I'm impressed with the way garbage is dealt with here. All recyclable packaging and containers are collected free of charge every other week and there's a weekly collection of 'real' garbage, which costs $2 per bag. You buy little blue labels in advance and stick them on the bags when you put them out. As the recycling is so comprehensive, we find we're only generating one bag of rubbish a fortnight - so we spend $52 a year (£26) for this service, which seems reasonable.
The Council don't currently provide a separate kerbside collection service for compostable materials, so a lot of it is going into landfill at the moment. It costs them $225 per tonne to dump things in landfill, so this trial is looking at ways of reducing that cost. As well as the composter, they provided us all with a green bucket for use in the kitchen and a scale to weigh it with. We have to weigh the waste that we put into the composter and record the amounts, until the end of October. Then these figures will be used to calculate the savings for the County. I didn't like to point out that I would have composted my materials anyway... 
This morning Mike and I set up the composter and I placed it next to the back door (this involved shovelling out a big snow drift). It's made by Sun-Mar, who started out making composting toilets and this is built on the same principles. The rotating drum speeds up the composting process, so that compost can be extracted from the centre in as little as two to four weeks. Although it might have to get a bit warmer outside before that's achievable, I suspect. The retail price of one of these is $250. I've paid $50 to take part in the trial, but I think $30 of that is refundable at the end of it, so I'll get my composter for $20. Bargain!
According to the chief climatologist of Environment Canada in the Ottawa Sun, anyway. The kids were home on two days this week because the buses were cancelled. Yesterday the schools were shut, which is the first time that has happened this winter (poor kids who live near them are usually expected to turn up, even if all the buses are cancelled).
Yesterday's storm started off with ice pellets, for a change, but then turned into snow again. It made shovelling it off the path harder, as the ice pellets form a hard, caked layer under the snow. I had a vivid Technicolor dream last night about all the snow melting and spring flowers and vegetables emerging from beneath it. Even my subconscious is yearning for spring! This image from Flickr was the closest I could find to my dream, so I'm putting it here to cheer the blog up a bit and make a change from the never-ending views of ice and snow.
Last year I didn't bother with party bags and I was planning not to this year either. I even deliberately ignored the party bags in Bulk Barn this morning. But by this afternoon I was feeling mean about it, so I made some fudge and then roped Child #1 in to help me make the wrappers. She found some silver ribbon lurking in a drawer and made name labels, then we wrapped baking parchment squares around the fudge and tied them up. It was an enjoyable way to spend the afternoon and I think they looked quite good in the end: not a bit of plastic tat in sight!
What a relief. The first sale fell through in September last year and then this one was being delayed by a bolshy pair of first-time buyers at the beginning of the chain. We've had a bottle of champagne chilling in the fridge since before Christmas, waiting for this moment. It's just about at the right temperature now.
In the evening we belatedly celebrated Chinese New Year with crispy duck and pancakes. This was an occasional treat when we lived in Sale (where we lived a five-minute walk from a Chinese take-away). There are Chinese restaurants around here (by that I mean within a half-hour drive), but we've yet to go into one. I found a good recipe for the pancakes online and, in a spirit of self-sufficiency, made it all from scratch (apart from the hoisin sauce). The pancakes don't look as round and purely white as the ones we got in England, but they're not as hard to make as they sound.
I think the icicles in this photo and the angle at which they've been formed sum up today's weather perfectly.
Quite large snow dunes are forming along the fences between our farm and the neighbouring one. Of course we did expect that there would be reasonable quantities of snow and ice here ("YOU'VE MOVED TO CANADA!", as a friend kindly reminded me this week), but we are assured by people we meet (and by the media) that this winter is unusually snowy, even for Ontario.
The dog still prefers eating snow to drinking the water in his water bowl, even when it is blowing a gale and snowing hard, as it was yesterday afternoon. I observed to child #2 that it might save us shovelling snow off the path if we could get Toby to do it instead, but that it might take him a long time to eat his way through it all. His reply was "Not like Daddy with the shovel, eh". The first example of a Canadian 'eh' from one of the kids - and so soon!
I haven't managed to take a picture of the wild turkeys yet, although we have now seen our local flock a few times. There are about a dozen of them regularly wandering through our wood. When I caught a movement in the trees by the pond this afternoon I thought it might be them again, but it turned out to be a coyote instead. If you look very hard you might be able to distinguish it from the trees in this photo.
My final set of seeds arrived this morning, from Thompson and Morgan. Mainly these are seeds that the North American catalogues only held a few varieties of - runner beans, broad beans and sprouts, for example. British foods that haven't caught on as much here, I suspect. ...forty years ago...there would have been no way to eat the way I propose in my book without going back to the land and growing all your own food. It would have been the manifesto of a crackpot.
Usually I just do regular pancakes with sugar and lemon juice for Pancake Day, but during the winter, since we've been here, I've been cooking just that for breakfast for the children every other day. (I did start out by giving them maple syrup with the pancakes, but they gradually reverted to type.) So it wouldn't have been much of a treat for tea today and I made stuffed savoury pancakes instead. I had spinach and ricotta in mine and everyone else had a bolognese mixture as a filling. A cheese sauce was poured over and extra cheddar and parmesan were sprinkled on the top. Then I baked them for half an hour.
My second seed order turned up today. This was the one from Baker Creek Heirloom seeds. It includes traditional tomatoes like Amish Paste, Purple Russian and Riesentraube, a stripy melon by the name of Tigger and the wonderful-sounding Hutterite Soup bean.
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.
