Solid second

Its difficult to get back into things that you have put aside for a while… perhaps even more difficult than starting anew, so I’m going to, after this sentence, pretend that I haven’t not been blogging for the past 3+ months.

It seems as though things are finally coming to a settling point after a busy summer that just bled into fall. A model for the social housing competition kept that to-do on my list long after the official win. Apparently when you win things it means you have to do more work. I will be reconsidering the goal of winning things.

Second place seems to be a nice comfy spot for me though. In addition to the design competition, my rowing crew won second in our last two races of the season. Even though the days are too short now to row during the week, we put together an 8 about 7 weeks ago and we’ve been training pretty intensively since then. This past weekend we raced in Seattle  and a few weeks ago we had 2 races in Victoria. All three got us 2nd place.  Getting back into rowing has given me another look at the city, both from the water and through people who aren’t students trapped in the architecture building at UBC. I’m really liking the women I row with and comradery of the club. It can get pretty sentimental and sappy (refer to previous sentence) when you have all that adrenaline running through your body, but none the less.

I’m thinking of taking up fly fishing though I’m not sure where my startup funds will come from. There’s a sport that has no winning, except belly filling winning and its just one more thing to do in the beautiful outdoors that doesn’t involve too much potential for me getting hurt.

I won something!

So one of the big reasons I didn’t post all summer was this project, Future Social. It was a design competition sponsored by BC housing and UBC. The project I did with two of my collegues focused on women working to get their children back from the state’s care (thanks Katie for the info/inspiration). The awards ceremony was last night. I’m not sure how it happened since there were lots of really great entries, but we got second, SECOND! The images are the boards that we submitted (the images got a little long in the upload if they look funny).

Away awhile

Ah… Summer’s almost up and sitting inside on my computer more than I have to might start sound appealing again. In reality, I have managed to get myself into one of my busiest summers ever. I’m not quite sure how I do this to myself, but I do. I’ve been working full time at my awesome job, I started rowing and went from rowing 3 times a week to 5 before the Canadian Master’s regatta, plus I have been working on a little architectural competition for school, gardening and I’ve been reading- 10 books this summer and I think I can finish at least one more before Sept. This might not be impressive to all ye PhDs out there, but I draw for a living so I’m out of the habit I never got into.

A well loved but distant friend commented that my blog doesn’t actually say very much about me and what I’m doing. It’s true- it doesn’t focus on a single subject and it doesn’t focus on me so its probably not interesting to anyone. I’ll be working on that in the next few days catching people up on what I’m actually doing.

Till then, I’m not dead, just busy.

Food Sourcing

Strawberry fields in Watsonville from Kelsey Parker's Flickr stream licensed under the creative commons

There are many wonderful things about eating local foods, but I’ve always wondered, product by product, if it really is better for the environment to be a localvore. See, we only ever seem to take transport costs into consideration when we think about this, but there are really so many other factors. For example, natural gas is primarily used to make fertilizer. If a region grows more pounds of food on less fertilizer, it could have a higher enviromental benefit than a plant grown locally, that doesn’t want to grow there and needs more fertilizer. Or think about lamb. Some places you can raise more sheep per acre because of how well grasses grow. I’m not sure where this is done best, but if you need a ton of land (which must be fertilized) to raise fewer sheep than it might make more ecological sense to ship in lamb from somewhere else.

But I don’t know. I don’t know all the variables and I don’t know the numbers that go with each one. Some economists would argue that if there were not outside incentives (but there always are) than the products that are the cheapest use the fewest resources and are best for the environment. I can think of arguements against this, but there is a generalized point.

This question is why I found this article in the Toronto Starso interesting. It tracks a batch of strawberries from its begginings to its ends while comparing them to local Ontario strawberries. To start, the process of breeding strawberries is amazing as each strawberry plant has 8 distinct cromosons. Wen you go read it make sure to check out the comments. I swear some of the commenters didn’t read the article. They rail about how this is genetically modified fuit, when what it is  breed fruit, just like all our other food, local organic or not. Saying this is genetically modified is like saying that a german shepard has the same genetic manipulation as a glow in the dark bunny.

