Cold dawn

They were right about the temperature: it did go down to -4°C/25°F last night, as this frosted dandelion demonstrates.

The greenhouse and yesterday's additional precautions seem to have done the trick in protecting the young tomato plants. Although they still look a bit pathetic. It's hard to imagine that these will be six feet tall by the end of the summer. Some sunshine over the next few days and the warmer weather promised by the end of the week might make them look more respectable.

Hot bed

I've got my young tomato plants in the greenhouse and potted most of them on into small pots two weeks ago. Since then, they hardly seem to have grown at all, as the weather has turned colder.

I was dismayed this morning to see that the forecasted temperature for tonight was -4°C/25°F. Even with the protection of the greenhouse and a covering of horticultural fleece, I wasn't sure that they'd survive that. 

Luckily, I had cleared out the chicken coop and made some chicken manure at the weekend by mixing the litter with water. I checked the temperature of the manure this morning and it has reached a respectable 40°C/100°F. I thought I'd give the tomatoes a bit of help by shovelling some spadefuls of hot manure onto the greenhouse floor underneath the cart they're sitting in:

Having made all these elaborate preparations, the forecast has now changed to -2°C/28°F, which probably wouldn't have been a problem. Oh well, better safe than sorry!

Unexpected guests

I collected our new chicks today, bought to replenish our flock after the fox and weasel depredations we've experienced over the last twelve months. Unfortunately the weather is being unco-operative, with rain, snow and well-below normal temperatures today it was too cold, even with a heat lamp, to put put the chicks in the corner of the barn we had planned to use. Having chicks in the house is the way we reared our first batch in 2009 but since then we've also gained a rather efficient domestic bird-killing predator in the form of Minnie the cat. This meant that we couldn't keep the chicks in an area which is accessible to Minnie and, since our downstairs is pretty much open plan, that left us with little choice.

The chicks have therefore taken over our spare bedroom (one of the few rooms the cat can't get into) with an improvised heat-lamp bracket made out of a step-ladder:

We'll keep them indoors until they've got some feathers or until the weather warms up a bit. It's lucky we haven't got Mike's mum staying here at the moment, as she often does at this time of year - I don't think she'd have a very peaceful night with this lot cheeping away at the end of the bed!

Change of scenery

I've often travelled to Toronto on the train, but haven't ever headed east of our area by rail. Yesterday I took the train to Ottawa for the first time and was looking forward to a new view through the train window.

Once you get past Brockville, the landscape is very different from the more heavily-populated Toronto-Montreal corridor. The stretch between here and Toronto is a mixture of farmland and industrial development, with a few sections of park and beach. The lands either side of the line to Ottawa from Brockville are very different: evidence of human activity is much less obvious and there are lots of pines, boggy open areas and stands of dead, waterlogged trees.

The weather changed suddenly yesterday evening, as I came home. First the wind got up, producing a fairly scary dust-storm as the dry soil next to the road near the station in Fallowfield was lifted into the air. Then the rain poured down, settling the dust and drenching the commuters returning to their cars from the bus stops. The storm clouds transformed the landscape again. This is the view from Fallowfield station:

The reflections of the huge clouds in the pools of the wetlands we went through were beautiful, but hard to record with a camera because of the speed of the train. This next one is the best I could muster. This view is typical of the boggy nature of the scenery. I can't help but feel sorry for the men who laid the tracks in the first place: they must have been eaten alive by biting insects...

Five-years on

It's been pointed out to me that I haven't blogged for a while. Looking at the date of my last post, I have to admit that this is true. It's not that nothing has been happening, just that most of it is business-as-usual and probably not very enthralling.

Five years ago today we were on our first visit to Prince Edward County, hoping to find somewhere to live. It was a cold, blustery day; sometimes raining and sometimes snowing. One of the first things we saw as we stepped into the house was the woodburning stove; warm and welcoming. The kitchen has changed completely since then. All except for the woodstove which continues to be the heart of the house (but without the faux-brick surround it had then).

Out in the barnyard, an almost blank canvas awaited us. We didn't venture into it on the first visit (much too cold and wet), but on our second viewing, three days later, the weather had cheered up and we explored the barns and woodland behind the house.

The concrete pad next to the small barn looked like this:

Now that same space is covered by the greenhouse we put up in 2008. I spent some time on Saturday tidying it up and hoeing weeds out of the cracks in the concrete. This is how that space is looking today. Maybe it doesn't look terribly tidy to you. But you haven't seen the 'before' picture (which I conveniently neglected to take).

