2013's experiments

This year I'm growing two crops that are completely new to me. The first is sweet potatoes, which I hadn't realised could be successfully planted here. Sweet potatoes need hot summers and are good at withstanding drought, which should mean they're going to do well if this summer is anything like last year's. They aren't keen on alkaline soils, which might have put me off if I hadn't heard from a friend that his did really well in our lime-rich area last year.

I ordered two different varieties from Mapple Farm in New Brunswick: Ginseng Red (brown skin, orange flesh) and Travis (white skin, white flesh). To test out the best growing conditions for them, I've planted half in the upper vegetable garden, where it's a bit drier, and half in the lower garden. Those ones are in a trench of worm compost made from kitchen waste, which is more acidic than the regular soil.

We're surrounded here by vineyards as the County continues to establish itself as Canada's Burgundy. But up to now, the only grapes growing on our property were wild ones and this year I decided that this situation should not be allowed to continue. I bought a table grape (Sovereign Coronation). Mike helped me dig a hole for it next to the fence on the eastern side of the upper vegetable garden.

And three days later he ran it over with the lawnmower.

And I was left with this sorry looking stump.

I know that grapes can handle fairly severe pruning. But this looked a bit terminal to me.

Yesterday I noticed signs of life - distinct buds forming on the remains of the plant. Perhaps we will get some grapes this year after all. Maybe I should put a tomato cage around it, just to avoid future tractor-related tragedies.

Early harvest

Food is starting to come in big handfuls. Today I've gathered asparagus and rhubarb from the garden. The greenhouse is yielding snap peas, garlic scapes and dill.* The Tuscan/dinosaur kale plants survived the winter in there, too. A few of them went to seed in the spring, but the others didn't and those are now delivering respectable quantities of fresh kale.

I froze the dill, blanched and froze the kale and peas, cooked the rhubarb and froze half of it and turned the garlic scapes into pesto. This is the work of moments - just blend together half a cup of flaked almonds, three-quarters of a cup of olive oil, ten garlic scapes, a squeeze of lemon juice and about 50g cheese (Parmesan if you have it - I didn't and used Cheddar). Again, I froze half of that.

Can you tell I've made a resolution to make better use of my freezer space this year? I always freeze loads of tomatoes every August and September, but I'm not usually so well-organised with everything else. I'm not sure how long this hyper-efficiency is going to last, but at least I've made a start!

*It's called 'dill-weed' for a reason, I've discovered...

Working with the weather

Sometimes it makes perfect sense for me to put food on the table by sitting in front of a computer all day. Other days, it makes much more sense for me to put food on the table by, you know, growing food.

Today was one of those days where I give fervent thanks for the ability to work from home and do both. The weather satellite picture showed a band of rain slowly making its way towards us from Toronto and I had three box-loads of tomato plants which really needed to be put in the ground. I mobilised Mike and before breakfast we had spread chicken manure over one of the long beds in the upper part of the barnyard and planted 62 tomato plants.

Then I was back at my computer, working and watching the rain arrive and stay for most of the afternoon. When I went out in the early evening the tomatoes had been well watered into their new locations and I had time to gather up cut grass and mulch the whole area.

I still need to put some stakes in the bed, but at least the hardest part has been done.

In the greenhouse, my early crop of lettuces are beginning to go to seed. I like the tenaciousness of this one, growing out sideways between the planks of one of the raised beds.

The beans are just starting to emerge from the soil outside. It's been full-on with planting and sowing in the last few weeks, but nearly everything is in the ground, thank goodness. Now it's just the weeding to worry about!

Glimpses of the distant past

Europeans in North America tend to focus on the history of the continent since Europeans arrived, glossing over the people and civilisations that were here beforehand. A blog post entitled 'What if people told European history like they told Native American history' sums up the problem rather neatly. I hope that particular tide is on the turn, now, but there is still a lot to learn about the people who used to live here.

Last night I went to a fascinating talk by George Reid, who is making valiant efforts to identify the sites of early settlements in Prince Edward County. He is building upon the work of the Reverend Bowen P. Squire, who lived on the north shore of Lake Consecon in the 1950s. An article written by Squire about his findings is available online [PDF] and makes for interesting reading. Squire postulates that this area would have been an easily defensible place to create settlements in and he describes (and illustrates) the site he excavated on his property (which was just a little to the west of ours, I believe). The dam which formed Lake Consecon was built in 1806 - before that, the lake would have been a creek about half the width it is now.

