Raised beds (be VERY careful!)

Carol at May Dreams Gardens has written a great post on the subject of raised beds. I commented there briefly about my experience, but thought it might be worth blogging about it here, with some pictures to record what happened with mine (as a cautionary tale, too, perhaps).

We had a small easterly-facing back garden in Manchester (about 100 square metres/yards) which was really just a square of lawn with some shrubs around the edges and a small patio area. In 2005 (inspired by two allotment-owning co-workers) I decided to put a raised bed in the lawn near to the house as my first foray into vegetable-growing.

The frame was made from three eight-foot lengths of pressure-treated decking, screwed to four posts (the posts ended up shorter than they were in this picture). On 16 January 2005 I dug the grass up, put in the frame, added a big bag of compost, put the grass back in (upside down) and covered the whole thing with some heavy black plastic, weighted down, to stop weeds and to kill the grass. At the end of all that the bed looked like this:


Two months later, the covers were off and I was sowing my first vegetables. By the end of May the bed was looking full of green life and I was fully addicted to the process of growing food.


On New Year's Day 2006 the second raised bed was constructed.


This was not followed by a third bed in 2007 - because by then we were busily planning our move to Canada and weren't going to be in that house to gather in the harvest. I still couldn't resist planting seeds in the beds that year, though (more proof of my addiction). And yes, part of the motivation for our emigration was the chance of getting hold of a decent-sized plot of land for growing food without bankrupting ourselves.

As soon as we saw the new house in April, the potential of the barnyard as a vegetable plot became obvious and this blog records the progress we've made since we moved in here in June 2007. With ten large vegetable plots already established and plans for another one of those and three raised beds in the greenhouse this year, I find it a bit amazing that it was only four years ago that I started all this by digging out one little raised bed.

So, a warning might be in order. If your spouse suggests putting in a raised bed this year ("Just one dear, and it won't take up much space."), there is a danger that you might find yourself leaving your country a few years later to satisfy their insatiable hunger for more land for their crops. Be warned!!

Monochrome

Twenty-four hours of snow have given us a very black-and-white sort of world, even when shooting colour photographs.


The sun did make a weak and watery appearance earlier this morning, but it didn't last for long.

School lunch snack #2

Well, actually this is week 3 of school, but last week I made rice krispie squares (just melted marshmallows and butter with rice krispies stirred into them), which didn't really merit a post all to themselves. Although I am pleased to report that the children preferred them to the official Rice Krispie equivalent snack that we've bought in the past.

This week's snacks are cinnamon buns.

Ingredients

For the dough

1 pint warm milk (at body temperature)
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 egg
2 teaspoons dried yeast
4-5 cups of flour
1 teaspoon cinnamon

For the filling

1 tablespoon butter
Cinnamon
Brown sugar

Mix the yeast, sugar and milk together. Stir in the egg and then add the cinnamon enough flour to make a dough that you (or your mixer/breadmaker) can knead. I used about four cups of white bread flour and one cup of wholewheat. Knead it for 5 minutes or so, then roll out the dough into a large rectangle, making sure there's enough flour on the work surface so that the dough won't stick to it later on. Actually, getting the dough into a rectangle isn't possible, but something vaguely resembling a rectangle is fine.

Melt the tablespoon of butter and brush it over the dough. Sprinkle cinnamon and brown sugar over the top of the butter. Here's how mine looked at that point:

Clearly not a rectangle!

Then you need to roll it up from one of the longer sides:


This gives you a long sausage-shape which you then need to slice up. I need 20 buns (one for each child for each meal break: they have two meal breaks a day, which seems odd to me but the school says it works well, so fair enough). To make it easier I cut the dough into four first, then each of the four into five buns. If you're into precision, you could measure them to make sure they're even, but I didn't bother.


Arrange the sliced buns into a greased tray or dish and leave them to rise in a warm room, until they're looking as though they've filled out a bit. This will depend on the temperature, so can take up to an hour. Here are mine before rising:


When you're happy with their size, put them into a pre-heated oven at 400°F/200°C/Gas Mark 6 for about 20-25 minutes. I gave mine a brush of milk and sprinkled them with some white sugar before baking them.

