Okra in Ontario

The coolish summer we're having has been testing for my okra-growing experiment with the 'Clemson spineless' seeds I received from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds.Of the eight or so plants I put outside, only two have survived and this is the healthier-looking one. It's reached the giddy height of four inches: rather shorter than the six or eight feet I'd been reading about!

The two plants I put in the greenhouse are doing slightly better and I've picked a few okra pods from them already. They are still only eighteen inches (50cm) tall, but at least they are showing me how okra is supposed to behave.

The flowers are rather like a morning glory and, like morning glories, they only last for a single day.

 The flowers are self-pollinating - I love the velvety appearance of the stigma.

By the end of the day, the flower has shrivelled and the okra pod is ready to form.

On this plant you can see a flower bud before it opens at the top of the plant, an okra pod just forming on the right and a fully-formed pod at the bottom.

In a hotter summer it might be worth growing these outside, but I think from now on I'll treat them as a greenhouse crop.

Hatchlings

Transformations are going on all around the farm. The Eastern Black Swallowtail caterpillars which were eating my dill plants a month ago are now gorgeous butterflies:

The barn swallows have fledged and are learning to fly. This morning the adult swallow seemed to be giving the four youngsters a pep talk in the barn.

Two robin broods have already been hatched and fledged in the barn this year and now there's another four eggs being incubated in another robin nest in there. I'm not sure if it's the same robin or a different one.

My chicks are growing rapidly. At two months old they look like half-sized versions of their adult selves. They enjoy running outside in the evenings after I've put the adult

chickens away.

It's interesting to have different varieties of chickens this time, instead of the Buff Orpingtons we've always reared so far. The Welsummers have particularly attractive plumage (I very nearly wrote 'foliage' then!):

Works of art

I'd noticed signs for the Quilt Show around the county in previous years, but had never attended it before. With Mike's mum staying with us, it sounded like the sort of thing she might enjoy so we went along to it this morning.

I was amazed at the scale of the event - quilts as far as the eye could see, taking up the entire floor space of the arena in Wellington.

I know nothing whatever about quilting, but even as a complete ignoramus I could not help but be impressed at the intricacy of the designs and the time commitment that each quilt represents. They really are works of art and I have huge respect for the creators of these pieces. I loved the way that they varied from the very traditional to the more modern and abstract.

The vendors' displays were beautiful, too.

It was almost enough to make me want to take up quilting.

Fire and ice

It's that time of year when the sky lights up with fireworks and the humidity drives people to seek comfort in iced desserts.

Today I harvested two pounds of gooseberries and turned half of them into ice cream. I have found a local supermarket that sells 35% whipping cream with no added ingredients (hurrah!) and today they were selling them at half price. I bought four pints and used two of them to make this and a batch of vanilla.

The other week I was called upon to make a lactose- and gluten-free iced dessert. I thought it would be hard, but it was quite straightforward: easier than a custard-based version anyway. I started with two pounds (900g) of quartered strawberries and one cup of sugar, letting them mash for a while, then blended them to a liquid and pressed it through a fine sieve to remove most of the pips.

I used two cans of coconut milk (the highest fat one I could find) and heated them up to make sure the oil and solids were smoothly combined (they tend to separate in the can). Then I stirred the coconut milk into the strawberry mixture and froze it in the ice cream maker (in three batches). It certainly looked pretty.

I melted half a cup of cocoa, a cup or so of sugar, and a bar of 75% chocolate in another can of coconut milk and then stirred in two more cans and some vanilla extract for the chocolate version.

Apparently they went down well!

Bursting out

The leeks I sowed in the greenhouse towards the end of last summer never got big enough to eat, but they did survive the winter and I left them there in the spring. In recent weeks they have been sending up flower heads and I was happy to let them, thinking it would be good to gather some leek seeds for the future.

This was how the biggest flower head looked on June 6th.

It's been ballooning every day since and today, finally, the flower head broke open.

A slow-motion firework.

Dill weed

The dill is taking over the greenhouse and in the last week I've been pulling the plants up before they flower and set more seed to perpetuate the problem. In the process I noticed that there were some black swallowtail caterpillars on some of the plants. I made sure that I left those plants in place. It's quite amazing to watch how rapidly the caterpillars will chomp their way through a frond of dill.

But I think it would take a lot more than half-a-dozen of these creatures to deal with my superabundance of dill.

Exercising democracy

We became citizens of Canada just a week or two after the last Ontario elections and there hasn't been an election at any level of government since then. Today's Ontario election was the first time I have had the opportunity to vote in this country. It's something that's easy to take for granted, but after living here for seven years without a vote, I have come to realise how important it is to have that small role in a democracy. When I didn't have it, I felt excluded from a significant part of local, provincial and national life.

Our polling station is 10km (6 miles) away - so it's not like being in a city where you can just stroll down the road to cast your vote. I decided to make an event of it and rode my bicycle to the town hall in Hillier. It's a nice route, as much of it is along the old railway line and consequently it's fairly flat (important as this was also my first bike ride this year. Shameful, I know!).

