Thanking Last Season

Today I was very mindful of how much food we were eating from last season. We had two nice meals, one of veggie burgers and roasted potatoes (with lots of condiments), the other was chapattis and a beany stew (again with lots of condiments). To make these meals happen I have been going down to the basement and taking out potatoes, parsnips and lots of mason jars of preserved food. Here is a little rundown of all the great things we grew and preserved last year (and are enjoying now):

• Dill pickles
• Pickled beans
• Mustard pickles
• Green tomato relish
• Sauerkraut (made from radish and turnips)
• Potatoes
• Parsnips
• Jerusalem artichokes
• Canned tomatoes
• Green tomato mincemeat
• Lots of various jams, syrups and applesauce
• Salsa
• Garlic
• Pickled garlic scapes
• Horseradish sauce
• We made kim chi a few weeks ago from overwintered cabbage, turnip greens, kale and Jerusalem artichokes
  

I really encourage everyone to get into fermenting and preserving. But you already knew that. Check out the great book Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz.

Harvest Updates

Some pictures to share. Frances took some lovely shots this past download. Thought I should share them with you. I can't write much as we are taking Nikita and Joe to the Brook Village Dance, the last one of the year.


The summer squash and cucumbers have been very prolific this year. Perhaps I'm leaning a thing or two about growing them.


So much so that Joe and I made dill pickles in a brine so they are naturally fermented. They taste pretty amazing. I made up another 4 gallon crock about a week ago and I guess I can do another pretty soon.

We've also been dehydrating a lot of zucchini and summer squash for the long winter to come.

The strawberries that we planted last year have been giving en mass. Each week we sell out at the markets. They are not everbearing as much as I remember (hard to keep track of everything). But they had one big production in July and now are giving again. Must have been a pretty great summer for strawbs.


Sarah came out to visit from Hamilton and was a great help with her cycling partner Patrick. They biked all over Nova Scotia, ultimately ending up at Wild Roots with us.


So naturally we've been eating pretty well with lots of fresh veggies and fruit. This must be the best I've eaten my whole life.

Spring Garden

Here are some images from our spring garden. The orchard continues to grow with the efforts of Frances, Thom and Jane. It's difficult to get a picture of trees that are still dormant and are just now budding and waking up for the season. Thanks to Jane for coming down this weekend and just planting trees (plus bringing me chocolate and tahini). Frances is also working really hard helping plant and tie the trees to the stakes. And yes, it is still chilly here; I see lots of pictures of people in Ontario walking around in t-shirts but that's still a ways away.


Lots of things have overwintered in our garden: kale, spinach, chard, leeks, turnips and radish. So it means that we're not just eating dandelions and beans this spring. Frances and I pulled the radish and turnip and made them into kraut a few days ago. I decided to try something new and made kimchi out of the turnip tops and leeks. It's fermenting away in the kitchen. Might be an interesting taste, what do you think?


Oh and last but not least I planted 18 asparagus crowns. Two have come up already and it'll be three years before we harvest asparagus regularly but then we have 20+ years of asparagus. Can't complain about that. Go perennials!

Miso Making

So I had a go making miso tonight. It's actually quite a simple process. Cook beans, mash them, add a brine with a little live miso mixed in and something called koji. I'm still not sure if I got the koji process right. Basically koji is rice infused with a beneficial fungus. I just threw it in because my recipe didn't call for me to do anything else. Though I have this feeling that I should have mixed it with some warm cooked, fresh rice.

But if it doesn't work out then I won't sweat it. Though I'm going to have to wait a year to try this miso. Yup, that's how long it takes to mature, maybe even longer. It's in the cool basement starting its long journey right now.

FarmVille

So apparently a popular game on Facebook is called FarmVille. It's a game where you buy a farm and then take care of it, planting crops, watering them, harvesting, taking things to market, milking cows, butchering animals (presumably). I have no experience with this game apart from this "article" which felt more like it was selling stocks in the company that developed it.

It's interesting that this game is so popular. Maybe it reflects the feeling that most of us have that our lives are so disconnected from anything real that we're getting sick (literally). How does it make sense that I sit in front of a screen for 8 hours a day and get tiny pieces of paper that I can give to a store and get food. I think we all know that this is a weird system and likely not long for this world. Maybe people will use this as a start to growing their own food. Though this game requires no hardwork or exercise so it's sure to come in above the original.