These will keep in an airtight container for the week. I'd put the container in the fridge if the weather was hot and humid. Not that I think that's going to be a problem this week...

Am I going to be able to keep this snack-making activity going into a fourth week of school? Watch this space...

Making your vegetable patch pay

I'm starting to get excited about this year's vegetables. I already have some onion seeds in trays on the living room window sill and a tray of mixed lettuce seeds next to them. These will be transferred to the greenhouse once it warms up a bit. While browsing around trying to find out exactly how hardy onion seedlings are, Google took me to pages of the Vegetable Growing Handbook: Organic and Traditional Methods by Walter E. Splittstoesser. This book was published in 1990 and looks like an interesting read. For example, he shows a table of value ratings for particular vegetables, based on the space they occupy, their yields and their monetary value, on a scale of one to ten. This was developed by the US National Garden Bureau (no date given) from feedback given by expert home vegetable growers. I've reproduced the table here (click on it for a closer look):
So, to get the most value from your plot it's best to concentrate on the higher-rated vegetables, particularly if you're short of space. As long as you like them, that is. I also liked the mention of a study in Ohio which was published in the journal Horticultural Science in 1978 by Jim D. Utzinger and H. E. Connolly which calculated that...

...a garden of 150 sq ft produced enough vegetables to provide a return for labor of $1.08 per hr; and this value was calculated after all expenses, including depreciation on the garden tools, were deducted. Few leisure-time activities pay you for doing them.

I'd love to know what that $1.08 figure would be in today's money. I wonder whether vegetables more expensive, relatively speaking, now, than they were then, for example? Organically-grown ones certainly are.

Fencicles

In a bit of an Arctic snap at the moment - the temperature hit a low of -24°C (-12°F) yesterday morning, which is the lowest we've experienced here. Or anywhere, for that matter! It's not too bad, as long as you wrap up warm. I don't much like the sensation of ice forming inside my nose though...


The sun is still managing to melt the snow on the metal roofs of the barns. It re-freezes almost immediately, creating these icicles on the cedar fence next to the small barn.

Twin peaks

I mentioned that I missed seeing ancient buildings in an earlier post, but I don't want you to think that there is a complete dearth of attractive old buildings here. One of my favourite churches, for example, is the Wesley United Church at Mountain View, which was completed (at that time a Wesleyan Methodist church) in 1878.

It is tucked underneath the 'mountain' (actually a rocky hillside which is, geologically speaking, a gneissic inlier*). You get a glimpse of the church as you drive on Highway 62 from Belleville to Picton. It is unusual for Prince Edward County in that it has two steeples. I snapped it this afternoon as we drove past. The sun was about to be swallowed up by a grey bank of cloud, but it just caught the spires before it vanished.

Here's another picture of the church that I took last July. Just to remind myself that one day those naked trees will be dressed in green again.



*I suspect this might be interesting in itself, but I got lost in geology-speak when I tried to find out more.

POSTSCRIPT: See VP's great explanation of what a gneissic inlier is, in the comments!

Head-rest

Falling off a cliff

One of the grown-ups' presents for Christmas was a second temperature transmitter for our weather station. This one is for the greenhouse, so that we can monitor the conditions in there. Spot the moment when Mike transferred it outside from the heat of the kitchen:


The lower line is the temperature outside the greenhouse.

Crash and burn

Fascinating sunset this evening. Looked to me as though the sun was falling through the sky.

School lunch snack #1

Scho-ol dinners, Scho-ol dinners,
Concrete chips, concrete chips,
Soggy semolina, soggy semolina,
Quick, quick, quick,
I feel sick.

This is what we sang when I was at school (to the tune of Frère Jacques). Ungrateful little brats, we must have been, as this was in the days when the women working in the school kitchens made proper food from scratch. It was pretty good, too - I have particular soft spots in my memory of egg-and-bacon pie and some sort of deep-fried cheesey thing (cheese aigrettes, perhaps?). The mashed potato was awful, though, and I've never been able to face liver-and-onions since.

