Ice-sketches

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll know that I'm fascinated by ice formations. The first photo I took this morning was of one of the artefacts left behind by the weekend's freezing rain:

Come, let me clutch thee.

Much more interesting, though, were the live ice-pictures being created at the edge of the stream by air entering below the layer of ice. They were just mesmerising:

Yellow peril

I've had a few complaints lately about the class of wildlife I've been featuring on this blog. Vultures, rats and snakes are a little unsavoury for some people, it seems. By way of respite I offer up this creature instead.

This ridiculously cute bird has been terrorising the front of our house all day. It appears to be convinced that its reflection in the windows is a rival male and is alternately bashing against the glass and then sitting on the trellis by the side of the house and singing its little heart out.

It's a yellow warbler (Dendroica petechia).

Snakes and sparkles

I've only seen today's weather conditions a few times since we've lived here. It was a sunny day but there was a very fine snow falling. This filled the morning air with glorious sparkles of light. I tried making a short video of it against our neighbour's dark blue garage wall. I'm not sure how well this shows the effect, but it might give at least some idea of what I'm on about:

I had to stop the car on my way to work to take this photo of a cedar fence. I've been admiring it for years and meaning to take a photo of it for some time. Today the light and the dusting of snow combined to make the perfect moment. The zig-zag style is known as a snake fence. Good for shallow soils, apparently, which are certainly not hard to find in these parts.

"Daddy's on YouTube?!!"

This was the reaction from our children when they heard that Mike's green home interview was up on the internet. I think YouTube just lost its status in our house as a cool website to look at.

Here it is:



The videos of the other homes featured on the tour are all available from the Quinte Sustainability site.

Pear tree attack

One of the pear trees has been colonised by these tiny tent caterpillars. Well, they're tiny now, but if they keep going like this I imagine they'll soon be enormous.


As we stared in horror at the denudation of the top growth of the tree, Mike noticed that a rearguard action was being fought by a parasitic wasp which was busily laying its eggs in the caterpillars. Good to know we've got an ally!


And in other insect news, it has finally got warm enough for the annual cicadas (Tibicen linnei) to emerge. I've never seen one, but you can't mistake the song the males sing:

Is it a bird? Is it a frog?

Some creature was making an extremely peculiar noise up by the pond this morning. Any ideas what it might be?

The Queen Anne's Lace (Daucus carota) flowers are opening up. I really like the delicate basket-work tracery of the green bracts underneath the flower heads.

That is LOUD!

The cockerel known to us as Cocky* has discovered his voice:



*Well OK, maybe there wasn't a huge amount of originality and creative effort involved when the name was chosen. It was just so exactly the right word for the way he acts. And then it had stuck and it was too late to think of anything better.

And yes, I'm a little embarrassed about it.

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!).

Seville oranges and cedar planks

After making marmalade for the first time last year, I was looking forward to doing so again. I keep seeing other bloggers mention theirs and have been looking out for Seville oranges every time I go shopping. Until this weekend: nothing. I was beginning to get twitchy and irritable about the lack of marmalade-fodder. We shopped at the A&P in Belleville yesterday and they had about 12 very sad Seville oranges. I asked if they had any more and was informed that "That's all we've got and there won't be any more". I finished my shop (a very minimal one because by now I was feeling super-grumpy) and we trekked down to the Dewe's store and, joy of joys, they had a large display of lovely-looking Seville oranges. I bought a couple of kilos and left, very happy.

Last year I used a Delia Smith recipe, which made great marmalade but which took a looooong time. I liked the method, which involved pre-cooking the fruit, so looked around for another similar recipe. I found one which had been put online by chef Anna Colquoun. I hadn't heard of her before, but love this quotation from an interview with her on the eat the right stuff blog (which doesn't seem to like CAPITAL LETTERS much):

americans eat one meal out of five in a car. the western industrialised food system is fast ruining our planet, our social and economic relations, our bodies, our understanding and appreciation of these things, and ultimately our happiness. there are plenty of things wrong with the world, and cooking lovely food isn’t going to lead to world peace, but life for many could be a bit better if more people cared where their food came from and how it was made, had some basic cooking skills so they needn’t rely on processed food, and took time to eat together. plus, cooking is a creative outlet and a hopefully healthy addiction. food can be so delicious and also so bad. it’s more fun to eat the delicious stuff.

This is someone I feel I can trust! The marmalade recipe is the one her mother uses, based on one by Katie Stewart in The Times Cookery Book. Phew, that feels like a long and convoluted provenance (here's the recipe: it's a PDF file).


I had about 4½ pounds of fruit, so had to multiply everything in the recipe by 1½. The simmering-the-fruit phase takes an hour, then the oranges are cut open and the pulp and pips put into one bowl and the peel into another. Here is my first attempt at a video cookery demo (so be gentle in your criticisms please - I know it isn't very enthralling - and I think I sound horribly like Delia Smith!). This is to demonstrate step three in the recipe above - the way that the oranges look after they've been simmered for an hour.



While it's boiling the marmalade fills the house with a wonderful syrupy citrus smell.

