Me and Mine – Page 15 – A Good Beer Blog

Garden 2012: Making Meals From The Harvest

Yellow carrots. Small onions. Mine. Bought the seeds for the carrots in early March from Stokes. The variety is Yellowbunch and the seeds cost $2.25 a packet. Been eating them for likely 2 months now. Next year I am buying ten times as much. I believe I planted the carrots from May 5 until mid-July. Some are over a foot long now. Others are tiny like those above. The green bits taste like parsley when lightly roasted. Next year the spuds will be mine as well. I am building a tower, a crib, a box. Fill with soil. Ram spuds in through the sides. Potato high rise. A spuddy ziggurat.

Great Grannie’s Favorite Pub Was A Boat

Great-grannie passed away in 1946. Tales have been told about her ways. If you click on the thumbnail you will see the house above the car where she lived on the second floor, stepping out on the second floor ledge to wash the windows in her 80s without tying on. Sending her grandson down to the pub for a half-pint of whisky after being barred – again – for life. Plenty of slack is given, however, seeing as she lived across the road from the shipyard before, during and after the blitzing.

She had issues, sure, but she also had a certain sense of style. Her favorite pub “The Suez Canal” was actually in a village down the Clyde. I had always been told she loved the portholes for windows. Classy. I recall seeing a few portholes still still up a back alley when lost while wandering around town in the 80s looking for cousins with beer. Found one at “The George” who called out “Ets ma cuzn frae Ganeeder!” Twelve hours later…

The picture above was posted today by the local newspaper on Facebook. The smiling barman in the picture in the wee boat is local lad and former world flyweignt boxing champ, Jackie Paterson. Worth the bus trip apparently.

My Place Of Work About 160 Years Ago

My place of work in the 1850s when the waters lapped up to the stone wall of the market battery. As in a battery of cannon that protected the market. Because City Hall was built in the 1840s on part of the market square that he been there for decades before that. If you click on the picture you will see more detail. Like these bits:

To the left, you see the sign for “A & D Shaw” but I am not sure why there was a sign like that on the front of a government building. Were there businesses in the building, too? In the middle there is the detail to the left, a week glimpse up Market Street. To the right there is the same thing up Brock. The Market Street buildings are still there but there is no awning or porch on the south side as there was back then. An one of the buildings on Brock could be Sipps or Casa Domenico.

Garden 2012: Onion Harvest Day Is Now… As In Now!

Onions are no so much a vegetable as a necessity. At the old farmstead, I planted 2000 onion sets a year. This year, a quarter of that on about ten square feet of where the front lawn was removed last Easter.

They may last until Christmas. Unless I make a whopping pile of onion jam or something nutty like that. The smell of harvesting them with your bare hands is exotic. If onions, something we ate 1,000 years ago, were not common they would be a spice. Next year, more.

Garden 2012: Your Late August Update

The garden – by which I mean the yard – has been inordinately productive while promising more and more.

The green beans are on their third wave of crop. Salad green have been on every plate for weeks. Stoke’s Cherokee purple tomatoes are meaty things with tiny watery seed cell. And, as illustrated, the yellow and purple fleshed carrots that were planted where I lifted up front lawn on Easter weekend are now a foot and a half long. I dug deep. Layered in a deep seam of sheep poo. Going into a carrot cake this evening. And green beans can be made into pesto. Who knew? Ripped out another yew hedge and put in black currants. Sugar snap peas for autumn planted.

Foot long Chinese pole beans are in my diet now. Hidden under over reaching… or, really, crowded… collards there are defiant multi-coloured Swiss chard. I am already looking at seed catalogs dreaming of next year. And that shower stall in the basement might get turned into a salad grow-op for the off season. It already has a drain so why not? I could start 1,000 onion seeds in February in my own home. I could. As the thumbnail shows, Google maps hardly recognizes the place out front since the decision was to ditch the ornamental ugliness of the front lawn for tasty utility.

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Not Beer: Unfiltered Rosé 2011, Closson Chase, Ontario

Another day with nothing to do. Another summer run into nearby Prince Edward County, Ontario, to hit a few wineries and pad what we like to call the Christmas stash. See, I like good beer just fine and all but when you have big gatherings around roasts and twenty types of root vegetable when the sun goes down about 3:15 pm and find yourselves packed in tight with people whose tastes I am not sure about – well – I am going to pour wine. I will have good beer around, too, but just like a 50th birthday party I attended recently where I took a few good beers I expect they will sit there on the counter as every cooler, every bulk beer is drained ahead of it. See, most people are not like us. They don’t share our hobbies. They like auspicious dates on the calendar to be filled with familiar comforts and joys. And why not? Does every occasion need to be some sort of amateur training session?