The funny thing about the game is that I'm sure Monsanto has caught wind of it and I bet that Roundup and Roundup Ready crops are available for purchase through the game. I wonder if the "farmers" know they are growing genetically modified corn?

Repulsion

I have to write about this one because I feel that it's a good sign. Yesterday I walked into a massive Atlantic Superstore. I do this maybe twice a month when I need flour or nachos (well the truth is that I don't really need them). Not a big deal.

But this time when I walked in I had my head in my hands in no time and I was literally stumbling through the aisles trying to find what I wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. It was a completely bewildering experience, I don't usually get instant headaches (in fact I never get headaches) and really a sense of repulsion, no other way to describe it. Not even when I'm dumping the shit bucket.

That's the thing. Finally life is making sense. A shit bucket makes sense. I shit, I compost it and I eat it in the form of veggies later and then I repeat. Makes sense.

A supermassive grocery store doesn't make sense. All that food with no garden--certainly no shit--all the bright packages, all those bright lights; who fucking knows what death solvent they use to clean the floors. Imagine working there! Yikes.

I'm quite proud that my civilized body is learning intuitively what is right and wrong. Because there are things in this life that are right and wrong. Things that we just know inside. The problem arises when you grow up believing that the grocery store is where food comes from and that veggies are all perfect with no blemishes, just like your skin should be. These are insane lessons of an insane culture.

More and more I'm realizing that I have to start telling new stories because teaching how to grow food isn't enough. Humans need legends. Right now the corporations decide what our legends are, what stories create our world.

A winter challenge. Next to knitting my felted clogs.

Preserving

It's that time of year. I got a taste of it last year but this year it just feels right, it's not a chore. We are preserving food for the winter. That means fermenting, freezing, canning and jams.

Frances does the jams and the sweet stuff. She's been making everything out of green tomatoes: mincemeat, chutney, dill "pickles. She made a mincemeat crumble this morning and it was so great. No chow sadly. And she made lots of jam and jelly out of all the chokecherries that grow everywhere in August.


This evening we canned up probably at least 30 litres of tomatoes. All different colours, reminds me of the tri-colour pasta. It's nice to have canned tomatoes for the winter. I suppose ideally we'd love to have enough canned for two one litre jars a week, at least. Really easy to do too. I never thought about the canned tomatoes that I bought before but they are I think lined with that chemical that everyone was worried about in their plastics. Is it BPA? And a wwoofer told me that it's likely that the tomatoes are cooked in massive aluminum pots, wherever the hell they cook them up. Not exactly a nice process. Even if we buy organic that doesn't mean they were produced in a healthy way. So what better way than to can them up yourself?


We made lots of pickled beans this summer. Some with chillies and some without. We pasteurized them which is too bad but means that they'll last a bit longer. One can only eat so many beans right?

As usual I'm making my kale chi on a weekly basis. As the leaves are frosted they become more purple and the kim chi changes colour which is cool. I also grated three gallons of kohlrabi and we are krauting it up. It smelled so amazing. The salt is definitely running out and I still don't have any idea how to make it. Do you?


We got a bunch of basil from our friend Candy. She has a greenhouse and grows huge basil plants. Much bigger than anything I grew this summer. Thanks to a generous donation of pine nuts from our friend Alison, we made a few litres of pesto for the winter. I can't wait, I love pasta more than anything I'm coming to realize.

Last and never least, we bought a nice dehydrator and have been drying zucchini and apple and some mushrooms. We might make some jerky in it though this reveals how much flesh is mostly water, as you end up very little in the end.

Children of the Corn

We just watched this amazing movie that you should get out of the library. It's called King Corn and it's about, well, everything. It's about civilization, about food, about that crazy state, and people, mostly fat people, which is to say people. It's about everything. And it all comes from corn, which comes from oil. They didn't really talk much about oil but that's okay, you can't cover everything in a film.

If you were to have your hair analyzed you would find that most of the carbon in your body (which you got from food) comes from corn. We eat corn in everything: pop, all processed foods (that's right, all!), cheap meat is fed corn, and any sugar is probably made using cheap corn syrup. It's pretty much impossible to avoid unless you are going to grow your own food and only purchase whole foods. And even then, who isn't tempted?

I actually called Smuckers (the jam company, likely owned by Lockheed-Martin) the other day because I naively wanted to know if their sugar was made from sugar beets (genetically modified) or cane sugar (not genetically modified yet). Little did I know that their sugar comes from corn (genetically modified). So as I informed Linda on the phone, there'll be no more Smuckers on the kitchen table and probably no more commercial jam since it will all contain fructose from corn because it is so cheap.

