Field of sticks

We have an orchard! Well, actually, we appear to have a field of sticks tied to other sticks, but in my imagination they're just oozing with potential. In my plans for the orchard planting work I pictured Mike digging the holes with the tractor and me planting the trees. Easy, right? Er, no. I failed to factor in the physical effort involved in filling the holes in again, which obviously (I now realise), you can't use the brute force of the tractor for. It was stupendously hard work. By about the third tree I was wondering if planting an orchard had been such a brilliant plan, after all.

Things got a bit better once Mike had finished digging the holes (by which time I'd planted nine out of the 17 trees), because then he was able to help with the filling-in (he's got the shoulders for this kind of work - I'm built more like the spindly apple trees). It took five hours to get all the trees in the ground, staked, pruned and watered. The staking was a good bit of recycling: the stakes are bits of wood that were lying around the farm (some old fence posts, others branches from the poplars we had cut down last year) and I made the ties holding the trees to the stakes from an old pillowcase (Canadian pillows are bigger than UK ones, so I figured it was unlikely I'd need the pillowcase again).

By the time we'd finished we were exhausted, but very pleased with ourselves. Then we were rewarded with seven hours of steady rain, which should have soaked the trees in well.

In other news, over in the 'tyre garden' the very first asparagus shoots have emerged:



And two out of the three rhubarb crowns are showing signs of activity too. Here's the better looking one:



As the vegetable garden is still more pond than plot, I've sown spinach, rocket (arugula), chard and lettuce in the front garden, in a bed which I had originally planned would only hold flowers and herbs. For the record, here's how that looks at the moment:



I've also been busy rescuing tulip bulbs. Last summer the black squirrels took great pleasure in digging up the tulips and redistributing them all over the lawn. So far I've dug up about twenty bulbs (luckily the squirrels plant them very shallowly, so this isn't too difficult). They did the same thing to one of our neighbours' tulips, but replanted them in someone else's lawn. I wonder what the etiquette is concerning rescuing one's own tulips from a third party's garden?

These are the same squirrels that were living in our roof-space this time last year. At the St. George's Day party, I learnt that they have now crossed the road and taken up residence in our neighbour's (the one with the tulip-filled lawn). She told us that she has been trapping the squirrels and shooting them with a pellet gun. I think I might have been shocked by this a year ago, but now I am quietly pleased that she is taking care of the squirrel menace and find myself singing lines from Tom Lehrer's Poisoning Pigeons in the Park:

And maybe we'll do in a squirrel or two,
As we poison the pigeons in the park.

I know I complained about lack of water last year...

... but please, please could we just get it distributed a bit more evenly?

The vegetable garden had just dried out enough for me to feel brave enough to plant the garlic, shallots and onion sets yesterday. Then today's rain arrived - 38mm (1.5 inches) so far and it's not even midday yet. I'm expecting to see the onions floating past any minute.

The basement cistern is nearly full, the water measuring 47 inches (120 cm), so I've had to make use of the diverters on the drainpipes for the very first time, to stop the rainwater from filling it any more.

I think sorting out the drainage in the garden is going to have to be a priority. The annoying thing is that I can be fairly sure that in three months' time I'll be struggling with a drought again.

I've probably been slow on the uptake here, but Google has introduced a really neat conversion calculator - so if you put "47 inches in cm" (without the quotation marks) into the Google search box, it gives you the answer. Very handy.

The only good thing about the rain is that the tulips look just as gorgeous in the wet as they did in the sun.

Tulips x two

My mother-in-law was closely monitoring the tulips' progress when she was staying here during the last three weeks. Typically, they reached their peak of perfection two days after she left. So these pictures are for you, Mum!

Orchard-in-waiting

These startlingly red catkins were out along the lake shore in Wellington when we took my mother-in-law there for a stroll along the new boardwalk on Thursday. There were lots of tree swallows darting about, making the most of the insects that had been brought out by the sunshine.

Yesterday I took Mike and Mum to Toronto to catch their flight back to the UK. I'd arranged to pick up my fruit trees on the way back, so did a detour of 70km or so up to Siloam Orchards, near Uxbridge, to collect them. The apple whips were fairly small, but the apricot, pear, plum and cherry trees were all over six feet long, so I was glad that there were only three of us in the car.

I won't be able to get the trees in the ground until Wednesday at the earliest, so I've lined them up against the north wall of the small barn and put shovel-loads of wet soon-to-be-orchard soil on the roots so that they won't dry out.

There are 13 apple trees in all, mostly historical varieties and a mixture of cider and eating apples, some which will store well, some which will be good for turning into apple purée. I've never had fruit trees before, so it's really exciting to be able to plant my own orchard.

