The Sourdough Blues

I’ve had the sourdough blues. It started out well enough: the loaf pictured here was my first leavened entirely by wild starter (as opposed to commercial yeast). By then I’d nurtured the teeming colony of lactic acid bacteria (LABs) and various yeasts for almost two weeks, feeding it once, and then twice a day until the blob settled into a familiar pattern of eating, rising, falling. What magic, our microbial world!

The Comfrey Mocks Me

This morning I went out to the garden, coffee in hand, and was reminded for the umpteenth time that we really need to hack back the comfrey and throw it in the compost before it smothers the strawberry patch. It’s even turned up in the front yard and along the driveway fence; whether seed blew over or it tunneled underneath isn’t clear. Incredulous as it sounds, the latter wouldn’t surprise me. But instead of grabbing the shears, I went back inside…again. Don’t get me wrong, comfrey is a wonderfully important plant if you’re trying to recycle nutrients in your garden, but calling it an ambitious is putting it mildly. Only the raspberries and the mint are comparable opportunists.

The comfrey somewhere it shouldn’t be.

So it seems fitting that later this morning I stumbled across an article on prickly comfrey in an 1875 issue of Canada Farmer, chiding me for my laziness. We have the regular comfrey, rather than the prickly sort they describe (thank goodness), but their wisdom still holds:

“The advantages which are claimed for it over other plants are these:–It affords a cutting earlier, and lasts longer than almost any other. If cultivated upon a good deep soil, it will yield a heavier crop than any other plant; and, when once planted, it will last for ever.”

It sure does.

Our Plucky Urban Garden

We’re late starting the garden this year, but since spring took its sweet-ass time we should be okay. The strawberries and garlic are mulched, the raspberry bush has been reprimanded for growing everywhere, and we finally sowed some peas, fava beans, chard, lettuce, radishes, and arugula. Roots tomorrow, if it doesn’t rain again. We even bought an electric rototiller. (If you’re in Hamilton and need a rototiller, you can borrow ours!)

The Sunflower Mess

Last summer I drove Cheddar the Chariot (my scooter) back and forth along Highway 6 on a regular basis.  As any historian of agriculture is wont to do, I’d often converse with things, like the cows at the farm with the big green barn near Morriston.

Shit Dead White Dudes Say…about Dairy

A few folks have mentioned that my occasional Facebook dissertation updates are amusing, though I suspect the amusement is partially at my own expense.  Nevertheless, I thought it fitting to start a series of short posts about stuff I come across.  Enjoy.

When Farmers Don’t Co-operate (Dairy Style)

Hello, world!  I’m working on some lengthier posts, but in the meantime I’d like to share with you something I found in the archives yesterday that made me smile.

The context: I’m working on a couple chapters for my dissertation that focus on the idea of a ‘landscape of co-operation’ in the 19th century dairying countryside and all the ways in which that rational, scientific, spatial, and social ‘plan’ was thwarted by local networks, bad roads, grumpy cows, farmers shopping around for the best deal for their milk, and so on.

Building a Hamilton-based Seed Library?

Over the years I’ve developed a finely tuned tolerance for winter that balances the recognition of seasonality’s importance for southern Ontario with a curmudgeonly bitterness far more intense than the rest of the year.  I’ve coped with winters of late by dividing them into the holiday part, followed by the long, escapist part when I think about gardening, pore over seed catalogues, and mastermind brilliant garden plans. (Incidentally, my summers seem to be divided into two parts as well: the part when I try to put those plans in action, followed by the hot, sweaty resignation part when things get out of hand.)

Shame on the Anti-feminists

Lately I’ve noticed numerous anecdotal signs of an anti-feminist groundswell: friends announcing on Facebook that they’re ‘over’ feminism (post-feminists, some would say), and a proliferation of signs on Hamilton telephone poles decrying the supposedly feminist-led assault on men’s rights.  (I’m working up the energy to eventually tackle a post on the men’s rights movement, but today is not that day.)

Brief Thoughts on Five Days in Boston

For a historian, a trip to Boston is pretty cool.*  I did a little bit of work while I was there, followed by a lot of walking, a lot of eating, a lot of drinking local beer, a lot of reading small plaques on old buildings that celebrate (mostly) rich white dudes who did stuff (and usually not in the best interests of other non-rich, non-white, non-male people), and admiring those buildings even though it made me feel a little guilty.  We–my boyfriend and I–did a lot of chatting, too, which reached the level of slightly inebriated, semi-philosophical debate about History at McGreevy’s Bar in Back Bay.

Doing Away with Double Blind

Warning: academic rant.

Having taken a solid month six weeks seven weeks off after comps to ‘unwind’ (i.e. do everything I put off for 8 months), I’ve returned to my academic work.  One of my fall projects is to revise and submit for publication two papers I’ve been working on for a while.

Once submitted to academic journals, both of these papers will undergo a process known as peer review, which means that they will be judged by a couple of readers (experts in one’s field) who suggest to the journal whether or not they think the article should ultimately be published. In general this process is  double-blind, meaning I will not know who reviewed it, nor will the readers know whose work they are reviewing.