And why is it so cheap? Because the government subsidizes corn production. In the film, most farmers (if you can call them that) post a loss until the subsidies come through. So the only reason we have a crazy, deadly, stupid, death food system is because the government supports it. You'd think that in Canada, with nationalized (for now) healthcare that this would be discouraged. Recognizing this fact, I don't have high hopes that universal healthcare will come south of the border anytime soon. Good luck President Obama.

The only good news is that this generation is likely to live shorter and much more painful lives than our parents and their parents. Serves us right for being so stupid. So hopefully some humans will die. But that's the only good news and it's kind of twisted.

But check out King Corn if you can. But if you still can't do without the grocery store and your daily dose of cola then maybe you should just get back to the television. I'm sure something good is on. Perhaps another Michael Jackson retrospective?

Lost at Sea

We've had a fun week here at Wild Roots. The fellow who brought us our firewood for this winter also works as a lobster fisherman in season. He offered to take us out to show us how they do it. So we joined him for an early morning lobstering adventure. It was nice to be out on the water in the early morning light. There was no rain and no waves. I'm not normally seasick but I think that being hammered by waves might be a bit much. It was a nice treat for our wwoofer Yuka, who in typical Japanese fashion took lots of pictures. Happily she provided me with some to share here.


So what did I learn? I learned yet again how fucked up the global economy is. Sorry, I mean the death economy, we've really got to tell it like it is. There were so many traps everywhere along the shore, marked by hundreds of little coloured buoys. Dan and I both remarked on it. Way too many. And the lobster fishermen are getting even less for their catch this year.


Basically the lobster fisherman (didn't see a woman but you never know) are catching lobsters to send to the United States and other countries. Those countries don't want to pay a fair price, so lobster fishermen have to sell it for nothing for the privilege of feeding some bastard who works in an office and produces nothing and gets paid more than them.

I'd like to submit that lobster fishermen instead tell all those shitheads in their offices to fuck off if they don't want to pay a fair price and just focus on selling their catch locally. Why ship them around the world anyway? Oh yeah, because those other countries have already destroyed their fisheries and they want the same for us. Thanks for sharing. But seriously, if 90+% of the catch was saved for Cape Breton the fishery might last for a long time, maybe even forever (as much as humans are aware of forever). Because Cape Bretoners who live here wouldn't want to lose a valuable source of food. Why would you throw that away? For money? You must be insane?

I still haven't eaten lobster. I'm sure it's nice. I did eat some donair beef that was offered me on an organic farm we worked at last week. It was nice, flavoured with some spices. I didn't have any tummy upsets. And I had a sausage of a bun today at lunch from the same organic farmers who come to the Mabou Farmers' Market. Again no ill effects.

But don't worry, oh faithful vegetarian reader, I'm not going totally carnivourous. If I did I would be living on the street anyway. Have you noticed just how much food prices are going up? We're fucked. And I'll only eat happy animals or the happiest animals, wild animals. I'm game to try deer or moose in the fall. Dan's going to try for a moose but it's a lottery to get your tag.

And I read a review for a book that I'm not going to read unless the library gets it or someone brings it by that might be some food for thought about the diet issues raised above. It's called The Vegetarian Myth by Lierre Keith. It sounds like a heavy read for a vegetarian but it might be really important for you to read it. Check it out.

The thing that made me think in reading a review the other day was that vegetarians assume that our choice to not eat meat causes less violence or environmental destruction when in fact it just shifts the violence and desolation. Instead of slaughtering thousands of factory farmed chickens we are encouraging the dead economy to mow down forests to plant grains and beans destroying countless beings. So really if food is already about violence then you might as well take on that violence yourself and be accountable for it.

And it again makes me think about population. C'mon swine flu! Just a few billion to go. You can do it! We really need your help as we aren't about to take action on our own.

In Praise of Oil etc.

Remember that big pile of wood that we had delivered? We finally got through it and piled up all the split wood. The big lesson that I learned from this exercise was the amazing power of oil. When you think about how much it can improve work and annual chores like blocking and splitting wood it's amazing. How much more energy would I have had to expend to do the same job as a chainsaw? Or the log splitter that we were lent? Watching both easily slice through wood, you can only be amazed.

