2016 - The year of (more) foraging, pressure canning, reducing waste, expanding the garden, and getting help from our Amish neighbours

We seemed to advance by leaps and bounds this year - thanks in large part to our Amish neighbours. Mike was in California for 3 1/2 months looking after his mom, and I was here by myself with everything else. I suspect the garden and I would have been a total wreck if it hadn't been for Isaac and Martha.

Foraging

I looked this word up when I started this post, and it may in fact be the wrong word! It means to search far and wide for provisions. So yes and no. To me, foraging is looking beyond the garden and the grocery store for that which Mother Nature already provides. Here's what we discovered this year.

Maple syrup

Maple syrup

Isaac had assured us that, given we have maples on the property, we can make syrup, that any maple tree grown in this area will work. (I found out this summer that they are all in fact sugar maples. So much the better.) So we gave it a try, and the result was amazing! I'll do a post on how easy it is to do your own backyard sugaring.

Dandelion jelly and wine

 

Dandelion wine

Both are time-consuming, but well worth it - especially when it involves sitting on the warm, sun-drenched grass with a friend, chatting and filling a bowl with dandelion petals. The jelly tastes almost like a floral honey, and the wine after 2 months was delicious. We drank one bottle, gave one bottle to Mark, and saved the remaining 6 for Christmas, which is when it should be at its best.

I'll post the recipe for dandelion wine in the next while. The only thing I'd add is that, when you transfer the fermented wine into sterile bottles, be sure to strain it through a coffee filter or tea towel. You don't want the sediment from the bottom of the jug (the lees) in your wine!

Elderflower syrup

Elderflower syrup is a very big deal in Austria, where my dad was from. So when Mark came by this summer with a sprig to show me, I headed right out to pick the flowers. I found the syrup to be lovely, subtle and sweet, and delicious mixed with sparkling water. But according to Andreas (also Austrian), it was not quite right. It was missing a je ne sais quoi.

I think I figured out why: The recipe calls for citric acid, which helps preserve it, adds a tang, and also apparently inverts part of the sugar (The Uncarved Block). I didn't have any citric acid, so froze the syrup instead to preserve it. Curious now to see the difference when I add it this year!

I'll post the recipe in the next while.

Walnuts

Mark's black walnuts produced again this year, and he brought over a bag of them for us. Would I ask for them again? I'm not sure. Prepping them to dry is a lot of work, and I haven't tried any yet, so still don't know if they were worth it!

Puffball mushrooms

I had never seen a puffball mushroom until Mark brought one over late this summer in a large plastic bag. I don't think you can grow them, but if you're lucky enough to have them already on your property, and if the conditions that summer are right, you'll have puffballs. If you check Images on Google, you'll get a sense of the size of these. We didn't master cooking them this year, but I'd try it again next year. From everything I've read, they're quite wonderful if cut in fairly thick slices, brushed with oil, salted and peppered, and barbecued.

 Milkweed pods

 

Seriously! I scavenged around Chesley in search of milkweed, only to discover an enormous patch in the pasture in front of the barn. According to Wild Fermentation, the tiny pods can be fermented and are a lot like capers. Yum! But that's for next year. By the time I got to them, then were a bit bigger - although by no means mature - and we rinsed them off and sautéed them with butter, garlic, and salt. Delicious!

 

Pressure Canning

 

For those of you who are old hands at canning, it will come as no surprise to you that there are two kinds of canning: hot-water-bath canning for tomatoes, pickles, chutneys, jams and jellies, and other high-acid foods, and pressure canning for everything else (low-acid foods).

I suppose I could cover off the highlights in this post, but have decided instead to dedicate a post just to the joys of pressure canning - which I'm still doing several times a week. Stay tuned!

Reducing Waste

Fermented pickles and piccalilli

The first years were chaotic. We had no idea what to do with excess harvest - particularly zucchini and tomatoes - so there was a lot of waste. This year we did much, much better. The zucchini only produced as much as we could comfortably use (what a blessing!), but the tomatoes went gangbusters.

Of course, tomatoes don't all ripen at the same time, so if I only had a few, I would wash and core them and put them on cookie sheets in the freezer. Then, once they were frozen, I'd put them in freezer bags until I had enough to can.

And so on top of canning diced tomatoes and tomato sauce (our staples), we also dehydrated tomatoes and packed them in olive oil. At the end of the season, we had 2 bushel baskets of green tomatoes, and those were turned into piccalilli and fermented pickles, which we nicknamed champagne pickles because of their colour and fizz. The piccalilli is similar to green tomato chow-chow, my grandfather's favourite, and is almost as good as Auntie's chili sauce!

Expanding the Garden

And so our garden has gone now from 3,500 square feet to about 6,000 square feet, just like that. Presto! (Our entire property in Brampton was 3,000 square feet, and the only garden I'd ever had was a few herbs outside the dining room window. Just sayin'...)

Isaac had been eyeing a piece out back for a second garden for a while, and this year we agreed to go ahead. So he came over with the plough and got it ploughed and fertilized. It's a bit intimidating, but I think we're up for it!

