Friends have asked and I have been working hard on the methodology as well as doing a course at a pro-bakery. As a result I have revised some old material about making basic and tasty sourdough bread at home. If a simple way to make tasty sourdough breads interests you then you can find [...]
Sparrows are perhaps my/our favourite birds. From the point of view of nostalgia I would say especially the House Sparrows that I grew up with but otherwise one of the great things about living in Canada is the number of other sparrow species (most of them more strictly Buntings, but we won't go [...]
Bruce Spanwing Moth A couple of days ago we saw a pale moth flying across the garden - late November, snow on the ground, temperatures around zero or below - and shrugged as it flew away. This morning we got a closer look at it, or a relative. I am reasonably confident that [...]
On Saturday morning, Bird Protection Quebec organised a birding field trip in the Arboretum to which Arbo members were invited and which several joined. For my sins, I was delegated to organise and lead the outing. I don't go on many field trips (I have problems with more than six people together at once) [...]
One of our most enjoyable activities each year is spending the winter servicing and filling the bird feeders at the local bird banding station and recording the birds that are in the season when the nets cannot be put up. This year we started a bit earlier than usual after the first decent [...]
Learning More About Bread I have been making most of our bread for over 30 years. Originally I used to use yeast as the raising agent but since Breadzilla (another post about her sometime in the future) came into my life a decade ago, gifted by an American colleague who really knows her [...]
Year One of the LoMow Lawn Project Gardening simply does not allow one to be mentally old, because too many hopes and dreams are yet to be realized.(Allan M. Armitage - professor of horticulture at the University of Georgia) After five decades or more of mowing the lawns around each of the houses [...]
Post-Election Pondering Now the dust has settled for almost a week ... This is a rare deviation from the usual gardens and wildlife topics, but I hope I can interest you during this post-election period in a couple of non-partisan observations on how the process of electing governments might be improved next time around. [...]
As luck would have it ... This Thanksgiving Monday it was cool and showery looking out of the window, as one does, I was struck by the combination of birch tree trunks and golden birch leaves forming a backdrop to a berry-rich rowan tree that has begun to lose it's leaves and thereby [...]
Thanksgiving Sunday 2019 A lot of summer is too hot while winters, delightfully cold as they are, are too long (they'd be fine if we could just skip the month of March). Meanwhile this part of the world is famed for its glorious autumn/fall colours which are just beginning to reach their peak [...]