Two-lips

Now the snow is beginning to melt we're beginning to see things growing outside, too. Here are some bulbs emerging from the soil underneath the living room window. I presume they're tulips, but at the moment they strongly remind me of the seedling stage of Audrey II, the monster plant in the 1986 film version of The Little Shop of Horrors.


At the side of the house, the buds on the lilac trees are swelling. Prince Edward County is famous for its lilacs, so I'm looking forward to seeing these flower. They do need a bit of pruning, though, which I think is best done after they've flowered, so a job for late May.

Spring green

Here's a sight to gladden a gardener's heart - the tomatoes that I sowed at the weekend germinated yesterday and are now out of the intensive care of the propagator. They're on the windowsill of the living room, which is within reach of the dog, so I'm hoping that he won't decide to investigate them too closely.

We're beginning to see the end of winter outside, too. As the photo below of the northern shore of Prince Edward County shows, the Bay of Quinte was still frozen and snowy when we came back over the Norris Whitney bridge from Belleville on Easter Monday. But yesterday afternoon when I came over the Skyway Bridge from Deseronto, there was a fair bit of water visible in the middle of the bay, which hadn't been there in the morning (well, it was there of course, but you couldn't see it!).

There was no ice at all in the Bay when we came here for our reconnaissance trip last Easter, but I suppose that was two weeks later than this year's, so there's still time for it all to melt, unlikely as it seems right now.

First sowing

I was planning to hold off on sowing any seeds until after my trip to the UK in April. Not that I don't trust Mike to take care of them (honestly!), but I just thought it might make things easier all round. Plus I didn't have any potting compost, which does rather constrain that kind of activity. And I wasn't sure if my UK-purchased propagator was going to work here.

While the kids were at their swimming lesson we did the usual mad dash round the library and supermarket in Picton, followed by a trip to a garden centre. This is a small business, comprising three or four polytunnels and a small barn which houses the shop. The shop had a sign by the till saying "We're in the greenhouse, come and find us!". This is fairly common for businesses here, which are often small family concerns run out of the owners' homes. This style of doing business took us a bit of getting used to - there isn't always an obvious 'shop front' to go to, for example.

I used to spend ages of indecision looking at all the different types of compost when I bought it from garden centres in the UK - peat free? multipurpose? sowing and cutting? brand or own brand? moisture-retaining or not? So it was quite refreshing at this establishment to be offered the choice of either a 10 litre bag or a 107 litre bale. And that was it. So I plumped for the bale (Mike was with me to carry it, luckily (or maybe not, from his point of view)).

I've just looked at the ingredients and it's 70-80% Canadian sphagnum peat moss. Cue feelings of guilt about destruction of peat bogs, followed by superficial internet research, which seems to suggest that there are an awful lot of peat bogs in Canada:

...more than 270,000,000 acres, 25% of the world's supply, of which our industry harvests on less than 40,000 acres, or one acre in 6,000.

According to the Canadian Sphagnum Peat Moss Association, anyway. They harvest the stuff, so they might be just a teensy bit biased. Not sure now whether I should be feeling guilty or not. Maybe I should make myself a hair shirt out of sphagnum moss to be on the safe side.

Anyway, we hooked the propagator up to one of the voltage regulators we had to buy to save getting all new electrical appliances, so that works fine. Now I couldn't resist starting some seeds. What did I sow, you may or may not be asking. Red tomatoes in this batch - Riesentraube (an heirloom grape-style) and Amish Paste (another heirloom plant, ideal for tomato sauces). I think of the propagator as an incubator or intensive care unit, so once they're up I'll replace them with peppers, chillies or aubergines and get a little production line going.

Golden moon

Another cold and crisp night - lit by a beautiful moon. Have to admit I was tucked up in bed when Mike took this picture.

Hot and cold

The hot cross buns were refusing to rise so I went for a walk with Mike, as he'd found some interesting ice formations (we had a hard frost last night after several warmish days (warmth being a relative thing, you understand)). He was right - the stream looked lovely.



The snow was much easier to walk on - yesterday it had the texture of slightly melted sorbet, but today it was crispy and hard. Here's Mike standing next to the footprints I'd made the day before:



It was so pleasant to walk on that we crossed the hayfield for the first time in months. Well, actually we'd never walked across the field diagonally before, just in the mown strip around the edges. It was cold, but beautiful.



