All sinus suffers welcome

Cucumber relish and more zippy zucchini

       There's been more pickling today, mainly because the garden just won't stop producing zucchini and cucumbers. So, four more bottles of Zippy Zucchini Relish (recipe here) and five bottles of Wallace's Cucumber Relish. I've tried this one before, with rather poor results; it was quite watery, not like a relish at all. But all this zippy zucchini has given me ideas, so today I chopped the cucumbers in the food processor, and strained them for a very long time through a piece of nylon curtain sheer (it's what I prefer to cheesecloth, which is quite sleezy to my mind, and not up to the job at all) and then squeezed out as much moisture as I could.  I brought the vinegar-and-sugar mix to a boil first, dumped in the cucumber and simmered it for 15 minutes. Then I added cornstarch (1 T to 1 T water) and cooked it for another 5 minutes. These ones will be thick. The recipe calls for 7 cucumbers (I used 10 because that's what I had), chopped and drained. Syrup is 3 cups white sugar, 3 cups white vinegar, and a teaspoon each of celery seed and mustard seed. Easy peasy.

"Icicles" on left, cut up ones on right

      The Icicle Pickles were bottled on Sunday - the 14 days being up at last - and it made quite a big batch, as I suspected.  I tried to arrange the "icicle" ones in the jars so they will be straight when they come out. Some were too long, and others too floppy, so they went into a tester jar for later (it's in the background up above). After all of this I am really hopeful that they will live up to my expectations! And my memories of having them at church suppers & the like.
     I actually bought more pickle jars at Value Village yesterday - I thought a dozen for $6, but it turned out that one wasn't a canner jar so I only got 11. I bought more seals and looked for a box of seals and rings, to no avail - everywhere I went, they were sold out. I've been robbing them off the jars in the pantry - I keep dry ingredients like rice, lentils, cocoa etc. in jars so I have a bit of a supply there. If all else fails. I have plenty of the wide-mouth seals and rings, but almost none of the jars, so they aren't much use to me.
     I should note that I have been using the Bernardin Pickle Crisp in everything - apparently it has a best-before date so it won't last forever, and when it goes by heaping 1/8 tsp. per jar it goes a long way. No results to share as yet.
    I have found a recipe for salsa that takes 7 pounds of tomatoes, as well as zucchini! But I think I shall have to amass some more jars before I can tackle that one. And then surely that will have to be that. Until chutney season, of course, but that's a more winter-ish activity.
     We are expecting rain, and then later this week, cold weather - I should be outdoors, probably cutting the grass like the neighbours - or battening down the greenhouse. Not on the computer, at least!

Glory of Gladioli

This one got knocked down by the rain.

       Not much to add after yesterday, except that I am going to be outdoors! all day because the weather is so glorious. I bought some bags of sheep manure at Van Kampens yesterday, so I shall do some planting, and probably mulching, of newly planted things. Weeding continues to be easy because of all the moisture in the soil. So there will be weeding - as well as harvesting.
     I've been enjoying the gladioli - planted out not that long ago, after being started in pots in the greenhouse - the last time I looked at them up close there were no signs of blooms, and I was resigned to just building up the bulbs for next year. And then, the other day, I noticed colour! in the bed, investigated, and found two peach ones blooming, with a couple of these darker ones ready to go. Of course, when the rains came it bashed down this one, so I brought it in and am enjoying the blooms up close. The little bedding dahlias I planted in the new bed by the west side of the house are doing really well, too - the white more than the burgundy, but still! I picked a few earlier in the week, and noticed that one of the white ones was looking really dark in the centre - yuck! Earwigs! I stomped on it, hard, and checked the others carefully, but it was the only infested one. So they are residing in a nice bowl in the house. Not much for stems, these bedding dahlias.
     Fred was planning to take the day off today, so there was to have been carpentry, but he has a special event on Saturday (I work, so that doesn't matter) so he has to go in. He may take Monday - however I forgot to check next week's schedule when I was in last night, so with *my* luck I'll be scheduled to work on Monday! We are planning to insulate the garage, which may just give us the root cellar my fond heart desires. We've been clearing up in the garage, and built some lumber-storage units on the walls, to free up the floor a bit. And once we insulate, we can get on with hanging some of those surplus kitchen cupboards, to store even more of the stuff which has been accumulating in there.
     I finally cut the doors for the linen cupboard last weekend, and it looks like it should be quite do-able to just make them smaller by a bit.  I just cut the top and bottom frames at the outer corners, and the panels popped right out.  I wish I had sharper tools is all. The bits have to fit back very smoothly in order for them to be glued properly to take all the strain of hanging as doors, particularly on the hinge side. However, on the plus side, I think we have a couple of those square hammered knobs from the kitchen left over, which will look very nice on them. When I get them glued up and installed, that is. Hmmm, some carpentry content after all!

