Canning is the New Knitting

Last week, I heard on the radio that canning was the new knitting. The idea is that people can continue to eat locally during the winter if they preserve the harvest now. My mother would say everything old is new again.
Being a country girl, I've always been into canning because I was spoiled as a child with home made everything and the store bought versions were never as good. So years ago I started with jam and sweet fruit preserves. The other one loves pickles, so pickles were my next attempt. I used to spend weeks in the fall preserving everything I could get mt hands on that I could do in a hot water canner. My intentions were good but invariably we never ate all of it, and after a few years of dusting jars full of suspect stuff that eventually got thrown away, I gave up most of it and just stayed with the staples.
I'm not so fond of pickles and making them is a lot of work, so I don't do as many of those as he would like. The picture above is a small batch of green tomato chow, because we have a lot of green tomatoes and both the O.O and his father like them.
Salsa is one of those things that I can't stand if bought in a store. It just tastes like chemicals to me, but we eat a lot of Mexican food, and homemade salsa is a staple now. For a couple of years I've attempted to plant everything in the vegetable garden that one needs to make Salsa, but no matter how much I plan, the plants don't seem to co-operate. This year I got enough green peppers, about 2 weeks earlier than any tomatoes ripened. We got cold weather in early September which threatened frost, so I picked the bulk of my tomatoes while they were still green and packed them up in boxes to ripen later. None of my hot peppers grew at all. I couldn't find cilantro to plant at all this spring and my onions are just about ready to be picked now, although they are very small. So once again I went to the farm market and bought the ingredients I needed to make salsa and spent all day yesterday in the kitchen.
The other one, meanwhile finished off roofing the garden shed with the help of our neighbour Dan. This will keep the floor from rotting out again, and will also keep the new lawn mower dry in the winter.









Today he is working on replacing the sheathing on one end of the garage in a vain attempt to keep the critters out. Again, we are doing this a cheaply as possible because we want to tear the ugly garage down someday, so instead of using something proper, we are slapping up something call super roof, which seems to be half inch chip board, but not chip board.

Homely Renovations R Us

Now that Study Boy has emerged from writing the first draft of his research proposal, we spent some time doing house reno stuff yesterday. The never ending process of putting the actual house back together was temporarily suspended though because regular maintenance was required on the garage. It is disheartening to spend money and time on such an ugly building. We have future plans to tear the existing garage down and build a new one because it is:
1 ugly
2 in the view
3 falling down anyway
4 badly designed for our needs

But until we build a new one that corrects all these faults, we still need a place to store tools, motorcycles, kilns and building materials. Oh, and the car in winter. The roof has leaked for a while, and we tried to ignore it but it started leaking on things like the table saw and the chop saw and it really wasn't going to survive another winter. We thought that maybe we would just cover it in a tarp, but realistically, this building will be standing for at least another 3 years, but probably more like 5 or 6. Sigh.
So Study Boy morphed into Good Ol' Boy and visited the local hardware store to see if he could strike a deal on some cheap, roofing shingles. The staff at the local Timbermart know us by name, so when we appear and ask if they have any open or leftover bits and pieces they want to get rid of, they are usually pretty happy to sell it to us at a good price just to get rid of it.
Compared to the shingles we put on the house a couple of years ago, these are really thin and seem to lose a lot of asphalt while you are handling them. They are meant to be 15 year shingles, but they won't last 10. Fine for a building that (hopefully) will be gone in half that time.
With all the money he saved on shingles, Tool Boy bought a roofing gun on Ebay. When we shingled the house roof, we borrowed one from a neighbour who has since moved away, so we justified the expense by saying that we have friends that need roofing projects done this fall. What goes around, comes around.

Death and Literature

This is the Death of Rats. He (she?) is one of my favourite literary characters from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series.

On the disc, Death is a character that shows up wherever there is, well, death. Which, like in our world, is pretty much everywhere, all the time. He is the standard Anthropomorphic Personification of death, which is to say, he looks like a skeleton, wearing a black robe and carrying a scythe.