The problem is that we don't use oil to improve on the everyday jobs. We don't make plans when it comes to oil, setting out priorities like home heating, public transit and delivering local food to markets. So in the end we spend this energy legacy on trinkets that are shipped in from China and break the day after they arrive in our homes. Not much thoughtful planning going on here.

If I was allocated a portion of all the remaining oil on earth, I would gladly save it for my annual wood splitting and cutting. But unfortunately that's not how it works.

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In fermentation news, mum just made a gallon of dandelion wine. It will actually take a whole year before it is ready to drink but when it comes, I'll toast planning for the future.

And in a nod to an amazing Korean food, I made some dandelion kimchi. Are you noticing a trend? If there's one thing we've got a lot of, it's dandelions. And they taste great and really are going to be our spring green of choice for I think the rest of our lives here. We're not wasting our money on mixed greens from California every few days and are eating just as healthily and locally. Even in the city, dandelions would make a great compliment to your healthy diet.

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And the hummingbirds have arrived. We had this feeder up for a while but it felt a little like we were dealing hummingbird crack so we took it down. But the junkies keep coming back, even though there is great food just a few metres away in the gardens.

Spring Salad

So one thing that kind of strikes people about my diet these days is that there are very few fresh greens on the menu. No salads in February though we did make some out of shredded carrots and sprouted seeds. And I guess if you sprouted something long enough you'd get some greens. But still I don't have many greens in my diet.

And amazingly, perhaps, I'm feeling really good. I guess I do eat sauerkraut every single day, which trust me, never gets boring (well maybe it would if there was a grocery store nearby). Kraut I think provides a lot of what I need and is something that can be prepared in the fall and last all the way to summer and the glut of fresh greens that awaits me then.

But for now I wanted to share our newest salad ingredient. Everywhere around our place, dandelions are growing. And the greens are nice and tender and young, just right for eating. So mum and I gathered a whole bunch yesterday and made this yummy looking (and tasting salad).


So I encourage you to wander around your garden and find some fresh dandelion leaves to make a salad with. Why go to the store and pay for something that you can get for free? And there are endless salad options available. I'm so happy to learn about all the "weeds" that I can eat.

Diametrically Different Diet

I've come to the realization, since moving here, that I'm eating much better than I ever did in Hamilton. Whereas in Hamilton, the grocery store always provided everything and I was tempted by perogies and soysages and salsa and super spirals, here the grocery store doesn't appeal. I guess that's half due to my frugality and desire to save money and half due to the limited selection. It's a long drive to an Ontario-scale grocery store (and I can't drive).

So I find myself eating relatively simple meals of beans, grains, sauerkraut and hot sauce (some things never change and at least it doesn't have any preservatives). I'm sprouting all the time and we eat sprouted salads and I make sprouted bean burgers often enough. I'm working on a recipe that will fool my sister into thinking it might actually be beef. I think I'll try using beet juice in the next batch.

But definitely the variety is lacking but really that's realistic in winter. If I live in Canada, I can't expect salads in February. Unless, I guess, I'm growing them indoors which we may do next year.

And I think my simple meals now will make the amazing variety of the summer all the better. Fresh salads. Steamed greens. Fresh berries. Excellent.

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In fermentation news:

My beer is carbonating nicely and I'm looking forward to trying some at Easter. I hope that it's good but I have another kit and I'm looking forward to starting it soon. It's a honey blond beer and I'm told it's a lot better tasting than my last batch will be.

We picked up some koji in Sydney yesterday. Our friend Mike is a Doctor of Chinese Medicine and has lots of interesting stuff. Koji, as far as I know, is moldy rice. Obviously though, not the kind of mould that's going to kill us. You use it to make many fermented East Asian foods like tamari. We're going to make a few gallons(!) of miso using it. Our organic soy beans are on the way too; they have to be organic since soy is one of the four major genetically modified foods (do you know the others?*). Miso will take a year to age properly so next spring we'll be up to our elbows in miso.

I've started making ginger beer. I remember my dad buying it for me when I was a little boy. I loved it, so strong and fizzy. Much better than pop, just harder to find. It's going to take a few weeks and I'm going to make it strong. I'll also have to plant some ginger and see if I can keep it going inside the house so I don't have to keep going to the store.

Last and definitely not least, I'm going to make injera, sour Ethiopian bread. The Bulk Barn actually sells teff flour which is the grain used in injera. I wonder if teff could be grown here in Cape Breton. We're going to have an Ethiopian Easter and surprise a friend who lived in Ethiopia once upon a time.

