Walk in the garden

April is half over, and just like clockwork, my annual spring arthritis flare-up has arrived - a not very welcome return guest. Fortunately I have learned a thing or two, like the importance of not giving into the urge to be in the garden all day every day because overdoing things only prolongs the misery. And that the worst feelings of self-pity can be alleviated by nothing more than a walk through the garden. There's enough there to make the most miserable person feel better.

The fawn lilies, for example. We're blessed with hundreds of them, in all the shady beds around the house. And this year it's a bumper crop, thanks (I think) to all that scratching and flicking and digging the chickens did before The Great Divide. These are spirit lifters nonpareil, with their gorgeous speckled leaves and the sheer whimsy of their slowly lid-flipping blooms.

The catkins of the curly hazel tree along the fence line have erupted, giving us a reason to stop and admire the berserk curly pandemonium. I have to wonder about what evolutionary advantage is at work here...

The huckleberry bushes growing near the coop are a favourite of the chickens - in the summer, once all the berries at chicken height have been eaten, Hector jumps up to grab more, then drops them on the ground for his hens to enjoy. And when even those berries are gone, Kim weighs down the taller branches with string and cinder blocks, so the chickens can enjoy every last berry.

Every time I visit our local nursery I'm captivated by the deep indigo hellebores they have. But I've been reluctant to fork out the money to buy a couple, especially since we have about half a dozen hellebores in the garden already. One, in particular, is blooming abundantly this year, working hard to show it can stand up to its showier cousins at the nursery.

I think this is a spirea. I love its colour, especially in the sea of green this time of year. We have a few shrubs in the woodland part of the garden, and they're letting us know they're feeling neglected and a bit crowded out by ferns and salal. Transplanting might be in order.

No, Frankie is not a plant in the garden, but he makes my heart happier than one. Unfortunately he's having a sore April, too, because of what might be a pinched nerve in his neck. So he and I are laying low together, content in the knowledge there will still be gardens to play in and balls to catch when we're feeling better.

A gardener's apology

This is our fourth spring here, and it has taken me that long to develop an understanding of how little I actually know about gardening.

For sure, I have been diligent in my attempts to figure out what the heck I am doing, and I am learning all the time. But I think I am only just now at the point where I have learned enough to know how little I know. And that realization has grown hand in hand with a heartfelt appreciation for the skill and passion of the gardeners who came before me here at Mucky Boots.

Let me give you an example. When we got here I was irritated by all the valuable real estate taken up with flowering plants (yarrow, bee balm, lavender, daisies, poppies) in the vegetable garden. I was a serious gardener, darn it, and I wanted to grow vegetables. I learned to appreciate the beauty pretty quick, but it wasn't until I read my first book on companion planting this winter that I really understood the beneficial role all those flowers were playing, in warding off bad bugs and attracting good ones. When I closed the cover of the book I wanted to say "I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" for all the times I rolled my eyes at yet another yarrow plant tucked into the corner of a bed. Not to mention the medicinal value of many of those plants, which I am just starting to appreciate.

Here's another example: I have just recently learned that most perennials need regular dividing if they're going to stay healthy and productive. So I started to make a list of the ones I should think about dividing ASAP, given they haven't been done since we got here. What was on the list? Rhubarb, hostas and primulas, for a start. And then the penny dropped - that's why there's so much of all that stuff around here! We have rhubarb galore, way more than any two people can use - enough that the other day the father of our neighbour, looking over the fence, said in a voice full of awe, "That's a lot of rhubarb."

Some clever person, someone who knew about dividing perennials, divided those rhubarb plants faithfully until she ran out of room, then started putting it in the perennial beds, where it makes a colourful early show, with a nice coarse texture that complements all the finer stuff we seem to have. But there is no more room anywhere, and so I am going to have to be even cleverer: I am going to have to start giving it away.

