Postcard from Boston

I'm on another one of my occasional city jaunts. I had some spare time to explore Boston today, so went walking around the city centre, intermittently following the Freedom Trail which is a route marked by a red line around the town. Only intermittently though, as after a very short period of time I decided that I didn't like being told where to go (where's the freedom in that?!). On one of my detours I found myself unexpectedly coming into the Granary Burial Ground by its north entrance. I spent quite a while in this graveyard, which was peaceful and covered in fallen and falling leaves.

It was one of the few places in the city where you could feel connected to the original inhabitants, away from the noise and bustle of everywhere else.

I re-followed the red brick road after this and it took me straight to the King's Chapel burial ground, which is even older. The carvings on the stones have weathered amazingly well:

I suppose it is entirely predictable of me to prefer to spend time in those parts of Boston that are quiet and full of trees and history!

Here comes winter

This tree stump is the closest our garden has to a piece of sculpture. I love it and have a lot of photographs of it, taken at different times of the year. These three were all taken in 2007 and show the gradual onset of winter.

November 11:

November 22:

December 11:

The middle one reminds me of British costume dramas, when they spray artificial snow around in an unconvincing attempt to make it look like a real winter.

Here's one from 24 January 2008, looking at it from the other side. According to the weather station records it was -9°C/16°F at 11.45am when I took this photo. Brrr.

What does this piece of wood make you think of?

More 'shrooms

I thought I'd better do another post today in case anyone was worried that I'd poisoned us all last night with the wild mushrooms I'd picked. I did have a shuddery moment this afternoon when I reflected that I'd served them up based solely on information scavenged from the Internet. What if it had been wrong? I'm amazed that Mike ate them without checking up on my identification, though. There's trust for you. I suppose it helped that I was eating them too...

He found these ones today, growing on a stump of ash tree. I have no idea what variety they are, or if they're edible, so have left them well alone. They are lovely-looking though: like glazed bread rolls fresh from the oven.

Dining on lawyers' wigs

I've been away for a week and the weather has been damp. This has brought forth a respectable crop of mushrooms in the grass of the orchard. These are shaggy ink caps - also known as shaggy manes or lawyers' wigs (Coprinus comatus) - which gradually dissolve into a black ink as they mature in a process known as deliquescence. The ones in the foreground are young specimens, while those behind them are beginning to deteriorate at their bottom edges.

In this photograph, the inky cap is well on its way to disintegration.

The mushrooms are edible, but you have to eat them shortly after they've been picked as they will start to deliquesce* once they are harvested. They don't have the same nasty side effects as common ink cap mushrooms (Coprinopsis atramentaria), which make you ill if you consume alcohol(!). I'm planning to pick some lawyers' wigs for supper tonight. This will be my first ever attempt at eating wild mushrooms. Hoping it won't be my last...

*I think this qualifies as my favourite new word of the week.

Greenhouse goodies (and baddies)

The protection of the two layers of plastic sheeting have kept the greenhouse tomatoes going long after the outside ones were killed by frost. The chard and the parsley are still looking good, too, although the basil has succumbed to the colder weather.

The other things that are thriving are the cabbage (white) caterpillars. I haven't seen a butterfly for weeks, but there seems to be a healthy crop of caterpillars on the kale and broccoli plants in the greenhouse every time I go in there.

Having feasted on my brassicas, the caterpillars are in turn feasted upon by the chickens. They come running if I go anywhere near their orchard run, in the hope that they'll get caterpillars or something else that's good to eat.

The chickens then convert the caterpillars into eggs for us to eat, so I can't complain too much!

Dark as December

In the mornings, anyway. As the clocks don't go back until the early morning of the first day of November, the sun will be rising at 7.45am here by Hallowe'en: exactly the same time as it will be rising in late December/early January. Last year, when the clocks went back a day later, the sun rose at 7.47am, causing our darkest morning of the year to happen on November the first, rather than around the winter solstice. Which seemed very wrong.

I hate the dark mornings (can you tell?), although I suppose they do give me the chance to see the sunrise more often.

Cabbages again (and again)

...bread and margarine for breakfast, boiled potatoes and cabbage for lunch, and cabbage soup for supper. Sundays were a bit better. They all looked forward to Sundays because then, although they had exactly the same, everyone was allowed a second helping.*

I've been a bit haunted by the Bucket family's diet lately, as the cabbage crop has been the runaway success (I'm not sure if that is actually the right word) of this year's vegetable garden. I've already blogged about the sauerkraut I made in the summer. On Friday I pulled up a lot of the remaining cabbages. Many are hanging by their roots (that sounds terribly cruel doesn't it?) in the root-cellar part of our basement.

