Gardening and Thoreau (by way of Gaspereau)

With Tim in London for the triplets birthday this weekend I had little to distract me - so I put on my gloves and rolled up my sleeves and got down to weeding and doing some other gardening tasks.  I am happy to say that all of the things that I planted from seed directly into the garden are doing exceedingly well.

My scarlet runner beans (in the front) are growing like gangbusters! I'm hoping the corn in behind can keep up since the beans are supposed to use the corn as a support.

In fact the snow peas are doing so well that I had to scrounge about for the materials to make an impromptu trellis, as they are already putting out their little feelers.

The snow pea trellis, a.k.a. the Spider's Web. I didn't want to have to buy a trellis system so I scrounged around the yard for dead branches, stuck them in the ground and kitchen twined it up good! It's not pretty but its free and soon enough it will be covered in the snow peas so it will grow into a beautiful thing.

 I also thinned everything out in order to give seedlings more room to grow into big hearty plants - this was exciting for me, as it meant I got to have wilted baby rapini and swiss chard with garlic for lunch....mmmm mmmmm good.  It was delicious but its probably because I grew them myself.

There is just something so satisfying about the results of ones own labour - can you tell I've been rereading Thoreau's Walden. I was reminded how much I love the book by a recent lecturer at Willowbank Andrew Steeves- one of the partners in the small publishing company Gaspereau Press (in the news semi-recently because of The Sentimentalists).

He came to speak about the traditional methods that Gaspereau Press uses in the very modern world of publishing - yet the lecture had very little to do with the use of older technology and much more to do with taking great care in what you do. In Andrew Steeves case that means understanding the needs of the book that you are publishing - from the cover art or lack of it, to the font style, to the sewn binding, so that you create something that conveys the message of the book and will survive to do so for the next century or so. It is really about being respectful and responsible about what you create - which if you've read any novels recently, has not usually been the purview of the huge publishing corporations out there.

Steeves just mentioned Walden in passing within the lecture but it got me to thinking about the book again and how much I liked it when I first read it. I also figured that if I read it again now, it would help to put the summer in perspective i.e. the growing of our own food and saving as much money as we can.  When it comes down to it, I don't think I could give up as much as Thoreau did when he was living on Walden pond (although I don't think that's his point - since he repeatedly pleads for people to live authentically - the lives that they want to live and not the lives their families or society dictates.)  BUT I do think that I can do with much less than many people do and I think I've got my priorities straight when it comes to stuff. That's not to say that we don't have a lot of stuff (much more of it is Tim's than mine!!) but it doesn't drive our lives in anyway and there isn't much that I couldn't part with if and when we move into a smaller place.

On that note, here's a picture of one of the gorgeous peonies that are just beginning to wain from too much rain and wind in the front yard. They were gorgeous while they lasted.

Bring on the weeding!

So, despite the fact that it blustered and thundered and blew our plants around yesterday, the garden is looking pretty darn good and it's finished. I just went out and picked up a few more plants (zucchini and eggplants) to fill in some remaining space. I had made a last dash decision to not try to grow the romaine lettuce seeds that I had gotten. I didn't think they would still do well - seeing as it is already getting super hot and muggy so I needed something to put in their place - tiny "kermit" thai eggplants it is - should be a cool experiment.



Here ares some pics of the finished garden, notice that I made a few more paths out of some more scavenged rocks and some barn boards:

Yes there does seem to be a lot of empty space...BUT those have seeds in them which will hopefully produce a beautiful cornucopia of edibles!

This is my little corner herb garden. It's so cute!

Here is a list of the veg we are growing this year:

- Tomatoes... of course, they are all cherry varieties, including the more exotic yellow canary and zebra striped but including Sweet 100 and Juliets
- Basil...and lots of it! pesto here I come!
- Herbs - parsley, lemon balm, rosemary, sage, thyme, oregano and dill
- Snap Peas
- Rapini
- Brussel Sprouts
- Cabbage
- Bok Choi
- Swiss Chard
- Collards
- Carrots
- Jalapenos
- Red Chilis
- Corn
- Scarlet Runner Beans
- Squash
- Cucumbers
- Cantaloupe
- Zucchini
- Eggplants - Sicilian and Kermit Thai
-Potatoes

I have high hopes for this garden. I'm really hoping to reel in a big harvest come the end of the summer and stock it away for the winter, plus its just fun to putter around in the garden. Tim seems to be all for the garden but I'm not sure if he knows what he is getting himself into - he did plant the parsley and then complain of vertigo after standing up. It might be a long summer of weeding.

