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.

Nary a cloud...

Well, alright, there was one - but even that had gone ten seconds after I took this photo in the hayfield. It's been a very sunny month and is on track to be our best month ever in terms of the average amount of electricity generated each day by the solar panels.

The stream that runs down from the big pond is down to a mere trickle and the seasonal pond in front of the greenhouse has already dried up. Usually this doesn't happen until June (just when it's full of tadpoles).

The other odd thing has been the complete lack of any April frosts - the lowest temperature recorded this month was 0.4°C/32.7°F. The average temperature for April is usually 6.1°C/43°F - this month it has been 8.6°/47.5°F.

We're picking asparagus already - last year I didn't pick any until the middle of May - and the lilac is very nearly out. The trees generally seem more leafy than usual: I didn't notice such a big contrast between the advance of spring here and in England. I'm normally struck by how much greener it is over there at this time of year, but this time there wasn't a huge difference.

Spring beauty

Claytonia virginica

Home truths

It's so good to be home again, especially given the volcanic ash cloud-chaos of last week. That sort of event makes you really think about how important it is to be able to get a lot of your food locally. In the greenhouse the plants have been growing with great exuberance in my absence. Many of the over-wintered greens have gone to seed and need to be pulled up (I expect the chickens will enjoy them). The weeds have been germinating with similar gusto and it will take a few hours to get them back under control again.

The other lovely part about being back is the availability of the most local of local foods, right here in our backyard. Lunch today was a salad made with greenhouse salad greens, eggs from the hens, croutons of home-made bread and the very first of the 2010 asparagus from our tire/tyre garden. Mmmmmm.

I had some lovely meals with family and friends in England, but you really can't beat the sense of achievement and delicious flavour that is offered by a plateful of home-produced food.

Checking in...

The lack of recent updates is mainly due to me being working hard in England over the last week. Underneath a cloud of volcanic ash - although it was fairly hard to believe, looking out at the blue skies over Salford on Thursday. So I'm checking in here, but am beginning to get worried that I won't be able to check in next weekend at Heathrow to get home. I'm wondering whether there will be a Dunkirk situation arising soon, with small boats being requisitioned to take people to and from the UK across the seas.

As a bit of light relief from a busy week I got a chance to visit a friend's house in Lincolnshire yesterday. We met as undergraduates and have probably only seen each other half a dozen times since we left university. It was lovely to catch up and to meet her family and tour their domain. I don't think that either of us ever had any dreams about becoming self-sufficient when we were twenty-one, but both of our families have ended up with similar sets of values and lifestyles, twenty years later.

My friend's family have three different breeds of free-ranging chickens, with a very handsome Sussex rooster. The Cream Legbar hens were interesting too, with beautiful blue-shelled eggs. I know that shell colour doesn't have any impact on the flavour of the egg inside but there's something undeniably beautiful about the combination of the blue and brown eggs.

Recipe for a Happy Easter

One of the easiest chocolate treats in my recipe book collection is the desperately unexcitingly-named 'Chocolate Refrigerator Cake' from the 1986 Hamlyn New All Colour Cookbook (a volume I've mentioned here before). The recipe ought to have a better name, because it is not just easy, but delicious, too.

The ingredients given in the recipe book are:

450g/1lb plain chocolate (70% cocoa solids)
100g/4oz butter
2 tablespoons brandy
225g/8oz crushed chocolate digestive biscuits
100g/4oz hazelnuts

You just melt the chocolate and butter together, stir in the other ingredients and pour it into a 7-inch square cake tin. Leave to set in the fridge for an hour or so (or in the freezer if you're in a hurry). Then just cut it into squares and watch them vanish.

I don't think I've ever made this with precisely the ingredients given above. I only ever have plain digestive biscuits, for one thing, and I don't put brandy in the mixture because the children usually demand one or two (or four) of the finished squares. Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever put hazelnuts in them either. In today's version I put diced dried mango slices and raisins with the digestives (you could use Graham crackers instead of digestives). I've used diced preserved ginger in the past, too, which is particularly good. To be honest, almost any foodstuff is going to be improved by being coated in a luscious layer of decent chocolate and butter, isn't it?

They're always very popular. How can they not be, with ingredients like these? But I do think they need a more tastebud-tempting name. Any suggestions?

Yellows

Yesterday I wondered whether the miniature daffodils would be flowering by the end of the weekend. Today they obligingly opened: a full two weeks in advance of their flowering date last year. In front of them are the leaves of a delphinium I grew from seed in 2008 and which has yet to flower at all. I'm hoping this will be its year. Especially as I read yesterday that they often don't last much past three years. Maybe this will be its first and last year of flowering.

The earliest of the tulips are open, too.

