People are always asking which came first the chicken or the egg. I just want to know how to crack an egg without getting pieces of the shell in the bowl. And when I do get pieces of shell in the bowl, how do I get them back out? Chasing that piece of shell around [...]

After meeting Patrick and Sheila – a couple who shared an enthusiastic passion for gardening – I could see straight away that Darcy and I were missing out on something wonderful. “The couple that grows together stays together,” I told Darcy as I herded him past the tools and automotive parts and into the seasonal [...]

Whenever people are asked to introduce someone who is well known they always say the same thing.  “Ladies and gentlemen, here’s a person who needs no introduction” and then they go on to introduce the person anyway.  I would love to be at an event where the MC stands before the microphone, smoothly delivers the [...]

Up in our neck of the woods the May long weekend has traditionally been set aside by gardeners for planting, while non gardeners choose to hook up their boats and RV’s and set off on their inaugural camp of the year.  Pity the fools.  As you may have gleaned, I am a gardener.  And I [...]

A garden has a curious innocent way of consuming cash while all the time you are under the illusion that you are spending nothing. ~ Esther Meynell   I have a friend who suggested it might be good idea for me to keep track of how much I spend on the simple self sufficient life [...]

Everyone knows the proper way to cook a roast is to shave at least seven centimetres off one end.  Or at least that’s what Louise had always thought.  Her Grandmother had cooked it that way, her mother had cooked it that way and so when her turn came to cook the roast, she did the [...]

The 11 chicks I hatched out in my incubator in April are growing like crazy.  Their soft down is being replaced by feathers and the birds that they will be are slowly emerging.  It’s sort of like those game shows where one piece of a picture is filled in at a time until you shout [...]

This is complete and utter madness. Madness I say! I am talking, of course, about Cadbury Mini Eggs. It’s not that they’re 160 calories for a tiny little package. It’s not that the package contains a miniscule 0.1 grams of Trans fat. It’s not even the 5 mg of cholesterol or conversely the fact that [...]

Living in a land where snow blankets the ground seven months of the year means the white stuff is seldom far from my mind.  I can’t tell you how many hot summer days I have leaned on my hoe, wiped sweat from my brow and thought how wonderful it would be to have a pile [...]

 A few weeks ago our nest was about as empty as it could get.  Neither of our boys were planning on coming home for Easter and their Christmas visit was long behind us.  As I moved the chick incubator into a son’s old bedroom I couldn’t help being struck by the irony of hatching eggs [...]

  If the conditions of our northern roads are not bad enough all by themselves, we have to contend with a virtual Noah’s Ark of animals doing the 20 metre dash across our highways and byways. There seems to be even more than the usual flashing of hooves, paws and wings in front of my [...]

 An egg is truly a miraculous object; the purple and red foil, the dark chocolate shell, the creamy centres. How do they get those in there?   It’s another that miracle I didn’t gain more over Easter than I did.  I think I burned off all the calories running up and down the stairs to check [...]

With hatching eggs winging their way towards me through the postal service I dug out my ancient incubator and set it up in a spare bedroom and soon had it clucking along at a perfect 38 degrees Celsius.  A friend had a question about the hatching eggs.  “How do they ship them?  In an insulated [...]

Somewhere along the line between deciding to get some heritage turkey chicks for my 100 Metre Thanksgiving Meal in the fall, I ended up instead with three dozen hatching eggs.  If they were turkey eggs it would make sense, but they’re not.  They’re chicken eggs.  Heritage chicken eggs mind you, but chicken eggs nonetheless.  My [...]

If you read last week’s column you know that I’ve been thinking about milking my sheep and making my own gourmet cheese and yogurt. I was originally attracted by how healthy and great tasting sheep milk is supposed to be, but now I’ve come up with an even better reason.

There’s an old Spanish proverb that goes:  “Cheese from the ewe, milk from the goat, butter from the cow and ice cream from Haagen Dazs”.  Okay, I stuck the last part in there, but I bet the first part surprised you a little as well.  After all, when people see a sheep they think about [...]

A friend of mine went crazy around mid-February. She started telling everyone who would listen – and even those who wouldn’t – that spring had hatched. Now it’s true that our groundhog never saw his shadow. And it’s also true that over the last month the temperatures have been hanging out on the upside of [...]

The Olympics are finally over and for me it’s not a moment too soon. I’m exhausted. One more week and who knows where I might have ended up? I never knew that watching the games could be such an overwhelming responsibility. By turn I had to will the rain to stop falling, the fog to [...]

Twenty years ago jokes about programming the VCR abounded. If you could figure out how to do that you had pretty much conquered new technology. I’ve noticed we don’t laugh about stuff like that anymore. For some it’s probably because doing things like programming a VCR has become as second nature as buttering toast. For [...]

Now that I’ve decided to spend the year raising all my own ingredients for our Thanksgiving dinner, I have made some rather startling discoveries about turkeys. The Broad Breasted White accounts for ninety-nine percent of all the turkeys consumed in North America. A turkey bred to gain weight so fast they are no longer able [...]