This weekend I have pickled about two and a half pounds of red cabbage:

And there are still more cabbages out there:

I haven't tried making cabbage soup yet, but it might be on the menu soon...

*Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl

Oranges

Was compelled to stop driving twice in the last two days in order to record some of the glorious colours of the season. The trees above are on Burr Road in Prince Edward County, next to the cemetery there. The pumpkin patch below is just south of Highway 401 near Trenton.

Bird trouble

Since June we've been getting our meat from a CSA (community-supported agriculture) scheme. The farm is run by Colleen and John Nyman and is a mere 20 miles (32km) from our house. It is much harder to buy free-range meat here than it was in the UK and I'm a lot happier now that I know that the meat we're eating came from animals that have been treated humanely.

When I heard that the Nymans were offering turkeys for Thanksgiving and Christmas I was thrilled. John told us when he delivered them that they had come from the same supplier as our chickens - they hatched about a week later, I think. It's the first year that the Nymans had reared turkeys and they did rather too good a job - the birds we received were both around the 25lb mark. Yikes!! As you can see, the one we had for Thanksgiving just fitted in my oven (and yes, I did take the bag off before roasting it).

Despite my misgivings about the size, the turkey cooked beautifully, and in much less time than the experts would recommend. I don't know if it's just the convection oven that makes the difference, but this bird was perfectly cooked after three hours at 325°F. If I'd left it for the five hours that it should have had, then it would have been dry and inedible.

All the vegetables for the Thanksgiving feast came from our barnyard, meaning that about 90% of the food we ate came from very local sources. Flour and dairy products were the exceptions. Overall, that is something that I am truly happy to give thanks for.

Our own birds caused me some heartache today. There were only eleven in the run when Mike opened it to let them out into the orchard. I thought I'd counted all twelve back in there last night, but must have missed one. I was very depressed to think that we'd lost a chicken - and of course it would be one of the hens and not a rooster. Two hours later I noticed a hen in the vegetable garden so went out to return her to the orchard. I counted eleven again, but then checked in the barn and there was another hen sitting in one of the nest boxes. The one I found in the vegetable garden did look a bit bedraggled, so must have been out all night (it was raining for much of it). I hope she's learnt her lesson!

Furry and unfashionable

I'm not the person you'd consult on any sort of fashion, be it haute couture or horticulture, but I recently read a remark about sumac (sorry, can't remember where!) that suggested this is a deeply unfashionable plant among UK gardeners. I do recall my parents putting a sumac tree into our 1970s garden. Mind you, they painted the walls of the bathroom orange at around the same time, so maybe the current unpopularity of sumac is a response to 1970s bad taste in general (sorry, Dad).

Staghorn sumacs (Rhus typhina) grow wild here (often in large groups along the side of the roads) and I'm going to thumb my nose at those who dislike them because I think they are beautiful plants, particularly at this time of year, when their colours are so vivid. I took a series of photos of a big clump of them on my way home tonight to prove my point. Then found I'd left my camera cable at work, so couldn't download them. Bah. This picture is from an obliging Flickr user called tboard who has allowed others to make use of it. It's even better than mine would have been, as the sun is shining through the leaves, which it wasn't here today.

Return on investment

Now that the chickens are beginning to pay for their keep I've been turning my attention to the ways in which the other living creatures I feed are contributing to the household. As far as I can see, neither the dog nor the children are really turning any sort of profit. I saw this dog-powered treadmill in the Ameliasburg Historical Museum yesterday. I'm sure it could be adjusted to run on kid-power, too. Would just have to find a way of attaching it to the TV so that they could only watch it while walking or running...

Barn views

A heavy shower last night produced a once-in-a-lifetime rainbow that perfectly echoed the arch of the greenhouse, as seen from the doorway of the chicken's barn. I couldn't fit the whole thing into one shot, but it was a pleasing sight.

Today I discovered that we have at least two laying hens. They were sitting in their respective nest boxes when I visited the barn to feed the chickens some leftover spaghetti squash. There were two eggs when I went back just now. This is the first day we've had more than one egg, bringing the average since they started laying up to one a day. Is it a bit sad of me to have set up a spreadsheet with this information in it?

So the only two productive members of the flock were the two who failed to benefit from the extra food, which was quickly demolished by this bunch of slackers:

Get to work, you lot!

It never rains...

The rainfall distribution for this month was a little lop-sided:

Like all those 'long tail' graphs, but in reverse.

Cracking

It's probably going to sound silly, but I was a little nervous about breaking open the first eggs from our hen(s). We had three eggs in three days: all laid in different nest boxes (there are only four to choose from). I don't know if these were all from one doughty hen or from three separate birds.

