Birthday

This is Frankie singing along with a musical birthday card featuring a barking-dog version of "Happy Birthday." Whose birthday? Mine!

I had a lovely day, beginning with breakfast in bed prepared by my sweetie, with lots of lounging and book reading, after which we put the first coat of paint on the walls in the dining room (yes, that was my idea of a fun thing to do on my birthday), then a tasty lunch, then a lazy afternoon with a perfect snooze, then a drive along winding seaside roads to the cafe at the Genoa Bay Marina, for supper.

(Photos from here)

The entire day was punctuated by phone calls from family and friends, which made me feel so loved - I always think nobody will remember it's my birthday, and everyone always does. Some days I think I must be the most fortunate person in the world. Tomorrow will be a regular day, with rain and weeds and chores and paint spatters to clean up, but today - lucky me.

Apples

There are a few ways I know fall has arrived. The hostas in the perennial beds are turning yellow. The nights are cool enough that with our windows open, a fluffy warm duvet makes the bed feel like heaven. My little tutoring business has started up again. And the apple harvest has begun in earnest.

Last year, with very different weather, the Pink Ladies were ready in mid-August, giving us time to pick bushels and bushels for drying and applesauce making, before the Cox Orange Pippins ripened in late September. This year, probably because of the crappy summer and the early autumn, it's all happening at once. It's probably fortunate for us that the trees are not as loaded with apples as they were last year, but we're still having trouble keeping up. The dehydrator is being kept busy, and since there's no room in the freezer for apple pies and crumbles (what with all those chicken breasts...) we'll have to get cracking on the applesauce and apple butter.

But before they all get peeled and sliced and cooked and processed, just look at that gorgeous Pink Lady atop a pile of Cox Orange Pippins. What with bugs and scabs and all the other things that mark up the fruit, most of our apples are a bit homely looking. But that Pink Lady - that's one perfect apple.

Forty-seven

We have a chest freezer - a modest one. We thought it was important to get one when we moved out here to Mucky Boots for two reasons: to preserve our fruit and vegetable harvest for the non-harvest months, and to allow us to buy in bulk when things we like to eat are on sale.

But I have learned there is more to using a freezer than just plugging it in and filling it up. You have to actually eat what's in the freezer, at least occasionally.

I first started thinking about this when my darling, wonderful sister came for a visit last month. She made a passing reference to not having a chest freezer because she is trying not to encourage her "food hoarding tendencies." Hmmm......

And about the same time I was working on our finances, and wondering why the heck our grocery bills are still so high, given that we're growing at least some of what we eat. Hmmm...

So this week I decided to go excavating in our freezers (the chest freezer in the workshop and the freezer that's part of our fridge) to see exactly what was in them. And what I found was chicken breasts.

Forty-seven of them.

Kim and I could eat chicken twice a week for 3 months without buying any more. And that doesn't even count the whole chickens (three) or chicken thighs (one big package).

I feel a word of explanation is in order. Maybe I have food hoarding tendencies, too. (Er - yes.) But when there's a 2 for 1 sale on chicken breasts, of course I'm going to stock up. It's all about ensuring that Kim and I are safe and won't go hungry. (Okay, I know that's not entirely rational, but even former Math teachers have an irrational side.)

It's not just chicken. I also found six pounds of butter and eight packages of spicy turkey sausages, plus lots and lots of frozen green beans, blueberries, tomatoes, carrots, beets and strawberries. Some of them were from last year, and still haven't been eaten.

Forty-seven. That must be a record. No wonder our grocery bills are higher than they should be.

So I made an inventory of everything in the chest freezer, and another one of everything in the house freezer, and stuck them on the fridge where I can see them when I make meal plans. Then I made a pledge not to buy any more chicken breasts - even if they're on sale - until we're down to six, and to eat all the wonderful frozen produce from our garden by the time next year's harvest starts rolling in.

We got started last night: I cooked four chicken breasts (two for supper, two for leftovers) and faithfully crossed those four off the inventory list.

Forty-three to go.

Kim's homemade chicken feeder

By popular demand, here are Kim's instructions for how to make a chicken feeder with found materials, cheap! (Or is that cheep...)

This is what the $32.99 hanging feeder looks like. Notice how the tray at the bottom hangs lower than the bucket, so that the feed slips through the gap from the bucket into the tray at the bottom.