The raised beds are looking good and already producing some food. On the left of this photo is the purple sprouting broccoli which I left growing over the winter. I've tried this most years and this is the first time that it hasn't been killed by frost. We had some with our lunch last weekend and there are new sprouts coming. The rest of this bed is filled with young peas, growing up tomato cages. They don't seem to mind that the supports were designed for another plant.

In the bed which held tomato plants last year I've got radishes, beets and salad greens of various types growing. I'm trying to get better at timing my succession sowing of salad leaves: too often I end up with a glut followed by a few weeks of no-greens-at-all. Not this year. Oh no. This year I'm going to get it right.

Today I sowed another few rows of greens in one of the barnyard beds, along with some parsnips, carrots and some more beets. It's a lot drier outside than it usually is at this time of year: five years on, we could really do with some of 2007's rain.

But maybe not the snow, if everyone's OK with that.

A new record

In 2010, these daffodils opened on April 3rd. And that was two weeks earlier than in 2009. This year, they were open when I arrived home on March 20th: two weeks earlier again. The anemones are flowering, too:

Quite a contrast from the same week in 2008, when the hayfield looked like this:

Of course the disadvantage of all this warmth is that the weeds are actively growing, too...

Big views, little views

 It's been one of those mad fortnights where I've been dashing from venue to venue and city to city. I've seen two different Londons, one of which suffered a riot while I was there (and it wasn't the one you might expect). My travel plans were complex, sometimes bordering on the convoluted, but went surprisingly smoothly. Well, all except for the last day, when Toronto's waterfront was cushioned with a fluffy layer of fog and the plane I was on couldn't land there. We ended up going to Ottawa to get more fuel and finally landed back in Toronto four hours later than scheduled.

An unexpected bonus of the diverted flight was that we flew over Prince Edward County on the way back to Toronto. I was sitting on the right hand side of the plane and got a good view of the Bay of Quinte and Lake Consecon. At times like that, you wish there was an option to don a parachute and get straight back home without having to go to the airport and then take the train for the two-hour trip back along the shoreline. Although it might have been tricky to get my suitcase down to earth in one piece, I suppose.

It was good to get home and catch up with what had been happening here. The weather has been unseasonably warm, meaning that the greenhouse sowings I made before I left have been making impressive progress. The experimentally pre-sprouted peas have come up in soldierly-looking lines of sturdy little plants. This is definitely the best way I've found so far of ensuring germination and growth of early peas. Says she, counting her peas before they've podded.

The carrots I sowed last autumn are looking good, too:

Outside, it's been warm enough for the tyre/tire-garden rhubarb to start unfurling its leaves.

On my rushing-to-catch-up to-do list for Sunday is: sow eggplant/aubergines, peppers and tomatoes; clean out chicken coop; cut down last year's asparagus ferns.

Day of rest? I think not.

Cracking crumpets

I read Emily's post on making English Muffins the other day with interest. It reminded me of the crumpet rings I bought a long time ago (probably from Lakeland, but the ones they sell now don't look like mine). I think I tried to make crumpets with them once, when we lived in England, and it wasn't a successful experiment. But crumpets, once regular weekend tea-time fare for us, are hard to find in the shops here (and disappointing when they are found) so I thought it was worth repeating the experiment.

I can't remember what went wrong last time I tried, but I suspect the problem was that the crumpet batter stuck to the rings. The trick to avoiding this is to make sure that the rings are greased and that they are allowed to get hot in the pan before you add the batter.

Anyway, here's the recipe I used. It's from the Good Housekeeping Cookery Book (1998). I note that the other recipe on the same page is for Peshwari Naan Bread. This one cookery book page sums up a century of British food tastes, I'd say. But I digress...

Crumpets
Makes 12 crumpets. (The book says this quantity makes 24. The book lies.)

350g/12 oz/2 generous cups strong white flour (I used all-purpose*)
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon sodium bicarbonate
1½ teaspoons instant dried yeast
300ml/10 fl. oz/1¼ cups warm water
250ml/8 fl. oz/1 cup warm milk
Oil for frying

Mix all the ingredients except the oil in a food mixer for a few minutes to make a thick batter. Cover and leave somewhere warm for an hour. Beat for a further minute then pour into a jug.

Heat a little oil in a frying pan over a high heat. Grease four 3-inch crumpet rings and stand in the pan for two minutes until very hot.

Pour the batter into each ring, so that they are about three-quarters full (the batter will expand as it cooks). Cook for 5-7 minutes on a medium heat until the surface is set and holey.