I don't know much about tulips, apart from that they seem to like the weather conditions here. Can anyone tell me what variety these are? The flowers are smaller and shorter than the 'regular' tulips which flower here in late April and early May.

Good Friday progress

The new greenhouse beds are full of soil now. I sowed broccoli, cauliflower, cabbages and romanesco in the far one this morning, using it as a nursery bed. I did the same last year and it worked very well. Although I haven't sown as much cabbage as I did last year (learned my lesson, there: we're still eating sauerkraut...).

Last year's beds are getting fairly full of seedlings already. I put up some wire for the sugar snap peas to cling on to. In front of those, carrots are germinating and I'm being as diligent as I can about thinning them. I've also sown peas, carrots and parsnips outside. The rodent-proofed peas are beginning to germinate: only five up so far, but that's five more than I had without the chilli experiment, so it was at least partially successful!

If you look at the top picture, you'll notice that we've got the side wall of the greenhouse rolled up. It was over 30°C in there at 10am (pushing 90°F!). Which I'm only saying to upset my friends and family in the UK, whose Easter weather is being less clement.

Powering down

Perhaps you are a person who is interested in domestic energy consumption. It's not a subject area that absolutely enthrals me, I will admit, but it does interest Mike and he has kept a record of our monthly energy consumption from our electricity meter since we moved in.

I did think it was worth sharing the graph he showed me today and making a few observations on it. Electricity is our only externally-supplied fuel: we don't use natural gas or heating oil, so this graph represents our entire energy usage except for the wood we harvest from our land (which so far has been mainly from fallen or dead trees). A cord of wood generates heat at approximately the equivalent of 6,000 kilowatt hours of electricity. We probably burn about five cords over the course of an average winter.

During February 2008 we ran out of wood to heat the house and our electricity consumption rose, peaking in March at 3,500 kilowatt hours as we had to use the electric baseboard heaters instead. In that month, the average temperature was -2.3°C/28°F and there were 29 days where the temperature dipped below the freezing point. The dip in consumption in the January of 2008 was a result of us starting to use the big woodstove in the kitchen in that month (which we had been warned not to, as it didn't meet current safety codes - but there comes a point where all risks are outweighed by benefits and we reached it!).

In the summer of 2008, the geothermal system went in. In the last two winters we've had plenty of wood to burn, which has been our main source of heat, with the geothermal kicking in when it is really cold overnight and in the early mornings. With the exception of August 2009, our electricity use has actually been lower in 2009/2010 than it was in the first year of having the geothermal system. A lot of this can be attributed to the improved layer of insulation in the attic (installed January 2009) and to the windows and doors we've gradually been replacing. It hasn't been as cold this winter, either: over the November to February months, the average temperature has been nearly four degrees Celsius (seven degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than it was in the 2008/2009 winter.

We've reached the point now where our solar panels are generating the same amount of electricity that we are using - so our domestic consumption is getting close to being self-sufficient (although we are still using fossil fuels in our car and in the tractor).

To put all of this into context, it might be helpful to compare our energy use here to that of our old house in Manchester. There, we were using natural gas for heating and stove-top cooking. In the course of a year we would use the equivalent of 15,000 kilowatt hours of gas and 5,500 kilowatt hours of electricity (so 20,500 in all). Our total electricity use in a year here is 12,000 kilowatt hours, or about two-thirds of our previous usage. Which is quite a big difference, when you consider that the Manchester house was about half the size of this one, and the climate was considerably more temperate!

And if you're wondering, no, we didn't sit in the dark with candles for Earth Hour on March the 27th and I doubt we'll be doing anything for Earth Day (or Week, or Month, or whatever's next). Just get on and do something that has an impact all year round, I say.

Almost edible

Meeting your meat

This weekend it was 'Maple in the County' time, when maple producers and other food-related businesses open their doors to the public to promote their wares. We took the opportunity to visit the small farm belonging to the Nyman family, whose meat CSA scheme we joined last year.

There were baby lambs, pigs and cows in their barn. It's not often that most people get to see the meat that they'll be eating while it's still on the hoof.

All the attention was a bit too much for some of them!

Spring's teeth

After months of gingerly negotiating huge sheets of ice around the stream that leads up to the pond, we've had two or three weeks of warm weather and it has all melted and been forgotten.

Until today, when the temperature dipped to -8°C/17°F overnight and we were given a reminder that Spring can bite. It was cold enough to freeze the surface of the stream in places. Sometimes in jagged toothy outcrops:

And in other places in solid sheets. The droplets of water underneath this layer of ice caught the sun in a pleasing manner. Like beads of glass.