Getting help from our Amish neighbours

Jacob on the cultivator

In late April, Jacob came over with the horses and cultivator and cultivated the garden. That's a sight to behold! It took Mike almost 2 days to cultivate the garden with a rototiller. Jacob cultivated it in about 20 minutes, when went home, pick up a load of horse manure, spread that over the garden, and scuffled. The whole thing took less than 2 hours. Progress ain't all it's cracked up to be.

Then in early June, Isaac and Martha started coming over once a week to help me tend the garden. Mike was in California at the time looking after his mom, and I was more than grateful for the help.

It used to take Mike and I several hours a day of weeding to keep it reasonable (not under control by any means, but reasonable). The whole garden took Isaac and Martha half an hour to whip into shape. Ridiculous how competent they are!

Isaac brought the horses and scuffler, and Martha brought her daughter and a couple of hoes. While Isaac scuffled between the rows and used a hand cultivator in hard-to-reach places, Martha and her daughter hoed between the plants. (Yes, of course I helped, but I'm not nearly as fast as they are - at least not yet!)

By the time Mike returned from California in mid-July, the garden looked better than it's ever looked before. Amazing what a little old-fashioned know-how can do!

Sweet potatoes - slips, planting, harvesting and curing

I LOVE sweet potatoes! And I've grown them every year since we moved in, with tepid results. The slips always arrived stressed and in some cases dead, and my best efforts to revive them were less than what was required. So we decided to grow our own - from scratch.

Here's how we did this year.

In late February, we brought up the rest of our mediocre haul of sweet potatoes from the basement and put them on a seed heating mat on the kitchen windowsill. Here's what they looked like after a few weeks:

I changed the water every couple of days, and this is what they looked like a couple of weeks later:

The roots grew down and the slips grew up. Once the slips were about 12" long, I broke them off and put them in jars of clean water to root. Interestingly, because some of the slips started close to the water line, they already had vigorous roots. As with the sweet potatoes, I changed the water every couple of days, and by the time planting rolled around, we had about two dozen slips.

I wish I'd taken some pictures of the sweet potato vines taking over my garden, but I didn't. So beautiful! The leaves are a lovely shiny dark green.

I did, however, take a picture of our harvest:

Half a bushel - our best haul ever! And some of the biggest sweet potatoes we've ever grown, too.

Sweet potatoes are supposed to be left on the ground for 2-3 hours to begin curing, and then put in a warm, humid, dark environment (unwashed) for 7-14 days to cure properly. This heals up any cuts or scrapes on the sweet potatoes and thickens up the skin a little for better storage. This is also when the starches in the sweet potatoes are converted to sugar. Yummy!

This year, unwashed was out of the question. The sweet potatoes had to be harvested because we'd had a couple of good frosts and the leaves were dead. (If left too long, the potatoes can be damaged.) But we'd also had a lot of rain and the garden was muddy, muddy, muddy. So Mike took the hose to them and got the worst of the muck off before we put them to bed.

For curing, sweet potatoes prefer 75-85 F with high humidity. Not sure where we'd find that in our house at this time of year, but Mike had a brilliant idea. We put the sweet potatoes in two plastic crates, and put them on 3 seed heating mats with a bowl of water between them for humidity:

 We'd already checked, and the crates fit perfectly under our coffee table!

Cover with a nice heavy quilt, and voila, a micro-environment for sweet potato curing!

 After 2 days, the temperature was about 80 F, and I had to fill up the water bowl after 4 days, so looks like we've given them perfect curing conditions: hot, humid, and dark. We'll get back to you when it time to store them for the winter.

Autumn - the view from here

The view from the front porch:

The view from the back:

Takes my breath away...

Eat local!

This whole area is a farming paradox.

On the one hand, you have factory farms, confined feed lots (chicken and pigs), cash crops, and probably Monsanto seeds.

On the other hand, you have grass-fed, pastured beef and pork, free-range chickens and eggs, and loads of inexpensive organic produce - if you know where to look.

Farmer Jim was out first meat supplier: beef and pork.

I don't know how long Jim's been raising cattle and pigs, but it's been a while. He's not from around here, though. I knew he was in Caledon for a long time before moving here, but I'm not sure where he was before that.

I made a beef stew for the family shortly after we moved here with beef I got from Jim, and you'd have thought they were eating in a five-star restaurant the way they carried on. It was exceptional, like nothing any of us had ever tasted before.

Other than a bit of sausage or bacon, Mike won't eat pork. Never has. But he'll eat Farmer Jim's pork. He says it tastes "clean".

We get out chickens and CSA from Tarrah and Nathan at Green Being Farm. Tarrah went to university to study farming, and I feel like I have a vested interest in their success.

The first two years, we got 30 chickens a year (that's when we had other family living here). Now we're down to 15 a year. I couldn't go back to store-bought meat again - partly for ethical reasons, and partly for taste. Those chickens taste the way chickens tasted when I was a kid: delectable.

