Actual gardening!

We were promised rain today and my gardening plans were suitably modest - maybe sowing a few seeds in the greenhouse.

But instead, the day proved to be gloriously sunny and warm and for the first time in six months I was able to get some work done outside. The chickens seem to be enjoying being out again after months of unusual captivity.

I never bother to cut down the old asparagus ferns in the Fall because a) I'm lazy and b) I kid myself that they give the asparagus roots a bit of extra protection in the winter. But that means that I have to do it in the Spring and today seemed like the perfect opportunity, given the unexpected window of lovely weather and the disappearance of most of the lingering snow.

Here's the 'before' photo of one of the tyre/tire beds, bristling with dead ferns and tangled with quack grass:

And here's the 'after', when I'd pulled out the old ferns and dug out the weeds (which is relatively easy to do at this stage of the year, before the new spears start emerging):

The last stage in the process was to add a top-dressing of well-rotted chicken manure. This is the batch-before-last, probably the one I made in 2012. It's lovely now - all crumbly and soft and full of insect and (I presume) microbial life.

My rhubarb plant from 2008 is also in one of these tires and is just starting to produce buds. I dug it up, split it in two and replanted half in the old tire and half in a spare one where one of the other original rhubarb plants hadn't survived. They got a shovelful of chicken-litter-compost over them, too.

By the end of all that I was exhausted and extremely warm. I'd almost forgotten what it felt like to feel hot outside!

You missed a bit

 The snow is melting away in a sometimes unpredictable manner. Lumps are left behind here and there, like a man who hasn't quite rinsed off all the shaving foam from his face.

The gate is finally clear of snow, although the lake you can glimpse in the distance is still frozen.

In places, the remains of the snow drifts create artistic cliffs above the fast-flowing meltwater.

Usually there are huge sheets of ice at this time of year, but all the snow has stopped much from forming around the stream this winter. It's certainly been an interesting season, but I'm not sorry to be seeing it leave!

Yellow daffodils

Yellow in the 'we've been deprived of sunshine until yesterday' sense, that is. These miniature daffodils have become my springometer over the last few years. The snow which had been covering them finally melted yesterday (don't worry, there's still plenty everywhere else!). On April 2nd last year these daffodils were about the same size, but a bit greener:

And last year set a record for us in lateness of flowering for them. 2014 looks like it might top that! The average temperature in this area for March is -1°C (30°F). This year we've had an average of -5°C (23°F).

But, hey, I can finally see the daffodils, so at least things are improving!

Another boring post about snow

I apologise - you  must be utterly sick of all the snow pictures by now. (Although not as much as I am, I suspect.)

As you can see, there's still a lot to left to melt - and guess what? It's snowing again as I type.

The depth of snow around the gate is back to about where it was in late-January.

It's funny to think that I entitled a post 'Relentless winter' back on January 7th. Little did I know...

My seedlings are keeping me (mostly) sane. Here are those little asparagus plants, growing away well.

Snowing and going

When I woke up today, it was snowing again, but only enough to turn the world completely white for a few hours ('English snow', I thought to myself). By lunchtime the morning coating had melted.

The day warmed up a bit more and now there is some serious melting of the big snow banks going on. The ditch on the western side of the farm is visible again for the first time in months as the drifts have collapsed into it.

And the gate is a bit more visible than it has been of late.

The softening snow brings new perils, however. This next picture is the deep hole my right leg descended into as I walked back from taking the two photos above. The hole that made me tumble forward, flat on my face.

With a pocket full of eggs.

First (or last?) harvest

The snow is slowly, slowly melting away as the sun gets stronger. The days are still pretty cold, but at least they are longer now. In the greenhouse the warmth has finally unfrozen the raised beds and I was able to dig up the remainder of my 2013 parsnip crop today. I thought there were only one or two parsnips out there - but I gathered nearly four pounds of them (1.7kg)! Some are on the slender side, but they look pretty good, considering the winter we've had (some nearby carrots had completely rotted away). If it's true that frost makes them taste better, they should be amazing!  