And there are beautiful deep purple primulas everywhere, giving a wonderful spring boost of colour exactly when we most need it. I know darn well neither of the gardeners that came before me here would have spent all the money to buy that many plants - instead, they came for free through regular division.

Now, everywhere I look, I see echoes: Siberian irises here, and there, and there. Lilies by the house, by the pond, by the chicken coops. More astilbe plants than I can count. Globe thistle in every direction. I already feel surrounded by a chorus of plant life every time I walk down the verandah steps into the garden - now it's like a multiple exposure, where I'm seeing the fruit of all the work done by the gardeners that came before me, in each of the springs that came before this one.

Now it's my turn. Rhubarb, anyone?

The great outdoors

Yesterday was a big day for the chicks hatched by the two broody hens - they began their acquaintance with the great outdoors.

The sun was shining and the temperature was climbing, so Kim got the chicken tractor set up with a wind cover over half, a heat lamp, and one of her newly built double nest boxes. Then we transferred the two mamas and their chicks from the special coop enclosure where they have been living, to outside. We thought there might be at least a brief period of adjustment, but the mamas immediately began making their "come get some food" clucks and demonstrating how to peck at the ground for grass and bugs, and before we could even get the camera focused those chicks were busy at work.

The parenting instincts of our broody hens are an amazement to us. Without having been raised by a mama hen themselves, they somehow know just what to do. They sat on the eggs, hatched the chicks, kept them warm, showed them what to eat and how to drink, defended them even from Kim, who has the bloody pecks on her hands to prove it. They didn't have to take a course, or read a book. And the fact that they are doing it together, sharing the chicks and the chick-raising duties, is a continuing delight to us.

Hatching eggs in an incubator is really, really cool. But watching these hens and their chicks is magic.

Wake-up call

There are clock radio alarms, and Mickey Mouse windup alarms, and discretely beeping digital alarms.

This is a Mucky Boots alarm.

Good morning everyone!

Chicks galore

That sounds like a good name for a rural drag queen...

But it's also an apt description for life at Mucky Boots these days. As well as the batch of Buff Orpington chicks hatched by the two Broody Hens out in the chicken coop, we have fifteen Australorp chicks hatched in the incubator, the youngest finally kicking free of its shell overnight. Some of them have been sold already and will be off to their new homes in the next day or two, some will be raised until they are ready to lay and then sold, and some will be used to improve Kim's breeding flock. But right now we are just enjoying them as the amazingly wondrous balls of fluff they are.

It has been so interesting for us to see how the Broody Hens have managed their chicks. Kim's chicken-raising mentors cautioned her that they might try to kill each other's babies, so we were on high alert for the first few hours. But contrary to expectation, what has developed instead is a lovely co-parenting arrangement: the chicks go freely from one mama to the other, and not only do the two hens care jointly for all the chicks, they are extending their maternal instincts to each other. One day I went into the coop to check on things and found the two hens nestled together, one tucked under the other's wing just like a chick would do, with all the chicks roaming happily around them. At other times we have found both hens and all the chicks snuggled into the same nest box. All in all it seems the arrangement is making everyone happy - at least until the chicks have to go to a new home. We're trying not to think about that too much.

The Australorp chicks in the house are a few days younger than their Buff cousins, and the last two to hatch are still fluffing up in the incubator. Once again our perpetually unfinished powder room is home to a peeping, pooping bunch.

It has been interesting to note the differences between the Broody Hen hatched chicks in the coop, and the incubator/brooder gang in the house. We noticed right away that the chicks in the coop are much calmer than any we have raised in a brooder. That's a good thing. On the other hand, the bunch in the house are more comfortable being handled by humans, which makes complete sense. And that's a good thing!

But the best thing is the return of our favourite program on Chicken TV: the chick channel.

New Home

We said goodbye to Broken Feathers, Ginger and Marilyn this week. They have gone to a new home in Cowichan Bay, where they will be Queens and Layers in Residence, providing their new family with healthy and delicious eggs.

