rural life

Learn Something New

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

My first skeins of mohair yarn, showing improvement from left to right.

Not long ago I learned to spin. I should have learned earlier, right after my angora goats were shorn the first time, but I looked at all that mohair and lost heart—it was too much for me to deal with. So I dropped it off at a commercial spinner.

A year later, the spinner still hadn’t spun my mohair and finally admitted they had no intention of ever getting to it, so I picked it back up and brought it home.

It was time to learn to spin.

At first I hated it. It was fiddly and frustrating. The resulting yarn, if you could even call it that, was thick and lumpy. I was set to give up on it.

But a friend who spins encouraged me to keep working on it—it’s always hard at first, she said, and that lumpy thick yarn is beautiful and artistic in its own right.

I took her advice, and kept at it. A hundred metres of thick lumpy yarn later, I suddenly found I was producing fairly consistent worsted-weight yarn. And I was enjoying it!

Learning something new is never easy. I know I’ve blogged about this before, but it’s worth repeating. We watch accomplished people at the task, and we think, “I’d like to do that.” Then we try, and our efforts are fumbling, the results uninspired. It takes determination (and often encouragement from others) to push through the initial discouragement and get to the point where you can enjoy the new skill.

I’ve tried to teach my kids that it’s worth pushing through that learning hump to gain a new skill. Sometimes I need reminding myself.

Happy New (Garden) Year!

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I love the month of July; it’s the beginning of the garden year in my mind, because it’s the month I plan the garden and order my seeds. It’s been a few years since I blogged about my garden year, so I figured it was time to do it again. I unearthed this little graphic my husband helped me create a few years back, showing my annual planting and harvesting schedule. It has changed a little since then, and I notice some crops, like garlic, are missing from it, but it’s still a fairly good indication of my year in the garden.

I struggled the first few years here. Coming from the Northern Hemisphere, I had no idea when I should plant things. And the idea of growing vegetables over winter was foreign to me, too.; gardening in Minnesota and Pennsylvania is sharply seasonal. It’s seasonal here, too, but much less dramatically so.

Instead of growing a ton of spinach over the summer and freezing it for winter, I learned to simply plant small quantities regularly throughout the year, for a perpetual supply of fresh greens. Same with lettuce, chard, broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower.

Today my garden year ebbs and flows, but there is never a down time in the garden. There is always something to plant, weed or pick. The end of last year overlaps with the beginning of this year, so while I plan my seed order, I’m harvesting the lettuces, broccoli, leeks and other late crops planted in the autumn, and I’m weeding the garlic and broad beans that will be harvested in the coming spring and summer.

Sometimes I miss the complete downtime of gardening in Minnesota—the winter lull when there’s no need to go out and weed in the cold. But only sometimes. The never-ending garden year here has its perks in garden-fresh vegetables year-round.

To the Beach

/ Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

While all you folks in the Northern Hemisphere are flocking to be beach for a swim and some sun and sand, we are shivering down here in the dark days of winter. But that doesn’t mean we don’t go to the beach.

Research from England has found that people living by the coast have better physical and mental health than those living inland. I can certainly understand that.

Growing up three hours’ drive from the beach, I visited the ocean about once a year. My husband, raised in the midwestern US, doesn’t remember seeing the ocean until age twelve or thirteen.

Today, we live a mere four kilometres from the beach. When the wind is calm, we can hear the surf. When the wind is high, we can smell the sea. Even without research to back us up, we’ve learned to head to the beach when we’re stressed.

Our beach isn’t a white-sand swimming beach—it’s made of cobbles, and the waves pound viciously on the shore. It’s not a place to swim, nor really a place to sit for very long (those rocks get uncomfortable fast). It’s a place to walk. A place to search for wave-polished rocks in glittering colours. A place to watch sea birds, dolphins, and the occasional seal. A place to leave all the stress of daily life behind (I challenge anyone to remain stressed while watching dolphins cavorting in the waves).

Researchers point to the calming blue colour, the hypnotic sound of waves, and the cultural context of the beach to explain its calming effect. But for me its influence is more profound. Our beach is usually free of other people—on a busy day you might see four others. From the beach, it is difficult to see any sign of humans at all—the odd bit of flotsam, but not even much of that. On our beach, the world is reduced to sky, water, and rock, shared only with wildlife. It’s easy to imagine the world is in better shape than it is. It’s easy to believe the vast ocean will endure, in spite of human stupidity. It’s easy to think those rare Hector’s dolphins, which we see nearly every time we visit the beach, are actually common. For the space of time we inhabit the beach, all is right in the world.

It doesn’t last, of course, but it’s good to have that escape so close at hand.