Since he is so busy, it stands to reason that he needs an assistant. So the Death of Rats takes care of ushering smaller souls into the afterlife. Not just rats, but mice, small mammals, insects, you get the idea. And like the bigger Death, he is a rat skeleton wearing a robe and carrying a scythe. Because standards are important.


This is Atticus, named for a literary character. When we named him after the protagonist in "To Kill Mockingbird" we didn't expect he would take the title so literally.
Like the Death of Rats, he has decided it is his job to help usher smaller souls into the afterlife. At first it was a few house mice, then field mice, then several squirrels, a vole, a chipmunk, a bat, countless crickets and spiders and just today, 2 birds.
I love my cat, but he is starting to scare me.

Because I Don't Have Enough to Do...

Yeah right. Honestly I've been looking forward to getting laid off in October for about a month now; I want to do more pottery, rearrange elements of the garden before winter, do some smallish home reno projects and start curling. That was my plan for the fall. But Robbie Burns knew about the best laid plans. Today I agreed to teach a course at the community college. Just 1, and only 4 hours a week. It starts tomorrow. Actually it started Monday. Last minute and under the gun, just how I like to work.
I don't have a course outline or a semester schedule. I probably won't have access to a computer account or email tomorrow, and I haven't done any paperwork about being paid yet either. I have taught the course before, so I've decided to wing it tomorrow. I figure I can probably muster a 2 hour introduction to Horticulture Structures and Environment off the top of my head.
When I say wing it, I mean I have typed up 3 pages of outline stuff I may talk about. Or maybe not.
I expect something of my fall plans will suffer, most likely the garden.
Oh yeah, and I'm still working. What was I thinking?

Catching Up

Seems like the end of summer is coming whether we want it to or not. Everybody has been commenting on the shorter evenings and later mornings.

This morning the temperature said 3 degrees Celsius when I was getting dressed to ride the bike to work. I had to dig out the wind breaker pants, and as always, I wondered just what 3 degrees with a 80km/h wind actually makes the wind chill. I think the non technical answer is Brrrr. But now I need wonder no more, because this is a website that can calculate that. The technical answer is -14.7 degrees, way colder than I thought!

Tonight there is a large frost warning for most of the province. So I was out tonight covering the tomatoes and basil with bedsheets just in case. One can never have too many bedsheets. These ones came from Frenchies (my favourite store) and they are used as drop sheets when we do messy work in the house, and have also taken the place of walls when visitors need privacy for stuff like showering and peeing. (Oh those crazy visitors!) Tonight bedsheets are frost protection.
Before I covered everything I picked what was ripe. I never seem to remember that I don't need that many tomato plants. This year I thought I did well to keep it to a mere 10, or 2 each of 5 varieties. But as you can see, even just two, is too many for the cherry types. I remember one year in Vancouver I resorted to making green chow with cherry tomatoes, I may need to do this again.

Last Monday I went to the city to see a play at the Fringe Fest. It was called Audacious Babe and Glow Girl and it was written and performed by a friend and student in Acadia's Theatre programme. I thought it was awesome. That is my completely unbiased opinion. The theatre review in today's Chronically Horrid wasn't as positive as my completely unbiased opinion, but happily they didn't post it on the website so you don't have to read that trash.




For those of you wondering what the O.O. is up to, he is still chained to the computer trying to get his research proposal ready to send to his advisers, and consequently is still not allowed to have any fun at all until he finishes his homework. On a positive side, Atticus has decided to help.

And Finally, a long while back I mentioned to a potter friend that I follow a number of Pottery Blogs as a poor substitute for the feedback and ideas you get from being part of a community studio. She asked that I list them on my blog, so here they are added to the left pane. Each of these also have more potter's blogs listed on their site so I can pretty much get lost in virtual clay all evening.

