Green Homes Tour

We were invited to take part in the County Sustainability Group's Green Homes Tour this year, which forms part of the Quinte Sustainable Living Symposium event this weekend. Three bus parties turned up today (in wet and miserable weather, unfortunately) to get a tour of the solar hot water and geothermal systems in our basement, followed by a look at the greenhouse and at the solar panel set-up in the barn.

It was fantastic to meet so many people with similar interests to ours and Mike did a great job of transmitting his enthusiasm for the green energy projects that we've been undertaking over the last two years. There were a lot of pertinent questions and some good ideas for making the best use of the greenhouse and barns.

One thing that came up which we hadn't heard about before was a concern about using the rainwater from the house roof as drinking water, as the roof has asphalt shingles on it. People in two different groups mentioned that the asphalt can leach out unpleasant chemicals (including oestrogen-like ones) into the water. We hadn't come across this potential problem, so immediately turned to the Internet for answers when the last bus had gone. It turns out that the best way of ensuring that oestrogens are removed from water is to use a reverse osmosis system. Which is what we have, so that's quite a relief!

Filling raised beds

In wet weather, the greenhouse raised beds sit in a puddle of water. To make sure that drainage in the beds wouldn't be a problem I thought it might be a good idea to put sand in the bottom of them. We still had a fairly large heap of sand left behind after the channel from the barn to the house was dug for the backup-power supply, so we didn't need to buy any. Thinking of the way you are supposed to put crocks into containers, I also decided to recycle the large pile of stones that I extracted from the vegetable garden in our first summer here. The pile didn't look that big, but became six (very heavy) barrow-loads.

After tipping in the stones and three tractor-loads of sand the beds had about an inch of material in the base:

Mike has been digging another channel for the stream on the western side of the property, which has given us some topsoil. Here he is with the front-loader of the tractor full of soil for the first bed:

I don't think he had enough opportunity to make mud-pies as a child. Here's a close-up of the contents:

After tipping in six loads, the first bed is now about half-full. The tractor had churned up the path so much that making any more trips seemed unwise today. We've left everything to dry out a bit before doing a bit more, perhaps tomorrow.

While I was away the spinach, lettuce and leeks I sowed in the greenhouse have germinated, but the peas I carefully sowed in the gutters seem to have vanished altogether. Hm, mice maybe? Will have to re-think and re-sow those.

Indoors I've sown peppers and aubergine seeds into trays in the electric propagator. I wasn't too impressed with the Hungarian Hot Wax chilli peppers last year, so this time I've gone for Cayenne and Tomato peppers. I'm also trying again with the Corno di Toro Rosso sweet peppers, despite a lack of any peppers managing to reach maturity last year. I'm hoping that a slightly drier summer and a better location in the garden (one that won't get waterlogged) will do the trick.

Spring at Wisley

It has been a bit quiet around this blog because I've been on a longish trip away: first Amsterdam, then London, then Manchester, then Buckinghamshire, then Edinburgh and finally to Kent. All in eleven days, so it has been a hectic rush on occasions.

Last Wednesday was one of the more peaceful days in the mix, when my aunt took me out to the Royal Horticultural Society's gardens at Wisley in Surrey. I'd never been before, so this was a real treat. The daffodils, magnolias, hellebores and camellias were looking lovely in the warmish spring sunshine.








The dogwoods (Cornus sanguinea) were looking striking, too. I thought this one, 'Midwinter Fire', was particularly impressive.


The bursts of colour in the Alpine houses were beautiful.


Next door, in the rock house, the resident cat, Sunny, was having a luxurious bask in the sunshine, while pretending to be a plant.


I've been wanting to visit Wisley for ages, so am really grateful to have had this chance, and on such a beautiful day, too.

Recht Boomssloot

I have only been in Amsterdam for three hours but have learnt a few things already.