I found two of the comparisons to Ontario strawberries interesting. First “On a per-pound basis, an 18-wheeler emits one-fifteenth the carbon dioxide of a delivery van heading to a local farmers’ market.” I’m not sure if that is mile for mile or in total though I’m guessing the first, meaning its probably still better in this part of the equation to buy local. Second cooling strawberries in Ontario takes 3 days in a fridge in California they have a super cooler that takes an hour and a half. Again I’m not sure how much energy both systems draw except that the 1.5 hour method uses 1/5 the energy of the 3 hour method.

So I still don’t really know which is better, but if we really want to know- here’s a sample of everything that would go into it.

Chocolate Chip Cookies- Thank you Cook’s Illustrated

I’m a pretty simple girl when it comes to home made cookies- I just want them to be good and in my book the tollhouse recipe is good enough. Unfortunately the tollhouse chips have been hard to come by for me in Canada and with it the recipe. (who would write down a recipe when you have known where to find it your whole life?) So I was pleased as punch that Cook’s Illustrated came out with an improved recipe in this months magazine. I’m not going to give it away because I appreciate the work Cook’s Illustrated does and I want you to go buy the magazine. If you are not familiar, its the one that always has the hoity toity paintings of veggies or fruit on the cover. But what they do is remarkable, it’s like a cooking magazine for scientists. In each article they have a goal of something they want to make or make better. They do research start with a combo of recipes and test them on food testers all the way along. When they have made 1200 cookies and are satisfied, the recipe is done. You get the recipe and the story of how it came to be.

So back to the cookies. The main move in this recipe is melting and browning most of the butter which gives the cookies a really deep nutty flavour and it you bake them right away they get this awesome crust. They are not as amazing when you freeze and then cook the dough, but I’m sure experiments could be done toward that end as well. The down side is it took a bit more hand beating in intervals, but more importantly the opportunities to surreptitiously eat cookie dough diminished. My favorite part (like everyone else) is licking the “empty” bowl, spatulas and beaters. Here the melted butter made the the dough stick together better and be more greasy so if you wanted to eat cookie dough, you had to just admit it to yourself and take a wad off the giant ball (I did).

All and all, better that the recipes of Canadian chocolate chips and probably better than tollhouse.

Planting strawberry runners

My happy strawberry plant started sending out runners last week and I stared at them for a week growing longer and longer before I bothered to look into it. See I knew the plant was looking to expand, but the real estate market on my balcony is tight so the runners just hung sadly over the pot, using up good strawberry making energy and finding nothing except that it made a good cat toy. However, once I bothered to look on the internet I saw how easy these buggers would be to transplant.

They had reached the stage where little root noduals (they look like tiny nipples) were starting to emerge so I stuck them in two small transplant pots, weighted them down with bits of terracotta so that they stayed where I wanted them andv voila. Apparently I can cut them loose from their mamma’s umbilical cord once the settle in, or so says the internet. I’ll let you know if that is not the case.

Garden not so succeses

I have a close friend who has recently started indoor herb gardening and has run up against some trouble. She also seems to think that I have a perfect garden, which, looking back at my posts it does appear I have. Frankly my gardening is going better than it’s ever gone before, but I’ve had my share of failed gardens, like my first attempt at 13 when I spent a week digging into our tiny back yard trying to till and improve the soil after which I tended a bed of plants for weeks with nothing to show but one lousy pepper, and in Southern California no less where no one can ever complain that an early frost got the crops. This garden too, is not without its share of not quite successes. So today we’ll have the gardener’s lament.

First both of my strawberries have survived, but when one is really happy, you can see how unhappy the other is. This little guy gave us a strawberry or two, but just hasn’t grown at all. You can compare its lack of growth with the giant leaf of the other strawberry plant’s leaf poking into the picture. I don’t blame mysel here, except that I must have been greedy and bought a plant that already had strawberries on it. Also known as, has been in the tiny nursery pot too long.

Last year I planted this lettuce and nothing ever got larger than the plant on the right so I’m not complaining too much, but you should know that I planted more than twice as many of these guys and this is all that bothered to grow.