I've been slow to start seeds indoors because I've been so demoralised by the winter, but I did sow a few asparagus seeds a couple of weeks ago and was pleased to see that they've bravely surfaced.

Today I've set up the propagator and sown eight different varieties of peppers and one Cosmos (bipinnatus 'Rubenza' - which I don't remember buying but which looks pretty in the pictures I've found of it online).

I've finally got around to sowing the onions and leeks indoors as well, which my calendar has been reminding me about since late January. I kept hitting 'snooze' on the reminder, telling it to remind me again in a week. I've finally caught up with that one, but the trouble is, I've got reminders for sowing lots of other seeds popping up now as well. It seemed such a good idea last year to set all those reminders up, but I have a feeling that I will never catch up with where I think I should be this year.

Spring?

The average temperature so far this month has been -13°C. A pathetic 8.5° in Fahrenheit. The newspapers are full of advertisements for Spring products, the weather people are proclaiming that we're in meteorological spring, and yet the view from the window is determinedly wintry.

The garden gate is still comprehensively buried in its deep snow drifts.

And fences and barns are still sporting picturesque snowy highlights.

There is a chance that the temperature will edge above the freezing mark tomorrow, for the first time in nearly two weeks. The poor chickens have not been out of the barn since mid-December and they've probably forgotten that there even is an outside. In the kitchen I'm sprouting some green lentils - ostensibly to give the chickens something fresh to eat, but really to give myself something green to look at!

Seedy Saturday 2014

Last year I wrote about how I'd become a vendor at the Picton Seedy Saturday event just two years after attending my first one. This year I became one of the organisers of a new Seedy Saturday in Trenton. I feel as though I've been on some sort of apprentice-training scheme with these events, with my involvement gradually escalating.

This event was a scion of the Picton one, with one of the Picton organisers encouraging our efforts and coming to the first meeting of the Seedy Saturday Quinte West committee.

We applied for start-up funds for the event from the Bauta Family Initiative on Canadian Seed Security - and were fortunate enough to receive $350. Thirteen vendors from a range of farm and seed-related businesses paid a small sum for tables on the day and we received enough contributions in kind to fill four raffle baskets, which proved a good fund-raiser. Around 80 people came through the doors on the day, which we were really pleased about. Donations for the book table and seed swap table brought in additional money, ensuring that we have enough in our bank account to pay for the hire of a venue in 2015. This means that the event should be self-sustaining after this first year.

If you get a chance to go along to a Seedy Saturday or to get involved in one, I can highly recommend it. There's always an interesting range of people to talk to and seeds to pick up. I was relatively restrained this year and only came away with four new packets of seed: one bean, two tomatoes and one pepper.

Ice retreating

After a day or two of above freezing temperatures we are finally starting to see some of the driveway beneath the layer of ice that's been there since the ice storm in December. I'm unreasonably excited about this.

There has also been a bit of a let-up in the succession of snow storms and snow squalls recently - the wind has been in the wrong direction for picking up snow from Lake Ontario and the jet stream has either been taking the snow further south or bringing rain over us.

I was reading about how rapidly the Arctic is warming and how this is affecting the weather both here and in the UK, where it's been so wet this winter. The retreat of ice in the Arctic is depressing.

You could say that I'm feeling a bit conflicted about ice today...

Volcanoes

The weather conditions this year have created ice volcanoes in places along the Lake Ontario shoreline. I stopped to take pictures of some on the north side of Wellers Bay this morning, on my way home from running some errands. They give the impression more of a moonscape than a lakescape!

Further down the same road is a patch of open water, where swans and geese congregate in large numbers.

Pastel dawn

 The clear skies and snow cover gave this morning's sunrise a peaceful pastel palette.

The solar panels were particularly pink in the first rays of the sun - with one mysteriously clear of yesterday's snow, giving the array the impression of a gap-toothed grin.

Snow-bound greenhouse

I waded through the snow to the greenhouse today, thinking about the parsnips I've still got in there and wondering whether they'd be dig-uppable. Luckily the eastern doors slide, otherwise I would not have got inside.

I took a fork to the parsnip bed, but it is still frozen solid, so no joy there. I left the greenhouse to its winter peace and solitude.