More pickling, and a bit of carpentry work, too!

      On the long weekend (and at long last, as our new kitchen was completed last Christmas!) we installed the over-the-range microwave/range hood. We had taken advice from a much more experienced friend, NOT to carve up our new cupboards, but to cut through the wall stud directly behind the range, as the boards under the shingles will prevent the house from falling down when the stud is cut. Luckily, it turns out he was right! We started by just cutting the gyproc, and checking out the stud, and the electrical wire running UP the stud to the plug-in inside the cupboard. The wire was quite slack, so we carefully pulled it out of danger and examined the stud - actually, studs, there were two.

That's the outdoors!

      The next day we cut the studs, and the boards and shingles, and then started putting up the support plate on the wall - that was a bit of a job, as there was a difference in the dimensions at the wall, and at the cupboard face. We finally got it placed, though, and then had to make the hole bigger on the outside...luckily they gave us quite a bit of leeway in the size of the hole. It took us bits of all four days of the long weekend, but finally the unit is in and functioning. We're almost used to looking in the new location for the time, and I almost always head in the right direction to heat milk for my morning cappucchino. (Almost always.) The vent fan has been useful in my continuing pickle-making operations, as it takes quite a bit of the vinegar smell outside.

    The garden continues to be prodigiously productive, and I expect that this week's torrential rains (110 mm in two days! Thanks to TS Leslie) will mean a new lease of life for some things.
    I picked enough cukes this week to make quite a big batch of icicle pickles - 32 cups of peeled and cut up cukes, which are now soaking in brine in two big glass pickle jars. They stay there for a week! and then get various other things done to them, including a hot water soak for a day, a soak in alum for a day, and then a pickle bath for 4 days. These ones are the 14-day variety.  I discovered that I have some dessert dishes that fit exactly into the mouths of these jars, and they are easy to remove to give the cukes a stir, as I must do daily. Gosh! I hope these work.  I decided to do a batch of cut-up ones, and a batch of the traditional icicles, as they apparently make good cocktail-party fare. I am coming dangerously near to having to buy a box of pickling jars, which is amazing to me! As we usually have many unused ones (we always buy pasta sauce in the mason-jar type jars so we can re-use them, and I really thought we had a beyond-life-expectancy number of these). I may have become officially pickle-mad.
    We have given the Zippy Zucchini Relish a taste test, and it's quite pleasant, just a bit of heat from some dried chiles. And as the zucchinis continue to produce, I have made another batch of four jars. We simply can NOT eat more than we already do. And I've dehydrated a lot as well.

   I planted a "Hot Pepper Mix" of seeds from Veseys and now I'm reaping lots of peppers, but the big problem is I don't know WHAT I'm reaping. I recognize jalapenos, and I think the long yellowish ones are banana peppers, or maybe yellow wax peppers? But some of the others - they are green, long and thin, should I be letting them ripen to red? (Advice I got last night said you can use those latter ones red or green, which is good.) I have a pious hope that these might be cayenne peppers, so I am going to leave some alone to ripen. I hope I have enough time. I am trying drying peppers in the dehydrator, to make hot pepper flakes, or hot sauce, later. I think that the lobed small ones growing in amongst the jalapenos might be habaneros, as I always buy those to make hot pepper jelly. Maybe I will have my own this year!
All the peppers dehydrate quite well, I just put them in at night and the next morning they're crispy! I have the dehydrator set up in the garage, so there's none of the eye-watering vapours I've read about either. I should have enough dehydrated jalapenos to make salsa all winter, at the very least.

Domestic Engineer

Test batch of tomatoes for dehydrating

     I've been stuck in to preserving the bounty of the garden for the past two weeks. I have dehydrated a big batch of plum tomatoes - these were just the test ones. They turned out really bright red and leathery, as the dehydrater book said they would. I was a bit worried about spoilage so I froze them, but the next batch I dried overnight and they are dry and crispy, so I have them in a bag in the cupboard.

Dehydrated!

