Covid's gardening lessons

This year's crop of greens waiting for placement. After last year's disasters, I chose carefully.

Planted greens in the boxes John built last year when we thought (mistakenly) that opening up one side of the garden with lattice work would provide lots of sunshine for veggies. 

It was all so much more fun last year. Covid was new, the spring blossoms were out, and we were all being good sports about entertaining ourselves while we followed the rules and stayed home.

John enthusiastically cleaned out the compost area and built two new boxed beds for seedlings. I went to the garden centre and, panicking about scarcity, snatched whatever I could find. That turned out to be bok choy, kale, arugula, Swiss chard, and, unfortunately, tomatoes, beans, peas and celery. The greens did well, but the rest failed all in their different ways. The beans and peas collapsed without proper sun or supports and mouldered sadly on the ground. The celery was tough, with a white wood centre. The tomato vines soared into the trees, but the little fruit they gave was split and bland.

This year, John glumly surveyed the garden beds and suggested any new compost I wanted added would have to be done by an expert – me. At the garden centre, I confined myself to tried-and-true greens, bypassing a whole greenhouse of tomato seedlings. But I admit to some frivolity -- sweet peas, heliotrope and a few delphiniums to round out my flower garden. And when asked, John put up a screen for the sweet peas to climb on.

We aren’t nearly as jolly as we were at this time last year, and the sense of adventure is missing. But in the end, we might be happier watching bok choy thrive than beans expire in the dirt. Covid is teaching us all something.

Last fall, I knew I'd need something bright and cheerful for the spring, so I invested in a batch of flower bulbs. These tulips have been a splash of colour in the back garden for a couple of weeks. 

Narcissi, tulips and pansies in the front garden, also courtesy of last fall's bulb-buying spree.

These might look sad now, but the green splotches in the middle are the new white and lavender delphiniums I just planted. They'll join the other delphiniums in towering over my head later this summer.

This year's experiment is with sweet peas. Usually, I put them in the middle of the delphinium bed, but last year, they got crowded out and produced virtually no blooms. This year I'll give them a chance by planting them around the central tower and along the screen John just added to this bed. Imagine this bed in July with bright sweet peas climbing the tower and the screen...

Last year, I had to snip all the blooms off the newly planted strawberries in this bed, to give them a chance to root properly. This is the second year, so I'm hoping for blooms, and berries.

Something that did work: I always wanted an urn with ivy growing up it, and here it is! The flowers are winter pansies that have decided to give a good show now.  

More winter pansies, planted last fall and finally blooming up a storm. 

I didn't plant them, but these lilacs have bloomed every year since we bought the house in the mid-1970s.  There's a lot to be said for a faithful old tree. 

John's baking dilemma

 

Now that John is getting into baking bread regularly, he's discovering that it may be more complicated than he thought.

His whole-wheat loaf tastes great, but he's not happy about that dip in the middle. Why does it plummet instead of soar?

John has pitted his wits against computers, motorcycles, leaky plumbing and entire photo departments, but he’s finally found an adversary that has him stumped: a loaf of whole-wheat bread.

The contest began simply enough. With Covid and confinement stretching into seeming infinity, he decided to start making bread as a regular thing. But he wanted it to be pure whole-wheat bread – no white flour, no ingredients beyond the strict essentials – and no fancy techniques.

Search long enough on the internet and you can find almost anything, So, water, flour, yeast, a dab of sugar, a dab of salt. Mix the flour, yeast and salt in one bowl. Combine sugar and water in another. Dump the latter into the former, mix for two minutes. No kneading, and no second rise! Place in oiled pan, let rise to top of pan, and stick in 400-degree oven.

John has made about half a dozen loaves now, and each has been perfectly edible. But not one has had the height or the nice rounded dome of the finished loaf in the recipe illustration. Rather, to be perfectly honest, the opposite. Instead of ballooning up with the oven heat, John’s loaves seem to get smaller. “It’s shrunk!” was the wail I heard from the kitchen on his first attempt.

