Nipped in the bud

This was as close as we got to a tree fruit crop this year. The lack of frost in April meant that the orchard trees were two weeks in advance of their usual flowering time. I took the picture of these apple blossoms on 30 April. On 11 May the temperature dipped to -1.7°C/28.9°F and we lost all of our nascent fruit apart from the cherries. I even took a picture of the frost on our neighbour's roof that morning, with the early lilac flowers behind it, little realising the damage it had done.

There will be no apricots, plums, greengages, apples or pears this year. And we're not the only ones: I noticed that the orchard where we bought the trees has had to cancel their heirloom apple festival this year as their apple crop has been severely limited by the same frost. It's been a bad year all round for our little orchard - three of the apple trees didn't survive the winter: Pumpkin Sweet, Fireside and Duchess.

I console myself with the thought that our remaining young trees can put their energy into new growth and increasing their strength for next year.

Finally!

I grew some perennial flowers from seed in 2008, two of which have flowered for the first time this year. In this picture are the coreopsis ('Early Sunrise', which have flowered every year), the delphinium ('Blue Mirror') and the Tennessee coneflower (Echinacea tennesseensnis).

They're in a difficult spot - a dry, sunny border at the front of the house which gets occasionally flooded with rain from the roof when there's a big downpour which overflows the gutters/eavestrough. I've been more diligent about watering it regularly this year, though, which seems to have helped these flowers. Maybe next year I'll have enough blooms to be able to pick some!

The colours of Canada

I had Canada Day in mind when I chose the seeds for my hanging baskets. The nasturtium is a variety called 'Gleaming Mahogany' which I thought would look good against the white of the Swan River Daisy.

I wish I'd put as much thought into my own colour-co-ordination for the day itself. I was helping out at the Friends of the Wellington Museum's Pancake Breakfast at the Wellington Town Hall. All the volunteers and nearly all the customers were wearing red and white, but the only red clothes I possess are thick woolly sweaters!

I don't think I'll be able to top this lady's hat, though...

P.S. Just saw a clip of the Queen who's in Ottawa for Canada Day. Even she's wearing red and white. How shaming.

Wasps again

We've been clearing out another stall of the small barn, today, making room for the new chicks and some potential chicks from the five eggs that a broody hen is incubating for us at the moment. As I tipped a wheelbarrow-load of straw on to the compost heap, I noticed this delicate structure on the underside of the barrow. If you look hard (or click on the picture for a closer look), you can see the wasp larvae in the cells towards the bottom left.

Flowers and fruit

A light rain this morning. After a very dry start to the growing season, we've been lucky with the weather in the last month. Our water tanks in the barns are full and the plants are all coming along well. The squash are starting to flower:

As are the eggplants/aubergines in the greenhouse:

The other warm-weather greenhouse fruit are swelling. I think these are Amish Paste tomatoes. But they could be Purple Russians. Won't know for sure until they ripen!

This is the largest of the Tomato peppers. I love the shape of this variety. They taste wonderful, too.

Aww and ugh

I picked up our 2010 batch of chicks today. I'd forgotten quite how tiny they are when they're newly-hatched.

Slightly less appealing were the other babies I found. These are the offspring of the Colorado potato beetles that I so cruelly dispatched on Tuesday. I get the feeling I was being too blasé by half about them. There were several dozen chomping away on the potatoes this evening.

Fortunately, the fully-grown chickens were just as keen on the larvae as they were on the adults.

Oh, and we had an earthquake this afternoon.

Blue mud dauber

Last year's parsley plants are now flowering and taking up a ridiculous amount of space in the greenhouse. I'm leaving them in place for now, as they're attracting a lot of insects. I hadn't seen this particular wasp before, but it's very beautiful, with a metallic blue sheen to its blackness. I like its name too. Sounds like an X-rated show of some sort.

A dangerous foreign pest

That's how I've been brought up to think about Colorado Potato Beetles. I've been trying to find an online example of the 'wanted' posters that used to be in British police stations, warning the public about being vigilant and reporting any sightings of the creature to the authorities. I haven't had much luck: this being the closest I could get. The site says the image is from The National Archives, but I couldn't find any trace of it in the Catalogue or in their image library. The latter isn't searchable and is divided up into a number of categories, none of which suggested 'Colorado Potato Beetle' to me. But this post isn't supposed to be a rant about usability of archives' websites, so I won't go on about that (however tempting it may be).

