What did you do this weekend?

Not so much house reno as house maintenance. After digging up the drive to install the water line, it got very mucky and rutted in the spring thaw. We first tried to use field stones in the ruts to firm it up and hoped that they would act like cobblestones, but that was a disaster. We talked about getting a man with a digger to grade it and fix up the ditch that ran along side. We talked about doing it by (gasp) hand. We even looked into renting a machine and driving it ourselves. We were waffling about the work and the price of all these options. On Saturday though, our neighbours had a digging machine in their yard to look for the septic tank which they suspected needed pumping. They had spent several hours looking for it with shovels and long poles without success and had decided to get in a professional. We took advantage of that event to ask the guy if he would do some things for us. In about an hour with no physical or organizational effort on our part required at all, it was all done.
He dug the ditch.
He graded the drive. He pulled out several tree stumps that still had massively long roots attached.
He levelled a spot for the new wood shed.
Peter was so happy he couldn't stop grinning.
It cost a $100.
Then, we considered that our septic system hadn't been pumped for several years so we decided to find our tank, and unlike the neighbours, we mostly knew where to look because it was new when we bought the house 8 years ago. I took pictured so we would remember where to look next time, because you only do this every few years. We are not sure if it needs to be pumped or not, but we will call and try to piggy back onto our neighbour's house call now that it is all dug up.
I started back to work this week, and except one particularly gruelling day I didn't feel as bad as expected. I did get a sunburn on Thursday because the weather went from cold and rainy to hot and muggy in about 3 minutes and apparently it was sunny for at least some of the time.These are a couple of gratuitous pottery photos from the last glaze kiln. I just unloaded a bisque this week and I've been working on making plaster molds for some new ideas. The plaster is a nightmare though and I've had several mishaps with it setting too quickly or oozing out of the forms and going everywhere.

