There's A Hole In the Bucket...

... actually it's a whole set of cracks, the handle-holding spot broke, and so I spilled my gathered produce as I dodged the ladder set by my back gate...

The bucket is plastic, of course, and it's been out in the sun and weather for more than a few seasons.  It originally held muffin batter, I think (the label is all worn off).

Anyway, the old bucket went into our plastic recycling -- and I picked up four much newer buckets of a similar size on the neighborhood boulevard.  They have metal bails and originally held drywall compound -- much sturdier!

I also brought home three glass jars for hold dried foods,  a former olive oil bottle whose dark green glass will perfectly hold a Christmas gift of fermented hot pepper sauce,  a Windex spray bottle, a 2.5 gallon water jug (it has a spout that comes off) for emergency water storage,  a gallon metal tin, and a shoebox sized filing box (with label holder).

I'm all for reuse over recycling!

The Re-Use Earwig Trap

Earwigs love to nest in -- and ruin -- my ripening grapes.  I don't  have as many this year because they bloomed early and frost hit some of the blossom.  I also deeply mulched the grapes this year so I wouldn't have to water them as often. The little earwig traps I bought a couple of years ago would be lost in it.

I've been eating tall tubs of Astro yogurt all summer.  I kept three out of the blue box to make earwig traps.  If they didn't work, I could always toss them back into the blue box.

The trap needs a way for the earwigs to get in,  the impossibility that they can get out again, and a bait to draw them in the first place.  A bait that they drown in keeps them from getting out.  They like beer and liquid detergent with a scent also helps draw them.  The detergent assures a drowning.

I drilled  four or five 1/4" holes in the top inch of yogurt container.  The lids go back on to keep out the rain and bigger vermin. The earwigs will crawl through the holes and drop into the bail solution.  Every few days I can remove lids and empty out dead earwigs and spent bait.

I had some very old near-beer sitting around.  It's the hops and malt that draws the earwigs, not the alcohol, so that was fine to use.  I had picked up a couple of detergent jugs early in the summer with push-spigots on them to replace my older outdoor sink water supplies.  Rinsing them out, I got a fair amount of diluted detergent which I stashed in another tall yogurt container.  I mixed the near-bear, detergent, and water in 64 oz. jug and now have a good month's supply of earwig bait.

I nestled the traps in the mulch under spans of vine that had grapes growing.  I've been removing earwigs every few days since and the grapes still look healthy.

Everything I've used in the traps has been diverted from the waste stream.

The Wrap is a Gift

These bags contain presents. These bags are reusable and were made from off-cuts when I remodelled some old drapes to smaller curtains for my husband's studio. The tags are reusable too! I designed some tags in Inkscape, using some vintage Santas off the Internet, and laminated them. Names can be written on with dry erase markers, then later wiped off and used next year.

The Mouse Count Begins

Every fall mice invade the pantry and undersink area. We have an old porous foundation and that's how they get in. This year my husband is sealing it up so the invasion has come late, but there must still be an opening or two they can get through.

In the past I've put out mouse bait and poison cakes. The mice just seem to make a mess of them and pass on the word that there's tasty treats to be had inside this house.

Last year instead of spending money on bait I got a couple of old-fashioned traps. I had some peanut butter that was starting to go stale so a dab of that became bait. The first evening we're sitting in our living room and we hear a SNAP!. Sure enough, there's a mouse in the trap under the sink. A day later we had one in the pantry. Once the trap was sprung, peanut butter gone, and so was the mouse -- one up for them.

Last year's score: Me: 4 Mice: 1.

After the fourth mouse, we never saw trace of another.

Two days ago I saw mouse sign under the kitchen sink. Last night I set out the traps. The old peanut butter is even staler. This morning I had a mouse. The trap is baited again.

It's a great way to use up old peanut butter.

Mid-November Scrounge

It's been a while since I made the rounds of the recycle boxes in my neighborhood. Christmas is coming and my jar stock is low, so that was my primary objective this week.

It's also been a dry, sunny week. There's frost in the morning on everything, but the sun warms things. That we've moved into daylight saving time means it's light out at 7 am again, so that makes scrounging easier too. Though I got five bags of leaves for my garden (few leaves fall in my yard) the night before -- and they were a super find since the leaves in four of the bags were already chopped up and I had to run my electric mower over only one bag of them.

