Almost edible

Meeting your meat

This weekend it was 'Maple in the County' time, when maple producers and other food-related businesses open their doors to the public to promote their wares. We took the opportunity to visit the small farm belonging to the Nyman family, whose meat CSA scheme we joined last year.

There were baby lambs, pigs and cows in their barn. It's not often that most people get to see the meat that they'll be eating while it's still on the hoof.

All the attention was a bit too much for some of them!

Spring's teeth

After months of gingerly negotiating huge sheets of ice around the stream that leads up to the pond, we've had two or three weeks of warm weather and it has all melted and been forgotten.

Until today, when the temperature dipped to -8°C/17°F overnight and we were given a reminder that Spring can bite. It was cold enough to freeze the surface of the stream in places. Sometimes in jagged toothy outcrops:

And in other places in solid sheets. The droplets of water underneath this layer of ice caught the sun in a pleasing manner. Like beads of glass.

Experiment in rodent-proofing peas

The Oregon Sugar Pod II peas are coming up beautifully in the greenhouse:

The Lincoln peas I sowed a few days earlier failed to appear and it soon became clear that they had all been consumed by rodents unknown. I don't know why they are so appealing and the other ones aren't. I still had some seeds left, so this time I thought I'd experiment with a chilli deterrent. I ground up three of last year's dried cayenne peppers, added them to a bowl of water and then soaked the peas for a few hours. My idea was that the infusion would make the peas less palatable to whatever was digging them up (although I should note that the chilli-coated bird seed wasn't much of a deterrent to the squirrels). I sowed them in the same spot and then tipped the bits of chilli and the soaking water over the peas before covering them up with soil.

This morning, there were some small holes in the soil but it does look as though once the creature hit the layer of chilli fragments, it gave up. Time will tell - I'll report back on whether it worked or not.

The slight (and possibly obvious to you) flaw in my method, which only occurred to me after I had covered over the peas, is that those pepper seeds from the dried peppers are probably perfectly viable. Which means that I may well be getting pepper seedlings germinating along with the peas. Oops. Oh well, it's far too early to be sowing peppers in the greenhouse, so even if they do germinate, I doubt they'll last very long!

Park life

I dragged everyone out for a walk this afternoon, as the day was fine and mild. We went to Belleville and did the circuit of Zwick's Park. It's a level route which is popular with cyclists and skaters as well as dog-walkers. There were quite a few people out enjoying it today.

A pair of swans were feeding on the east side of the park, where the Moira river empties into the Bay of Quinte. I did take some in-focus pictures of them, but this one, where the camera paid attention to the tree instead, is my favourite:

The park is bisected by the Bay Bridge Road carrying traffic to and from Prince Edward County over the Norris Whitney Bridge. The path goes underneath the road in two places. Just after going under the road for the first time we caught sight of a red-tailed hawk, gliding to rest on a tree:

There were only small patches of ice left in the edges of the bay. Not enough to make this sign useful, though.

There are good views of the bridge from the western half of the park. I have no idea who Norris Whitney was, by the way.

In the water just to the right of the bridge we saw a beaver. And just as I pressed the shutter button it dived underwater. Pesky rodent.

We've been over this bridge many times but this was the first time I had been under it. I liked this view of the supports: a bit like the effect you get when you're caught between two mirrors.

Dreaming on the left

Driving on the other side of the road is one of those things that causes worry for people. It doesn't take very long to get used to - especially as you're generally on the opposite side of the car as the driver. I noticed in a few driving-related dreams I've had recently that my sub-conscious is still driving on the left (although the car I'm travelling in is left-hand drive).

This morning I had another driving dream. (Sorry, I know other people's dreams are really boring.) This time, I made an effort within the dream to see which side of the road we were on. It was the left, again. I turned to the driver (Mike) and said "You're on the wrong side of the road!". At which point he crossed over to the other side of the road and started driving on the right.

Maybe my sub-conscious will drive on the right from now on. Now I've just got to worry about the fact that I always seem to be a passenger rather than the driver in my own dreams. I bet Freud would have had a field day with that...

Image from Flickr user Sergio~.

A little summer heat

We were given a jar of chilli jam by one of our neighbours at Christmas. It was delicious: so much so that it didn't last very long. We had a bumper crop of chillies and peppers last year, a lot of which was still taking up space in the freezer. Nigella Lawson's chilli jam recipe looked like an ideal way of using some of them up while replenishing the store cupboard with fiery tastiness.

I didn't have any jam sugar, so to start with I optimistically made the jelly with just regular sugar, hoping that there might be enough pectin in the chillies and peppers to set the jam. There wasn't. I bought a packet of pectin in a quick supermarket dash today and re-boiled the runny jam with it. This time it looks like it's going to set. The colour is great.

