Here be Dragons….
Quick and Dirty Tips is a network of blogs and podcasts I wandered into today. It looks good and I like the addition of podcasts. If you are looking for a network to write for take a look. I noticed no one is doing a home and garden theme yet.
I came to it through Grammar Girl .
Green Tomato Pie
Pastry for 9 inch pie with cover
3 cups of green tomatoes
2 tbsp. flour
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 tsp. nutmeg
1/2 cup molasses
1/4 cup water
Remove the stem end of the tomatoes, but don’t peel them. Slice the tomatoes in thin rings, cover them with boiling water, and let stand for about 10 minutes, then drain them. Arrange them in the unbaked pie shell. Combine the flour, sugar, spieces, molasses, and water. Pour the mixture over the tomato slices and cover with the top crust. Bake at 425F for 15 minutes and then at 350F for 30 more minutes. Serve with vanilla ice cream, whipped cream, or sweetened sour cream. Serves 8.
This recipe was in the book: In a Country Garden – Life at Ravenhill Farm , by Noel Richardson.
All the goldfish survived the winter. I was tossing in a bit of fish food and watching them when I noticed a snail in the pond too. How it got there I have no idea. I read that they came come when you buy pond plants. But, we haven’t bought any plants except for one last summer. I counted at least five snails when I looked for them. I don’t know what kind they are or if I should get rid of some, how many are too many? Anyway, interesting to find them living in the pond. If they are purely scavengers they are welcome, tons of dead leaves in the pond for them to feast on. But, if they eat the fresh growth we will have a problem. There are only two waterlilys in our pond and one is pretty sensitive. Anyway, will see how the new tenant works out. I took a photo, if anyone knows what kind of snail it is let me know.
(As always you can click on the photo to see it bigger).
Lots of pretty things on the Swarovski site but this one was especially pretty and I thought the idea was clever. Wouldn’t be a ring you could wear everyday – it would get caught on things and be in danger of being damaged – but quite eye catching.
I’ve been watching one of those animal shows today and they were talking about snakes. At one point they showed a hibernaculum of garter snakes leaving in the Spring. Made me think about how we could encourage garter snakes or at least help them to survive by having something like that in our garden. I’d also like to build a bat house to encourage more of them too. We used to get a lot when we lived in Alliston. They eat a ton of bugs and only come out for about an hour just as the sun is going down. All the rumours about them being dangerous are a bit overdone. They may have rabies true but that is the extent of the danger.
Meanwhile, back to the garter snakes. I found information about building a snake hibernaculum on the Toronto Zoo website. I don’t know if my Mom would be interested. Not that she is afraid of snakes at all but her garden space is mostly spoken for with all the plants she already has and those she is more than likely to find to add during the garden season.
Would you build a winter home for snakes? In Ontario we don’t have to worry much about poisonous snakes or any other kind of poisonous creature really. Rabies are a bigger worry.
How to Build a Hibernaculum
1. Select a well-drained site protected from cold winds, with good sun exposure (south-facing). Ensure that surface and ground water flows away from the site (i.e. build on upland areas). If not, drainage pipes below the frost line may be required to prevent flooding.
2. Your snake hibernaculum can be sized to fit the available space, but it must be deeper than the frost line (at least 2 meters deep). Snakes prefer an overwintering site that is close to the water table, but not flooded. Moist air ensures that snakes do not dehydrate over the dry winter months.
3. Place rubble in the bottom to create chambers for the snakes. Chambers created at different depths allow the snakes to move vertically and horizontally to select a preferred temperature/humidity microhabitat.
4. Concrete blocks or PVC drain pipes (with holes cut into the sides along the length of the pipe) can be used for entrances and passages to allow the snakes multi-level access. Snakes use these passage ways to move to the bottom of the pit and into the underground chambers. It is necessary to hand place the concrete blocks to ensure that a space or tunnel extends down into the bottom of the pit at each of the corners. Continue to fill the pit with larger rocks, old concrete blocks and slabs, maintaining as many openings and chambers as possible.
5. Cap with an insulating layer of smaller rock rubble. Be sure to leave the entrances open and keep the top clear of shrubs that may grow as the site matures.
6. Protect emerging snakes from predators by having cover objects such as logs, rock piles, brush and uncut grass nearby.
7. In the spring (mid April to late May), monitor your site to determine if wildlife are using the hibernaculum. Don’t get discouraged, it may take several years before snakes “discover” your hibernaculum.
Wild About Gardening has more information about building hibernaculums for toads and how to keep frogs in your pond as well.
I’ve got a crayon box sitting on my desk. It had Crayola markers in it, 64 of them. One of them, garden green, has no colour and I’m going to send an email to Crayola about that. Maybe I will even get that done, off my to-do list, tonight.
I’m just looking at this box and thinking about the paper/ cardboard used to make this box which is now disposable. Thinking about all the years we had boxes of crayons, pencil crayons and pens and threw away boxes. Often they were kind of ripped up cause I did try to keep mine all tidy in their box as long as I could. But the box never could outlast a pencil case or metal crayon box (usually a cookie tin left over from Christmas).
Does it make anyone else feel kind of sad to think of the trees cut down to make packaging which we throw out soon after we bring the stuff home?
A crayon box isn’t big. One crayon box is just one crayon box. But, we bought a new bathtub for the renovations to add an apartment to the basement and that was a really big box, for one home, one family. It had to be strapped to the roof of a friend’s van to bring it here. The empty box had to be folded several times to fit into the trunk of the car. The recycling truck which picks up our cereal boxes, milk cartons and newspapers, would not take the bathtub box. The man on the truck explained that it would not fit on their truck. The box would take up too much space and they would not have enough room to load all the recyclables from the houses on their usual run. We would have to drive that box to the dump.
To the dump? That doesn’t sound like recycling.
So that isn’t what we did. I folded and semi-crushed that box until I could smoosh it into the trunk of the car. Then we drove it to the massive store (one of those huge parking lots with a row of massive chain stores to one side) where we had bought the bathtub. I dragged that box out of the car and put it into a handy shopping cart in the parking lot. I left it there. My small protest to too much packaging and the waste of too many trees.
This crayon box is still on my desk though. Still making me feel sad for the part of a tree it once was. Never to be a tree again. Was it worth it? To be cut down, pulverized, painted and folded and then stuffed with crayons only to be bought and then discarded? I don’t think so.
We need different packaging. Why can’t crayons be sold in a tin box which would last longer and not become dog earred and torn. A tin box could go to school and stay in a locker and then come home again. A tin box could last a kid from grade one to high school and beyond. The tin box could outlast the original crayons and end up holding pens and pencils when that kid starts their first job in some cubicle or something more interesting and unique. A tin box could be passed on to children of that child and then grandchildren. A tin box would only increase in value and be something treasured if it was kept by the family.
This cardboard box is never going to be any of those things. If I don’t take it to the blue box it will just be landfill, un-needed and unnecessary landfill. We have an overflow of landfill of this kind already.
So here is this one box. One box isn’t much. Like one tree in a forest, it’s just one and when it’s gone it makes a bit of room for saplings to reach up through the space and grab some sun for themselves. The problem is that it’s not just one tree or one box.
Think about all the packaging we take for granted, don’t even see it as we go through our day to day lives. There is such a ton of it. In a week you might be throwing away a whole tree. But, one tree isn’t much. Right?