Sunday, April 28, 2013

Transplanting Rhubarb

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Our week started with Rhubarb. In the back of the house partially sitting under a deck, the Rhubarb was already showing signs of life. Our variety is called Strawberry Rhubarb; it has a mild taste with bright red stems. We used it last year to make some preserves and they were the first jars to disappear from our pantry this winter. We simply loved it.

The problem is that the back of the house has become a construction site and the deck is planned for removal later this summer. In order to save these plants, we decided to transplant them to a safer place and perhaps propagate them.

Digging up Strawberry Rhubarb from under our deck
Spring is apparently the season to do this. We dug up our roots as best we could. They were very deep and the plants were difficult to access.

These Rhubarbs had a very extensive and deep root system
Once removed from the soil, it was rather easy to see where the roots could be split in order to generate more plants. In the end, we transformed an eight foot row of Rhubarb into four rows planted in a raised bed behind our barn.

Our new Rhubarb patch
We were reluctant to put them in direct sun; Christine and I always thought Rhubarb needed shade. Our neighbor (the original source for these plants) put our minds at ease. Her Rhubarb is in direct sun and thriving. Hopefully our new Rhubarb patch will do the same.

From Rhubarb, the entire week ended up being dedicated to planting.

We were actually surprised when we took delivery of our first production root stock: Red Gooseberries; a Japanese variety called Hinnonmaki. 160 small plants arrived and we were far from prepared.

Hinnonmaki Red Gooseberry stock
We ended up quickly setting up our rows and posts. Using our trusted Polyamide cable, we ensured the plants were arranged in a straight line. This is where we realize that tilling by "eye" on some rather hilly terrain results in some rather crooked rows.

Nevertheless, Tristan and I planted our stock. As for the Chestnut trees last week, we decided to plant the Gooseberries with a mix of soil, peat moss and bone meal.

Planting our Gooseberries
The trick now was watering (and this is a concern for all our planting). Although we were told the farm had no irrigation, it is clear that at one time it did. The ground is crisscrossed by miles of tubing. Regrettably the configuration was never recorded and in many segments the system is utterly damaged.

The result is that we have no system of irrigation currently installed. Our temporary solution: a sprayer. This small unit is powered by the John Deere battery and happens to be sufficient for our current task.

Our current watering solution
Planting did not stop with the Gooseberries. With our inside growing space restricted, we felt we really had to start planting some of our vegetable seedlings.

We are currently about 1 week before the average last frost and this can be a risky thing. However, we do know that certain things can be safely done. This includes our Rutabaga (yes those cuttings from out store bought root have taken really well); the Artichokes (grown as an annual they need to feel as if they have gone through a winter) and probably our cabbages (Cauliflower, Broccoli and Brussel Sprouts). Hopefully things will work out; the fourteen day weather outlook is promising.

Planting the "remnants" of our store-bought Rutabagas
Planting did not end there. Now that our drained land is clear, we felt we had to recondition the soil. To do this, we need to fix some Nitrogen back into it. Usually recommended are things like clover or fall rye. Given what we intend to do there, we decided to use an all purpose mixed ground cover which includes clover and rye grass. We did this manually and I am sure it will require a few passes.

Seeding our newly drained land
We even had the chance to start "chitting" our potatoes this week. Perhaps late (we're still getting our heads around the timing for all this planting), this basically entails the pre-sprouting of the seed potatoes or cuttings  in order to get better yields.  Doing this basically requires placing the prominent "eyes" up and for small seed potatoes, the base of the potato (the one originally attached to the rooting system) down. Once the "eyes" begin to sprout, it will be time to plant.

"Chitting" Potatoes
This week was also time to return to our mead experiment. Since 4 weeks have gone by, I thought it may be the right time to test for alcohol content and taste.

Getting ready for a pleasant experience or a nasty surprise
The first honey mead provided a hydrometer reading of about 1.034 suggesting an alcohol content now of roughly 6%. The taste was actually pleasant, although still quite sweet. Since we were using a buckwheat honey, the taste is very much that of buckwheat. With a slight effervescence, it felt like we were drinking a sweet beer.

The brew is bright orange (almost like orange juice) and it is opaque because of yeast particulates. A thick residue was left in the bottom of our fermenter.

We decided to take our brew and transfer it to two 1 gallon jugs for a secondary fermentation. We'll now try it again in about another four weeks.