I love the way that a combination of new and old food-preservation techniques means that I can be making preserves out-of-season like this with last summer's bounty.

Cooking...something else

Warm weather and the sight of seedlings in the greenhouse prompted me to get making some compost from the detritus in the chicken coop. The chickens are spending most of their time out in the orchard again now, which meant I could get into their corner of the barn this afternoon and remove a barrow-full of shavings and droppings from underneath their roosting area.

We obtained a rotating composter from a County scheme two years ago. I was never very satisfied with it as a means of turning kitchen waste into garden compost. This was my own fault, I think, for failing to supply it with enough moisture to do the job properly. My regular vertical plastic bins do a good job without needing any additional water, so I'd stopped using the rotating one. But it did occur to me recently that it might be a suitable container for turning the chicken waste into compost.

I transferred my barrow-load of material into the composter, adding a fair bit of water as I went. By the time I finished there was an unappetising chicken-poop-coloured drip emanating from the base of the unit, so I hope I've added the right amount.*

I did all this in the greenhouse, thinking this location will help the contents get to the required temperature to kill pathogens (130-150°F/55-65°C according to this article at Seattle Tilth). There is a ready supply of water in there, too, which will help me to keep it at the right level of saturation to encourage decomposition. The 'uncooked' compost mix looks like this:

The article from the Seattle Tilth site suggests that the proportions of brown to green material (i.e. shavings to manure) in the mix should be 1:2, 1:1 or 2:1. I have to admit that I did not carefully measure the proportions (shocking, I know), but I suspect that it is more like 2:1 or even 3:1. I hope that in a month or two it will be in a fit state to add to the garden.

*This is reminding me of one of my grandfather's jokes. Oh dear, can't resist sharing it.
Woman to butcher: "Do you keep dripping?"
Butcher: "No Madam, it's just the way I stand."

Covered

After yesterday's trailer shenanigans, today Mike made the three new raised beds in the greenhouse, which now looks satisfyingly full of growing space.

Most of the seeds I've sown in there so far are in the central bed on the right (the one with the extra protection of a floating row cover). The rockets seedlings have been the first to emerge.

It was warm in there, so we seized the dog and the opportunity of giving him a good wash. For which we were rewarded in time-honoured fashion:

Trailer hitches

This photo was taken the last time we tried to use the trailer, in December.* It took Mike several hours to get the lights to work. It was a similar story yesterday: the lights were poorly-made and never seem to work consistently.

Poor Mike spent much of the day stripping the lights down into their component parts and then giving up and going off to buy new ones. All so that he could get some more cedar planks and build me three more raised beds in the greenhouse.

Meanwhile, the kids and I were having fun at a birthday party down the road. I provided lemon-meringue ice cream. It was the first time I'd made it and ended up being a combination of two different recipes. The idea was stolen from Delia Smith's Summer Collection, but the lemon ice-cream recipe was lifted from David Lebovitz's excellent book The Perfect Scoop. In that book, he crumbles speculoos/speculaas (gingersnaps from the Low Countries) into the lemon (I've made that version too and it is delicious). But since I was going to be making the ice-cream properly for once, i.e. only using yolks (I usually use whole eggs), I thought I'd make meringues with the whites and stir those in, instead.

The ingredients for the lemon ice-cream:

Zest of two large lemons
¾cup/150g sugar (with the sugar in the meringues, this could probably be reduced to ½cup/100g)
1 cup/250ml whole milk
2 cups/500ml double/heavy cream
Pinch salt
5 egg yolks

And for the meringue:

3 egg whites (or use all five and add proportionally more sugar - you can always eat the extra meringues on their own!)
1 cup/170g sugar

Make the meringue first: whisk the egg whites until they are stiff and then add half the sugar, a spoonful at a time until the meringue is glossy and holds its shape. Fold in the rest of the sugar. Heat the oven to 225°F/100°C/Gas Mark ¼. Put spoonfuls of the mixture onto parchment paper on a baking sheet and then bake for an hour and a half.

Put the lemon zest and sugar into a saucepan with the milk and about a quarter of the cream. Warm it thoroughly and then leave to infuse for about an hour.

Pour the remaining cream into a large bowl and set a sieve/strainer over it. Re-heat the infused milk until it is warm, then beat it into the egg yolks (it's important to add the milk to the egg yolks and not the other way round - they will curdle if you do!). Return the egg yolks and milk mixture to the pan and heat, stirring constantly, until the mixture thickens enough to leave a thick coating on the back of the spoon. Pour this custard through the strainer into the cream. Discard the pieces of lemon zest that will be left in the strainer and put the ice-cream mixture into the fridge to cool down until you are ready to make the ice cream.

After you have got the ice-cream made, crumble or cut the meringue into small pieces, stir them into the soft ice-cream and then freeze until you need it. You have to take it out of the freezer at least half an hour before you want to eat it, to soften.

It was very good!

*No husbands were harmed in the making of this image.

Cheating

The heavy snow of last Thursday is still on the ground, but it is melting fast and turning our back garden into a highly unattractive pond. I don't have any well-formed plans for the future of this area, in terms of planting, but I think whatever ends up here will need to be fairly amphibious.

Still wintry-looking outside, then, but inside the greenhouse there are some promising signs of life. The soil in the raised beds has unfrozen and the purple sprouting broccoli and kale plants that I left in there to over-winter as an experiment are looking much better than they did at the end of January.

There are some blood-veined sorrel seedlings pushing their way out of the ground, too:

This afternoon I did my first bit of seed-sowing in the greenhouse for the year: some rows of peas and spring onions. I'll probably follow those up with some lettuce, carrots and spinach in the next few days for some early crops. This time last year, the beds were still a month away from being filled with soil. It's wonderful to be able to get ahead of the weather like this, even if it does make me feel that I'm cheating, somehow...

Photo opportunities

As the snow has been so thin on the ground* this year, the scenery offers views that aren't always available in the winter. I stopped to take this picture of pleasing stripes in a ploughed field yesterday.

The camera is a huge help in identifying birds. To my eyes, this bunch of birds were black silhouettes against a grey sky. Later on, looking at the photos I took of them and my invaluable Birds of Ontario book I could see that they are cedar waxwings: the yellow stripe at the end of the tail and the yellow breasts are quite clearly visible to the camera's eye.

This morning we have snow. Usually by the end of February I'd be bored of taking photos of snowy trees. With so little snow this year (and today's is likely to turn to rain) I seized the opportunity of an early walk with the dog in a snow-weighted world.

*Sorry

Frozen falls

I had to stop the car again on my journey home tonight. The ice formations on this rock cut(ting) were too intriguing to drive past:

Here's a close-up of one section. It reminds me of those long-exposure pictures of waterfalls that people take.

It has definitely been more of an ice-winter than a snow-winter. So far, anyway. (Probably just typing those words will guarantee us a major snowstorm later in the week!) Our well has even run dry a few times, which is the first time that has happened to us in winter-time.

Winter comforts

The very first of this year's vegetable seedlings has emerged today:

It's so tiny that my camera can't focus on it, even on the macro setting. This is not the first seedling to appear in this seed tray: I proudly took a photograph of another tiny plant on Thursday, which turned out to have two cotyledon leaves. So whatever it is, it isn't a leek! I've left it there for now - there is so little green in my life at the moment that I'm even reluctant to pull up a weed.

I made a rice pudding the other night, to keep out the winter cold. Doesn't it look billowingly beautiful?

The first recipe I found online called for 20 ounces of rice for six people. That can't be right, can it? Instead, I went with a Delia Smith recipe, which sounded a bit more sensible (although I did increase the quantity of rice to six ounces, which worked fine).

Punks make my day

Sorry, yes, yet another picture of these cattails/bulrushes. In fact, if my digital camera files outlive me, I'm beginning to worry that my descendants will think that I'm suffering from an unhealthy obsession, as I've taken so many photographs of them. I love the way the seed heads unravel. With everything else in a winter stasis, these are one of the few things in my landscape that are changing every day. And just look at the colour of that sky.

What I didn't know until recently was that most parts of these plants are edible. The seeds themselves were used as stuffing for pillows and for lining moccasins, according to the mine of information at this site, while the brown heads burn slowly, so were used as fuses (known as candlewicks or punks) and are also effective at keeping mosquitoes away.

Another reason I'm intrigued by this particular stand of cattails is that they are fairly new. I dug out a photo of the pond from November 2007 and you can see that there are no reeds in the foreground.

The photo below, taken on 30 January this year, from roughly the same place, shows how much they've grown since them. The seeds are so light that they are easily distributed by the wind. The plants also spread underwater through their rhizomes.

They are an invasive species but they also perform a valuable role in filtering impurities from water, so I'm not too worried about them taking over. I'm looking forward to tasting the shoots in early summer: they're supposed to be like cucumber and can even be made into pickles!

Snakes and sparkles

I've only seen today's weather conditions a few times since we've lived here. It was a sunny day but there was a very fine snow falling. This filled the morning air with glorious sparkles of light. I tried making a short video of it against our neighbour's dark blue garage wall. I'm not sure how well this shows the effect, but it might give at least some idea of what I'm on about:

I had to stop the car on my way to work to take this photo of a cedar fence. I've been admiring it for years and meaning to take a photo of it for some time. Today the light and the dusting of snow combined to make the perfect moment. The zig-zag style is known as a snake fence. Good for shallow soils, apparently, which are certainly not hard to find in these parts.

Sunshafts

I like the contrast between the dark, twisting roots of the tree-stump fence reaching upwards and the bright, straight fingers of sunlight stretching down.