Remove the metal ring - the batter should have shrunk away from the edge, so this is fairly easy (not how I remember it from my earlier attempt!). My rings have little handles, which help. Flip the crumpets over to cook for one minute on the other side.

If you eat them straight from the pan, you don't need to toast them. But if you let them get cold, then toasting them will bring them back to full crumpetty perfection.

Watching the holes appear in the surface of the crumpets is fun. Here they are after a minute or two, with holes appearing at the edges:

Two or three minutes later, nearly ready to flip over:

And the finished product, crying out for some butter to melt into all those holes.

Personally, I don't think crumpets are complete without Marmite on them, too. But I accept that might be a little too English for some people...

*I tried this recipe with strong flour a week or two after writing this post. It wasn't a success: much harder to pour the batter, which turned into a gloopy mess. My advice is to stick with regular flour. If you like, you can substitute wholemeal flour for half of the total, to make a slightly more rib-sticking version.

Wind of change

There's a damaging gale blowing down the lake at us this morning. From our house, we could see white horses on the surface of the water, as the ice was broken up by the wind. The dividing line between water and ice was rapidly advancing down the lake from west to east, so I went for a walk with the dog to capture the moment of change. This is happening about three weeks earlier than it usually does.

The eastern half of the lake was still fairly frozen, although close to the shore the ice has broken up into large, angular chunks. This picture looks peaceful, but it was so windy at this point on the road that I could hardly stand upright.

A limb of this tree had fallen into the road, so I carefully pulled it off to the side, so as not to impede traffic. Not that I'd seen any cars this morning.

The boundary between the ice and the water was fairly clear:

The waves on the water were echoed in the ice which moved in an much slower wave. One that made me feel slightly seasick to watch.

Just past the join between the water and the ice, the reason for the lack of traffic became clear:

One of our neighbours' trees is completely blocking the road. I couldn't even get past it on foot.

Made me feel a bit silly for pulling that other branch off the road, I can tell you.

Signs of life

It may still be looking snowy outside, but my thoughts are turning to this year's vegetable gardening. I've had onions and lettuce growing on the windowsill of the living room for a few weeks now. The corn salad is looking good:

In past years I've started peas off indoors, too, as I've found that they get eaten if I sow the peas directly into the greenhouse beds at this time of year. I'm doing things differently this time, though. These Lincoln pea seeds were gathered from the plants I grew last spring: I left some of the pods to fully ripen and then stored them over the winter. I did the same with some of the Oregon Sugar Snap II peas. A few days ago, I soaked the peas overnight in water, then drained off the water and waited to see if the peas would sprout.

Now they're actively growing, I hope they'll be less of a temptation to the local rodent population. I'll put them out in the greenhouse at the weekend and see how they fare. Mike dug the last of the over-wintered carrots out for me last week, creating some space in there for the peas. There were over ten pounds/five kilos of carrots to be retrieved.

I think this is one vegetable that we can safely claim to be self-sufficient in!

Messy mix

The weather people don't like it when the temperature is around the freezing point and a system is due to arrive. It makes it difficult to forecast whether people are going to get rain, freezing rain, ice pellets or snow. They always say that there will be a 'messy mix' as the system passes through.

Messy from a forecaster's point of view, perhaps, but my ears always prick up when I hear that phrase, as I know it means there will be a chance of some interesting ice formations for me to take pictures of. Today was such a day: we had freezing rain on waking, which turned to regular rain and then to snow.

On my morning walk with the dog, I found a fence-post decorated with a combination of snow, ice and lichen:

Some aster seed-heads, weighed down and encased by ice:

This Canadian thistle head looks like something microscopic blown up big:

And this seed head of Queen Anne's Lace was somehow still standing upright, where most of the others had toppled to the ground:

Not messy at all, in my opinion!

Taste test

When I looked at this huge pile of citrus skins to shred on Sunday night I felt like Cinderella or some other of those put-upon fairytale characters who are given impossible tasks to do.

But eventually I managed to turn every single orange, lemon, lime and grapefruit shell into shreds for the marmalade. I didn't have time to do the boiling down afterwards, though, so I saved that job until yesterday afternoon, when I was slightly more awake. Somehow I don't think being in charge of boiling pans of syrup is a good idea when you're dog-tired!

My reward at breakfast-time this morning was to test the new four-citrus marmalade alongside last year's Seville orange variety, to see whether it came up to standard. The toast on top has the 2011 batch, the one underneath is the new variety, which came out a few shades lighter than the old one. The taste is different, as you'd expect, but still pleasantly tart and definitely something I will enjoy eating for the rest of the year.

Missed the boat...