Asparagus and rhubarb

The original plan was to have one bed as the perennial bed, holding rhubarb, asparagus and soft fruit. Given the dampness of the patch at this time of year, we decided to make use of the heap of old tyres/tires behind the big barn and plant the rhubarb and asparagus inside them, so that they wouldn't get waterlogged.

Today the rhubarb and asparagus roots arrived, so we lugged six tyres into place. Then I opened the box holding the plants and realised that the six asparagus roots I thought I'd ordered had somehow become THIRTY six. So we used up the remaining tyres and placed them onto the bed immediately to the south of the perennial bed (this area had originally been earmarked for a 'three sisters' Mohawk-style planting of beans, corn and squash). Even then, I ran out of space in the tyres and had to plant the remaining eleven roots in the soil. In puddles in the soil, to be precise. We used up more of the manure and borrowed topsoil from what will be the brassica bed to fill up the tyres. I'm worried that there's too much manure in the mix, but we'll have to wait and see how they all do.

It may not look aesthetically pleasing, but it is satisfying to know that we've recycled the tyres. It'll be even more satisfying if everything grows.

Shiny green bug

The warm weather is bringing out the insects. This one is a Six-spotted Tiger Beetle:


Frogs are emerging and I visit the pond daily, waiting to see frogspawn, but so far there hasn't been any. Quite a few pond-skaters though.



This time last year we were back in the UK after our house-hunting trip, arriving here permanently in June. Spring is the only season we haven't experienced here and I'm enjoying every minute of it.

Potatoes

My seed potatoes from Eagle Creek arrived yesterday. As the bed which will hold them is still pretty boggy, I've placed them in egg boxes (saved for the output from my future flock of chickens) on top of the basement freezer (empty but ready for all the amazing produce that I intend to harvest this summer), where they'll get some light and the right temperature range for them to start sprouting.

Mother-in-law and I spent some time weeding the front flower beds in the early afternoon (the tulips are ready to burst open any minute) and later I worked out back on the plot that will hold our perennial vegetables and fruit, removing more of the infernal quack grass/couch grass and digging in some of the manure we obtained last October. Mike watched me struggling for a while then offered to till the plot over with the tractor. I gratefully accepted, so that's one plot that's now looking fairly good - just another seven to go! They're all still too wet to plant or sow anything into, but they have dried out a lot in the last week, so it shouldn't be too long.

Eating for England

The St George's Day celebration went off swimmingly - helped by beautiful weather. The food went down well (although we will be eating leftovers for the rest of the week, I think!). All the Banbury Cakes were eaten and the Bakewell Tart and Wensleydale Tarts proved very popular. Eating scones with jam and cream seemed to be a new concept to people and generally I had the impression that my guests felt they'd been eating strange and exotic food, which felt a bit peculiar!

We decorated the porch with some suitably-coloured bunting and Mike managed to get hold of red and white carnations and roses, so the house looked quite festive (and we can always re-use the bunting on Canada Day). I even managed to pass on some of my Riesentraube tomato seedlings to new owners, so a good day all round.

Warm sunshine brings forth first tulip ... and first snake

Our first tulip bloom. Soaking up the sun nearby was an Eastern Garter Snake, which must have emerged from hibernation quite recently:



It was a lovely day yesterday too, polished off by a gorgeous sunset. I made Mike stop on the Skyway Bridge on the way back from Deseronto last night so that I could take this picture of the Bay of Quinte, looking towards Tyendinaga:

My house is being taken over by tomatoes

This scilla came into flower this morning and next to it is a shoot from one of the iris rhizomes that I painstakingly planted last summer.

I spent a companionable hour this afternoon in the sunshine on the front steps with my mother-in-law, potting on the tomato seedlings into their own pots.I now realise that I've got far too many of the Riesentraube variety, so may have to find new homes for some of those. I've got the same number of Amish Paste, but I'm planning on turning those into freezer fodder, so the quantity won't be such a big issue.

Peppers (Corno di Toro Rosso), aubergines/eggplants (Ping Tung) and chilies (Hungarian Hot Wax - which sounds like something you could opt for at a beauty salon to me) are coming up in the propagator now and will need potting-on themselves before too long. I'm running out of space to put the pots!

Meanwhile, in what will become the orchard, Mike has been valiantly digging up the roots of the dead trees that he cut down last year (with the help of the trusty tractor). The area looks a bit like the aftermath of the Battle of the Somme at the moment - or the playground of enormous moles.

Good drying weather?

Yes, I know long-range weather forecasts are even more of a work of fiction than party manifestos, but I can't help but feel encouraged by the Weather Network's view of the next two weeks. Maybe my vegetable plots will finally dry out enough for me to be able to start sowing seeds!

First bloom

The first flower of the year. There were four of these in the front garden and shortly after I took this picture the blasted dog ate great chunks out of all of them. Hope they give him indigestion.