So, west we drove the thirty miles or so to the winery laced county. It is pretty impressive when you get into the back roads. Corn and produce stands mix with wineries as well as folks’ houses and farms down narrow back roads roamed on a Saturday. Lunch was at Huff with its table service dining. The food was swell. Architectural even. The service attentive. We only had one glass of 2007 Merlot to check on the state of one of the bottles laid in last time. No need to save it any longer. The kids will do without in the 2020’s. Then we hit Grange, a new one for us with a bucolic setting and plenty of folk enjoying a basket lunch on the grounds. Our favorite sample was the most humble, a 2006 blend that was under 11 bucks. I also bought a Cabernet Franc, too. It’s destined for a roast as well. The tasting room had that odd library hush about it that wine people seem to like but the service was pleasant. Not that I was going to slap my knee and shout yee-haw or anything but, really, could the staff ask what I thought of their wine?

Last of the three was the smallest, Closson Chase, a return visit. On the way out, I told the staff that they won our loyalty with that free Freezee give away – not to mention the gardens in which you were invited to take the samples. Kids need a break and drinks buyers have kids. Smart move. Buys you 12 minutes. We tried a pinot noir, their 2010 Chardonnay from local grapes as well as this pinot rosé in my glass here later at home. It is tough having pinot noir or other red wines from Ontario having been trained as you all have for years on inky red plonk from Oz and Chile. These are lighter. And complex in ways that are… complex. So, even swishing the rosé around we noted something that was not acid, fruit or mineral in there. Something vegetative. We hummed. We hawed. Then green beans next to salmon were mentioned and, bingo, there you were. Now that thing is reminding me of that thing in saison that I like when it is there in a saison. Something between white pepper and green beans.

That was it. All the kids could take. We were off to the beach to paddle about and then off to Black River for cheese curds, a block of maple cheddar and a round of ice cream before the ferry home.

Garden 2012: Been Away And Back And What Survived?

The drought has had its effect. Something of a shut down by the onions. A refusal to go on. Squash and zucchini did not make it for a couple of reasons well studied already. But the leaves are booming. I have two sorts of mustard green as well as beet greens, red and green oak leaf lettuce as well as spinach. The salad bowl is full nightly. Beans boom. We are between flowerings so may well be looking at a late August harvest mirroring the mid-July one. A second planting of peas is taking off, too. Basil is booming. It will be pesto week. Collards have formed a blue green wall. All but two of the grave vines have excelled. Location is everything apparently. Having a yard full of berries now makes sense. There is nothing wrong with a yard full of berries. The rabbit has taken up residence. Were this 1870, he would make a swell stew along with the purple and yellow carrots. Starting to think about next year already. Five month to seed catalog ordering you know. Soil will need shifting, too. Much depends on soil quality.

Garden 2012: I Now Hate All Acalymma Vittatum

Acalymma vittatum or the striped cucumber beetle is the enemy of my now entirely dead blue hubbard squash. The wee bastards not only chop the plants themselves but carry the wilt bacteria in their propagating guts. Bastards. Anyway, all the vines are dead and I seethe with hatred. The only thing that calms me is the vast crop of green beans, lettuce and carrots.

We are eating our greens and have pretty much been since early June. I also built a second raised box bed out of cedar this week and have started to think more systematically about what the front lawn will look like. See, I have a system. And the system demands berries. So, out with the ornamental hedges of juniper and yew and in with the juneberries, raspberries, black currants and other stuff.

And it has rained. It began raining about 4 am and has been raining off and on since then. Big news since we’ve been mostly dry since early June.

Garden 2012: What A Difference A Week Makes

What a difference a week makes. The long vines to the right are yellowed and likely lost. I do not have the heart to photograph them. All for the lack or even delay in application of a little copper sulphate. Really? Apparently I also did not know the golden rule: do not water your winter squash from above but tickle only from below. Who knew? Lesson learned. Well, some are now saved but, as on the Day of Judgement that awaits us all, others may not be saved. In better news, the yellow pettypan summer squash are being eaten, the replacement zucchini are up, the cantaloupe show no sign of disease but no sign of fruit either, the green beans are heroic, the carrots are worth pulling from the ground and leaf lettuce continues to feed us. The grapes greens thrive. Leeks are holding their own. The raised bed built just last week shows good efforts from both the mixed greens and basil. I may mow but only to reshape the weeds. Still no rain.

Garden 2012: A Raised Bed Is Born

On rolls the summer. The lawn has the texture of shredded wheat cereal. The squash display a range of coping that stretches from vitality to the grave. Next year more zucchini. Not the green hot dog shaped ones though I have rammed more of those seeds into the ground to compensate for the lack luster patch of blue hubbards. No, I want the yellow 1950s spaceship shaped ones, pattypens. Been watering like a mad man. Everything has made its case for increased acreage next year. I would not sow a second round of bok choi, however. Seems to be not liking the heat. Spring and fall for that one. Carrots have been eaten. Onions are robust. Made a box out front with cedar boards. The box itself cost maybe $35 bucks to build but the soil was more. Some handy, though. That’s what I said when I looked upon my work and saw that it was good. “You’re some jeesely handy” I said to myself. And so I was.