And then I planted garlic!

Yesterday, for the first time, I planted garlic. I have always wanted to grow garlic but for some reason it never really panned out and this year I thought it wouldn't either; I have a community garden plot that gets rototilled every spring, so it just didn't seem to make sense. Garlic must be planted in the fall if it is to do well and between the spring tilling and the fall freezing, garlic just didn't seem to be in the cards.

But then, a few things magically conspired to make it work for me. First of all, the woman who runs the community garden told me that they had decided NOT to till next spring but instead to use the tilling rental cash to put beams between the plots. (I'm new to the garden and at first I thought she said "beans" which simultaneously excited and confused me, but anyway, I digress...)

Then, I was working a coffee gig at the market and I went early to admire the produce. Some folks had bags of local organic garlic for $6.00/lb which is about the going rate here and it was beautiful garlic with tight, fat cloves and a mauve skin. I asked about it and the woman told me that the variety is called "Music". Then, without prompting, she mentioned that I could plant it if I wanted to. I've read that Music does very well in Ontario, so I bought a bag thinking I could eat it all if I didn't plant it. (I like to slow roast whole heads of garlic with olive oil and salt and eat them, smeared on toast.)

Finally, my sister Karen boasted on Facebook that she had planted 300 cloves of garlic in her big garden and I became consumed by envy. I wanted a garlic garden too! I even had some garlic to plant! But those in the know say that root crops should always be planted under a waning moon and time was running out. I was in Toronto for a few days and when I got home it was the last day before the new moon. In Chinatown I found bags of shallots, 2 for a dollar. Why not? I said to myself.

So when I got home, I flew into action. First, I walked the dogs, then I threw garlic, shallots, stakes and red string into a bag with my gardening gloves and hurried off to the garden. I dug and cursed and planted and cursed and marked the plot with red string, then mulched it lovingly with yellow leaves. I only planted 30 garlic cloves and perhaps 8 shallots but I left feeling totally smug.

I won't have a whole lot of garlic but I'll have some and maybe even some shallots, too.

A Moment of Peace

I wonder if I'm not finally learning how to relax. I also wonder how much of the stress and tension in my life is caused by hormones. Really.
I suspect that hormones essentially run the planet, (along with fungi) and that we have no actual control over either of these things.
Tonight I was cutting up vegetables in the kitchen and listening to the radio and I had the sudden realization that I was happy. Just happy in the moment, listening to the radio and having a glass of red wine and dicing a chunk of rutabaga. The dogs were lying around watching because I am cooking a beef stew, which is a rare occasion at my house. I gave them some tidbits of beef and wondered, as they licked my fingers clean, why I felt so good.

Part of it is definitely feeling some sense of order in the universe. Cooking usually does that for me; the order implicit in cutting things up and adding them to the pot, the sensibility of seasonings. Imposing order on the chaos. No doubt I find the familiar voices on CBC radio soothing and the smells of food cooking comforting. Wine always makes me happy. The presence of my calm, attentive dogs pleases and comforts me.

But mainly I think that my hormones are taking a break from their nearly constant driving mission to fuck with my mind. What a relief! How pleasant to just enjoy the sights and smells of cooking a beef stew, slowly in the oven, while listening to the radio and enjoying the quiet company of two old dogs. How restful to sip a glass of red wine and listen to Johnny Cash singing "One", in his gravelly old man's voice or Kiri Te Kanawa belting out a Puccini aria, without breaking into tears and wishing I was dead! A blessed moment of peace in a turmoily universe!

How lucky I feel at this moment.

Things that Suck

Some Things that Suck:

- Waking up with a sore throat.
- Monsanto
- BP
- Buying the "bale" of 20 bus tickets in order to *save money* then only using 2 of them.
- Trying to sell them to your friends, who don't want them.
- Discovering you're the only person in your circle who takes the bus to Toronto.
- Lying in bed, coughing.
- Then spitting.
- War
- Pesticides
- Vomiting
- Colony Collapse Disorder
- Sad dogs
- Feeling too crappy to fix yourself a can of soup.

Mushrooms for dinner again...

So, it would seem to be a *STELLAR* year for wild mushrooms, at least for me.
I bragged in my last post that I finally found white matsutakes in Temagami, after looking for them in vain for about 25 years. Then, yesterday, while walking my dogs at a favourite park, I noticed what appeared to be a rather large, well-organized squirrels nest, lying on the ground under an oak tree. My heart went pit-a-pat.
What IS that? I asked the dogs, who didn't answer. But I wondered if it might not be the polypore called "hen of the woods" and I approached the thing with bated breath.

To make a long story short, we have been eating mushrooms for about 24 hours now and I, for one, am full. The thing weighed thirteen pounds and was nearly all usable; we gave some away and made a huge soup yesterday. There is talk of frying some up, later tonight as we still have a huge chunk in the fridge. I've been bragging non-stop to my long-suffering family.

As a forager, I feel fulfilled.