Spinach has been a perpetual problem for me this year. I thought I was maybe doing all right with my slow growing spinach until I got the giant spinach from Ward that I photographed a couple of weeks back. Then it started to yellow so I started another batch. Spinach is not supposed to be this small for this long and no suprise, it has already bolted. Maybe if I learn to spell the word on the first try…

We got this crazy little green zebra tomato plant to fill in when the fava beans fell over and quit, but it’s just not too happy. It’s growing really slowly in the pot that has only made other plants gloriously happy. Plus the stems keep wilting and breaking off. My other tomatoes are doing well except that the bottom leaves keep turning purple. I am currently picking them off and hoping it’s not a problem.

And finally, downy mildew on the sage. I plucked it all feverishly before deciding to blog this so here it is in the trash. I see a little on my cucumbers too. I hear milk and water work so I’m going to try that once we get some milk back in the house.

Oh, and how could I forget, squash. This little guy looks fine, but he’s my second attempt and it may be too late. I nutrure a few little squashies under a lamp indoors for a few weeks. The ones I gave away to friends are not huge, but mine really never got much larger than this one should be in a week. Only one sorry leaf. Looking closely and worrying one day I thought it might have mites so I sprayed it with a home made solution. Too much for the little guy, after a few more days I just pulled it out.

Favas by the Wayside

So the giant fava beans have met their demise. It’s true, they didn’t yield all that much and they more or less collapsed and stopped new seed growth as soon as it got hot. That said, we did get two meals worth of fava additions, they were wonderfully tasty and they’re unprecedented growth made me so proud. Plus, they supposedly reinvigorated the soil with nitrogen.

That said, the sweet peas have yielded more, are less unwieldy, and proof of their soil improving abilities is already evident. I’ve planted 4 cucumber plants in 3 containers and the one growing in between the peas is twice the size of the others. The consensus on the favas is, yes, in the future if I still live in this clime and have a real yard, but for next year, we’re just going to have a ton of peas.

After they had been flayling all over the place for a week making it difficult to eat outside, I pulled the buch out, walked over to our local community garden and put them in thier compost. I can’t imagine they will mind the nitrogen.

Hops again

Just to prove that I’m not nuts about how fast this is growing check out last week’s photo and then this week’s. Triffids as Colin would say.

Where Have All the Rollerblades Gone?

Care of Travelin' Librarian's Flickr stream licensed under the Creative Commons License.

I promise to drop the 1960s folk music references after this post, but really, I have an answer for this one, Vancouver. Before moving here, I don’t think I’d seen Rollerblades since I gave up my own in the late 90s after getting into the trend late and being perhaps the last person left rollerblading in Newport Beach. Because I had a rambunctious German Shepard pup who pulled me though the streets I never regretted this, though when I gave the blades up I never thought about it again. I vaguely recall seeing a group of hard core in-line skaters in Central Park at some point, and flickr has proved to me that rollerblading is still cool for someone somewhere, but the trend seems all but gone… except in Vancouver.

my first summer in Vancouver, I hardly noticed in-line skates, but now that I bike the seawall almost everyday, their presence is ubiquitous. For every two bikers there is one in-line skater, and they are not all guys stuck in the 90s with a racing stripe of neon pink running down their spandex shorts; its kids, good looking youngn’s, sporty types- you name it. Plus the seawall is even marked with a little man on wheels next to the little man on a bike telling all the folks in-line skating where to go.

So why Vnacouer? At first I thought it must be that we have  the extensive system of pathways along a beautiful ocean and a summer of frankly lovely weather. But that should imply that California would have at least double the rollerbladers and let the California girl tell you, the only person skating in LA is the guy in the header photograph. So what does Vancouver have that California doesn’t? Canadians, Canadians who love hockey. Canadaians who love hockey and learned to ice skate before they were potty trained. This is my best guess. In addition to the seawall and weather Vancouver has hockey lovers and players. The fact that it’s never cold enough to have an outdoor rink probably helps to.

So that’s it mystery revealed discussed and solved.