I went out with a couple of bags and came back with 4 quart jars, 4 three-quarter quart Mason jars, a pint Mason jar, a jam jar, and a face cream jar (love those for my homemade body sugars!). I also found a large wire basket of the sort you find in freezers -- too big for mine but still a great bin for all sorts of things -- and a lime green Starfrit frying pan. I'm divided between keeping the pan for myself or filling it with something like the ingredients for a paella for a sprightly gift.

Not a bad haul at all!

The Jar Dilemma

I have nearly 300 Mason jars that I've accumlated over the years -- yet I still scrounge for jars at the height of canning season. A major part of it is poor stores management on my part: I don't eat some of the stuff up fast enough. At least I do keep track of what is around from the past year or two and put a priority on using that first. But there is only so much mustard and ketchup two people can eat in a year.

Of course I can give stuff away as presents, and I do, with much appreciation from recipients. But once a jar leaves this house, it rarely returns. I can only hope it is being reused. But I've reached the point, with the rising price of new jars, of not using new jars for gifts.

So I periodically check the Value Village housewares section. Four pint Mason jars, often with bands and lids, which is the size I most frequently use, can be had for a Canadian buck plus the sales tax. These are the jars I use for Christmas gifts, as it were.

Another kind of jar is the non-sealing kind. We're getting fewer and fewer of these in our house every year. Some is because food manufacturers have been moving to lighter-shipping-weight plastic for things that used to come in jars. A lot is because most things that come in jars (jams, pickles, fruit, sauces) I put up myself in my own Mason jars.

But these jars are great for such home-made gifts as body sugars, bath salts, soup mix, and spice mixes. Baking mixes are a "once opened, it's used" sort of thing and they can easily be put into cleaned and dried milk bags (4 liters of milk are often sold in a set of three bags here in Canada -- nice size for something like a cookie mix).

The source for these: the neighborhood scrounge on garbage/recycle day. Sometimes I score Mason jars as well!

Winter Collages

We cleaned out the attic preparatory to upping the insulation to R-50 (recommended here in Ontario). We found a lot of old barn boards and a lot of pieces of plywood panelling, the stuff that is all wood (and glue) with scribed "board" lines one side and prepainted white; the reverse side is plain medium brown grain. We recognized that some of the barn board was candidate for art work and the panelling could be used the side of small boxes or for small shelves.

I was in a local gallery which was selling packages of Japanese paper scraps, so I picked one up, thinking I could use it for collages.

I was straightening up my craft room after Christmas and I came across a stack of art gallery postcards and an old French book on animals in Africa with black ink drawings. Hmmm, collage material, I thought. I was starting a Year of Creativity too and I thought some collages might be a nice project as part of that.

I went out to the shop shed and cut up a stack of 6" x 6" pieces of panelling in the week between Christmas and New Year's. Then three weeks later I cut another stack, some of them 7" or more to a side.

I found a tin to keep the cards, paper, and scissors in. An old Olay creme jar was perfect for white glue. I had some roller-ball pens for text and signing the backs, brushes for applying the glue, and ergonomic tweezers I picked up at a Cape Cod flea market for handling small pieces.

Ideas came to me as I browsed through the art card, the book, and the paper pieces. I'd cut and layout, then glue everything together.


It's been a very artful January!

Beads and Things

I've been periodically going through shelves upstairs, downstairs, in the pantry and in the back room and pulling things out, saying "I don't use this", "I don't need this"... "But someone else might!"

So I've been listing things on Freecycle lately. I stopped for a while because I was responding to first responders (probably lurkers with email on their cellphones) who were never able to pick stuff up and then I had to go to a later responder anyway who would be responsible and pick things up. I'm usually going with the later responder right up front now (like the radio or TV show that say "7th and 9th callers get the prize") and I'm liking the dealing a lot better. I'll post at night and check responses the next morning.

Things I've Freecycled in the past month:

• a microwave rice cooker/vegetable steamer (I use my thermal cooker for rice now)
  
• a waffle iron/sandwich griddle (older than our current waffle iron)
• a bag of cookbooks that had been superceded by newer ones
• a bundle of computer art books
• a 50' length of garden hose
  

During my period of disenchantment with Freecycle I put a few things on the grass strip between the sidewalk and the actual street in front of my house. Folks picked up:

• two coffee urns
• a vanity top
• pink venetian blinds that don't go with our current decor but went with someone else's
• a mailbox
• a disassembled cabinet

Now I've made up 33 bundles of Mardi Gras beads and offered them on Freecycle. Once they're gone I'll have a wooden milk crate for storing other things.