Today I plucked (ooh, sorry) up the the courage to crack the eggs. No unpleasant surprises inside them and everything you hear about the colour of free-ranging hens' eggs seems to be borne out. The picture shows the three eggs from our hens (or hen) and a shop-bought supposedly-free-range one on the left.

An hegg

"I expect they'll start laying when I'm away," I gaily predicted, not believing any such thing.
When I got back home last night from a week in the UK, I took my mother-in-law out to see the chickens, as she hadn't met them before. I demonstrated the little flap in the coop which gives access to the nest boxes, explaining that in theory we'd be able to gather eggs without disturbing the hens. And blow me down, there was a single, perfect egg sitting in one of the boxes, waiting for me to find it.

I half-suspected that Mike had put a shop-bought egg in there to trick me, but it is significantly smaller than the eggs we get from the supermarket and is a completely different colour. I was so proud and pleased!

Mystery wildflower: please help!

Found an unusual plant in the woods yesterday. I thought I'd seen all the wildflowers that we have here, but this one is new to me. I'm sure that it must be easily identifiable: the leaves look almost like those of a banana plant, they're so large.

It would have been simpler to ID the plant if I'd come across it while it was flowering, I'm sure, but all that is left of the flowers are very long stalks and these dried heads. Leave a comment if you can help me out!

I'm not entirely sure which type of asters these are either (there's a long list of possible candidates). But they looked lovely with the sun setting behind them.

Greenhouse gleanings

The greenhouse has been a real help for the more tender crops this summer as the weather has been cooler than we might have expected. Last year was similar: we had hardly any eggplants and none of the peppers ripened. With the additional heat captured inside the greenhouse this year I can't complain about either. This view of the centre raised bed shows the bumper crop of Corno di Toro Rosso peppers (with one of the eggplants peeping through towards the back of the shot).

I picked two pounds (850g) of these today and froze them.

Last year we had just one melon ripen in the garden. Which the dog stole because he thought it was a tennis ball. Well that's what I assume he was thinking. Maybe he just likes melons. This year we've had five so far and there are three more which are still green. The three in the photo are 'Golden Jenny'. The other variety I'm growing is called 'Tigger' and the fruit have an attractive stripy skin (you may have guessed this already). I like looking at both types - the Golden Jenny ones have an interesting embroidery effect on them - but I have to admit that I really don't like eating either of them. I'm just not keen on melons and the rest of the family are either ambivalent or hostile to them. I don't think I'll bother with them next year.

The raised beds in the greenhouse are so much a part of the garden now that they even have their own amphibians. This is the frog who inhabits the bed next to the water tank. This bed is now home to kale and broccoli plants (as well as the rainbow chard (and the clover (and the grass)) visible here) which I'm hoping will provide some winter greens for us. They've proved to be a target for cabbage white butterflies, so I'm relying on this frog to help me get rid of the caterpillars.

A long gestation

One of the promises I made to myself on emigrating from England was that I would use some of the extra time I thought I'd have (hah!) to go back to the story I started writing on 17 November 1985. Which was a little while ago now. It had been knocking around in my mind for far too long and I needed to get rid of it and move on. I started writing it in pencil in a spiral-bound notebook all those years back, often while travelling to and from school on the bus. In later years, I used a computer to re-write the same scenes when the mood grabbed me. All of those early versions of the story are now lost, which is probably a good thing (although it doesn't reflect well upon my skills as an archivist, I do accept...).

At Christmas in 2007, the year we emigrated, I did manage to get going on it again, but got stuck after I'd written down all those original ideas I'd had. Luckily, before I'd left Manchester* I'd confided my ambition to finish the story to a friend. On a visit back to the city in May this year I had dinner with her and she asked about it. Her enthusiasm for the basic plot outline re-energised me and over this summer I was able to craft it into a (short) novel. I was so pleased to have finally got this thing out of my system. But what was I going to do with it next?

I read Chris Anderson's book Free the other week. Free of charge, online (though it's now only available in that way in the US). This method of accessing the book was inspiring, especially when combined with the book's subject matter. In the old days, you needed to have agents, publishers and printers involved in order to share a story with other people. Which meant that you had to tout the manuscript around until someone decided it was worth smearing dead trees into sheets for (to borrow one of Anderson's phrases). Nowadays, it is easy to publish things online and the whole middle-person thing is less necessary. OK, that also means that there are some terrible pieces of work around, but at least they can find their own market and writers are able to get on with writing and to share if they choose to.

Which is all a round-about way of saying that my story is now out there: set free, sitting on a server somewhere for its audience to find it. Which I fully expect is not going to be the same audience as the people who read this blog (as it's basically a school story aimed at young adults). Oh well, I had to pimp it somewhere and if you've got a teenager lurking around the house, they might like it! I had a lot of fun writing it and testing it out on my not-quite-teenage daughter. I'm pleased with the way that self-publishing this book fits into our general ethos of self-sufficiency. There's another blog out there too, which covers the background to the story and my observations on the whole experience of self-publishing.

