The third one in the group looks like something stepped on it, and the fourth I found off to the side doesn’t seem to be getting any bigger. I wonder what kind they are?
We are expected to drop to 3C/37F tonight. Tomorrow, we’re supposed to hit 0C/32F, then 2C/36F the night after, before things are supposed to warm up a little bit overnight. The winter squash are covered and should be okay, but I decided not to bother trying to cover the rest. Instead, I did a harvest.
There is our single White Scallop squash that I’ve been allowing to get bigger. No chance it would get big enough and mature enough for viable seeds, but it is at an edible stage right now.
The peppers and Turkish Orange eggplant, on the other hand, are now set up in the living room to ripen. We’ve had a red pepper and an orange one so far. There are also supposed to be yellow ones in there. The one that’s darkening if from a plant we got a red pepper from. I’m curious to see if the lighter green ones will turn yellow, or if they’re just really immature.
Tomorrow is supposed to be a mix of sun and cloud, with a high of 11C/51F. The day after is supposed to reach a high of 8C/46F. After that, we’re supposed to have highs above 15C/59F. The lows are supposed to be all over the place, but still below 10C/50F. It’s also supposed to be sunny until Sunday, when we’re currently expecting to get rain. Of course, the forecast will be changing from day to day, but it does look like we’ll be able to get more progress in the garden, getting the garlic in, and preparing beds for winter sowing. Normally, I’d say we have a good window of pleasant weather to get that done but, considering how many huge roots I’m finding in the main garden beds I’m prepping, it’s likely to take quite a bit longer than it should!
The first picture was of a group of three very round mushrooms – I thought they were puffballs at first, until I saw the stems. The next three pictures are with my hand for perspective – then I found a fourth one, off to the side!
I have no idea if they are edible, and have no intention of finding out.
As I was heading inside, I found this adorable cuddle puddle.
Two of them! The smallest kittens really like to pile together.
Once the morning round were done, I was able to get a few things done before heading to my mother’s. My brother came out today, but he had to focus on replacing the radiator on one of his tractors that got damaged last fall, then try to get it going. Days are short, so I just popped over to say hello before I headed out.
When I got to my mother’s, she was all “prepared” for me. I barely got through the door! She had ice cream buckets of tomatoes she wanted me to take home. One of her neighbours in her building has had a great tomato year in their little garden plot and has been leaving boxes of them in the common room for people to help themselves. My mother keeps taking more than she needs for herself, because apparently no one else is taking any, and she doesn’t want them to go to waste.
So… she gives them to me.
While I was getting the two ice cream buckets of tomatoes out from under her table for her, I saw her collection of jugs for her drinking and cooking water, so I refilled those right away.
There were other errands she wanted me to do, but I told her I’d do them after I’ve put away her groceries.
She didn’t have a list, so I sat down to start that with her. It took a while, because she kept wanting to go on about other things. There’s one home care worker she has issues with in particular. For a basic med assist, they are supposed to be there for 5 minutes, making sure she takes her medication before they leave. The morning assist is for 10 minutes, as they are supposed to help with emptying the commode or helping apply her Voltaren to her back. This one rushes to put the meds in the little bowl she has for them, to make sure they’re all there (sometimes, they can get caught in the packaging), locked the box up and leaves without making sure my mother takes her meds. Apparently, she’s been so rough with the lock box, she ended up knocking my mom’s phone off its charger and just left it where it fell.
My mother was also angry about her new schedule. She has five evenings, which is two med assists done by the same person, plus four mornings, done by someone else (out of a 2 week schedule) listed as “unfilled”. I tried to explain to her that they have to have the schedules out by a certain time, so if they don’t have someone for a specific date or time, they have to list it as “unfilled”. That doesn’t mean they won’t find someone. Just that they hadn’t, before the deadline. My mother thinks it means people are going to show up because they’ve… called in sick, in advance? She doesn’t understand how scheduling works.
It did give me a chance to try and talk to my mother about things she can do to try and get herself into a nursing home faster. I tried to explain that, because she’s only getting med assists, they basically view her as being able to care for herself. But if she takes advantage of the other assists they have available – meal assists, bathing assists, dressing assisted, etc. – that would go a long way to helping her get in faster.
She just got angry at me. She doesn’t trust the home care workers (there’s one that she says is really good at her job, and that’s the one that helped care for my father, before he went into the nursing home) and doesn’t want them touching her or preparing her meals. I tried to explain why she needed to get it anyhow and, besides, if she were in a nursing home, she’d be having that all done for her, anyhow. To which she said, in a nursing home, she would have “professionals”. I told her, the home care workers are “professionals”. They may or may not be good at their jobs, but they get training, first.
