Blurry blob

There are some fantastic pictures of Ruby-throated hummingbirds on the Internet.

This is not one of them.

But it is a small proof that I wasn't imagining things when I thought I saw a hummingbird the other night.

Seeing red

I don't want to be the type of ex-pat who spends all their time moaning about how hard it is to get certain things in their new country (although I know I've already done that here a bit). My attitude towards this type of problem is to find a way to emulate whatever it is that I'm missing. OK, Marmite is one I'm not going to manage, but other things might be easier.

One food item that we grew to love in England was harissa paste. This is a hot chilli/garlic/coriander concoction which is North African in origin. We love it with cous-cous. It is possible to make harissa paste, but it doesn't keep very long (and a little harissa paste goes a long way). When I saw a recipe for tomato, chilli and pepper chutney, I wondered if this might be something we could use when our harissa supplies run out. I made a third of the quantities in the recipe, to test it out.

Here are the raw ingredients that I picked from the garden (except for the garlic which I only remembered after I took the photo). The small red chillies are cayennes, which were hot when they were still green, but which are now HOT!


This is the chopped mixture in the saucepan ready to be cooked.


After about three hours of cooking, the chutney is much reduced in quantity, but still has a vibrant red colour.


It will be two months or so before the chutney is ready to eat, but I'm looking forward to trying it already. The smell of it cooking was so pungent that it made the dog sneeze, so I think it will definitely be hot enough to replace harissa's kick.

Hummers

No, not the ridiculously huge vehicles, but the avian variety. I have a vague plan about planting the long bed beside the house with native plants that will attract hummingbirds, but haven't quite got around to that yet. This year it was taken over by wildflowers (no, they're not weeds because I'm happy for them to be there...for now). I started to think more seriously about my plan this morning because I saw my first hummingbird. Of course I didn't have my camera handy, and it took me a few seconds to realise what it was I was looking at. It was feeding from one of these flowers:


This is Spotted jewelweed (Impatiens capensis), which is also known as Touch-me-not because of its exploding seed pods. We have a large clump of these next to the stream near our barns and it is quite a distinctive plant, with light green leaves, pale purple stems and those attractive slipper-shaped flower heads. It looks particularly beautiful when it's spangled with morning dew.


I always liked this plant, but now I know that hummingbirds visit them, I'm looking at it with a new respect. I've also found out that it has a number of medicinal uses, including stopping fresh mosquito bites from itching and swelling. I really must do something about that long bed next year. There's a handy list of native plants which hummingbirds can feed on, which will give me something to work from.

Double yellow lines

A couple of snapshots from my journey home from work in Deseronto today. This first one is of the view towards the heavens that is afforded by the aptly-named Skyway Bridge:


The twin yellow lines painted on the bridge seemed to be reflected later on in my journey by the goldenrod plants lining both sides of this country road:

Summer storm

I took a lot of photographs of complete darkness yesterday evening, but did manage to get this one, too. It's one of the many bolts of lightning that were sparked off by the passage of a cold front across this region after a hot, humid day. Elsewhere in Ontario, tornadoes touched down, killing at least one person.

Superstar superveg

One of my favourite vegetables is broccoli. Its supervegetable health-promoting qualities are well-known* and it is one of the limited list of vegetables that are enjoyed by everyone in our household.


But mostly I like broccoli because it is so well-behaved. It grows well, regardless of whether there is too much water (as happened here last year), or too little (this year) and once the main head is picked, it obligingly sends up side shoots after side shoots until the cold weather finally kills it off. I can't help but compare it unfavourably to its relative, the cauliflower, which acts like a spoiled celebrity diva: demanding just the right amount of water, having to be picked at just the right moment and refusing to put in any overtime to produce extra florets after the main event.

It is important to soak broccoli florets in salted water after you pick them, if you grow organically. This removes any little bugs and caterpillars that might otherwise provide you with an unwelcome extra portion of protein in your meal. Five to ten minutes or so seems to do the trick.


Broccoli also freezes well, should you find that you've got a little too much to eat all at once. This situation does arise occasionally in my life. I boil it in water for a couple of minutes, then plunge it into iced cold water and bag it up.


*This is a link to a cosmetic surgery site which (for some strange reason) has articles on nutrition. Please don't take this as an endorsement for cosmetic surgery, of which I generally disapprove.**

**Although since I once had laser surgery on my eyes to correct my short/near-sightedness, that probably makes me an enormous hypocrite.

Hot

Summer has finally arrived in the last week, with temperatures getting above the 30°C/86°F mark for the first time this year and relative humidity levels of 70% or so. Needless to say, the cooling provided by the geothermal system that was installed this time last year has been very welcome!

