Mille Bornes, Poppies, Curry and Pie

A half day off. Vibrant Poppies. First crop of peas to snack on.  Mille Bornes (a favourite game in our family - my one from childhood misplaced in the last year but another one found at the thrift store last week and played endlessly since). A cast iron pot of curry on the stove made with loads of veggies from the garden (including garlic scapes and mustard greens), and rhubarb cut up on the counter ready to be made into the last rhubarb custard pie of the season and then shared with friends tonight.

Our dog "testing" new dog biscuit recipes E is making to sell at the farm stand.  A different recipe in each hand and finding out which hand he licks the most. ;-)  The apple and greens recipe seemed to be his favourite.

Life is good!

First Farmers' Market and Lots of Radishes

Well, it seems Blogger has completely changed while I was busy in the market garden.  It took me a few minutes to even figure out how to post now. ;-)

Tomorrow is our first farmers market and I'm feeling quite excited!  Initially I had thought I would try to quickly harvest everything on the morning of the market (love fresh just-picked!!) but after considering it for a bit changed my mind. 


We starting harvesting first thing this morning and it's a good thing we did, it took longer than I thought and that was with one harvesting and one washing and bundling.  We've got most of two fridges packed with bags of lettuce and spinach, bundles of radishes and kale.

The radishes are truly stunningly beautiful, even though we were hurrying to get the harvest done so we could get back to planting I made time to snap some photos. It's possible I may have had a hard time not taken a ridiculous amount of photos of radishes.

Fresh, ripe vegetables are as beautiful to me as flowers in bloom.  It is important to me to use as little plastic as possible and so as much as we can we are bundling with compostable twine, we will need to use plastic bags for our leaf lettuce and mixed greens but our head lettuces I'm hoping customers will pop right into their cloth shopping bags.

Tomorrow morning I'll harvest the head lettuces and the little bit of rhubarb we have and head to the market.
 
All the head lettuces look beautiful to me and (a small) part of me wants to just leave them there growing in their lovely rows and beds. ;-)  Freckles (above) is so fun and this one - Marvel 4 Seasons - is truly gorgeous!  Love the colours.


While I'm there my family will be working on the farm stand as we plan to open it this coming week - or next Saturday June 2 at the latest. 

I made a bit of time for my banner sewing.  I had just about given up the idea of taking time for sewing the triangles right side together and then turning them right side out - too time consuming just now - and had decided I would just sew each triangle on the twine as is (so, one sided) when my friend suggested I just zig-zag them right side out and be done with it.  That sounded very good to me.  They're all zigged and zagged and now I just have to space them out on the twine once I see how I want them to hang on the stand.

Along with my farmer tan I'm also keeping farmers hours - awake before the sunrise shortly after 4 am - which means I'm also ready for bed before my boys are. ;-)  I keep thinking things will slow down a bit "once everything is planted" but I'm realizing that with this much property and succession planting that there is no once everything is planted.  I'm having a fantastic time though and looking forward to meeting some people at the market tomorrow and sharing our love of fresh vegetables with our community.  We've been at this for several months now and it feels So Good to finally be harvesting something to sell.
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Farm Stand, Fabric and Morels

We've been working everyday at the market garden trying to get things ready,  I've been busy in the field and greenhouse, and my family has been working hard on the farmstand.

It is such a treat to look up from my work and see my boys working with S at building a gorgeous stand.  It's going to look wonderful when it's done.  Yesterday they put the roof on and did most of the shingles, today they will do the siding.  Our signs were ready this week as well and it really feels as though everything is coming together - we've even got irrigation up and running in half our north field so we were able to plant half our main potatoes.

I've been planting, planting and planting some more and potting on loads of tomatoes.

I did take time out yesterday to go for a walk with a friend along the creek.  We were walking back along the path and saw a man with a bag in his hand and we both guessed that he was collecting mushrooms.  We talked with him for a bit- saw his bags of loot! - and then we also started looking for mushrooms.

It was interesting to both of us to see how many mushrooms we'd walked right by the first time when we'd been so busy talking and catching up that we weren't looking for anything else.  Once we knew there were mushrooms right alongside the path we started seeing them everywhere.

Over a month ago I started cutting out some fabric to make a pennant banner for the farm stand.  It seems the stand will be built before I get it sewn together...actually, at the rate I'm going, it may  well be built before I even finish cutting the triangles out. ;-)


Life is very busy but very, very good.