How Gardeners Get Their Jollies

Happy New Year. We survived the season of Madness. It was good. Saw lots of friends, some from away, some from here but living away. Didn't over eat too much. Didn't get too much excessive stuff that we didn't need or want. The other one has been off since early December, and we have done some useful but mundane chores around the house over the past few weeks. Tonight, while tidying up my photos in the computer, I found some pictures of a gardening project I did last October and meant to write about but never had the time due to: work, craft fair madness, pre-Madness madness and just general all round madness.
It is still an experiment in progress, and finding the pictures made me go check on the actual experiment to see how it was getting along.So far so good, which is gratifying as I put a lot of work into this one.
Last October, I started taking apart the planters that the Town uses on the street in summer. One plant we always like to use for the planter boxes is ornamental sweet potato vine. They don't usually flower in Nova Scotia, but add interesting and full foliage to the planters. They come in lime green, bronze, and tricolour. I like the lime green ones the best, they really set off purple or blue flowered plants like heliotrope or verbena, and they are tough as nails for drought and wind and drunks. All of which we get on Main Street.
The down side is their price. A four inch plant retails for $4.99. I know we bought at least 54 last spring, that is $250+ just for one type of plant. They are expensive because they are grown by cuttings and our local nurseries can only buy plugs and pot them up because they are patented and you must pay a royalty to propagate them.
Last spring I put two lime green plants in each planter, and by fall they were huge trailing vines over the side of the boxes. As their name suggests, they make sweet potatoes. The lime green plants make pink ones. I'm not sure if they are edible, they are a cultivated variety selected as ornamentals and I imagine they are probably more starchy than tasty. But plants that produce storage organs like tuberous roots (as these are), true tubers, rhizomes, bulbs and corms do so as a method for surviving a season when growing conditions are not favourable for the plant. So it would stand to reason that I should be able to store the sweet potatoes and use them to grow plants again next spring. Last year, I saved some in my basement as an experiment. I treated them just like I treat Canna rhizomes. I brushed the soil off them, let them dry a bit and then stuck them in a box in the basement and forgot about them. This worked for the Cannas, but come spring, the sweet potatoes were wizened up and not one grew when I potted them up.
This year, I got scientific. I started researching how to save ornamental sweet potato vine on the Internet, and what I found was that it was all but impossible to do. Every gardening forum and website suggested that the tubers were useless but you could take a cutting in fall, root it in water and grow the plant as a house plant. A colleague at work tried this and it worked. Sweet potato vine roots easily just by sticking it in a jar of water. The problem with this, is that I want to save lots and lots. More than I have room to grow in my living room certainly.
And then there is my dirty little secret...I kill house plants. I am useless with plants indoors. I am aware of the irony. I cannot seem to keep a plant alive inside over the winter. Mostly because I forget to water it, and unlike the dog and cat, (and the sweetie for that matter) who will tell you that they are hungry, a plant will go to its death quite uncomplainingly.
Logically, and biologically, a plant would not put so much effort into producing a storage structure unless it was able to use it for survival. So I concluded that someone had figured out how to do this for the edible type of sweet potatoes, because after all we eat those in Nova Scotia all year round. I surmised that if I could duplicate the storage method for edible sweet potatoes, it would work for the ornamental ones as well.
I began by looking at agricultural websites and university research papers on sweet potatoes. I found a really good research paper by Paul Sumner at the University of Georgia (where else would you expect research on sweet potatoes?) It went into a lot of detail of how they commercially harvest and store sweet potatoes. I learned that I did everything wrong. Sweet potatoes need a warm humid curing environment for several days, followed by a cool moist storage environment. The paper is very specific about the temperatures and humidity and duration if you care to read about it at the link above. The problem is that it describes the commercial methods, with big specially built facilities with computer controlled environments. I needed to devise something that would do the same thing, for cheap on a small scale.
First, how to cure them at 28 degrees Celsius and 94% humidity? The humidity would come from putting them in a large plastic garbage bag. Their own moisture would keep the humidity high. The temperature was more of a problem, our house is a comfortable 18 degrees in summer most days because we are heavily shaded on the south and the house is super insulated with the windows shut. By October it is getting cooler outside but not so cool we want to light a fire or turn on the heat. At first I thought I should get an electric heating pad and cover them. The sweetie wasn't too keen on running a heating pad for 10 days continuous just for a crazy plant experiment. He came up with using the warm space on top of the fridge.
If you have room on top of the fridge it is good for all sorts. I have a friend that uses it to thaw frozen dinner rolls quickly. It is useful for rising bread dough, and I myself have used it to hasten germination of seedlings in spring. The compressor that cools the fridge has to expel heat somewhere, and usually it is out the back and rises to the ceiling. Even if the top of your fridge is not open, an enclosed cupboard above will be a few degrees warmer than the rest of the room.
The sweetie made a box out of 5 pieces of Styrofoam, 2 inches thick. We had this just lying around in the barn because we are in constant renovation mode and you never know when you night need some off cuts of Styrofoam. The bottom piece was square, roughly the size of the fridge top. The sides were 8 inches high, and hung out over the back of the fridge all the way to the wall. The top covered the sides to the wall also, and this way the heat got trapped into the insulated box. The front was cut to slot neatly into the rim made by the bottom top and sides, with a finger slot for opening. I was amazed to find that the temperature got up to 26 degrees Celsius in the box. The research paper suggested that a lower temperature would need a longer curing time, so I placed the sweet potatoes in the box and left them there for a two weeks instead of 10 days.
The curing is meant to produce a thicker skin on the sweet potato so it can be stored. When you dig them, sweet potatoes are easily bruised or damaged by the shovel, so treat them gently, more like a peach than a potato because any bumps or cuts will wound them and they will start to rot in the curing stage. One bad sweet potato can spoil the whole lot, so check them frequently and take out any that are going soft or mouldy.
Once I was sure they were cured, my basement is a constantly cool 15 degrees, at 60% rH, perfect for storage. The paper suggests that storing them in crates covered with barely moist sand will help stop the dessication I experienced last year. We still have half a yard of sand left over from the electrical trench we dug to the garage last February, so I used that and occasionally remember to mist the top of the sand lightly to keep it moist.
It has been two months since I put them in the basement, and so far they look the same as the day they went in. If all goes well in spring, I will pot them up in the green house and have lots of reclaimed plants for the street planters next year.

