Posts from — February 2010

While parenting young children, you always hope you are doing a good job. In the daily up and downs, the temper tantrums, disagreements, firm talks, routines, school work, homework, play dates, chores, sports — it goes on and on!– you can often feel unsure about how it’s all going. Are you raising good kids? The time does fly, and you hope you are sharing your values with your kids as well as helping them grow up knowing how to survive on their own.

Now that our kids are pretty much grown, I stumble upon little signs now and then that make me feel quite proud of our parenting skills and hopeful, even, about the future. One such occasion happened recently.

On a Saturday afternoon, I was talking with our son, who we fondly call The Boy, even though he is fully grown and lives with his young family live not far from us. We were discussing our activities of the day. Mine had included a stop by the local Kiwanis’ Thrift Sale Shop to drop off a couple bags of some no-longer-needed items.

The Little Family, as we call them, had included a drop-off at the Kiwanis in their day as well. That made me feel quite pleased.

To me, it seems no big deal that we should have “excess stuff” in our house. We’ve been around a lot longer and have absorbed the belongings of relatives and also have a tendency to accumulate stuff. Jim and I think it’s right and good to pass on clothes we don’t wear, household items we don’t use, books, CD’s, etc, that don’t fit into our lives anymore. The “Kiwanis Bag” is a long-standing tradition in our home; the bag waits patiently until brimming and then the next Saturday we make a run by the drop-off. To us, donating items shows a small bit of generosity in being able to give away (as opposed to selling) possessions as well as a sense of care of the earth in not throwing away still useful objects.

Apparently, the Little Family feels the same way. So I’m just saying: maybe we did something right.

(20 Minute Jim) Little in this world reminds me of the limits of my know-how like an apple tree.

Apple trees trigger fond memories for me. We had an apple tree in the backyard of the house where I grew up. Most specifically, my dad planted an apple tree as soon as he and Mom bought the place because he wanted me to grow up with a tree to climb and fruit to pick. And I did hide in the canopy of its leaves on more than one occasion, especially in high school. I knew just about as high as I could climb before the limbs would groan under my weight. The fruit was less predictable. One year we’d get absolutely nothing. Then the next year we’d have hundreds of tiny apples, maybe an inch and a half in diameter. It was my duty to rake them up before they soured on the ground and attracted a yard full of hornets. Apples this size, however, were perfect ammunition for battles with the neighborhood children.

Occasionally that tree gave useable fruit… sort of. As I raked them up, I would gather any windfalls that had the blush of ripeness and that didn’t have the spots of worm or hornet sting. Often they yielded a bite or two. Sometimes, I was able to gather enough for Mom to make a quart or two of apple sauce — rather tart apple sauce, as I recall. The year she moved out of the house was the best year for the apple tree. Mom canned several quarts of “Climb my Branches” apple sauce that we brought over to our cellar pantry.

The last few years there, I had started fertilizing and pruning. I fertilized with tree spikes hammered into the ground within the drip zone of the tree’s branches. Fertilizing helped the tree produce that bumper crop of tiny fruits every season not just every other. Pruning helped it produce slightly larger fruit, occasionally three inches in diameter. I don’t know if this correlation is common.

I asked a friend of the family who’d majored in forestry to show me a thing or two about pruning. One January afternoon — a couple decades ago now — we walked around the tree. To the extent that I know anything about pruning, I learned it that afternoon. I was more than daunted by the task, and I was glad I had a knowledgeable friend. I had grown up with the tree my entire life and now I was preparing to lop off parts of it. Sure, I’d trimmed branches that had been cracked in a storm but I was preparing to make deliberate cuts. I was literally dwarfed by this semi-dwarf. I didn’t really have the proper ladder and I only had a bow saw and a pair of hand snips.

Cathy started simply enough, telling me to walk around the tree and just look at it. Once you learn to see the tree, its shape, the way it grows, the easier it is to see which branches just don’t belong. That apple tree seemed to have a tulip shape, like a champagne flute rather than, say, a single poled ladder. I made a few tentative cuts. I started to see the tree a little better.

Cathy taught me to respect the “collar” around a twig or a branch when pruning. The collar is a slightly raised, well ah, collar, and it’s where the tree stores all the necessary ingredients to help a wound heal over when a branch or twig is removed. Though a branch should be removed as close to the collar as possible, it’s important not to nick or damage it.

This story isn’t one of those sudden revelation tales where I became a pruning master in one swoop of inspiration. We worked for awhile, ’til we got cold I bet. We cut away some dead wood and some water sprouts, cleared a little way for light to shine into the center of the tree. I still didn’t have the proper ladder reach up to the high branches which needed the most work. I gather it’s important not to prune away too much at any given time. I’d made a start. And I wish I could say I was diligent about pruning a bit every year. I remembered a few times, I know that, and the harvest grew at least a little better because of it. I never did get a better ladder.