The point I was originally going to make was that my impression from all those posters was that the potato beetle was enormous. They always showed it at such a high magnification that I was quite surprised to find that the bugs are really quite small. Here's one sitting at the base of my middle finger:

In spite of their 'most wanted' status, they aren't any sort of a threat to humans or at all difficult to catch. They don't move very quickly and their hard shells make them easy to pick off the plants (unlike the tomato hornworms, which are all wriggly and revolting). I keep an eye on the potatoes, but have only found four of these beetles so far this year. When I find them, I feed them to the chickens, who think they are a great treat. The rooster picks them up, one at a time, then makes excited 'look what I've got for you' noises and presents them to the hens. Seems a better way of dealing with the problem than spraying the crop with anything.

Solstice sunset

At this time of year the sun sets in the gap between the two barns, its last rays causing the greenhouse to momentarily glow with light. Makes me think of Chinese lanterns.

Carrot, pine nut and dill salad

The greenhouse is beginning to yield more root crops. We had carrots and beetroot for lunch today, with the last of the greenhouse-grown potatoes. I made the carrots into a salad with some pine nuts. It was an experiment, and one that worked out well, so I thought I'd make a note here of the recipe. I sliced the carrots into coins and steamed them for ten minutes. Half-way into the carrots' cooking time, I dry-roasted the pine nuts over a medium heat for five minutes. I added the cooked carrots to the pan at the end of that time, to dry them off. Then I tossed the carrot slices and nuts in the dressing, which was a mix of olive oil, lemon juice and chopped dill.

Strawberry season

I've mentioned David Lebovitz's excellent ice cream book The Perfect Scoop before. The only recipe I think is missing is a simple strawberry ice-cream. There's one for strawberry-sour cream ice cream, though, which I've adapted today to use just double/heavy cream.

The adapted ingredients:

1 pound/450g fresh strawberries
¾ cup/150g sugar
1 tablespoon vodka
2 cups/500 ml double/heavy cream
½ teaspoon lemon juice

Slice the strawberries and stir them into the sugar and vodka (the vodka is to help keep the ice cream soft). The strawberries start off looking like this:

and after an hour they'll look more like this:

(at this point we came perilously close to giving up on the ice cream idea completely: the strawberries looked and smelt so delicious).

Blend with the cream and lemon juice - not too much; it's nice to have some chunks of strawberries left.

In his recipe, David exhorts us to "try to eat this ice cream soon after it's been churned." Well, alright then. If I must...

Pier 21

I'm in Halifax, Nova Scotia at the moment, at a conference. It's a lovely city and we've been lucky with the weather: warm and sunny all the time, so far. Here's the view from my hotel room:

Looks a bit industrial, perhaps, but this complex of buildings is highly significant in the history of twentieth-century Canadian immigration. It's known as Pier 21 and is where ships bearing immigrants tied up and discharged their human cargo between 1928 and 1971. The main building is now a museum dedicated to the experiences of those new arrivals in Canada.

As a relatively new arrival myself, my feelings about the exhibits were mixed. In one sense, it was disturbing to think of my recent immigration experience as something that people could learn about in a museum. Although Pier 21 is no longer a point of entry for immigrants and therefore has passed into history, the immigration process has not. To me, it is still a fresh and recent experience and there was something very strange about seeing stories like mine represented in a museum. I felt very unsettled by it.

The oral history aspects of the museum were excellent, although I was less convinced by the audio-visual experience called Oceans of Hope. There was one unintentionally very funny part with a war bride who had the most peculiar English accent I've ever heard. I nearly laughed out loud when she claimed "I've lived in London all my life!". No part of London I've ever visited, I thought...

Overall, the museum was well worth a visit but it did leave me with confused emotions which I'm finding hard to adequately express. Mostly I suppose I felt that the museum didn't address the fact that immigration is an ongoing Canadian fact of life as well as part of the country's history. Will have to think about it some more...

Yellow peril

I've had a few complaints lately about the class of wildlife I've been featuring on this blog. Vultures, rats and snakes are a little unsavoury for some people, it seems. By way of respite I offer up this creature instead.

