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 [...]
The uncomfortable silence of 2.9-billion missing birds ** I usually confine my political or controversial comments to Facebook and face-to-face but this editorial from the 5th October Globe & Mail newspaper says it equally as well, if not better, than I could ... so here are my thoughts written by someone else. The last couple [...]
A Tale of an Errant Cat This has been a rather exciting two and a half weeks at the Sparroworks - but entertaining too. Around mid September a neighbour just around the corner posted on the town Facebook group that a cat she was looking after for a relative had nipped out of [...]
This has been a busy couple of weeks, culminating today with the planting of a new community orchard in our little town of Baie-D'Urfé. This is NOT me ... Those of you who knew our garden in England 21+ years ago will remember that we had lots of fruit trees, bees [...]
Recipe Recipes are not the usual focus (dare I say bread and butter?) of this journal, and when they do appear they are almost always something to do with breads. This is a new one that is so successful I thought others might like to try it. The basic recipe came from the [...]
Glowing at Twilight One of the pleasures of a garden like ours is that, especially at this time year when summer is sliding into autumn/fall, is sitting with a restorative drink and watching the seasonal flowers begin to positively "glow" as twilight takes over. It would be an unwanted cliché to suggest this [...]