Culinary catastrophe

This is what happens if you steam your Christmas pudding in a plastic container for 12 hours instead of the recommended six. The steamer was full of horrible grey smoke when I came down early this morning. The base of the lower half is covered with a thick layer of burnt-on melted plastic which I've optimistically put in water to soak for a while, but fear might be irretrievable. The steamer was a wedding present that I use nearly every day, so I hope it can be saved.

It's been a pain getting the ingredients together for this pudding, so I'm even more annoyed with myself for ruining it. Vegetable suet seems to be unheard of here, although I had managed to get hold of black treacle (obviously maple syrup is the preferred sticky substance here). You can't buy alcohol in supermarkets so we had to buy the stout in a separate trip to the LCBO. Luckily you could only buy Guinness in a four-pack, so at least I've got spares.

I found a recipe for Christmas Pudding with butter instead of suet so had used that, but now I'm thinking I'll just pick up some vegetable suet in the UK next week and try again in a couple of weeks' time. I'll want some suet to make mincemeat too (not to mention dumplings for winter stews). Surely vegetable suet isn't one of those banned substances that you're not allowed to import? I also need to stock up on harissa paste - it seems to be very hard to get hold of here. Though perhaps I won't put that in the Christmas Pudding.

UPDATE (6:40pm): Just in case something similar should happen to you... Soaking the ruined pan in bleach for 12 hours loosened the burnt-on layer of plastic and remnants of pudding (following advice from the ThriftyFun website). Then I scraped it off with a fork, followed by a good scrub with a scourer and Astonish. Looks nearly as good as new! Now, I wonder whether I can get Astonish over here...

Dealing with wood

Mike invested in a manual log splitter yesterday to help us deal with our poplar logs. It's a great device, somewhat similar to those ski machines you get in gyms (says she, never having been to a gym). With it I can actually split the logs - well, those that I can lift on to the cradle, that is. There's a wedge-shaped piece at the back that the log is forced against with a hydraulic ram, operated by pulling the two levers backwards and forward, until eventually the log cracks with a most satisfying noise. It's still fairly hard work, but you get a real sense of achievement with each log split, which I'm sure would be much more difficult to attain with a ski machine.

We've still got a fair number to do, but I don't think it'll take too long. I managed to create the little heap of split logs below in half an hour this afternoon.

We spent another hour or two today turning the top hamper from the poplars into wood chips with yet another new gadget for the tractor which was delivered by Mark the tractor guy this afternoon. This is a scarily efficient machine - it can take branches of poplar that are up to about three or four inches in diameter and it gobbles them down in seconds.We've got a huge heap of branches to deal with (behind the tractor here), so this is another job that will take a little while to complete. The chippings are being used to form the paths between the vegetable plots (I'm hoping the quackgrass won't like it).

Blues and reds

I was feeling a bit low this morning after (1) another early start with Toby and (2) a splitting headache, had sent me back to bed for a while. Worked for a few hours then decided to take the dog out for a walk as it was a lovely day and I needed to walk off the chill that had taken hold of me. Now he's had all his vaccinations we can walk around the isosceles triangle of roads that forms our little community. This picture was taken as we came along the stretch which borders the lake. It's impossible to feel low for long with a view like this to cheer you up. I love the coruscation of sunlight on water almost as much as I love the word coruscation (thanks to Emma, for introducing me to it (20 years ago now, eek)).

We were barked at by Lacey, our neighbour Janice's dog, as we got to the top of the triangle and Janice came out for a chat and to meet Toby. Dogs are really excellent at getting conversations going. I asked her whether I could have some manure from her cows for the vegetable plots and she said she'd ask her sons about it. I don't think it's in short supply at their dairy farm! Two of our other neighbours, Tony and Marilyn, gave us this load of lovely tomatoes this morning, so I plan to have a gently domesticated afternoon making tomato sauce and restoring my inner equilibrium.

Daisy, Daisy...

This is another lovely aster that is growing in some numbers up by the pond - a Panicled Aster. Its status is "very common", but it's jolly pretty in spite of that. Panicled doesn't mean 'a little bit frightened', but "a loosely branched flower cluster that is usually shaped like a pyramid" (according to Dave's Garden).