This ridiculously cute bird has been terrorising the front of our house all day. It appears to be convinced that its reflection in the windows is a rival male and is alternately bashing against the glass and then sitting on the trellis by the side of the house and singing its little heart out.

It's a yellow warbler (Dendroica petechia).

Cream tea

Had a go at making clotted cream yesterday. For a first attempt, it went pretty well. Well enough for my 12 year old to say "I adjure you to make this cream again!". Then she asked me what 'adjure' actually meant, but we decided it was an appropriate word to use in the context.

The Bel Cream Maker instructions for 'Devonshire Cream' require you to pour no more than an inch of cream over an inch of milk in a shallow pan and then allow to settle overnight. "Afterwards heat very slowly until crust forms and cracks. Skim off and cool." These latter instructions were a bit vague for my liking, so I consulted the Internet and found a likely-looking recipe on the Sustainable Table site. No mention of having milk underneath the cream, though (and as I'd already done that step, I couldn't undo it!).

After eight hours of slow baking, the cream looked like this:

I skimmed off the thick top layer with a slotted spoon and transferred it to the fridge. You're left with a fair bit of thin cream underneath, which can be used for something else. After the top layer had been in the fridge for a few hours I took it out for our cream tea. I found that it was very dry, so mixed in some of the thin cream until it was of the right consistency for use on jam and scones. Next time, I'd probably leave it all in the fridge to cool completely and do the skimming later on (as the Sustainable Table recipe suggests) - this might help to get the right consistency from the start.

It's a bit of a faff, to be honest, so despite Child #1's adjuration, I don't think it's something I'll be making too often.

A gardener is someone who...

...can't resist planting anything with the potential to grow.

I found this hickory nut in the hayfield on 25 March (probably dropped by a squirrel). I potted it up, kept it in the fridge for a while and then placed it on a sunny window sill. Nothing seemed to happen for a long time, but in the last few weeks the nut sent up this delicate little seedling:

There are two varieties of hickory trees that grow in this area, the Bitternut (Carya cordiformis, whose nuts aren't edible (as you may have guessed)) and the Shagbark (Carya ovata), whose nuts are sweet. I'm hoping this is the latter (although if the squirrel didn't eat it, perhaps it's the other one!).

The other day I came up with another way of completing that first sentence: A gardener is someone who has to wash their hands before they use the toilet. Have you got a favourite definition of a gardener?

Ratcatcher?

I disturbed two garter snakes in the greenhouse last night. This one was in the middle of digesting something - the arrow is pointing to a distinct bulge in its midriff (well, OK, if I had to draw an arrow maybe it's not very distinct in the photo, but it was quite clear as it wriggled around, trying to avoid me!). I'm hoping this is another ally in my war against the rodent population.

Tubers

I was given a box-full of young Jerusalem artichoke plants a couple of weeks ago and planted them on the day I received them. Since then, they've been looking progressively sick, with only one of them retaining its original set of leaves. Here's a typical example of the others:

It's been very hot and dry here, so I've been watering them regularly, but was beginning to think it was a waste of time. This morning, though, I noticed some of the stems sprouting new growth:

Not all of them, but a fair proportion, are showing similar signs of life.

In other tuber news, the greenhouse-sown potatoes are flowering (and beginning to shade out other plants), so I lifted one of those this morning and got a pound and a half off it: our first potatoes of the season. I've learnt that it's best not to sow any outside until early May, so the outdoor ones are going to be a few weeks behind these. Here's how they look right now:

Rice pudding for summer

With the hens back laying again and the temperatures rising, the recipe for Gelato di Riso sounded perfect. I adapted it to speed the process up (the original - David Lebovitz's Rice Gelato in The Perfect Scoop - involved making the rice pudding in the oven) and to conserve the eggs a bit. I generally replace the egg yolks in his recipes with whole eggs - assuming that five yolks is the same as three whole eggs. I usually have to strain the custard to take out any small strands of cooked egg-white (although you can't in this recipe) and it probably makes the ice-cream taste slightly more 'eggy' than with just yolks - but that doesn't seem to bother anyone here. I don't want to be left with loads of egg whites to use up!