Yesterday morning was ethereally misty when we woke up, allowing me to snatch a nice photograph of the sun as it came up through the trees and (looking in the opposite direction) a picture of the cannas that have grown from the rhizomes my step-mother and father bought us back in May.


Apparently the cannas in their own garden have not produced flowers yet, so I'm just putting this picture up to annoy them, really. ;-)


The heat and sunshine is helping to ripen the peppers and tomatoes. Here is tonight's harvest of sweetcorn, tomato peppers, various tomatoes and a couple of shallots. I turned most of this lot into a paella. I really like the size and shape of the tomato peppers. They're sweet, rather than hot, peppers and they're ripening thick and fast at the moment. Soon I'll be complaining about them, I expect!


Here's how the paella turned out. Hm, the last meal I featured on the blog was a risotto, now more rice. We do eat other starchy foods too, occasionally!

Not so incy wincy*

Another dewy morning meant that the spider webs were highly visible again. There are some huge ones in the area behind the big barn.


Most seem to be occupied by the striking Yellow garden spider (Argiope aurantia), which are correspondingly large (their bodies are about an inch long). The web has an interesting zig-zag centre part (called a stabilimentum), which doesn't capture prey and which is apparently there to stop birds flying through it (according to the University of Arkansas's Arthropod Museum, anyway). The female spiders also eat their own web every day, before rebuilding it in the same place (seems like a lot of work).



*Or itsy bitsy, or teensy weensy, depending on your cultural background.

Paralysis of plenty

You start off being so proud of the produce that your lovingly-tended plants are turning out. Then, after a remarkably short period of time, the delight begins to turn into complacency. A week or so later, the produce is beginning to pile up in the fridge and the challenge of having to do something creative with it all starts to induce sensations of panic in the grower. If you're not careful, a kind of paralysis sets in, until you are faced with the certain knowledge that if you don't do something about it all RIGHT NOW, it's going to start turning bad and you're going to start feeling bad.

It got like that today, with the courgettes/zucchini, which had completely filled the salad drawer in the fridge when I brought two more in to join them (and those two didn't make the photo-shoot). I've only got two plants, but they're ... productive. So far, I've grated four of them and frozen them to be added to winter soups and stews. Three were eaten up at lunch time and my next step is to try my hand at a Chocolate Zucchini Cake. Only don't tell Child #2, who has a horror of anything with zucchini or pumpkin in it.

Paper Lace

The most common wasp we see here is this paper wasp (Polistes fuscatus). It isn't as aggressive as the usual wasp (Vespula germanica) you see in the UK. Those ones do turn up here too, where they're known as yellow jackets - but I've only really seen them in towns, frequenting their usual favourite haunts of garbage/rubbish containers. These paper wasps have very pronounced waists and extremely long back legs, which look quite comical when you see them in flight.

Constant vigilance!

I could really use someone like Mad-Eye Moody from Harry Potter to help me keep an eye on the pickling cucumbers I'm growing. They're supposed to be picked small and pickled as gherkins (the variety is called Parisian Pickling). Although I check them EVERY SINGLE DAY, there always seem to be one or two that escape detection.

The picture shows the harvest over the last two days, arranged by size. On the left are those I managed to collect at approximately the right moment. As you move to the right, you see those that successfully hid from me until they were a bit too big. The yellow monster on the end managed to grow to full ripeness before I noticed it.

Yes! We have some tomatoes

Happily joining the ranks of those with some tomatoes to show off. These are a mix of Black Cherry, Velvet Red and Principe Borghese. These all came from seeds exchanged with Ottawa Gardener in the winter.

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:

August dew

In response to Esther's comment, I should explain that the lower picture is of a small mushroom known as a Japanese parasol (Latin name either Coprinus plicatilis or Parasola plicatilis, depending on which fungus expert you talk to*).

*If you talk to any at all, that is.

An unwarranted invasion of privacy

I was tidying up the pots in the greenhouse this afternoon. An innocent enough activity, you might think. As I emptied one of the white plastic boxes in there, I was startled to find a mouse running around in the bottom of it. When I realised that I'd disturbed her in the process of giving birth (the baby was still attached!), I was mortified. Though quite why she chose that particular location, I'm not sure. There weren't any nesting materials in there, so perhaps she got trapped?


With the seed trays that had been in the box removed, she managed to jump out, but left the poor baby behind.


I tipped it out onto the greenhouse floor, but don't have a lot of hope that she'll come back for it.

I think she was a deer mouse (Peromyscus maniculatus). According to Wikipedia they normally have litters of around four young, so I'm hoping that she's got a nest somewhere where she can give birth to the other babies in a more private setting. What with this and the mole nest I disturbed in April, I'm beginning to get a bit nervous about doing any tidying-up in the garden.