George described how he and his co-investigators are using a combination of Google Earth's satellite imagery and local knowledge of archaeological finds to identify the sites of such settlements around the County's shores. This is one of the images George showed last night:

The image is from 2009 and the paler field on the middle right of the picture is the hayfield at the rear of our farm (with a triangle of woodland just beneath it). In our neighbours' fields on the left and in the centre you can see dark cross-hatching in one of the fields and some dark shapes which George told us represent an old settlement.

The people who lived here were of the Wendat nation (the people dubbed the Huron by French explorers) and George explained that their longhouse settlements were surrounded by palisades and that the whole village would have been moved to a new site periodically once nearby sources of wood for fuel had been exhausted. These villages may have been home to 2,000 people - raising the possibility that the population of the County may have been almost as high then as it is now (around 25,000 people).

The Wendat people lived in this area in the period up to around 1525, according to George, and may have been here for 2,000 years. They would have lived on eels and fish from the creek and Weller's Bay, the wild animals they hunted and the food they grew: corn, beans and squash. I was sowing corn and squash on Monday in a small ploughed-up part of the hayfield in that satellite image. I now wonder if 500 or 1,000 years ago a Wendat woman might have been doing exactly the same thing in exactly the same place.

May frost

This strawberry plant was touched by this morning's frost. The temperature dipped to about 1°C/34°F.

After a few years of frost damage to our fruit trees, I was concerned that we would have the same problem this year, even though the trees are far less advanced than they were in 2012, where the warm spring made them much more vulnerable to a frost. There is an interesting series of Critical Temperature Charts on the Colorado State University site which explain at which point the fruit is most likely to be damaged by frost. Generally, once the buds are fully opened, a temperature of -2°C/28°F will kill 10% of the flower buds, while -4°C/25°F will kill 90%. That's what happened last year, but we weren't close to that last night, so I'm hopeful.

The apricot tree flowered last week and there are embryonic apricots already visible:

The pear trees are fully in flower right now:
 

While the apples are at the stage known as 'full pink':

The only crop that was damaged was the asparagus: the visible spears won't be edible. Glad I harvested some for our lunch yesterday!

Crossing the line

The line I'm thinking of is the one that divides behaviour that is considered quite normal, and behaviour which is viewed as eccentric. The location of the line varies from person to person, of course, and I'm fairly sure that a lot of things I consider perfectly reasonable activities would definitely be on the other side of the eccentricity line for other people. Growing my own food, raising chickens, baking all my own bread, making granola, refusing to buy processed food - that sort of thing. But I crossed my own version of that line in recent months when I started making my own yog(h)urt. I don't know why that seems more eccentric than baking bread (and the two activities are now closely linked, as I'll explain in a minute), but it does. Somehow making yoghurt seems such a 1970s thing to do.

But it's so easy that I've become completely addicted to the process and always have a batch of home-made yoghurt in the fridge. I've delayed blogging about it because of my reservations about it being an odd sort of thing to do.

The initial stimulus for the activity involves another confession (you can see why I delayed writing this post). I'm really bad at throwing out man-made containers like jam jars and yoghurt pots. I have cupboards full of them and they do come in very handy at times, but I really don't need any more. When I read Mimi Spencer's book 101 Things To Do Before You Diet back in February and she explained how simple it was, I was inspired to give it a go. And now I've been re-using the same yoghurt pot for the last three months. Win!

I started out by ordering a sachet of yoghurt culture online. You can just buy a jar of plain active yoghurt as your starter culture and don't need to do this, but I didn't have any to hand at the time. Then you heat some milk to boiling point (I use 2% fat milk) and let it cool down to about 45°C/115°F (if you don't have a thermometer, I read somewhere that at this temperature you should be able to keep your finger in the milk for 20 seconds). Stir three tablespoons of the yoghurt into the warm milk and then pour it into a vacuum flask (at the start of the process I just fill the flask with milk to measure the quantity - hence the lack of precision in these instructions! [I've now measured the quantity and my flask holds a litre/quart of milk]). After a couple of hours the milk will have curdled and you can strain the yoghurt to remove the liquid whey and thicken it up. I use a sieve lined with a coffee filter paper or kitchen paper for this.

Here's the view from the side. You can see the whey underneath the sieve.

I use the whey as part of the liquid I add to my bread - which means that a yoghurt-making day is usually also a bread-making day. But I've also read that tomato plants really like the calcium in whey, so I might use it for that in the summer.

Tonight I'm planning to use the yoghurt to make naan bread and raita to accompany the curry we're having for supper. My stomach is already growling at the thought.

So, do you do anything that you feel crosses your personal eccentricity line? Or is it just me that worries about these things?

