. I've got some in the greenhouse because I had too many for my potato bed.

As usual, I have vast quantities of tomato plants. I sold about a third of what I grew. I planted about 20 plants in the greenhouse a few weeks ago and finally finished planting the remainder outside this week. The greenhouse ones are starting to flower now. I still have about ten jars of tomato sauce from last year, so with any luck I will run out just as I start to pick this year's crop.

Rabbits have been a huge problem this year - my outside peas and cabbage crops have all been pretty much wiped out by the blighters. They also destroyed most of the apple trees this winter: the snow was so deep that they were able to gnaw the bark above the tree protectors. My orchard doesn't really deserve the name any more. :-(

Visitors: expected, unexpected and missed

There are various creatures we expect to see at this time of year. Colorado potato beetles and their offspring, for instance.

Check. (And ewwww.)

Then there are creatures that we don't normally see. I went for a bike ride yesterday and saw two very tall birds in a field beside the road. I thought at first that they were herons, but when I looked at the photo more closely I realised that the colour was all wrong:

They're actually Sandhill cranes (Grus canadensis), which usually pass through but don't breed in this area, from what I've seen online, but this looks like a parent and youngster to me.

Then there are the expected-but-missing. This year it is the caterpillars of Monarch butterflies, which are usually munching their way through the milkweed plants by now.

There are some milkweed plants down at the bottom of this photo, and if you look really closely in the middle of the dark area at the top, you might just see a small flash of orange. This is only the fourth Monarch I've seen this year and there are widespread reports that there have been fewer sightings of this particular visitor than usual.

I spent a while this evening inspecting a lot of the milkweed plants in the hayfield. As usual they were host to many different insects: ladybirds, spiders and beetles.

But I didn't find a single monarch caterpillar. Around this date in 2009 I hadn't noticed any Monarchs but the caterpillars were easy to find. I hope their numbers recover.

Orchard produce

The combination of last year's dry summer and the chickens developing a taste for apple-tree bark meant that I have lost about half of the fruit trees we planted back in 2008. Last year we got hardly any fruit from the surviving trees. This year, though, things are looking better. The picture below is of a variety called 'Lady' and I'm fairly sure this is the first time it has had any fruit on it. 

You can see that the leaves of the tree are speckled with the cedar-apple rust which originates from the weird orange fungus growths that appear in wet weather in the Spring on cedar trees. Some of the other trees are much more badly affected than this one, but they are still managing to put forth new leaves and the fruit seems to be alright.

The apple trees which have grown best are 'Lady' and 'North Star' (also known as 'Dudley Winter'): on both of them the fruit had set so well that I had to thin it out a bit. This is one of those activities I knew about in theory but have never had to do in practice before. Rather like 'What to do with Leftover Roast Potatoes', or 'How to Invest your Spare Cash'.

Both of the pear trees (Clapp's Favourite and Bartlett) are still with us and have respectable amounts of fruit coming, although the Bartlett has had a new addition since the last time I looked at it:

Death and foxes

Some weeks, you just want to see the back of. This was definitely one of those weeks. On Saturday three of the hens were killed by a fox. A fourth died of her injuries on Sunday. On Wednesday the dog discovered something in the corner of the big barn and started barking furiously at it.

This was what he'd found:

Hardly recognisable as such, but another fox, this one badly affected by mange. The next day it, too, had died. Today I picked up its body on a shovel and took it into the woods.

I know death is a part of life and all that, but this week I feel as though I have been dealing with nothing but death.

A bit of light relief then, to discover that a new book from one of my favourite authors had come into the library. I collected it today:

I'm obviously not going to be allowed to forget this week's foxes as quickly as I'd hoped...

P.S. The book was very good. But really should have been called Death after Death, I think. And foxes did feature rather a lot. Representative sentence (p.141): "She hadn't expected to die like a fox frozen in its den."

Eggs, tomatoes and kale

We've been having a disappointing performance from the chickens in recent months: ever since we merged the new chicks in with the remainder of our original flock we've only been getting one or two eggs a day. In recent weeks this has gone down to just one egg a day and sometimes none. This means that we've been feeding 31 birds and only one of them has been deigning to return the favour.

About 12 of those birds are males, so I'm not expecting any eggs from them, but it would be nice if the remaining 19 could pull their weight a bit. I was therefore very pleased to find two eggs today, one of them quite small. I hope this means that our new flock have started to lay: with any luck we will soon be overrun with eggs again, instead of portioning them out as though they're made of solid gold.

I had a go at making oven-dried tomatoes this weekend, using some of my crop of cherry tomatoes. It takes quite a while, but it's really worth it: they taste amazing - a really concentrated burst of tomatoey sweetness.

I was away at the end of last week and in my absence the cabbage worms have done a good job of eating nearly every leaf on the young Tuscan kale plants which had been doing very well in the greenhouse. I spent half an hour yesterday morning picking the little blighters off.