You might remember that Broken Feathers was the sorry-looking hen who lost most of the feathers on her back through the amorous attentions of first Pee Wee and then Gump. To make matters worse, she went through a heck of a molt, until she was practically naked. Poor Broken Feathers.

But the good thing about a molt is that after a hen loses all those feathers, she grows beautiful new ones. Just look at her now!

Happy New Home, girls - you're in good hands!

Chicks!

Yes, those out-of-focus fuzzy yellow pompoms are chicks - our first ever hatched by broody hens. We're old hands at the incubator business but had never let Mother Nature and her crew of Broody Hens handle the job, so when two of the Buffs became persistently broody a few weeks ago, Kim decided to give them a dozen eggs each to sit on, just to see what might happen.

Those hens deserve a medal for Dedication to Service. Although they would probably be just as happy for a chance to stretch their legs...

Sprung

Spring, that is - finally sprung. We had a wonderful weekend full of sunshine, t-shirts, chicken chores, garden work and outdoor violin and banjo concerts courtesy of Kim and our talented young neighbours next door. It felt wonderful to be outside and working in the garden, even though, as could have been predicted, we overdid it a bit. I should have read the Annual Letter Full of Good Advice a bit earlier this year, I think...

Sore muscles aside, Mucky Boots Farm is a happy place these days. The perennial beds are full of snowdrops and aconite past their prime but still welcome, now joined by yellow and purple crocuses (croci?) and the first tulip and lily shoots. I am determined to make friends with the perennial garden this year, so I made good use of the sunshine to get started on the first of many projects that I hope will make the garden feel like mine. This weekend that involved planting the last of the shrubs we bought in fall sales, that spent the winter snuggled up in the greenhouse, and digging out the bricks that once neatly edged the beds but had been buried in successive years' worth of moss, grass and mulch.

(Before: left side of path. After: right side.)

Moss is one of the most beautiful and underrated crops we grow here at Mucky Boots, especially on the shady side of the pond. One of the bricks I dug out there was so beautifully adorned I saved it to share with you.

We've been busy in the vegetable garden, too, with the annual Rebuild Two Beds event. (It's so lovely to think that we've been here long enough to celebrate annual events!) We're getting better and better at this: our corners are now so neat and tight we think of them as miracles of engineering. The freshly milled cedar comes from a local lumber yard -they are full dimensioned 2x6 boards, nice and beefy, and they look and smell wonderful. It won't take them long to weather to the grey of the older beds, but for now they look as fresh and new as the season.

While we've been making use of the fine weather to get outdoor tasks done, the chickens have another idea entirely. Warm sunshine and dry weather can mean only one thing to a chicken tired of a wet and mucky winter...

Too much of a good thing

I have been going just a little bit overboard in the fermentation department. As soon as I started to get better from the horrible cold that knocked Kim and I flat, I craved anything and everything fermented, and the Mucky Boots Fermentation Factory kicked into high gear. While I waited for those efforts to bear fruit I made my first yogurt (so easy, once I realized I could use my dehydrator to keep it at 110 degrees for 7-10 hours) and bought some miso that I've been using to make soup almost every day.

Then a couple of days ago I tasted the sauerkraut I started at the beginning of the month, and realized it's spectacular, even though it could use a bit more time fermenting. Really flavourful, and way less salty than my first batch. So I've been eating a bowl of that every day. And today I drank my first home-brewed kombucha, and it was wonderful, too.

Clearly my body is looking for something, and I am happy to do my best to provide it. But I am learning that there can be too much of a good thing. Not that it's dampening my enthusiasm for all things fermented, but I have realized a certain period of acclimatization is probably in order...

Today the two crocks of kombucha that have been fermenting for a few days reached a nice balance between tart and gently sweet, and so I started the second step of the double-fermentation process.