In one short stretch of my journey I encountered three separate snapping turtles, all scraping out hollows along the edge of trail and laying eggs in the depressions.

Definitely not something I've ever seen while going to cast a vote in England!

Nature walk

I spent an informative and enjoyable two hours exploring the Quinte Conservation Area today in a small group led by Tamara Segal of Hawthorne Herbals. She walked us around the Creekside Loop Trail and talked about a huge range of wild plants, some native, some European invaders, and their uses as both food and medicines.

Just for my own benefit, here's the list of plants we heard about: wild sorrel; wild grape; wild strawberry; mullein; motherwort; plantain; nettles; wood nettles; garlic mustard; sumac; linden; ground ivy; parsnips; wild geranium; burdock; elecampane.

I had no idea that parsnips have become naturalised here - I've not spotted them in the wild before, but they were all over the place at the conservation area. Because it is a conservation area, we didn't actually do any harvesting, but I know quite a few of these plants are growing around our place and will now keep an eye out for the others!

Chick update

The new chicks have been out in the barn for a couple of weeks now and seem to have settled into their current home well. I hadn't realised how much they've grown until I compared this picture of the way they looked when I brought them home:

with this one of the way they look now, at nearly four weeks old:

The white Ameraucana one draws the eye, as she's so different in colour from all the rest. She also seems to be a bit more feisty than the other chicks and the most likely to start a fight!

Growth

I'm conscious that it's been a bit quiet on this blog for a few weeks. Mainly this is because this is such a busy time of year in the garden. I've been sowing and planting and weeding like a possessed thing - and the weeds are still winning.

We had some welcome rain on Tuesday. I didn't really get dry all day, but that was my fault for spending far too long trying to get photos of flowers bedecked with raindrops.

The greenhouse beds are mostly under control and producing tremendous quantities of dill, coriander/cilantro and lettuce leaves.

The potatoes popped up overnight. I've got some in the greenhouse because I had too many for my potato bed.

As usual, I have vast quantities of tomato plants. I sold about a third of what I grew. I planted about 20 plants in the greenhouse a few weeks ago and finally finished planting the remainder outside this week. The greenhouse ones are starting to flower now. I still have about ten jars of tomato sauce from last year, so with any luck I will run out just as I start to pick this year's crop.

Rabbits have been a huge problem this year - my outside peas and cabbage crops have all been pretty much wiped out by the blighters. They also destroyed most of the apple trees this winter: the snow was so deep that they were able to gnaw the bark above the tree protectors. My orchard doesn't really deserve the name any more. :-(

Hot-weather crops

Last year was my first attempt at growing sweet potatoes. They didn't do brilliantly, due to the damp conditions we had last summer, but there were enough small potatoes to keep over the winter. I chatted to a man at the Seedy Saturday event who specialises in sweet potatoes and he agreed that last year was a particularly bad one for this crop, which encouraged me to try again this year. About a month ago I covered my pathetic little 2013 crop with compost and watered them every so often. Quite a few of them sprouted and I put them out in the upper vegetable garden the other day. I covered them with fleece on the day that it was supposed to drop to nearly freezing, which was just as well, given the slight ground frost yesterday morning. They look fine so far.

Alongside them, I've put most of my okra seedlings. This is the first time I've grown okra, which I've always assumed (as I did with sweet potatoes) I couldn't grow in our climate. They are tender, but if we have a hot summer we should get a decent crop. Growing okra and sweet potatoes together is supposed to help both crops, so I will watch this experiment with interest. I've also put two of the okra seedlings (the variety is Clemson spineless)  in the greenhouse, to see if they do better there.

I had no idea what okra plants look like and was picturing something like a pepper plant in my mind - about one or two feet tall. It was a bit startling to read that they can get up to eight feet high!

Greens galore

The greenhouse is producing lettuce and herbs like mad at the moment. Some are ones I sowed this year, others are volunteer seedlings from last year's gone-to-seed herbs and salad crops, like the cilantro/coriander in this clump.

One bed is nearly full of volunteer bok choi - too much to eat and it bolts to seed very quickly. But the chickens seem to love it, so it's not being wasted!

We had hours of heavy rain on Friday which has left the lower vegetable garden too wet to plant anything into, and to add insult to injury we woke up this morning to a very light frost.

I think the squash and pumpkin plants which were already outside have weathered it. As a vote of confidence in their future I sowed a lot of radish seeds around that bed this morning. Apparently radish is a good deterrent against squash bugs, which have been a problem in the past. Tonight is supposed to be cool, too, but after that the temperatures should be much warmer at night. With any luck the soil in the lower vegetable garden will start to dry out a bit. I hope by next weekend most of the tender crops will be safely planted out.

Cheep!

I blame my friend Kate for this. When I visited her farm back in 2010 I was charmed by the range of egg colours her flock of chickens laid. Since then, I've had the thought at the back of my mind that it would be good to diversify our egg production - to get some hens that weren't Buff Orpingtons.