*The picture, in case you're wondering, is of Manchester Cathedral, as seen through raindrops on the Big Wheel in Exchange Square. Old, new and raining. Everything Manchester means to me, summed up in one photograph.

Before the Fall

Nothing says 'Fall' to me as much as the sight of squashes and pumpkins. Of course I'm still thinking of the season itself as 'Autumn', but the way that these fruit are used here as decorations is sufficiently different to the way things are done in the UK to make the North American word the one that comes to mind when I admire my gourd, squash and pumpkin harvest.

I've just gone to the Oxford English Dictionary, to find that the word Fall was used in Britain, in the past, to describe the season. It originally appeared as a phrase: 'Fall of the leaf'. Which is rather lovely, don't you think?

A glimpse of times past

Had a lovely walk around the Massassauga Point conservation area on the north coast of Prince Edward County this afternoon. This spot was once home to a hotel and was a popular resort. Now it is a pleasant tree-shaded place for an afternoon stroll, with good views of the Bay of Quinte.

One of the few passenger ships that is still cruising these waters went by as we got to the end of our walk. This is the Kawartha Voyageur, which does a five-day cruise from Peterborough to Kingston. Sounds like a lovely way of seeing the waterways.

One hundred years ago, these waters would have been busy with steamships. I love this view of the Brockville, anchored at Massassauga Point on 9 July 1908, with a party from the Presbyterian Sunday School in Deseronto on board for their summer picnic outing:

"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.

Of cabbages and builders

Back in April, in the protective warmth of the greenhouse, the red cabbage seedlings germinated. I sowed many more than I needed but hoped that I would be able to sell the surplus seedlings at a plant sale I would be attending the following month. As it turned out, red cabbages were not a huge hit with the people who visited the sale and I didn't sell a single one.

As a consequence, I have a more than adequate supply of red cabbages becoming ready to pick. The rabbits have nibbled on a few of them, but there are plenty left for us. Coleslaw has become a fairly regular part of our meals of late, but I was also keen to have a go at making sauerkraut with some of the surplus.

About two weeks ago Mike and I set to, slicing cabbages and filling my largest stainless steel pan with the shredded pieces.

We soon found that one head of cabbage makes an awful lot of cabbage shreds.

Sauerkraut is easy to make. We added salt and a little water, weighed the cabbage down with a plate and let it ferment for 10 days or so. Today I packed the sauerkraut into jars. The colour of it is breath-taking. It tastes pretty good, too.

In writing this post I have learnt that sauerkraut was the principal food of the builders of the Great Wall of China. So I shall be expecting great things from myself and Mike in the weeks to come.

Harvesting peas, peppers and sunshine

I've had mixed success with my first try at sowing an autumn crop of peas. I sowed them indoors in July in the cool of the house.* They went out into the garden in early August, in a bed that is fairly shady in the morning. The sugar snap peas have romped away and I'm now picking them again:

Next to them, the Lincoln peas are not looking so good. I think members of the local rabbit population have been tucking into these:

The Corno di Toro Rosso peppers have started to live up to their name, at long last. The cayenne and tomato peppers have been red for a while now but, even with the benefit of the greenhouse, this variety have been slow to ripen.

The solar panels have been in operation for ten months now and yesterday the meter rolled over** to read 1,000. This means that the panels have harvested 10 megawatt hours of electricity from the sun since October last year. Highly satisfactory!

*At this point anyone who lives in Eastern Canada will be thinking that this was an unnecessary precaution this year, as July was cooler than usual.

**Well OK, it's digital, so it didn't actually roll.

Birds again

Another bird photograph (just to prove that I can get one that is recognisably a bird). This is a Solitary sandpiper (Tringa solitaria) that was feeding on the weed-caked surface of our pond the other day. My bird book describes this as an uncommon sighting in this area: they breed further north, which means that this one was probably on its way elsewhere.

I haven't posted any chicken pictures of late, so here is one to show them in their new enclosure. Mike has blocked off the five gaps in the orchard fence to give them a semi-secure area to roam around in. We let them out in the late morning and they have the freedom of their run and the orchard until the early evening. The logic is that they will lay their eggs in the barn nest boxes in the morning and then fill up on bugs and greens in the orchard the rest of the day. It might not work out that way, but that is the plan. I'm beginning to get impatient to see (and eat!) that first egg.

I bring them in at night by bashing the side of a feed scoop with my fingernails. They recognise this noise and usually all come running back into the barn to get their evening snack of scratch (a mixture of different grains). Occasionally I have to go and chase a slow one back in, but the promise of food works well most of the time.