Happy Easter

Well...things have been a little...erm...hectic around here and it seems it has been some time since I've visited here.  Thank you to those people who emailed me and offered such kind thoughts and compliments, I do appreciate it!  This weekend, life seemed to get a little more on track (something to do with three days at home?) and we had plenty of time for enjoying lots of family visiting, walks, a hike (with some geocaching), work in the yard and, of course, egg dyeing.  This year, thanks to my visiting sister-in-law, we had the opportunity to dye duck eggs and E even got to do a goose egg.

The eggs picked up the colours brilliantly and it was extra fun to get to dye them with Auntie C.

E was pleased with his goose egg, he wanted to do one similar to his favourite one from last year.

Of course there were chocolate eggs - inside and...

outside.

 

Egg hunts can offer such a great lesson - you'll always find something good if you're willing to look. ;-)

Quite a lot of time lately has been spent at the market garden, if you're at all interested in following along with us as we make our way through our first year of market gardening you can see what we've been up to here.  It's a new website that W put together for us and I'm planning on catching things up there too as soon as possible.

Very Simple (Wacky) Birthday Cake

We had a birthday here a little while ago...a two cake birthday. ;-)  That means one cake on the day our family celebrated and one cake on the day the friends came over to celebrate.  This birthday boy knows just what he wants for a cake and it mostly has to do with a lot of whipped cream. He specified a very certain look.  Two layers of chocolate cake.  Whip cream in between.  LOTS of whip cream on top piled in a dome shape.  And since it's not for me to question why (?!?!), I just went ahead and made one. 

 (same birthday boy wanted whipped cream along with peach butter and blueberries for his birthday breakfast waffles)

And since he liked that cake so much I made another one exactly the same for the second cake day.  One of the things that he liked about it was that I put something special in between the layers along with the whipped cream - his very own strawberry jam that he made in the summer.  It added just an extra touch of deliciousness.

The cake recipe is an old favourite.  I've been making it since I was about 8 years old.  I always called it Wacky Cake but I've seen it with all kinds of names.  I'm sure you'll recognize the recipe (if so, I'd love to know what you call it) but I was visiting with my friend yesterday (an experienced baker and wonderful cook) and was surprised to hear she hadn't heard of it - even when I described the 3 holes and the vinegar, vanilla and oil part!!  So...obviously I have to share the recipe with her (poor deprived girl) and thought I'd share it here too.

Wacky Cake

•1 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

•1 cup sugar

•3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa

•1 teaspoon baking powder

•1 teaspoon baking soda

•1/2 teaspoon salt

•1 teaspoon vanilla

•1 tablespoon vinegar

•5 tablespoons melted butter (or melted coconut oil or grape seed oil)

•1 cup warm water

Mix dry ingredients in 8X8 pan.  Make 3 holes in mixture.  Put the 1tsp vanilla in one hole, 5 Tbsp melted butter in other hole and 1 Tbsp vinegar in another hole (that bit was always the exciting part because it starts to fizz a bit).  Then pour 1 cup of water over the whole lot and mix well.  Bake for 35-45 minutes at 350. 

That was how I always made it and then quite often I used to ice it too.  Since then I've learned that chocolate chips in the batter make a delightful addition.  And these days I no longer mix it in the pan because I'm usually doubling the recipe and then making it in two pans (or you can double it and make it in a 9x13).

At any rate it is a simple-to-make and delicious-to-eat cake - a very good "starter" cake for a new baker but also the kind of cake that one never gets tired of.  So there you are M-S...make it with your family and let them eat cake!

Puttering

Yesterday was just the kind of day I like - a day for puttering.  A slow start to the morning. Coffee in the sun room.  S busy with a wood project (a gorgeous walnut table set he is making), the boys busy with their fun and time to plant more seeds for me.  I wanted to start a few tomato plants in the hopes of having some very early tomatoes to offer.  I planted some of my purchased seeds and then went through my box of saved seeds and had a moment of wonder when I couldn't find any of my saved tomato seeds.  A rummage through the garden "shed" and I discovered another box of saved seeds that was mostly all tomatoes.

I'm thrilled with the variety that we will have this year.  I have several planted as trial early birds but will wait to do the main tomato seeding in several more weeks.  Tomato seeds really are so very easy to save, if you've been wanting to start saving some of your own seeds but haven't tried it yet I highly recommend starting with beans and tomatoes.  If you're interested in keeping up with our market garden I've started a blog to share what's going on with our endeavour and you can see it here.

This is what our sun room is starting to look like - seedling trays all over.  Snow outside and tender green shoots inside! (J...see the little found greenhouse you gave me?  S just shook his head and muttered a bit when I dragged it inside). ;-)

There was time for a walk in the woods and time to catch up on things I won't have time for in a few weeks - like finally shelling my saved beans to use for planting this year.