Our mead ready for secondary fermentation
We also managed to try the Acerglyn (Mead with Maple syrup). The hydrometer reading was just about identical and the colour of the brew was more on the amber side.

The sweetness of the Acerglyn was similar to the Mead, perhaps a bit less. It also had some light effervescence. The buckwheat taste of the honey was not as overpowering but the Maple flavour is barely perceptable. Perhaps with aging and more fermentation this will change.

As for the conventional Mead, we also set this up for a secondary fermentation for trial in another 4 weeks.

Our first batch of Acerglyn
On the Birch syrup front, we processed our last batch. I combined all of the syrup to make a final boil. It turns out this syrup is very sensitive to heat; you cannot boil it as you would Maple. In fact the process requires a lot of precaution; the syrup will rapidly burn even as it touches the edges of a hot pot. Slow simmering is the solution.

The final result was  just over 2  liters of dark syrup. As for the Maple, we also found that crystallization occurs in the process. Unlike "Maple Sand" however,  these crystals seem to dissolve in your mouth. I'm not sure if we created a sugar crystal (it is not very sweet) or some mineral crystal (as for the Maple), or a combination. In any case, now that it is bottled, the syrup will need decanting.

Although we do not have a proper kitchen yet, we did try to marinate some beef ribs for a barbecue and the results were actually very good. It is really hard to believe that a colourless and almost tasteless sap could generate such a dark and aromatic syrup. We'll definitely do it again next year.

Our Birch syrup
Finally, home renovations continue. This week some major work was undertaken to provide outside access to our newly combined cellars. To do this, we decided to actually re-open a doorway original to the house. The difficulty in doing this is the fact that this doorway is well below ground level and into the original foundations. So here goes another addition to our messy construction site!

The old doorway is once again exposed

Sunday, April 21, 2013

Planting Chestnut Trees

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With Spring well underway, it was time this week to begin some serious planting.

Our first effort is Chestnut. In North America, the Chestnut tree was virtually wiped out by a fungal disease. However new hybrids have been created from Chinese Chestnut trees that are blight resistant.

When buying the farm, having a few Chestnut trees was a "must" for the family. We love Chestnuts, and not just roasted, but in baked goods, as part of a vegetable side dish, or even candied ("marron glace"). It is a very versatile food (in Corsica - where we have relatives - they make Chestnut flour, Chestnut pasta and even Chestnut beer). In fact our entire Christmas dinner is based on it: Chestnut cake, Goose with Chestnut stuffing, Roasted Root Vegetables with Chestnuts and braised Brussel Sprouts with Chestnuts! Most years, we are often been disappointed with the quality of the imported Chestnuts available at our local grocery store (often dry, attacked by worms, and to add insult to injury, expensive).

Needless to say, Chestnuts were a necessity. So this week, Tristan and I picked up 10 trees from a local (Niagara-on-the-Lake) nursery specializing in nut trees: Grimo.

Chinese Chestnut Hybrid
The problem with these trees is that they do require quite a bit a space (40 feet between trees) and need to cross-pollinate. As a result, we decided to set aside an odd shaped piece of land (somewhat triangular) just for this purpose. We had cleared it last year and it turns out to fit 10 trees quite well. This land slopes to the creek crossing the farm and is wet in some places, but we hope the trees will draw much of this dampness. Before clearing, it was already over run by bush and rather large trees including a couple of Black Walnuts.

The first step was to lay out the spacing and the location of the trees. We did this with a measuring wheel and some metal posts. This gave us a sense of the miniature Chestnut "forest" we were about to create.

Laying out the location of our new trees
Using a shovel and our trusted Stihl auger, we proceeded to dig our planting holes.

We combined the soil we dug up with peat moss and bone meal prior to refilling the holes with our tree roots. Given the fact that we face some rather strong southerlies from Lake Erie, we decided to tie the trunks of these small trees to metal posts installed on their south facing side (to ensure they do not lean with the winds).

Pounding a support post for our new Chestnut trees
We did this under rather difficult (grey, wet and very windy conditions) and we ended the week with a rather brutal frost. However, the trees look to be in good shape and we can hardly wait to see them grow (I have to admit, there is something very fulfilling about planting a tree). We were told that Chestnut do produce rather fast and that our trees may fruit within a year! It's hard to believe, but it would be great to see our own Chestnuts for Chistmas 2014.