Here's the homemade version, made from found materials and about $2.50 worth of hardware.

You will need a bucket and a base of some kind bigger in diameter than the bucket. Kim has used both the bottom drip tray of a plant pot and the base of a ceiling light fixture, and recommends the plant pot drip tray because it has steeper sides that will make it harder for the chickens to flick food out of. You also need something to cover the top of the feeder, like an old pie plate or a Tupperware lid. (So that's where all the lids have gone to...)

You will also need a drill, some leftover bits of electrical wire, three lengths of chain, an S-hook, some plastic zip ties, a wire cutter and some needle-nose pliers.

First, cut a generously-sized hole in the bottom of the bucket. Make sure it isn't bigger than your lid!

Use the drill to create three equally-spaced holes near the top of the bucket and attach the lengths of chain with zip-ties. Then drill one hole in the bucket and a matching hole in the lid to attach the lid with a zip-tie. Any more and you won't be able to lift the lid in order to fill the feeder.

Now attach the bucket to the base. Look to see where the bucket fits into the base, and mark three or four equally-spaced spots for holes in the base, and corresponding holes near the bottom of the bucket. Use the bits of electrical wire to attach the bucket to the base, making sure you use long enough pieces of wire so that when the feeder is hung upright, the base hangs an inch or so below the bucket. But make sure it doesn't hang so low that the top of the base is below the bottom of the bucket, or the food will overflow. Kim said the advantage of using the electrical wire is that it is easily knotted and re-knotted if you need to make adjustments once you see how much food comes out into the base. (Somehow we didn't manage to get a good picture of this - so sorry!)

Attach the three chains to an S-hook, and the feeder is ready to hang. Lucky chickens!

Fair day

This is the weekend of the Cowichan Exhibition, so of course we had to go. After all, we're farmers now. There was a tractor pull, a threshing demonstration...

... and because this is logging country, the men did manly things like sawing logs with antique gas-powered saws.

There were competitions for the best jams and jellies, the best pie, the most colourful squash...

...the best local honey...

...the best cake made by a man (the lone entry won first prize)...

...and the best decorated cake (presumably by a woman). Sheesh.

The 4-H club kids were busy showing off their projects...

...while family members watched and cheered them on.

We went into the animal barns to see goats...

...pigs...

...and the strangest chicken-like objects we have ever seen.

Most important: we would have eaten the mini sugar donuts, but we're sticking to our gluten-free diet and had to go with the fresh cut fries instead. No sacrifice is too great where our health is concerned.

Chicken empire

When I got home from my trip to Banff I discovered a few things: the leaves have started to turn, Frankie and Petunia didn't even notice I was gone, and Kim has started a chicken empire.

When the decision was made to start our adventure in chicken land, I was already busy with the perennial and vegetable gardens so Kim agreed to be the main chicken mama at Mucky Boots. And she is the best chicken mama ever. Our five pullets and five cockerels are strong and healthy and haven't suffered a moment's thirst or hunger in their 13-week lives. They live in a beautiful, clean, warm and dry coop and have the best of feed and fresh fruit and veggies. Kim even planted a rye garden for their winter pleasure, which is growing like mad.

Our original plan was to keep the hens for eggs and maybe one crowing rooster for barnyard-atmosphere and possible breeding, and send the other roosters to the slaughterhouse where they would become dinner. But all the love and attention Kim has lavished on her birds has meant she's not so sure anymore about the dinner part. At the same time, she's starting to become quite interested in the breeding part.

That raises some complications. We shouldn't breed brother and sister, for obvious reasons (although this didn't occur to us until just a while ago...) and so Kim decided we needed a Buff Orpington rooster from another bloodline. So she found another breeder nearby and swapped one of ours for one of hers. There's still the problem of what to do with the rest of the original roosters, including Red Toe, who is not enjoying favoured status these days as he's been a big bully around the new rooster and has taking to pecking us, too.

Kim also decided to add a second breed to the mix. Meet our two new Black Australorp pullets.

They look amazingly like fluffy crows. The best part is their black feet. The old girls didn't know quite what to make of them, but the new girls are quick and strong, and are carving out a space for themselves in the flock.