* Corn, soy, canola and cotton are the four major genetically modified foods. Take a look at your grocery cart, you'll find them in everything.

The End of Vegetarianism

A tarp on our kitchen floor is a bloody mess. In the other room, as I type, a cleaver is being pounded into spinal columns. Copious fat renders in a large stainless steel pot and smells faintly of fish. Six or seven other carcasses are buried in a pile of snow outside, awaiting their time under the butcher's knife. Their hides await the removal of fat and the distant promise of waterproof clothing.

After a long wait, the seals have arrived.

Shocked? Most people are when seals are killed. It leads to strong feelings, yelling matches, boycotts, press releases. They are cute so killing them is wrong. The European Union is planning on banning all seal imports from Canada partly motivated by these reasons. Fair enough, Europe is far away and long ago they devastated and removed most aquatic mammals from their shores. With that track record, why let them do it to ours?

But cuteness is hardly a reason to ban hunts arbitrarily. Deer are beautiful, rabbits are cute, chicken have their moments, goats are characters, cows . . . well you can't win them all. But all these animals can be killed by the thousands if not in the case of chickens, billions. But if hunting an animal provides you with the things you need and you enter into a relationship with it, ensuring that its species survives so you may survive, then your hunt cannot be wrong. Zebras provide lions what they need to survive in east Africa. Seals provide polar bears with what they need in the arctic. Plankton must die so that whales can sing.

Humans are not very suited to their environments like lions, whales, plankton and seals. We live in cold places without a layer of winter fat (McDonald's fat doesn't count because sadly, it lasts all year). So we need a little more from our prey. We need to borrow their successful evolutionary adaptations such as warm skin and we can, smartly, make light from their oil. We're differently from most animals in that way, but still very much animals.

When you live in a place, and you really believe in eating locally and efficiently it's important to take stock of your potential sources of food. So if you live in India, rice and lentils make a lot of sense. If you live in Nunavut, caribou and, by the coast, seals and whales make sense. Indians shouldn't really eat seal and certainly Inuit wouldn't last long on beans and rice. And why, with all we know about climate change, would you expend energy to ship these products around the world when the earth already provides all you need where you live? Seriously.

And if you plan to leave behind a habitable home for your children, you'll probably make the most of the "natural resources" at your disposal. So only an idiot, and we are definitely idiots, would kill a shark and only take its fins for Chinese soups. This is so immoral, let alone wasteful, that I have no problem making a t-shirt that says: "Vote for human extinction".

But in the case of large mammals like seals, humans can make use of most of their bodies. Skins can, as mentioned, keep us warm and actually waterproof. Fat can nourish us and provide us with light. Meat, bones and marrow provide protein. Today I wondered if their whiskers could be used as a brush of some kind. I haven't thought of a use for their flippers yet--perhaps a windmill? In light of this, to kill them wantonly merely for their attractive fur is a crime worthy of the death penalty.

And efficiency is an important consideration. Ten seals may provide a group of three humans and one cat with enough food for one year when combined with other sources of food such as mushrooms, cultivated vegetables, perennials, deer, rabbit. Ten lives for three. This is the stuff of life. Think of the millions of plankton that feed one mighty whale or even the thousands of fish consumed by one seal. This is the way it works.

The best part is that seals take care of themselves. You don't have to do anything but hunt them and skin and butcher them maybe a few times a year. Whenever I see a cow, I wonder why we waste our time and energy on these animals.

For meat? Kill a deer or a seal and don't worry about antibiotics, cleaning out their pens, providing them with hay for winter, keeping their water from freezing in winter, building them a barn, birthing calves. 365 days a year. Maybe you don't raise it yourself but you support and believe in a system that does. Why would we waste our time on all this when the world provides us with an abundant source of meat in seals and deer and smaller mammals?

The only thing I can see is maybe milk is that great. But I've gotten by fine without it for close to ten years and I'm probably never going to let it touch my lips again for the rest of my life. Yuck!

So where do all these thoughts lead me? I'm still very much a vegetarian but I'm not blind. I can see the writing on the wall. Chickpeas come from Turkey. Quinoa comes from Saskatchewan. Rice comes from Asia. Avocados come from Mexico. Does this diet make sense knowing what I know about ecosystems and climate change? No, but old habits die hard. I'll probably not start by eating seal but they are an abundant wild food where I call home.