I set aside the scoby from each crock, along with a couple of cups of kombucha that will be used to start the next batch, and ladled the rest into clean 600 ml canning jars, along with about an inch of pomegranate-blueberry juice in each jar. Lids were screwed on tightly and the jars were put back in the warm music room to ferment for two more days. This is the step that should give the kombucha a bit more fizz. Then the set-aside scobies and kombucha were used to begin all over again, this time with freshly brewed chai tea for one crock and green tea for the other. (Instructions for all of this can be found courtesy of Kristen at Food Renegade.)

In the photo above you can see one of the jars of kombucha, along with a glass of pure kombucha - which I drank right up as soon as the photo was taken, and it was delicious!

Wondering what the tulips have to do with anything? So many people were grossed out by the scoby I thought some nice tulips might lend a more positive association.

Is it working?

Scoby-dooby-doo

The Mucky Boots Farm Fermentation Factory is proud to announce the birth of its very first kombucha scoby. Have a closer look at that beautiful baby...

The two scobies I started almost two weeks ago have been quietly fermenting in Kim's music room, the only consistently heated room in the house. You might remember I was a little worried about whether either would work, since I mistakenly bought raw kombucha that had been adulterated with other things: ginger juice in one case, and spirulina in the other. The ginger juice scoby is developing v..e..r..y....s..l..o..w..l..y but the green one grew lickety split. The white rubbery layer on top is the scoby and it's very strange to handle. Kind of creepy.

I was worried enough that neither scoby would grow that I ordered one online, from a source in Ontario, and it arrived today, double bagged along with about a cup of the fermented kombucha it grew from.

So today I started brewing my first batches of kombucha, using the purchased scoby and my home-grown one.

To brew kombucha, start with about four litres of strong brewed tea, sweetened with a cup of sugar. The sources I have read don't hesitate to use regular white table sugar, since it's eaten by the friendly bacteria during the fermentation process. The sweetened tea is cooled to room temperature, and then the scoby is gently added, along with at least half a cup of the already fermented kombucha it came from. I put one batch in a ceramic water crock and the other in one of my fermenting crocks. The top of each crock is covered with a clean towel to let oxygen in and keep bugs out, and the crocks are put back into the warm music room to ferment for about a week.

I tasted a bit of the fermented spirulina kombucha before it got added to kick-start the newly started batch, and it was delicious: zingy and tart. I can't wait for a whole lip-smacking glass!

The Great Divide

There's a new sight as you walk the road from the house to the back half of the property: double gates, attached to a fence that stretches from one side of our property to the other. Gates and a fence that mark the beginning of a new, peaceful entente between Miriam the Gardener and The Flock of Destroyer Chickens.

You might remember that way back in December Kim and I began construction on this fence. At that time I optimistically expected it would take a week or two to finish. I should know better by now - none of our construction projects, with the exception of the time we jacked up the chicken coop, ever goes according to schedule. Life intervenes: bad weather that makes it punishment to work outside, colds that lay us up for a while, other jobs with higher priority. Sometimes it's frustrating that it seems to take so long to get things done, but other times it's perfectly lovely to opt for a morning snuggled up reading a book instead. Balance, it's all about balance.

In any event, the last gates got hung this week. They were a bit of a challenge for Kim to build - they needed to be so big that she was worried they would eventually sag. One trip to the hardware store was all it took - it turns out they sell anti-sag kits just for that purpose. Which further convinces me, if I needed further convincing, that most problems in the world can be solved by a knowledgable hardware store employee.

So now the property is properly divided. There is a smaller gate at one end of the meandering fence line, and the larger double gates at the other.

Half of the property for me, half for the chickens. Sounds good to me.

That's why they call 'em snowdrops

Monday, 6:00 p.m. Kim comes in from putting the chickens to bed after a beautiful sunny day that saw us working outside in our shirtsleeves.

Monday, 6:30 p.m. We leave the house for our choir/orchestra rehearsal only to find an inch of wet snow on the ground and more falling so thickly we have trouble seeing the road as we drive.