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More Manure Chronicles

I saw another ad for "well-rotted horse manure" on Kijiji. It was at a place here in town, so I emailed the person, asking for directions and what would be a good time to drop by.

That was back in September. I never did make it to the place in amidst harvesting and preserving everything in my garden that could be subject to a hard frost while we vacationed in New England the first two weeks of October.

I kept the email from the horse-owner, so when I got back I asked if any was left. Oh yes, there was. So Monday morning I went to the place (it's about 10 minutes from my house) with my tarp-lined CRV and loaded up. This stuff was well-rotted: absolutely no manure smell. They had used coarse sawdust for the horse bedding and the result was a nice crumbly dark brown product. It was much lighter than the stuff I had gotten in Marmora and I quickly got a good pile of it into my CRV.

On the way home I stopped at Costco to stock up on calcium tables, vitamin D, and soy milk. The stock should last me into the winter.

When I got home, I topped up my yard waste compost pile with a tub of it. Another tub fertilized the rhubarb, elderberry bushes, and saskatoons. Then I topped off the one planting box I've been filling with more leaves and a good layer of the horse manure. More went on a three other raised beds and my small square planting boxes. I still have a cartful (inside the tarp -- just hauled it out of the CRV and into the cart) to dispense on my black raspberry row and my clump of red raspberries.

By then the sky had cleared to a brilliant blue so I went out for possibly my last kayak ride of the summer. It was a little windly on Little Lake but the trees still have some exquisite color.

The Great Cellar Refurb, Part 1

The cellar is small in width, depth, and height (even I at 5' 1" can bang my head on duct work). Strictly speaking it is a tall crawl space. But we have our laundry, freezer, water heater, furnace and storage down there.

In the spring we put in a hanging grow light over a fold-up camping table. Later I built a much shorter table so that we could use a gravity-fed waterer for the plants on it. I got longer chains for the grow light. When we're not growing things on it, it will be a platform for winter storage of vegetables that I built stackable bins for. Now we just needed a unit to put the water on.

Just a week or so ago, a neighbor put out a disassembled shelving unit on the boulevard. It was actually sawed off a hutch unit, but it was all wood. I reassembled it with an additional shelf, all spaced to hold canning jars. I painted the whole thing blue with acrylic enamel we had on hand. My husband found another shelf unit while sorting through our main floor storage room. I put two more shelves in it with everything spaced to hold canning jars. I painted that blue too.

Then we had to rearrange what storage we did have for home preserves to fit the units in. The metal shelf unit by the stairs came out. In its place went the unit from the neighbor. I commenced to moved all of the older preserves into it and put the two kettles I use for water bath processing on the top shelf; they're very handy to get at from the stairs. That freed up space on the bigger shelves along another wall for things that had been on the metal shelf unit, though an old enamel processor went to Freecyle.

We moved the top shelf of the metal unit down and put the unit between the stairs and the grow light table. The gravity fed waterer went on the moved top shelf. Other planting things will go on the other shelves.

The main unit I had built two years ago for home preserves had a decided lean to it. I took everything off, placing it either on top of the washer and dryer or in our wheeled laundry bin. I determined that the lean was due to the lay of the floor (it is rough cement). Rather than having it against the wall, I turned it 90 degrees and found a spot where it was horizontally level. If I put in a board brace to move its top away from the wall (which was not vertically level), then it would be vertically level as well as more stable. My husband found a piece of old paneling in our storage room that just fit the back of the unit. Jars won't fall out and that stabilizes the unit more too. The second new unit went across the end of the older unit to form a T. Everything is accessible.

I sorted the remaining preserves into older and this season's . The older preserves and empty jars went into the second new unit. This season's preserves went into the older unit. Now I don't have to search for the older stuff and I have plenty of empty space for new preserves.

Part 2 will be the wall shelves and the double bank of shelves on the other side of the stairs!

Using the Forage

Yesterday I went out for my usual early morning Friday walk and saw nothing to come home with.

That was all right. I wasn't "shopping" for much anyway and I was in the process of de-cluttering anyway. This week I had a number of projects on the go that used the stuff I've foraged in the past few weeks.

