Seeing Red

 When I woke last Sunday morning and saw the brilliant sunshine I knew I wanted to go for a walk in the woods. Although there was a noticeable absence of predawn gunshots I didn't know for sure that hunting season had ended. But desire trumped reason – I just wanted to go “forest bathing” or Shinrin-yoku" as the Japanese call it. But, feeling I should make at least a nod to caution, I decided to don an orange jacket and scarf.

Late fall seems at first to be monochromatic, especially compared to the brilliance of fall foliage and the spring to autumn parade of kaleidoscopic annual and perennial bloom. Once you accept the limited palette you begin to notice the many subtle variations of green, brown and beige. 

Milkweed seed head

Walking through the fields there was a gorgeous “big sky” - perhaps nothing to compare with Montana's, but beautiful for Ontario; a glowing blue with dark ominous clouds above the northern horizon and a combination of cumulus and cirrus clouds to the east. 

Scylla "home on the range"

It may have been donning my orange jacket, but I first noticed a florescent orange fungus on a fallen tree trunk in the hedgerow. Commonly known as Orange Witch's Butter and scientifically as Dacrymyces palmatus, it is described, accurately I'd say, as looking brain like. 

Dacrymyces palmatus or Orange Witch's Butter

After that I  became aware of the flashes of complementary red – rare but more delightful for their economy in the landscape.

A bright purple bramble stem

 Red osier dogwood growing on the bank of Railway Creek

Once I entered the woods, having been alerted by the Orange Witch's Butter, I started to notice other colourful macrofungi. I did my best to identify them, but offer no guarantees. The site I found most useful was the University of Wisconsin's. http://www.uwgb.edu/biodiversity/resources/mushrooms/descriptionsD-H.asp

Another orange mushroom, Omphalotus illuden

Omphalotus illuden, known as Jack O' Lantern mushroom

I came across something I couldn't identify on a fallen tree trunk. I'm not even sure if it's a lichen or a fungus….

In the part of the woods dominated by hemlock and yellow birch I came across Ganoderma tsugae, Hemlock polypore which is relatively rare simply because it only grows on hemlocks.

Hemlock polypore Ganoderma tsugae

Another example a few feet along

There was another magnificent fungus, Fomitopsis pinacola, quite gaudy with its distinctive striping. Commonly know as Red-banded Conk, it is characterized by a gray center, outlined by a black band with an outermost red band. 

Fomitopsis pinacola or Red Banded Conk

 Having gotten used to picking out flashes of red I saw a stand of red osier dogwood in the distance. 

Walking further there was an exposed tree root on the path, worn smooth and a warm red colour.

Once I got back home I noticed the brilliant red of the high bush cranberry. There are very few berries this year and I think it must be related to the hard frost we had in May which also reduced the number of wild grapes and apples.

High bush cranberry berries

And there was the brilliant red of the modest, ground-hugging wild strawberries bravely growing in the sharp drainage of the gravel in front of the garage.

Wild Strawberry leaves

The meadow rose that Alex gave us rewarded with both red stems and red hips.

Red rose hips and stems

While there may be some who are seeing red at the lack of snow this Christmas, Nature hasn't forgotten the season. She's just reminding us that the red and green of Christmas are all around us. 

2015 Christmas Offerings

It doesn't seem to feel a lot like Christmas yet. A year ago we had a blizzard. This year leaves are still on some trees and the predicted high tomorrow is 9C! But, weather notwithstanding, Christmas is three weeks today. The Centre for Social Innovation Pop-Up Market was a great success and supplies of the condiments continue to dwindle. Christmas Offerings 2015 includes shortbreads and condiments, both in sweet and savoury versions.

The shortbreads are made from the finest ingredients; Balderson 12 year cheddar, 72% dark chocolate, organic flour and sweet butter. Each package contains 10 cookies.
As always most of the fruits and vegetables come from my organic garden. We had a devastating frost in May so there were very few wild grapes. But sometimes adversity leads to opportunity. In this case, for the first time, as well a picking wild grapes, I also bought grapes - Fredonia which is a native wine grape and Concords. So this year there are wild grape, Fredonia and Concord grape jellies.

The jellies contain nothing but fruit juice and sugar (no commercial pectin). The marmalades highlight citrus fruits available only for a few weeks each year. The savoury condiments include a spicy ketchup made from my heirloom tomatoes, cayenne and jalapeno peppers. New this year are Pickled Radishes. The pickles and relish come in 250 ml jars and everything else is in 125 ml jars.

You can order by email as often as you like. Order early, regardless of your delivery date, to ensure you get what you want. I make the condiments as the fruits and vegetables are in season so once they’re spoken for they’re gone. I continue to bake the shortbreads as orders come in so they’re always fresh. Let me know when you prefer me to deliver it and how many gift bags you would like.

Each item is $5.

Have wonderful holidays!