Slim pickings

It dawned on me today that this blog is the twenty-first century way of writing letters home. If I'd emigrated one hundred years ago, I'd be putting pen to paper to share updates about my new life. But the web makes life much simpler: instead of maintaining communication with a range of correspondents I can just update this one location and keep in touch with lots of people all at once.

Having said all that, I think my asparagus harvest to date would hardly have been worth writing home about.

On the other hand, the tomato plants are flourishing:

Just before I left for a trip back to the UK I was draping them with polythene and stacking hot chicken manure underneath them to protect them from the cold. Since I got back on Monday the weather has abruptly turned from winter to summer without the courtesy of a sojourn in spring. The daffodils were over in a few days and the tulips and grape hyacinths were hot on their heels.

Finally flowers

After weeks where I have quite literally been dreaming about spring flowers, the garden  has caught up, with a sudden flourishing of floriferousness.

And in the greenhouse, an uninvited strawberry plant has turned up and is joining in the general gaiety:

Preparing for Spring, eating like Winter

Friday's ice storm didn't do too much damage here, although the trees were coated with a fairly thick layer of ice for several hours.

I'm wanting to transfer my tomato seedlings to the greenhouse, but the temperature isn't high enough yet. I did mobilise the children to start the process today. We liberated an old table and a cable spool from the big barn and carried/rolled them down to the greenhouse to act as potting tables. Then we spent twenty minutes or so laying out pots and filling them with potting mix. So the pots are now ready for the tomatoes, if the weather should ever decide to co-operate.

Our reward for all the hard work was a new dessert (on the premise that it's still cold enough to be eating hot puddings). It's based on a Bakewell tart, but without the pastry. So just a 'Bakewell', maybe.

Ingredients

150g/¾ cup sugar
150g/1½ cups ground almonds
4 eggs
75g/3oz butter
300g/10oz mixed summer fruit
60g/½ cup flaked almonds

Preheat the oven to 350°F/180°C. Melt the butter and mix it with the eggs, 100g/half a cup of the sugar and all of the ground almonds. Mix the summer fruits with the remaining sugar and put into the base of a glass dish. Pour the egg mixture over the top, then sprinkle with the flaked almonds. Bake for 40 minutes.

Death and foxes

Some weeks, you just want to see the back of. This was definitely one of those weeks. On Saturday three of the hens were killed by a fox. A fourth died of her injuries on Sunday. On Wednesday the dog discovered something in the corner of the big barn and started barking furiously at it.

This was what he'd found:

Hardly recognisable as such, but another fox, this one badly affected by mange. The next day it, too, had died. Today I picked up its body on a shovel and took it into the woods.

I know death is a part of life and all that, but this week I feel as though I have been dealing with nothing but death.

A bit of light relief then, to discover that a new book from one of my favourite authors had come into the library. I collected it today:

I'm obviously not going to be allowed to forget this week's foxes as quickly as I'd hoped...

P.S. The book was very good. But really should have been called Death after Death, I think. And foxes did feature rather a lot. Representative sentence (p.141): "She hadn't expected to die like a fox frozen in its den."

Phenological update

The dog and I were caught in a snow squall when we went for our early-morning walk today. The lake you can (sort of) see behind him in this photo is still frozen. That's the first time in the six years we've been here that it has still been frozen in April.

Last year my daffodils were in flower on March 20th. At the moment they look like this:

 I think it might be a new record in the opposite direction in 2013!

Getting organised

As usual, this year I'm determined to crack the succession-sowing issue. I've resorted to technology to help and have set up reminders in my calendar to sow seeds/transplant things at appropriate points. The calendar then reminds me every Saturday about what I'm supposed to be sowing that weekend ("Sow carrots in the greenhouse" "Transplant onions outside", things like that). Not only that, but I've set up the reminders to repeat every year on the same weekend. So I'll have the reminders for the rest of my life. Or as long as I continue to use that program, anyway.

However, I'm already getting a little irked when the reminders pop up (stop nagging me!), so perhaps this wasn't my most brilliant plan, after all...

I also went through all my tomato seeds and planned out how many of each I would sow this year. Below is an extract from the list I made. Mike made fun of its vagueness, but it actually turned out to be quite specific: 'lots' translates to 25 seeds sown and 'fewer' became 12 or 13. The only exception is 'German Lunchbox', which I received as a free packet. Which contained just one seed. Such generosity! I'm growing 16 varieties this year. Most of them are old favourites of mine, but the German Lunchbox is new to me and so is Tigerella, the first stripy tomato I have grown.

And they're just beginning to show themselves...

Happy New Year!