Elsewhere on the farm, we felt like we were starting from where we had begun: it was time to prune the raspberries. I say this because when we committed to buy the farm, I had asked the farmer at the time to use Tristan and teach him a few things before we took possession. Tristan's first task at the farm was the pruning of the raspberries last Spring and here we were at it again.

Back where we started, pruning Raspberries
Having weeded the raspberries last fall, the job proved to be extremely easy to accomplish. We were done within a day (last year it had taken days to go through the process).

We also took this time to prune back the blackberries. We had weeded them and had cut them back last fall, but we were still unsure of the pruning. We decided to be somewhat aggressive since these stalks had reached incredible heights.

We also took the time to finally "seal" our drainage tile. Even though we have had some wet weather, the land is decidedly drier and easier to work. Tristan is now finishing off the surface by leveling it using a tractor-pulled blade (he calls it "zamboning"). Once this is done we hope to seed it to fix some Nitrogen back into the soil.

Tristan's "Zamboni" work
Meanwhile our budding vegetable garden is starting to overtake our handling capacity. I think I may have been overzealous when we started our miniature nursery. All our plants have had to be re-potted; we are really scrounging for containers; and, we are running out of space. Since we are not ready for planting yet (the last frost is still not upon us), we have had to take the plants outdoors in the day time and store them in a heated portion of the barn at night.

The "mini nursery" is overflowing
Keen as ever though, we decided to begin to use the space available on our lighted shelving for new seeds. We've planted more!  This time we've added new varieties of heirloom. non-GMO vegetables to the long list already in production. The way we look at it, if we over produce, we'll be more than happy to sell these in our new country market....and of course we can still develop our canning skills.

Our next batch of seedlings is on its way
This means we also had to start preparing the raised beds. Last year we only used three; we were late in being able to plant anything. This year we expect to use another six, plus some space next to our Beaver pond.

The raised beds were all constructed last year, so it was now just a matter of adding some fertilizer (sheep manure) and a bit more top soil.

Preparing the raised beds
On the renovation front, a lot of our attention has shifted to the barn. With the Tea Room and Country Market set to open in June, a lot of work has been done to re-equip our restaurant kitchen, furnish the store and finish the barn exterior.

The exterior of the barn is almost completed

The new store is coming together
Finally, we continue to process Birch syrup. I will end with one word of caution: do not leave a teenager in charge of supervising evaporation. The end result can be disastrous (I never thought you could actually melt a pot!).

There goes a great 40 liter pot

Sunday, April 14, 2013

It's Time to Try Birch Syrup

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Having processed some 10 litres of Maple syrup, it was time this week to begin our next food experiment: Birch syrup.
Our last 4 litre batch of Maple syrup

I had never heard of this until our neighbor Roger brought it to our attention. It turns out that Birch sap can be processed into syrup pretty much in the same way as Maple. Although not a common experience in our part of America, Birch has been tapped in Russia and the Northwest for a while.


The first major difference between Birch and Maple is that Birch syrup requires about 100 litres of sap for every litre of syrup; this is vastly different than the 40 to 1 ratio of Maple. As a result, Birch syrup takes a lot more energy and labour to produce.

The other interesting difference is that Maple syrup is primarily sucrose. Birch on the other hand is fructose and glucose.

While Maple trees are tapped once they have a trunk diameter of 12 inches, Birch are tapped as early as 9 inches given the shorter lifespan of the tree. In our case, we had enough old Birch on the property to redeploy our Maple syrup equipment and tap some rather spectacular trees.

Tristan had his eyes on this gorgeous Birch from day one
With its massive trunk, it has already proven to be our best producer
With our first batch of sap, we managed to process a small amount of Birch syrup in the same way we did our Maple. We could already sense the difference between the two just by the aroma of the boiling sap. The processing of Birch releases a distinctive aroma which to me was similar to malt and molasses.

The end product is a very dark syrup with a reddish tinge.

Our first batch of Birch syrup
As for the taste experience: do not try this expecting anything like Maple syrup. Birch would just not be right for your pancakes. Birch syrup is more aromatic and perhaps more complex. It has a distinctive woody flavour combining molasses and caramel with a tangy finish. In the end, this would be ideal for cooking such as glazing salmon or pork.

