First snow

Tuesday night and Wednesday morning brought our first snow of the winter. It was a windless night, which meant that the snow piled up in impressive layers on top of everything. I was out early, taking Child#1 to school for a trip and the roads near us hadn't been ploughed then.

Later, on my way to work, I had to stop to take this photo of the sumacs at the end of our road. I love the way they look after snow.

In the days following the snow, the temperature dropped and the sun came out. This morning we woke to -17°C/1°F, which is pretty cold for here in November.

In the evenings, the three big silos in the farm next door are acting like a mini-Stonehenge, marking the progress of the sun towards the solstice.

Ways with cabbage

With the weather due to take a wintry plunge this weekend, I decided that I'd better harvest the remaining cabbages from the barnyard. It made for a daunting pile:

I spent some time on Thursday shredding the heap. Two kilos of it are currently being turned into sauerkraut, I blanched and froze another batch and have been using the remainder fresh in meals: a simple braised cabbage for supper last night and as an ingredient in hash browns for breakfast today. I'm not sure how authentic it is as to have cabbage in hash browns, but it seemed like a good way of using up one of the smaller Savoy cabbages (and it really was small - about the size of a tennis ball!).

I never made hash browns when we lived in England, although I did sometimes eat them in hotel breakfast buffet spreads. Home-made are much nicer and really easy, I discovered quite recently. With the addition of cabbage, they are quite like bubble-and-squeak, so perhaps this recipe should be called squeak browns, or bubble hash. Or something...

Anyway, here is the recipe. This is enough to serve four people:

Squeak Hash Bubble Browns

2 medium-sized potatoes (unpeeled)
1 onion, peeled
1 very small Savoy cabbage, shredded
quarter of a cup of flour
salt/pepper/spices (whatever you fancy - I put some smoked garlic powder in this batch, but I'll often add paprika or maybe some shredded sage)
1 tablespoon butter or oil

If you have a food processor with a grater attachment, the easiest way to make this is to put the potato and onion through that. Or you can use a regular grater. Put a non-stick frying pan on a medium heat and add the butter or oil. Meanwhile, mix the grated and shredded vegetables together and stir in the flour and seasonings. Once the pan is hot, pack the hash brown ingredients into it so that they form a layer about 1cm/half an inch thick. Then leave it to cook for about seven minutes.

After that time, use a plastic spatula to divide the mixture into four (assuming you're feeding four) pieces. Carefully flip each one over and leave it for another seven minutes until the other side is brown and crispy.

My cabbage cornucopia is looking a little less intimidating now:

Clean-up

While I was away there were a few hard frosts which finished off the more tender greenhouse crops. I cleared out all the tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and beans yesterday. There are still some peas, kale, coriander, parsley, and a few carrots, parsnips and beets in there, but there is a lot of empty space now, ready for next year's crops. Talking of which, I received a wonderful surprise in the post recently from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. I'd sent them a recipe for their seed catalogue and in return got a paint-pot-tin full of heirloom seeds for next year, including a number of things I've never grown from seed (asparagus, water melon, celery, turnips, and okra, for example). Very exciting, and just what I need as I'm putting the garden to bed for the winter!

The chickens enjoyed the remaining tomatoes:

I had some pumpkins curing in the greenhouse, so I've brought those in before they get damaged by the harsher frosts. Though they clashed horribly with the pink plastic trug.

Outside, there are still some swedes, kale, cabbages, sprouts and parsnips to harvest. And my trusty sunchokes which will keep providing food in mild spells throughout the winter.

Bright berries

Oh dear, over a month since my last post? It's been a busy one, I must say, but I hadn't realised it had been that long. 

I got home from a short trip back to the UK on Tuesday. The difference in the scenery between there and here at the moment is stark. Here there are very few leaves left on the trees and the main colour is from dogwood branches and the occasional bright berry. Over there, a mild October has meant that most of the trees still have their leaves - and there are still roses in flower!

I noticed the berries on this tall shrub at the edge of the highway as we drove to Toronto last week and was pleased to find some on a local road here today. I've tried without success to identify the plant - if you know what it is, please comment! I don't think I've seen it before and the berries are a beautifully bright orange.

OK, answering my own question here, but I think this plant might be Winterberry (Ilex verticillata). It's certainly well-named!

Wordless Wednesday

Jelly

 Another first for me this year was getting a harvest from the two large wild grape vines that are on the farm. There's one just on the fence behind the chicken's barn and another right at the back of the farm, sprawling over a hedge.

The grapes are very small, about the size of a pea, but I thought I should make use of them somehow. On my first excursion I picked six pounds.

After all that picking my hands looked liked I'd been taking part in a massacre.

I also went into the orchard and harvested this year's apple crop. Only five pounds of apples, but better than nothing!