1. It is very easy to get lost while walking in the city centre
2. The roads have wonderful names (the title of this post is the name of the street in the photo)
3. I wouldn't want to be responsible for parallel-parking a car next to one of the waterways

Trust, identity and paranoia

This is a bit off-topic, but I had an email this week from a researcher at Washington University in St. Louis. It read like this:

This is an invitation to participate in an online research study being conducted by Mr. Tal Yarkoni under the supervision of Dr. Simine Vazire at Washington University in St. Louis. The study investigates the relation between people's personality and the content and style of their writing, and has been approved by the Washington University Human Research Protection Office.

The study consists of a single personality questionnaire assessing your personality and background, as well as information about your blog (if you have one). You can choose to participate in either a short or a long version of the study, so your participation can take as little as 10 minutes or as long as 30-40 minutes.

The email address given in the text of the message was a Washington University one, but the email itself came from a gmail.com address. The website with the questionnaire wasn't an official Washington University one and, although the text on the questionnaire looked very legit, I wasn't entirely happy about taking part in the experiment, although it did sound interesting. I did a bit of Googling and found that there certainly was a real researcher by this name, so I sent an email to his 'official' email address, hoping to discover whether Tal was really behind this site and suggesting that the email was likely to put some people off taking part. Searching for the text of the email suggests that it has put off at least one blogger.

Anyway, the upshot is that I had an immediate reply from Tal, explaining that he used Gmail to send out the bulk emails and that Gmail would not allow anything other than a Gmail address to be used for this. He couldn't use a university server for the questionnaire because he needed particular software tools which weren't available on them. So if you're a blogger who has received this message, I feel honour-bound to let you know that it isn't some sort of confidence trick, but a genuine experiment. Tal told me that he's had a better response rate than he was expecting, so clearly not everyone is as paranoid as I am!

Spot the garlic

The garlic I planted in October is just visible again against its mulch of hay, now that the snow has melted. The shoots look a bit sad and sorry for themselves at the moment, but I hope they'll perk up a bit as the weather gets warmer.

Ice on the line

They were right about the freezing rain. Don't think I'd want to be hanging my laundry on the line today.

Brief glimpse of Spring

Hung the washing on the line for the first time this year and then spent a couple of hours this afternoon in the garden and greenhouse. I cleared up the remains of the cabbages that I had failed to harvest before the frosts arrived last year. I also sowed some more lettuce and some leek and spinach seeds into trays in the greenhouse. Mike added a few more scoopfuls of sand to the wettest of the beds in the lower vegetable garden, which I raked into the soil. Or into small ponds, in some cases. Mike also dug another channel to divert some of the stream water away from the barn, which might help to dry the barnyard up a bit more quickly.

I've read about using guttering (eavestrough) to start off peas, so thought I'd have a go at that. In fact the gardener Sarah Raven recommends this for a variety of different vegetables in an article I found online just now. Including parsnips, which might be worth a go. I've never tried doing this before, but as our soil is so cold and damp at the moment (and as I now have a greenhouse to shelter them in!), I thought it was worth a try.

The only time I've seen people doing this, they've been using the semi-circular sort of plastic guttering that you get in the UK. All I had to hand was some old alumin(i)um eavestrough that must have fallen off the side of the small barn at some point. It's square rather than semi-circular, but I'm assuming that it will work just fine. It was quite long, so I got Mike to cut it into two pieces for me, then filled it with potting soil/compost. I've sown Oregon Sugar Snap II in the smaller length and Lincoln peas in the longer one.

Tonight we've got freezing rain forecast, so the fleeting look at Spring won't last long, but it was enough to fill me with enthusiasm for the growing year ahead. Yesterday was so hectic with the book launch we held at the library in Deseronto, that it was lovely today to reconnect with the garden. I'm even pleased to see that my fingernails have regained their trademark growing-season line of muck!

Daffodils from Canada for St. David

Impressed, huh? Yes, beautiful daffodils flowering in this Canadian garden just in time for St. David's Day. Not something you see in Ontario very often.