Looking on the positive side, my first order of seeds arrived yesterday, bringing with them at least the promise of better weather in the months to come.
It's taken a month or so of experimentation, but I think I've finally worked out the best way of making bread. I left my old breadmaking machine in the UK, as it wouldn't have worked on the voltage here. After a bit of research I decided that I'd invest in a Bosch Universal Plus machine. It isn't a breadmaker as such - just a powerful motor that you can plug various attachments into. Its main appeal for me was the quantity of dough it could handle (up to 15 pounds). I rarely used the breadmaker I had before to actually cook the bread, just to knead the dough (I was always irritated with the hole left in the loaf if it was cooked in the machine and kneading the dough by hand literally irritates my wrists). The Bosch kneads the dough in ten minutes, which is a lot faster than my old machine.
This is the first fox we've seen. It strolled around the garden and barnyard for about five minutes this morning. Something to bear in mind when I eventually get some chickens...
Had my first ever attempt at making marmalade yesterday. Thought I'd go with a Delia Smith recipe, as they're usually pretty reliable, and I found a recommendation for her Dark Chunky Marmalade on the Cottage Smallholder blog, so tried that. It's quite a long cooking process, as you poach the fruit whole first and then go on to the boiling phase. The house was filled with wonderful citrus smells throughout the day.
Delia says you should make the marmalade over two days, but I did it all in one afternoon and evening (with half the quantities) and it worked fine. My memories of earlier attempts at making preserves (my mother's and mine) were that the end result tasted fine but didn't set properly. I haven't tried the marmalade yet, so can't vouch for the taste, but am pleased that it has, at least, set.
There were many more birds around today, on the feeders and in the woods. Perhaps because it's less windy - it certainly isn't any warmer than it has been for the rest of the week. Up by the spring there was ample evidence of the wild turkeys who'd been taking the waters: nearly all the tracks in this picture were made by them. I could hear the turkeys in the woods, but didn't get close enough to see them. There are estimated to be over 600 of these birds in Prince Edward County now, all the descendants of 20 birds that were released in 1989, according to the County's conservation page.
There were two sets of coyote tracks across the frozen surface of the pond this morning. I was rather surprised when the dog started following them: he's never walked across the ice before. He's not so brave when the coyotes are close by. I heard last week of a small dog that's gone missing, presumed to have been killed by them, so perhaps it's just as well.
It's sunny on our side of the lake today, though the clouds on other side look a bit threatening.
... and we've had snow again, yes. Can't say I've noticed any robins hiding in the barns though. 
My original plan had been to send the children to school with these as part of their packed lunches, but then I remembered that the school has a strict 'no nuts' policy, so that isn't an option and we'll just have to eat them at home. Shame.
"He's holding on to a firehose, eh? The thing is jumping all over the place, eh, and he can hardly hold onto it eh? Well, he finally loses control of it, eh, and the water knocks down half a dozen bystanders."
I don't remember hearing 'eh' used this way (or at all, really) when we visited Alberta and British Columbia in 2006 and that is borne out by Gold's paper, where her survey suggests "that eh is used more in central Canada than in the west".
She also looked at the response of immigrants to the word:
New immigrants quickly pick up the use of eh, with two-thirds reporting use of eh with opinions after less than five years in Canada. They associate the use of eh with their developing Canadian identity: one speaker, who had been in Canada for less than two years, said, "I was kind of proud when it slipped out of my mouth the first time."
I'm too aware of 'eh' now for it to 'slip out' like that, but I'll be monitoring the children for signs of incipient ehs.
The ice on the pond is down to a mere sliver now and the only snow remaining is in the greying heaps that the snow-ploughs left in road-side ditches. I went for a squelchy walk through the woods this afternoon and there were not many signs of life: the ghosts of last year's wildflowers and luxuriant cushions of moss and lichens on the fallen trees and tree stumps.
These are part of the new roof that was installed back in October. You may have noticed that they're not on the roof. Yesterday was quite blowy: our weather machine registered a high wind speed of 25 metres per second, which is 56 miles, or 90 kilometres, an hour, if my sums are right. So not hugely high (especially as the roof was supposed to be able to survive 80mph), but high enough to do some damage. Dean the roofer is coming back tomorrow. 
We also finally lost the side door of the small barn, which had been looking a bit sorry for itself ever since we arrived. I'm actually glad about that casualty, because it was a pain to open and close in its previous, hanging-on-by-a-hinge, state.
The decorations are all down now and everything's looking a bit bare, so I thought I'd decorate the blog to keep Christmas going until the last minute. I've always thought that this last day of Christmas would be an ideal one for a party: people often feel a bit low after the holiday and somehow the feasting and jollity never lasts the whole twelve days. I think that the retail trade is to blame for this - the shops certainly don't have any incentive to keep Christmas going past the 25th. Perhaps there should be an official Twelfth Night holiday to keep the festive momentum going for the traditional number of days. They certainly celebrated it properly this side of the Atlantic in the past.
We've invested in a proper whistling stove-top kettle for the woodburner, which must be conserving a fair amount of electricity, the number of times we boil a kettle every day. It's also a very cheering sight in that rather dark corner of the kitchen.
Today was quite frigid too - a maximum of -14°C. When we got up it was -21°C, which is -6°F. Both fires were on again, needless to write.
The melting of snow on the metal roof of the barn has resulted in some lethal-looking icicles, but more interesting were the structures that were created on the ground, where drops of meltwater hit bits of grass that were sticking up out of the snow, and then refroze. I expect there's a technical name for these beautiful, blown-glass-like forms, which probably isn't icicalagmites.
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.