Anyway, this nostalgic ramble into my childhood is bringing me to the point. It was back-to-school today for my kids and so, back into the packed-lunch routine. School dinners aren't an option here. I don't know if that is true for the whole of Canada, or even the rest of Ontario, but they certainly aren't on offer in this school. I know they got a bad rap in the UK after Jamie Oliver exposed the miserly methods of modern school kitchens (turkey twizzlers were something that my kids ate, I have to admit (covers her face in shame)). But for a full-time working parent, school dinners are wonderful things, particularly now that Jamie Oliver's campaign has started to improve the quality of the food.

Now, I absolutely hate making packed lunches, even though I'm not a full-time working-out-of-the-home mother any more. I also detest the pre-packaged school lunch items that the supermarkets sell. So one of my resolutions this year is to avoid buying the drink cartons and snacks that are on offer there and to make more cookies and cakes at home. Today snuck up on me a bit and I wasn't adequately prepared to face the challenge. Luckily, this classic snack is quick to make and I was able to whip some up before the children had to leave for the bus (though it doesn't come until 8.55am, so I do have more time than many...).


Ingredients

• 70g chocolate (whatever type your kids (or you) prefer)
• 70g butter
• 1 tbsp syrup
• Cornflakes (didn't weigh them, but quite a few!)

Melt butter, chocolate and syrup in a bowl over simmering water (or in the microwave). Stir in the cornflakes so that they are all coated with the chocolate mixture. Spoon the cornflakes into paper cake cases and put in the fridge to harden. By some fluke this made exactly 20 cakes - precisely enough for two each for each child for a week. So that's one lunch element sorted for this week, at least!

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...

Coffee and cholesterol croissants

When the condensation starts freezing on the inside of the windows, in spite of the geothermal heating and the newness of the windows, you know it is cold outside. At 7.00am it was -18.4°C.


So a perfect morning to have warm croissants for breakfast.


I've never made croissants before, but I found a straight-forward-looking recipe for the croissants that used to be made by the pâtissiers on the SS France. I also discovered a fantastic video demonstration of how to make croissants by Esther McManus from an episode of 'Baking with Julia [Child]' on the PBS website. It's a two-day job, as you have to leave the dough to rest overnight after all the rolling, but the process isn't particularly difficult. There was enough dough for 32 croissants, so I made 16 regular croissants, 8 pains au chocolat and 8 almond croissants. I'd probably halve the recipe next time - as this is far too much for just the four of us (although they do seem to be vanishing fairly fast, I have to say).

Perhaps not the healthiest start to 2009...

Winter harvest

A few mild days have melted the snow (much as it did this time last year) and made it possible to get a fork into the ground. Made it possible to see the ground, in fact. The surface of the soil did freeze again last night, but not so much that it stopped me digging up the last of the leeks, a few carrots and some parsnips this morning.

Retrospective, 2008

Time for a bit of a backward glance before falling headlong into plans for 2009.

2008 was our first full year in Canada and there's been quite a lot of progress to report. On the self-sufficiency front we had the solar hot-water and geothermal systems installed and our bank of solar panels wired up to generate electricity, starting on 29 October (830 kilowatts so far). The latter two systems require a bit more work to make them function perfectly (the geothermal develops a fault when the outside temperature drops below -15°C and the panels aren't at their full capacity yet, but we'll get there...).

The kitchen was stripped back to the wood framing and then re-fitted and all the old alumin(i)um wiring in the house has been stripped out. The latter took so long that the electricians began to feel like they were part of our family.

In May we got the apple, pear, plum, cherry and apricot trees into the ground, creating the orchard. It'll be a few years before we get decent quantities of fruit from the trees, but they all seem to have established themselves successfully.

