This site's got L.E.G.S.
The seasonal ebb and flow of mother nature.
Frost Warning tonight. Busy day after a busy Thanksgiving weekend. Wanted to can some apple butter and apple sauce, but instead I spent naptime madly harvesting all remaining veggies from the garden: 3 green cabbages 1/2 dozen japanese eggplants of varying sizes 2-3 dozen peppers, green and purple, of varying sizes 3 over-sized zucchini 1 [...]
It’s that time of year when I cut and dry all my herbs for winter use. The small-leafed herbs are hung to dry – tied up with twine and hung from coat hangers – but the majority of my harvest meets the heat of the dehydrator. I like that it’s done quickly but still at [...]
Pure unsweetened apple butter was my kids’ first condiment. When they had their first rice cakes, and it was too soon to try peanut butter, I gave them apple butter. When I made Apple Barley Pancakes, they were never served with maple syrup; they were served with apple butter. Their first “cookies” were sweetened [...]
The orchard is throwing up apples. We don’t spray for pests or diseases, and we stopped pruning years ago – call it laziness, busy-ness, whatever – but every two or three years, we have perfect growing weather and in spite of our lack of attention, the trees give us a fantastic harvest. This year is [...]
June was a blur. But the garden grows without me, now, so there’s little to do there except wait for the harvest. The peas are just finishing, the beans are just starting, the greens are continuing, and the tomatoes are full size and ready to change colour. I have never had such a lush vegetable [...]
I like manual labour. I like to see immediate results of my efforts. Weeding dandelions is a perfect example. I’ve been pulling them almost daily. It’s very satisfying work. I already have a fridge full of leaves, so today’s harvest went straight to the compost pile. My first planting of beets did not germinate. Have to [...]
I have spinach in my garden! The one bed that was to have been my “winter greens” experiment (but was ultimately destroyed when my hoop house collapsed under a foot of snow) is waking up and producing green, baby! In celebration of the discovery, each of us sampled a perfect tiny little leaf, then went and [...]
Three weeks into the year and I’ve already received all of my seed catalogues. I’ve spent the last few days laying out my garden plan on the computer. Already the list of jobs to do (outside of planting, seeding, etc) is a mile long. We usually begin with whatever jobs weren’t finished last year. Makes [...]
It is usually a struggle to get a decent rink made in time for Christmas. We bought a rink kit a few years ago, but without the right kind of weather, it still won’t work. Some years, winter arrives early with a huge dumping of snow in late November, but it’s often just a lot of [...]
Better late than never. The best time of year to make baby food is late summer or early fall. Peaches, followed by apples and pears, reach their peak at this time, and these flavours are always well received. If you are new to canning, then making baby food is a good way to …
I was worried that my beautiful greens might take a wee bit of a hit tonight (-2 predicted), so we rigged a temporary mini hoophouse over the garden bed. It was a very last minute decision – made at about 4pm – and I think we did well. We happened to have several yards of [...]
Growing up, my family always had a Tickle Trunk. It was a big black old-fashioned thing with metal hinges and clasps – both my cousin and I could fit inside it. It had some really interesting costume pieces in it: old wedding veils, a couple of wigs, old shirts, ties, skirts, high heeled shoes, scarfs, [...]
With all of the tomatoes ripening on the counter, it was no surprise to find a few fruit flies flitting around. I detest them. So, in a mild panic, I decided to get every scrap of food off the counter and into the fridge, and I put the kitchen compost outside on the …
I have 6 jars of green tomato salsa in the canner. I’ve never preserved green tomatoes before. Usually, at the end of the season, I cut down all the remaining clusters of tomatoes, leaving as much vine attached as possible, and spread them in a single layer between newspapers in the cold cellar. …
I don’t ever remember October being this dark and wet. Unpredictable, yes, but never consistently dreary and damp. The annual golf tournament at the cottage is held on Thanksgiving weekend. It’s always a roll of the die as to what the weather will be like. We’ve had Indian Summer and we’ve had blistering …
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