Today I collected my 20 new chicks. I went for five Barnevelders, five Welsummers (these both lay dark brown eggs) and ten Ameraucanas, which lay pale blue or green eggs. The weather is due to be cool over the next few days, so I've set them up in the spare bedroom for now, until they have a few feathers and are ready to move into the barn.

At this point, I can't tell the Barnevelders from the Welsummers - but the Ameraucanas are more readily identifiable, just because their legs are darker and their colouring more diverse - from one chick that's almost completely black to the blonde one you can see below.

They are such fun to watch.

Sacred sights

I was at a work-related event in St. Catharines last week and took the opportunity to visit Niagara Falls for the first time. It's only three hours away from home, but somehow we'd never taken the time to go there, despite being in Ontario for nearly seven years now.

It's still quite early in the tourist season, so there weren't that many people around. What struck me was how mulitnational the crowd was - this really is a place that people will make a pilgrimage to from all over the world.

And with good reason - I had not realised how awe-inspiring this natural feature is.

I loved it and found it hard not to keep smiling as I walked along the gorge, admiring the views and marvelling at all the people who were there with me, recording themselves with the falls as their (literal) backdrop.

I drove home on Sunday and got delayed in traffic in Toronto for a while. But because I did, I saw the meteor which fell over Peterborough at around 4.17 on Sunday afternoon. It's been a week of wonders.

Easter parade

I couldn't have asked for better weather for the Easter break. It got increasingly warm and sunny over the course of the weekend.

The bees don't have many open flowers to visit at the moment, so these anemones growing in the cracks of the paving at the front of our house were proving popular:

And the daffodils are finally starting to open - a full month later than the earliest I've seen them (in 2012). I think they're a bit shorter than normal, too. The last of the ice melted from the lake on Saturday (April 19th) - definitely the latest we've seen it still frozen.

I spent the whole weekend either cooking or gardening. All the tomatoes and peppers were transplanted into pots in the greenhouse (208 tomato plants and 34 peppers this year) and I dug dandelions by the dozen out of three of the vegetable beds.

The children gathered up all the bits of tree which had fallen during the ice storm - we'll turn those into woodchips for chicken litter. We didn't lose too many large branches near the house, but up by the hayfield is another matter. There are several fairly large ash trees up there which look like this one:

I think Mike is going to be busy with his chainsaw when the ground dries out!

Easter nostalgia

I seem to have more memories of childhood Easters than I do of Christmases, for some reason. Like the time I left an Easter egg on the living room windowsill and it melted into a puddle. Mum put it in the freezer and I remember sitting in the garden the next morning, nibbling on frozen chocolate, thinking it was much nicer than the egg would have been.

Apart from hot cross buns on Good Friday, I don't think we had any particular food every Easter. Except various forms of chocolate, of course - the children at school would brag about how many eggs they'd received. Easter eggs don't seem to be as much of a thing over here, although chocolate certainly is.

My aunt sent us an Easter parcel with some Cadbury's mini eggs in it and they brought back a vivid memory of a cake my mother made one Easter. It had a bird's nest on top, made out of Shredded Wheat coated with chocolate, and a clutch of mini eggs in the middle.

I don't have any Shredded Wheat, but I did have some chow mein noodles which I thought might work just as well. I melted a bar of 85% chocolate with about 50g of butter and a tablespoon or two of honey, then stirred in the noodles, breaking them up a bit. I used my crumpet/egg rings as moulds for the nests (on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper) and piled the chocolate-covered noodles into them. 

I used the handle of a wooden spoon to make a bit of an indentation in the centre of each nest, then refrigerated them for a couple of hours until the chocolate had hardened, Then I removed the rings and put the mini eggs in the centre.

A perfect Easter dessert!

Actual gardening!

We were promised rain today and my gardening plans were suitably modest - maybe sowing a few seeds in the greenhouse.

But instead, the day proved to be gloriously sunny and warm and for the first time in six months I was able to get some work done outside. The chickens seem to be enjoying being out again after months of unusual captivity.

I never bother to cut down the old asparagus ferns in the Fall because a) I'm lazy and b) I kid myself that they give the asparagus roots a bit of extra protection in the winter. But that means that I have to do it in the Spring and today seemed like the perfect opportunity, given the unexpected window of lovely weather and the disappearance of most of the lingering snow.

Here's the 'before' photo of one of the tyre/tire beds, bristling with dead ferns and tangled with quack grass:

And here's the 'after', when I'd pulled out the old ferns and dug out the weeds (which is relatively easy to do at this stage of the year, before the new spears start emerging):

The last stage in the process was to add a top-dressing of well-rotted chicken manure. This is the batch-before-last, probably the one I made in 2012. It's lovely now - all crumbly and soft and full of insect and (I presume) microbial life.

My rhubarb plant from 2008 is also in one of these tires and is just starting to produce buds. I dug it up, split it in two and replanted half in the old tire and half in a spare one where one of the other original rhubarb plants hadn't survived. They got a shovelful of chicken-litter-compost over them, too.

By the end of all that I was exhausted and extremely warm. I'd almost forgotten what it felt like to feel hot outside!