Experiment in rodent-proofing peas

The Oregon Sugar Pod II peas are coming up beautifully in the greenhouse:

The Lincoln peas I sowed a few days earlier failed to appear and it soon became clear that they had all been consumed by rodents unknown. I don't know why they are so appealing and the other ones aren't. I still had some seeds left, so this time I thought I'd experiment with a chilli deterrent. I ground up three of last year's dried cayenne peppers, added them to a bowl of water and then soaked the peas for a few hours. My idea was that the infusion would make the peas less palatable to whatever was digging them up (although I should note that the chilli-coated bird seed wasn't much of a deterrent to the squirrels). I sowed them in the same spot and then tipped the bits of chilli and the soaking water over the peas before covering them up with soil.

This morning, there were some small holes in the soil but it does look as though once the creature hit the layer of chilli fragments, it gave up. Time will tell - I'll report back on whether it worked or not.

The slight (and possibly obvious to you) flaw in my method, which only occurred to me after I had covered over the peas, is that those pepper seeds from the dried peppers are probably perfectly viable. Which means that I may well be getting pepper seedlings germinating along with the peas. Oops. Oh well, it's far too early to be sowing peppers in the greenhouse, so even if they do germinate, I doubt they'll last very long!

Park life

I dragged everyone out for a walk this afternoon, as the day was fine and mild. We went to Belleville and did the circuit of Zwick's Park. It's a level route which is popular with cyclists and skaters as well as dog-walkers. There were quite a few people out enjoying it today.

A pair of swans were feeding on the east side of the park, where the Moira river empties into the Bay of Quinte. I did take some in-focus pictures of them, but this one, where the camera paid attention to the tree instead, is my favourite:

The park is bisected by the Bay Bridge Road carrying traffic to and from Prince Edward County over the Norris Whitney Bridge. The path goes underneath the road in two places. Just after going under the road for the first time we caught sight of a red-tailed hawk, gliding to rest on a tree:

There were only small patches of ice left in the edges of the bay. Not enough to make this sign useful, though.

There are good views of the bridge from the western half of the park. I have no idea who Norris Whitney was, by the way.

In the water just to the right of the bridge we saw a beaver. And just as I pressed the shutter button it dived underwater. Pesky rodent.

We've been over this bridge many times but this was the first time I had been under it. I liked this view of the supports: a bit like the effect you get when you're caught between two mirrors.

Dreaming on the left

Driving on the other side of the road is one of those things that causes worry for people. It doesn't take very long to get used to - especially as you're generally on the opposite side of the car as the driver. I noticed in a few driving-related dreams I've had recently that my sub-conscious is still driving on the left (although the car I'm travelling in is left-hand drive).

This morning I had another driving dream. (Sorry, I know other people's dreams are really boring.) This time, I made an effort within the dream to see which side of the road we were on. It was the left, again. I turned to the driver (Mike) and said "You're on the wrong side of the road!". At which point he crossed over to the other side of the road and started driving on the right.

Maybe my sub-conscious will drive on the right from now on. Now I've just got to worry about the fact that I always seem to be a passenger rather than the driver in my own dreams. I bet Freud would have had a field day with that...

Image from Flickr user Sergio~.

A little summer heat

We were given a jar of chilli jam by one of our neighbours at Christmas. It was delicious: so much so that it didn't last very long. We had a bumper crop of chillies and peppers last year, a lot of which was still taking up space in the freezer. Nigella Lawson's chilli jam recipe looked like an ideal way of using some of them up while replenishing the store cupboard with fiery tastiness.

I didn't have any jam sugar, so to start with I optimistically made the jelly with just regular sugar, hoping that there might be enough pectin in the chillies and peppers to set the jam. There wasn't. I bought a packet of pectin in a quick supermarket dash today and re-boiled the runny jam with it. This time it looks like it's going to set. The colour is great.

I love the way that a combination of new and old food-preservation techniques means that I can be making preserves out-of-season like this with last summer's bounty.

Cooking...something else

Warm weather and the sight of seedlings in the greenhouse prompted me to get making some compost from the detritus in the chicken coop. The chickens are spending most of their time out in the orchard again now, which meant I could get into their corner of the barn this afternoon and remove a barrow-full of shavings and droppings from underneath their roosting area.

We obtained a rotating composter from a County scheme two years ago. I was never very satisfied with it as a means of turning kitchen waste into garden compost. This was my own fault, I think, for failing to supply it with enough moisture to do the job properly. My regular vertical plastic bins do a good job without needing any additional water, so I'd stopped using the rotating one. But it did occur to me recently that it might be a suitable container for turning the chicken waste into compost.