At one point she told me she had been talking to a woman that used to live in our little hamlet, that I went to school with. Her mother lived in the same building as my mother, having moved in a few years ago. It turns out her mother is in a nursing home now! She was visiting a friend and stopped to chat with my mother. As my mother told her how much she wants to be in a nursing home, she was told to try falling down! Which is pretty much what I was thinking, but hadn’t mentioned. My mother is constantly afraid of falling down, so she is super careful not to. If, however, she did have a fall, she’d have to use her Lifeline to get help, because she certainly couldn’t get up again on her own. They could call her an ambulance (and would call me to inform me of any issues). Chances are if that happened, my mother would end up going straight to a nursing home or supportive living, somewhere.
She did mention about the last time she used her Lifeline to talk to someone about her she was feeling. At the end of it, she was asked if there was anything else they could do for her. She said, help me get into a nursing home! The person on the Lifeline said they would talk to someone higher up about it.
I don’t know what they can do, but if there’s something, it would help! Lord knows, my mother isn’t willing to do anything herself that would get her in faster. We keep telling her things that would help (like getting other home care assistance that they have available), but she just refuses. I can understand why, but she doesn’t understand that she is sabotaging herself. She much prefers to complain and expect other people to do things for her, not do them herself. This is not a new thing. She’s been like this for as long as I can remember.
After much circular conversation, I did manage to get a shopping list written down for her. Some of it was “see how it looks” or “depends on the price” type stuff. She needed more of her Voltaren, too, so a trip to the pharmacy was also in order.
I was able to find everything she wanted, and even got her a pumpkin pie as a treat I was pretty sure she would be happy with. Either she’d be happy, or she’d be angry. Thankfully, she was in a good mood, and was very happy to see the pie!
Once everything was put away, she insisted I sit with a cup of tea for a while before I finished doing things like sweeping her floor, taking care of her garbage, etc. Then she foisted a bag of aluminum foil she saved from her Meals on Wheels packaging onto me, together with the tomatoes! She’s been carefully washing and setting aside the foil each part of her meal is wrapped in. From the amount in the bag, it’s been probably a year’s worth of foil! She thought I might be able to use them in the garden (??) or something. I told her, I could add them to our aluminum recycling. We save up our aluminum until it’s worth the trip to the salvage yard. She was quite happy with that idea.
All in all, the visit with my mom was pretty good. Just one racist rant I had to distract away from, and during the times she did get angry because she didn’t like what she was being told, it wasn’t quite the personal attacks on me such things often become. It was actually a pretty good visit, as far as that goes with my mother!
That done, I had a request from my husband, so I went to the town we usually go to for our local shopping. The difference in prices between grocery stores was worth the extra driving.
Thankfully, fruit cake was not part of his shopping list.
I could not believe how expensive these fruitcakes have become! Not that long ago, seeing them at prices above $7 was considered expensive!
After I got the few things on my husband’s list and made a stop at the gas station, it was time for home.
My brother was still working on his tractor, so I headed over for a quick hello and to update him a bit about how it went with Mom. Then I went in to change into my grubbies to do some work in the garden, instead of in the sun room, while there was still light enough.
I made sure to water the winter squash and cover them for the night, first. We’re supposed to get rain, but it’s also supposed to get cold enough that I’m not sure the winter squash would survive it. They might be kept covered for several days, if the 7 day forecast is at all accurate. The next three nights in particular will probably put an end to the eggplant, peppers and summer squash, so if there’s anything to bring in an ripen indoors, tomorrow will be the day to do it.
I need to get more garden beds ready for winter sowing, though, and today I started working on the bed the carrots and peas were grown in.
I got a little more than a quarter of it done. As I was working my way down one side, I kept getting tangled up in tree roots. It was a while before I found root they were all coming from and got that pulled out. Then I found more from another root!
It was starting to get dark, so I didn’t want to start fighting with roots I couldn’t quite find yet, so I decided to call it a night. For all the work done in these beds, particularly when they got shifted to their permanent locations, getting them ready for the winter should be easy. All of these roots I’m hitting were not there in the spring. I’m blown away by how far they are extending from the trees, and how big they are.