The Garden...So Far

So down here in Niagara, April showers turned into May Showers and I've barely been able to get into my garden over the past month. On the few days when it didn't rain, we got out there, taking out the sod and putting up rabbit board along the bottom of the fence but its been slow going. Apparently all of this rain has been good for growth and flowers and all that, and all of the bulbs and perennials on this little plot of land have been coming up beautifully. If only I'd been able to get in there and plant my veggies a little earlier, alas, like the rest of the country I am waiting for the May 2-4 to plant all my veg (though in reality, because we will be in Orillia and London over the weekend it will likely be done on Monday or Tuesday of next week).

We went to a local nursery today to get our plants, because I know there will be a mad dash for them this weekend and I don't want to be stuck with slim pickin's after the long weekend rush. I had planned on starting most of my plants from seed but that was an experiment in FAILURE. After my first failed attempt, I thought that I had just left them under the clear plastic lid on the seed starting kit, but my second attempt hasn't been much better. I just don't think they've gotten enough light - its not that bright in here on the best of days and all the gloomy rainy days over the past little while haven't helped. I have not given up though, next year we will definitely try again but with a grow lamp.

Failed seed attempt #2. These are the basil and tomatoes, most of them are at least still alive, but they are still quite small. This is not even the worst batch, all the cruciferous veg I tried to start got really tall really quick, then they got all droopy and died. Boo.

With all of our plants bought and sitting on my kitchen table. I figured that I had best do what hardscaping I needed to do in the garden before the long weekend, because I won't have much time afterwards before the plants all need to go in. Thankfully, it was a nice day today - we didn't even get any of the scattered showers they were calling for and it was even sunny in the late afternoon - hurray!! So I got to work organizing stones and turning over soil. Yes that's right you heard me - organizing stones.

Here is the garden pre-hardscaping and with bags of composted manure all ready to go. It's a good picture that shows the rabbit board we've put around the garden (all sawn by my own hands I might add) and the potato planter outside the garden - apparently potatoes don't like amended soil so, I've put it outside the garden and filled up a couple of buckets of soil for when I start hilling the potatoes.

I was determined to keep this garden on as low of a budget as I could by seed starting (fail) and by using free materials when I could. Luckily, I was able to get old barn boards from a barn that was being torn down and have used that for rabbit board. And as you'll know from all our house pictures we've got a big stone ruin in the back yard that has provided us with piles of stone (don't worry heritage friends, they had all already fallen out of the wall and were in various piles about the yard - or buried in the garden), so I was able to build a little pathway and a bit of a dry stone retaining wall to keep the slope where the melons and squash will grow from tumbling down into the rest of the garden.

 A nice sunny after picture in the afternoon. My pretty little path and all freshly turned over soil. Unfortunately I've run out of stones, so my other paths will have to be leftover barnboards. Not as pretty but it'll have to do.

Another view that better shows you the wee stone wall - it's only about a foot high. 

Now all I need to do is get the plants in and then we can begin to weed in earnest. Tim has no idea what he is in for!

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter Everyone! It's my favourite holiday of the year.  And this Easter Sunday has turned out to be a beautiful day - chockful of blooming flowers! (See the picture above.)

We were in London for the Easter weekend, which was great because we got to see Tim's side of the family; meet an interesting family that's living our dream by living in rural northern ontario with five home-schooled kids (ok, maybe my dream, 5 kids seems a little much for Tim); and we also got to spend the Easter Triduum (well Friday and Saturday) at St. George's which was a great Easter present to ourselves.

My school year is over, which means that I am trying to find myself a summer job (if anyone knows about anything either construction-y or planning-y in the heritage field let me know! Will travel for work!) But while I am on the hunt for the elusive awesome summer job experience I will be working on the garden. We started cutting out the sod a few weeks ago when it was warmer but its been raining ever since. Here's a sneak peek of what we are working with, there will be more to come in the next little while.

Ulli eating grass in the garden area that should not have grass! We'll be getting to that this week.

Carmelized Onion Tart

I don't really understand it when people say that they hate to cook for just themselves. I love it. I feel none of the responsibility of feeding and pleasing other people when I cook just for me. I can eat crappy food if I really want to OR I can get really creative OR I can make something that takes a bit longer to make but which makes me happy without thinking about other people getting hungry, while I'm taking my sweet-a$$ time making dinner. Tonight's dinner falls into all of those categories above, Tim's away, so in the kitchen I was, getting to play. And I decided I wanted to make a tart, unfortunately (or is it fortunately, because it ended up being delicious!!) I didn't have much to put in the tart.

