First Harvest!

I tend my garden every morning. I water and weed a bit. And a few days ago I was able to harvest a few radishes but my husband ate them before I was able to get a picture.

These are some I harvested today.



As you can see I planted my radishes in with my onions. Radishes are so easy and quick. They take about 20 days to grow and they love the cold. These seeds were the first thing I planted outside this spring. The onions will be in the ground all summer but the radishes will be long gone before the onions begin to take over. I will most likely plant radishes a second time in August.



Everything in the garden is coming along well. My strawberry plants are quite high now. The peas and lettuce are coming in. In the next week I hope to have everything out and planted. All my gardens will be set and growing. Last day of frost around here is June 1st, but I could have gotten away with planting two weeks ago since the weather has been so unseasonably warm but, I am convinced that had I done so frost would have visited that first night. Better safe than sorry.

My schedule has been so busy lately too that I have had to postpone finishing my last raised bed and the compost heap that I planned to plant my pumpkins in has been taken over by some wild plants, but I can reclaim it.

Working in my garden is one of my life's greatest joys. I truly love growing and tending things. And everyone in the house benefits from my efforts.

Summer UNPLUGGED

Like many others, I have a Facebook account. Like email, Facebook has become a daily stop on the Internet. Facebook allows me to be nosy, without being intrusive. I can brag a bit about what we are doing here at our house, or even talk a bit about how my day is going. Most of it is redundant. Many of my facebook friends are my real life friends, and so Facebook has become an interesting redundancy in my life. It keeps me at the computer for longer than I would like, and prevents me from doing the things around here that should be of higher importance.

Facebook has become an issue at our house recently. With reports of privacy concerns, my husband, an IT technician and thus a worthy source, has questioned the true mission of this Internet company. As a family, we are naturalists, (striving) survivalists, and homesteaders. We like simple quiet things. We strive to keep unnecessary things from crowding our lives so that, in the end, our lives will become more abundant with the things that truly grant us peace and happiness.

For these reasons, we no longer feel Facebook fits in with our life goals. It no longer provides a reasonable intrusion. Facebook has become a near addiction to many and so tomorrow, Quit Facebook Day (May 31) we are deleting our accounts. 25,000 other people are doing it as well.

This turn of events has also caused me to question other forms of intrusion that keeps me from my life goals. We are not minimalists in the sense that we don't have a phone or a vehicle. We appreciate modern technologies for what they are, and embrace the modern world as mostly beneficial, however we also see how certain technologies are not beneficial or even desired. Modern women would baulk at the thought of spending an entire 10 hour day to completing the wash as pioneer women did over 100 years ago. Who has the time? How would we get anything else done if we had to spend so much time on one task? For all the time saving devices we posses nowadays, we seem to have less and less time. Are modern technologies really saving us time? or are we kidding ourselves? Technology has become a crutch in many ways. It prevents us from being who we truly are and living the lives we were meant to live.

I am looking forward to an UNPLUGGED summer. As a family we will watch far less television. We will be on the internet less. We will be enjoying real life, rather that an artificial one found on social networking sites and the internet. I can not wait to feel free.

The Wind, The Wind...The Wind has Changed!*

We went on a road trip this past weekend to see a play in Stratford. It's about three hours from where we currently live and so we had to take the road trip in stride. About an hours drive in, we started passing these gigantic wind turbines. It was not so much a wind farm more like individual farms with four or five on their land. They seemed to pop up everywhere as we drove along the highway. The turbines were enormous yet elegant.



We stopped to take a look and listen. All we could hear was the wind. Other than that the turbines moved silently. Some anti-wind power activists say that since the installment of these wind power generators local residents have felt ill, get headaches, and all because of the supposed vibration these things cause.

Mind you, we were just passing through, but I felt no such difference in that area than in our own backyard. My husband likes to point out that no matter where you live, city or country, beneath wind turbines or elsewhere, there are frequencies passing through us all the time we just don't notice them.



Perhaps certain people are more sensitive to these vibrations, or perhaps they are just causing a squawk for no reason other than aesthetics. I can not determine someone else's comfort (or lack thereof) so I must give these claims some thought.

What I do know is this: our way of life and our ability to continue living like this is dependent upon our ability to find alternatives. We need a cleaner more permanent solution than coal or oil. Nuclear power is clean but not desired. Solar energy is expensive and has more impact on a individual basis than on a larger scale. Wind Turbines generate a lot of power and can be done on a larger scale for the general population but people don't like the look of them.