According to the weather apps, we’re supposed to get rain all night and all through tomorrow, with heavy rain warning. So it might be a couple of days before I can continue. The overnight lows that had been forecast to drop below freezing have changed to just at freezing. Hopefully, the cover will be enough for the winter squash. After that one cold night, we’re actually supposed to get decent, if cool, weather again. That would be a good time to get the garlic in.
Well, we’ll see what actually happens! I’ll take the mild weather for as long as possible!
Heading out to do my morning rounds, it was already getting really hot. As I write this, we’ve reached 28C/82F, and we’re still about 5 hours away from when the hottest part of the day usually hits. We’ve got forecasts for possible thundershowers this afternoon. I hope we at least get some rain, but I doubt it.
The spinach we set out to dry in the sun room was… wimpy. :-D I set them up outside, covered with mosquito netting, to dry in the sun and wind. We’ll see how it works. Meanwhile, once the oven is available, after making a spinach frittata, I plan to set some up to dry in there.
I had a very pleasant surprise while checking the garden.
The bigger Crespo squash plant has flower buds! Quite a few of them. It looks like it’s all male flowers for now, just like with the other squash.
Speaking of squash, we have some mystery squash!
These have popped up in the old compost pile. I’m not sure what they are. When we cleaned up the squash beds last fall, we used the old compost pile instead of dragging everything across the yard, but I didn’t think anything went in there that had mature seeds. The only think I can think of is the pumpkin. They were planted very late, and the few pumpkins were quite small and green when the first frost hit and killed them off.
It would be cool if they were pumpkins! Whatever they are, I’ve been watering them, too. :-D
Then we have these, near the pink rose bush in the old kitchen garden.
I had spotted them last night, when they were just little bumps breaking through the ground. They tripled in size, overnight.
In setting up the old kitchen garden beds this spring, one of the things I made sure to do was make paths that allowed us to enter and exit the garden in several places. The straw covered path that runs across the far end of the garden, near the beets against the retaining wall, continues around one of the rhubarbs and out the middle.
It now has a “gate.”
An asparagus gate!
It always amazed me that these are still coming up at all. There were more of them, when I was a kid. My mother had asked about them, not that long ago, and she mentioned that these were here before my parents bought the property. Which means they’ve been growing here for at least 60 years. I’ve never seen spears suitable for harvesting, but that’s okay. I love the ferns!
At our last Costco trip, we picked up large packages of three different types of mushrooms. After using as much fresh mushrooms as we wanted, I planned to dehydrate the rest. I really like the mushroom salt we’d made, but wanted to have mushroom powder, without the salt, to use. The powder is an excellent flavour enhancer.
We had used a dry “gourmet mushroom blend” we’d picked up at Costco to make the salt, but it looks like they don’t carry it anymore. So I decided to just dry our own mushrooms.
I had used a coffee grinder to made the mushroom powder for the salt. The mushroom blend had some very large pieces – large enough that I cut them with scissors before I could put them in the coffee grinder. Even so, some of the thicker, more leathery pieces would jam the blade.
With that in mind, I very deliberately sliced the mushroom pieces quite thin, before laying them out on baking sheets to dry. I had enough button mushrooms to fill one sheet, while the other was filled with shitake and crimini mushrooms. The “warm” setting on our new oven is 175F, but I put it at the lowest temperature it would go: 145F. Then I left the trays in the oven overnight.
This morning…
Well… they did dry very thoroughly!
This is the sheet of white button mushrooms. They had been quite crowded together, and I could barely fit all the pieces in. They are now about 1/3 – 1/2 the size before drying.
They are also thoroughly stuck to the pan.
The shitake mushrooms didn’t shrink anywhere near as much, and were easy to loosen.
These are the crimini mushrooms, which are also very stuck to the pan! I have been using a spatula to try and scrape them off. We’ll keep working at it, little by little, as we are able, throughout the day.
Well, I wanted powdered mushroom, and I’m getting powdered mushroom!
Normally when I dehydrate in the oven on pans, I like to use a cake rack to allow air circulation under whatever I’m drying. Some things are just too small for that, which is why I didn’t use any this time. I was thinking that it might have been better if I’d had a drying screen, but looking at how the pieces have adhered to the pans, I’m thinking they would have done the same to a screen. At least with a pan, I can scrape them off and still use them. If they had stuck to a screen, there probably would have been no way to get them unstuck without damaging the screen.
So in the future, I’ll know to cut crimini and white button mushrooms thicker! I know we should be able to leave them whole, or just cut them in half, but I don’t want big pieces. I’ll have to find that balance.