Well, OK. I cheated. That's how my daffodils looked last year on April the 19th. So a little way to go before I'll see them flowering again. On the plus side, a thaw at the end of last week has melted enough snow for me to begin to see some signs of life. Here are the daffodils as they look today:


And I do believe those are small buds of growth on one of the rhubarb plants:
Even the spinach that was sown in September looks as though it might not be completely past it:
It's so lovely to be able to see the soil and the beginnings of new growth again. Even more so this year, as many of the plants are ones that I've set there. Last spring was our first in this house and I was waiting to see what would come up. This year I know what's in the garden and have put a lot of it there myself, so it feels different. Perhaps a little like the difference between a music teacher watching an unknown musician perform and watching one of their own pupils do so.

Depth of winter

The days are getting longer but it's still really cold (-10°C right now). The wind has been particularly nasty on occasion. This photo is an attempt to capture the thickness of the layers of snow and ice that have built up next to the stream. Precious few signs of spring out there.


Inside I have got some signs of new life with the lettuce mix I sowed in January. They've been growing away well on the living room window sill. I've been putting them out on the veranda on the few days where the temperature has been above freezing. I thought I'd killed them the other day as they had become rather wilted by the afternoon, but was relieved to see this morning that they've bounced back to health again. Some of these will be big enough to eat, soon.

Seville oranges and cedar planks

After making marmalade for the first time last year, I was looking forward to doing so again. I keep seeing other bloggers mention theirs and have been looking out for Seville oranges every time I go shopping. Until this weekend: nothing. I was beginning to get twitchy and irritable about the lack of marmalade-fodder. We shopped at the A&P in Belleville yesterday and they had about 12 very sad Seville oranges. I asked if they had any more and was informed that "That's all we've got and there won't be any more". I finished my shop (a very minimal one because by now I was feeling super-grumpy) and we trekked down to the Dewe's store and, joy of joys, they had a large display of lovely-looking Seville oranges. I bought a couple of kilos and left, very happy.

Last year I used a Delia Smith recipe, which made great marmalade but which took a looooong time. I liked the method, which involved pre-cooking the fruit, so looked around for another similar recipe. I found one which had been put online by chef Anna Colquoun. I hadn't heard of her before, but love this quotation from an interview with her on the eat the right stuff blog (which doesn't seem to like CAPITAL LETTERS much):

americans eat one meal out of five in a car. the western industrialised food system is fast ruining our planet, our social and economic relations, our bodies, our understanding and appreciation of these things, and ultimately our happiness. there are plenty of things wrong with the world, and cooking lovely food isn’t going to lead to world peace, but life for many could be a bit better if more people cared where their food came from and how it was made, had some basic cooking skills so they needn’t rely on processed food, and took time to eat together. plus, cooking is a creative outlet and a hopefully healthy addiction. food can be so delicious and also so bad. it’s more fun to eat the delicious stuff.

This is someone I feel I can trust! The marmalade recipe is the one her mother uses, based on one by Katie Stewart in The Times Cookery Book. Phew, that feels like a long and convoluted provenance (here's the recipe: it's a PDF file).


I had about 4½ pounds of fruit, so had to multiply everything in the recipe by 1½. The simmering-the-fruit phase takes an hour, then the oranges are cut open and the pulp and pips put into one bowl and the peel into another. Here is my first attempt at a video cookery demo (so be gentle in your criticisms please - I know it isn't very enthralling - and I think I sound horribly like Delia Smith!). This is to demonstrate step three in the recipe above - the way that the oranges look after they've been simmered for an hour.



While it's boiling the marmalade fills the house with a wonderful syrupy citrus smell.

The final boiling phase took about an hour, but might have been quicker if I'd let the marmalade boil faster (I'm a bit timid about leaving pans of boiling syrup unattended). The next video clip shows how it looks at the end of the boiling phase (and how to see whether it's reached setting point):


If you've ever wondered what the recipe books mean by the marmalade wrinkling on a saucer, here's a demonstration:


The finished product looks fine - just as dark and chunky as last year's, but with a shorter cooking time, which is what I wanted. It made eight one-pound jars, which is about four fewer than the recipe suggests I should have got.