Much work went on in the vegetable garden, including the construction of a 'tyre garden' for rhubarb and asparagus. The eight beds that we created for vegetables in 2007 became ten, mainly due to over-enthusiastic sowing of brassicas. Amazing quantities of produce were harvested over the year. This despite some notable failures: the onions were washed away, the fennel and one of the rhubarb plants rotted after the unusually heavy July rains and the waterlogging which followed them. This also severely disabled the chillies, peppers, aubergines and paste tomatoes. I got a few cauliflowers, but overall those suffered from a lack of water in June, I think. Maybe in 2009 the weather will be more evenly balanced between rain and sun. No, I don't think so, either. With any luck, our attempts at improving the drainage of the area will help a bit.

My pleasure at the complete absence of slugs and snails in the garden was slightly tempered by my introduction to the tomato hornworm, a truly fearsome beast. We also have a small (in stature and in number) rabbit population which nibbled through most of my sweetcorn plants before they had a chance to reach maturity.

Building the greenhouse was perhaps the biggest (in all senses of the word) achievement of the year and I am thoroughly excited at the prospect of using it to extend our growing season in 2009.

I see that I've taken 4,368 photographs this year (not including the ones I've deleted...). Nearly 12 every day, on average! Thank goodness for digital cameras - can you imagine how much that would have cost in film and development costs?

I'm conscious that this blog was started as a record of an emigration experience, but has turned into more of a gardening/cooking/self-sufficiency log. Eighteen months into our new life, perhaps I should be saying more about how the immigration has gone.

I can honestly say that my overwhelming feeling about our move is that I have come home.

Yes, I miss certain things about my life in the UK: particular people; ancient monuments and gardens to visit; and certain food items. People are fairly mobile and are able to visit, but I have to get my fill of the other things through books, TV programmes, DVDs (I'm watching The Buildings that Shaped Britain on BBC Canada and The Victorian Kitchen Garden on DVD at the moment) and on my intermittent trips back to the UK.

These are minor things that come nowhere near to outweighing the benefits of the move. This is where I belong. This is where I will set down my roots.

A small Christmas miracle

I'd resigned myself to not having sprouts with Christmas dinner, but yesterday's rain and the high overnight winds melted and scoured away enough snow to expose my sprout plants this morning. The harvest was small, but supremely satisfying. To round things off to perfection, lake-effect snow (all the way from Lake Huron's Georgian Bay) was falling all morning.


Here's (part of) me modelling one of my presents from Mike:


He bought the 'large' size (for which he has not entirely been forgiven), but I think I approve of the sentiment...

Merry Christmas!

Snowflakes

There are some Brussels sprouts on the plants out in the vegetable garden which I had been planning to harvest for Christmas dinner, but the plants themselves are visible only as small mounds in the snow this morning, so I think I'll give sprouts a miss this year. I've still got potatoes and parsnips in the house that we grew this summer, so at least some of our produce will end up on the table tomorrow.


Perhaps you'd think I'd seen enough snowflakes this Christmas, but I thought I'd bring a few indoors by icing the cake with some, this year.


It's actually raining right now, but there's so much snow on the ground that I don't think there's any chance of it not being a white Christmas!

Bleak midwinter

I was going to post about the cooking I was doing this morning - but then I read Amy Williams's entry for today over at her Garden of Eatin' blog and I lost my appetite for it. We hear stories of the credit crunch on the news all the time and here is evidence of its effects on one of the families who are feeling the full force of the downturn. And yet Amy is still managing to keep posting recipes and find ways of being pro-active about the situation, in spite of it all. Good for you Amy, and I really hope it all works out.

Snowy not-a-snow day

I was fairly sure that it would be a 'snow day' for the kids today - high winds and a day of snow had been forecast. But I was wrong - the buses were running as normal. It seems extraordinarily difficult to predict whether they will run or not - I think the bus board takes pleasure in being fairly random in its decisions.

By the time the kids came home there was a lot of snow around - being blown all over the place. There's more snow forecast for Sunday and for Christmas Eve, so it looks like it will be a white Christmas again. I was supposed to pick up the bird today (finally found a supplier of fresh, free-range turkeys, yay!), but decided that it would be prudent to wait until tomorrow. I hope we'll get all the food shopping done then, before retreating inside for the rest of the season.

After the rain, the sun...

At the end of last week the weather dropped very cold. This picture shows the dog next to the frozen surface of the stream that runs down from the pond.