Pictured above: thirteen pounds of "hen of the woods" or Grifola frondosa. Also known as "maitake", it is one of the mushrooms that has been used medicinally by the Japanese for time immemorial.

Back from the woods

Hey, we're back from our canoe trip!
We were in Temagami for 20 days.
We were rained on for 19 of them.
We ate 12 different species of wild mushrooms! (Not all at the same meal...)
I did not find it warm enough to swim, even once. One day I was almost going to do it, then the wind picked up again and I came to my senses.
We stayed at 12 different campsites.
We made 12 portages.

Highlights:

I found white matsutakes, for the first time ever. I have been looking for them for about twenty years.
We ate a lot of boletes and suillus mushrooms. When fried in ghee and salted, they taste a lot like bacon, or chicken skin or something very meat-like, fatty and satisfying.
River otters: What could be more thrilling?

The One Big Thing

Today, while dehydrating peaches, I noticed that we appear to be having a hurricane. It is exceedingly hot and humid outside; over 40 with the "humidex" but windy as hell! The branches were beating against the windows and I kept hearing things falling over outside. Every now and then there is a tremendous BANG! from behind the house; the sound of a black walnut falling on the tin roof of the neighbour's carport.

It is going to be a good year for black walnuts. The trees are loaded and the nuts are big. It is a pity that I seem to always take my yearly holiday during black walnut season. (Not true of last year's trip to Guatemala and Belize, done properly, in the dead of winter...) But fall is the best season for most things, including canoe-tripping.

I was going to follow this up with a short list of things I hate but find I am totally uninspired. As it turns out, there aren't really that many things I hate anyway. It pretty much all comes down to the one thing and I don't really know how to sum that up.

How a few have everything while most have nothing? How we are cautioned to be grateful for our "freedoms", while everything is taken from us? How we learn to disrespect the natural world and the other animals, and instead worship human celebrities? How we are duped into supporting the war machine?

...Yep, I'm really looking forward to getting into the woods for a few weeks...

The dehydration station

Every year, we go on a canoe trip, usually in September. Last year, for the first time since 2001, I missed out; Rob took a spring trip with a guy I'll call "Neighbour Boy", shortly after the ice came off. I don't remember now why I couldn't go then, but I did manage to put enough food together for their meals and also for Seamus, who went along for the trip. Blue and I stayed home and as I recall, had a nice time. But when fall arrived and it was time for our usual trip, I was involved in a medical drug study that was going to earn me some money. I couldn't just drop out, no matter how badly I wanted to. So, last year, I didn't go canoeing. At all.

Rob came home from Temagami with an awesome camera that he found while picking up garbage from the dock.
I attempted to console myself with a trip to Guatemala and Belize, during which we blew most of the drug study money. And we took a lot of pictures.

We dry all our own food for the trip, with the exception of a few things that we buy already dried, like mashed potatoes and onions. Generally, food prep is my department. Rob assembles our gear and makes sure it is ready for the trip. I plan our meals, cook them, dehydrate them, weigh and sort them, assemble "extra" ingredients and condiments, buy snacks, make and dry dog food. We calculate about a pound of dried food per person, per day. The dogs eat a lot. Their appetites seem to double in the woods. Some of their food is meat - we don't take meat for ourselves but I like to take some for them. We usually buy ground beef from the drug-free meat place at the market and dry it raw. Then it gets mixed with a variety of other ingredients, to make their food. They get oatmeal and skim milk and vegetables and supplements. The mix is so superior to kibble that we always notice a positive change in their coats very shortly after we leave. They get glossy and their eyes get brighter. I'd make it for them year round if I wasn't so lazy. Oil cannot be dried so we have to take oil for all of us, separately.

Our longest trip was 18 days. That worked out to almost 60 pounds of dried food. (We generally take a little extra in case some is lost to circumstance.) This year, we're aiming for around 20 days on the water. I have been a slave to the dehydrator for the last couple of weeks. And I got a very late start. Usually I spend the entire month of August more or less chained to the dehydration station.

Today is a turning point. In the beginning, getting ready for a trip of this length is a formidable task. You dehydrate a basket of peaches and end up with a small zip-lock bag that weighs about an ounce. A head of celery fits into the palm of your hand. It seems like you will never be able to dry enough food, no matter how you sweat and toil. But at some point, you see that it's starting to come together. Today, as I bagged some peppers, I realized that we are starting to have enough food for a trip. We aren't there yet, but I can see that we will be.

This trip is shaping up to be bittersweet because my dogs are both aging so rapidly. This could be their last canoe trip. Every time I run my hands over them I find another lump, bump or growth. I worry about their ability to do long hikes; to portage over rocky trails; to swim, if necessary, a long ways. But they, like us, are looking forward to the trip. Ever since we started hauling out the stuff - the food barrel, the dry bags, our sleeping pads - they have become inseparable from the gear.
They stick close to the stuff, as if we might forget to bring them along otherwise.