chromedome

A fun interview with Steve (conducted by a personal friend): https://www.altaonline.com/culture/food-drink/a63904280/steve-sando-rancho-gordo-bean-empire/

I just got back from my monthly 5-day visit to my mom and daughter in Nova Scotia (it seems to be the optimal compromise between "never enough time there," and "always too long to be from home"). In my absence, the baby bunnies grew immoderately. These are Hazel's and Ivy's litters, so the little ones from the compare-and-contrast above are both shown here. Hazel's kits are still bigger, though the others are catching up fast. This next two weeks, until they're fully weaned, is (to me) when they're at their absolute cutest. Right now they follow Mama around, trying to nurse, until she gets impatient and hops up on top of the nest box to get a break. We separate them right around the time they're finally big enough to follow her up there, because sheesh! They need some downtime. Also, that's just how the timing works out for breeding the does again, at least in our scheme of things. Commercial meat-rabbit growers breed them shortly after they've given birth, so the old litter is weaned just as the new litter is about due, but that's hard on the does and (as explained way back upthread) we don't want to work ours that hard. Healthier mamas and fewer, healthier kits works for us. So yeah, if harvesting our fuzzy bunnies is the worst step in the process (it is), this is the most agreeable. For the next few weeks we'll handle the little kits as much as we can, to socialize them and get them comfortable with humans. Whether we sell them as pets or breeders, or ultimately put them in our freezer, having them associate human hands with warmth, cuddles and - in general - Good Things Happening just makes life a lot easier. I've mentioned before that our buck Carrot is by far the most cuddly of the current crew. When I got home on Saturday and fed the bunnies for the first time since returning, he came to the door of his cage for his usual nose-boop and cuddles. Instead of turning his head after the nose-boop, as usual, so I could stroke around his chin and chest (his favorite thing), he instead just leaned his face into mine and stayed there for several long moments as I petted him. That was a first, with any of the rabbits we've had. I definitely felt I'd been missed.

It's funny, the things that linger on. Here in Canada, for example, the use of personal cheques essentially died in the 90s, with the advent of debit cards, except for the older half of the Boomer demographic and the dwindling number of our parents. The only reason I even have a chequebook anymore is because my former insurance company (note the adjective) would not accept payments in any other format, and my former landlord required his year's rent in the form of post-dated cheques (that was a decade ago, and I still have the remainder of that book of cheques). Yet they remain widely used in the US. On the flip side, that rapid and near-universal adoption of debit cards (especially now that debit and credit are tap-and-go) means that we've been slower to adopt phone-based wallets relative to many other countries. It's not uncommon here, but is nowhere close to supplanting the actual cards in universality. For me it's a no-brainer because my card is always in my wallet, which in turn is always in my pocket, whereas my phone is wherever I last set it down. Also, having written so much about online/digital security, the less of my life is on my phone the better I like it ("Okay, Boomer..."). You might accurately guess from that "...wherever I last set it down" comment that in my case, this is based less in paranoia than learned experience. For another example of decidedly old-school tech, the fax still lingers on here at medical offices. It's used for sending prescriptions from doctors to pharmacies, and prescription requests from pharmacies to doctors (ie, if a prescription is running out and has no refills, they'll fax the doctor for you to have a refill prescription written and returned). I believe they're also still used for sending requisitions from doctors to labs for bloodwork and imaging, though email and the province's new-and-improved digital portal are slowly taking over on that front. I don't know if it's the same in Ontario or if we're just that much of a backwater, though @Kerry Beal could probably enlighten us on that score.

It's a green tomato relish. Very popular here in Atlantic Canada, where some years we're likely to have more green tomatoes than ripe ones.

I remember you! Glad to hear that the LoafNest was a success, however modest (I gave you a quote for the campaign). I am on record here on the site (probably more than once) as saying that induction would be perfect for seniors (for safety/convenience reasons), if only someone would build an affordable induction hob with a simple dial rather than [expletive] touchpads. I'm not nearly as exacting in my use of induction as some of the others here on the site, largely because I have no meaningful use-case for sous vide, but a unit with better control than the two I currently use (both of them increment the power in 10 steps, so I'm often choosing between "a bit too fast" and "a bit too slow." At this point app-controlled/IoT devices are a hard no for me, and I'm an open-source guy by inclination (Ubuntu Linux is my OS of choice since 2007), so you check the right boxes for me on that front, as well. Several people here on the site bought an induction hob called Paragon, which also aimed for precision at a low price (perhaps some owners could weigh in on similarities and differences?) but sadly didn't make it commercially. Hopefully you fare better with this device.

It's almost that time of year again...

Huh. I don't know if it qualifies as "fun stuff," but one of our two national grocery chains (Sobeys) is now carrying a range of products from its UK counterpart, Sainsbury's. It seems to mostly be incidental stuff, like marmalade, candy, canned beans, cookies (sorry, biscuits) and lemon curd. UK peeps, are any of their products especially notable?