Emergency watering: rain did not come as expected mid-week so the drip waters I made from kitty litter jugs and water jugs came into use. The grape vines, blueberry bush and pole beans were very happy.

I decided it was time I had a good salad garden outside my kitchen rather than have to go to the main garden to get salad fixings. I used eight of the concrete blocks I'd foraged to build one, using the lasagna method of a 6-sheet thick layer of wet newspaper over sod, then layering in compost and garden soil to a depth of 8". I also filled the cement block holes with the same compost and soil for salad complements such as radishes and peppercress. So the stack of bagged soil and compost is cleared from our side entry walk, as are the concrete blocks!

Once set up this is a prime spot for cat deposits unless the little beasts are kept out. I bought a T-bar post to support one end of a 6' by 4' fence panel built of reused lattice and new fence boards. The other end of the fence panel is secured to my shop shed corner. I had improvised a barrier with some green fence netting and a foraged small cement pillar to keep cats from my tomato and herb beds. That was easily transferred to serve as an interim gate from the T-bar to the kayak shed. The permanent gate will be of reused trellis and new fence boards as well.

More of the trellis will be a shade for the new greens. I already have shade supports built and painted from last season. The rest of the trellis will probably be made into portable cat barriers to protect the melon and bean areas.

When it rains here, it pours -- and the one rain barrel we have fills very quickly, then we see a lot of water going out the overflow. I picked up a plastic barrel that had a clamp lid. I reused the main hole in the lid for a hose from the first barrel's overflow. I filled around the hose with some leftover window screen. I drilled/cut another hole in the second barrel and installed more hose for that barrel's overflow. I had plenty of hose from a Friday forage to do this. Some of the pipe insulation that I took off the solar oven when it failed there as a gasket works fine as hose gasket (to keep out the mosquitoes). I may eventually put in a tap (I have a couple on hand from some other previous use) on the second barrel, but for now it is easy to lift the unclamped lid and get a pail or watering can of water. I've also got a remainder of old garden hose I can use to siphon water out of the second barrel. I used two thinner concrete blocks I had foraged to support the second barrel.

I also finally sealed (with a can of acrylic sealer I got in a remainder sale) the two framed pieces of fretwork hardboard from a yard sale, put the piano hinge on them that I got another yard sale and set up a new screen in the gazebo. That nicely cleared some clutter from the shop shed.

Living With Less Plastic

It's ubiquitous, it's obnoxious, it's strangling the planet -- that's plastic. Our economy is addicted to it and its convenience. I have no statistics on how much the average person uses (misuses, has to dispose of) but I know it's too much.

Here's what I've done in the last two years to shrink down my "plastic heap":
1. Filter my own tap water and drink it from stainless steel bottles. A lot of times I don't filter it, but in the summer our local supply picks up a noticeable taste from some plants growing in it. The big filter jug in the refrigerator cuts down our need to run tap water until it is cold in the summer as well.

2. Switch from plastic clothespins to bamboo. The plastic ones were disintegrating anyway -- literally falling apart in the storage bag after a few uses on the outdoor dryer.

3. Don't drink carbonated drinks. A great health measure in many respects anyway.

4. Buy a big bag of flour in a paper bag and bake my own bread, English muffins, hamburger buns, sausage holders and pizza. The flour is stored in food-safe plastic buckets. I think about four months of storage evened the amount of plastic used to store the flour and the amount of plastic I was recycling from bread product bags and bulk food store bags. My body doesn't miss the bread product preservatives at all!

5. Make my own kefir from goat milk (in a wax board carton). Kefir requires only a glass jar, growing culture, and room heat to develop. This is easier and requires less heating than yogurt. No more plastic yogurt containers!

6. Grow my own sprouts. No more plastic bags or containers for these!

7. Buy apples in bulk from the farmer's market.

8. Use good quality bar soap for washing and shampoo (lasts a lot longer than liquids -- and no more plastic bottles!)

9. Re-use plastic containers or glass containers with lids for storing leftovers. (No more plastic film!) Also do the same for lunches away from home.

Things I want to do over the next year:
1. Switch from plastic for freezer storage to glass or soy-waxed paper.

2. Keep refining the list of what I can to best replace what I buy in the way of condiments (often in plastic containers!).