...the one carrying Seville oranges, that is. Somehow it's already the end of February and there isn't a Seville orange to be had. This year my marmalade will have to be made from something different. Here are some of the starting ingredients:

I'm going to use the same method as the Seville orange marmalade I've been making since 2009, but this time there are regular oranges, lemons, limes and grapefruit in the mix. They're simmering away on the stove right now in the first stage of the process, filling the house with the smell of citrus. I'll let you know how it turns out...

Cabbage-stuffed pancakes

Tonight's supper was a Shrove Tuesday variation on the cabbage soup I talked about the other week. I chopped up about two-cupfuls of cabbage, fried it gently in butter for a few minutes and then poured in some canned tomatoes which had been blended to a purée. These were home-grown ones I canned last summer (using this technique), which had some thyme and oregano in with them, but a can of regular tomatoes would work fine, too. I added a cupful of red lentils, some salt, pepper and smoked paprika and let that all simmer away for 30 minutes until the lentils and cabbage were soft and most of the liquid had been absorbed or boiled off.

While that was happening, I cooked pancakes. For four people, I used two eggs, about 2.5 cups of flour and two pints of milk-and-water (I don't do a lot of measuring when it comes to pancakes...). This made eight pancakes, which got steadily smaller in size as I realised I was running out of batter! I stacked them on a plate with kitchen paper in between to stop them sticking together and to make the process of folding them up easier.

Then I made a roux sauce and stirred some grated cheese into it. This is what the cabbage and lentil mixture looked like when it was cooked:

I folded each pancake around a few spoonfuls of cabbage, then arranged them in a lasagne dish and poured on the cheese sauce, scattering some more grated cheese on top.

After about 20 minutes in a 350F/180C oven, here's what the finished dish looked like.

Warming, filling and satisfying food. Perfect for a February night.

Two-day winter

Looks pretty wintry, doesn't it? It was cold and snowy over the weekend, with temperatures struggling to get above -8°C/17°F, but the cold spell didn't last long. It's above freezing again today and I don't think this snow is going to hang around. It's already gone from the road in front of our house.

The ice over the stream is usually deep and unbreakable by this time of year, but it's not very thick at all at the moment - certainly not strong enough to bear my weight:

Such a peculiar winter...

Sky strokes

Had to stop on my way to Deseronto this morning to capture these lovely swirls of cloud in the sky over Lake Consecon:

And a bit closer up:

Just beautiful.

Chickens, inside and out

We keep getting little tastes of winter, followed by warm spells. Yesterday there was an inch or two of snow on the ground in the morning, enough to keep the chickens indoors. It melted over the course of the day and by this morning the chickens were happy to scratch around in the soil of the orchard.

January was stressful in relation to the chickens, as they were being preyed upon by a nocturnal killer. We lost five hens over the course of ten days. Mike spent a lot of time hammering wire over any holes he could find in the chickens' corner of the barn. We think the killer was a stoat (or ermine, as they are known in their white winter coats), as they just drink the blood of their victims, rather than eat their flesh. All the dead birds had damage to their throats but were otherwise unharmed.

Since the carcasses were basically sound, I decided that I should use some of the meat. It seemed a waste to just dispose of the bodies. The hens range in age from one to three years old; they weren't going to suitable for roasting and I therefore decided not to go the whole plucking-and-gutting route. Instead, I removed the skin from their fronts and legs and cut the meat out. I write that very casually, but I felt very nervous and sad about it. I don't look upon the chickens as pets but cutting them up for meat wasn't something I had been planning to do.

The first thing I noticed about the meat was the colour of the fat around the legs: a really bright yellow, not at all like the fat you see on the meat of the young chickens which are normally offered for sale. The leg meat was also much darker, although the breast meat looked much the same. I'd never cooked meat from such a (relatively) old bird, so I spent a little while researching the best way of doing that.

Long, slow, cooking seemed to be the Internet's answer, along with letting the meat mature for a few days in the fridge before using it. I just added water to the chicken legs and cooked them for eight hours on my oven's slow-cooking setting (around 225°F/108°C). Afterwards, I chilled the meat so that I could take the layer of fat off. The meat was very good to eat and the resulting stock was great but I would still much rather have had the chickens alive and well and producing eggs.

It has been ten days now since we last found a dead hen, so we're hoping that the ermine has been foiled in its chicken-hunting enterprises.

Freezing rain

Another morning of freezing rain and no school buses. We seem to have had more freezing rain this winter than any other since we've been in Canada. Although as I type, it's turning into snow. Or 'transitioning' into snow, as the Weather Network people would say.