On a broccoli plant I found that one of the caterpillars had already matured enough to build itself a cocoon. I know there's not much logic to it, but I left the cocoon in place. It may well hatch out and lay another devouring army of eggs on my plants, but there's something so wondrous about the transformation of caterpillar to butterfly that I can't bring myself to interfere with it.

Indoor corn

I nearly didn't grow corn this year as I seem to have spent the last few years growing it exclusively for the consumption of the neighbourhood raccoons. Then in early June I read somewhere about a person eating early corn that had been grown in a hoop house and it occurred to me that this might be a solution to my raccoon problem.

With the dry spell in July, the corn in the fields around here is looking stunted - by now it is usually towering above my head. But my greenhouse-sown and regularly-watered corn is looking stately:

Silks are forming on some of the plants now. I love the wanton way they unfurl and cascade down the stem of the plant: like Rapunzel letting down her hair.

There will be less wind in there than there would be outside, which means I might need to give the plants a bit of extra help with pollination. And of course it remains to be seen whether the greenhouse will offer the corn enough protection to prevent the raccoons from having their annual corn-feast. They are devious little beasts, after all. But I'm hopeful...

Pumpkin patch

The plants in the experimental pumpkin patch we've carved out of the hayfield seem to be doing well. We've been lucky with the weather - there has been just enough rain to keep things going up there, although there were two frustrating nights when we watched storms pass closely to the north of us without dropping any rain. More storms are possible tonight. Fingers crossed.

The point of this bed was to avoid the squash bugs which destroyed all the cucurbits in the barnyard and greenhouse last year. I've sown cucumbers, melons, zucchini/courgettes and a variety of pumpkins and squash up there. As a control, I sowed two zucchini plants in the barnyard. They haven't been bothered by squash bugs yet, but there are loads of cucumber beetles on them which have turned the leaves into lacework in places. In contrast, the two zucchini plants in the hayfield are completely undamaged and much bigger than their barnyard cousins.

The only problem with the hayfield plants is their distance from the house (I know I shouldn't complain about this). If we get a good crop of zucchini and cucumbers it's going to be hard work carrying them back indoors!

On the way back from the pumpkin patch last night I had to do a double-take when I saw these flowers. For a moment I thought they were asters but then realised it was much too early in the summer. They're actually thistles; the flowers are much smaller than Canada thistles and so far I haven't been able to positively identify them. I don't think I've ever noticed them before.

Chickens, inside and out

We keep getting little tastes of winter, followed by warm spells. Yesterday there was an inch or two of snow on the ground in the morning, enough to keep the chickens indoors. It melted over the course of the day and by this morning the chickens were happy to scratch around in the soil of the orchard.

January was stressful in relation to the chickens, as they were being preyed upon by a nocturnal killer. We lost five hens over the course of ten days. Mike spent a lot of time hammering wire over any holes he could find in the chickens' corner of the barn. We think the killer was a stoat (or ermine, as they are known in their white winter coats), as they just drink the blood of their victims, rather than eat their flesh. All the dead birds had damage to their throats but were otherwise unharmed.

Since the carcasses were basically sound, I decided that I should use some of the meat. It seemed a waste to just dispose of the bodies. The hens range in age from one to three years old; they weren't going to suitable for roasting and I therefore decided not to go the whole plucking-and-gutting route. Instead, I removed the skin from their fronts and legs and cut the meat out. I write that very casually, but I felt very nervous and sad about it. I don't look upon the chickens as pets but cutting them up for meat wasn't something I had been planning to do.

The first thing I noticed about the meat was the colour of the fat around the legs: a really bright yellow, not at all like the fat you see on the meat of the young chickens which are normally offered for sale. The leg meat was also much darker, although the breast meat looked much the same. I'd never cooked meat from such a (relatively) old bird, so I spent a little while researching the best way of doing that.

Long, slow, cooking seemed to be the Internet's answer, along with letting the meat mature for a few days in the fridge before using it. I just added water to the chicken legs and cooked them for eight hours on my oven's slow-cooking setting (around 225°F/108°C). Afterwards, I chilled the meat so that I could take the layer of fat off. The meat was very good to eat and the resulting stock was great but I would still much rather have had the chickens alive and well and producing eggs.

It has been ten days now since we last found a dead hen, so we're hoping that the ermine has been foiled in its chicken-hunting enterprises.