The final boiling phase took about an hour, but might have been quicker if I'd let the marmalade boil faster (I'm a bit timid about leaving pans of boiling syrup unattended). The next video clip shows how it looks at the end of the boiling phase (and how to see whether it's reached setting point):


If you've ever wondered what the recipe books mean by the marmalade wrinkling on a saucer, here's a demonstration:


The finished product looks fine - just as dark and chunky as last year's, but with a shorter cooking time, which is what I wanted. It made eight one-pound jars, which is about four fewer than the recipe suggests I should have got.

I have since been wondering whether it is all worth it, given the food miles involved in shipping the oranges from Spain to Canada (and being aware that several jars will be travelling back to England with my mother-in-law after her next visit!). But I love making (and eating) marmalade so much that I would be sorry not to, even if it is a thoroughly environmentally-unsound rigmarole. [POSTSCRIPT: It turns out that our Seville oranges are actually from the USA, so I'm less worried about this now.]

My other Valentine's Day present was a fine trailer-load of cedar planks and posts, which were destined to become the raised beds in the greenhouse. We had thought we'd be able to use pressure-treated timber, but I remembered some question about arsenic being used in that process (rendering it not safe for use around food crops) and Mike looked it up to check. Well, the good news was that arsenic hasn't been used in the pressure-treating process since 2003, but the bad news was that if you want to grow food that will be certified organic, it might not be acceptable. Using cedar planks was the other option. The wood should last for 20 years - but was twice the cost of the pressure-treated alternative. So I really do need to sell some of the food we'll be growing in these beds in order to justify the expenditure. Which means jumping through the organically-certified hoops at some point. Oh joy.

Building them was fun though. It was still below freezing outside, but in the greenhouse it was pleasantly warm. We constructed three beds in a couple of hours and they look fantastic. Now we've just got to work out how to fill them with a suitably organic growing medium. I had been thinking of getting some spent mushroom compost from the local mushroom farm, but a bit of reading around the topic suggests that it will be full of chemicals, so not a good plan. Looks like we'll be digging soil from other parts of the farm and combining it with home-made compost to start with. But 270 cubic feet of material is quite a lot to find...

Do I have to go out?

Just taking the green kitchen waste out to the compost bins is a mite challenging when the bins look like this:

The greenhouse is getting a good bit of snowy insulation:
I would hardly venture out at all if it weren't for the dog needing to do what a dog needs to do. It seems to take forever just to put on enough clothes to be able to go out and stay at least mostly warm and dry. Though even the dog didn't waste much time out there yesterday afternoon, when the snow was coming in horizontally and the temperature was -5°C (23°F):

Bolts into the earth

The geothermal drilling guys were back at work today and managed to drill three out of the five holes that we need for our system. The holes are 150 feet deep and progress on the drilling was pretty rapid - the rock beneath us is mostly shaley, rather than thick slabs of limestone, so they were pleased with how quickly their carbide drill got through it. In the video you can see how steadily the drill is descending.



Lucky we're not the type of people to worry about having a perfect lawn, I think.

Here's the piping that goes into the hole:
And here's the end piece, which the piping is attached to (not in this picture, but it was later) and which is weighed down with a long metal rod to ensure that it reaches the bottom of the hole:


The pipes are filled with water for the moment, which will be replaced with a glycol/water mix later. They've nearly finished for today, which is just as well because the satellite picture is showing a beefy line of thunderstorms heading our way (we're on the sticky-out bit of land between Peterborough and Kingston).

The sky is already looking a bit peculiar - rather the texture of a brain, I thought.


Ah, here it comes. Over and out.

Hornworm again (warning: bad language)

Just the one, but I was amazed and affronted to find it tucking into one of my still-droopy and pathetic-looking waterlogged tomato plants. As I had the camera handy, I thought I'd make a video of me picking it off the plant, to show just how disgusting the procedure is. Unfortunately it doesn't really work as a demonstration of how the caterpillar reacts to being removed, as my response to its spirited defence ruined the carefully-scripted piece.



It squirted green, er, stuff all over my camera too. Everyone's a critic...

Giant toilet roll invasion

Three more big water tanks arrived today and had to be rolled up to the barn. Here are the children demonstrating the required dung-beetle technique:


And here is their father showing how not to do it:

Dog vs. Frog

Since the frogs re-emerged, the dog's favourite pastime has been patrolling the long stretch of water currently taking up the area in front of the vegetable garden, trying to grab one. He hasn't managed to catch a frog yet, but will happily splosh up and down for half an hour at a time. You can almost hear the frogs sniggering at his efforts. If you look very closely at the video clip, you may be able to see a frog swimming away at top speed.

Take two

It's been a while since I posted a video of the dog, so for those who like seeing a mad creature gambolling (there's no other word for it) in the snow, here he is:

He's grown quite a bit since his last piece of cinematic exposure. Hasn't got much brighter, though: his favourite hobby at the moment is eating the snow.

This is 'take two' because in my first recording of this scene Mike was tormenting the dog by making mad growling noises and I had to remind him that the camera records sound as well as video. If he really annoys me I might post that video one day too...

Screen test

I've never made home videos of the children, and here I am, posting a very amateur 40 second home video of my dog on the web. Oh dear - am I turning into the sort of person who values pets over family? Or is it simply that my digital camera and the Internet make it incredibly easy to do this kind of thing now, which it wouldn't have been when the kids were tiny? Or perhaps it's more that I don't think Toby will ever reproach me for doing this...

P.S. In case you were wondering, the big concrete cylinder behind the dog is our well.