I almost had to drag the dog up to the pond tonight for his walk, as Mike was out getting his chainsaw chains sharpened (as you do) and Toby really isn't happy going for a walk with only one of us. He keeps looking back for the other one and is only really content when the whole family are out together. When I was finally happy with my aster photos and turned round to go home he ran off with huge relief and kept looking back as if to say "What's keeping you?"

We finished creating the vegetable plots on Friday and sowed the last of the buckwheat in the eighth one, expecting rain on Saturday. It didn't actually arrive until Sunday, but then we got five hours of good old Manchester drizzle, which will have watered all the seeds in beautifully. Saturday was very hot and Mike spent two hours splitting old ash logs in the big barn. At the moment this is a very physically demanding task, involving an axe, a 10lb lump hammer and two five-pound splitting wedges. It took him two hours to split eight logs into quarters. My job was to schlep them to the wood storage area in the small barn, which was easy-peasy in comparison, but still hot and tiring work and I was very grateful for the downhill slope from one barn to the other.

More caterpillars

We've seen a lot of these webs on trees in the past few weeks. They're created by a caterpillar known as the Fall Webworm. One of those rare cases where the moth hasn't got a name of its own because the caterpillar was the thing that people noticed first.
We were watching the caterpillars crawl back into their web early this morning after a night spent nibbling away at the leaves of this ash tree.


And here's one of the little culprits.


As they appear late in the year they're not considered to be particularly damaging to the trees, although the webs aren't desperately attractive.

Working conditions

This is the phone at Deseronto archives. I had to lift it up to see if it actually works. It does. Well, there was a dialling tone, anyway. I had a good first day there: there's a school reunion at the end of the month to celebrate Deseronto Public School's 50th anniversary, so I was helping the town's Recreation Programme Co-ordinator to find school-related material, while trying to establish what else there was in the archive room. There is a PC, and Ruth, one of the library staff, helped me find out what the password for it was. It has an internet connection, too, which I'm sure will come in handy. The library is quite a thriving little focal point for the town and it also houses a job information centre. I haven't yet ventured into my other accommodation, at the Town Hall, but they're getting me a key cut so I might go in there next week and maybe even brave the dreaded basement vault (or at least try to figure out what might be down there).

Working from home has its own challenges - the dog has decided that my feet are its favourite comforter so I'm often sitting at odd angles trying to reach the laptop while he has his naps.

After a week where the dog was waking up and howling every two hours in the night we seem to have cracked the problem with another handy tip from my aunt (don't know what we'd do without you Laine!). We've been leaving a radio on at low volume in his room and that seems to do the trick. The only talk-radio station I could find was a French-language one, but, as Wikipedia says,

all Alsatians today speak French

so obviously that suits him just fine!

A walk in the park

We visited Presqu'ile Provincial Park yesterday. It's about 40km away and, as the name suggests, is surrounded by Lake Ontario on nearly all sides. They were having a big Monarch Butterfly weekend as it's a staging post for the butterflies on their way south. We had a lovely walk on one of the woodland trails. It was only four kilometers, but that was just about right for the kids and the puppy. We didn't see many butterflies but there were plenty of squirrels, chipmunks and interesting mushrooms.

Today it's Labour Day, a public holiday here and the last day of the school summer holidays. I thought that there might not be such a big 'Back to School' push here, as the children don't wear school uniforms, but if anything it's even worse than in the UK. It's mostly focused on school supplies, but I even saw an advert for 'Back to School mattresses and furniture' yesterday (!).

Weeeeed?

The caterpillar of the Monarch butterfly is a lot easier to photograph than its parent. There were two of them on what is left of this common milkweed plant in the hayfield. After I took this, I transferred them onto another milkweed nearby which had a few remaining leaves. Milkweed is the only thing that Monarch caterpillars can eat, so it is a desirable plant for people who want to encourage butterflies to their gardens, but it is considered a weed by farmers as it is poisonous to sheep.

Identifying all the wild flowers we're seeing is sometimes easy, sometimes hard. I was surprised to see Golden Rod growing all over the place - it's generally seen as a weed here, rather than as a desirable cottage garden flower, as in the UK.

I found this flower last night - initially thinking it was a thistle, but then on close inspection realised that it was an aster. I think it is a New England Aster. The Wikipedia article mentions that this is another wild flower that was taken back to Europe as a garden plant.