3. Make my own salad dressing.

4. Get all my soil amendments and mulches in bulk in my own containers. This ended up being my biggest use of plastic this spring. I'm still expanding my garden so I need more compost than I produce at this point.

Solar Oven Saga

I set up the solar oven at 10 am in the morning

It worked!

Maybe too well: the pipe insulation I used as a gasket material melted, the double pane window cracked when it hit the nail sticking out of the melted foam insulation, the meat thermometer blew its bottom off and I nearly burned my fingers lifting the pot cover to check how the orzo was doing. This was all by eleven-thirty in the morning. At least the candy thermometer was surviving; it read close to 250 degrees F.

I stripped off the gasket stuff, pulled out the nails and used a couple at the bottom of the window to keep it from sliding. At twelve-twenty I had overcooked orzo, but a good cold rinse made it edible for a pasta salad.

I decided to try cooking some rice, but a lot of intermittent cloud started to move in and I gave up on it at two-thirty.

I lost less than $2 in materials (the thermometer was a 25 cent yard sale purchase and I used two lengths of pipe insulation) and gained a powerful solar appliance. The double-paned window cost $3 at the local ReStore and everything else was reused material: 2" foam insulation scrap, 1 1/2" insulation scrap, the green plastic corrugated box my greenhouse came in last year, and tarp material used for lumber bundles. I bought the dark granite ware pot at the hardware store for $10.

I don't know how long the tarp material will last. I may have to upgrade to something more substantial -- such as aluminum flashing painted with high-temperature paint. It certainly works fine as a heat absorber in my solar dehydrator.

The foam insulation sure keeps the heat in and carries the cooker through an occasional cloud. I'd like to get a true oven thermometer for it, especially if I decide to set up a reflector for it to try baking. I'll keep an eye out for one at yard sales.

Shipwreck BBQ Sauce

What do cranberry mustard, apple-rhubarb chutney, spicy tomato sauce, roasted red pepper spread, runny orange marmalade all have in common besides their original recipes being in the Bernardin home preserving book? They're ideal components for a shipwreck BBQ sauce for ribs, chicken, pork, and tofu!

"Shipwreck" originally was a way of using up odds and ends in the fridge. The first iteration of the sauce was just that. I also had some chipolote ketchup and mesquite smoke on hand that I could throw in. I made up about half a cup of sauce which was great for ribs for two in the crock pot.

Then I thought about the odds and ends I had in my canning pantry that would be entering their second or third year on the shelf -- and I still had some remains of odds and ends in the fridge. And my husband said he wanted that sauce again on the next batch of ribs and he thought it would go great on chicken. So I put together 6 cups of sauce and canned it in 3 half-pints and 6 quarter-pints. The half-pints are ideal for the occasional 2-person crock pot meal in the winter. The half-pints are for company meals.

Ingredients
1 pint of spicy tomato sauce
1 pint of apple-rhubarb chutney (or another chutney)
1/2 pint of roasted red pepper spread
2 tablespoons cranberry mustard (or other mustard)
1/3 c orange marmalade

Method
Combine the above in a deep bowl and blend with an immersion blender. You can also just do the chutney, marmalade, and mustard in a regular blender and combine with the two sauces in a bowl. Now taste. Need more spice? Add something like chipolote ketchup (which will add a small touch of sour). Need more sour? Add malt or apple cider vinegar. Like it smoky? Add any smoke flavoring you have on hand (one drop at a time! -- then retaste).

When you're satisfied with your blend, you'll probably have about 6 cups of sauce. Prepare your jars while slowly bringing the sauce to simmering boil. Fill jars, seal, and process for 10 minutes.

Last May Friday Forage

We've had more than two inches of rain over the last two days, with about an inch of it last night, so there were a lot of soggy newspapers set out for recycling.

With the uncertainty of the weather, I went out Thursday evening during a lull in the rain. I came back with a stack of plastic pots. I'll have enough now to give away rhubarb divisions in the fall or next spring (my original plant needs dividing again). I also found a closet pole and some galvanized round duct down the street.

Just drizzle is forecast for today and it was mild at seven this morning. I set out our recycling (a lot of soil and compost bags -- I think I'll be eliminating that over the next year; the stuff isn't the same quality as what I can get at the Ecology Garden bringing my own containers), then I set off with my grocery trolley.