Could it be?

I've been watching other people's reports of tomato harvests with envy and have been grumbling about the way my tomatoes have remained stubbornly green, despite my lavishing them with water, food (lovely worm tea) and a roof over their heads. At last it seems that one of the greenhouse Black Cherry tomatoes has been embarrassed into producing a slight blush. And about time too.

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.

Summer vegetable risotto

Cooking seems a lot easier when you can wander around the garden, pick what's ready to pick and then turn it into supper. Saturday night's haul included some onions (supposed to be for pickling, but they didn't get that far), carrots, zucchini, beans, spinach and broccoli.

I had some leftover cooked ham and the stock that it was cooked in, so it seemed that a summer vegetable and ham risotto would be a perfect way of using all these things up.

I melted some butter in a pan and gently cooked the chopped onions and some crushed garlic (not in the picture, but also from the garden!) until they were transparent. Then I stirred in the risotto rice and the sliced carrots. Once the rice was coated in the butter I gradually stirred in the stock, a little at a time, and adding the other vegetables at the appropriate moment. The rice takes about 20-25 minutes to cook, which is fine for the carrots and onions, but the other vegetables need less cooking time. I added the beans and broccoli when there were about 10 minutes to go, then the courgette/zucchini slices and the spinach with 5 minutes left.

If you don't eat ham, then you could use a vegetable stock instead and perhaps replace the protein in the ham with some cheese stirred in or sprinkled over at the end of the cooking time. Summer on a plate: delicious!

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.

Any day now...

There's a sense of anticipation about the vegetable garden at the moment. Not a huge amount is being harvested: the peas have stopped producing and a lot of the lettuce has gone to seed (there is more growing, but it isn't big enough to harvest yet). Broccoli, carrots and beetroot are the main things that are pickable right now. The warm-weather crops are not quite ready to harvest, but I have a feeling that it won't be long before we are struggling to keep up with them all.

Last night we had half an inch of rain, which was extremely welcome. It's been very dry for nearly two months (there have been some impressive storms just to the south and just to the north, but no rain over us) and recently we've been having to water the whole vegetable garden every evening just to keep the plants alive. The huge water tanks we've installed in the barn and greenhouse over the last two years have made that possible: our water situation in 2007 was so much worse.

The tomato and pepper plants in the greenhouse are producing a lot of fruit, but none of it has ripened yet. These are the appealingly-shaped fruits of the tomato pepper:

I'm also growing cayenne peppers and Corno di Toro Rosso (red bull's horn) peppers. These are almost being swamped by the cucumber plants that are in the same bed:

I'd almost given up on finding any actual cucumbers, despite the rampant growth and the presence of many immature fruit. Then I found this lurking on the floor:

Is there any logic to the way that cucumbers develop their fruit, or is it just random as to which one grows to maturity first? I like the way the cucumber is shaped like a question mark: as though it would like to know the answer to that, too.

In the vegetable garden these crops will soon be ready to harvest:

Fennel and French beans:


Courgettes/zucchini:


Corn (four cobs on this plant - is that a record?!):

Winged beasts

The area around the pond is alive with dragonflies. This morning's haul:
Ruby meadowhawk (Sympetrum rubicundulum)


Well-camouflaged female Eastern pondhawk (Erythemis simplicicollis)


And a Twelve-spotted skimmer (Libellula pulchella).


These bird's-foot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus) flowers aren't dragonflies, but they're jolly pretty.

Where DID you get that hat?

That little tree frog was there again today (charmingly adorned), when I took the children on a milkweed nature trek. There were no caterpillars, but we saw this beautiful Canadian Tiger Swallowtail instead:

Milkweed menagerie

At the risk of starting to become a milkweed bore, I offer up some further images of the lives that the common milkweed plants are supporting. Of course there are several Monarch caterpillars (two visible in this picture):


But beyond the very noticeable (and presumably, therefore, highly unsavoury) caterpillars are other creatures, too. I loved the brilliant colours of this tiny fly (and have given up trying to identify it!):


There are two patches of milkweed plants in the hayfield, and the flowers of those in the second patch are slightly darker pink than those in the first group I photographed. There was a small yellowish spider lovingly dealing with its ant prey when I first looked at this plant. The spider didn't like the attention and sidled off (as if to dissociate itself from the dead ant) when I tried to snap it.


On another plant in this group was this rather fed-up-looking frog. I think it's a Gray Tree Frog, simply because it looks less like any of the other nine Ontario frogs than the pictures I've seen of that one. But gray (or even grey) isn't a colour I'd use to describe this beastie. Duck egg blue, perhaps?


On the way back from this trip I spotted a Monarch butterfly, at last: