Sprouts

I found some instructions on how to sprout alfafla seeds on Saturday. I started the process off and was pleased to see that on Sunday afternoon many of the seeds were already sending out small roots:

It works!

Seedy Saturday

There's a seed-swapping event going on today in Picton. I've never been to one before, so wasn't sure about how they worked. But taking seeds seemed to be a key part of the whole concept, so I spent some time this morning bagging up some of the parsley, dill and coriander seeds I collected from the greenhouse herbs last summer.

There was a long table at the event, with different containers for different categories of seeds. I deposited my collection in the 'herb' basket and was then free to browse the others. I came away with some Dakota Black Popcorn, Green Arrow peas and a packet of Nicotiana sylvestris.

See those brown envelopes? They're just made from single sheets of paper. I felt bad about my seeds in their plastic bags when I saw them - I think they're great. Maybe next year...

There were seed vendors there, too, with a wide range of seeds for sale. I couldn't resist a packet of alfalfa seeds: I've been meaning to have a go at growing some seeds for sprouting for ages. Child#2 was given a packet of mixed sunflowers by the lady at the Edith Fox Life and Loss Centre's table and I listened to Vicki Emlaw of Vicki's Veggies give an interesting talk about the concept of seed sovereignty and how to go about saving lettuce seeds.

I'm glad I went along. Now I need to do some research to find out how best to sprout these alfalfa seeds...

Early start

A dentist's appointment at 8am had the children and me on the road early this morning. We were rewarded with sparkling trees and bushes, coated with hoar frost. Not sure that these photos do it justice, though.

Boo

I keep forgetting that I need to shut the cupboard doors these days.

Chickens out

The cold and the depth of snow have kept the poor chickens confined to their coop for much of the last month-and-a-half.

With a few days of above-freezing temperatures at last, enough snow had melted to reveal some small patches of grass for them to eat today. It's been such a contrast to last winter, when they were out in the orchard much more often. I love seeing them scratching and pecking about outside.

Powerless

Last May I wrote a short post about how we're sponsoring Mike's mother to come and live with us here. We knew it was going to be a long wait before she would come out: parents and grandparents are not a priority for the immigration service.

Today's news about immigration rates is not good for our family and many others like us. There are 140,000 people in the parents-and-grandparents queue, it seems, and now they are only going to allow 11,000 in, each year. At this rate, it will be more than 10 years before our family will be reunited.

It's so frustrating and upsetting. A lot of new immigrants have no vote (ourselves included), so it's an easy way for the government to save money without losing the good opinion of voters. Indeed, reading the comments on that CBC article would suggest that this move is popular with many Canadians, who see immigration as a problem and people like my mother-in-law as a potential burden on the state.

All we want to do is offer my children's grandmother a place in our new life and the comfort of having her only family members around her. Apparently, it's too much to ask.

Growing

The snow drifts are still getting bigger.

But so are the lettuce seedlings on the windowsill in the living room.

I am beginning to get tired of the snow, but not enough to stop taking pictures of it yet!

It'll come in useful, one day

My parents had one of those fundamental personality differences in relation to 'stuff'. I think it's like the cat person/dog person distinction. Dad's tendency is always to keep a thing in case it might be useful, whereas Mum had more of a 'chuck it' mentality. My sympathies were with Mum, generally, and I am usually fairly ruthless in trying to keep the number of my possessions to a minimum.

This little trug is an exception. I received it as a Christmas present from a colleague, ooh, probably about 10 years ago now. It contained some hand-cream and hand-scrub for gardeners. It's too small to be of much use in harvesting garden produce, but I've always kept it, as it seemed too nice to throw away and I thought that maybe, one day, I would come up with a use for it.

Now we're getting a respectable number of eggs, that day has come, at last.

Temporary installation

Art Gallery of Ontario: first impressions

It's hard to do justice to a gallery or museum on a first visit - there's always far too much to see and my legs always give up before I feel I've done the place justice. My overall impression of the AGO was positive, and my response to the physical space that was the Galleria Italia (below) was one of 'Wow!'.

I had time to visit the current exhibition on the Maharajas (worth seeing for the amazing restored Cartier diamond and ruby necklace towards the end, alone (the photo in that article doesn't do it justice)), the Canadian artists section, most of the European section on level 2 and the ship models in the basement. These are watched over by a splendid lion figurehead. Which I wasn't allowed to photograph and which isn't online anywhere, so you'll just have to imagine it. You can see highlights of the Canadian Collection on the gallery's website. It's a shame that you can't click from one image to the next, rather than having to go back to the list all the time, but at least you can see some of the artworks without having to visit Toronto.

My favourite piece of art in the Canadian section was Franklin Carmichael's Cranberry Lake (1931) - the way he's captured the sun on the water and the eerie shapes of the dead trees in the foreground. In the European section the image which caught my attention the most was James Tissot's The Shop Girl
- I love the tangle of ribbons on the counter. I was also fascinated by the carved items in the Thomson Collection - some of them quite macabre, such as the rosary pendant showing a skull being eaten by worms and lizards. The incredibly intricate wooden carvings in prayer beads were also amazing - such detailed work in such a tiny space.

I paid a visit to the basement café, which was rather a disappointment after the rest of the gallery. Like having a cup of tea in someone's basement, in fact. I think they could have made it a more interesting space. But, perhaps, as so often happens, the money ran out before the basement could be properly finished. ;-)

More white things

The promised storm left us with some impressive snow drifts yesterday. The tractor's snow-blowing attachment hasn't seen a lot of use this winter, but it was proving handy this morning. Yesterday was the first Wednesday when I haven't driven to Deseronto because of the weather. In our first winter I drove through a few storms like that (they always seem to happen on a Wednesday), determined not to be thought of as wimpish and probably giving myself a few more grey hairs in the process. These days I'm more sensible.

The dog disturbed an animal in the barn yesterday - all I saw of it was its tail, which was rather like a cat's in shape and size, white with a black tip. It hid in the woodpile before I could get a better look at it. At first I thought it was a cat, but a bit of hunting around on Wikipedia suggests that it was a stoat in its white winter coat. Which is ermine, of course. Nice to see it on the animal instead of trimming someone's robes. Not that I spend an awful lot of time with nobles in full regalia, it has to be said. If the stoat's going to eat the rats and mice in the barn, then I'm quite happy - but I am worried about the chickens...

Talking of pests, I had to do a bit of snow-clearing myself. While Mike was negotiating the tractor around one of the trees at the back of the house, the blowing snow hit the back door, forcing it open. Our utility room rapidly filled up with snow:

Mike's slippers were one of the main casualties. Which I feel is a suitable penalty for making me shovel snow indoors.

This evening, Mother Nature is the one doing the snow blowing:

Groundhog Day

You know that 'stuck in a rut' feeling? Well, walking the dog is just that at the moment. The depth of snow has made it easier to follow a particular route, which has now become a regular pathway, brooking no variation to our twice-daily excursions. It's getting a bit...samey.

I'm almost looking forward to the promised (threatened?) 'Groundhog Day storm': 20-30cm/8-12 inches of snow which will obliterate the path and force us to forge a new trail.

Libraries and volunteers

Wellington Library

This post is slightly off-topic for this blog, really, but at the core of it is what seems to be a deep difference between the way things work in Canada and in the UK. The context is the deep cuts in library services that are being made across many areas of Great Britain. This grim map shows the extent of the planned closures. There is an assumption being made by those advocating closures that volunteers will step up to keep libraries open.

My very limited experience here in Canada is that volunteers have an important (actually, essential) role in small libraries. There is a core of paid staff, but a lot of desk-duty, book-shelving and labelling is undertaken by volunteers. When I started reading British librarians' objections to the use of volunteers, my first reaction was to think 'well it seems to work quite well here', and wonder what the fuss was about. The work done by volunteers in just one library I'm involved with here is worth tens of thousands of dollars a year.

But then I reflected a bit further and realised that 'here' and 'there' aren't very similar in this respect. My sense is that volunteering is much more common here and there is much more community spirit. Of course, part of this is the difference between living in a rural area here and (most recently) living in a city, there, but I also lived in an Oxfordshire village for a while and I still don't think there was the same extent of voluntary work there. There was a central hard-core set of retired people who had time to spare for community work, but I would say that was it. Just here in the County there are so many different organisations which do charitable works in the community - Lions, Kiwanis, Rotary, Legion, Elks, Odd Fellows, Masons, Women's Institutes, to name but a few (and that's not even looking at the activities of the various churches). And all for a population of only 25,000.

In Ontario, children have to do 40 hours of community service once they get to high school, which helps to get them into the volunteering mindset, I suppose. The Canadian Citizenship Study Guide we've got to learn for our test emphasises that one of the responsibilities of citizenship is 'Helping others in the community'. I somehow doubt that the same point is made in the British equivalent, but I'd be happy to be proved wrong about that.

Philip Pullman's wonderful, passionate speech in defence of Oxfordshire's threatened libraries makes good points about the scarcity of volunteers in the UK. I wonder why the two countries are so different in this respect, and whether it has always the case, or if something changed at some point in the UK to make people less likely to volunteer their time for others.

Icy Mondays

Last Monday was the coldest we've seen here, as previously reported. The inside of the chickens' plastic water bottle froze around the edges (even though it's sitting underneath a heat lamp). The circle of ice looked like a crown, we decided.

Today is cold again and this time the ice from inside the water feeder looks more like a pork pie hat.

One of the things I really dislike about this very cold weather is the way the snow sounds when you walk on it. It's squeaky: like walking on polystyrene. Then the laces on my winter boots freeze solid and I have to stand in front of the wood stove for a minute or two before I can get them off. It has been too cold to melt the snow on the solar panels, so although the sun has been shining, we've made hardly any electricity in the last two days.

 It will be warming up tomorrow, to -1°C/30°F, which will be quite a relief!

Snowstars

Sparkles of sunlight

in yesterday’s snow. Stars that

fell down in the night?

Coldest yet

The temperature dropped to a new low of -28.8°C/-19.8°F this morning (at which point the weather-recording device decided to stop working. I don't blame it.) It wasn't quite so cold when I took the dog out for his mid-morning walk. More like -15°C/5°F. He didn't seem to mind, though.

It makes me laugh when he has to negotiate deep snow - he bounds through it, like some kind of giant dog-rabbit.

You wouldn't think that water would be running after such a cold night, but the spring near the pond was still flowing:

In other places, where there had been some water visible a few days ago, the ice had formed interesting new structures on the surface. I thought I'd seen all the different types of ice that could form on or around the stream, but these ones were new to me. They look like flowers, or somebody's crystal-growing chemistry experiment:

Ginger syrup sponge pudding and vanilla ice-cream

Another day, another egg-induced panic. Ice cream is always a good way of using them up, of course. For future reference, here is my bulk recipe for basic vanilla ice-cream, made with home-made cream, for reasons previously rehearsed.

Ingredients

1lb/454g unsalted butter (must be unsalted)
32 (UK) fluid ounces/900ml milk (3-4% fat)
1½ cups sugar
8 eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla extract

To make the cream, melt the butter and then put it in a blender with half of the milk (16 fl. oz/450ml). Blend on high speed to combine them well. This is your cream, but it will tend to separate back into milk and butter if you don't emulsify it with the eggs (my Bel cream maker can do the emulsifying, but it's such hard work - this way is much easier). So that's the next stage. Put the cream back into the pan in which you melted the butter (wipe it round with kitchen paper first, so that you don't have big globules of butter left in it), add the sugar and put the pan on a medium heat while you deal with the eggs.

I use whole eggs, rather than just yolks, for my ice cream but find that they work best if I blend them first. You don't have to clean out the remains of the butter and milk mixture from the blender - just break the eggs into the empty goblet and blend briefly - you don't want it too frothy, just uniform-looking. Pour the remaining milk into a large bowl and set a sieve over it.

When the cream is nearly at boiling point, pour it into the blended eggs. Don't do it the other way - putting the eggs into the cream - they will curdle and you'll have wasted all that effort. Then tip the cream and egg mixture back into the pan, still on a medium heat, add the sugar and stir continuously until the mixture (custard, really) starts to thicken. When the custard thickly coats the back of the spoon (so that if you draw your finger across it, the line you make stays there), then it's ready.

Pour the hot custard through the sieve into the milk to make sure that no bits of cooked egg white go into your ice cream. Mix the custard into the milk and taste the mixture to make sure that it is sweet enough for you (it's often at this point that I realise I've forgotten to add the sugar, so I always taste it, to be sure!). Add the vanilla extract and allow the mixture to chill before putting it in your ice-cream maker. This quantity makes three batches in my machine - enough to serve about 12 people. Or (more likely) the same four people three times.

Of course ice-cream is all very well, but it's somehow not that appealing as a dessert on days like today, when the outside temperature peaked at -6°C/21°F. Something more warming was called for, so I made an old British favourite - syrup sponge pudding, with a warming ginger twist.

Ingredients

4oz softened butter
4oz sugar
2 eggs
4oz flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1½ teaspoons ground ginger
2 tablespoons syrup (I used a mixture of Golden Syrup and maple syrup)

Mix the butter and sugar together until creamy. Beat in the eggs, then fold in the flour, baking powder and ginger. Grease a one-litre/two-pint bowl and spoon the syrup into the base. Pile the mixture on top of the syrup. Cover with plastic film and microwave on full power for about two and a half minutes, until the pudding is well risen. You can steam this pudding too, but that takes a long time (two hours!) - this is one case where the microwave really comes into its own for a last-minute dessert.

I didn't have time to take a photo of the finished pudding before it was itself finished. But here's a nice one from the Pudding Club, which gives the general idea.

Except that you have to imagine a scoop of home-made vanilla ice-cream melting into it...

White and curvy

It looks like a marshmallow-making machine has gone berserk in places, after yesterday's snow.

I pressed my snow-shoes into service today for the first time this winter. I'm not sure my hips are grateful.

As we're now drowning in eggs, I decided to pickle a couple of dozen. I've never eaten a pickled egg*, so I've no idea if I'll like them or not. But I like eggs and I like pickles, so I'm cautiously optimistic.

*Oh dear, that somehow sounds terribly snobbish.

Up and down

The January snows have not been accompanied by high winds, so it has accumulated evenly on every surface.

Likewise, although it's been cold, it hasn't been really bone-chillingly cold yet, this month. I've been enjoying the crisp air and the winter scenery. I'm sure I'll feel differently when I have to go out to the chickens in a blizzard, but right now, I'm feeling well-disposed towards the season.

Melting snow on the metal roofs of the barns have created the usual interesting icicles on the nearby fences.

Winter definitely has its compensations.

Eggcitement

Oh dear, what a terrible title for this post. So sorry, but I'm a bit distracted and don't have time to think of a better one. For one thing, I broke open a double-yolked egg today:

I've never seen a double-yolker before, and this is the first we've had from our hens. So that was a thrill. Yes, I'm easily pleased.

After a dearth of eggs in October and November, the hens all started laying at once in mid-December and we've been rather inundated. I made a new mini-sign for our farm-gate one over Christmas:

I'll never make a sign-writer, but it seems to have worked, because this morning we had our first farm-gate sale to a couple who went off with four dozen eggs. We've sold a few eggs to friends and neighbours before today, but these were our first 'proper' customers. The egg mountain is suddenly looking a bit less intimidating. I might let Child#2 have something other than eggs for breakfast...