I transferred my barrow-load of material into the composter, adding a fair bit of water as I went. By the time I finished there was an unappetising chicken-poop-coloured drip emanating from the base of the unit, so I hope I've added the right amount.*

I did all this in the greenhouse, thinking this location will help the contents get to the required temperature to kill pathogens (130-150°F/55-65°C according to this article at Seattle Tilth). There is a ready supply of water in there, too, which will help me to keep it at the right level of saturation to encourage decomposition. The 'uncooked' compost mix looks like this:

The article from the Seattle Tilth site suggests that the proportions of brown to green material (i.e. shavings to manure) in the mix should be 1:2, 1:1 or 2:1. I have to admit that I did not carefully measure the proportions (shocking, I know), but I suspect that it is more like 2:1 or even 3:1. I hope that in a month or two it will be in a fit state to add to the garden.

*This is reminding me of one of my grandfather's jokes. Oh dear, can't resist sharing it.
Woman to butcher: "Do you keep dripping?"
Butcher: "No Madam, it's just the way I stand."

Covered

After yesterday's trailer shenanigans, today Mike made the three new raised beds in the greenhouse, which now looks satisfyingly full of growing space.

Most of the seeds I've sown in there so far are in the central bed on the right (the one with the extra protection of a floating row cover). The rockets seedlings have been the first to emerge.

It was warm in there, so we seized the dog and the opportunity of giving him a good wash. For which we were rewarded in time-honoured fashion:

Trailer hitches

This photo was taken the last time we tried to use the trailer, in December.* It took Mike several hours to get the lights to work. It was a similar story yesterday: the lights were poorly-made and never seem to work consistently.

Poor Mike spent much of the day stripping the lights down into their component parts and then giving up and going off to buy new ones. All so that he could get some more cedar planks and build me three more raised beds in the greenhouse.

Meanwhile, the kids and I were having fun at a birthday party down the road. I provided lemon-meringue ice cream. It was the first time I'd made it and ended up being a combination of two different recipes. The idea was stolen from Delia Smith's Summer Collection, but the lemon ice-cream recipe was lifted from David Lebovitz's excellent book The Perfect Scoop. In that book, he crumbles speculoos/speculaas (gingersnaps from the Low Countries) into the lemon (I've made that version too and it is delicious). But since I was going to be making the ice-cream properly for once, i.e. only using yolks (I usually use whole eggs), I thought I'd make meringues with the whites and stir those in, instead.

The ingredients for the lemon ice-cream:

Zest of two large lemons
¾cup/150g sugar (with the sugar in the meringues, this could probably be reduced to ½cup/100g)
1 cup/250ml whole milk
2 cups/500ml double/heavy cream
Pinch salt
5 egg yolks

And for the meringue:

3 egg whites (or use all five and add proportionally more sugar - you can always eat the extra meringues on their own!)
1 cup/170g sugar

Make the meringue first: whisk the egg whites until they are stiff and then add half the sugar, a spoonful at a time until the meringue is glossy and holds its shape. Fold in the rest of the sugar. Heat the oven to 225°F/100°C/Gas Mark ¼. Put spoonfuls of the mixture onto parchment paper on a baking sheet and then bake for an hour and a half.

Put the lemon zest and sugar into a saucepan with the milk and about a quarter of the cream. Warm it thoroughly and then leave to infuse for about an hour.

Pour the remaining cream into a large bowl and set a sieve/strainer over it. Re-heat the infused milk until it is warm, then beat it into the egg yolks (it's important to add the milk to the egg yolks and not the other way round - they will curdle if you do!). Return the egg yolks and milk mixture to the pan and heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture thickens enough to leave a thick coating on the back of the spoon. Pour this custard through the strainer into the cream. Discard the pieces of lemon zest that will be left in the strainer and put the ice-cream mixture into the fridge to cool down until you are ready to make the ice cream.

After you have got the ice-cream made, crumble or cut the meringue into small pieces, stir them into the soft ice-cream and then freeze until you need it. You have to take it out of the freezer at least half an hour before you want to eat it, to soften.

It was very good!

*No husbands were harmed in the making of this image.

Cheating

The heavy snow of last Thursday is still on the ground, but it is melting fast and turning our back garden into a highly unattractive pond. I don't have any well-formed plans for the future of this area, in terms of planting, but I think whatever ends up here will need to be fairly amphibious.

Still wintry-looking outside, then, but inside the greenhouse there are some promising signs of life. The soil in the raised beds has unfrozen and the purple sprouting broccoli and kale plants that I left in there to over-winter as an experiment are looking much better than they did at the end of January.

There are some blood-veined sorrel seedlings pushing their way out of the ground, too:

This afternoon I did my first bit of seed-sowing in the greenhouse for the year: some rows of peas and spring onions. I'll probably follow those up with some lettuce, carrots and spinach in the next few days for some early crops. This time last year, the beds were still a month away from being filled with soil. It's wonderful to be able to get ahead of the weather like this, even if it does make me feel that I'm cheating, somehow...