Laundry List of Fun and Exciting Things

Wow, I have a whole laundry list of fun and exciting things to write about. I've been so busy doing all these fun and exciting things that blogging was impossible. It is a real time commitment to do this regularly and I admire people who do, but I don't know where they find the time. Perhaps it is just me struggling to find the perfect phrase instead of just dashing off whatever comes out that makes it more time consuming that it should be.
Enough naval gazing. On with the list.

Just before my first craft show I attended an awesome workshop put on by the Nova Scotia Potter's Guild. They had Joan Bruneau of Nova Terra Cotta Pottery in Lunenburg do a 1 day workshop on how she alters and decorates her pots. I love the idea of altering thrown pots, but when ever I try it my pots just look lumpy and sad. Now I understand that when she alters her pots, she has a plan before she starts. Go figure. Lots of other potters were there including some potters that I didn't think needed to see any workshop, namely Ray Mackie from Lucky Rabbit Pottery, and Jim Smith from Chester. Yes, I'm name dropping. Going to a workshop like this is like watching the Brier on TV. You can see how it is done, you understand the process and you get really jazzed up to try it; and then you plunge into the depths of dispair when you realize that knowing and doing are different. I just don't have those skills yet.

Speaking of the Brier, October came and that means curling season again. You would think that after 7 months of professional gardening (not to mention the unprofessional hours put in at home); months spent bending and stretching and lifting and shovelling and pushing and carrying and raking, that the little matter of sliding around on ice and doing a bit of sweeping would be no problem. It is not like I spent the summer drinking beer (well yes OK I did that too.) I am a pretty active person. But apparently for all the muscle groups I use in the summer, gardening and swimming and well, drinking beer, I did not use the muscle groups required to slide out of the hack 16 times and sweep 48 rocks in two hours. My work colleagues got some amusement watching me groan about the first week. For some reason, climbing in and out of a truck seem to be the worst, and I only do that about 50 thousand time a day. Life was complete madness on those overlapping weeks when I was starting to curl twice a week, preparing for and going to craft shows and still working. Happily I stopped work and now all is fine.

The parks department finished work last Friday, one day before my second craft fair. I sold the same number of pots as the first show: three, but as Peter wasn't with me to buy things and lunch was catered, I came out $19 ahead. Whoo Hoo! I am, however still learning who buys pottery. I can tell you that women with small children DO NOT buy pottery, because they cannot justify spending money on a beautiful object that will get broken when Walmart sell those object in plastic or metal for less. This is as good a reason for not having children as I have ever heard.

That show was also in the middle of a terrible rain storm that went on for 5 days, flooding south west Nova Scotia and washing out roads and bridges in many communities. It was not a hurricane although the winds on Friday were higher than during those so called hurricanes we had this year. We were untouched, but I was constantly amazed at how full the rivers were last weekend. Our Habitant River, normally a ditch with barely a trickle of water, was 25 feet wide and probably as deep. Even in the spring melt I have never seen it so high.

This was also the weekend my dear parent- in-laws came for a visit. They had been attending a reunion in Fredericton at the University of New Brunswick and popped over here before heading back to British Columbia. At this time of year, we could have easily been under snow or at least experiencing freezing weather, so 5 days of rain is not so bad. Except the wind and rain cancelled all flights into the airport and they were delayed 24 hours before they arrived. Had they known, they could have driven the distance in a mere 6 hours. It was dismal and gloomy for their visit throughout, I don't think they miss this coast at all.

My next hurtle is the 3 day craft fair at the end of this week. Since the parent-in-laws left I am potting full time, in a crazy push to get things through the entire process so I have some fresh new things for the show. Typically perhaps, the full time push has meant that my pots are drying much more quickly as I am leaving them uncovered to hurry them along. Consequently my pots are developing stress cracks in the bottoms. I had to recycle two vases yesterday and one chip and dip plate today. I suspect a large bowl and a small casserole will be next. At this rate I may have nothing at all to fire which will certainly free up some time. It's frustrating because stress cracks are not usually a problem for me, but I've been going through a phase and some of my bowls came out of the last glaze kiln with cracks too. I have had to bag up the remaining pots to prevent them drying too fast and therefore I have nothing to do, so today, instead of pottery I mowed up the leaves on the driveway and watched a movie. It was like a forced day off. The forced slow down may mean nothing gets finished before the weekend.

