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Via EnjoyGardening)
Posted by admin to Jim's Notebook on 2008-02-21, 07:05:52
Hits & Misses: Encores & High maintenance
Question of the Week: What do I do with my celeriac?
Science & Technology: Porcupine whine
The Path to Enjoy 2009: History repeating
I know I shouldn’t have laughed the other night when my daughter began crying about her homework, but I couldn’t help myself. Her frustration was due to a Grade 4 English assignment that involved writing a fairytale to fit on no more than five double-spaced pages. Having written 10 pages of her fairytale, my exasperated daughter screamed out that not only was she less than half way through her story but also that a five-page fairytale was “impossible and stupid.” Now, seeing as I was 650 words into my 500-word maximum Western Living magazine article, I could empathize to a certain degree…damned genetics! Whenever I ramble on with my writing, I always remember Dad quoting Winston Churchill. Apparently, Churchill had ended a letter to a friend of his with “I’m sorry I wrote you a long letter but I didn’t have time to write you a short one.” Uh…I think I will stop my intro right here.
Hits & Misses
Hit: Encore!
I know, I know. I’m always writing about primulas at this time of year, but I just can’t resist! Everyday, I walk past a sea of primula that yield a multitude of brilliantly coloured flowers that perfume the entire greenhouse with a truly amazing fragrance. To my way of thinking, primulas are the very definition of spring.
Miss: High Maintenance
Heat is a friend and an enemy from a grower’s perspective. Grow plants too cool and they stop growing and become more susceptible to root rot and leaf spot. But grow them too warm and plants become lanky, weak and—you guessed it—more prone to root rot and leaf spot. This year we have a few begonias that have been grown just a tad too warm and are a little too tall for their own good. The solution is to move them from their nice, warm, 20°C environment to a slightly cooler, 16°C greenhouse for a few weeks. It’s amazing how quickly a temperature change of a degree or two can change the life of a plant.
Question of the Week
What do I do with my celeriac?
To serve celeriac on its own as a vegetable dish, cook it as you would a turnip. The cut surface of raw celeriac darkens quite quickly when exposed to air, so if you want to retain its milky colour, don’t cut it until just before cooking. If you’re serving it raw, simply rub the cut surfaces with lemon juice or vinegar. A great choice for enhancing soups or adding flavour to vegetable juices, stews and salads.
Science & Technology
Porcupine Whine
When porcupines dine on bark, they’re also dining on the tree’s vascular cambium, the thin layer of tissue beneath the bark. Vascular cambium is responsible for moving nutrients from the leaves to the roots, and destroying this cambium eventually starves the tree to death. We’ve lost cherry, apple, pear and spruce trees in exactly this way, so as you can imagine, porcupines are one of the least welcome visitors to a yard or farm.
The Path to Enjoy 2009
History Repeating
“Are you willing to consider some new ways of constructing this building?” was the question our architects asked us last week. Well, yes, but we never thought that our follow-up meeting today would include ideas that involved using rubber tires, straw, scrap lumber and rusted metal in our new location. In that moment, it became clear to Bill, Valerie and myself that we needed to think outside the box and, in some ways, get back to our roots. Convention, after all, was not something our parents always subscribed to. When Dad started on this farm, his first greenhouse was made of wood trusses from a cancelled project with Nelson Lumber. The first root cellar was insulated with straw, and rubber tires were used to hold down the roof. Today, nearly 45 years later, we’re considering using some of the same materials and methods. Can it work? It might just be a little bit of history repeating.
Did You Know?
An Oriental sacred lotus seed germinated after lying dormant at the bottom of a dry ancient lake bed for over 1200 years.
“Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow.”
–Lawrence Clark Powell
The COBH Heritage Centre
And lastly, this bucolic scene of the misty, emerald isle,
The COBH Heritage Centre
And lastly, this bucolic scene of the misty, emerald isle,