Beautiful Brawny Barnacles

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My daughter and I went for a walk on the beach after school yesterday. It was chilly, but calm, with a clear mid-winter sky and dolphins in the surf.

Washed up on the beach was a large tree stump crusted with barnacles whose colours mirrored the evening sky. The size and profusion of barnacles indicate the tree was lodged in the water for a long time before it was hurled onto our beach.

Barnacles are strange creatures. They’re crustaceans—kin to crabs, shrimp, and lobsters—but they don’t look anything like their relatives. Barnacles have given up the ability to move on their own (after a brief mobile larval stage), and instead settle down in places where the water moves around them—intertidal zones, the backs of whales and the bottoms of ships are popular barnacle real estate. Instead of having to wander in search of food, moving water carries lunch to the barnacles, and they filter it out of the water with feathery appendages called cirri.

Staying put in places where waves pound day in and day out isn’t easy. Barnacles produce a ‘glue’ that’s one of the strongest natural adhesives around. With a tensile strength of 35 N/mm2 (5000 psi), it rivals the best commercial epoxies. In a strange quirk of biology, the glue is produced by a gland at the base of the barnacle’s antennae, and so the animal is glued head-first to the substrate. Once glued to its home, the barnacle forms a ring of plates around its body to protect it (this is all that is left of the barnacles pictured here—the animals themselves have died).

There are costs to gluing oneself in place. Unlike other sessile animals like corals who release their eggs and sperm into the water for fertilisation, most barnacles rely on internal fertilisation. To reach their neighbours and manage this feat, the hermaphroditic (both male and female) animals have penises that can be 8 times the length of their bodies. Until recently, researchers thought this was the only way barnacles could reproduce, but in 2013, a study found that at least one species of barnacle (with a particularly short penis) can capture sperm from the water if it’s too far from its neighbours.

Barnacles are of human importance. They encrust ships, leading to increased drag and fuel costs. But their habit of attaching themselves to all sorts of debris can also be used forensically to track marine wildlife like whales and turtles, items from shipwrecks and airplane crashes, and marine debris. Additionally, barnacles are considered culinary delicacies in Spain, Portugal and Chile.

Beautiful and brawny, weird and wonderful, barnacles always make me smile.

Self-control … yeah, right.

/ Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

Now that we’re on the upside of the winter solstice, I’ve planted my garlic—108 cloves, which should yield about 100 heads, assuming my usual success rate.

That’s absolutely too much garlic.

It’s a bad omen. I drew up my garden plan this morning—a garden roughly three-quarters the size of the one I’ve planted for the last decade. Hopefully it won’t yield 200 pumpkins and 80 kilos of pickling cucumbers next year when my teenage son won’t be around to eat them all.

But, plan or not, if I plant other crops with the exuberance with which I planted garlic today, I’ll end up with a garden every bit as big as past gardens. Some time in the next two weeks, before this year’s seed catalogue arrives, I need to get control of my gardening urge.

Wish me luck.

Here Comes the Sun

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After weeks of grey, unending drizzle, we’re finally seeing a bit of sun. Mushrooms abound in the yard, revelling in the dank mist we’ve been swimming through for a fortnight. We are all eagerly awaiting passing of the solstice and the lengthening of the days.

Though it is still pretty dark and drear, and the days will still be short for some time, there are signs of the spring to come.

Lambing has started. This is the time of year when the neighbours grow noisy, with lambs and ewes calling to one another day and night.

The preying mantids are gone, but their egg cases are dotted around the yard, promising a healthy population of my favourite predators come spring.

The daffodils and snowdrops are coming up, and I’ve even seen them blooming in other people’s yards.

And tomorrow is the solstice. Friday, the sun will remain above the horizon fractionally longer than it did the previous day. We’ll be on the upswing.

Pumpkin Pancakes

/ Robinne Weiss / 1 Comment

Now that winter has set in, we’ve turned our culinary sights from eggplant and courgettes to pumpkin, pumpkin, and pumpkin. I blogged about our excellent pumpkin harvest earlier this year. That post was written mid-way through the harvest–ultimately we picked nearly 200 pumpkins and other winter squash.

So w’re eating a lot of pumpkin. That’s not a problem.

Yesterday I made lovely pumpkin pancakes for breakfast. They were moist, dense, and spicy—excellent with maple syrup or redcurrant jam.

To make these delicious pancakes, start with a double batch of my World Famous Pancake Recipe. Add 2 tsp cinnamon and 1/2 tsp cloves to the dry ingredients. Add 1 1/2 cups pureed pumpkin (or other winter squash—I used kabocha squash) to the wet ingredients.