We’ll just have to get more mushrooms and try again.
Not that we need an excuse to get more mushrooms! :-)
Welcome to my “Recommended” series of posts. These will be weekly – for now – posts about resources and sites I have found over the past while that I found so excellent, I want to share them with you, my dear readers. 🙂 Whether or not I continue to post these, and how often they are posted, will depend on feedback. Please feel free to comment below, and if you have a favorite resource of your own, do share, and I will review them for possible future posts.
I hope you find these recommendations as useful and enjoyable as I have!
When I was a kid, I refused to eat mushrooms.
Especially morel mushrooms, which we found in various places here on the farm. I thought they looked like brains.
My parents, being Polish, loved mushrooms, but couldn’t make me eat them.
To this day, I have yet to taste a morel mushroom.
I have, however, developed a taste for other mushrooms, and even an interest in the idea of growing them at home. I had discovered a website that sold different types of mushroom spores, which I didn’t even know was a thing until then. We were still living in the city, however, so the closest we ever got to growing mushrooms was to buy an oyster mushroom kit we saw at a grocery store. Once.
It didn’t grow very well, but we did get a couple of mushrooms out of it.
Since moving back to the farm, we have talked about buying spores and inoculating areas around the farm. I have been interested in trying morel mushrooms, but have only ever seen very expensive dried ones in stores. Since I already know they can grow here in the wild, it seemed logical to inoculate an area somewhere closer to the house.
Unfortunately, the website I’d found years ago has disappeared. I found a few other sites, but they were all US based.
For starters, they are Canadian. They might be in BC, but it still makes being able to find varieties that will grow here in our province much greater.
What is awesome is that this company doesn’t just grow and sell fresh mushrooms, mushroom spores and the things you need to grow them. They provide a lot of information and support to teach people how to start a viable mushroom growing business for themselves.
With the current Wuhan virus shut downs, they are now producing videos that focus on how to continue to run a business and make an income when almost all avenues for sales are no longer available.
While most of their growing videos involve greenhouses or indoor mushroom farms, they also have videos on growing mushrooms on logs, outdoors. Which is more in line with what we were originally thinking of doing here at the farm.
Their video channel is a wealth of information, from how to grow different types of mushrooms, to equipment used, to financial concerns.
On their website, you can buy mushroom kits and supplies and, if you are in their area of BC, order fresh mushrooms. They even have a mentorship program for those interested in commercial mushroom growing.
Now, we’re just interested in growing mushrooms for our own use. We have lots of mushrooms growing wild here at the farm, but I have no idea which ones are safe to eat (except morels, which I have yet to look for since we’ve moved here, because where I remember finding them is actually on the other quarter section that’s rented out), so this would be a way to have mushrooms we can be sure are edible. We would also be able to grow varieties that are either not available locally in stores, or are way out of our budget.
After discovering What the Fungus, however, I am starting to feel that growing commercially is something we could do at some point. Right now, this farm makes no money. We don’t own it, so we’re not the ones paying the taxes or the property insurance (and the income from the renter barely covers the taxes, if I remember correctly), but the maintenance of this place is almost all out of our own rather limited pockets. As it stands now, at some point, when my husband and I are no longer able, it’s already planned for the girls to take over as caretakers, and it would be good to have things set up so they can run a profitable farm, even on just the few acres that aren’t rented out. So this is one of the avenues we can consider in the longer term.
With the wealth of information and resources available in the videos and on the website, this actually seems quite feasible!
While walking around the yard this morning, picking up branches fallen after last night’s high winds and a bit of a storm, something caught my eye.
I ended up having to grab a stool to get any photos, since standing in my tip-toes, stretching as high as I could and using voice commands to take pictures, wasn’t quite cutting it. ;-)
These pretty little mushrooms are tucked into the V split of the large maple that is causing me so much concern about the power lines.
I love finding these little, hidden surprises. :-)
Walking through the West yard, we noticed these, high above our heads…
This is on one of the three big maples near the fire pit.
They showed up very quickly; I know for sure they weren’t there, just a couple of days ago!
Looking around, we found these on another branch of the same tree.
That’s as much as I could zoom in with my phone’s camera and still get a half decent photo.
Of course, we immediately started looking around the other trees for more, but found none, so we continued on through where I had been working this morning. We ended up going through the rest of the maple grove, too, and found more!
These were just a few feet above our heads.
Whatever these mushrooms are, they like maples, they like the spaces where branches used to grow, long ago, and they grow really fast!
The Re-Farmer 