I think it was those fleeting thoughts I had as I edged the raspberry beds that afternoon, that maybe, just maybe, spring had finally arrived. I should know better than to tempt the Weather Goddess that way.

This morning the sun is shining again and the snow is melting as fast as it came. That's spring in the Cowichan Valley for you.

Fermentation Factory

We are definitely back in the land of the living here at Mucky Boots, after about ten days' worth of coughing and wheezing and feeling miserable. Kim ended up with pneumonia, and my asthmatic lungs were crackling so loudly my doctor didn't know what to call it, but today we are both feeling human again.

Maybe because of that emphatic reminder of how awful it is to be sick, or maybe because my cold-deadened taste buds needed reawakening, I woke yesterday morning convinced that there was nothing more important on my to-do list than gearing up production again in the Mucky Boots Fermentation Factory.

The health benefits of fermented foods are well known. By introducing probiotics into the digestive system they not only help us get the full nutritional benefits of the food we eat, they can help the immune system and play a role in fighting chronic diseases, among other things. Plus they taste great.

I've had some spectacular successes fermenting food (sauerkraut and deli pickles) and some spectacular failures (broken glass in the sauerkraut, and a batch of unintentional sauerkraut wine). Sure, the fermentation disasters bummed me out, but yesterday when I woke up craving the sour bite of home-brewed sauerkraut, I realized those unhappy memories had faded into oblivion and I was ready to try again.

Just a few hours and a lot of chopping later, the kitchen counter looked less like a place to make toast and tea, and more like the site of a science experiment, with three different fermentation projects on the go. A big crock of sauerkraut, of course. But also, for the first time, a smaller batch of kimchi, that potent mix of fermented vegetables my Korean students used to obsess over.

To make kimchi, add a few chopped carrots and radishes to a chopped head of Napa cabbage. (I also added some locally harvested kelp.) Cover with brine, weigh down with a plate and leave it overnight. The next day drain the vegetables, saving the brine. Make a paste of chopped onions and garlic, grated ginger, and some fresh or dried hot peppers (I did this in my food processor), add it to the drained cabbage mixture, and then tamp it all down in a jar or crock. Weigh down the top with a plate or jar and add as much of the reserved brine as needed to make sure the vegetables are all submerged. Cover with a clean cloth to keep the bugs out but let the bacteria in. Taste it every day until you're happy with the flavour - this could take as little as a week in warm weather - and then store it in the fridge.

The third project now fermenting away on the counter is kombucha - a fizzy, slightly-sweet-slightly-tart fermented tea that many people drink as a detoxifier. I can buy it in 16 ounce bottles at my local health food stores, but at $3.95 a pop, that adds up. With a "mother" (an established kombucha culture sometimes called a scoby) it's apparently as easy as pie to brew up a couple of gallons of the stuff in 10-12 days, for only the cost of a few tea bags and a little bit of sugar to feed the bacteria.

The hard part is finding a scoby in the first place. If you're lucky enough to know a fermentation master with their own scoby, bring them a batch of home baking and they will probably give you a daughter scoby from the next batch of kombucha they make.

I'm not so lucky. I'm not sure I even know anyone who knows what kombucha is. Enter one of my favourite new blogs, Food Renegade, where Kristin gives instructions for growing a scoby using a purchased bottle of raw, organic kombucha. Unfortunately I failed to read the instructions carefully enough, and came home with kombucha adulterated with other ingredients: ginger juice in the case of one bottle, and spirulina in the other. I decided to give it a go anyway - the worst that happens is the loss of two perfectly good bottles of a tasty, refreshing drink.

One of the issues with fermenting here at Mucky Boots is how cool our house is. This isn't a problem for many things - in fact, some people believe a slower, cooler ferment results in a more flavourful outcome. But the recommended temperature for growing a kombucha scoby is 25 - 30 degrees Celsius. Our kitchen is 15 degrees on a good day. So I brought in an unused heat mat from the greenhouse and put the kombucha jars on top. This could just end up cooking the whole mixture instead of helping it ferment, so between this and the adulterated kombucha I started with, I don't have high hopes for this experiment. But I already have Plan B in my back pocket: purchasing a scoby online (which convinces me all over again that you can find anything on the internet...)