Chapter and Prose

Lots to talk about, so longish post. Here goes with titles so those of you skiving at work can skim.

Pottery

Last weekend my friend Natalie came over for a pottery session. Natalie is a pinch potter that I met in Newfoundland at the Craft Council Studio. She is spending the next year going back to school to get an M.Ed, and so she is going to get her clay fix with me. The bonus to having her here is that she motivates me to do things too. So while she continued working on a pinch pot that she started the week before, I actually made some butter dishes and got the studio a little more organized. Here is a lovely little pinch pot she made in a mere 6 or 8 hours. And I thought coiling was slow.


Studio Upgrade

My tiny studio is feeling a little small lately. The first week Nat came, we potted outside on the patio until it got dark, but this week it got dark just that little earlier. With Natalie being here, and my friend Susann occasionally too, and Colleen across the street waiting to fire some things I was getting short on shelf space. So carpenter man built me some cubby holes into a space that will eventually be a window when the studio is eventually a sun porch. If the spaces seem small understand that each shelf is removable to make a taller space as needed, and each shelf is just the right size to double as a bat on my wheel. Clever.

Bye Bye Binky

We have decided that we are not motorcycle tinkerers. Both our motorcycles are 30 years old and need constant tinkering to run well (or at all) I like riding a bike, not repairing one, and between gardening and swimming and PhD ing they just doesn't get the tinkering time they really need. Therefore we have listed both our motorcycles on KIJIJI to sell this fall with the plan that we will buy one newer more reliable and less problematic (hopefully) motorcycle to share between us. It is sad to see Binky go, he was a good first bike, I think a person becomes attached to these things like their first car or teddy bear. Peter is not so find of the Cherry Red Virago, but it has always been a problem child.

R-U-N-N-O-F-T

While I am left alone to reply to motorcycle inquiries, Study Boy has flown to Ottawa for a Canadian Association of University Teachers Conference until Friday. In my head I pictured getting lots of stuff done while he was away, but tonight is my first day without him and I am realizing just how much stuff he does that I now have to do by myself. Like walking the dog, feeding the dog, shocking the pool, making dinner and watering the greenhouse. So much for getting other stuff done, it is now 23 minutes past my bedtime and I still have to put gas in my bike for tomorrow and water the greenhouse.

Speaking of Water

The long wait is nearly over, last week we signed up to get the new municipal water service coming through our community. We still haven't booked a contractor to dig the hole and lay the pipe to the house, but we are at least started. We have until December to hook up, but hopefully we can get to it sooner than that. Knowing that we dug a trench last February though, I'm not holding my breath or anything. The county has organized a loan to people wishing to sign up because the cost of installing the line and service is $6000 for each homeowner, but this means you will get an $850 bill every year for the next 10 years. We have great water but we are at the mercy of power outages so we decided to do it now rather than later when the cost would be even more after December. I met one man who said his water was good too, but all his neighbours' wells had gone bad from seawater infiltration and he figured that his will eventually go too. Two years ago they tested all wells and found that 25% were unacceptable because of seawater or farm contamination. Water security is a big issue, so I think we are being prudent in spending this kind of cash.

Robbery in the Park

Sad news. Yesterday while I was working in Waterfront Park I was robbed. Truly. I left the park to get a rake from my truck, I was gone only three minutes but when I came back my tool belt was gone. Admittedly, I left it on the grass, because it didn't occur to me that anyone would want to take it. My tool belt has very sentimental value to me, my Sweetie made it for me in 1995 for my birthday in Vancouver when I was still a sound technician. Over the years it was adapted to be a gardener's tool belt. Off came the flashlight and pliers holders and on went the pruners and digging knife. Most of the tools were issued at work, but the belt and the original gak bag were mine. So was the Gerber multi tool, another Sweetie birthday present, from about 1998 I think. I looked everywhere for it, including the garbage cans and the mud flat bottom of the harbour but it is gone. The Mounties don't expect it to turn up, but I spent a half hour today with a nice constable who took my formal statement for the file.