And clearly, as usual when I think about anything these days, I'm reminded that there are far too many humans on this planet. I'm making an argument for us being the top predator (not the civilized top predators that we currently make ourselves out to be) but if we are to accept that role we must accept all that comes with it including responsibility for the lives of those that sustain us and the vital importance of maintaining a reasonably small population.

Ugh, Buddy just caught a mouse and brought it upstairs. At least he's doing his job. Now if only he could lose the sadism and fucking kill it. If only he could read this post.

Blue February Skies

It must be the blue skies and longer days but I'm feeling really motivated. Of course I forget to do lots of things on my many lists but who goes through the day like it was a list anyway? That's crazy.

But I can't overstate the power of seeing a blue sky after a grey, overcast winter. And if the wind is down, as it was today minus temperatures seem a paltry thing.

Today we went to the beach and took in the frozen wasteland there. Imagine, to the horizon, nothing but a sheet of ice. Pieces pushing up from below, snow piled here and there. For someone who's never seen a frozen winter sea, this was amazing. Unfortunately I can't share because I didn't bring my camera. But I did take some pictures of the rising sun and the bright, white valley when the recent bright days started. So here you go.



So I guess I should get back to creativity and motivation. Good things to embrace of course. This weekend it's been bread and knitting that have been explored. I learned an easy bread recipe from a wonderful woman. Her recipe is flexible in that you can really use anything that's hanging around your fridge too long. Unfortunately (or not if you don't care) it uses yeast but I'm already learning about sourdough bread so that will be the next adventure. What if the yeast factories stop working?


Anyway here's the recipe (for 8 loaves):

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8 cups of warm to hot liquid (which can include blended veggies and leftovers)
1/2 cup of fat
1/2 cup of sweet
3 tbsp yeast
3 tbsp sea salt
Flour to texture

Mix together everything excluding the flour. Add flour and mix to the point you can stir it in. It needs to be good and moist and a little sticky. Knead it out on a floured bread board. Try and be rhythmic with your kneading. Then you can let it rise in loaf pans and then put it in the oven. I baked it, having no frame of reference, at 350 fahrenheit for 30-40 minutes.

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The liquid I chose to use was the juice from the mason jars that had once contained pickled beets. I thought red bread would be fun and the salty juice meant that I put in a little less salt. The results (and smell of the baking bread) were amazing! Next I might use the liquid that I save from cooking beans. Try it, it's fun and so nice to make bread that's almost as good as from a bakery.


And then there's my new scarf. I don't actually need one but it's an easy place to start. When I started I was always bugging mum but now I just soldier on (another militaristic term). Two knit, two pearl. Easy as pie once someone patient shows you. Maybe by the end of the week I'll be finished. I think knitting a pair of socks would be amazing. Maybe that will be my next project.

Of course all this knitting is stupid because I can buy socks and scarves from China for a tiny sum compared with the hours it will take me. Hell even the yarn costs more than a few pairs of socks from China.

But what if those socks stop coming?

Kraut, Mushrooms and Apple Cider

So we're getting on with a lot of things. It's been fun and we've had some company which has made life better as it usually does. The fall keeps hanging on. Yesterday it was 15 degrees.


1) Thanks to the help of three intrepid wwoofers we fermented a large batch of sauerkraut. It fermented over the course of approximately three weeks and tastes great. It's really easy to make your own kraut. Use three tablespoons of salt for every five pounds of shredded cabbage. In a ceramic crockpot sprinkle the salt on top of each four inch layer and throw in a few peppercorns or whole cloves. Toss it around with clean hands then add other layers until you're out of cabbage. Put a plate upside down on top and put a heavy weight on top of it (maybe a large glass bottle filled with water) and cover with a clean cloth. Keep it in a warm place for a few weeks.

2) Did you know that most apple "juice" sold in Canada comes from China? Pretty crazy stuff considering the number of apple trees on our street let alone in all of Canada. Happily our house has a large apple press which we used to make cider a few weeks ago. It tasted great and sadly didn't last long. The best part was that it was made with apples picked within a few hundred feet of our home. With a few carboys you could make hard cider easily too.

3) It's damp near our house and there's a wooded brook which is home to numerous species of mushrooms. Did you know that mushrooms breathe oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide? I just assumed they were plants but they are something else, something special. We've seen chanterelles and turkey tails not to mention hundreds of little brown mushrooms which are almost impossible to identify and therefore should be avoided. We're hoping to inoculate a few logs soon to grow our own mushrooms. You could also do this easily at home with some freshly cut hardwood and some inoculated plugs.

Will keep you posted.