Since then, each loaf has been a hopeful new experiment in solving the problem: Weigh the ingredients instead of using measuring cups (new scale: $80). More water, less flour. Hotter water. More sugar. More time rising, less time rising. The result is always the same: a lean, clean-tasting loaf with a flattish, if not absolutely concave top.

“It reminds me of when I was learning to ride a motorcycle,” said John, surveying his latest disappointment. “I kept coming home bloodied and bruised.”

 I suggested he shouldn’t worry about the appearance. “It tastes good. Why worry about what it looks like?”

But John, the man who spent years perfecting dirt-bike jumps, does not hear such words. “What would happen,” he asked, “if I just left out the salt?”

"There will be tools," I thought when John got into bread-making. I wasn't wrong. Soon enough, classy new weigh scales arrived in the kitchen. 

Every drop of water is weighed and measured.

This two-minute stir takes the place of five minutes of kneading in most bread recipes.

The dough is poured into a pan, smoothed out...

... and into a 400-degree oven.

This loaf turned out more level than some, but it still wasn't what John was hoping for. 

We eased the disappointment by spreading it with cream cheese and smoked salmon. Next time, it will be perfect.....

A tale of two sock drawers

 

No, it's not a showcase, but the sight that greets my friend Linda when she opens her sock drawer every morning. My own experience is quite different.

Linda’s sock drawer is like a jewel case. Seventeen pairs of hand-knitted (by her), beautifully colored, carefully chosen socks are tidily lined up in rows. She wears them in turn, starting with the red pair and working her way through until she’s at red again. Every morning it’s a treat, a surprise, to see which lovely pair pops up for the day.

I wasn’t surprised at what this looks like when she sent me a photo the other day, although I was impressed by the beauty and the number (Covid has been good for knitting.) But it did start me thinking about my own sock situation, which is kind of the polar opposite.

My sock drawer is a disgrace. Normally, I would take a photograph to illustrate, but in this case, it is too embarrassing. I will use words instead.

Imagine a drawer, quite a large one, stuffed to bursting with generations of socks and undergarments, some not seen for years. The ones in current use – think of them as flotsam and jetsam washing up on a beach – settle at the front and get used, washed, and used again. Everything else settles into the depths of the drawer (I think of it as kind of an ocean) and vanishes from conscious knowledge.

Almost everything has a greyish tinge, “wash light colours together” being interpreted loosely in our household. My socks are mostly those white athletic ones, the type you buy five pairs to a package for a ridiculous price that makes you think of semi-slave labour in some far-away factory, and slightly guilty, but that’s what’s there, so what the hell. Usually, I buy the ankle socks, but some longer ones have made their way home with me. Finding these uncomfortable, I took to snipping them off just above the ankle. They fray, but they’re usually hidden by pants, so who’s the wiser? Well, Linda, for one. When we were sitting on a waterfront bench on one of our recent distanced visits, she told me later that she noticed a space between my (frayed) sock tops and my pant legs. She wasn’t being critical, she was just worrying that my bare legs would be cold while hers were toasty warm in her high, hand-knitted, beautiful, cozy socks.

In my defence, I haven’t renewed my socks for a year because of Covid. Why risk death for a new package of athletic socks? Eventually, the world will be safe to buy socks again.  But that up-front supply continues to shrink, and it’s getting harder to find a usable pair. Every morning is a surprise – will there be a functional matching pair, or will there be one black, one white? Will I find one (or two) with new holes?  Will I have to scoop back into the “ocean” in hopes of finding something usable?

So in one way at least, Linda and I face a similar situation every morning. She gets the surprise of which of her hand-crafted gems pop up for wear that day. I get the   surprise of whether I’ll find any at all.

Linda has knit a couple of pairs of socks for both John and me, which we both treasure. Here are ones she knit for John. (Photo by John Denniston)