On the other hand, the Canadian Thistle seems always to be considered a weed, although I rather like both its flowers and its seed-heads. The butterflies love them too.
The bright red berries of this plant caught my eye this when out for my morning constitutional with the dog (who, by the way, has been waking us up repeatedly during the night ever since I wrote about how good he is at night-time). Its delicate lilac flowers look like those on potatoes, so I presumed that, like the potato, it would be a North American plant. Wrong again - it is Bittersweet Nightshade, which is European and poisonous and highly invasive. It does have some uses in herbal medicine though, so it's not a completely hopeless case.

Roads, old and new

This is the view of Prince Edward County that you get as you approach from the Glenora Ferry, a 10-minute trip that takes you from the mainland to the county. We all went to Kingston on Monday to register with the provincial health insurance plan (you have to be here for three months before being eligible for it). As we were going to be out of the house for a few hours we took the puppy with us. This meant that we didn't need to rush back, so instead of heading back along Highway 401 (a very boring dual carriageway) we decided to take the old road, Highway 33, marketed as the Loyalist Parkway. It runs alongside the lake most of the way from Kingston and then along into the County. Although it takes a bit longer, the route is far preferable to the 401 alternative.

I've had a particular request for an updated picture of the puppy, so here he is. This is the 'Where's my treat then? Look I'm sitting down and everything.' pose. He is now house-trained and usually wakes us up to go out between 5-6am, which I hope will get later as the mornings get darker. He's still chewing anything he can get hold of with his needle-sharp puppy teeth - will be glad when he finally gets his adult set. He lives on the ground floor and doesn't venture up or down stairs (yet). I must admit that it's quite heart-warming to see how pleased he is to see you in the morning - his whole body wags!

I went to Deseronto last night to talk to the Archives Board about priorities for the next few months for the archives. I was handed the keys to the room in the library that serves as the current archives and, as the meeting ended, I met the Mayor and the Deputy Mayor of the town. The latter looked at me and said 'I was expecting somebody older'. So that's nice - I still look too young to be an archivist. Thought I'd moved on from that! So I start work there next week - I suggested that I would do one day a week and they seemed happy with that. I drove back as the sun was setting - more lovely views of Lakes Ontario and Consecon. The drive takes the same length of time as my commute into Manchester did, but the contrast in terms of traffic and scenery couldn't be greater.

The very fat caterpillar

Spotted this huge green caterpillar on our walk up to the field with the dog this afternoon. It is about the size of a cigar and was moving very quickly. Mike discovered that it's a Waved Sphinx moth (or will be, next year), and it was heading off, having feasted on our trees, to find somewhere to pupate.

We now have six vegetable plots dug over and sown with buckwheat. There are seedlings appearing on the plots I sowed first, but whether they are buckwheat plants or something less desirable I can't yet tell.

Quackgrass

OK, so the grass in the barnyard that I naively thought was just an extra-strong, butch Canadian version of ordinary grass - isn't. Anyone who's had to deal with couch grass would have recognised it straight away, except that here the preferred term seems to be quackgrass and it is defined by the provincial government as "one of the most difficult weeds to control".

I'd never had to deal with couch grass before, so didn't realise that was what it was until tipped off by my aunt. So, far from being a native Canadian type of grass, this stuff is, like me, a European interloper. Quackgrass seems a ridiculous name for such an invasive and pesky plant, but perhaps it is a corruption of 'quickgrass', which is one of its other names. Actually I think the most appropriate of its many names is devil's grass. I'm fairly sure that sinful gardeners would spent their time in Hell dealing with an infinitely large field of the stuff.

Rain

Well it's early afternoon and at last we've had some decent rain showers. According to our weather system 9.6mm has fallen so far today. This translates into a gain of 3 inches of rainwater in our cistern.

Yes, sorry about the mixing and matching of measurements - we've got a home-made measuring stick marked in inches for the cistern (fewer lines to draw than if we'd marked it up in centimetres), but have attempted to modernise by measuring everything to do with the weather station in metric units. I think we come from a generation which is completely confused about systems of measurement and Canada seems to be just as confused as the UK, but often in the opposite direction. It doesn't help when they call Imperial units 'English'. I've had to stick a small concordance table of oven temperatures in °F and °C in one of the kitchen cupboards, which I check frequently, as this oven is calibrated in Fahrenheit and I'd got used to Celsius in England. On the other hand I do quite like having the road signs in kilometres, as subconsciously you read them as miles and journeys seem to go more quickly (which is necessary when the speed limit is only 50mph, sorry, 80kph, most of the time).