With all this coming and going in the chicken yard, Kim has had to create a third enclosure in the chicken coop to house the new birds at night until it's safe to let them join the flock. The new girls stayed there only one night, but the new rooster is going to be there for at least a few nights because the rooster enclosure is a bit too small for comfort, given Red Toe's nippy tendencies.

Kim has also been adding feeders and waterers, to make sure the new birds have a chance to get eat and drink if the original birds are being proprietorial - and she's been so clever about it. She made three new feeders from recycled buckets, plant pot drip trays, and even the base of a ceiling light fixture we replaced a couple of weeks ago. She's in her element: planning, building, making do. That's my girl!

The best summer camp ever

I'm back, after a wonderful holiday with my mom Yvonne: we stayed in residence at the Banff Centre for the Banff International String Quartet Festival, and it was the best summer camp for adults ever.

Mom picked me up at the Calgary airport and we drove straight out to the mountains. I think Vancouver Island, where I live, is a beautiful place, but the foothills outside Calgary are the most beautiful landscape I know - rolling and austere, topped by the biggest sky I've ever seen.

After a quick hour's drive we were in the Rocky Mountains...

...and then in Banff National Park, where the Banff Centre for the Arts is located. Most of the summer programs for young people had already finished, which was a good thing because otherwise there wouldn't have been room for the 500 of us who all arrived the same day, to spend eight days listening to wonderful music in a spectacular setting.

We stayed in this building...

...and ate in this dining hall.

What a view. That's Yvonne, who is the best travelling companion ever. I feel incredibly lucky to be able to have an experience like this with my mom.

A typical day: get up, have breakfast with a few hundred other buzzing, excited chamber music fans, go to a lecture about the music we would hear that day, attend the morning's concert, have lunch, attend the afternoon's concert, have a snooze and then dinner, attend the evening's concert, and then head off to bed so it could all start over the next day.

We shared the campus with wildlife, of course - it IS a national park, after all. Fortunately we encountered no bears or cougars on our walks from dining hall to theatre, but we did meet a pair of mule deer...

...and an elk.

If you're interested, you can go to the CBC website to read their blog about the competition and hear podcasts of most of the performances.

I came home to Mucky Boots yesterday to find that fall arrived while I was away: leaves are starting to turn colour, the autumn crocus are up, and the air smells like wood smoke. How did that happen so fast?

(My dad, Jim, suggested I tell you that the picture at the top of the post is of The Three Sisters, looking down on the town of Canmore a few minutes outside of Banff, and the place where Yvonne grew up. I took the picture in the Canmore Cemetery, where many of the headstones are inscribed with pictures of The Three Sisters. When Yvonne was growing up she liked to think of that particular mountain cluster as a representation of the three girls in her family: Eldene, Yvonne and Sharon.)

End of summer

It feels like fall at Mucky Boots. There's still a full week of August left and it continues to be hot and dry, but there's something different about the sun light - the angle? the intensity? - that speaks of autumn. I need a fleece when I go out to the verandah with my early morning coffee now, and dusk is signalling bedtime for the chickies earlier than it used to. But the biggest sign is the irresistible urge I have to buy new school supplies. I'm about to turn 48, and this is only the third time since I was 5 that I haven't returned to school in September, either as a student or a teacher. That kind of ingrained patterning is hard to change - and why would I want to? Why give up the hopeful imagining that comes with embarking on a new year, the feeling that anything is possible provided I have enough sharp new pencils and different colours of sticky notes?

I'll be absent for the next while: I'm heading here with my mom for this. How lucky can I be? I wish you all a peaceful and happy end-of-summer, and I'll see you here again in September.

Artichokes

I feel very ambivalent about our artichoke plants. Almost as ambivalent as my feelings about our gooseberries, now successfully overcome thanks to this delicious jelly.

The problem with the gooseberries was that they tasted awful and stabbed me with their wicked thorns every time I got near. The problem with the artichokes is they take up an enormous amount of space for relatively little food pay-off.

When we came to Mucky Boots we inherited a bed of about twenty mature plants, each needing six to eight square feet and producing (if we're lucky) two or three artichokes. I confess I'm something of a neophyte, so beyond steaming the artichoke, pulling off the leaves and dipping them in aioli or garlic butter, I wasn't quite sure what to do with them. Our neighbour Nick is a chef, so once I asked him to show me how to take an artichoke in its entirety to an artichoke heart. We began with a nice big artichoke and ended up with a single heart about an inch-and-a-half in diameter. Six or eight square feet of garden space for an inch-and-a-half artichoke heart. In my head, it just didn't add up.