We'd been gone so long that the buns had grown quite significantly - allow me a small moment of domestic-goddessy pride:

Moon-planting

I've spent an enjoyable afternoon ordering my seed potatoes and checking out blogs about allotments. There are a large number of such blogs (there's even a little Google Maps mashup of where some of them are on the Allotments-UK site). I've never grown potatoes before - the picture below shows the extent of the growing area that I tended in Sale, which explains why. So I was looking for tips on potato cultivation.

"Plant potatoes on Good Friday" was something that came up a lot. Well, that might be possible in the UK, but I'm blowed if I'm going to dig through the snow to do that here. I wondered if this tradition might be related to the moon phases - since Easter Sunday is the first Sunday following the full moon after the Spring Equinox. But after reading up on the matter, advice about moon-planting of potatoes seems contradictory: a New York Times article from 1991 makes this point too. So maybe I won't bother waiting for a full moon and will go by the soil temperature instead!

I had no idea how many seed potatoes to order, so have probably ordered either far too many or far too few - time will tell.

Spring?

The temperature has crept above freezing during the day for a few days now. It's raining pretty hard this evening, too, which should help melt some more of the snow. We're starting to see insects emerging and the sparrows and starlings are certainly getting frisky. I think it's going to be a while before I'm sowing anything in the vegetable garden though - this is how it looked yesterday:

Comfort food

Pudding for our Sunday lunch today was an adaptation of Nigella Lawson's recipe for German Plum Tart (from How to be a Domestic Goddess (I'm still trying)). I had some leftover white bread dough which I used for the base, then added a mixture of wild blueberries (confession: they came from a frozen food aisle, not a hedgerow) and sugar, then topped with the crumble mixture as detailed in the recipe (140g plain flour, 100g brown sugar and 110g butter (I didn't have any walnuts or pecans, so they were left out)). It looked great and went down well, although I was a bit disappointed in the blueberries - they weren't very flavourful. I think I'd like to try this with rhubarb or something else with a more tart flavour.

Aftermath of a 36-hour snowstorm

This is the biggest snowfall in one go that we've had this winter, and as there was already a fair bit on the ground, it's getting pretty deep in places. It was windy with it, so the snow is in drifts and has formed some attractive contours around the trees:



This was how our driveway was looking first thing this morning:



...before Mike got to work with the tractor and snow-blower attachment:



The front path and steps had to be done with a shovel and it was quite a good workout (though I realise now that I was doing it all wrong).



The new composter is looking a bit buried, too:

Talking garbage

I'm impressed with the way garbage is dealt with here. All recyclable packaging and containers are collected free of charge every other week and there's a weekly collection of 'real' garbage, which costs $2 per bag. You buy little blue labels in advance and stick them on the bags when you put them out. As the recycling is so comprehensive, we find we're only generating one bag of rubbish a fortnight - so we spend $52 a year (£26) for this service, which seems reasonable.

I've been composting all the vegetable waste we produce in two plastic compost bins that were here when we arrived, but it seems this isn't that common a practice here. Recently the County advertised in the local paper, asking people to apply for a rotating composter as part of a County-wide trial. I've always fancied one of those, so I applied and was thrilled to find out the other week that I had been selected to take part, along with 19 other households around the County (75 applications had been received in all). Last night there was a meeting about the trial and I got to collect my new toy.

The Council don't currently provide a separate kerbside collection service for compostable materials, so a lot of it is going into landfill at the moment. It costs them $225 per tonne to dump things in landfill, so this trial is looking at ways of reducing that cost. As well as the composter, they provided us all with a green bucket for use in the kitchen and a scale to weigh it with. We have to weigh the waste that we put into the composter and record the amounts, until the end of October. Then these figures will be used to calculate the savings for the County. I didn't like to point out that I would have composted my materials anyway...

There were some interesting talks, including one from Doug Parker, who farms on an organically-certified farm in South Marysburgh. It was great to listen to someone who is so passionate about compost (which, by the way, is mainly pronounced to rhyme with 'post' around here). He had even brought some of his compost along for everyone to examine. Then two representatives of the manufacturers described the features of the composter. It's supposed to be pest-proof (which is good, as we had a rat living in our compost bin in Sale for a while), although they had heard of one installation in Vermont which was regularly played with by a bear.

This morning Mike and I set up the composter and I placed it next to the back door (this involved shovelling out a big snow drift). It's made by Sun-Mar, who started out making composting toilets and this is built on the same principles. The rotating drum speeds up the composting process, so that compost can be extracted from the centre in as little as two to four weeks. Although it might have to get a bit warmer outside before that's achievable, I suspect. The retail price of one of these is $250. I've paid $50 to take part in the trial, but I think $30 of that is refundable at the end of it, so I'll get my composter for $20. Bargain!