And so here they are: two jars of kombucha and one of kimchi, all lined up on the counter.

Don't they look like the Three Wise Men from a school nativity play?

Turning green

If you opened this post thinking you were going to read about how lovely spring is on Vancouver Island, and how shoots are coming up in the garden and buds are coming out on the trees, you're going to be disappointed. Yes, some of that is happening, but what's really turning green is all the statuary in the garden: anything stationary in these parts is sporting a slick coating of slimy green.

Including Kim and I. We're still sick, and have hardly moved from the couch or the bed for the last week. Yes, we have seen the doctor, and yes, we are taking care of ourselves and each other.

But if you, too, are feeling under the weather, I have some advice for you. If you're wheezing and coughing and otherwise dealing with a respiratory condition, it's probably not a good idea to watch the movie Contagion.

What were we thinking?!

Looking on the bright side

Dark Side:

• Kim and I are sick. Cough, cough.
• It's raining. No, it's pouring.

Bright Side:

• It's not snowing.

The rain overnight and through the morning has left the path by the pond flooded, and the chickens are wet and miserable, huddling in the coop or underneath the overhang, trying to keep dry.

But in the greenhouse my little seedlings are warm and dry, thanks to my trusty heat mats, and now they're well lit, too, thanks to my new acquisition: a grow light!

Grow lights are pretty expensive to buy, so I've resisted the temptation until now. February is the month for starting onion seedlings in these parts, but the sun isn't getting high enough in the sky yet to adequately light the greenhouse for the minimum six hours per day. So I decided to bite the bullet, and bought one light to see if it would make a difference.

Kim mounted it to scrap piece of cedar and then hung it on chains so I can adjust the height as the seedlings grow. And that's exactly what they're doing - my leek, shallot, and red, yellow and green onion seedlings are noticeably happier, and the hardy greens I seeded this week (mizuna and pac choi) came up in two days. And I'm happier, too: this grow light, pricey though it was, has made me feel like a grown-up gardener.

In contrast, the other thing that is making me smile in the greenhouse today cost all of $1.95. It's a cap that turns a soda bottle (or in our case, a spring water bottle) into a watering can, gentle enough for the most fragile of plants.

Seedlings need to stay moist, which means daily watering when they're on heat mats. Most gardening manuals suggest misting them, because anything much more forceful than that can break or dislodge a tender new shoot. But have you ever tried misting 8 or 10 trays of pots and soil blocks? It's a good way to invoke carpal tunnel syndrome. So the last time I was in the garden supply store I looked at fancy watering cans with special heads designed to shower tender plants like the most gentle of rain showers. The problem? The price tag: over $40. So I gave up that idea, went to the checkout to pay for the package of cream-coloured nasturtium seeds I hadn't been able to resist, and there in a bucket by the cash register were these caps. I bought two.

They work like a charm. If you just hold the bottle upside down the shower of water is so soft you can hardly feel it, and if you need a more substantial stream all you need to do is squeeze the bottle a little.

A product that works better and costs less. Definitely something for the bright side.

Tarnish

It may seem a strange thing for a gardener to say, but I've always had a thing for decay. Don't get me wrong - lush green growth busting out with life is wonderful, too - but there's something about the colours and textures of something worn by life into a more subtle kind of beauty that has always had a great appeal for me.

Take this old washing machine under the trees near the house, for example. In the summer it looks like this.

As a backdrop to the colourful spill of nasturtiums it has its charms. But in the grey light of another rainy day, in its end-of-winter emptiness, it really comes into its own, with all the understated beauty of tarnish and lichen and rust.

Maybe I'm just feeling a little tarnished myself, and hoping to find the beauty in that.