I have since been wondering whether it is all worth it, given the food miles involved in shipping the oranges from Spain to Canada (and being aware that several jars will be travelling back to England with my mother-in-law after her next visit!). But I love making (and eating) marmalade so much that I would be sorry not to, even if it is a thoroughly environmentally-unsound rigmarole. [POSTSCRIPT: It turns out that our Seville oranges are actually from the USA, so I'm less worried about this now.]

My other Valentine's Day present was a fine trailer-load of cedar planks and posts, which were destined to become the raised beds in the greenhouse. We had thought we'd be able to use pressure-treated timber, but I remembered some question about arsenic being used in that process (rendering it not safe for use around food crops) and Mike looked it up to check. Well, the good news was that arsenic hasn't been used in the pressure-treating process since 2003, but the bad news was that if you want to grow food that will be certified organic, it might not be acceptable. Using cedar planks was the other option. The wood should last for 20 years - but was twice the cost of the pressure-treated alternative. So I really do need to sell some of the food we'll be growing in these beds in order to justify the expenditure. Which means jumping through the organically-certified hoops at some point. Oh joy.

Building them was fun though. It was still below freezing outside, but in the greenhouse it was pleasantly warm. We constructed three beds in a couple of hours and they look fantastic. Now we've just got to work out how to fill them with a suitably organic growing medium. I had been thinking of getting some spent mushroom compost from the local mushroom farm, but a bit of reading around the topic suggests that it will be full of chemicals, so not a good plan. Looks like we'll be digging soil from other parts of the farm and combining it with home-made compost to start with. But 270 cubic feet of material is quite a lot to find...

I'm really, really not sure about this...

It's a bit slick up by the barn, where all that water froze overnight. The dog was not impressed.

Awash

A few days of above-zero temperatures and over an inch of rain have left us swamped with far too much water. Yesterday began rather attractively with layers of mist forming above the snow. I stopped on my way to work in Deseronto to take this picture of the Bay of Quinte from Georges Road. The mist was forming above the ice on the bay as the snow began to melt.


Last night was just plain foggy. We drove back from a meal in Picton through some of the thickest fog I've ever seen. Where there were road markings, it wasn't too bad because you could line up with the white and yellow lines, but on the minor roads it was scary because the edges weren't so obvious. It was particularly frightening coming along Lakeside Drive, as we were all too aware of the proximity of the lake in question!

Today the fog had gone, but water continues to gush down the slope on which our property sits. The 'path' to the barn has been transformed into a fast-flowing stream with treacherous icy sections which is almost impossible to walk along:

The worst part is that the weather is due to turn cold again for the next week, which will turn all of this water into ice and make it even more difficult to walk!

Enough grumbling. Here's a pretty sunset from the other night to change the subject.

Cold out there - but warm and cosy inside

It's finally started to warm up a bit. The weather station reports that for January we had:

Mean high: -4.7°C/23.5°F (norm -2°C/28°)

Mean low: -14.3°C/6.3°F (norm -14°C/6.8°F)

Average temperature: -9°C/15.8°F (norm -7°C/19.4°F)

Days with temperatures below -18°C/0°F: 12

Days with temperatures above 0°C/32°F: 5

Highest temperature: 3.3°C/38°F

Lowest temperature: -24.4°C/-12°F

So it has been a couple of degrees colder overall than the long-term average for this area. There certainly wasn't a noticeable thaw this January.

With precious little happening on the gardening front (and beginning to get tired of looking at snow and icicles), I've been interested to follow a gardening meme started by VP on her Veg Plotting blog. VP is asking fellow gardening bloggers to select 3-5 dinner party guests for this evening who have an interest in gardening or nature. There have been some excellent entries (see VP's own selection and the links from that post for other people's).

I've been having some thought about this and am finding it very difficult, but here are my choices of people I'd like to see around the table at my imaginary dinner party tonight.