Sooo, I caramelized some onions, managed to make the most out of the rest of my rind of parmesan and chopped up a few kalamatas from the oversized Costco jar (best Costco purchase ever - we go through those things like water) and wrapped it all up in a delicious extra-buttery free form tart crust (which I added spelt flour to, out of guilt for the amount of butter I used).

This is kind of like an even worse version of Pissaladiere, one of my favourite pizzas, but with more crust (and a way more buttery version at that) and I held off on the anchovies - thinking that the kalamatas were salty enough. Although in retrospect, seeing as Tim was away, I perhaps should have taken the opportunity to get my anchovy fix in. Feel free to add a few, anchovies only make things better, I swear!


Caramelized Onions:
3-4 large onions, sliced thinly
salt and pepper,
olive oil and butter
thyme
1 tbsp. good quality balsamic vinegar

Heat olive oil and butter (however much you want, I did about a tbsp of each) in a frying pan and add your onions. Season this with salt and pepper. Set to medium-low, cover and leave it for a good 15-20 mins. stirring occasionally. You want the onions to soften. Once this accomplished, uncover it, add about a tsp of thyme if using dry or a tbsp if using fresh stuff, and turn up the heat to medium. You'll want to stir it occasionally to end up with a lovely golden brown mess of delicious caramelized yumminess. This will probably take another good 15 mins. Right at the end, add your balsamic vinegar - the more stars your vinegar has the better for this part - you want to enhance the sweetness, not make it acidic. Meanwhile, you can work on your tart crust.

Savoury Spelt Tart Crust:

3/4 c. white flour
1/2 c. spelt flour (you can sub in any other whole grain flour, but spelt is delicious)
1/2 tsp. salt
10 tbsp. or a 11/4 sticks of unsalted butter, frozen or refrigerated and cut into small chunks
1 egg yolk
2-3 tbsp. cold water

Place flours and salt in a food processor and process until combined. Add all of the butter at once and buzz away, until the butter has been distributed evenly in the flour. (My food processor is a little intense, so it ends up being like large bits of sand, rather than the more common consistency of peas.) Add the egg yolk and blend. Dump it all into a bowl and work the water into it, until it just sticks together. You might need to add a bit more. Form a disc of the dough and wrap that in plastic wrap and stick it in the fridge for a minimum of 10 minutes.

To assemble:

Caramelized Onions
Tart Crust
1/3 cup chopped kalamatas
Parmesan or other delicious cheese to taste

Preheat your oven to 450F. Roll out your dough to about a quarter inch consistency, in a roughly circular shape. Grate some cheese into the centre of the dough, leaving yourself enough room to fold the pastry over onto itself. Pile your onions and kalamatas onto that and then fold over your pastry. It doesn't matter what it looks like, it can be roughly circular (or polygonal in my case) what matters is that all is contained because it will taste great in any shape you end up with - I kind of like that it ends up looking like a windmill. You can grate a little extra cheese over the top of this.  Stick it in the oven on a cookie sheet or a piece of parchment on a pizza stone like I did and cook for up to 30 minutes or more. Keep an eye on it when its all toasty brown its done.

And then enjoy with a salad or with a delightful saute of cauliflower and kale, like I did. Magnifico!

A Few of My Favourite Things

Just a few things that I've been really diggin' lately.

Photo Courtesy: thisweekfordinner.com, 2010.

The Food Matters Cookbook by Mark Bittman: Everyone who knows me knows that I am a serious Mark Bittman recipe groupie. My wonderful little brother happened to (unknowingly of my Bittman obsession) buy me his How to Cook Everything  and How to Cook Everything Vegetarian a few Christmases ago and with that there was no turning back. In those cookbooks, Bittman has the most wonderful basic (and complex variations) on anything you could possibly want to cook and his newest cookbook doesn't disappoint. With a new ethical philosophy on eating responsibly - for the planet, society and our own bodies - that is of course in Bittman-esque simplicity incredibly straightforward, i.e. eat less meat and more legumes, replace refined carbohydrates with whole grains and alternative sugars, and don't eat anything you can't pronounce (basically make your own foods). 

Tim and I have gravitated towards eating less meat (flexitarians) for quite sometime now, but this book has made me feel a whole lot less guilty about it -- by explaining the fallacy of the meat = protein equation, once and for all and by explaining how much energy is spent in meat production - it's an incredibly unethical disgusting amount. Don't get me wrong, I love me a good steak every now and then, and thanks to my awesome hunting-gathering/friends-with-organic-farmers parents, much of the meat we do eat is wild or organic. But we are now trying to only eat meat once or twice a week and even then we use it as more of a garnish than the main menu item. A nice side effect has been the reduction of our food bill, as well as getting to try out all kinds of cool new foods - like millet and farro ---- can you say delicious risotto!