My Morning Routine

This morning, as usual, after my 30 minute sleep in and my first cup of coffee, I wandered out to the berry patch to gather some fresh gooseberries for my yogurt and muslix breakfast.

Then after dawdling around some more, I finally realized (as usual) that I had about 10 minutes before I needed to go to work and proceeded to rush around (as usual) getting dressed, making lunch, finding keys and shoes and sun screen and remembering that I should water the greenhouse and turn on the drip line in the berry patch.

Yup. That's pretty much my morning routine.

Except this morning was anything but routine. When I finally went to hook up the drip line (now 5 minutes late leaving for work, as usual) I noticed there was something wrong with the pool. It was only an inch deep.

It had collapsed sometime between 9'0clock last night and 7:35 this morning. The weird thing is, I can't tell you if it was like that at 6:30 when I went to pick gooseberries or if it happened this morning in that 65 minutes. At any rate I had just enough time to tell the pool boy the news before I had to rush off to work, unhappy in the knowledge that for the first time in weeks, I would not be swimming tonight after a long hot stinky day in the sun.
We suspected this might happen but we were hoping it wouldn't. Once we set up the pool and had it filled we realized what we thought was a level piece of ground was only sort of level. It was in fact about 4 inches out which translated over an 18 foot diameter, 4 feet deep is quite a bit of water pushing on one side of the pool just waiting for an excuse to tip. Of course, once the pool is full of 20,000 litres of water there isn't much you can do about that. Now that the pool is no longer full of 20,000 L of water we decided that this was an opportunity to fix the underlying problem.
Pool Boy went to work and ordered a load of top soil to level out the pad. We were hoping it would be delivered today but it hasn't arrived. He did prepare for it by using small stakes you see in the picture to find out what level is. Hopefully, we can get the topsoil tomorrow and begin refilling the pool by tomorrow night.
Unfortunately, we invited friends for a Brunch/Pool party on Sunday morning. I don't think there will be much chance of it being filled by then.

Wolfville Arbor Day

Almost the end of April, and that means deadlines are looming. One for taxes, which are mostly finished. The other one needs to update his banking info with Rev Can before we can e file and get the whopping $26 return. The other deadline is snow tires need to be swapped before the end of the month because we have studded ones on the truck. I went to see my friendly neighbourhood garage mechanic today after work and gave him a hug to ensure that he would be able to do that for me tomorrow.
Time does speed by when you are forced to spend all day at work. I am into week two now, and I am still holding up OK. Today was Wolfville Arbor Day. A local businessman donated 85 trees to the town to be planted on public and private land. We organised 8 volunteers from the local Katimavik group, 6 second year Horticulture Students from Kingstec and some town gardener volunteers (who we affectionately call the Gorilla Gardeners) to do the work this morning. I think we got about 50 planted, with still another 35 to go into a local park space later on. This is definitely a fun part of the job, we get to talk to homeowners in town that are thrilled to be getting a new tree for free, and we get to have a celebratory barbecue to say thank you to our volunteers after the hard work is done.

Homework

School work is coming to an end. The students are finished their part of the deal and now I have marking to do. I brought it home with me yesterday. It's homework.

I started taking a class last week at the Nova Scotia Centre for Craft and Design. I'm not fond of glazing so I enrolled in a glaze class hoping to pick up some tips or at least become more comfortable with the process. My last glaze kiln was a complete disaster. Of 9 pieces, only 1 is semi passable, and the rest exhibit every problem there is. The most disappointing was a bowl that would have been beautiful except two bits of ceramic stuff cracked off my pyrometer in the kiln and fell into the bowl while it was firing. Bugger.
The glaze class is mostly focused on making and testing glazes, but I figure it can't hurt to force myself to glaze more. It's all practice. I have to make at least 36 test tiles for next class which I did yesterday. It's homework.
I was called back to work at the Town of Wolfville parks dept. starting Monday. That's a week earlier than I thought and now I'm scrambling to find my work clothes and water proof my boots. There were some other things I was hoping to get accomplished before I went back, like rototilling the vegetable garden and getting a new back tire on my motorcycle, but these will have to be relegated to weekends now. They're homework.