      Then I moved on to the abundance of cucumbers and the expressed need for mustard pickles. Each batch takes 12 cukes (why are pickle recipes so outdated? What the heck does 8 quarts of small cucumbers look like? Even when they say 12 cukes, are those big or small? Mixed? and don't even get me started on "pecks" of green tomatoes or gills of something else).  I have made two batches, so far, for a total of 12 jars, mostly 1-litre ones. I also made some "Zippy Zucchini Relish" with some of my many yellow zucchinis - I am hoping that people don't know it's zucchini. Now I will have to freeze or dehydrate the rest - they are still producing at a prodigious rate - though the green ones, in the lasagne bed, haven't done anything but bloom, all summer.
      I have been wanting to make bread and butter pickles as seen in Fancy Pantry, so I spent quite a bit of time looking for pickling lime (slaked lime, calcium hydroxide), including asking at a pharmacy. No dice. So I googled it, and got a lot of conflicting information about its safety (ranging from - go to a hardware store and get them to shovel a few pounds into a paper bag - to - never eat even the food-grade stuff as it will kill you). But I was determined to have crispy pickles even if it literally killed me, so I found a recommendation for WalMart's pickling department. I went there, and found - not calcium hydroxide, but calcium chloride, marketed by Bernardin under the name "Pickle Crisp". You don't soak the cukes in it, you just add a bit to each jar after  filling them. Sounds quick and easy, so I did it. (Watch this space for further details!) 6 - 1/2 litre bottles of bread and butter pickles.
        Next I made cucumber relish, a new recipe this time, with an overnight brine soak - I have never had much luck with this, as I find they really soak up the salt and the taste stays in the pickles. However, I did it anyway, rinsing them three or four times and straining them through a piece of nylon curtain sheer, which is wonderful stuff for the purpose.  So I have 8 - 1/2 litre jars of cucumber relish! If the cukes continue to produce, I would like to make icicle or nine-day pickles - I have only ever tried them once and they were a limp failure.  But I love them, and now I have a secret weapon (Pickle Crisp!) so I may just try again. And of course there are dill pickles - my dill has finally sprouted in the garden, I think because there was finally some moisture for it.
      As I have a big glut of non-plum tomatoes, and two batches of salsa already laid down, I made chili sauce. I don't know what I'm going to do with it - folks online are pretty disparaging about its use. However, I have 6 one-litre jars of it now.

Chili sauce in back, with cucumber relish & one B&B pickles

    Today I have been water-bath-ing them all, and washing the jars, putting on labels, etc. I must get canning kettle with a wire rack - it would help a lot with this chore. 
      Last night we had rain (!) and a bit of a thunder-and-lightning show, so today is cooler, with a nice north-west breeze, so I have decided to make bread. I started with my favourite "Oatmeal Brown Bread" from The Laura Secord Canadian Cook Book, my very first cook book, purchased on 19 Feb. 1974. I remember the first time I made this recipe, it calls for 1/2 cup molasses, and I didn't have any. I called on my neighbour, a little old exPat British lady who lived across the hall in my apartment block in Winnipeg - she didn't have molasses either, but gave me 1/2 cup of corn syrup. I found I preferred it with the corn syrup, as I don't like the rum/molasses flavour, so I have been using corn syrup ever since...until today, when I substituted organic honey. I have decided that the evil corn syrup will never again be used by me, so I am hoping that honey will be a good substitute, I'd hate to have to go back to molasses after all this!

Dog Days

         I've been busy with visitors for a lot of the summer, and now that I have some gardening time, it's so hot and humid that I don't want to go out there. But there is deadheading to do, and tomatoes to gather, so I must go.

        The lilies are doing well - the hemerocallis are almost over, and of course the bi-colour orange ones have been absolutely spectacular (alas for my pink-and-white colour scheme). The regular lilium have a bit longer bloom season, and so they are still carrying on. But I am at a loss to think what I can replace all those orange ones with - I don't know of anything but phlox paniculata that's as vigorous and blooming now, and they don't have the different foliage and so on that's the real treat with the hemerocallis. And of course I have too many phlox already. I should say that I have quite a number of different burgundy hemerocallis (but they are just not as vigorous) and they have done quite well.
         Yesterday the humidex was 34, so I spent most of the day in the basement, sewing - and I still managed to work up a sweat, mostly running upstairs to cut out or press things. It's warm in the basement anyway, with the dehumidifier running. It's not the chilly dank place it used to be. I also went through all my bins of fabric, and threw out about 2.5 binsworth. That felt like an accomplishment. Also now all the silk is organized into one bin, etc. I only managed to finish one thing, but I have several other things cut out and have tidied up the work area, sorted out a dress I cut out some time ago and decided to throw out another - it was lined and had a printed chiffon overskirt and was just too fussy - and also the chiffon and the lining weren't working at all together. I found a cotton blend I made a lot of things out of a few summers ago - all gone now, or stored, I suppose - and I cut out a dress that should fit, with some of it. And I finally cut out that too-bright-for-the-eyes green bathing suit, and started to sew it. I may have already screwed up a bit because I was supposed to make a shelf bra for it, but I didn't install it at the right time and now it may be too late. Ah well. Sewing is a process, not a product (or not so much a product). I do like to wear stuff I make, though. I need some sewing things - cotton elastic for the bathing suit, bright red thread for a top - but I work tomorrow so I can pick them up then.