So this year's list

SAVOURY SHORTBREADS

12 Year Cheddar Rich and with a bit of a cayenne kick

Parmesan Fennel Light and melt in your mouth

SWEET SHORTBREADS

Toblerone      A classic shortbread studded with the dark chocolate version of this Swiss chocolate bar

Lemon       Flecks of lemon zest add a bit of tang to complement the richness of this traditional butter shortbread

Dark Chocolate Orange     A classic duo

Cranberry Pistachio       Perfect for Christmas with flecks of red and green

SAVOURY CONDIMENTS

Bread and Butter Pickles 250 ml    A great addition to sandwiches and charcuterie plates   Sold Out

Sweet Zucchini Relish 250ml    Perfect for hamburgers or mixed with mayo as a homemade tartar sauce for fish  Sold Out

Pickled Radishes 250 ml        New this year   Four left

Hot Pepper Jelly      A lovely jewel-like deep red with a bit of edge from jalapeño peppers

Spicy Tomato Ketchup Much more complex than commercial ketchup. Slow cooked all day. Great with gourmet grilled cheese!

SWEET CONDIMENTS

Grape Jelly            Choose Wild Grape, Fredonia or Concord

Crabapple Jelly            Beautiful translucent red jelly good for breakfast and with roasted pork and chicken

Blood Orange Marmalade         A taste of summer in the depths of winter   One left

Meyer Lemon Marmalade         Not too sweet, a refreshing marmalade with toast and scones

                                                       

The state of the garden the first week in June

After the traumatizing weather in May, things seem to have settled into a more seasonal scenario with regular rain, sometimes accompanied by thunder and lightning, bright sun during the day, although not yet hot and humid, and cool temperatures at night. There is heavy dew which is really good for maintaining moisture al long as plants have a dressing of mulch.

Things are starting to come back after the late frost; the wild grape is putting out new leaves, the ostrich ferns are green again and even the catalpa seems to be forming new leaf buds.

The ostrich ferns are now bright green again

The garden too is recovering. While the radish seedlings were killed by the frost, the later seedings have germinated and are looking healthy. Successive seedings of lettuce, spinach, kale and mustard are all looking robust.

New radish seedlings on the left, spinach in the centre and lettuce to the right

The first potatoes I planted, the weekend of May 10, have broken through the earth and I hoed up around them.

Potatoes planted three weeks ago now have been hoed and hilled up

I prepared the bed and planted the heirloom bush beans, mulching afterwards with straw and grass clippings.

The newly sown heirloom bush bean bed with a mulch of straw or grass clippings between the rows  

I planted 30 more tomatoes on Thursday. There are 20 left at home to plant next weekend.

Fledgling tomatoes planted against Josh's tomato frames 

There has been a little time so far to do anything other than planting. I remember a farmer I had not met before, coming to take the hay off the field. When he stopped to chat he said he knew I was organic. Feeling somewhat pleased I asked him how. He said, "Because all I can see is weeds!" Put firmly in my place, since then I have always been acutely aware of all the weeds. This weekend I finally got a chance to do some weeding; the red currants are now free of their previous enclosure of quack grass, in addition to the straw I used in the fall to mulch the garlic, they now have weeds pulled and laying at their feet instead of competing with them.

The red currants weeded and now recognizable

The ornamental beds also were in desperate need of a little care. There's never enough time to do everything that needs to be done, so I start by edging the beds. That seems to guide the eye and restore the beds to three dimensions rather than two. Without intervention the weeds and grass just seem to fill in all the gaps and make everything the same height, colour and texture. There are so many more beds to edge and more weeds to remove farther back but at least I have started and feel just a little optimistic about how they might look if I just keep at it.

The shrub border has a crisp edge now

And the purple and orange bed was a treat to edge since the soil always stays moist and easy to work

I also started a new compost. There is just so much raw material and I've never really been able to successfully get good compost here like I can in the city. So, ever the optimist, here's one more attempt. All this material was collected on Saturday from my weeding efforts!

The latest attempt at composting - all this material was the product of one day's weeding!

Our native tree nursery seems to be doing well - the red oaks have leafed out and spruces are putting on new growth.

The tree nursery - spruce on the left, red oak on the right

More and more insects are showing up. There are dragonflies and the Yellow Swallowtail butterflies seem to time their arrival with the blooming of the Preston lilac.

Yellow Swallowtail feeding on the Preston Lilac

This bumblebee systematically went to every single blossom on the columbine.

It's hard to see the bee because it disappeared totally into each flower

I had two other exciting sightings; one of an oriole going from one shrub to the next in the Highbush Cranberry hedge. The other was of a hawkmoth at the Johnny Jump-Ups. But in neither case did I have my camera. Sigh, sigh.

Nature vs. Nurture Part 2

I realize now that my last post should have been entitled Nature and Nurture. This past week has illustrated what Nature vs. Nurture really is - in terms of being adversarial, not alternatives. In the five days since we left there has been a drought - and a hard frost, as in -4C!

On Monday we left the farmhouse with seedlings of radish, arugula, kale and mustard all having emerged with their primary leaves. We returned to find them black from the frost.

Arugula seedlings - the blackened ones frost-bitten

The pots which we planted with tropicals are now mush and the geraniums are wilted and waterlogged.

Formerly datura a sweet potato vines

Frozen portulaca

Waterlogged geraniums

When I finished planting them, I loved the datura and geraniums and thought the pot with pot marigold (calendula) I had grown from a packet of seeds looked sort of weedy. But after this week's weather the ugly duckling seedlings are maturing into healthy looking plants.