I ended up doing a figure-eight route, dropping off one load at the house in the middle of it. I got: 2 10-liter water containers (excellent for emergency storage), 5 one-gallon or more kitty litter containers which will make excellent drip waterers for single plants or small areas around the garden, a rectangular planter with enclosing fiber box, a salad container which will make an excellent seedling greenhouse and a Mexican glass pitcher. The last item I was guided to by another forager out looking for wine bottles to turn in for deposit money. It had a crack across the bottom of it but it doesn't leak. It will make a fantastic planter for flowers (forget-me-nots will go well with its blue) on one of the decks, though I may use it for beverages first.

Cleanliness is Next to...

Now that I've got my garden hose permanently on to a shut-off sprayer, I can clean my hands whenever I want. But it does use a lot of water and will often wet my jeans and feet as well as my hands. And the sprayer is close to the garden, but outside its fence and it's not close to the greenhouse at all.

So last week when I spotted a discarded laundry tub on the boulevard down the street, I had an "Aha!" moment and brought it home. I already had a spare pail with no lid kicking around as well as one of those large detergent containers with a push-button spout.

I shifted the potting table over to the edge of the cold frame behind it and had enough space to fit the laundry tub between it and the sage. The bucket has a good hand and fit nicely under the tub's outlet. I had previously rinsed out the spouted container so I filled it with water and put it on the potting table's edge so it hung over the sink. You just need a little water to rinse off the compost before grabbing the hoe again or whatever. I had a sprayer bottle as well that I could put in there for getting garden gunk off of tools or rough-clean vegetables. The used water can be cycled through the garden. The finishing touch was a sturdy stainless steel soap holder that I picked up at a yard sale the following Saturday for biodegradable soap when I've not resisted the urge to mess about the soil with my bare hands.

Now I did have a old bathroom sink hanging out by the sprayer hose. It'd come from the far back of the yard when I put in the shade garden. I decided to see if I could set it up by the greenhouse. The trick was elevating to the old machine part that was holding. I had a quartet of of 4x4 chunks and a couple of bricks that provided a stable base for it on either side of a square bucket. I nailed a horizontal support for the sink edge to the kayak shed which is opposite the greenhouse. The second detergent container still wasn't very stable, so I ran some covered wire through a piece of discarded hose to make a tether that held the back end of the container to the shed wall. The covered wire is easy to detach when I need to refill the container.

To Screw or Not To Screw

They cost over $5 a pound and you need either a good arm and lots of patience or a strong powered screwdriver to put them in, but my hubby and I use wood screws in most of our wood construction, especially any framing.

When we close in pipes behind the shower, we make sure we can access them again. That means planning a structural piece that looks good in the finished room and securing it with screws. Because after you do the fix, you can screw it back in again, and don't have to worry about wrecking the look (or structural integrity) by yanking out nails to get in there again.

I've yanked out my share of nails when repurposing wood. It can be hard -- and dangerous -- work. That you can knock lots of nailed together things apart with a few strong whacks of a heavy hammer doesn't reassure you about the structural strength of things put together with nails.

Well, yesterday we decided to dismantle one of the two horsehoe pits we don't use. Out came the 18V cordless screwdriver and out came the screws. Only two were bent; the rest went into the screw box for that size. An hour later we had 4 6 foot 2x 6s, 4 corner posts, a 2 foot length of rebar, half a cubic yard of sand on and under the tarp cover by the garden fence and the area reseeded to clover.

Yeah, we'll just keep screwing around.

Market Day and the Great Gilmore Garage Sale

Every Saturday (all year long!) is farmers' market day here. From mid-October to May they hold it inside a big building. During the nice months it takes up most of the parking lot just outside the building.

Some of the lovely things you can buy there:

• veggies, veggies, and more veggies (a lot of them organic)
  
• brown eggs, white eggs
• emu meat and oil
• buffalo meat
• organic beef
• pork
• cheese (cow and goat)
  
• locally roasted and ground coffee
• locally made goats' milk soap
• baked goods and ethnic foods
  
• crafts: pottery, wood, jewelry, knitting
• sprouts
• lamb
• fruits
• mushrooms (sometimes up to 5 different kinds)
• sweet potato fries (from local sweet potatoes -- yes, you can grow them in southern Ontario)
• apples, apples. and more apples (and cider from them in the fall and winter)
• and right now plants of all sorts are everywhere

They also have a much smaller scale market in the downtown on Wednesday mornings during the outdoor months.