Vacationing at Home

The garden, decorated for my birthday.

        With my momentous birthday behind me, I am continuing on my stress-free lifestyle, concentrating on growing things and making things, and forgetting I ever had sleepless nights!
        My brother and sister surprised me by coming for my birthday! So we have been doing summer things - many trips to the beach, eating out, visiting friends - with a bit of garden work thrown in.
     The garden was looking its best for the birthday party. There were lots of roses out, and some of the clematis blooms managed to hold on until then as well. The mystery rose was doing its stuff splendidly!
      One beautiful present I got was another F.J. Grootendorst rose, so I put it in the shrub bed to the west, under the linden a bit, but in pretty much full sun. Hope it does well there. It is a beautiful healthy one. The Pink Grootendorst in the "Ring-around-the-Rosey" bed is blooming! Lovely.
      Anne has bought me some plants as well - another rhododendron (which I'll put with the first one, I think) and, the thing I've been wanting for a year, a Sambucus "Black Lace" - I think it will go on the east side of the shrub bed, across from the golden elder.  Symmetry!

Climbing Rose - maybe "Henry Kelsey".

      The rose I put at the back of the vegetable bed a couple of years ago, and which bloomed for the first time last year, is doing its stuff at the moment. I am not sure if it is the Explorer climber "Henry Kelsey", or suckers from the root stock. I don't care. It is blooming lovely. There is a slight scent, but its main claim to fame is the glorious colour - a really, really dark, velvety, red.
     My eryngeums are doing well also - the first one is "Blue Glitter" and then I got two more, both "Blue Hobbit", which I put in front of the first. So, I have a small clump in front of the lilacs, near that mystery clematis (which didn't bloom this year, alas!). They come out green and then turn blue. So neat.

The one on the left is Blue Glitter and the one on the right is Blue Hobbit, not yet turned blue. This was a few days ago, and they are both blue now. It is interesting to note that the Blue Glitter is supposed to get 80 cm tall while the Blue Hobbit maxes out at 30 cm. They are pretty much the same size at the moment.
      There were some roots around the pot of the first one, which I pulled off and discarded at first. Then I realized (looking at the little leaves attached) that they were baby ones! So I rescued them and potted them up, and two have survived and are growing, Must get them into the ground somewhere soon, so they get a chance to get growing before the winter. I could become a specialist in Eryngeum! Not much chance, as Kent was selling them for $4.00. Everyone must have one by now.

First Rose

Terese Bugnet rose

     It's official...this is an early spring. My first rose bloomed yesterday - a Terese Bugnet on the 'Rose Mound'. I'm sure that in other years the first rose has bloomed about two weeks later than this. There are other roses waiting in the wings as well. Many of the roses have been attacked by bugs but I don't care - bloom season is the best.   
     Gardening organically as we do, these are the hazards we have to live with. I am pleased with the variety of ones that are preparing to bloom - the Blanc double de Coubert is full of bud, as is the Snowy Pavement, the Marie Bugnet and the rugosa at the corner of the south lawn area. It is usually the first, so it's nice to see someone else win! And I was sure that the first would be David Thompson by the door, because there was colour showing in the buds last week, but he is still in bud. And speaking of buds, check out the wild rose in the 'Ring around the Rosey' bed! It will be covered come bloomtime. I hope it's out for the party!

My 'wild' rose, full of buds

     There are ripe strawberries in the greenhouse (a few, but still!), and quite a few dry plants - I have been in town all day for the last three days and haven't been able to check on it as frequently as necessary. However, I have today, and several days next week. Gardening will progress quickly from now on. I watered thoroughly last night, and I'm hoping to see a few miraculous recoveries when I go out to the greenhouse this morning.
     I am also under the gun a bit to get my 'outfit' finished for the 'Party like it's 1952' on the 30th. Yesterday I bought the materials to make a 1950s hat - Vogue pattern 8052 - in white organza. It looks like a ton of fun, but also quite a bit of work! I have had my dress cut out for ages - it's a Butterick Retro pattern from 1952.  I'm making the short version, of course. There are a lot of 50s patterns out right now - and of course every one of them suggests that this is not the sort of thing that someone of my shape should wear - the block shape is not suited to this nipped-in waist and full skirt at all. Oh well, it's just for one day! But it won't be, if I don't get it sewn up and finished.