We're Jammin'

This weekend I found myself with the unusual circumstance of not having anything to do. No social commitments, no house reno planned, no plans already made at all. And with the tail end of a tropical storm bearing down on us, I knew I wouldn't be gardening or going for a spin on the bike.
I may have mentioned that strawberry season is my favourite time of year. My love of strawberries is easily surpassed by how much the Other One adores blackberries.
With the O.O. locked in his room until his school work is done, I decided to reward his efforts by making him some blackberry jam. Off I went this morning to my not so secret spot down by the railroad tracks, just as the rain began to fall. It has been three years since I was last there. Last year and the year before, we were in Newfoundland. (AKA no berries to be found land.)
The berries were still there but they were smaller than I remembered, and pretty picked over already in most spots. Since I was last there, a proper walking trail has been put in beside the tracks, and I think more people walk there now. CN used to be pretty unhappy when people would use the train tracks as a trail, so they gave people a place to walk, just about a year before the last train stopped running. It took me nearly three hours to pick a scant five pints. It rained lightly, but I got soaked through, wading deep into the thickets looking for bigger berries. Finally I figured I had enough for a batch.
The bad thing about blackberries, aside from the thorns and the wasps, is that you have to sieve out the seeds and so you need to pick a lot more of them than say, strawberries. (Mmmmm, strawberries.) Happily, the O.O. likes jam more than jelly, (or at least so he tells me) and I don't have to get rid of all the seeds, which would be too tedious. When I was a teenager with braces, my Aunt Erica use to make me blackberry jelly. Now I know that there is just nothing I can do to make it up to her.
The jam making took most of the afternoon. Usually I double or quadruple a batch to save time. The directions on the pectin packaging warn against this, but I like to live on the edge. Except this year, none of my strawberry jams set up properly. I was blaming watery berries from all the early rain we got, but to be on the safe side I decided to follow directions this time. I forgot to put in the pectin in the first batch before I started to bottle it. Then I had to reboil the jam and re wash and sterilize the jars so I could add it. This slowed the process down a bit.
Then I had the brilliant idea to try and save the seeds I had sieved out so I could plant them and have my own berry patch. The O.O. was really excited by this idea and so we began. We washed and we washed and we washed and we washed. And lots of pulpy gunk came off the seeds, but at the end of 20 minutes, they were still pretty pulpy. I was concerned that they would go moldy before they germinated, so we tried a different tactic. We smooshed them out onto newspaper to dry them. My theory is that the pulp will brush off easier if it is dry. Once the seed is clean, we can stratify it in the fridge and sow it in a cold frame to germinate in spring. All in all, I had about 4 cups of pulp, which probably translates into thousands of seeds, so even if the germination rate is really low, I should get a few plants growing in the spring to plant out. It's a start.

A Play 's the Thing

What thing, though, I am not exactly sure. Last weekend we went over to the other side, to visit the parental units and see a play at the Ship's Co. This year was the 25th Anniversary of Ship's Co, and as the other one and I met there (everybody go awwwwwe) we should have attended all the events ( or at least some of the events) during the season, but we didn't. We do remember the 10th anniversary though; I think we worked it in fact.
Guilt finally caught up with me and we did arrange to see the second mainstage production aptly named Ferry Tales. It was commissioned to celebrate this year's anniversary, and was a collection of stories around and about the Minas Basin as told by passengers aboard the MV Kipawo when she was still a ferry travelling between Kingsport, Parrsboro and Wolfville and long before she was a theatre dry docked in Parrsboro. Most of the stories I had heard before, growing up on the Minas Basin. How Glooscap made the Five Islands. The story of a Bishop from Greenwich who hopped across the ice cakes one winter to ask his Parrsboro girl to marry him. The ghost story about the cave at Black Rock where you can still hear the woman abandoned by pirates, crying for help as the tide comes in and drowns her. (everybody go oooooh!)
It was fun, but a little disjointed, and I wonder if a tourist would be able to follow the narrative as it was just loosely strung together with a little music and comedy. The acting was very good. The set design worked well, although, there was a time when the MV Kipawo could have, (and would have) been used to play herself. Alas she is reduced to being a lobby for a black box stage. The costumes were confusing, and seemed to say 70's Britain more than 1930's Nova Scotia. They had that distinct low budget Frenchy's feel. Not the best offering from Ship's Company, let's hope their other mainstage productions were more interesting.