Just under his chest you can see a gash in the ice. I've been experimenting with lowering the camera into these gashes to try and capture a fish's-eye-view of the stream underneath the ice:


Today the weather warmed up considerably, with rain which melted all the snow and much of the ice. The lake which the stream feeds was already frozen this time last year, but isn't this time round. Here's the view of the stream this evening:

The rain cleared away as the sun set, leaving a lovely sky.
It's dropping cold again now and it look like there'll be more snow before Christmas. Although the Weather Network woman warned that the "models were not in agreeance" last night, so we'll have to wait and see...

It's pants!

"...not trousers, Mummy, that's soooo English!"

So I was scolded yesterday, by Child #2. Suddenly I was on the defensive, in a conversation that had started with me demanding to know exactly why he had come home from school still wearing the ripped trousers/pants I'd asked him to change in the morning.

Intellectually I know that trousers=pants, as petrol=gas, jubilee clips=hose clips and skirting board=base board. But there's a linguistic problem with using the word pants, as it still means 'underwear' to me and has an associated taboo around it.

Then of course there's its relatively recent emergence in British English as a mild swear word (e.g. "That film was absolute pants!"). The Oxford English Dictionary dates this usage to the early 1990s (it seems to be generally blamed on Radio 1 DJs). I think I first came across this use of the word when I started working in Manchester in 2001.

The first sentence of this post illustrates another fundamental linguistic issue for British English speakers in North America. I think of myself as a 'Mum', but everyone else is a 'Mom'. We actually managed to find a birthday card for Mike's mum with the word 'Mum' on it yesterday, but it was the only one in a shop full of Moms.

Perhaps as part of my re-education/re-programming, Child #2 bought me a Christmas present of a bracelet last year:

I don't think he noticed that the beads had been threaded wrongly, so that whichever way you look at it, it spells 'WOM'.

Moon shots

I read on the BBC website about the moon being at its closest to the earth today, so thought I should make the effort to try and take some pictures of it, since the skies were clear this evening.

The time and date.com site gave me the information I needed about when and where the moon would rise, so I got up to the hayfield just before it was due to appear. At first I thought it was going to be hidden, as it was cloaked in a line of cloud:


But it gradually emerged:


I didn't have a tripod with me, so these were just me trying to hold the camera as steady as possible, and using the 'twilight' setting.


I was out for about 45 minutes in all, which was quite long enough in the sub-zero temperatures.

Grey, grey, grey

The weather turned mild and wet today, slowly melting the snow around the farm. The strips of snow on the roof of the grain bin next to the big barn seemed reluctant to fall.


Yesterday's icicles have been replaced by running water.

Nicely icy

It's been very cold here over the last 24 hours: down to -18°C and no higher than -8°C. There was snow on Saturday night; enough to let the kids go tobogganing for the first time this winter. But by Sunday afternoon they decided it was too cold to stay outside. There was quite a breeze, which made it feel more like -24. Today was as cold but less windy, so it felt more pleasant (as long as you stayed in the sun, anyway).

There were a few icicles hanging from our water-collecting gutters on the big barn:

The stream had several layers of ice over the top of it.


This tree looks as though someone in charge of a line-painting vehicle had got a bit carried away:


The old tree-roots that form much of our western boundary look gorgeous with the snow on them. Well, I think they look lovely anyway, but the snow really enhances their contours and cragginess.

Bird life and death (or maybe not)

This skein of Canada Geese treated me to a noisy fly-past this morning, but Tuesday's bird encounter was a bit more disturbing. The dog found this Ruffed Grouse by the side of the small barn. I got to the bird before he did it any damage and picked it up to put it out of his reach. I had thought it was dead, but when I picked it up it seemed to be vibrating with life, so perhaps it had just knocked itself out by flying into one of the barn windows.


I hope it woke up before the local fox found it. Part of me feels that if I were being truly self-sufficient I should have wrung the bird's neck and turned it into supper in true Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall style. But I'm just not ruthless enough. And it wasn't big enough to feed four of us, anyway...