Since we put the weather station up on 6 August and until today we'd only had 7.6mm of rain - about one third of an inch - in nearly three weeks. And there hadn't been much before we started measuring it either. Our lawn is completely brown and a lot of the trees are beginning to show signs of stress - the poplars are losing their leaves rapidly and the leaves on some of the smaller ash trees are turning brown. The rain is particularly welcome as on Tuesday evening I sowed some of the buckwheat seed in the two vegetable plots that we'd created by then, so this might give it a fighting chance of germinating.

A Rake's Progress

It's been a frenetic few days in the barnyard. The tree surgeons came on Friday and Mike helped them carve up the poplars into manoeuvrable chunks which can then be split into logs for the fires. They also cut down the branches of the ash tree that were resting on the roof at the back of the house. This has had the added benefit of preventing the squirrels from getting on to the roof and into our roofspace (for the moment anyway).

The rotary tiller attachment for the tractor turned up in the afternoon and we spent an hour or two getting it fixed on during Saturday before we could start using it. I'm glad Mike's got a background of working with machinery because I wouldn't have had a clue how to fix it all together. My role on these occasions is solely as moral support, or more likely, irritatingly curious bystander.

Once the thing was fixed on, Mike used it to till Barnyard Two. It was pretty effective - tearing the grassy soil up into big lumps. Lots of stones came to the surface and we removed the biggest ones. Before tilling the area looked like the grassy strip on the right of the photo.

Yesterday I was finally able to do some of the work myself. I started by clearing more stones from the western end of the yard. I persuaded the children to help me and they picked stones with me for half an hour, pretending that we were a pioneer family. Then they realised that being a pioneer family wouldn't actually have been much fun and they went off to play Top Trumps instead.

When I'd cleared the biggest stones I marked out the boundaries of my first vegetable plot, an area ten feet wide and 15 feet deep, and proceeded to rake it clear of big clumps of grass and more stones. The grass roots are long single strands, rather like thick noodles in size. The rotary tiller has left many of these in the soil so I had to pull them gently out by hand as my experience in the front garden has shown that the grass will re-sprout from these roots very readily. I spent about five hours raking, de-stoning and de-rooting the area yesterday and I think it's now ready to be seeded. My plan is to sow buckwheat as a green manure (I ordered two kilos of seed last week) in the vegetable plots. I might be cutting it a bit fine, as it will be killed by the first frost, but it is supposed to be very quick to grow so I'm hoping it will work. The soil is so fine that leaving it bare seems like a really bad idea.


The picture shows the finished plot, although I know that it actually doesn't look very different from the 'before' picture. Even this one plot is twice the size of the raised beds I had for growing vegetables in the old house. There will be eight vegetable plots in all in this part of the barnyard - and by the time I've cleared all eight I expect to be super-fit and as thin as my rake.

Timber!

Charlie the tree climber and his mate came this morning and took down the two poplar trees ('widowmakers' as Charlie called them). Bill will turn up tomorrow to cut the trunk into smaller pieces, which will eventually end up in our woodburner. Someone finally came to take our hay bales away this morning too. There were 40 of them in all.

We're getting obsessive about watching the weather radar and calculating how soon it will be before we get rain and how long it might last. At the moment we're down to nine inches of water in our cistern, which is effectively only four inches if you take off the width of the outlet pipe. Both wells are dry so I'll be trying to learn how to do a rain-dance soon.

Water works

Thought I'd better post an update on our smelly water situation. Here's a picture of the solution to the problem. The white unit is our filter, which takes out any solid particles in the water. Next to it, on the left, is the reverse osmosis unit, which subjects the water to high pressure and forces out the dissolved solids which make the water hard. It's been two weeks since the system was installed and it has taken that long for the hot water tank to finally be free of the old water and the sludge that had built up in the bottom of it. So now we've got lovely clear, non-smelly water and there are no excuses for the children not to have a bath. Well, apart from the ongoing lack-of-water scenario, that is.