Firstly (since an interest in nature as well as gardening is allowed) I think I'd like Sir David Attenborough to come along. I bet he is just full of brilliant stories about plants, animals and people. I so enjoyed her book The Naming of Names, that I'd love to have Anna Pavord as guest number two. I'm sure lots of other British gardeners will choose my third guest, Geoff Hamilton. My parents always watched Gardeners' World on a Friday evening and Geoff presented the show for 17 years until his untimely death in 1996. I wasn't really into gardening in those days, but even I found the parts of the show with Geoff in them interesting and accessible. As an early advocate of organic methods, he had a big impact on UK gardeners.

I would be interested to see how Geoff got on with my fourth guest, Michael Pollan, the hugely influential US writer on food and agriculture. My final guest would be Kate Gardner, resident of Bozeman, Montana, and author of the Manic Gardener blog, which is stuffed full of interesting research on organic gardening and the environment, but which also makes me chuckle on a regular basis. If I had a bigger table there are a number of other bloggers that I'd squeeze in around the corners, too, but VP has limited our guests to just five, so maybe another time...

Having a (snow) ball

We've had so much snow over the past week. The kids are thoroughly enjoying it: making forts, snow-people and burrows and getting completely caked in it. The demand for hot chocolate is high.


After this family snow battle on Friday, child #2 declared it to have been the best fun he'd ever had (except for our trip to the water park in Montreal last year). That made me smile - you can spend a fortune on electronic gadgets of various kinds, but in a child's mind, it's the time you spend doing fun things together as a family that are the best.

Do I have to go out?

Just taking the green kitchen waste out to the compost bins is a mite challenging when the bins look like this:

The greenhouse is getting a good bit of snowy insulation:
I would hardly venture out at all if it weren't for the dog needing to do what a dog needs to do. It seems to take forever just to put on enough clothes to be able to go out and stay at least mostly warm and dry. Though even the dog didn't waste much time out there yesterday afternoon, when the snow was coming in horizontally and the temperature was -5°C (23°F):

Sleeping under newspapers

Now that the alumin(i)um wiring has all gone, we could finally get round to putting a decent layer of insulation in the attic. I'd say 'loft', but I recently discovered that attic≠loft in Canadian English. Though I'm not entirely clear on the distinction - so any clarification welcome!

We now have a snug 15-inch layer of recycled newsprint above our heads (it has been converted into fluff and treated to make it fire- and pest-resistant, I feel I should point out). This brings the R-value of the attic's insulation up to 50 from its previous level of around 10. Should make it a bit warmer upstairs on these cold winter nights...

'Photogenic drawings'

Couldn't resist having a bit more of a play with making some high-tech versions of the Fox Talbot photogenic drawings. These are made from some pictures of the few plants that are still visible above the snow: trees, grass and seedheads of asters and Queen Anne's lace.

Black on white

Some lake-effect snow coming down this morning while the sun did its best to reach us. I've always liked the way that falling snow looks black against the sky. Not sure you'll be able to see it in this shot (unless you click on the picture for a closer look).

Thought I'd try turning the image into a negative to see if I could turn the snow white again:

I'm not sure that the snow is any easier to see, but I really like the effect made by the outlines of the trees. It reminds me of the early 'photogenic drawing process' images developed by William Fox Talbot in the 1830s (for an example see the lovely image of fern leaves in an online De Montfort University exhibit about the man). Will have to play with this option some more, I think...

School lunch snack #3

Yes!! Have managed to make sweet snacks for every school day in January. Now just have to keep that up for the rest of the year. This week the request was for jam tarts.

I once made jam tarts when I was a first-year student. I had jam and butter but no bread (of the yeast or financial varieties), and a desperate craving for something sweet to eat. Making jam tarts seemed like the obvious solution - even though the hall of residence kitchen only had one of those terrible little Baby Belling ovens. We had had a Christmas party which involved making mince pies, so I did have a bun tin to hand.

Jam tarts have never tasted as good as they did that night.