Time for soap-making  and special drink making (made a batch of mead (or Sima) with E) and time to make some delicious caramelized onion soup with a few tomatoes from the freezer for extra flavour.

I don't normally freeze tomatoes this way anymore (although I know many people like to) but I found them so handy for this soup that I will do some again this year when I am in a rush and have too many tomatoes to deal with...and I'll be able to use this soup as justification for doing so. ;-)

My boys love this soup too and we've decided we should have it much more often.  This week I told them I would make it with bread and cheese on top and then broiled. I'm hoping that E will make one of his yummy loaves of bread. 

Just my kind of day.

The Fog

Several days ago the fog came...I want to say on little cat feet except it feels more as though it came stomping in on great big mountain lion feet.  And now I feel as though I'm waiting for it to move on.  Our valley has been socked in for days and it starts to feel somewhat confining. 

It does, however, make for some incredibly delicate and lovely scenery. 

All the trees and shrubs - even the weeds- are enveloped in icy shrouds and they look beautiful. I was wishing I had my camera with me on the weekend when we went by a row of trees with their black branches covered in soft rime - the contrast was stunning.  We have a large weeping willow and a weeping birch tree in the front yard and every time I look at them they seem even more beautiful.

So today, instead of being grumpy that there was no sunshine during my walk I decided to grab my camera when I got home. The photos don't completely capture the delicate beauty of it but stopping to take them and to really look helped me to let go of my wish for sunshine and appreciate that foggy days can also bring pleasure if we are open to it. 

Things That Are Making Me Happy

There are many little things that are making me happy right now.  Today, despite the cold, I am feeling just the slightest bit springish.  It could be because I'm working on the garden plan  but I think it has more to do with the fact that at 3:39 it is still bright out with no sign of darkness yet...I'm  grateful for lengthening days. I'm also very much enjoying the geraniums I brought inside back in October.  The red ones bring such a bright splash of colour to our home and it is such a simple delight to have something blooming inside at this time of year.

Molasses Softies are a treat that have made me happy many times over the years.  I found this recipe when I was a child and it is still a favourite tea time treat - especially nice in the wintertime.  I've put a link to an online recipe, the only thing I've changed is that I don't use corn syrup so I substitute honey or cane syrup.

Being (and continuing to work on being) o r d e r l y  is making me very happy.  I know that more orderliness in our home over this next year will help to make our lives much more enjoyable as we go through some big changes this year and I am getting a surprising (to me) amount of pleasure out of the order we already have in place - such as weekly menu plans.  Truly it will never cease to amaze me how such little changes in our daily round can make such big differences in our enjoyment of our days.

And fortuitous book finds are, as always, making me happy.  Some weeks back I was cleaning out some of my boxes of books that have been packed up these last two and a half years.  I found an old Alexandra Stoddard book ( Living Beautifully Together) and enjoyed re-reading it SO much that I immediately ordered all of her books in our library system.  Books have always had a way of showing up in my life just when I most need the wisdom within them and so it is with Alexandra Stoddard's books - the timing is just right.

Owls, Angels and the First of December

A special young friend is celebrating a birthday soon and so when we went to visit yesterday we took along a handmade gift.  I Love having a young girl with an appreciation for crafts in my life, my boys have always enjoyed my handmade things but there is something very fun about crafting for a girl too (I've had fun, fun, fun in years past making her gifts).  This girl has a connection to owls and so, when I saw this post, I couldn't resist making a woolly owl for her.  I still have my sweater scraps from my patchwork blanket so I chose a gray one and got started. 

I dug out our needle-felting supplies which haven't been used since we moved and needle felted the eyes and beak. 

I stuffed it with some batting. The feet were cut from another felted sweater bit.

And then I used some buffalo wool (also in thrifted stash) to crochet a nest.  The entire time E eyed it covetously and so I think I know what to make him for his Solstice gift.  He does have a fondness for felted animals and I thought it was so cute that I might just have to make myself one too.

November has passed by so quickly that I could hardly believe it was already time to get the boxes of decorations out last night so we could find the advent calender.  We put up the calender and then got out one of my favourite childhood decoration - this angel chime candle.  We sat together and watched as the candles burned down and we talked about what we look forward to in December.  This was always the first decoration I would set up when I was little, that way I could listen to it chiming as we set about putting out the rest of the decorations and there really is just something magical about candlelight, isn't there.

This afternoon E and I made some paper snowflakes (as we do each year) to decorate the windows then E lit the advent candle because the first day of the month always takes a bit longer to burn down than the other days (there are markings on the candle and we burn one section each day).  And, as I took this photo I gave thanks again for the grace that brought us to this place...right here...right now.

Here's to a magical month.