Growth

The tomato peppers are plumping up:

And so are the tomatoes, though none have ripened yet. I love the flattened shape of the Marmande variety:

Managed to get a photo of all three chicks at last. They don't sit still for very long, so it's hard to get a picture that isn't just a blur of fluffy movement.

When they're not under the hen, their second favourite place seems to be on her.

Early-onset nostalgia

Child #1 is moving on to high school in September and it looks as though Child #2 will be going to a different one in the following year. Consequently, this week will be the last for them to be travelling home together on the same school bus. It's making me sad, this end of a stage in their lives.

Of course, if we'd stayed in England, this stage would have finished two years ago. Here, the elementary schools run to grade eight, rather than the more usual year six in English primary schools. So both children would have been in secondary education by now. I'm happier with the way it works here, although I didn't know about this particular difference until after we moved. By delaying high school to the age of 13 it feels like they get to be children for longer.

The transition from one school to another is celebrated in a graduation ceremony. This seemed odd to me, when I first heard about it. Graduation from high school seemed strange enough, but from elementary school? For all I know, this is something that is happening in the UK now, too, but neither of these transitions were marked by a school event when I went through them. I do remember being very excited about leaving both my primary and secondary schools, though. No nostalgia at all for me in those days. Must be something that comes on with age...

Last night was my daughter's graduation and although the school's gym was hot and crowded, the ceremony was enjoyable: it was great to see the young people being recognised for their achievements. I don't often blather on about my kids, so bear with me while I share the moment of happiness I felt as I watched my fledgling young woman dance with her dad.

After a long time of being the parents of two children, we're suddenly finding that we are sharing our lives with two young adults. I can't quite believe how quickly that has happened. It's wonderful to watch them growing up, but nostalgia for their almost-over childhood years can be hard to shake off at times of like this.

Now I'm going to listen to ABBA singing 'Slipping through my fingers' while I shed some tears onto my keyboard. With any luck I'll be back to normal by the time that yellow bus draws up outside again...

Rare glimpse

The good thing about letting a broody hen do the job of caring for a new batch of chicks is that you don't need to worry about using heat lamps to keep the chicks warm - they just snuggle up underneath the hen's wings when they're cold. All that obsessive checking on them that happens when you have an artificial set-up (are they too hot, too cold?) just isn't necessary. The downside is that in the early days (when, let's face it, they're at their most cute) you don't actually get to see the chicks very often!

Death and life

Yesterday we lost eight of the hens to (we think) a fox. We've lost one or two hens before, but this was the first time we've had a mass killing. The fox only ate one and a half of them - the rest were just killed for sport. We found them all around the orchard. Upsetting.

Mike had spent the afternoon building some more nest boxes for them. Seems like a waste, now. Were we tempting fate?

This morning we had a more pleasant surprise - we've had a broody hen sitting on five eggs for the last three weeks and today two of them hatched out.

Next time we let a broody incubate some eggs (next year), I'll put more eggs underneath her: apparently they can cope with up to 14 at a time.

Naming names

I went up to the hayfield today, to see whether any Monarch caterpillars had hatched out on the common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) plants which grow around the edges of the field.

The milkweeds are popular with many creatures and the first one I saw today was very strange: a sort of wasp/praying mantis hybrid.

It took a bit of digging around, but eventually I ID'd it as a Wasp Mantidfly, Climaciella brunnea (yes, it's obvious, once you know...).

There weren't any caterpillars to be seen. I noticed some attractive white flowers on my walk. These ones are (I think) field chickweed (Cerastium arvense):

And this small shrub is gray dogwood (Cornus racemosa). Later in the year, the flowers are replaced by pale green berries, popular with the birds. I'd noticed the berries before, but not the flowers.

There are two small swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) plants near the pond. As I passed them, on my walk back home, I noticed that there was a Monarch caterpillar on one of them. Actually, there were two - the camera picked up a second one (on the top right of this shot) which I didn't notice at the time.

I don't know why it's so important to me to know the names of all these things. They're just as attractive or interesting without a label, but there's something very satisfying in tracking down their identities...

On freshness of eggs

I've never had to worry about how fresh our eggs are, since the chickens started keeping us supplied. There's a system of sorts in operation, where the most recent dozen are at one end of a shelf and the oldest are at the other. But as there are rarely more than six dozen eggs on the shelf at a time, even the most elderly are never more than a week old.