England, and St. George

I'm planning a (slightly early) St. George's Day celebration for the weekend after next. Not because I've suddenly come over all patriotic since arriving in Canada, but because I feel I owe our new friends and neighbours a party and it seemed as good an excuse as any. I'm intending to serve an afternoon tea with an English theme (of course) but I'm getting a bit stuck with finding suitably-named savoury items.

For sweet treats I seem to have quite a lot of things to choose from:

• Bakewell Tart
• Manchester Tart
• Chelsea Buns
• Bath Buns
• Banbury Cakes or Eccles Cakes

Plus the obligatory English Cream Tea ingredients of scones with cream and jam.

But for savoury things with an English name I can only think of Cornish Pasties and the various English cheeses (oh, and Yorkshire Pudding, naturally - but I don't think that's a tea-time dish!). I know cucumber sandwiches are supposed to be traditional afternoon tea food, but I would be embarrassed to serve up a sandwich containing just cucumber! Are there any other obvious savoury foods with English names that I'm forgetting about? Or maybe it's time to start inventing a few?

Photo from Nick Corble on Flickr.

A week is a long time...

...when it comes to weather conditions.

This was the view down the western boundary of our property on 29 March:



And here's the view today:



The lake in the background is still frozen, but our neighbour, David, reckons it won't be by the end of the week. Everything's still very soggy, as this picture shows. My vegetable beds are more like vegetable ponds at the moment. Watercress, anyone?

On my way up to the field today I saw my first butterfly of the year. Goodness knows what the poor thing is going to live on - not many flowers out yet. I've spent a fruitless half hour on the internet trying to find out what it's called, but with no luck. So if you recognise it (or are better at finding out butterfly names), please let me know!



Postscript: The butterfly is known as Mourning Cloak here, and Camberwell Beauty in the UK

Bird's eye view

I've never quite grown out of the childish joy I get from seeing the earth from an aeroplane. It's particularly enjoyable if you recognise the places you fly over, of course, but this view of the sea ice off the coast of Labrador and Newfoundland really took my breath away on Sunday.

Flying towards Heathrow last week was great too, as it was clear over the western half of the UK and there were great views of southern Ireland, south Wales and the M4 corridor. The contrast between the UK and Canada from the air is quite striking. The UK has small patches of wilderness surrounded by carefully tended fields, while in Canada it is the other way about. It probably is hard to see, but this photo is of a patch of farmland, north of Ottawa, surrounded by more rugged countryside.

When I was a teenager there was a poster on the wall of my English classroom for a production of As You Like It, which depicted a partially-forested hillside. Eventually I realised that the hillside was in the form of a naked woman (and I could never see it as just a hillside again). England from the air reminded me of that poster - a land that has been extensively trimmed and manicured and is essentially feminine in nature. Canada is more untamed and masculine. Perhaps I should have got more sleep on the plane...

Spring preview

I'm having a week in the south of England, attending the Open Repositories conference at Southampton. Of course it's a lot milder here, with daffodils, snowdrops and new leaves visible. These bluebells were blooming just outside my window here, so I couldn't resist taking a photo. Mike tells me that the snow is melting fast back in Ontario, so it sounds like Spring is finally making an appearance over there, too.

Two-lips

Now the snow is beginning to melt we're beginning to see things growing outside, too. Here are some bulbs emerging from the soil underneath the living room window. I presume they're tulips, but at the moment they strongly remind me of the seedling stage of Audrey II, the monster plant in the 1986 film version of The Little Shop of Horrors.


At the side of the house, the buds on the lilac trees are swelling. Prince Edward County is famous for its lilacs, so I'm looking forward to seeing these flower. They do need a bit of pruning, though, which I think is best done after they've flowered, so a job for late May.

Spring green

Here's a sight to gladden a gardener's heart - the tomatoes that I sowed at the weekend germinated yesterday and are now out of the intensive care of the propagator. They're on the windowsill of the living room, which is within reach of the dog, so I'm hoping that he won't decide to investigate them too closely.

We're beginning to see the end of winter outside, too. As the photo below of the northern shore of Prince Edward County shows, the Bay of Quinte was still frozen and snowy when we came back over the Norris Whitney bridge from Belleville on Easter Monday. But yesterday afternoon when I came over the Skyway Bridge from Deseronto, there was a fair bit of water visible in the middle of the bay, which hadn't been there in the morning (well, it was there of course, but you couldn't see it!).

There was no ice at all in the Bay when we came here for our reconnaissance trip last Easter, but I suppose that was two weeks later than this year's, so there's still time for it all to melt, unlikely as it seems right now.

First sowing

I was planning to hold off on sowing any seeds until after my trip to the UK in April. Not that I don't trust Mike to take care of them (honestly!), but I just thought it might make things easier all round. Plus I didn't have any potting compost, which does rather constrain that kind of activity. And I wasn't sure if my UK-purchased propagator was going to work here.