One thing that has helped us conserve water a bit is our new washing machine. You can't tell from the picture, but it is huge. It holds at least twice as much washing as our old machine in the UK, so I'm having to run it half as often. I know it's a very dull and mundane thing to get enthusiastic about, and this may be a reflection of how quiet my life is now, but I actually look forward to doing the laundry so that I can use it - it's got neat little sound effects, whizzy lights and a countdown feature which make it seem quite space-age. There's a matching tumble dryer too, but I haven't used that yet and hope I won't have to for some time.

Thanks to the voltage difference we've had to buy loads of electrical devices on moving here. In time we'll be able to preserve our house as a museum of the Canadian home in the year 2007.

...and I'll give you the key

Well OK, it's not quite a combine harvester, but our mini-tractor arrived today and Mike's already tested it out on the grass of Barnyard One, the route into the woods behind the big barn and the grass around the house The thing on the back is a heavy-duty rotary cutter which is suitable for cutting down rough grass. There's a lawn mower attachment underneath the tractor for shorter grass. So basically what he achieved in a week or two with the strimmer in the barnyard has taken about 20 minutes with the tractor and its attachments. That's impressive.

We'll be getting a rotary tiller attachment to go on the back too, but they didn't have it ready to deliver today. The same was the case with the snow blower attachment, but I'm rather hoping we won't need that in the next few weeks. It's a relief to finally have the grass cut - we've been in the house nearly seven weeks without having the tool for the job. The lack of rain, while problematic for our water supply, has at least stopped the grass from growing too much (although there were some pretty beefy weeds).

Black and white

The children met our nearest neighbours this evening, chatting over the garden fence. There seemed to be a mutual fascination. I have designs on the waste products of these creatures for my vegetable patch and plan to negotiate with their owner, Janice, about that. Actually I'm running low on milk too, come to think of it...

No prizes...

... for guessing the name of this frog.

Yes, you've guessed it: Lithobates clamitans. It was having a nap on the inner side of the barn door this morning when Mike went out there. Quite nice to see a live frog for a change: the dog has developed an uncanny instinct for finding dried up dead frogs and using them as puppy chews. I've only just got over a phobia of dead insects and now I'm having to get used to extracting dessicated frogs from the dog's mouth. Urgh.

Trees

I continue to be impressed by Mike's ability to turn his hand to new skills. Today was his first go at using the chainsaw that he bought last week. It's been fairly overcast, so not quite as hot as it has been of late. He started off by removing a dead bough from the Silver Birch in the front garden, then progressed to cutting down some of the dead Eastern Juniper (aka Red Cedar) trees in the barnyard (I'm assuming that they were killed by the cows that used to be housed there). He's made a good start on our wood supply for the winter. I love the colour of the freshly-cut red cedar logs - they look a bit like cartoon depictions of legs of ham.

The tree-climber member of the tree surgeon's team which will be cutting down the poplars came round earlier and they'll probably be bringing those down later in the week, so that will give us even more wood, although poplar doesn't burn particularly well, so it might be better to leave that for a while to season. My new bible, John Seymour's New Complete Self-sufficiency: The Classic Guide for Realists and Dreamers agrees with most other sources that ash is the best wood for burning. There's an ash coppice up by the pond, so we're well set up in that respect. According to John, if you cut the trees down at a diameter of nine inches, they'll regrow and be ready to cut down again in 12 years' time. Sounds ideal to me - then you don't feel like you're destroying something.

Veins and vines

Managed to get a photo of a Monarch at last yesterday evening, on our walk up to the hay field. Apart from its size, the main difference between it and a Viceroy is the lack of a black vein cutting across the lower wing on the Monarch.

We also noticed that the wild grapes (Vitus riparia) are swelling well in the hedgerows around the field. The hedges are mostly Blackthorn and there are lots of sloe berries forming on them. So I've started looking up recipes for sloe gin and sloe jelly. Apparently the wild grapes can be used for wine and jelly, but I'm not sure there will be enough of them for the former. The early missionary settlers round here used them for communion wine when they ran out of the stuff they'd brought with them from France, so it might be worth a try...

POSTSCRIPT: I was wrong about the hedges - the tree with black berries is Common or European Buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica), which is (a)invasive and (b)a killer of native trees. Nice...