Until this week, that is, when we discovered a stash of two dozen secretly-laid eggs in the orchard. Off to the internet to work out how to determine their freshness.

Putting the suspect egg in a bowl of water is the tried-and-tested method. If they sit flat on the bottom, they're fresh, if they don't, they're not. So I diligently baptised each egg. And they all sat firmly on the base of the bowl.

I found it hard to believe that they were all scrupulously fresh. I'm guessing, from the colour of the eggs, that there are only one or two hens involved. So that's at least three weeks' worth of eggs. They can't all be fresh!

The only way to find out was to actually use the eggs (don't worry, egg customers, if you're reading this - I won't be selling these ones to you!). The difference between a fresh egg and one that's past its best is mainly to do with the structure of the white and yolk. The white loses its plumpness and, if it's very old, the yolk's membrane dissolves and you end up with an unappetising mixture of yolk and white. The trick is to break each egg into a cup first, then decide, from its appearance, whether you want to use it or not. I threw away four of the eight eggs I used at lunchtime today. They didn't smell bad - just looked unappealing, as the yolk had disintegrated into the white. I suppose I could have used them to make scrambled egg, but once you're used to very fresh eggs, you're spoilt. The ones I tested today were the muddier ones of the batch, which probably means they'd been outside longer than the others. I hope the freshness ratio will improve with the remainder.

Now I've got to add 'patrolling the orchard' to my list of evening chores...

Hooray, pesto!

I picked the first basil leaves this afternoon and turned them into pesto this evening. By some oversight, I didn't have any pine nuts in the house, so I replaced those with some slivered almonds. The basil, a couple of parsley sprigs, some Parmesan and almonds were blended with olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper. After putting the blended mixture in the jar I put a thin layer of olive oil on top, to stop it discolouring.

And that's it - very simple, and it tastes just as good with almonds as it does with pine nuts. It will keep in the fridge for about a week, although I don't think it's going to last that long!

Daisies

At this time of year there are stands of Ox-eye daisies in various places around the farm, particularly on the edges of the hayfield. This clump were in a shady corner of the ash woods.

They're not a native plant, but they always cheer me up when I see them. I even picked a few and normally I'm not into cut flowers. I would probably tell you that I prefer to see them growing in the ground if you were to ask me why. Which is partially true, although I suspect that lack of time to think about growing a cutting garden is probably more to do with it. I have a deep admiration for gardeners like Sarah Raven or fellow blogger Karen Hall who do amazing things with beautiful flowers grown for cutting. It's something I aspire to, but somehow know that I'm never going to achieve...

Running to seed

Picking things at the appropriate moment isn't something I'm always good at. As a consequence, there are often plants in the greenhouse which get to the flowering stage when they should have been harvested long before. Sometimes, this can be useful - I've got carrots left over from last year, for example, which survived the winter in the greenhouse beds and are now sending up flowers.

The carrots on the right are either Little Finger or Chanteney Red Core. Not sure which.*

The ones on the left are purple carrots. The colour of the flowers makes that fairly clear!

I'm planning on collecting the seeds from these: something I've never done before. There are so many flowers that I don't think I'll ever have to buy carrot seed again...

Something similar happened with some salad onions that I failed to pull last year.

You can see the black seeds in the one below, almost ready to drop. I picked this and two other seedheads and put them in a bag to finish drying out.

All these flowers are doing a good job of attracting pollinating insects into the greenhouse, which is just what I need as the tomatoes are flowering now. There are even respectable-sized fruit on some of them.

The pepper plants are starting to flower, too. This grasshopper was almost perfectly camouflaged against one of the new leaves.

*Labelling of crops being another personal point of failure...

Five-days' growth

Being away for a few days at this time of year means that there's always a startling amount of change in the garden when I get back. The seed potatoes have grown into small plants:

And suddenly there's a glut of sugar-snap peas:

And as for the weeds... well, perhaps it is best to draw a polite veil over that particular area of exuberance.

Ice-cream weather (finally!)