In England, in years gone by, March 25 (Lady Day) was the day when the calendar changed over from one year to the next. It wasn't until 1752 that the official start to the year became the first day of January. Lady Day was the first of four 'quarter days' when you would have paid your rent and if you were going to be moving to a new farm, you would have done so on this day, ready for the start of the new growing year.

Here in southern Ontario, the ground is nowhere near ready for ploughing or sowing yet. But in the shelter of a greenhouse, it's a different matter. A few days of sunshine have nudged temperatures up and we're starting to see peas and greens poking through the soil surface.

The sorrel, parsley and Tuscan kale has survived the winter in the greenhouse.

I harvested some of the kale and sorrel for my lunch.

The slow warm-up over the last few days has melted a lot of the lingering snow outside. Enough to tempt the chickens back into the orchard again, at least.

I'm hopeful that the slower spring this year might be good news for the fruit trees: they're less likely to be nipped by a late frost. We've lost a few of our young trees in the last year or two, so one thing I'd like to do this year is plant a few more.

Indoors, I've got pepper and eggplant seedlings up and I sowed more than 300 tomato seeds at the weekend. From a gardening point of view, this week definitely feels like the start of a new year, even if the calendar disagrees!

Slow Spring

Still a bit chilly!

Room to roam

These chickens seem to be enjoying reclaiming their orchard space from the snow, even though the temperature is still below freezing.

These ones, on the other hand, look like they're quite happy to stay snuggled up inside with a friend: there are seven of them crammed into four nestboxes. And of course the four boxes on the opposite wall were empty...

More snow is forecast for the next few days. I know I'm being impatient, but at this point some warm weather would be very welcome. At the moment I feel more inclined to act like the second set of birds than the first.

Glimpses of grass

Overnight rain and a lot of melting has made for a day of torrents. The meltwater is carving its way through the ice and snow on the western side of the farm, making some mini-canyons en route.

And, at long last, enough snow has melted for the chickens to be able to go out into the orchard again.

Although only after I walked past it with my camera. Typical.

Gingerbread Pudding

Bread Pudding is one of those names that could trip a British English speaker up, over here. It usually refers to what I think of as Bread and Butter Pudding - sliced bread, spread with butter, layered with dried fruit and sugar and baked in a milk and egg custard and served hot. Bread Pudding in England was similar in that its main ingredients were bread, milk, egg, sugar and fruit, but different in texture and temperature: it is much more dense and is usually eaten cold. In both cases, the dishes seem to have been designed as a way of using up stale bread. And in my current domestic situation, I can't make either, as Child#2 objects to dried fruit.

I've shared my gingerbread recipe on the blog before. Having to use up stale gingerbread is one of those 'never gonna happen' situations, but I needed a dessert in a hurry today and happened to have half a loaf of gingerbread to hand. I turned three large slices of it into a ginger version of bread and butter pudding. But as there was no butter involved, I've had to call it Gingerbread Pudding. Which just perpetuates the confusion, I suppose. But this is definitely a hot pudding, not a cold one.

Ingredients

12 small slices of gingerbread (about 1 by 3 inches)
3 eggs
¼ cup sugar
300ml milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
(If I'd had any preserved ginger, I would have added that to replace the dried fruit in 'classic' B&BP)

Heat your oven to 350°F/180°C. Arrange the slices of gingerbread in a shallow ovenproof dish. Beat the eggs with the sugar, milk and vanilla extract. Pour the mixture over the gingerbread slices and allow to soak in for a few minutes. Then transfer the dish to the oven and bake for 30-40 minutes. Serve with custard or ice cream.

Warming up

It may not look like it, with the ground all white with snow still, but this week the weather has started to feel more spring-like. I didn't need a hat, scarf, or gloves this afternoon when I took the dog for his walk and the snow was distinctly squishy underfoot instead of the crispy surface of recent weeks.

It makes walking in it more of an effort, though...

On Tuesday the last of the snow on the barn roof gradually melted off, dangling some lethal-looking icicles precariously over the edge.

And after a month of confinement, the hens are impatient to get back out into the orchard. Maybe enough of the snow will have gone by the weekend to make that possible...

After the storm

 The day after the storm we got another helping of snow: one of those wet, windless snowfalls that leave everything heavily laden.

Afterwards, I noticed strange tracks between the barn and the house. I puzzled over them for a while. What sort of animal could make marks like this? Was it a new predator, trying to get in to the chickens?

 

After wondering about it for a while, the answer suddenly presented itself. The 'tracks' were directly underneath the power line from the barn to the house. They'd been created when the heavy snow on the wire had fallen off as the temperature rose later that morning. Not so mysterious, after all...