Outside, it's still just about the snow. We did get a bit of rain for a change on Saturday, which means that the driveway is back to the December layer of ice again. But everywhere else is still pretty snowy.

But the sun was shining and it's now setting well past five o'clock, so the year is turning towards summer, even if it does feel like a long way off.

Thigh-high

Just in case anyone's still interested - the gate is just visible after another 48 hours of pretty much continuous snow:

The path up to the bigger barn is impassable - I tried it earlier today but wading in snow up to my hips proved too difficult.

The dog managed to bound his way through it, though. Here he is on his way back:

Invisible at this point, apart from his tail:

And emerging triumphantly from the bottom.

...a bit snowy.

Snow on snow

If things have been a little quiet around here, it's mainly because I've been spending my spare time digging us out from underneath the snow.

After last Sunday's day-long blizzard, the gate next to the small barn was fairly well buried.

The last three days brought yet more snow and now the gate is barely visible.

But the high winds have scoured the snow off the solar panels, so at least we're back in production up there.

There's no sign of warmer weather in the forecast, although there are threats of more snow, so I suspect it will get worse before it gets better. Oh well, all the shovelling provides a pretty good workout. Who needs a gym membership?

Ineffectual sunlight

 In theory the solar panels work best in cold weather. In practice however, the really cold weather (today's high was -18°C/0°F) brings some snow with it, which refuses to melt at such low temperatures, limiting our production.

With a whole day of brilliant sunshine, you would hope that the snow on the greenhouse might melt a bit. Well, I suppose it did a bit, but hardly enough to notice. Not that there's much growing in there at the moment. Today I took a look inside for the first time in weeks.The sage bush is still holding on in there and I think one or two of my leeks, kale and parsley plants might just be still alive - but otherwise it all looks a bit bleak. It's hard to believe that in the summer months I am busy in there every day.

Really starting to look forward to spring...

It's complicated

One thing that has struck me about winters here is how varied they are, which is not something I was expecting before we emigrated. Snow and ice, yes, I was expecting them, but it's the varied combinations of precipitation and temperatures that makes each winter not quite the same as the last and keeps us all talking constantly about the weather (I know the British have a reputation for talking about the weather a lot - but Canadians have so much more weather to talk about).

The ice storm was a first for us, and this winter was also the first time we'd experienced frost quakes (cryoseisms) - when rapid freezing after the ice storm jolted the house in what felt like a small explosion.

After grumbling about the blizzard-like conditions on Tuesday, I had a lovely walk in the snow-drifts that were left in their wake on Thursday.

There were interesting, meringue-like heaps,

alongside coyote tracks,

and ash trees disguised as silver birches, under an impossibly blue sky. Perhaps winter isn't so bad, after all.

Today's walk was less fun. It has warmed up just enough to make the layer of December ice below the snow unstable. Every so often the ice cracks underneath your weight, maliciously snagging an ankle or unexpectedly dropping your whole body six inches lower.

So yes, my relationship with winter is complex. Just when I'm ready to call the whole thing off, it charms me back. And then trips me up again. Sigh.

Relentless winter

I suspect that the first week in January is probably too early to be getting fed up of winter weather. We haven't had a full thaw since before Christmas, so the layer of ice that fell in the pre-Christmas ice storm is still there, and every so often the weather warms up enough to melt the snow on top of it, but never enough to melt that underlying layer of ice. Which makes walking outside tricky.

The children have not gone back to school yet as the last two days have been extremely cold and windy. Today we've had snow all day with 30mph/50km/h winds, visibility has been pretty low at times. You can see from the trees that the wind has pasted the west-facing trunks with snow.

Temperatures at the end of last week were around -25°C/-13°F. It's a bit warmer this week, but with the wind, it doesn't really feel it! We've been using the kids' toboggans (and the kids!) to bring wood for the fires down from the barns.

We don't rely on the fires now in the way we did in our first winter here, as the geothermal heating copes pretty well in averagely cold temperatures, but warmly glowing logs are a very welcome sight once the temperature dips below about -15°C/5°F!