A neighbour gave me some spearmint for the garden, just after we moved here (nearly four years ago, now - doesn't seem possible!). It's been fairly well behaved until now, but this year it has lived up to its invasive reputation. I spent some time today pulling a fair proportion of it up. But it seemed a shame to throw it on the compost heap, and the summer weather has arrived at last, so I thought I'd use it to make mint choc chip ice cream.

I found a recipe online from the ever-reliable David Lebovitz (well, in ice-cream matters, anyway, I can't speak for his personal life). It called for 80 grams of mint leaves, which is pretty much exactly what I had pulled from the garden. You steep the mint with hot cream, milk and sugar for an hour, after which time it looks like this:

You can see how the milk is turning a pale greenish colour. After an hour of steeping you squeeze the mint leaves dry, extacting every possible drop of colour and flavour. What's left of the leaves makes a very compact ball!

The infused milk is then used to make a custard with eggs, in the usual way. Because our chickens' egg yolks are so orange, the resulting colour of the custard is more yellowy-green than you'd think of for mint ice cream. Chartreuse, even:

The mixture is then frozen in an ice-cream maker and melted dark chocolate stirred into it. By the time it's been churned, the green tinge has pretty much gone and it could be just vanilla. It hasn't lost the mintiness, though. Oh, no.

Now I've never really liked mint choc chip ice-cream. But this one, I feel differently about. It's really fresh: a perfect way to welcome summer.

Tree news

We obtained a dozen very small white pine seedlings from Quinte Conservation in early May at the sidewalk sale in Deseronto. Mike and I planted them on the 8th of the month in an area of young ash and cedar trees on the east side of the hayfield. The soil was very wet at the time and we've left them alone since, although I have been vaguely worrying about whether they'd drowned in all the rain we've been having. Today I checked on them and was pleased to see that most of them are still alive and the majority are showing signs of new growth:

We've planted a few trees since we've been here, and have had varying degrees of success. We've lost about five of the 20 orchard trees we planted in 2008 and two out of the three sugar maples which we put in last year. I hope these will have better luck!

Plot progress

The potato bed was at last dry enough for me to risk sowing the seeds, yesterday. There was room in the bed for most of my tomato plants, too:

This area was previously two separate beds, but we combined them into one last year, to save Mike some of the effort of keeping the grass strimmed in the summer. We added the autumn-made chicken manure to this bed at the end of the season last year, so the potatoes and tomatoes should find plenty of richness in this soil.

I also sowed carrots, peas and greens in one of the other beds in this area. I don't expect the peas to work - they nearly always get eaten by rodents before they germinate, but hope has triumphed over experience again. One of our neighbours has given us a load of tomato cages, which I hope will work as pea supports. They're too small, in my opinion, to function well as supports for tomatoes - I prefer to stake those, as you can see in the photo.

In the orchard, the fruit trees are flowering at a more sensible time of year than they did in 2010 - two weeks earlier than this.

And up in the woods, the ash trees' leaves are bursting into growth. Everything is looking super-lush as a result of all the rain we've had this Spring.

Postcard from Cambridge, MA

I'm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a meeting. I haven't had a lot of time to explore, but I did take a few pictures as I walked around the city last night and on my way to the meeting this morning.

Some interesting old buildings:

A truly hideous lamp for sale (if you can see it past the reflection):

And, perhaps most worrying of all, a risk of zombie chickens:

Soggy...

It warmed up a bit last week and there was sunshine. I didn't always need a coat on when I went outside and I started planting out onions, corn and my brassica plants.

This weekend has been mainly wet.

The lower vegetable garden still has its winter pond in the centre. We've done a good job of lifting the beds out of the water, but they're still too cold and wet to sow anything in. The big bed on the right is supposed to be for potatoes. Luckily, it's been cold in Alberta, too, so the seed potatoes weren't shipped as early as they usually would be. They haven't got here yet, although Canada Post informs me that they have now reached Ontario, so they should be here this week.

On the far left are the brassica plants I put in on Thursday evening. The soil was really too wet, but they were getting too big in their greenhouse nursery bed, so I took a chance and put them in the ground. I should have left them where they were.

Even the dandelions have closed their flowers in purse-lipped disgust:

About the only living things that look to be appreciating all the rain are the toadstools it's brought forth:

Could do better

I don't want to be ungrateful. I mean, she clearly put some work into it. But you'd have to have quite a tiny appetite to be satisfied with that egg for breakfast.