Yeah, that's a head-scratcher. I wonder whatever possessed them to make the cooking vessel square (-ish) rather than round? It's a pretty fundamental design flaw; you'd think a beta-tester might have mentioned this?

I mentioned a few days ago that I'm trying to form the habit of taking pics of my food occasionally, just to develop some familiarity with the camera on my new (-to me) S22, a significant upgrade from my older phone (an S7). That resolve happened to coincide with me making a "grown-up meal" for just the two of us last night, instead of the usual routine of grinding out something acceptable to all three generations living under our roof. The plating isn't exactly elegant (it was late and I was hungry), but it's a stew of rabbit and dried wild mushrooms (the Costco mix), served over soft polenta with steamed cauli and Brussels sprouts. It was tasty.

Via my daughter...

AFAIK they're all coturnix quail in different colorations. They can be harvested for meat at around 7 weeks (less than half the time for bobwhite quail, for example) and start laying at around 8 weeks old IIRC. So that makes them pretty great as homestead birds. Not everyone has the patience for fiddling with their itty-bitty eggs, but it's not really *that* big a deal once you get used to it. Here's an article that gives the basics of quail-rearing, if you're interested (even vicariously). https://rurallivingtoday.com/backyard-chickens-roosters/coturnix-quail/

Yesterday was a "quail day." I've mentioned that my father-in-law was incubating a batch of them for us, and they began to hatch out in the early hours of Friday. We were there yesterday afternoon, and got to watch a couple of them hatch while we were there. Here's a shot of the view through the side of the incubator, with new hatchlings scurrying around on top of their siblings: Again, for context, they're about the size of my thumb at this point (a quail's egg is roughly a teaspoon, or 5 ml, in volume). Note the new arrival at bottom right. And this little guy is the one we watched hatch out, with occasional supportive pecks at the shell from the already-hatched siblings. He's pretty gassed, at this point. They bounce back quickly, though, once they have a chance to recuperate and dry off. Remember the itty-bitty quail in the box, from the pic a few posts upthread? Well, this is them now (roughly 1 month old). They're all fledged out, now, and just this morning I heard one of the males crow for the first time (in response/challenge to an adult in the main cage), so it's just about time to sex and separate them. They're perhaps 2/3 adult size, at this point. The females will start laying in another few weeks.

I made a point of taking pictures today, since it's been a while between bunny pics and I know some of you could do with a bit of fuzzy cuteness in your lives right now. I was out adding a panel of finer mesh to Hazel's cage, because her kits' eyes are open now and they'll be out exploring within the next few days. We've had unfortunate incidents of babies falling through the wider, heavier-gauge mesh that makes up the cages, but small-mesh "hardware cloth" (1/4-inch square mesh) is large enough to let rabbit droppings drop without allowing the babies to drop as well. Adding the mesh took longer than I'd expected, because Hazel - after being skittish and "hand-shy" since the day we'd gotten her - has suddenly discovered that she actually likes being petted, so while I was trying to wire the new panels in place she was bonking her head into my hand, just as a cat does. As it turns out, I may not have needed to worry about that. Her kits are freakin' HUGE! Check this out: I know it's hard to judge scale, when looking at photos like this, so here's a shot of one of Ivy's babies (a couple of days younger) for comparison purposes: Hazel's little one is at least 50 percent larger. So, while it's a shame that we lost so many kits, the survivors in her litter are reaping the benefit by having all the milk they can handle. In other news we're within a few days of our baby chicks hatching (here), and our next batch of quail hatching (at my father-in-law's place). We're not sure how we'll do with the silver-laced Wyandottes, because the eggs were held up in Ontario for two extra days by a late-season snowstorm. The silkies, at least, were local so we know their provenance and what temperature they were held at. I guess we'll see how things shake out over the next several days.

It's a beautiful day, today, so I took the opportunity to assess what survived and did not survive out in my garden. In the herb bed, the picture is much more positive than last year, probably because we had a normal quantity of snow to protect the plants. My thyme, oregano, sage and parsley all survived, this time, which was not the case last year. The lovage, mint and Egyptian walking onions all did as well, though I had no qualms about any of those. They'll survive just about anything short of nuclear winter. I also found my newly-established strawberry bed in good order, along with a few carrots that were too small to bother with last autumn. I'll let them run to seed, and then save the seed. The curly kale is still doing fine under its cover, but the lacinato kale, after over-wintering successfully, has been eaten to the stumps by some pest or other (grrr). It's too early for insect pests, I think, even at the larval stage, so I suspect rodents. On a happier note, I was surprised and pleased to see that last year's late-season planting of spinach is bouncing back quite happily. In my area we don't traditionally put out transplants or direct-seed most vegetables until mid-May or thereabouts, but I'm encouraged to see all of these things popping back up so readily.