The bottom line is that this is a great "foodie" experience and we'll definitely keep tapping Birch over the next couple of weeks. I hope to report on some recipe trials later this year (once our home kitchen renovation is completed).

On the home renovation front, this week has been dedicated primarily to concrete.

The barn foundation on the south side was in bad shape so this had to be fixed. We poured a concrete base and will now be rebuilding the old stone walls.

Rebuilding the barn foundation
The basement (last week's "can of worms") was a pleasant surprise. It will make an incredible wine cellar. The floor was poured and we now will be using the concrete reinforcement to provide "shelving" for wine barrels.
The "wine cellar" is finally coming together
Our mini nursery continues to show progress, we have had to transplant a large portion of our plants....problem is we're now running out of space. It is now time to seriously consider getting a greenhouse if we're to do this on a larger scale next year.

I should note that the Coir pellets worked well in the development of some roots, however certain plants had some difficulty in developing a good root structure. In the future, we will be looking to use something more sustainable and effectively make our own pellets.

Transplanting from Coir pellets into growing mix
On the farming front, we've had a few days (before the rains) to begin "sealing" our drainage tile and we've started to till the rows we had marked last fall for our new berry root stock.

Finally covering up some of our drainage trench

Tilling made easy with our BCS
I leave you this week with another interesting find. Thanks to my dentist (Dr. Louis Albanese at the Fonthill Dental Clinic), who happens to be quite knowledgeable about the town history, Christine and I found the grave site of Josiah Ward, the man who built our home. As soon as we discovered the site, an old Quaker cemetery, we decided to pay our respects.

The grave of Josiah Ward at the old Quaker cemetery (corner of Welland Rd. & Effingham)

Sunday, April 7, 2013

Mead, Cyser, Acerglyn...and Melomel

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As indicated in earlier posts, our key objective is to rebuild our land into a small fruit farm (the theme is sustainability with a Victorian flair). Since we will avoid modern and conventional industrial production techniques, we are hoping to rely on a broad based selection of fruit crops.

With this concept comes the need for pollinators  ie. bees. Although not planned for this year, our apiculture endeavours will take shape by next Spring. As a result of these plans, we have been toying with the idea of setting up a boutique "meadery". For those not familiar with mead, it is perhaps the most ancient of alcoholic beverages conceived over 4000 years ago. It is old and it is simple: a wine made of honey and water.

The reason for considering mead production is that mead can be the foundation for wonderful fruit wines. These would be a great way to showcase the very many (and odd) fruits we plan to grow.

So this week, Tristan and I decided to get started on "experimenting". Although I expected to do this later this fall, the push for this was our recent success in producing maple syrup. Maple syrup can be combined with honey and water to produce a distinctive wine called Acerglyn.

Our first experiments consisted of making a basic mead and then an Acerglyn. However, since we've never done this before, we had to equip ourselves. The basic tools are simple: a plastic bucket (our fermenter) with a sealed lid through which we drilled a hole for a plug (or bung); the bung itself has a hole through which we install an air trap (allowing gas from the fermenter to escape while not allowing air to get into the container). The whole kit was completed with a hydrometer to measure the specific gravity of our solution and therefore estimate the alcohol content and potential as we process our "must".

Our brewing equipment: fermenter and lid, bung,  air trap and hydrometer
For our basic mead, we took roughly 8 litres of distilled water and 2 1/2 kg of unpasteurized Ontario honey. We heated the water and diluted the honey. In the end, we had achieved a Specific Gravity (SG) of about 1.094 (the must was warm and we did not correct for temperature).

We sanitized all of our equipment using a diluted bleach solution. Once our must reached room temperature, we placed the must in our fermenter and we prepared our yeast. Although specific yeasts can be bought for the production of meads, we took the most available wine yeast at hand: a packet of Lalvin K1-1116 wine yeast. Once prepared, the whole thing was tossed into the fermenter and sealed.

Our first batch of mead
For our Acerglyn, we used about 2kg of honey, 10 litres of water and 1.5 litres of our light Maple syrup. Since I used syrup which had not gone through our final boil (before bottling), the density of the syrup was on the low side so our initial SG was 1.084.

Our Acerglyn must
Our air traps are  now bubbling away...so now it's a matter of waiting. Once fermentation is mostly complete, we hope to transfer the solutions to "secondary fermenters" (glass jugs). Here we will let the remaining yeast finish the process and hopefully have any sediments clear before bottling  We expect the process to take 6 to 8 weeks.