Ingredients

½ cup (100g) Arborio rice
4 cups (1 litre) whole milk
¾ cup (150g) sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
3 eggs, beaten
Freshly grated nutmeg

Cook the rice and the sugar in 3 cups (750ml) of milk on the stove-top, for about 20 minutes or until the rice is soft. Tip the mixture into the beaten eggs then return to the heat, stirring, until it is thick and creamy. Stir in the remaining cup of milk (the original recipe calls for cream or half-and-half - but whole milk works fine), the vanilla extract and the nutmeg. (I forgot the nutmeg, but I think it would make this even better.) Allow to cool, then freeze in an ice-cream maker.

It's lovely on its own, but would probably go even better with some bottled or stewed fruit.

Only disconnect

I'm hestitating about writing this post because a) I worry that I will upset a lot of people I like and b) I'm not sure it really belongs on this blog. But I'm feeling strongly about it and in need of unburdening myself. Is this a 'being over 40' thing, do you think? This urge to complain? Anyway, on to my point...

When I was in England in April I noticed the 'smartphone stoop' a lot. Standing on platforms, waiting for trains, nearly half of the other people waiting with me would be standing with their head and shoulders hunched over, staring at their phones, in an alternate reality to the one we were all sharing. It made me uncomfortable, in a way I'm struggling to articulate to myself. Perhaps I was just worried that they were doing some serious damage to their neck and shoulder muscles.

One night, I had dinner with three friends, all of whom checked their phones at various times during the course of the meal, usually without any comment or explanation. To them, this was perfectly acceptable behaviour. And I found myself uncomfortable, again.

I do spend a lot of time (too much time) online, staring at a screen, for both work and pleasure. The insidious thing about the smartphones is the apparent inability of many of their owners to ever be offline. Even when ostensibly involved in other activities.

Does this matter? If everyone's doing this, isn't it absolutely fine? Perhaps it is and I'm just turning into an old curmudgeon who's technologically dropping behind the times. Maybe nobody else finds the Royal Horticultural Society's iPhone app disturbing. From the blurb:

...it gives you the chance to access horticultural advice from the UK’s leading gardening organisation while you are out and about in your garden with your iPhone.

When I read this I could feel my mind rearing up in rebellion. I value my time in the garden as a complete break from the outside world. No phones, no computers, just me and the land. Maybe I will make terrible mistakes, gardening without the instant help of the RHS to hand, but that's a risk I'm prepared to take.

I hadn't realised that there was a word for this kind of activity.* But Marieke Guy's post on 'unitasking' yesterday has taught me otherwise. I agree wholeheartedly with the benefits listed there of this uninterrupted kind of work (although I'm not so sure about the word itself!).

Oh dear, that's ironic. Half-way through that last sentence I was disturbed by a high-pitched, insistent beeping. The sun had come out and the temperature sensor in the greenhouse was warning me that the temperature in there had hit 40°C. I have just had to dash outside to open up the side walls and cool things down in there. It seems that I'm more likely to have my Internet use interrupted by my garden than the other way around!

I do think it's important to disconnect some of the time. It is good for your mental and physical health and doesn't do your social relationships any harm, either. ;-)

*Apart from 'gardening', that is...

Contrast

I've featured these poppies before, but make no apology for showing them off again.

The other photo from this morning is of a completely different subject. There were four of these turkey vultures on the barn roof just now. Not the prettiest of creatures, but they are performing a useful function in clearing up the remains of the rats!

Greenhouse peas

I don't really think of peas as a greenhouse crop. Last year I started the peas off in guttering/eavestrough in there, but then planted them out in the garden. This year I've had mixed success, with most of the Lincoln peas I sowed in the greenhouse being eaten. I started a third batch of those indoors and they're now in the garden, but are only a few inches high. The sugar snap peas, on the other hand, were ignored by the rodents (why?) and have romped away to the point where they're now ready to pick.

This picture of the plants was taken a week ago and they're even bigger now:

This morning I took nearly a pound of peas off them:

I've never frozen this type of pea before, but at this rate of production I think I'm going to have to!

Not for the squeamish

My mental soundtrack this week has been either UB40's 'Rat in mi kitchen' or the Boomtown Rats' 'Rat-trap'. When I walked into the chickens' section of the barn on Tuesday afternoon to find three rats helping themselves to the hens' food I realised that the time had come to do something about the unwelcome extra guests at their table. Egg production had been dropping recently: either because the hens were unhappy with their uninvited visitors or (possibly) because the rats had been stealing the eggs.