Most of them were from a tree called 'Lady', which is an old French variety which produces teeny tiny apples (fit for a lady's delicate hand. Sigh. I'm clearly no lady.). Here's a close up of a few 'Ladies' with a couple of the more normal-sized apples for comparison.

With all this Lilliputian fruit, the one thing I decided fairly early on was that I wasn't going to spend hours picking every grape off the stems and peeling and coring each of those tiny apples. Making jelly seemed like the obvious choice, as it involves straining the fruit after it has been cooked, so you don't need to worry about unwanted pips and stalks.

For my first attempt, I just used the grapes. It didn't go well. I got to the straining-the-juice part, balancing the hot cooked fruit in some repurposed hosiery over a big bucket:

Then, under a second later, the precariously-balanced colander collapsed into the bucket with an almighty splash, leaving my kitchen floor and cupboards as further evidence of a terrible, bloody crime. Since I was standing there with camera in my hand, I recorded the scene.

I should have accepted that I was dealing with some bad jelly-making juju, but instead I persisted, boiling the juice with sugar and pectin. It never set properly: I now have several jars of a sort of runny wild grape syrup to show for all the hard work. It tastes alright and I think it will be OK on ice cream or pancakes, but it wasn't quite what I was hoping for. I think there was too much water in the mix and probably not enough pectin.

Unwilling to admit defeat, I tried again today, this time boiling down the apples and using their juice and the juice from another pound  or two of cooked grapes. I added more pectin than I did the first time and it seems to have worked - it's possible to turn the jars upside down without the jelly collapsing onto the lid, in any case.

Will I bother again another year? Probably: I really enjoy the process of harvesting wild food and I can see that turning the grapes and apples into jelly could become an autumnal ritual.

Maybe next year I'll manage it without the added ambiance of a ritual killing.

Autumnal jewels

I love driving home on evenings like today's. The sun's low angle in the sky lights up the creeper and vine leaves in the hedgerows which are just turning red and yellow. They form gorgeous garlands of colour along the edges of the country lanes and I can't get enough of them.

It's somewhat of a miracle that I get home without driving into a ditch...

The F word

I know I mentioned the F word in yesterday's post but, well, really. Before the equinox? It's just not cricket.

Bean counting

The dried beans have been piling up over the last few weeks. On the left are the star performers - Cherokee Trail of Tears, which have been wonderfully productive. Next are the Hidatsa Red and Early Mohawk beans - respectable but not huge producers. On the right are the frankly rather disappointing Deseronto Potato beans. Only one of the beans I sowed germinated - there are more beans still to come from that plant, but I'm going to have to save them all for seed for next year so won't get to taste them this winter.

Nearly all the Trail of Tears beans have been picked now, but the plants don't give up that easily - there are flowers and baby beans visible on them again. I doubt these will reach the dry bean stage before we get a frost, but you've got to admire their persistence!

Damp

If I had to summarise the summer of 2013 in a single word, that's the one I'd go for. Not that there has been endless rain, and we didn't get the horrendous floods that Calgary and Toronto saw this year, but there's definitely been more rain than we've had in recent summers - and it seems to have come in good long spells, rather than short thundershowers, which has been great after last year's dry season. The fact that I've now harvested several cauliflowers is evidence of that.

The temperatures were dead-on average for August and slightly higher than average for July, which just goes to show that my perception of the summer as being a cool one is completely wrong. Maybe it's just in comparison with earlier summers.

It's been a good year for the regular potatoes - this is my crop of 7kg of Pink Fir Apple potatoes.* I've still got to lift the Russet Burbank ones and the sweet potatoes, although the vines of the latter didn't grow as much as I was expecting them too. Sweet potatoes like hot and dry conditions, so I'm not expecting a stellar crop of those this year. Some you win...

*The dog was no help at all in digging them up, despite the proprietorial impression he's giving here.

Plum preserve

When we lived in the UK I used to buy a fruit preserve by Bonne Maman - I think it was plums or peaches (or perhaps both). It was good as a fruit pie or crumble filling or to go with ice cream - it was softer in texture than a jam, but sweet.

I haven't seen the same product over here, but when I saw the plums coming along in the orchard I remembered it and thought I'd aim for something similar if the crop was a good one. The variety we're growing is 'Stanley'.

Mike and I harvested the plums today, fighting the wasps for them. There were over eight pounds in all - not bad for our first harvest - and I've converted all of them into preserve, in two batches. Once they'd been stoned and quartered, each batch weighed about four pounds, to which I added four cups of sugar and a little water. Then I just brought the mixture to a boil until my cooking thermometer read just under 100°C/210°F. As it's not a jam, you don't need to worry about reaching setting point and they don't need long cooking - about 15 minutes at boiling point is plenty.