And the CSA that we got from them the first two winters was a delight for so many reasons. The price was great, the vegetables were gorgeous and delicious - and the bonus was the 4-page newsletter, complete with recipes, that accompanied every bag of produce. Awesome!

Winter of 2013 and 2014, we got a side of beef from Mary and Dennis Starkey at Hillview Farm. Mary and Dennis are true Torontonians. Dennis worked at the school board, and Mary had her own business at Yonge and Eglinton. When retirement loomed on the horizon, Dennis said, "I want a cattle farm," and Mary said, "Go for it" - never believing he would. But he did! (Having been in education, he knew how to research, and that must have helped!)

Mary continued to work in Toronto during the first year, then moved up here, fully expecting to get a Wife of the Year award for ditching her career to support her husband's dream. But she said that after six months, she realized she could never live in the city again.

Ever generous, Mary threw in organs and lots of soup bones full of marrow - oh, and a bottle of maple syrup. Best soups and stews ever! Again, when the kids left and it was just Mike and I, a side of beef no longer made sense.

Then there's Sugar Sweet Farms - technically local (they're within a 100-mile radius). I get all my veggies from Carla and Brian at the farmers' market near here, and we swap stories and compare "farming" successes and disasters. This year, we got hit with blight, and it wiped out our tomatoes. They got hit with a deluge of rain at the beginning of August that drowned their bok choy. It was Carla who advised me not to use summer cabbage for sauerkraut, but to use winter cabbage after a couple of good frosts. I didn't even know there was a summer and winter cabbage!

Everyone in the "eat local" community seems to know everyone else - and I'm sure we'll make new connections every year!

Shine on, shine on, harvest moon

It was a warm September evening, and my son-in-law, Matt, was wandering the property, phone in hand, talking to his mom. when he noticed an increasing brightness in the east.

"Mom, it's just after sunset, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"But the sun sets in the west, doesn't it?"

"Yes."

"Okay. Something's happening. Gotta go."

That's when he bolted in the side door and yelled, "Sue, come quick! Moon's coming up!"

I never take moonrises for granted - especially a full harvest moon - so I grabbed my camera and joined him outside.

I've seen dozens of moonrises since moving here, but they still awe and delight me. They're quite spectacular, even when they're a relatively common sight. This, though, was the first moonrise Matt had ever seen, and he was dumbfounded by the majesty and beauty of it. Here's what he was able to capture on film:

Snowdrops

I still remember my surprise and delight on discovering snowdrops.

I'd heard of them, of course, but I'd never actually seen them until I moved here.

And this year, right on schedule, they appeared in early March - a delicate, cheerful harbinger of spring.

A little medieval farm

You can't see it from the road, but if you follow the grassy laneway through the woods, you'll come across a little medieval farm tucked away in the trees. There's a horse, two dexter cows, a few pigs, and lots of chickens and roosters, as well as a small row garden, a larger permaculture garden, and a little house.

This is entirely Bryce and Misty's creation. They live there with their 1-year-old daughter Sage, and call it Ultima Thule. According to Wikipedia:

The term ultima Thule in medieval geographies denotes any distant place located beyond the "borders of the known world."

 According to me, it translates to Land of What If or Realm of Possibilities.
 
Bryce and Misty bought the land almost 7 years ago and began creating a farm and a home - from scratch. Initially, the house was 200 square feet - a 100-square-foot kitchen and stairs going up to the 100-square-foot bedroom. And because most of the materials were from salvage, the house cost them $600 - including the wood stove in the kitchen which was $150. A couple of solar panels power the pump for water, a few low-wattage lights, and their cell phones. This is no flight of fancy. It's a lifetime commitment to this way of life.

The house from the south side

Michelle, a dear friend and former city dweller, introduced us. I remember the first time Mike and I went there. It was during their Renaissance Faire in the spring. I spent an hour or so wandering around overwhelmed, open-mouthed, speechless - and delighted!

Although it's not clear in the photo, all the wood in the kitchen looks old and rustic. Bryce explained they boiled walnut shells and used the dye to stain the wood. The rafters are hung with drying herbs and more cast iron pots and pans than I've ever seen - and I have quite a collection! And the wood stove not only heats the house but is used for cooking.

The Kitchen

The living room was added on later. It has a dirt floor and a Rumford-esque fire place made of cob. The mosaic around the flue is lovely, as is the wonderful mermaid-fairy statue that Misty sculpted. This is the room where Misty delivered Sage a year or so ago.

The living room

The shower is ingenious!The shower head is attached to a coiled black hose on the roof which is gravity-fed by a rain barrel, also on the roof, and old bottles moulded into the cob let in light.

The shower

And this is a gathering area. The white drum is as a fire pit, and even though it was a chilly day, there's a warmth and welcome about it.

Sitting area

Below are a couple of photos from the Renaissance Faire:

Bryce and Misty

Michelle and Zoe in front of the firepit

 There will be much more to write about this in future posts. I'm looking forward to visiting Ultima Thule in the summer and getting some photos of the chaotic lushness of it all!