Nettles for lunch

I thought I'd test out this recipe when the children weren't home, as I can just imagine their faces if I suggested a dish featuring nettles. Well, actually I don't have to imagine it, as the expression on their father's when I told him what was for lunch today was probably a fair representation.

But I persevered, anyway, adapting a recipe from the Fat of the Land blog for stinging nettle ravioli and sage butter. I simplified the filling, using just some soft goat cheese rather than ricotta, egg and parmesan. The trick with nettles is to blanch them for a minute, to neutralise the sting. After that, you squeeze out the water and can cut them up as you would spinach and mash them with the cheese and seasoning.

I used some lasagne strips that I made with the pasta machine the other night. They're very narrow for lasagne, but seemed to be a good size for ravioli. The machine came with four little ravioli cutters, so it was just a case of piling the filling in small heaps on one strip of pasta, then wetting its matching strip, lining it up and pressing out the ravioli shapes with the cutter.

The resulting ravioli are a bit rustic-looking, but that doesn't bother me. They only take a minute or two to cook, and the simple sage butter sauce takes hardly any time. The nettles didn't have a strong flavour at all: the goat cheese was the main taste. I'm still not sure that the children would eat them, but I may have made a convert of their dad!

Making pasta (the lazy way)

Had our annual outing to the Deseronto Sidewalk Sale yesterday, where Child#2 and I sold a fair quantity of tomato and pepper plants. For once, the weather was decent (the last two occasions were wet and cold, making for few customers) and our stall outside the library did well. I'm glad I sowed the seeds earlier than usual - the spring has been so cold that they needed the extra two weeks to reach a reasonable size.

The stall next to ours was the Friends of the Library's one. In amongst the usual yard sale fare was an electric pasta machine. I don't usually buy anything from yard sales - figuring that I've got enough objects in my life and don't need to add to the number by buying other people's cast-offs. But I've always hankered after a pasta maker and, in the end, couldn't resist the purchase. I met the original owners later in the day, who admitted that they'd only used the machine once. So I'm hoping there's quite a bit of life left in it, even though it must be around 20 years old!

Making pasta is something I've been interested in doing for a while, but the traditional manual method of rolling pasta by hand always seemed too hard. I could buy a pasta attachment for my food mixer, but $180 seems a lot to shell* out for such a thing. I didn't even know that you could buy a dedicated pasta machine that would do the mixing and extrusion processes.

The original owners had lost the instructions, but that wonderful Internet thing provided both the manual and the original instructional video, so I was able to swot up on how it worked. The video was surprisingly entertaining, for its genre.

The video suggests extruding the pasta immediately after mixing the flour, eggs and water. But the more traditional methods stipulate that the dough be allowed to rest, so I left it in the machine for half an hour before starting the extrusion process. We all stood around watching in fascination as the first strands of linguine began to emerge:

Yeah, this is what passes for entertainment round here...

And here's the finished pasta. Which I think looks pretty fantastic for a first attempt. I am definitely going to be using this machine more than once!

The first asparagus spears were ready for picking, so I served the linguine (well, half of it - there's a bit too much for one meal there) with asparagus and Parmesan for lunch.

*Sorry.

Difficult subjects

I noticed a cocoon of spider eggs in the corner of one of the greenhouse raised beds the other day. This morning the spiders had hatched and were building out from their original web.

As they are so tiny and the web has some depth to it, it's quite hard to take a photo of them that's in focus!

Escapees

These dill seedlings shouldn't be here, really. Behind them are the beetroot seedlings which I did sow in this greenhouse bed. But the dill is so beautiful with the morning dew on it that I'm letting them stay for now.

I've also got a lot of self-seeded flat-leaved parsley in the greenhouse. Another handsome plant that I'm loath to pull up.

I was startled to find these four chickens out of place yesterday. The barrier at the back of the orchard had blown down in Thursday's high winds. Most of the chickens stayed put, but these intrepid few decided to go exploring. I found another pair by the greenhouse later in the day. When we first got the chickens, we spent a lot of time chasing them back into the orchard - it's interesting that now most of them are happy to stay within its bounds, even when one of them has been removed.