But all that math just went out the window. Because this morning, on a day that feels like the start of fall with hazy sunlight filtering through the trees and the air crisp and cool, the unharvested and now flowering artichokes are looking magical.

Hangin' out in the dirt

Remember the pile 'o dirt? Apparently these former Math and Science teachers aren't very good at estimating volume, because we ordered too much soil for our landscaping project - way too much. So for the last number of weeks we've had a slightly smaller pile o' dirt sitting in our front yard waiting for us to think of some other use to put it to.

Our neighbour Nick gave us a good idea. As he predicted, our chickies quickly decimated the vegetation in their enclosed yard, and he suggested we section part of it off and grow some fall rye for them. But the existing soil is poor and rocky and needs some help, so this morning Kim got shoveling, with a little help from me. Nine wheelbarrows of soil and three of compost later, we called it quits: too darn hot. It will take a few more mornings of wheelbarrowing before there's enough good soil to plant the rye, but in the meantime the chickens have the perfect use for it: dirt baths.

The case of the missing zucchini

This is a misleading photo. These are not our squash - at least not this year's squash. This was a typical every-other-day harvest last summer.

Now picture the colander empty. Absolutely empty. We haven't had a single zucchini or patty pan squash yet this year, and we have no idea what's wrong.

The plants are stunted. They are producing flowers like mad, and some small fruit that either get stuck at the size of a dime and don't get any bigger, or die and fall off. We have applied compost and fish fertilizer. We have checked for bugs, and can't find any. The neighbouring winter squash plants are doing great: growing vigorously and setting fruit.

I never would have imagined saying this, but I don't have enough zucchini!

Growing in the light

After the dark, here is the light.

"Ten Mile Stilts" by the Wailin' Jennys.

Changes at the chicken corral

Meet Red Toe. He is one of what has turned out to be five roosters. (Yep, that's right. After all that hemming and hawing about how many roosters and how many hens our gender-mysterious chicks would turn into, we ended up with five and five. As a former math teacher I find this hilarious.)

Red Toe is so named because of the lovely red nail polish he sports on one toenail - Flartus's suggestion for how to tell our chickies apart. We wanted to distinguish this particular rooster from the rest because he's so darn friendly. He's a keeper. He's the one who comes a-running as soon as he sees one of us near the chicken yard, and who used to climb onto Kim's lap for a snuggle when she settled in for a session of Chicken TV. (She can't do this anymore since the chickies started using her chair as a roost in her absence. Poop. Enough said.) Since our plan is to keep only one rooster and send the rest to the stew pot, we don't want any cases of mistaken identity - hence the toenail polish.

There were big changes at the chicken corral today. Shortly after this nap time photo was taken, the roosters were separated from the hens and will remain that way until the fateful trip to the slaughterhouse for four of them. They have their own enclosure in the coop, and their own fenced-in and disco-dance-themed outdoor area. We knew this was going to have to be done eventually, but we decided to do it now because the roosters are repeatedly chasing two of the smaller hens away from the food.

We have been busy painting and otherwise sprucing up our guest room in preparation for a visit from my dear, dear sister next week. I can't wait. Sister Kim (it gets a little confusing when the two Kims are in the same room...) is keen to have a repeat of our canning and preserving sessions last summer, so I've got my eye on what's ready to harvest from the garden. There are lots of beets we can pickle, but I think that's about it. Definitely none of the tomatoes or apples we canned last year - it will be a couple of weeks before there are sufficient quantities of those ready.

Onions, though. We've got lots of onions. Yellow onions, red onions, shallots and leeks. Mucky Boots is a fragrant place these days...

Rain

After an endless spell of hot and dry weather: finally, rain - all day today and probably tomorrow. We are saying "Aaahhh," the plants are saying "aaahhh." The chickens are a little confused.

We have all the windows open, letting the cool air flow through the house, and I have just gone for a walk around the garden in nothing but a t-shirt and shorts, feeling the rain on my skin and the damp grass under my bare feet. Heaven.