Once we complete these two batches, we expect to carry on with our experiments. In particular, we want to do a Cyser (using apple cider instead of water) and a Pyment (using grape juice instead of water). The reason for this is that these two drinks can form the basis of a good Melomel. Melomel is effectively a fruit wine that uses mead as its key building block. Fresh fruits are simply added to the secondary fermentation. We ultimately want to assess the differences between Melomels based on Cyser, Pyment or simple Mead.

On the farming front, Tristan and I also continued work on our drainage project. This proved rather difficult.

With the trenches dug, the concept was to build a "French drain". This basically consists of perforated tubing at the core, surrounded by gravel, then surrounded by landscaping cloth. In our case with used 4 inch drainage tubing with a layer of cloth or "sock" wrapped around its exterior, we also acquired 4 foot wide landscaping cloth hoping to "wrap" our pipe by at least 4 inch of gravel.

Covered drainage tile and landscaping cloth
You may wonder why all the fuss with cloth. Based on the problems, we have already faced on the septic tank drain, we were certain that all precautions were needed. In the case of the septic bed, the drainage tiles were simple perforated PVC pipes with a minimal amount of gravel. The result: major plugging due to sand filtering into the pipes.

We did not want to have to dig up this new installation any time soon.

The result was something Tristan referred to as a giant "taco". Working in a wet 12 foot trench with the landscaping cloth proved extremely difficult and all gravel needed to be shoveled by hand. This may be acceptable for small installations but would have taken us weeks to complete (well over 500 feet of pipe and some 20 tons of gravel to shovel). Furthermore, the longer this took, the more our trench walls were weakened by erosion (falling over in some places).


After some short discussion with our home building contractor, we decided one approach would be to simply lay some gravel in the trench, lay the pipe, cover it with gravel and then apply the landscaping cloth (since most of the sand filters from the top). With this concept we could easily use our tractor's front loader to handle the gravel.

We actually did this but since our cloth was 4 feet wide and our trench 12 inches, we deployed our cloth so we could have one half facing the trench wall where the water was presumably flowing from. We then folded the cloth over the final layer of gravel.

Drainage tile on gravel bed
Drainage tile covered with gravel
Landscaping cloth folded over drainage tile and gravel
On the growing front, our mini nursery continues to do well, but there again we had a set back. We decided to use a sprayer to water our plants. Our first attempt destroyed many of our seedlings since the spray was much too strong. For the more developed plants this is still a useful too as it allows us to water the roots much more accurately.

Our new watering tool: great for small plants, dangerous to seedlings
In the house, we had no better luck this week. In fact, after deciding to join the two cellars, we found we had uncovered a "can of worms". It turns out that there were two foundation walls (one presumably predating the current Victorian house). One of these goes down about 6 feet (as anticipated), but the other stops short around 3 feet. This means that to expose this wall, we now have to build a concrete foundation wall below it.

Two foundation walls: one shallow, one deep.
To make matters worse, when we exposed the crawl space of the house we noted some major buckling along two floor beams. These had been propped up with makeshift layers of wood and bricks. Since we now have to build a concrete structure between the two cellars we've decided to take the opportunity and provide a proper support for these beams.

Crawl space opened up to provide additional floor beam support.
We also found that one of the walls we were breaking through was supporting an interior brick wall. We ended up having to take this interior wall down. That was a shame, but at least this provided us with enough matching bricks to properly finish the outside of the house.

In fact, they have become essential to brick in two external doorways. Since being transformed into apartments over the years, the house had 7 main floor exits. The result is we had some rooms with an overabundance of external doors and internal access (ie. no free wall space).We decided to remove a doorway to what will be our dining room and to remove what was the entrance to the upstairs apartment.

When filling in these exits, we also decided to blend the brick laying pattern (ie. no seam will be seen). However, as a reference, we are keeping the decorative arches which were above the doorways.

Bricking in a doorway
Finally, Spring is officially here (Tristan and I are already sun burned) and the animals that frequent the farm are back in greater numbers. For once, I managed to capture a picture of the white-tailed deer that are often in our corn field. These beautiful animals were keeping and eye on Tristan and I as we were completing our current morning ritual: the collection of Maple sap.

White tailed deer at the edge of our corn field