The herbalist's apprentice makes a tincture

Since the early spring, I've been spending one day a week at a herb farm in the Ottawa Valley as a herbal apprentice. I've been getting hands-on with all kinds of plants, wild and cultivated, at the farm and experimenting at home.

Today, I decanted and filtered a tincture of St. John's Wort. There is lots of St. John's Wort growing on our property, the result of the generous application of horse manure by the previous owner. St. John's Wort is considered a noxious weed because it is harmful to some livestock.

A tincture is made by chopping up St. John's Wort flowers and leaves and stuffing them in a jar. The jar is filled with vodka and left to sit for six weeks. The active ingredients in the herb are soluble in alcohol. It looks pretty murky after spending most of the summer on the windowsill. St. John's Wort is typically harvested on St. John's Day (June 24), but it reblooms after being cut back so several harvests can be made from the same plant over the summer.

 

After six weeks, the tincture is filtered through a jelly bag and squeezed tightly to get every last drop. The tincture is still pretty cloudy at this point.

I used a coffee filter to clarify the tincture. You can see the lovely clear red colour.

The tincture can be taken, a few drops at a time, to help with stress, anxiety and the blues. This will be part of my winter survival kit for when clean living isn't quite enough .

Airing my clean laundry

I've posted before on my unnatural fascination with clotheslines. Well, I have not been cured of this fetish and I now am the proud owner of this super-deluxe clothesline. You can't see the silent bearings or virtually frictionless operation, but I can assure you it provides a wonderful clothes hanging experience. I don't think I could really think of a house as a home until there was proper provision for hanging clothes.

My belle-soeur (don't the French have a nice way of saying sister-in-law?), Danielle, was inspired by my previous clothesline post to create this amazing painting. It even has an engraved label saying "Bev's clothesline". I was completely blown away by Danielle's skill and thoughtfulness when she gave the painting to me.

Early morning walk to White Tail Ridge

Yesterday, construction work at White Tail Ridge, the 100 acre property next door to ours, began particularly early, and particularly loudly. The rock crushing, drilling and blasting that we've become quite used to intruded on our sleep and our early morning walk. This morning I decided to walk up the road to see what all the commotion was about.

It was about this. It was about piling up huge piles of crushed rock to make way for roads, sewers and utilities for a new subdivision. Site preparation has recently begun after years of controversy and financial problems at the site.

One might question the wisdom of plunking a 153 home subdivision on a country road, a couple of kilometres from town. One might ask the planning department if they realize we have entered the 21st century. One might also inquire of the developer how they expect to sell homes at a profit in a declining market while incorporating quite extraordinary site prep costs. And who do they think will buy all these houses in suburban Almonte? 

The developers of White Tail Ridge have followed the time-honoured and horribly ironic tradition of naming the subdivision after something that was present only before development. There certainly were whitetail deer on this property, but between the noise and vibration and destruction of habitat they have no doubt absconded. Perhaps a more accurate name might be White Tail Riddance.

I quite honestly don't believe that we will ever see more than a sales trailer, or perhaps a show home built on this site, but I fear the habitat has been irreparably scarred and the energy that has been consumed to do the scarring has been lost forever to entropy. Sometimes I feel like the only person around (in real life, seems like there are plenty of us on the internet) who sees that we are rapidly approaching economic, energy and environmental limits that make this kind of activity a terrible waste.

Our odd little pond

When we first saw our new property, it was February and blanketed in snow and ice. There was a spot which was identified as a pond but which we were sceptical, to say the least, was anything other than a wet spot in the spring. Much to our surprise, the pond has turned out to be a lovely spot and a draw for wildlife and birds.

The pond is on the flat bedrock which underlies most of the property. It is very shallow, but has remained filled and clear throughout our very hot July, leading us to believe it is spring-fed. It didn't even exist until a few years ago when the previous owner cleared the soil off the bedrock and piled it up around the edges. It wasn't his intention to create a pond, but a pond appeared and has remained ever since.