"Winter from Hell"

According to the chief climatologist of Environment Canada in the Ottawa Sun, anyway. The kids were home on two days this week because the buses were cancelled. Yesterday the schools were shut, which is the first time that has happened this winter (poor kids who live near them are usually expected to turn up, even if all the buses are cancelled).

Apparently there's another big storm heading in for Saturday, so all the families heading off for a Spring Break holiday abroad might have problems leaving the country this weekend. They don't have an Easter holiday here, just Good Friday and Easter Monday off, and the (inappropriately named) Spring Break, which is all of next week. So they won't be getting a lot of 'instructional time' this month, one way or another.

Yesterday's storm started off with ice pellets, for a change, but then turned into snow again. It made shovelling it off the path harder, as the ice pellets form a hard, caked layer under the snow. I had a vivid Technicolor dream last night about all the snow melting and spring flowers and vegetables emerging from beneath it. Even my subconscious is yearning for spring! This image from Flickr was the closest I could find to my dream, so I'm putting it here to cheer the blog up a bit and make a change from the never-ending views of ice and snow.

Image from QuintanaRoo on Flickr.

The one with the big clock

"You're from England, right?" asked one of the children at lunch time yesterday. "Is that the one with the Eiffel Tower, or the one with the big clock?"

The tyranny of party bags

I loathe organising children's parties. People don't reply to invitations and the kids are usually over-excited and often obnoxious. Here, parties seem to be a bit lower-key than some of the ones the children attended in the UK - they're usually held in the child's own home and I haven't heard of anyone hiring entertainers yet. For Child #1's birthday treat tomorrow we're taking a group of girls out for a pizza and a movie. We did this last year, in England, and two of the kids ended up being very sick (I do apologise, Altrincham Pizza Hut employees) so I'm hoping we'll have better luck this year.

Last year I didn't bother with party bags and I was planning not to this year either. I even deliberately ignored the party bags in Bulk Barn this morning. But by this afternoon I was feeling mean about it, so I made some fudge and then roped Child #1 in to help me make the wrappers. She found some silver ribbon lurking in a drawer and made name labels, then we wrapped baking parchment squares around the fudge and tied them up. It was an enjoyable way to spend the afternoon and I think they looked quite good in the end: not a bit of plastic tat in sight!

Postscript: The girls were all delightful and behaved beautifully. I might have to revise my feelings about birthday treats - or maybe 10/11 year olds are just more mature than smaller kids. Their class teacher and her two daughters ended up seeing the movie at the same time us, which may have been an added incentive for good behaviour, I suppose!

Smudging

I'm taking part in a twelve-week 'Aboriginal Awareness Course' at the local college. Mostly I wanted to understand more about the history of the relationship between the First Nations peoples and the later settlers, but it's also interesting to learn about the cultural side too. The classes are three hours in length and are conducted in a relaxed and laid-back style that is in itself a slight culture-shock, compared to most other courses that I've ever been on. The course focuses on the Mohawk culture and is run by people who live on the reserve at Tyendinaga, right next door to Deseronto and to the north of Prince Edward County.

We'd been told about smudging in the first class, last week. Nearly everyone had heard of it, except me, so I did a bit of background reading in order to catch up. It's a purification process which involves 'bathing' the body in smoke from smouldering herbs. White Sage (saliva apiana) is one of the preferred herbs to use, although as the plant is native to the south-west US, I did wonder whether it was really used historically by the Mohawks - as their original base was in New York State. Perhaps early trading links explain it, I surmised, or maybe it's later cross-community contact that brought it into use. A quick browse around the Internet suggests that the latter is the case - here's an interesting blog entry from a White Sage harvester about it.

A lot of the sites I looked at on smudging had a distinctly New Age flavour (the blog entry above mentions "turquoise jewelry wearing white folks", which sums it up perfectly) and I was a bit dubious about the whole thing. Strangely enough, though, as soon as the White Sage was smouldering in the room last night, I experienced a sudden (and totally unexpected) feeling of well-being. For someone with a more than the average share of healthy scepticism, this is quite something to admit to. I can see why the use of white sage has spread so quickly since the 1970s from its original Californian base. I just hope the species survives its sudden popularity.

Image of White Sage growing in California from dionysia on Flickr.

Loose end tied up

We handed possession of our house in Sale over to its new owners today. What a relief. The first sale fell through in September last year and then this one was being delayed by a bolshy pair of first-time buyers at the beginning of the chain. We've had a bottle of champagne chilling in the fridge since before Christmas, waiting for this moment. It's just about at the right temperature now.

