Playtime

Warm sun and fresh breezes through the green blades made another beautiful day today. I've made a play area for the birds outside so that they have a fairly secure home base from which to enjoy the outdoors. I fastened a birch branch down to the railing with some twine to make some chewable perches and there's a nice green potted plant underneath that they can fertilize. Almost an entire ecosystem. Not quite.

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Today is Day 1 of My Palate Experiment.

Yesterday was Day 0 and didn't really count since brunch included French fries. Yum! Later meals were good though: fruits only.

So today, I've been ingesting water, celery and organic carrots and mushrooms. I figure I'll leave the sweet fruits for later, or else it'll be harder to eat the veggies. One of the birds is following along with me; he shredded some celery, chewed up baby carrots, but he refused both of those as soon as he got a nibble off the organic mushroom. I bet he goes for those umami flavours from the glutamate, just like his mommy. He also tends to gorge on whatever food he likes the most and needs to be encouraged to eat a more varied diet. I hope he hasn't inherited poor eating habits from me.

Flavours On My Palate

To go along with my Spring cleaning, I'm planning to do a little experiment cleaning my tastebuds. In recent months, I've been eating a lot of strongly flavoured foods: my favourite spicy curries and fiery hot sauces, potato chips and other snacks high in salt and MSG, processed sugars thanks to my weakness for sour keys... I'd better stop describing all these or I'll never finish this experiment.

Materials:
4 grapefruit
4 tangerines
8 pears
6 apples
2 figs
a bunch of grapes
5 sweet yellow/orange/red peppers
2 lb. baby carrots
1 lb. tomatoes
1 lb. of salad greens
a bunch of celery
broccoli
pear yogurt
vanilla yogurt
various organic soy milks, rice drinks

Method:
1. Avoid all processed foods with added flavour, for a week or so.
2. Drink water. Avoid alcohol, sweetened juices, syrups, etc.
3. Eat healthy: only whole foods, vegetables and fruits.

I'll try to stick to plain raw fruits and veggies, and if I get desperate, I can break open some yogurt/rice/soy milk with some muesli. Or have a salad with a simple dressing (olive oil, vinegar, mustard, herbs, minimal/no spices, no sugar, no salt). If I really get desperate, maybe a vegetable/cheese sandwich with some mustard on whole wheat or multigrain. Let's hope it doesn't come to all that.

Purpose:
The goal is to cleanse my palate. By the end of the week, I am hoping my tastebuds won't be so accustomed to oversalting, oversweetening and overspicing. I want to taste everything vividly.

Flying Free

We had a gorgeous storm today. Rain poured for about an hour with high winds blowing everything down. I let some rain and wind come inside and the flock loved it. This weather has spurred me on to do some Spring Cleaning, although it might be Summer Cleaning by the time I've made enough progress to call it a "cleaning".

Lately, it's been warming. So warm, in fact, that I didn't notice my pepper sprouts were getting too much sun beside the window, and they promptly withered and died. My thumb isn't brown anymore; it's outright black.

I've taken the birds outside a bit to enjoy the warmth. While I want them to get fresh air and sunlight, it makes me nervous that they get so excited whenever they're out. They call out to all the wild birds they hear and hold their wings slightly away from their bodies as if they're about to flap any moment. I'm torn between wanting them to enjoy some freedom and fearing that they'll panic, fly off and get into trouble. Freedom or security?


In response to some feedback about how pale they looked in the last set I posted, here are some unretouched, non-colour-corrected photos of the birds outside. Note that the high contrast from the direct sunlight has overexposed the brights, and my camera chose to properly expose the dark brown wall in shadow in the background.

Springing Sprout

Some of my seeds have sprouted! The broccolinis are doing extremely well; almost every one sprouted up, although a few did not survive. I also have a couple of tomato and pepper sprouts, although I may have crushed one of the tomato when I accidentally dropped the curtain on it.

I also decided to seed some greens in my little garden plot today. I sowed some Catalina Spinach, Buttercrunch Lettuce and a couple of Chinese cabbages, Bak Choi and Choi Sum. Afterwards, I realized that the Buttercrunch and Chinese cabbages were in the same spot in the plot as last year. Too late -- I'd forgotten to plan ahead and rotate! I'm hoping it won't matter since the cabbages failed last year anyway. Last but not least, I planted some Red Butterworth lettuce and more spinach in some containers outside on the deck. I'm curious to see if they will grow better and faster in the theoretically warmer container soil.

Coming up, beans and cucumbers! I just bought the seeds about a week ago, on the advice that they're rewarding and easy to grow. This will be a nice challenge for my brown thumb.

Cold Cry Mates

I ran a bunch of errands today and bought a nice warm pair of black yoga pants for myself. The strange thing was that, in the front of the shop, there was a large rack of bathing suits. Mental check. Swimsuits? In the winter? It just snowed a few days ago and shops are selling swimsuits already!

Maybe this means it's about time to sow the seeds in the garden. Do I sow because we're coming on to mid-April and I won't have my harvest unless I start soon? Or do I hold off because it still snows and I'm supposed to wait until "all danger of frost is past"? Maybe the snow doesn't count, as long as I don't actually see any frost. Damn, I wish it were warmer.

While I cry to myself about the injustice of the local climate and its consequences on my agricultural instincts, I'll share a scan of my favourite sticker in the whole wide world.

Seeders

I'm starting seeds for my garden. Today I did some broccoli and tomato seeding in some peat pots and egg cartons, and last week I did some bell pepper and zucchini in peat pots. I'm hoping this will extend my season enough so that I can finally get some fresh ripe tomatoes from my garden! That's still my goal... third year's a charm, I hope.

Last year I found that seeding in the peat pots made it near impossible to control the moisture, so I've planted the seeds in the pots individually, then planted the pots into a compost/soil mix. This worked fairly well last year, almost a 100% success rate, so here's hoping for the same. I'm actually being reasonable this year and trying not to overseed since it breaks my heart when I have to kill the excess sprouts so young. I hope this is not too few: 9 broccoli seeds (one fell out into the big pot), 6 tomato, 2 zucchini, and a bunch of pepper seeds since they don't do as well.

Spring forth and prosper, little ones!