Garden garter snake

This guy does a lot to keep garden pests at bay. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to be having any effect on the chickens which make a mess of the garden and especially love seedlings and ripe tomatoes.That shortcoming aside, he's welcome to spend as much time as he likes sunning himself in the beds.

Early morning walk in the forest

Most mornings, Meg and I take a walk through the woods on our new property. These woods have seen a lot of change over the years. They were no doubt burnt in the Great Fire of 1870 which destroyed much forest and property in this area. A neighbour tells of finding burnt cedar stumps several feet in diameter, now hollowed out, in these woods. There is evidence that there was a maple syrup operation, and like much land around here, it was probably pasture for a while, too. Most of the trees aren't all that big, but they are straight and tall and appear to be healthy.

The sky is revealed through gaps in the trees. The early morning clouds are breaking up.

An old road which was used to haul maple sap and firewood makes an inviting trail through the forest. The sun is now shining beautiful dappled light everywhere.

Our 25 acres is a small part of a larger forest that is unfortunately threatened with development on all sides. There is a 153 house subdivision going in on adjoining land and 400 homes are scheduled to be built less than a kilometre away. We are privileged to live here on such beautiful land and so close to town, but the price to pay is the heartbreak of witnessing the destruction of habitat and biodiversity all around us. It's heavy stuff to contemplate so early, so I do my best to appreciate what's here right now.

Oops, we moved again! My blog silence explained.

Instead of blogging the last few weeks, I've been preparing to move house, moving house and now dealing with the aftermath. Since our last move, we've acquired a few more family members and their belongings. Meg the dog was simple to move - we simply lured her into the car and drove her to the new house. The chickens do not travel quite so lightly. We loaded the summer coop onto our trailer, along with the metal garbage can which holds their feed, then caught the girls, one by one and stuffed them into a dog crate. That is, until it came to Patty's turn. Patty was nowhere to be found even though we were offering raisins to sweeten the deal. We called and called and looked everywhere and I was beginning to fear she'd been nabbed by a coyote in the confusion. Luckily, Luc thought to look in the coop even though there had been no sounds coming from within throughout the coop moving process. Sure enough, there was Patty in the egg box just trying to lay an egg in a little peace. 

Our new house is just a few kilometres away from our old one. It's a 25 year old, rough-around-the-edges raised bungalow on 25 acres of quite lovely forest. The major selling point for me is its proximity to the beautiful town of Almonte. We are less than 2 km from the downtown shopping area and just about the same distance to the "strip" such as it is in Almonte. We can easily walk or bike to shopping, the library, a farmer's market, a beach, all kinds of activities, restaurants, and much else of what we used to drive to.

We knew we'd have some work to do at the new place, but there have been quite a few surprises, most of them less fun than finding a forgotten twenty in a coat pocket. So we've been busy writing cheques to various tradespeople in an attempt to bring the place up to the standard we thought it was already at. Tomorrow afternoon an exterminator is scheduled to hopefully address a bit of an infestation of .... rats. As a family who has had four pet rats this is a bit like having an exterminator come to take care of a puppy problem - but not quite. The body count is up to four and there is at least one that we haven't caught. That big fella was last seen scurrying away from a bag of dog training treats in the kitchen at 2:00 am. I expect a rat infestation might be a bit more traumatic for a normal family who hasn't been conditioned to feel all warm and fuzzy toward the rodents. Even the dog is pretty cool with it.

We haven't tackled the fairly daunting job of moving the compost and garden beds over from the old place yet. The new house has the same issue of shallow soil over bedrock as the old place did (should have moved a bit farther, maybe) so I'll be gardening in raised beds here as well.

I'm sure we'll be busy for months and probably years with improvements and repairs. A priority for me is improving the energy efficiency of the house to a very high standard from the rather minimally adequate state it is in now. Our to-do list has gotten rather long rather quickly. I don't want to think what our carbon footprint has been and will be with all the activity around the move, but I'm hopeful that we are setting ourselves up to be significantly more energy efficient over time.