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Jane Jacobs, 1961. This edition 1972. Cover photograph by Max Yavno.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs: I know, I know, Jane Jacobs seems to be a total trend right now but I have become increasingly attracted to the planning side of heritage and I couldn't not read Jane Jacobs obviously, and it just so happens that I love this book. 

It's actually kind of amazing that Jacobs was writing at the time about things that may seem counterintuitive to what most people think about big cities but make so much sense when you think about them even just a little bit. Like that sidewalks are where social interaction happens, and contrary to the idea that they are dangerous places in the inner city, they are often the safest place to be - especially when they are overlooked by the traditional mix of commercial and residential. Just think about it - if you've more people who think of an area as their own community - they know what are normal events for their sidewalks and what aren't. They will police it without even thinking about it.

Essentially Jacobs makes the case that complex community systems in the inner city really work (i.e. mixed use neighbourhoods) and that the whole of modern planning methods denied this and by separating residential from commercial from industrial you are essentially destroying human ecosystems. I like to think of Jacobs as having a holistic approach to planning - if you have a little bit of everything you are going to win everytime - especially if you ask the people who actually live in those communities which little bits they appreciate and want in their own communities. But this is the huge caveat, you have to ask the people who live in an area what makes their community their own - it might be the local coffee shop but that doesn't mean you should plan on having one in every community. What works in one place  won't necessarily work somewhere else.

P.S. Here's a really cool interview from the CBC archives with Jane Jacobs.

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Photo Courtesy: http://www.cocoandvanilla.com, 2010.

You're gonna be like "What?!" when I mention this next thing but believe me they are delicious and good for you and gluten-free. Right now I am loving Black Bean Brownies. I know it sounds weird and awful but in actuality these are incredibly good, dense, moist, chocolate goodies. Not only do they use legumes in place of flour (increasing your protein potential and making them very filling) they use agave nectar in place of sugar (decreasing your use of refined carbs). I can eat a couple of these itsy bitsy 1 inch brownies for dessert and be totally satiated.

I've also found a recipe I haven't had a chance to try yet that replaces the butter with banana - making these low fat and vegan. Cha-ching.

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Photo Courtesy: © 1999 Dietmar Regensburger/Innsruck

This awesome 5 part Ideas from the CBC on Rene Girard. I had to read some of his literature on the Scapegoat when I was in Theology which I thought was fascinating at the time but then promptly forgot about after the class. But then what do you know, I'm on my way home a few weeks ago and catch the tail end of Ideas (which is generally awesome but which I rarely ever catch) and I hear them talking with Girard about victimization in the modern society. I didn't even realize it was Rene Girard they were talking with but it piqued my interest thoroughly enough for me to seek the archive out on-line and listen to the whole thing during the course of one afternoon. 

Girard is a French academic that has created this all-encompassing system which doesn't fall under any one academic discipline but is an anthropological, philosophical approach to humanity that draws upon ancient literature (the greeks), the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, to form an understanding of the violence inherent in mimetic desire (the competitive desires of individuals towards the same goals).  The interview with him goes over his whole body of work and is a really great listen if you've got 5 hours of free time (it sounds like a lot but you could just replace 1 hour a day of television with a mini-lecture).

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Photo Courtesy: Irene O'Toole, http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/JOVMNAcCgKe8zBXVZqLuig

And now my last favourite thing of the moment....vegetable peelings. Yep, you heard right and you may believe that this is somewhat of an anti-climatic ending to this post. With all of the vegetables we've been eating, there seemed to be a lot of waste - and even thought we are lucky enough to live in a place which has green waste pick up - I was still feeling bad about the amount of waste. 

So I've started to keep a couple of freezer bags in the freezer that I fill up with all of my vegetable peelings (from pretty much everything except for the really watery things like tomatoes and cucumbers and don't put the papery skins of onions in - it'll make your stock bitter). After a couple of weeks or sometimes even just one week, I'll boil all of those vegetable peelings and make my own vegetable stock or chicken stock if we've had one recently (after picking the bones I put the carcass in the freezer to save for stock too). I reserve this activity for the weekend, when electricity is cheaper and I have the time to let it simmer on the stove for most of the day. I usually boil up a couple of batches of grains and beans on the weekend as well (in keeping with Food Matters- see above) so that they are easy to toss together during the week - so I'm in and out of the kitchen anyways.