In fact, I can’t even claim that I prune the tree in my backyard on a regular, annual basis. However, I did today. I donned steel-toed boots, leather gloves and a warm jacket and grabbed the bow saw, the folding ladder and the hand nippers. And at least I made an effort. I still don’t really “know” what I’m doing. But I tried to prune away the twigs the were on a collusion course with other twigs. I lopped off a good sized branch that had started to scrape against the barn. I nipped off a few water sprouts. And when I started to get cold, I came in. As I look out the back window, I *think* I can see the results of my handiwork but it’s not exactly that kind of a task, I don’t think.

And save the wood. It’s great for a smoker.

The Boy has helped me brew on several occasions but this was “his” batch. Last summer we went to visit the local brewing sage, Mike O’Brien and the Boy bought the ingredients for a batch of stout, his favorite style. He’s had to work two part-time jobs to make ends meet so we haven’t found time to brew this batch until yesterday.

In case anyone is following along at home, this is a rough approximation of the recipe we used. The bags of specialty grains were unmarked.

11.5 oz Crystal Malt
8.5 oz Chocolate Malt
7.5 oz Black Patent
9 lbs of Maris Otter
2 oz of Amarillo hops
Danstar – Windsor dry yeast

We typed this all into our BSOC (Brewing Software Of Choice – in my case it happens to be BeerAlchemy, a nifty Mac-based application) just to make sure we weren’t totally out of whack. Ideally, this is on track to be an American Stout.

We brewed indoors because my propane tank is empty… and because I didn’t relish sitting outside. The “big” burner on our new stove threw off a stunning amount of heat, nearly as much as the outside burner so the brew day wasn’t noticeably longer than usual. Cooling was a bit of a drag but as, 20MintueJan’s photo yesterday showed, it’s amazing what a pile of snow accomplishes.

Original gravity was 1.052 which wasn’t bad especially given that we batch sparged and that we had a bit of a calculation error with mashing temperatures. By bedtime, the carboy was gurgling happily and this morning we found the lid had been popped.

The great thing about brewing with friends or family is that there are stretches of time when nothing particularly is happening (during the mash, during the boil…) when it’s a natural, low-pressure time to chat. It was great to catch up a bit with the Boy and I hope this turns into a habit, an activity we can do together.

Sometimes you’ve got to make your own fun…

And today, after a long, dry hiatus, 20MinuteJim and the Boy did.

Jim had taken a temporary vow of not-brewing in order to devote energy to wrapping up some home improvement projects. While one has to admire that sort of self-less self-denial, one’s spouse also might start to miss the dependable presence of home brew. Eventually, the supplies ran low.

Thank heavens for project completion, for New Year’s resolutions, for day’s off and the boundless of energy of the young, i.e. the Boy (cuz those big pots of steaming mash are heavy!) Today the house smelled like a brewery– and I loved it!

Now the yeast is pitched, the pots are washed, and the spent mash is in the compost. Let the count down to new brew begin!

Our city collects yard waste at the curb, and then makes and sells the resulting compost, and I’m very pleased that it does. We abstain from contributing on a regular basis, however, except for the odd bag of weeds mixed with raspberry canes, because we have our own compost pile to feed.

A couple of years ago, one of the neighbors who lived in one of the nearby small apartment buildings knocked on our door and asked if he and his girlfriend could put their kitchen waste in our compost bin. They’d seen our black square composter from their apartment window. I was slightly surprised by this unexpected request, but, after talking with him for a few minutes, I readily agreed. They were not compost novices, and he assured me that they were put only vegetative waste in the bins. I admit that it was initially a little odd to open the compost bin and regularly see items we hadn’t purchased or added (when did we have blueberries? oh, that wasn’t us!), but we got used to it.

The neighbor who we garden with also likes to contribute her kitchen waste to the compost bin. We have an irregular system where she sets containers out on her back porch, and I take them to the compost bin with me. Winter has thrown off my schedule, however, and yesterday she patiently pointed out several containers of now-frozen kitchen scraps waiting on the back porch. I gathered them all up today and topped up the compost once again. Our container is getting a little full. We can’t add more to the Compost Tumbler in the winter because the contents sort of freeze to the bottom and make turning it pretty unsafe! We may need to expand our compost empire!

When we lived in Toronto in the 1990′s, one of our neighbors kept her compost bin in the front yard because that was her yard space in the shared house. One day she asked in a suspicious tone if we’d been putting stuff in her bin. No, I assured her, we wouldn’t do that without permission. Someone, not us, she then supposed, was adding little plastice bags of kitchen and mixed waste to her compost bin. Shortly after that, we noticed a padlock on the compost bin! It was both funny and sad that someone had to guard her compost bin from someone else who wanted to love the earth by composting and at the same time had no idea how to do it properly.

In the 20 years since, composting has come a long way in gaining popularity among lots of people, not just hardcore organic gardeners and hippies! I am pleased we can do our part. I’m also really pleased that we can compost in a neighborly way.