A damp start

It was the sort of dawn that shakes you out of bed and presses the camera into your hand.

I was just going to take a couple of pictures from the front step, but ended up wandering the vegetable garden in my slippers (which are now comprehensively soaked).

It looked very autumnal, but the temperature was already 18°C/64°F, so not particularly cool. Now, half an hour later, the mist has already gone and it is going to be a hot and humid day.

Jeepers Creepers

I do apologise. Not quite sure what it is with this cat and 1930s jazz songs, but you've got to admit that her eyes are quite unusual. We took her to the vet on Thursday for her first set of vaccinations and he said he'd never seen a cat with eyes this brown.

There was another grey tabby-ish cat in the litter from which my daughter chose this one, but her eyes were green. It'll be interesting to see how Minnie's change as she matures.

Up close

Now the sunflowers have opened, I can appreciate the complexity of the disc flowers in the centre of the flower head. They have a weird beauty which somehow reminds me of the illustrations in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's book, The Little Prince.

Nearby, a grasshopper seemed to be admiring its shadow. I didn't notice any ants, but I'm sure they were there somewhere, busily preparing for the winter.

Hi-de-hi-de-hi-de-hi

Thank goodness for digital cameras. This beast has been in the house for less than 24 hours and already there are 62 snapshots of her. These two are just to introduce her - I will try to restrain myself and not post hundreds. We've called her 'Minnie', which is short for Minerva (her eye markings made us think of Professor McGonagall's cat form in the Harry Potter books). Only problem with that is that I've had 'Minnie the Moocher' as an earworm ever since.

Playing catch-up with ketchup

I made a determined effort to get back in charge of the garden produce yesterday, picking and processing 2.5 pounds of french/snap beans and 16 pounds of tomatoes.

Most of the tomatoes went straight into the food processor and were then cooked down into tomato sauce on the stovetop. Two pounds of them were used for my first attempt at tomato ketchup, using the recipe in Jamie Oliver's Jamie at home book. It doesn't make a huge quantity: about half a pint of ketchup, which takes quite a long cooking time to get to the right consistency. Tastes great, though.

Bon Appétit, raccoon

Perfect isn't it? It's a bi-coloured variety called 'Bon Appétit' which I bought from Vesey's seeds in 2008. Vesey's describe it as of "excellent eating quality".

Unfortunately the raccoons agree and we've had maybe seven cobs from this year's crop. The remainder have been stripped on the plant by the pesky creatures, leaving nothing but the vaguely obscene and insulting remains:

This is in my 'three sisters' bed, which for the first time actually worked according to the plan. The beans have been cropping well and the squash plants have spread all around the corn. The idea was that the spiky stalks of the squash stems would deter raccoons. Pah.

Losing interest

The mother hen is beginning to get bored of her five-week-old chicks. For the last few days she's been spending the daylight hours with the main flock of adult birds. At night though, she wants to be in the chick enclosure with her three youngsters. Instead of sleeping on the floor with them, as she used to do, she perches on the old manger in the chick enclosure and the chicks huddle up next to her.

I've been letting the chicks out of their coop and into the fenced run in the evening for ten minutes or so, after the adults have been locked up for the night. In the mornings, I let the chicks and adults run together for a while, under supervision, before shutting the chicks into their corner of the barn for the day, without the ex-broody hen, who seems to have decided that she's had enough maternity leave for now.

The twelve larger chicks, which are now coming up for seven weeks old, are wary of the adult hens and keep their distance. They've learnt from their experience in sharing the coop with the mother of the small chicks that big hens can be aggressive. The three smaller chicks are used to being protected by their mother and are less sensible, often going a bit too close to the other hens and the rooster and getting a peck in return.

It will be a few weeks before I can integrate the two sets of birds completely, but I hope that this gradual introduction will make that process more straightforward. I have been doing a bit of reading around the subject of introducing a new set of birds to an existing flock, but haven't come across anything that quite matches the particular circumstances in which these chicks have been reared. Taking it slowly and closely watching the behaviour of all the birds seems to be the best way forward, for now.

Girasoli

Considering that I thought I'd killed the sunchokes (Jerusalem artichokes) back in May, they've bounced back well and are now flowering. I'm pleased to have finally got some of these, as it's a plant that is native to this continent.

In the lower vegetable garden I've got some giant sunflowers growing. They're already taller than me and I'm looking forward to seeing these flower, too. I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that I've never grown giant sunflowers before. I think this is because my mother didn't like them and I inherited her prejudice without questioning it. I probably would have carried on not growing them if I hadn't been given some seeds this year. At that point I decided that I had enough prejudices of my own, without having to carry around other people's, so I sowed them and will happily confess that I have quite enjoyed watching these monsters grow.

Baked tortilla chips & salsa

Another couple of recipes from The Kid's Cookbook. Child #2 and I made these for lunch. The baked tortilla chips were delicious. To be even more home-made, you could of course make your own flour tortillas, but I have to confess that these were shop-bought ones. You just brush them with some melted butter, sprinkle grated parmesan, pepper, salt and paprika over, cut them up and bake at 200°C/400°F for 8 minutes, until they're golden. The recipe also called for poppy and sesame seeds, but I'd run out of both of those.

Perfect with some fresh tomato salsa - a mix of chopped tomato with a small green chilli pepper (Hungarian hot wax in this case), a few chopped onion slices and coriander leaves/cilantro (I added parsley, too), some lime juice (I didn't have any, so used lemon) and seasoning.