On swearing

I wanted to jot down a few unscientific observations on a linguistic area that I've been pondering for a while now: the differences I've observed in the use of swear words by citizens of the UK and by those of this part of Canada. I'm sure there are whole theses and many articles and other blog posts on the subject, but I've avoided reading about them so far.

I informally polled co-workers last week at the library (ranging in age from late teens to late 50s) to help me work out how they see some of these words. I also interrogated my children, as their language is actively being formed at school by listening to the usage of others. They also get corrected when they use words that their teachers or friends think are inappropriate; people don't tend to do that when you're a grown-up!

I'm breaking my discoveries down into three main types of swearing:

Regular swearing

Most of the swear-words in this section are used in both countries, although the teenager I spoke to said that she liked using the word 'bollocks', which she saw as a British swear word. Most of the usual swear words are the same, with the exception of 'pants' and 'bloody', which are much more specific to British, rather than Canadian English.*

Religious swearing

The first difference I noticed on moving here was the greater sensitivity to religious swearing. I didn't ask the women at the library about the use of the word 'God' (will have to do that next week!), but we did discuss 'damn' and 'Hell'. Neither of these last two words seems particularly taboo to me, but they are looked upon that way by my interviewees. I was fascinated to discover from my colleagues that 'Hell' is considered the worse word of the two. Which seems odd to me, as really it's just a place name. If I say "Bloody hell", then to me it's the 'bloody' bit that makes it more rude. It was interesting that the eldest of the women in the library managed to avoid saying 'Hell' even while we were discussing it, such was her aversion to the word. I guess teenagers here would not be given Paradise Lost to read, like we were.**

Swearing that isn't swearing

The day after my discussion with the library folk, I had a visit to the dentist's. There's a lovely hygienist there and we had a good chat while she was working on my teeth. Which isn't easy, as you know. One thing we talked about was the prevalence of fighting in hockey, which she described as 'stupid'.
"But I don't use that word to my son," she added.
This was a new one to me, but I asked my children about it and they confirmed that 'stupid' is another word that they are told not to use at school. My library informants told me that 'shut up' is also fairly taboo, which is interesting, given its recent change of use as an expression of incredulity in Valspeak. I'm now wondering how many other relatively inoffensive words I've been using turn out to be rude here.

Conclusion

I'm not someone who swears a lot.† Not in public anyway. But what I've come to realise over the last week or so is that I probably have been swearing (to other people's ears) without even knowing it. I'm sure my observations so far are only scratching the surface!

*'Bloody' may technically be a religious swear word, but I don't think that's common knowledge (and there seems to be some debate about whether it is or not).
**Well, only the first two books, if I'm honest.
†Except where tomato hornworms are concerned

Making plans

While the weather is cold and the ground frozen solid it is good to be indoors, planning 2010's vegetable garden. This will be our third year of growing food in the barnyard, so I need to start thinking about crop rotation more carefully than I have done up to now. I made a similar plan for 2009's garden but the final planting locations ended up being very different from the ones I had put in the plan. In fact, with the exception of the first long bed, none of the plots ended up being used for the crops I had originally thought I would put into them. This does make me wonder if doing this year's plan is a waste of time, too.

The key problem is that the eight lower beds are generally waterlogged in the Spring and therefore stay colder for longer than the three sloping beds above them, meaning that the earlier crops have to go in the long beds. We have gradually been adding soil (and some sand) to the lower garden to build those beds up a bit. This year I'm aiming to put the potatoes in two of the lower beds, which will mean planting them later than I have done in the past. Last year it was the potatoes I sowed latest that did the best, so I'm hoping that this scheme will work. I suppose I can always plant some early potatoes in large pots in the greenhouse.

I haven't thought too much about what I'll be doing with the greenhouse this year. Probably much the same as last year, but rotating the crops in there as well. There are still some plants alive in there now. The kale are looking slightly droopy and haven't put on any growth in a while but they aren't dead yet:

The purple-sprouting broccoli look less happy, but we'll see if they come back as it gets warmer:

There are some (very late-sown) carrot seedlings clinging on to life too:

The Swiss chard has continued to grow and the chickens love it. Which is more than I can say for most of the humans. It's proved to be a useful source of green material for the birds when it has been too cold and snowy for them to go out into the orchard and eat the grass.

All of these things were experiments, as this is our first winter with the greenhouse fully in use and I wasn't at all sure what would survive and what wouldn't.

Wood. Pecked.

Something has been busy on this half-dead poplar tree. I just discovered that many woodpeckers have feathered nostrils to filter out the sawdust they produce while they are hammering.* Also, the tongue of the Hairy Woodpecker is four times longer than its beak (the tongue rolls up like a tape measure).

*I was going to make an observation about nose-hair here, but decided that it would have been in poor taste.