Pot marigold looking hardy and healthy despite the extreme weather conditions

Even native plants like the wild grape, ferns and sumachs which had recently leafed out, now have their foliage blackened from the frost.

Wild grape with frost-killed black leaves but with new green growth

The ostrich ferns after a killing frost

And the new foliage of some of the shrubs and trees we have planted, like the smokebush and catalpa,  is now blackened and shrivelled.

But in addition to the hard frost there has been a drought - no rain in weeks.The rhubarb, which is very cold hardy, had wilted as one would expect it to by the end of June when it was nearing the end of its season. And Railway Creek is as low as it ever gets at the end of a dry summer.
Today I have been dragging hoses around from vegetable bed to bed to water. But the problem with drought is that when you need to water plants and top up the pool, the creek is low and probably the water table too. We have never had our well go dry - yet. But many people have and it is not a situation you want to have to deal with.

Railway Creek, reduced to a trickle, the water so low its banks are exposed

All this weird weather feels biblical. My emotional response is that it feels personal - like punishment for being vainglorious; for thinking I had figured out a few things - about gardening, growing vegetables and the process involved. Who has ever had to water because of a drought when there is a killing frost?

My rational reaction is to think it is yet one more indication of climate change with its
accompanying erratic and unpredictable weather patterns. I have found the whole scenario to be scary and apocalyptic-feeling. I know on Victoria Days in the past, weather has been everything from snow to an occasion to cool off by swimming.  But previously, whatever the conditions were, they were expected because of the preceding days' weather. It is the conjunction of frost and drought that feels so unpredictable and impossible to deal with.

Monday morning I woe to grey skies and a slow steady drizzle - the perfect kind of rain to gradually be absorbed into the parched earth. I just hope it lasts long enough to quench the thirst of the plants, the soil and replenish the creek and water table.

Nature vs Nurture

At this time of year when I have been foraging, I start to reflect on the differences between wild and cultivated plants. When ramps and fiddleheads are at their peak there is virtually nothing to be seen in a vegetable garden.

Jessica and Alex picking ramps on Mother's Day, 2014,  accompanied by Scylla

Fiddleheads earlier this past weekend beginning to unfurl

Of course it is not really a justifiable comparison. If we were restricted to hardy plants we couldn't grow tomatoes and peppers which need to be started indoors since they need a longer frost-free growing season than we have here. I'm always finding potatoes when I dig the beds in the spring - but that's because I somehow missed them when digging last year's crop. But if I didn't rotate the beds for potatoes, very few would survive the growing season because the potato bug overwinters in the soil. With no control they would devastate the potato foliage preventing the plants from producing tubers underground. But I have never found a summer squash or cucumber seedling that survived a winter hibernation. Likewise with beans. Carrots and beets and all the biennials would undoubtedly be overcome by weeds even if they were left to flower and set seed for a crop two years later. Wild carrot (Queen Anne's Lace) thrives in the wild but because all of its energy goes into producing flowers and therefore seeds, the root is fibrous and skimpy.

But greens are a difference story. As long as you grow open pollinated lettuces, mustards and kales and allow them to flower they will drop their seed. After a winter under the snow, when conditions are favourable, they will germinate. Despite, or perhaps because of, the various weather scenarios they experience - everything from late frosts and snow to temperatures in the 30C's and full sun they grow hardy and well adapted to their very local environment. I then transplant these seedlings into beds refreshened with compost and manure.

Earlier this weekend weeding the bed of lettuces and spinach seeded last fall

A close-up of the bed with lettuces on the left, spinach on the right

Another greens bed. The lettuce on the top germinated from seed  that overwintered from lettuce plants left to go to seed and the seedlings on the bottom were sown a week ago from seed saved and stored inside all winter.  

I also plant a crop of spinach and onions in the late fall. Like the lettuce they start growing when conditions are suitable and provide a crop at least four weeks earlier than seedlings direct sown.

Fall planted spring onions

Permaculturists aim to reproduce, as much as possible, a woodland ecology; as many perennials as possible, a canopied treescape with large trees at the top, then fruit and nut trees underneath, soft fruit below like berries and finally strawberries and traditional market garden vegetables at ground level. It always seems to me, the optimum approach is to take the best ideas and/or the strategies easiest to employ from wherever you can glean information. I love my rhubarb patch - one of just three plants we inherited - who knows how old it is. Other than using the leaves from harvested stalks as mulch it needs no care.

The rhubarb patch

Another perennial vegetable I grow which I planted a few years ago is sorrel. It is not universally liked, but for those who are fans they love it for its crisp lemony taste.

Sorrel

It would be nice to have a greenhouse to get a jump on the season. But you really need to live where your greenhouse is, to monitor ventilation and temperature. I don't have that situation. But with some perennial vegetables, fall sowing and letting plants flower and go to seed, I can manage to provide a smooth procession from foraged plants to cultivated ones, by relinquishing a certain amount of control and working with nature, at least some of the time. So, not nature vs nurture, but nature and nurture.