The skins turn the cooking liquid a deep, ruby red, which looks fabulous with the light behind it.

This quantity of plums made nine one-pint jars of preserve. I processed eight of them in a hot-water canner to make sure they won't spoil in storage and thought we'd have the other one in the next week or two as a dessert. But Child#2 spotted the jar this evening and thought it would be really good to have it in a plum crumble RIGHT NOW. For quality control purposes, naturally.

He knows me too well. Guess what's in the oven...

At last!

I've never managed to grow a cauliflower successfully here - the heat and inconsistent rainfall in the summer just isn't ideal for these fussy vegetables. I threw several away this summer which came to nothing, but the other day I noticed that there was still one left which had somehow developed as it should have done. Finally!

The bean pods I featured two weeks ago have now dried up and the beans were, indeed, the Early Mohawk variety. I'm going to keep them to reseed next year, as there aren't enough to eat and to sow. Pretty, though, aren't they?

The Cherokee Trail of Tears pole beans are much more prolific - I'm hoping there will be enough of those to eat as well as to keep for 2014.

Tomato sauce

Although I do love eating fresh tomatoes, ever since we've been here, the focus of tomato-season for me has been turning the fruit into tomato sauce to last us through the winter. This was never an option when we lived in England and only had room for six or eight tomato plants - but now I usually grow about 100 plants, the scale of things is a little different!

The season has really started now and I am picking ten pounds of tomatoes every three days or so. This is the perfect amount for making a two-quart batch of tomato sauce. Over the past five years I've tried different techniques for making sauce and I think this year I've finally found the perfect method for my particular crop.

As you can see from the picture in the last post, I grow a lot of different types of tomatoes, many of which are pretty small. It's obviously not feasible to skin a cherry tomato, so my method works well for a big batch of different sized fruit.

To avoid having your finished tomato sauce separate, you need to minimise the time between breaking the tomato up and getting the sauce boiling. This is because there is an enzyme in tomatoes (the snappily-named polygalacturonase) which will degrade the natural pectin in the tomato once it is exposed to the air and will turn the fruit and the resulting sauce runny. You want to get the tomatoes onto the heat pronto to stop the polygalacturonase breaking down the pectin.

My method is to quickly process the fruit in batches of about two pounds at a time and to liquidise the tomatoes in a food processor before putting them through a food mill.

If the tomatoes are large, I cut out any hard white parts and chop them into halves or quarters. With the smaller tomatoes, I just remove the stalks and put them whole into the food processor. The picture above shows what was left after I'd done that to ten pounds of tomatoes: not a lot, really.

After 20 seconds of processing, the tomatoes are a runny sauce, which I then put straight through the food mill set over a large pan which is already on a medium heat. It only takes another 20 seconds to pass the liquidised tomatoes through the mill, which takes out the skin and most of the seeds. My mill is just the right size to hold the two-pound batch of sauce.

This picture shows the leftover seeds and skin, which go into the compost bin. Big tomatoes have a lot more flesh in proportion to the seeds than small ones.

Once the first batch of sauce is bubbling away, you can trim, process and mill the next two pounds, and so on, until you've done five batches and the pan is nearly full. I estimate this ten pounds took about twenty minutes to get to this point (well, not counting the picking part. Or the seeding/planting/growing/staking parts...).

The next stage is easy - you just leave the pan on a medium heat for about two hours, or until the sauce is at the consistency you want. I cook mine until it's about half the original volume. And it's always a good idea to set a kitchen timer, because it's easy to forget about it. I give mine a stir about every half-hour.

The reduced sauce:

Up until this year, I always froze the batches of sauce in medium-sized freezer bags. But with an investment a few months ago in a pressure canner, I now use that to further process it. I add a little lemon juice to the jars to make sure that the sauce is acidic enough to be canned. It takes 20 minutes at high pressure to make the jars safe to store in a cool, dark place.

I suppose it does seem like a lot of work for something that you can buy pretty cheaply from a supermarket. But the thing is, I enjoy doing it - and there is a unique, hard-to-describe pleasure in darkest midwinter to be cooking a meal made from tomatoes that I preserved the previous summer. I know these fruit are free from chemicals and as local, ripe and fresh as it is possible for tomatoes to be.

Rain (and other harvests)

We got some much-appreciated rain this morning: about four hours of what I think of as 'Manchester rain', which was just what we needed to refill the barn water tanks and revive the parched-looking garden. I'd sown some more carrots, beets and lettuce at the weekend, so the soaking will get them germinating, with any luck.

Despite the dry spell, the beans are coming along well - I think this variety is 'Early Mohawk', but I won't know for sure until I shell them, as I've only seen pictures of the bean seeds, not the pods (and I didn't keep the seeds separate when I sowed them with the other bush varieties). Very attractive-looking, anyway, and certainly early, compared to all the other dry beans I'm growing this year.