If your pumpkin is dry, you may need to increase the milk to achieve the right batter consistency.

We found these pancakes didn’t store/reheat as well as regular pancakes—they became quite fragile upon reheating (though they were still delicious).

Beautiful Basket Fungus

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Mature fruiting body

One of my favourite fungi is Ileodictyon cibarium, the basket fungus, native to Australia, New Zealand and Chile. We have been treated this year to an amazing display of these fungi in our recently wood-chipped pond garden. Usually we don’t notice them until the fruiting bodies are fully formed, but because there are so many this year, we’ve been able to watch their whole emergence, from egg-like volva to lacy soccer ball.

Aside from their striking look, there’s nothing particularly lovely about these fungi. The basket fungus is in the family Phallaceae, also known as the stinkhorn fungi. Members of this family—you guessed it—have a foul odour (and many are phallus-shaped). The carrion or dung-smelling fruiting bodies attract flies to disperse the spores. Supposedly, the young fruiting bodies are edible … but not very tasty, as you can imagine.

Immature volvae

In spite of their smell, basket fungi have a certain celebrity status, owing to their remarkable structure. In fact, in Hagley Park in Christchurch there used to be a play structure in the shape of a giant basket fungus. I’m not sure if it’s still there—my kids don’t frequent playgrounds anymore—but it was always a favourite with my kids.

In Praise of Parsnip

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The rangy rosette of a parsnip plant.

A bit like carrots, but sweeter and starchier, parsnips are wonderful winter vegetables.

I’m not certain when I first ate parsnip, but I know I’ve eaten a lot of it. When I was breastfeeding my son, nearly everything I ate gave him colic (It took eight weeks of 24-hour-a-day screaming for me to work this out … longest eight weeks of my life). Parsnips were one of the few safe vegetables, so I ate parsnips. Lots and lots of parsnips. But I never got sick of them. Their comforting, earthy flavour only grew on me the more I ate.

I try to grow parsnips every year, but I’m not always successful. Parsnip seed has a short shelf-life, and germination can be poor, even with seed that isn’t officially past it’s ‘plant by’ date. I buy a new packet of seed every year, whether I’ve used all of the old seeds or not. Even so, I don’t always have luck germinating it, because parsnip doesn’t like to be transplanted, and needs to be seeded directly into the garden beds. In my garden, that means the seeds tend to dry out, in spite of my best efforts. It also leaves tender seedlings at the mercy of birds and slugs, which seem to enjoy parsnip as much as I do.

But this past summer the parsnips did well, like many other crops that appreciated the unusually warm, wet weather. The parsnip I picked for dinner yesterday was 15 cm in diameter at the crown, but still tender and delicious. And there are plenty more out there to harvest.

Parsnips are sweeter after the first frost, so they’re a great autumn and winter food. They store well in the ground, so there’s no need to fill your fridge with them at harvest time. When we lived in Minnesota, I used to use a pickaxe to chip them out of the frozen ground through the winter.

Parsnips make wonderful additions to stews and casseroles. Their flavours meld well with potato, carrot, and celeriac. They compliment beans and pulses. They’re great vehicles for butter and cheese. Back when I was subsisting on little beyond parsnips, we used to mash them (like mashed potatoes), braise them, and roast them, in addition to using them in stew and soup.

It’s no wonder these versatile vegetables have been cultivated since long before Roman times. They’re a great winter staple—a vegetable you can eat again and again and still enjoy.

You can take me out, but you can’t dress me up

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I laced up my shoes to go to town yesterday and thought to myself, “Gosh, these shoes are comfortable.” My next thought was, “Gee these shoes are looking a bit rough for town wear.”

Truth is, I’m a bit rough for town wear. I feel it every time I go for groceries. Other women arrive at the store in high heels and skirts, with flouncy scarves and jewellery. I rock up in my hiking boots, still dusty from my last trip. My clothes are clean, well-made and tailored perfectly for me (because I make the myself), but that’s just it—they’re tailored for me, and not just in the fit. Denim, cotton, lots of pockets, and comfortable enough to walk five kilometres in (because I never know when I’ll have the need or urge to take a brisk walk).

Even my ‘town’ shoes—the ones I wear when I’m trying to look at least somewhat professional—are wide, clunky affairs that are, quite frankly, ugly (but really comfortable).

Most of the time, it doesn’t bother me to be the unfashionable slob in town, but it doesn’t mean I don’t notice my wardrobe is wildly different from others’.

I could theoretically dress up to go to town. Somewhere, deep in the closet is one outfit that could count as marginally dressy. It would pass for normal in the grocery store. I expect it will last the rest of my life, given how seldom it comes out.

You can take me out, but you can’t dress me up.