Owning the house was like having an anchor attached to our new life here, holding us back financially in terms of being able to start new projects, but more significantly, being a constant background source of stress. Being part of a fragile will-they-won't-they house-buying chain was part of it, but there was also the worry of being the owners of an empty house in Greater Manchester. It was broken into, two weeks ago, which was almost inevitable, given that it has been empty for nine months. Luckily no major damage was done, but it was something we could have done without.

So tonight we're raising our glasses to the new owners and hoping that they'll be as happy there as we were.

Family Day

We arrived in Ontario in time for a new public holiday (announced last October) - today is Family Day, which owes its existence to a guy with a cocaine addiction. So perhaps not the most auspicious of holidays. We had a friend of child #2's over for much of the day and I made pizza and cookies to keep them sustained, in between trying to do some work. Working remotely on UK projects is fine, but it gets slightly peculiar when there's a public holiday here that isn't celebrated in the UK. We've decided that the noise made by children is equal to the number of children squared. One is fine (lovely and quiet, in fact); two make the noise of four and that's bad enough, but three create a noise equivalent to nine and that makes it extremely hard to concentrate.

In the evening we belatedly celebrated Chinese New Year with crispy duck and pancakes. This was an occasional treat when we lived in Sale (where we lived a five-minute walk from a Chinese take-away). There are Chinese restaurants around here (by that I mean within a half-hour drive), but we've yet to go into one. I found a good recipe for the pancakes online and, in a spirit of self-sufficiency, made it all from scratch (apart from the hoisin sauce). The pancakes don't look as round and purely white as the ones we got in England, but they're not as hard to make as they sound.

We finally exchanged contracts on the house in Sale today, so that was another reason to celebrate.

"...a little snow, tumbled about"*

I think the icicles in this photo and the angle at which they've been formed sum up today's weather perfectly.

Quite large snow dunes are forming along the fences between our farm and the neighbouring one. Of course we did expect that there would be reasonable quantities of snow and ice here ("YOU'VE MOVED TO CANADA!", as a friend kindly reminded me this week), but we are assured by people we meet (and by the media) that this winter is unusually snowy, even for Ontario.

*The Life and Death of King John, William Shakespeare, Act III, Scene IV

Learning the language

The dog still prefers eating snow to drinking the water in his water bowl, even when it is blowing a gale and snowing hard, as it was yesterday afternoon. I observed to child #2 that it might save us shovelling snow off the path if we could get Toby to do it instead, but that it might take him a long time to eat his way through it all. His reply was "Not like Daddy with the shovel, eh". The first example of a Canadian 'eh' from one of the kids - and so soon!

They're also saying 'Dayedy' [dεədɪ] rather than 'Daddy' [dædɪ] some of the time and I've definitely heard a few 'tomaydoes' mentioned. It's fascinating - a bit like watching them learn how to talk all over again. We tease them about it now, but I'm sure it'll be them making fun of our accents before too long. I suspect they're doubling up at the moment - maintaining a mainly English accent at home, but sounding more Canadian when they're at school with their friends.

Wily coyote

I haven't managed to take a picture of the wild turkeys yet, although we have now seen our local flock a few times. There are about a dozen of them regularly wandering through our wood. When I caught a movement in the trees by the pond this afternoon I thought it might be them again, but it turned out to be a coyote instead. If you look very hard you might be able to distinguish it from the trees in this photo.

Crackpot?

My final set of seeds arrived this morning, from Thompson and Morgan. Mainly these are seeds that the North American catalogues only held a few varieties of - runner beans, broad beans and sprouts, for example. British foods that haven't caught on as much here, I suspect.

Although I don't have immediate plans to sell vegetables to the public, I have been looking into how to make our vegetable garden officially organic. One of the major problems will be obtaining organic seed, as far as I can see at the moment, so I'm hoping that I'll be able to gather a fair amount of seed from the plants that I grow each year and do it that way. It will take at least three years before I can even apply for organic certification, so I've got plenty of time to practise. It costs around $800 to just apply and the forms and record-keeping requirements are weighty, so it will take a lot of preparation and planning.

I read the introduction [PDF file] to Michael Pollan's new book, In Defence of Food: An Eater's Manfesto this morning, via the ChangeThis website. I agree completely with everything he says, although one paragraph made me doubt my sanity a bit:

...forty years ago...there would have been no way to eat the way I propose in my book without going back to the land and growing all your own food. It would have been the manifesto of a crackpot.