The dog had found a nest of baby rats in the barn on Sunday, but he was going to need some help to deal with the adults. We paid a visit to a local farm supply store on Tuesday and invested in two heavy-duty rat traps. Within twenty four hours we'd caught three rats. The tally so far this week  is seven adult rats, five babies and one mouse. One of the adults was actually caught by the dog (not bad, considering he's not a ratting breed), but the traps are proving to be very efficient at rapidly despatching the creatures. We didn't want to use poison, in case the dog decides to bite into a dead or dying rat (and from a general reluctance to put poison of any kind into the environment).

My biggest challenge came yesterday, when I was on my own and responsible for disposing of a dead rat by myself for the first time. The last occasion when I was knowingly anywhere near one was when we did a rat dissection one at school in the 1980s. That memory actually helped a bit, as I steeled myself to extract the rat from the trap.

I was going to put a picture of a dead rat here, but decided that it might be stretching the forbearance of my readers. The good news is that the chickens seem to be happier and are back to laying at their previous rate.

Waiting in line... again

It's been a while since we last had dealings with Citizenship and Immigration Canada, but now we're back playing the waiting game again, this time for Mike's mum. At current rates of progress, it will be around four years from now before this latest application is processed and she will be able to come out and live here with us permanently.

It is frustrating. The kids love having their Nana here and we're all the family she has. If things had worked out differently, we would have all applied to emigrate together and wouldn't have had to leave her on her own in England. As it is, parents and grandparents have low priority for the immigration service and we just have to be patient. But when a person is nearer four score years than three score and ten (I don't think she'll mind me saying that!!), every year counts.

Setting up shop

This weekend's project was to put up a sign advertising our excess vegetable plants. I was thinking of something smallish. Mike had (as usual: cf. the greenhouse) other ideas. I'm quite pleased with the end result, even if it is a bit enormous. I don't think it would win any prizes for sign-writing, but it fits in well with our home-produced ethos, so I don't really care!

My 'shop' is the verandah at the front of the house. And the virtual shop window is at GreenHill Greens.

Mother's Day

Yesterday I set up my stall in the library in Deseronto again for the annual Sidewalk Sale. If the weather had been better, I would have been outside and there would have been lots of customers. As it was, it was cold, windy and wet and, consequently, very quiet indeed. I didn't manage to sell as many seedlings as I did last year. But it was only two fewer, so not terribly bad. One thing I changed this year was the range of tomatoes: there had been one would-be customer last year who had wanted beefsteak tomatoes, which I didn't have. This year, I grew Marmande tomatoes and the same man came back and bought 12 of them. Which shows that it pays to listen to your customers, I suppose!

Child1 came with me and was a great help in setting up and taking down the stall. During the (many) quiet spells of our stay our location next to one of the public access computers turned out to be ideal for her. I sat and read one of the library books - so it was ideal for me, too!

Today is Mother's Day and it is the first time that we've actually had one of our mothers here in Canada for the day itself. We put a bit of an effort into setting the table for lunch for once: the lilacs are in full bloom already, which provided an easy bit of floral colour (flower-arranging not being one of my strengths), as well as being a reminder of the mother who was missing.

I always feel ambivalent about Mother's Day: I know it's a fairly ancient idea, compared to Father's Day and Grandparents' Day, but even when my own mother was alive I thought it was a celebration designed only to provoke guilt and spending (and sadness, if you'd like to be a mother but can't be).

However, my cynical old iceberg of a soul is capable of being partially melted when I'm presented with something like this:

Although (if I'm completely honest) it may have been the correct placement of the apostrophe that caused me the greatest delight. ;-)

A political rant

What? Politics? That's not what you expect from this blog, really, is it? Well I'm not ranting about politics exactly - more about the process that enables politics to happen.

There's a general election going on in the UK this week and, in theory, I have a say in who gets to run the country. Well, the person who will represent the constituency of Wythenshawe and Sale East, where we used to live, anyway.

Or I would have, if the voting papers had got to me on time. They arrived today, four days before the election. The chances of them getting back to Trafford Borough Council by Thursday seem negligible.