I don't like the look, or possible fall out of a nuclear plant. I don't like the look of oil spills. I certainly don't like knowing that somewhere in the world someone is blackening their lungs while mining coal for our energy. Taking everything into consideration I like the look of a turbine better than any of these other, more standard energy producers. And I certainly wouldn't mind having one in my own backyard.

*Inside joke from a production of Saint Joan in highschool.

Culinary Arts of Years Past

I had a wonderful opportunity this weekend to partake in a Historic Cake Baking class, at Fort York. The fort is the original military garrison that helped established what is modern day Toronto. The museum has focused its programs and activities around the period leading up to and during the War of 1812. While attending a homeschool group sleepover a few weekends ago, another homeschool mom and I noticed posting for a class in historic cake baking.



The day was wonderful. Using period recipes we mimicked the process of making baked goods and baking them as they would have been when the fort was active. We made Derby "Short" cakes, Portugal cakes, Lemon cake, Gingerbread cake and Rout cakes. We had cakes baking in the bake oven, over the hearth, and in a special pan with coals on the top and bottom which made a nice, efficient oven.



When we arrived there were two fires blazing, one in the hearth, the other in the bake oven at the side of the main fireplace. I had always thought the bake oven was heated from a fire underneath. When the bricks inside the bake oven turned white, we removed the fire and close the small door to keep the heat in.

One thing we learned is that baking in a historical manner is not an exact science. A cake one day could take an hour to bake, while the same cake another day could take four hours, depending on the temperature of the oven.

Another interesting thing about historic baking is that there was no baking soda or easy way to leaven a cake (leaven is the rising agent). Leavening had to be done with readily available ingredients like eggs. For each recipe the eggs had to be separated (yokes in one bowl, whites in another). Whites were always placed in a round bottom copper bowl. And then both bowls are whipped using a hand whisk. Each bowl needed 15 to 20 minutes of whisking to get the desired consistency. Our arms were exhausted!



The sugar as well would have been cone shaped, and hardened for transport to Upper Canada from far away locales. Cooks were required to use a mortar and pestle to smash the sugar into the form we have readily available today. This was another time consuming and physically taxing task. The nutmeg and ginger as well needed to be hand grated. Everything was measured by weight on a balance scale. And measuring cups were tea cups, a standard teacup being equal to 8 ounces (1 cup).





Historic recipes lack descriptions. It was assumed anyone worth their salt would know their way around a 1812 kitchen. Reading historical recipes can be difficult for a modern cook not knowledgeable in period cooking techniques. Even now historians are experimenting with different techniques and ingredients to piece together the foods that were once the staple of our young nation.




I find it all very fascinating. I know my way around a modern kitchen quite nicely. I rare rely on modern conveniences and electronic helpers but even I had a learning curve in this historic kitchen. It was a wonderful experience.

Archived: Ant and the Grasshopper

Archived post from June 2009

The Ant and the Grasshopper
The Ant works hard in the withering heat all summer building its house and
laying up supplies for the winter.

The Grasshopper thinks the Ant is a fool and laughs & dances & plays the
summer away.

Come winter, the Ant is warm and well fed. The Grasshopper has no food or
shelter so he dies out in the cold.

So which one are you? Are you an ant or a grasshopper? I am becoming an ant, although I am sad to say I used to be a grasshopper. I used to live day by day or week by week with the knowledge that whenever my food cupboards ran low I could just hop in my gazguzzler and go to the nearest warehouse foodmarket. They always have food and good food too, strawberries in January, apples in July and shelves upon shelves of boxes and cans. Where does food come from? The grocery store of course.

Not exactly...

-excerpt from Food Security for the Faint of Heart by Robin Wheeler

... the reason we get a tug on our hearts when we hear the geese heading out for the winter is that the call pulls on an ancient part of our brains, from a time we understood and paid heed to the messages of fellow beings, that it was time to begin preparations for the cold. The cells in our bodies know what need doing when the geese leave, that we need to find a warm place to prepare for the new season, to either follow our clever goose friends or hoard some food and nestle in for the long haul.

In essence, preparing for winter by stockpiling food is bred into us and can help combat the newly discovered Seasonal Affective Disorder. Without drugs or therapy, people who suffer from the winter blahs can help combat their emotions by being prepared, by living their summer like a ant, not a grasshopper.