D is for Daunting

I'm beginning to get overwhelmed with food from the garden. After being away for a week, I picked 17 pounds of produce yesterday (and that's not including the enormous marrow that was lurking under one of the courgette/zucchini plants). This afternoon's harvest wasn't as large, but was still respectable:

I've been using a different method this year to preserve the tomatoes. I saw it on a Food Network programme: Laura Calder's French Food at Home. It's a bottling/canning recipe which is extremely simple and which was originally published by the culinary writer Anne Willan (confusingly, the recipe title on the Food Network refers to Anne Willian: I spent quite a while trying to find out who she was before discovering the truth!). The recipe involves putting the tomatoes into jars, adding some onion rings and herbs and then boiling the jars for 90 minutes in a large panful of water. The preserved tomatoes should then keep well into the winter for use in soups and pasta sauces.

The chicks have been growing well in my absence. Gender-wise, I think the ones I picked up from the poultry farm are all female, this time, but I'm fairly sure that the three that hatched from our own eggs are a mixture: two pullets and one Sunday lunch. If I can steel myself to deal with him accordingly, that is...

D also stands for 500, of course, and, according to Blogger this is my 500th post. Hm, perhaps I should have blogged about something slightly more exciting than vegetables and chickens.

But then that would have been completely out of character, wouldn't it?

Banana breakfast

We had a few bananas that were looking past their best, so it was time to make one of our favourite breakfasts:

The recipe came from The Kid's Cookbook by Abigail Johnson Dodge, which I can recommend as a book aimed at children who like cooking. My son loves it and I approve of its focus on fresh, unprocessed ingredients. This one is our favourite recipe so far.

Banana Pancakes

3 oz/¾ stick/6 tablespoons butter
1 ½ cups flour
2 ½ teaspoons baking powder
2 tablespoons sugar
¼ teaspoon salt
1 ripe banana
2 eggs
1 cup/250ml/8 fl oz milk
½ teaspoon vanilla extract

Melt two-thirds of the butter and set it aside to cool. Mix the flour, baking powder, sugar and salt together. Mash up the banana and mix in the eggs, milk, vanilla extract and melted butter. Stir the liquid ingredients into the dry ones.

Heat a griddle or frying pan with the remaining butter and scoop ¼ cupfuls of the mixture into it. My frying pan fits three at a time. Turn the pancakes after about two minutes and cook for another 30 seconds or so on the other side. This amount of mixture makes about 15 4-inch pancakes.

Serve them with some sliced banana and maple syrup. I can't pretend that the bananas were a local ingredient, but the maple syrup was!

Drops

Very wet this morning. The garden is looking lushly green: almost unnaturally so for late July.

It's been warm with it. I picked the first aubergines/eggplants from the greenhouse yesterday. Those were the Ping Tungs, which are long, slender and dark purple.

 I'm also growing Rosa Bianca this year, for the first time. These are described as 'tear-drop' shaped in the seed catalogues, but I wouldn't call them that at the moment. They're certainly more curvaceous than the Ping Tungs.

Picking and pickling

It's been a much better summer than last year's (so far, anyway), weather-wise. Warmer and slightly wetter. On the 21st of July 2009 I was still awaiting tomatoes, beans and zucchini. We've been picking all of these for around a week now. Mind you, they are different tomatoes from those I grew last year - it's the Marmande and Poma Amoris Minora Lutea varieties that we're picking at the moment. All from the greenhouse - but there's at least one of the variety with the ridiculously long name outside that's nearly ripe, too. I didn't pick any tomatoes until August in 2009.

I've even started doing a bit of pickling already - some cucumbers, Hungarian Hot Wax peppers (the ones in the photo) and, today, some beetroot. Not because I have an excess of anything yet, just because we like pickles!

Mike bought me a hammock today, but I'm not sure when I'm going to get the time to lie in it.

Of course, he had to check that it was safe for me to use.

What a waist

Oh dear. This is rapidly turning into a wasps-and-chickens blog. This is another mud dauber (unsurprisingly called the black and yellow mud dauber (Sceliphron caementarium)) and here you can see it collecting a lump of mud with which to build its nest. There were around a dozen of these visiting a rapidly-shrinking puddle this afternoon. Like the blue mud dauber, these are solitary wasps and don't aggressively defend their nests - they're not a particular threat to people. They also stock their nests with spiders, so if you're the sort of person who is even more scared of spiders than you are of wasps, don't swat these ones!

Light and dark, feathers and fluff

We've taken a chance and put the two-week-old chicks in with the ones that hatched this week (and their mama). So far, so good. The broody and her young are keeping to one corner of the stall, while the twelve older chicks skitter about in the opposite corner, reminding me of the tiny but deadly dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. Two weeks makes a huge difference in chick development terms: it felt a bit like putting a crowd of toddlers into the same room as a newborn baby. Having the broody in the mix seems to be keeping the peace.

Newly hatched

Another one of the eggs has turned into a chick. This one looks slightly bedraggled, so presumably only hatched in the last few hours.

The hen-hatched chicks are spending most of their time underneath the hen, which makes it difficult to know exactly what's going on. But she seems to know what she's doing. Even if she does look like a Pushmi-pullyu on occasions.

Chicks, the old-fashioned way

We've had a broody hen sitting on a clutch of five eggs for a few weeks now. I had thought that today would be the day they'd be due to hatch, if they were going to. I was not at all convinced that they would, so was quite surprised to find this little ball of fluff on the barn floor this afternoon.

The broody hen was fluffed up next to it on the floor and very soon I saw that there was another chick underneath her wing. They'd both fallen out of the nest box on to the floor and lived to tell the tale.

The other hens were not as pleased to see the new arrivals as I was, so I've moved the broody and chicks into the new chick pen (which we only finished yesterday - phew!) with the remaining three eggs, some chick food and water.

I can see I'm going to be juggling chicks for the next few weeks!

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.