While the kids were at their swimming lesson we did the usual mad dash round the library and supermarket in Picton, followed by a trip to a garden centre. This is a small business, comprising three or four polytunnels and a small barn which houses the shop. The shop had a sign by the till saying "We're in the greenhouse, come and find us!". This is fairly common for businesses here, which are often small family concerns run out of the owners' homes. This style of doing business took us a bit of getting used to - there isn't always an obvious 'shop front' to go to, for example.

I used to spend ages of indecision looking at all the different types of compost when I bought it from garden centres in the UK - peat free? multipurpose? sowing and cutting? brand or own brand? moisture-retaining or not? So it was quite refreshing at this establishment to be offered the choice of either a 10 litre bag or a 107 litre bale. And that was it. So I plumped for the bale (Mike was with me to carry it, luckily (or maybe not, from his point of view)).

I've just looked at the ingredients and it's 70-80% Canadian sphagnum peat moss. Cue feelings of guilt about destruction of peat bogs, followed by superficial internet research, which seems to suggest that there are an awful lot of peat bogs in Canada:

...more than 270,000,000 acres, 25% of the world's supply, of which our industry harvests on less than 40,000 acres, or one acre in 6,000.

According to the Canadian Sphagnum Peat Moss Association, anyway. They harvest the stuff, so they might be just a teensy bit biased. Not sure now whether I should be feeling guilty or not. Maybe I should make myself a hair shirt out of sphagnum moss to be on the safe side.

Anyway, we hooked the propagator up to one of the voltage regulators we had to buy to save getting all new electrical appliances, so that works fine. Now I couldn't resist starting some seeds. What did I sow, you may or may not be asking. Red tomatoes in this batch - Riesentraube (an heirloom grape-style) and Amish Paste (another heirloom plant, ideal for tomato sauces). I think of the propagator as an incubator or intensive care unit, so once they're up I'll replace them with peppers, chillies or aubergines and get a little production line going.

Golden moon

Another cold and crisp night - lit by a beautiful moon. Have to admit I was tucked up in bed when Mike took this picture.

Hot and cold

The hot cross buns were refusing to rise so I went for a walk with Mike, as he'd found some interesting ice formations (we had a hard frost last night after several warmish days (warmth being a relative thing, you understand)). He was right - the stream looked lovely.



The snow was much easier to walk on - yesterday it had the texture of slightly melted sorbet, but today it was crispy and hard. Here's Mike standing next to the footprints I'd made the day before:



It was so pleasant to walk on that we crossed the hayfield for the first time in months. Well, actually we'd never walked across the field diagonally before, just in the mown strip around the edges. It was cold, but beautiful.



We'd been gone so long that the buns had grown quite significantly - allow me a small moment of domestic-goddessy pride:

Moon-planting

I've spent an enjoyable afternoon ordering my seed potatoes and checking out blogs about allotments. There are a large number of such blogs (there's even a little Google Maps mashup of where some of them are on the Allotments-UK site). I've never grown potatoes before - the picture below shows the extent of the growing area that I tended in Sale, which explains why. So I was looking for tips on potato cultivation.

"Plant potatoes on Good Friday" was something that came up a lot. Well, that might be possible in the UK, but I'm blowed if I'm going to dig through the snow to do that here. I wondered if this tradition might be related to the moon phases - since Easter Sunday is the first Sunday following the full moon after the Spring Equinox. But after reading up on the matter, advice about moon-planting of potatoes seems contradictory: a New York Times article from 1991 makes this point too. So maybe I won't bother waiting for a full moon and will go by the soil temperature instead!

I had no idea how many seed potatoes to order, so have probably ordered either far too many or far too few - time will tell.

Spring?

The temperature has crept above freezing during the day for a few days now. It's raining pretty hard this evening, too, which should help melt some more of the snow. We're starting to see insects emerging and the sparrows and starlings are certainly getting frisky. I think it's going to be a while before I'm sowing anything in the vegetable garden though - this is how it looked yesterday:

Comfort food

Pudding for our Sunday lunch today was an adaptation of Nigella Lawson's recipe for German Plum Tart (from How to be a Domestic Goddess (I'm still trying)). I had some leftover white bread dough which I used for the base, then added a mixture of wild blueberries (confession: they came from a frozen food aisle, not a hedgerow) and sugar, then topped with the crumble mixture as detailed in the recipe (140g plain flour, 100g brown sugar and 110g butter (I didn't have any walnuts or pecans, so they were left out)). It looked great and went down well, although I was a bit disappointed in the blueberries - they weren't very flavourful. I think I'd like to try this with rhubarb or something else with a more tart flavour.