There is still the same amount of waste but at least I'm getting the full nutritive and economic value out of everything and I'm buying way less bouillon cubes and making way more soup. Frugality is the bomb.

Oops I did it again...

So, I know I seem to be taking inordinately long amounts of time off from blogging, but that is mostly because I've kinda been boring for the last little while. We've done some slightly interesting things at school, that could have made for some interesting pics but I wouldn't have had much to say about them. Soooo, I'm going to put everything together in a mad mangled montage of stuff. (Which, sadly, is really not a bad analogy for my life.) Here goes:

Historic Roofing: Two whole days of discussing different roofing materials and then making a very poor attempt at roofing ourselves - on (if I do say so myself) the tiniest roofline ever. We tried out cedar, slate and copper - and ended up with a very eccentric looking roof. And yay, we got to work with lead again.

Incredibly realistic, as you can see, considering it is two feet off the ground.

Ruthven...again: Some of you may recall one of the historic places Tim and I visited a while back, the estate Ruthven in Cayuga, ON. At the time I only posted pictures of the outside since being cheapskates, Tim and I didn't want to pay to go inside. Lucky for me, we got to go on a (free) field trip and I got to take a bunch of pictures on the inside. It was very interesting because it is being maintained as a family estate - with all of its various permutations - including the whacky teal 1960s kitchen. But what was most striking - to me - was the fantastic elliptical staircase. Oh, and the family portraits.

I went a little artsy on it. But isn't it fantastic. This is looking up from the main floor. 

And here's my favourite portrait. This dapper looking Thompson, was wounded in WWI and upon being nursed back to health returned to Canada to become a Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod - hence the swanky outfit. We giggled a lot at his title, of course I got home and told Tim about him and he knew exactly what that was - apparently it's quite the big political dealy. Also, notice in the right hand bottom corner - I totally think his ghost did not approve of our giggles.

Carpentry: We are sadly finished carpentry for this year. Boo! I completed my panel, and we had moved on to the teeniest tiniest doors you've ever seen. Mine is 15'x 8 1/2'. It's adorable. But alas, we ran out of time to work on it in class. I am hoping I will be able to find some extra time to finish it up and make the teeniest of door frames for it. I am envisioning painting it red and putting it up along with my panel. Or maybe attaching it to a tree, like a tiny door to the elfin realm! I'm weird like that.

This was at the stage where I was just finishing up my tenons and was laying out my mortices. I have since begun to work on the teeniest panels you've ever seen, to fit into the dados. P.S. Shouts out to Doug, for letting us use his awesome multi-plane that allowed us to do our dados in 30 minutes instead of half a day. It was almost like using a
power tool.

Plastering: I didn't get any pictures of this. It was a little messy and smelly and really hard to get a chance to get into with so many of us clustered around a rather small wall mock up. And I'm still lamenting the fact that I don't know the ratios for the mortar and plaster mixes. Next week we are making a trip to T.O. to check out some great examples of plaster conservation, I'll definitely picture that up for sure.

Ithaca: Tim and I made a trip down to Ithaca, NY, to visit our friends Shaun and Amanda, made famous in my post about stained glass and wedding cakes. We totally crashed the honeymoon period. We even made it up to Cornell to listen to Shaun wax poetic on the troubadour tornada. The campus was beautiful but alas, I forgot my camera again -- which really wasn't that tragic considering there was a major blizzard going on. We did stop at a gorge on our way back home though and I was able to snap a few pictures of that...of course I was also drawn to the stone bridge.

The gorge falls, looking from the bridge. It was really cool. As you can see there are all of these  huge rocks that sit very proud of the water. It makes for a fantastic landscape...

...complimented by an almost equally fantastic stone bridge.

Aboriginal Perspectives: We had a wonderful man, Sakoieta Widrick, come and speak to us about the Mohawk people. He told us some incredible stories, taught us about traditional medicines, as well as some dances, songs and the peach basket game. But most importantly he imparted great knowledge about what it is like to be an aboriginal person in Canada and the U.S. It was a true blessing to have him speak to us, and I think we all felt like we learned a great deal, ecologically, intellectually and spiritually.

The Wall is Completed: I'm not sure I mentioned on here, but many of you know I have been doing casual updates on the work on the South-West Wall project at Willowbank. This has wrapped up just this past week, and as such I've just finished up my last update which should be up and posted in the next few weeks. If you are interested you can link to the updates on the Willowbank website and see what the project was all about.

And I think that is about it. Again, I apologize profusely for my lack of interweb communication. I'll try to be a better blogger!