The tomatoes are coming thick and fast, too. I've got my first batch of tomato sauce bubbling away as I write.

It smells delicious! This is the first time I will have used my new pressure canner to make tomato sauce, so this is a preliminary test-run with a small batch (about four pounds of tomatoes). The canner holds four two-pint jars, which I estimate would take 20 pounds of tomatoes to fill, once they've been reduced down.

Toads

I've been seeing quite a few of these little brown creatures hopping rapidly around the greenhouse recently. I believe they're American toad(let)s. To give you an idea of scale, here's the same toadlet with my index finger. (Very obliging of it to sit still for this photo, I thought. Also, note the cleanliness of my nail - you can tell this was taken before I did my daily hour of weeding.)

I think toads have an undeservedly bad reputation. A prime example is to be found in the opening lines of Philip Larkin's poem Toads. They have been in my mind since I started noticing the toadlets (although I was convinced that the poem was by Ted Hughes - sorry Philip). I first read the poem at school and have only just reread it now. I appreciate its message more these days than I did when I was seventeen!

Toads 

Why should I let the toad work

Squat on my life? 

Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork 

And drive the brute off? 

Six days of the week it soils

With its sickening poison - 

Just for paying a few bills! 

That's out of proportion. 

Lots of folk live on their wits: 

Lecturers, lispers, 

Losels, loblolly-men, louts- 

They don't end as paupers; 

Lots of folk live up lanes 

With fires in a bucket, 

Eat windfalls and tinned sardines- 

They seem to like it. 

Their nippers have got bare feet, 

Their unspeakable wives 

Are skinny as whippets - and yet 

No one actually starves. 

Ah, were I courageous enough 

To shout Stuff your pension! 

But I know, all too well, that's the stuff 

That dreams are made on: 

For something sufficiently toad-like 

Squats in me, too; 

Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,

And cold as snow,

 And will never allow me to blarney

 My way of getting

 The fame and the girl and the money 

 All at one sitting. 

I don't say, one bodies the other 

One's spiritual truth; 

But I do say it's hard to lose either,

When you have both.

Barley Days

...the day is not far distant when the Bay of Quinté will be as famous for its apples, pears and wine as it is at present for its wheat, barley and cheese

So predicted the Hastings County Directory in 1869 (p.26). Barley was a huge crop in this area in the 1860s and through to the 1890s; most of it being exported to brewers in the United States, who rated it more highly than more locally-grown grain for making beer. The price of barley dropped precipitously after the passing of McKinley's Tariff Act of 1890, which imposed punishing levies on imports in order to protect US farmers. Here in the County, farmers turned to other crops instead, with tomatoes, peas and corn taking over the acreage previously devoted to barley. Canning factories sprang up to process these highly perishable but easily preservable foods.

Soy beans and corn seem to be the main crops grown in the County today, but it's still possible to find fields of wheat and barley. Now that it's almost ready to harvest I couldn't resist stopping to take some photos of a nearby barley field.

I doubt garlic was one of the crops that County farmers would have turned to after the decline of the barley days, but it seems to thrive even in our fairly stony soils here. I plaited these and have hung them up in the unheated section of our basement, where they should keep fairly well into the winter (well, apart from those I replant in October for next year's crop).

And it's probably too soon to be looking up plum jam recipes,* but for the first time in six years it looks like we might get some fruit from our Stanley plum tree, as well as the apples and pears I noticed earlier. Very exciting!

*Not that this has prevented me.

Visitors: expected, unexpected and missed

There are various creatures we expect to see at this time of year. Colorado potato beetles and their offspring, for instance.

Check. (And ewwww.)

Then there are creatures that we don't normally see. I went for a bike ride yesterday and saw two very tall birds in a field beside the road. I thought at first that they were herons, but when I looked at the photo more closely I realised that the colour was all wrong:

They're actually Sandhill cranes (Grus canadensis), which usually pass through but don't breed in this area, from what I've seen online, but this looks like a parent and youngster to me.

Then there are the expected-but-missing. This year it is the caterpillars of Monarch butterflies, which are usually munching their way through the milkweed plants by now.

There are some milkweed plants down at the bottom of this photo, and if you look really closely in the middle of the dark area at the top, you might just see a small flash of orange. This is only the fourth Monarch I've seen this year and there are widespread reports that there have been fewer sightings of this particular visitor than usual.

I spent a while this evening inspecting a lot of the milkweed plants in the hayfield. As usual they were host to many different insects: ladybirds, spiders and beetles.

But I didn't find a single monarch caterpillar. Around this date in 2009 I hadn't noticed any Monarchs but the caterpillars were easy to find. I hope their numbers recover.