I tried that last year on a small scale. I froze some of the bounty from my garden and canned some jam. And it did feel good at the onset of the snowy months to know that we had a small arsenal of edibles ready for us.

This year I am doing more. I will make salsa, jam, pickles, tomatoes, and pizza sauce. I am also continuing my ascent into food utopia by purchasing food as close to it's original source and using to make something at home (ie: flour for bread, not just bread from the bakery section). It takes a while, and it maybe another few years before I am where I would like to be but I realized long ago that hardship was a poor excuse for procrastination.

So what are you an ant or a grasshopper?

Plastic and Oil

The David Suzuki Foundation is promoting this interesting personal saga of one woman who had sworn off acquiring new plastic for one year.




You can also check out her blog at Plastic Manners


Plastic is derived from fossil fuels. A few years ago, when I discovered this I was enraged with myself for not being better informed. I had been striving to lessen my dependency on oil by focusing on fuel use and the distance my food traveled. The depletion of fossil fuels is more systemic than what's on the surface. It's not just what we drive and how far we travel. It's also about how warm we keep our thermostats, what we feed our children and what we choose to purchase at the store.

I recently read the book, Why Your World Is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller by Jeff Rubin. It's an excellent read, one that highlights our dependency on oil and gives solid evidence to the future COMPLETE depletion of all oil on the planet, a natural resource that takes a million years to generate. We will run out eventually, that's a no-brainer.



So why are we using this precious commodity to wrap out kids' school lunches in, or to make toys with or to package water? We should be rationing this stuff for really important things like medical supplies and anything that can not be made with alternative sources (wood, metal).

Many people have debated the validity of this claim, stating that Peak Oil was a concept brought forth in the 1970s. Unfortunately, the scientists back then offered a much more generous time line. The rate of depletion has since doubled with international travel on the rise, more cars on the road and more consumption of meaningless and down right silly products. Our houses are bigger, which need more fuel to heat. Our commutes are longer. Our consumption keeps rising and yet not many stop to think where all this is coming from...or what will happen when it runs out.

Simplicity and You

I wanted to write a post a few weeks back about Earth Day. I wanted to give tips and hints, and examples on the types of things I do to keep my foot print small but my enjoyment of life big. Had I written such a post it would have contained pointers on composting, recycling, forgoing bottled water for reusable canteens. I would have written about choosing organic when possible, or walking instead of driving. In essence it would have been very similar to all the other Earth Day posts and articles that spring up this time of year. I doubted my followers would enjoy redundancy from me so I sat on it, and gave further thought to my efforts to be Mean Green World Saving Machine.

The answer to saving the planet can be found in simplicity. Simplicity is the act of doing less to derive more enjoyment from those things that truly matter to you. For example, I choose to make my own laundry soap, bake my own bread and shop at thrift stores so I can have the luxury of staying home, something that truly matters to me. I forgo trendy shops and frequent trips to the mall so that I can find better enjoyment from the few things I do buy. I stay home often on weekends. I read books from the library. I go for walks with the kids. I work in my garden. All these things are enjoyable to me in a way that schleping my kids to daycare so I can go to work, running my kids from here to there or throwing a boxed meal into the oven just isn't.

Earth Day should not be about what you do, it should be about what you don't do. I think if people realized the impact of passive earth awareness they would see a much greater impact than the active strategies being put forth by the media. There have been an abundance of eco-friendly products popping up in the market. While I am glad to see mainstream getting on board I can see it for what it truly is...another way for people to spend money, consume and never change their lifestyle one darn bit. Companies are created to make money and eco-friendly is what is selling right now. The average person needs to understand that the very act of NOT buying is better than buying all those products and bringing them home.

Forget the green cleaners, the toys made from recycled materials and the hemp t-shirt. Unless these things are truly a need, people who buy them are just as bad as the person buying t-shirts made in a sweat shop. As a civilization we need to bring things back to basics.

We need to instill this mantra in our kids:

Use it Up,
Wear it Out,
Make Do,
Do Without

That is the key to saving the planet. That is the key to better fulfillment. Learn what is that makes you truly happy and concentrate on that. By focusing on those truly enjoyable things you won't have a need for the other fillers in your life. Save the planet. Live Simply.