A more recent tradition is the Great Gilmour St. Yard Sale on the fourth Saturday of May (so it usually falls on the weekend after the long weekend). Gilmour Street is in one of the oldest neighborhoods in the city. For two city blocks and little bit, the majority of yards are selling their own things or things for some non-profit group. Parking or driving on the street is impossible while the sale is going on. You simply park one or two blocks away. I did so and went out on the street with my grocery trolley.

An hour and half and $3.75 (CDN) later I had:

• a leather satchel big enough for legal size papers with lock and key
  
• a good wire strainer
• a meat thermometer (for the future solar cooker!)
• 2 stainless steel magnetic clips to hold memos or drying plastic bags on the fridge
• a long magnetic knife holder, which may be strong enough to hold tools in the shop
  
• a good-sized piano hinge
• a sturdy stainless steel soap holder, ideal for my garden hand-washing station
• 3 pint canning jars (with rings and lids)
  
• 15 half-pint canning jars (with rings and lids)
• 4 quarter-pint canning jars (with rings and lids)
• an aluminum pot big enough to hold most of the jars with lid. It's a good size for blanching and scalding things. It has a bail handle and grab handle on the back edge -- great for pouring out water.

I don't think I'll have to buy any more canning jars this year. Usually I get a few to take care of those that leave the house as gifts.

I was parked near the bulk food store I usually patronize, so I decided to take one of my jars in and get baking yeast. I could only get it in the usual plastic container or take the whole pound in the original packaging. I'm baking bread often enough now that I decided to stock up and got the full package.

I decided I might as well get the supplies I need for cherry melomel which I'll be making in the next month, so I went into the wine shop next to my parking spot to get wine yeast, pectic enzyme, and another fermentation lock.

Then it was off to a book discussion group with a brown bag lunch.

I stopped at another yard sale on my way home. I got two sturdy cart wheels for $2 and a couple of ornately cut hardboard screens for another $2 which I could put together with my piano hinge for a nice room divider. Serendipidy!

Friday Forage

Friday is garbage/recyclables/green waste collection day in my neighborhood. This past weekend was the May holiday weekend in Canada and the traditional start of gardening, though there are a lot of folks like me who start earlier. Plastic plant pots are accepted as a recyclable here and I was hoping to intercept some for reuse, so I went for a walk around my block with my grocery tote cart. Jackpot! I came back with 24 small pots and 5 trays for holding them and the water that spills out the bottom when you water them. They went into the greenhouse. I also got a couple of 2 liter pop bottles to use as waterers or upside down planters. I also got some lengths of one foot wide 1/8" green plastic mesh. This is sturdy stuff that will be effective barriers to keep cats out of planters and squirrels off of beds.

The successful foraging revved me up to actually reuse some of the things I've accumulated for reuse. I set up a 2 gallon container with a push-button nozzle that formerly held detergent to hang over a reused laundry sink with a reused bucket under its outlet as a quick, easy, water-economical hand-washing station in the garden. Using the spray nozzle on the hose is wasteful overkill for hand-washing, though that nozzle will be great for rough cleaning root vegetable before taking them into the house. The bucket underneath means that the soil-laden (as in organic gardening residue) water can be reused to water the garden or shrubs.

The bucket under the laundry sink had been used for wood scraps in the shop, so I needed a replacement for that. Some 5 gallon containers that I filled with water after painting them black to use as a heat sink in the greenhouse had gone bust, so I cut the top off one to use it as a waste bin. I even reused the handle from the container's top by wiring it to the bin's side with a scrap wire tire lying on the shop floor.

I have a small tray of pegboard hooks of various types and sizes in the shop. Currently what pegboard I have is populated with these to my liking. I was looking, however, for a better way to hang some of our outdoor/garden decor. I have a clay angel face I would love to have on my garden shed door. The shed is made of double layerRubbermaid plastic. How to hang it? I got out my cordless drill and put a single hole in the outside plastic layer. In went a pegboard hook and now I have a wind-resistent way to hang my angel face. I found the hooks also fit into the holes in my T-bar pots that I use for fencing and trellis. A colorful Mexican sun now graces the corner of the fence. A hole big enough to hold a hook doesn't effect the soundness of aluminum siding, so the large enameled metal sun we got on our last trip to the Southwest is now hanging on the wall facing the deck.