A Versatile Blogger?!

Thanks to Ottawa Gardener  at The Veggie Patch Re-imagined for nominating me for The Versatile Blogger Award! The rules are that I must tell seven things about myself and pass the award along to several other bloggers that I have just discovered.

So - seven things you may not know about me:

1. I am a first-generation Dutch Canadian, yet I neither look Dutch (haven't been blonde since I was 3) or speak Dutch, and I have never been to Holland. I do enjoy salted licorice, though.
2. I am a very fast reader.
3. I have really flat feet that leave correspondingly strange footprints. I've always been self-conscious about my footprints.
4. I have moved thirteen times in twenty years of marriage.
5. I have worked as a navigation officer on an icebreaker in the Canadian Arctic, an airport firefighter, and an air traffic controller. And none of those jobs is as exciting as it sounds.
6. Someday, I'd like to keep bees.
7. The last time I cried at a movie was the South Central Farm scene in Escape from Suburbia.

And I would like to pass the award along to these great blogs:

1. Frog Blog is chronicling events at Chorus Frog Farm on Salt Spring Island in its first year (and beyond!)
2. I'm Unschooled. Yes, I Can Write has the best tagline: The life and times of an unschooling vegetarian animistic green anarchist hippie child. 
3. One Straw: Be The Change is an absolute treasure trove of practical information on permaculture in a suburban setting. Warning: set aside a lot of time to read through everything. 
4. Living the Frugal Life is a really interesting blog about food, thrift and permaculture with lots of  lists and records and tons of inspiration.

Rules:

1. Thank the person who gave you this award
2. Nominate more people 
3. Tell seven things about yourself

Eastern Smooth Green Snake climbing a Prickly Ash (ouch!)

I'm sure this smooth green snake could tempt me to eat forbidden fruit if he wanted. I've always been a sucker for a Kermit the Frog face. He climbed the prickly ash after we intruded on the sunny trail where he had been warming himself. We don't often see snakes in trees in this part of the world (Eastern Ontario) - perhaps we're just not looking for them. I have seen a garter snake on the side of a large maple trunk before, but this guy was practically defying gravity on the skinny branches. He is considerably bigger than the only other smooth green snake I've ever seen. I'm pretty sure he is at least 60 cm long.

Some of the older neighbours

We live on what used to be the bottom of the Champlain Sea not too far from the shore, I'm told. Around 300 million years ago, in the Ordovician period, there was a lot of marine life including cephalopods, similar to the squid, octopi and cuttlefish swimming around today. There are a couple of nice examples in the exposed limestone on our property.

I have no idea what specific kind of cephalopods these may be. There are all kinds of other little creatures in both of these pictures. My uneducated eye sees only things that look like they should be in the ocean. We're a long way from any salt water here so it's fun to go beachcombing in the backyard. 

I wonder if a few hundred million years from now anyone will be trying to identify me?

Don't tell the others...

...Edna is my favourite.

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.