I've just come back from our local post office, where I asked the manager, Betty, how much it would cost to ensure that my vote reaches Manchester by Thursday. She laughed in a somewhat sardonic manner and looked it up. "Eighty-one dollars," was her reply. EIGHTY-ONE dollars!!! That's over fifty of your British pounds.

According to the Voter Power Index, my vote is worth a measly 0.038 of a whole vote (as Wythenshawe and Sale East is a very safe Labour seat). But even if we'd used to live in Bangor, Wales, where voters are the most powerful (each vote the equivalent of 1.308 votes), I don't think it would be worth forking out $81 to make sure mine counted.

I had a card in the post last week which told me that the postal votes would be sent out on Monday 26 April and giving me a number to ring if I hadn't received it by Friday. As post usually takes a week to get here, I was not surprised when Friday came and I had no voting papers. So I rang the number.

"You're not on my list," I was told, when I finally got through to a human being who was able to help. I gave him my voter number. "Oh, that's a Trafford number!" he said. "You'll have to phone Trafford Borough Council."
"Will that do any good?" I asked. "Is there anything that they will be able to do for me if my vote doesn't arrive in time?"
"No," he admitted.
Wonderful. So I've been given the wrong number to call for help, I've been sent voting papers which arrived too late for me to be able to use and even if they had arrived in time, my vote would have been fairly meaningless anyway.

I've been following this election more closely than usual, perhaps because I still don't have a vote in Canada, so this is my one opportunity to engage in the electoral process. I think there might be an element of nostalgia involved, too. Perhaps other ex-pats have similar feelings.

So I've sent my vote by regular mail ($1.70) - not expecting it to arrive in time (though there is a very slim chance that it might). If enough votes arrive late from overseas voters, perhaps the electoral organisers will realise that by sending the papers out so close to the polling date, they are effectively disenfranchising thousands of ex-pat voters. Or maybe that was their plan all along...

Labour days

My first full weekend at home since the beginning of April, so it has been a mad rush to catch up with all the work that needed doing in the garden and barnyard. Mike has been supplementing the lower vegetable garden with additional soil and now has tilled all that into the beds so that they're ready for planting. This means that the beds are slightly higher than they've been in the past, so I hope we'll avoid the flooding issues we had at the end of July 2008.

I extracted the first batch of chicken manure compost from the rotating composter. That process (which I started on 11 March) seems to have worked very well - the compost looks great. I've added that to the beds that will hold the potatoes and have started another batch with a fresh load of chicken litter (the temperature of that hit 59°C/138°F this afternoon, so it's cooking away nicely!).

We've planted the sprouting Russet Burbank potatoes that were left over from last year's harvest and all the tomatoes and pepper plants have now been transferred to their own pots. There are around 250 tomato plants - most of which I'm hoping to sell. It's been great having Mike's mum here to help - an extra pair of hands makes a lot of difference at this time of year. On Friday afternoon we got all of the onions and leeks into one of the long beds in the upper vegetable garden, while the brassicas are gradually being put out into one of the other ones. I did the red cabbages just now - I thought I'd sown fewer this year, but there still seem to be rather a lot of them!

There was a tree giveaway at Picton this morning, so we collected three sugar maples and three highbush cranberry shrubs. Which also needed to be planted out today. The soil in the front garden was rock hard, as there's been so little rain of late, so poor Mike had to take the tiller attachment off the tractor and replace it with the back hoe (which he only took off last week) in order to get the trees in the ground. I'm not sure that I'm very popular with him at the moment...

The tulips are just beginning to fade, but they've been looking lovely:

Black fly blues

Even the black flies are two weeks ahead of last year. I had an impressive reaction last May to a black fly bite:

Yesterday, they started biting again. I wasn't expecting them to be active just yet, so hadn't put on any insect repellent. Every one of my limbs was attacked, but the bites aren't as swollen and painful as last year's, so perhaps I'm developing a bit of resistance to the blighters. There is also a line of three bites along the lower half of my neck. Not the most attractive of looks.

The really annoying thing (although looking like I've got a load of lovebites on my neck is pretty annoying) is that Mike was working just ten feet away from me (we were planting out the leeks and onions) and didn't get bitten once. He's proposing taking me with him everywhere in the next two or three weeks as some sort of human sacrificial anode.