Suffocating squash bugs

As soon as the title of this post came into my mind, it was swiftly followed by the phrase 'sufferin' succotash' - as used by Sylvester the cat and Daffy Duck. Succotash is a dish of corn and beans and my problem was with the other Three Sisters crop: squash. To be even more specific, it was with the cucumber branch of the cucurbit family. The greenhouse and garden cucumber plants have been completely polished off this year. Here's what's left of the cucumber plants (including the inevitable overgrown-pickling-cucumber-I-missed):

And here are the little pests that have done the damage:

Now normally I adopt a 'live and let live' approach to pests, reckoning that eventually the balance of nature will reassert itself and something will come along that eats the pests. But the force of numbers here was too great and my one remaining squash plant (not even sure what it is, to be honest, but I wanted a chance to find out) was in danger of being overwhelmed.

The organic-ish solution was to mix some dish detergent with water and spray the mixture on the bugs. I thought the chickens might be interested in helping, but the two I brought into the greenhouse last night were only interested in nibbling at the lettuce and peppers, despite there being bugs all over the bed. I gave up on that approach and reverted to plan A. The dish detergent mixture  works (the solution stops the bugs from breathing), although I can see that it will take a while before the bug numbers are brought down to a more manageable populations.

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.

Blowdown

Our path to the pond was comprehensively blocked this morning by a fallen ash tree. A closer look at the stump explains why the weekend's high winds had this effect:

Blowdown is a word I learnt only yesterday (I'm reading Bad Ground by W. Dale Cramer). I wasn't expecting to get to use it quite so quickly!

On the line

First line-drying day of the year. Ten days later than in 2009, I notice. The horizontality of the clothes suggests that I might have been over-keen about achieving this particular Spring milestone. Below the line, the grass is still very brown-looking, but with promises of green showing through.

Rocket/arugula and lettuce seedlings are beginning to emerge in the greenhouse and I've got peppers and eggplants coming up indoors. I sowed the tomatoes on Tuesday and they're sitting under a plastic cover on a sunny windowsill, so I hope they'll germinate pretty quickly. I moved the onion seedlings into the greenhouse this week and also transplanted the first of the peas. I germinated them indoors to avoid the problem I had last year with the seeds being eaten by rodents. There's still a risk that the young plants might get gnawed by rabbits in the greenhouse (if they're still lurking around), but I've given them some basic protection. It's not a rabbit-proof fence, by any means, but it might make them think twice:

Year of the Rabbit

You might think that the depths of winter would be fairly quiet on the destructive-animal-pest front in the garden. There isn't anything growing at this time of year for them to eat, after all.

It was such a beautiful morning here that I decided it was time to bring the greenhouse out of its winter hibernation mode and sow some seeds in there. The soil was warm, dry, and teeming with centipedes. Mike reconnected the water supply and I got to work, sowing carrots, beets, rocket, spinach and some lettuce and pak choi seeds in one of the beds. The dead-looking leaves in the corners are last year's parsley plants, which don't look very lively at the moment, but should burst back into abundant growth soon.

We had some high winds last week which blew out one of the small panels in the corner of the greenhouse.

I hadn't really given it a lot of thought, apart from adding it to the mental 'tasks to be done' list. The panel is nowhere to be found, so it's going to be a case of finding something suitable to plug the gap.

What I hadn't considered is that this gives a handy entrance to the greenhouse for winter-starved creatures. When I started watering one of the other beds, evidence of their activity was all too clear:

They'd been feasting on the last of my over-wintered carrots:

So suddenly it's become quite a priority to get that entrance hole fixed. Otherwise word will spread that I'm running a nice little rabbit restaurant and the plants from all the seeds I sowed this morning will be feeding Flopsy, Mopsy, Peter and Cotton-tail instead of us.

Sometimes I think Mr McGregor got a bad rap.

More white things

The promised storm left us with some impressive snow drifts yesterday. The tractor's snow-blowing attachment hasn't seen a lot of use this winter, but it was proving handy this morning. Yesterday was the first Wednesday when I haven't driven to Deseronto because of the weather. In our first winter I drove through a few storms like that (they always seem to happen on a Wednesday), determined not to be thought of as wimpish and probably giving myself a few more grey hairs in the process. These days I'm more sensible.

The dog disturbed an animal in the barn yesterday - all I saw of it was its tail, which was rather like a cat's in shape and size, white with a black tip. It hid in the woodpile before I could get a better look at it. At first I thought it was a cat, but a bit of hunting around on Wikipedia suggests that it was a stoat in its white winter coat. Which is ermine, of course. Nice to see it on the animal instead of trimming someone's robes. Not that I spend an awful lot of time with nobles in full regalia, it has to be said. If the stoat's going to eat the rats and mice in the barn, then I'm quite happy - but I am worried about the chickens...

Talking of pests, I had to do a bit of snow-clearing myself. While Mike was negotiating the tractor around one of the trees at the back of the house, the blowing snow hit the back door, forcing it open. Our utility room rapidly filled up with snow:

Mike's slippers were one of the main casualties. Which I feel is a suitable penalty for making me shovel snow indoors.

This evening, Mother Nature is the one doing the snow blowing: