I’m pretty sure this hawk knew I was taking this photo this morning. I’m glad he let me.
A labour of love. Lots of labour…lots of love. The Handyman built me an English secret garden over the past five years. I can’t wait for spring so I’m jumping ahead a few months.
As the Okanagan is so hot and dry in summer, the best way to re-create England was to do so in a contained area that could have heaps of compost and good soil and be efficiently irrigated. The soil is very sandy here so this step was key.
My ultimate garden is one where you can shove your hand into rich loamy soil up to your elbow. I’ve been working hard amending the soil every year to keep it that way.
Handyman can do pretty much anything with some rental equipment. The garden is located on what was a hill. We, well…he raised it even more and levelled it before installing cedar fencing around the perimeter.
He built this round gate in the garage in the winter and installed it the first spring we were here. I’ve toyed with painting it to emphasize the roundness but am still deciding. It’s awaiting a latch of some kind as well.
Stuff grows like Jack’s magic beanstalk with the good soil, proper irrigation and the protection from the wind. I’ve never seen anything like it. After moving from Calgary with its challenging gardening conditions its hard to have any discipline or order. I have a tendency to plant some of everything so it’s an editing work in progress.
Here’s just a few more photos for now. I’ll revisit the garden soon when the bulbs start blooming.
“However many years she lived, Mary always felt that ‘she should never forget that first morning when her garden began to grow’.” Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden.
“Is the spring coming?” he said. “What is it like?” … “It is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine…” Frances Hodgson, The Secret Garden.
“The Secret Garden was what Mary called it when she was thinking of it. She liked the name, and she liked still more the feeling that when its beautiful old walls shut her in no one knew where she was. It seemed almost like being shut out of the world in some fairy place.” Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden.
With bud break just around the corner in the Valley, here is a fast forward to the grape harvest on the Naramata Bench to remind us of the fruits of all the work beginning to happen in the vineyards.
(Reprinted with permission of The Calgary Herald, here is a story I wrote of my first harvest in the Okanagan.)
The Okanagan’s annual wine grape harvest requires spirit and stamina
By Elaine Davidson
Crush. It’s not just what they do to the grapes. Think about it: ideally, fresh fruit on the vine should be on its way to being a delightful alcoholic beverage all in the same day. This means working literally day and night, under lights, clad in rubber boots, wet, cold and stained purple.
At Township 7 Vineyards and Winery on B. C.’s Naramata Bench, assistant winemaker Stephanie Norton Minnick told me she only had about two days off last year between Oct. 4 and Nov. 7.
“Over the Thanksgiving weekend, I worked 42 hours, catching a few hours of sleep in my car,” she recalls.
She told me this after winemaker Bradley Cooper had hired me on as a part-time worker, but it might explain why he chose me just a few months before the grape harvest. He was clearly looking for help of any kind, and unfortunately the sort of burly guy with winery skills he was really looking for was making himself scarce.
Which is how, newly moved to Naramata from Calgary and surrounded by vineyards, I found myself marinating in my new carpe diem life in wine country.
Like many in the Okanagan, Township 7 is a relatively small winery (set up to produce about 7,000 cases a year) that uses every centimetre of space to make more wine (12,000 cases in 2008).
So how does crush work? First, tend the vineyard–seven acres of Merlot, Chardonnay, Gewurztraminer and Pinot Gris vines –for a year.
When grapes are ready, meaning they have achieved the perfect level of Brix (sugars, acids and pH), it’s time to handpick them.
De-stemmers, crushers and presses are set up in the morning, put through their paces for hours and cleaned every night.
Whites are then pressed and cold-settled overnight and racked to take the clear juice off the top and the solids filtered out, while reds head into the fermenters, where they have to be punched down three times a day, using a long stainless steel tool capped with a round plate. (The grape skins are punched into the liquid below to give the wine more flavour, colour and astringency.)
Either way, carefully selected yeasts are added (thrown) into the juice (called must).
So many fermenters are stuffed into the winery that some could only be reached for the punch-downs by walking a plank placed on the top. I declined this experience, although I am a good swimmer. When the reds reach the right Brix, they’re pressed.
Finally, reds and some whites are pumped into barrels; other whites are left to mature in steel tanks.
“Despite all of the stress and hugely long hours, you do think that each load of grapes that show up may be the champion ones that win you awards,” Cooper says. “It’s the time you find out if all the measuring, testing and the numbers mean anything.”
I learned a lot of things, like the winemaker’s mantra, “It takes a lot of beer to make good wine,” that working well together in a crew can be hugely rewarding, the crush smells good–and the purple stains eventually come off.
Copyright: The Calgary Herald
Anthropomorphism? I don’t think so. Dudley the pig is definitely smiling in the sun on this spring-like day at Andy’s Animal Acres on the Naramata Bench.
I don’t blame them. If I was a critter I would want to live on Andréa Buyan’s little farm at 1154 Three Mile Road on the way to Naramata. I hesitate to call Andy’s a petting zoo. It’s more like animal nirvana. And it’s place for parents and children to learn respect for farm animals. “Kids spend so much time in the virtual world and there is such a disconnect between people and the source of their food that I feel I can help,” says Andy. Many of her charges are rescues, all like Wilbur will not end up on a dinner plate and she works with many young volunteers who find the experience therapeutic. Lots of wins there. The animals come first with opening hours limited to four at a time and lots of fresh air, sunshine and room to roam at the farm.
I was particularly taken with the chickens. I feel I should name this series of photographs: Portrait of a Rooster, one, two and three.
Andy learned her animal husbandry skills during a 10-year stint at Maplewood Farms in North Vancouver. She turned her property from weeds and dirt to home for more than 60 farm animals over a period of eight years, opening to the public in the spring of 2013. A labour of love, it costs her more than $900 a month to feed all the critters and insure her business. Then there are vet bills, heating lamps, equipment….and “constant, constant, constant labour.”
There are some great rewards though.
And a whole lot of love on the farm.
It’s all fun and games until a goat jumps on your back.
Opening again soon on weekends, you can find out more by calling 250-809-5122. I’ll leave you with a few more photos.
Of the terms in my header…”vintage” is by far the most disturbing. I wrote my university thesis about Marian Engel and her novel, Bear, which is now mouldering in some unforgotten corner of the Mount Allison University library. Vintage? Really?
Engel’s Bear, is outwardly a novel about a sexual relationship a woman has with a bear told in a pretty explicit way. Inwardly, according to my brilliant thesis, it’s about a recurring Canadian literature theme of our complex relationship with nature. Like all Canadians, when we get a bit messed up in our heads, we find some wilderness to sort out who really are and what matters the most.
The novel won the Governor General Award in 1976 and then sort of fell into obscurity. Along comes 50 Shades of Grey and voila, Bear is re-discovered and an imgur post about it went viral.
A blog reader sent me this link to a series of Bear covers re-imagined. I love this one by Kris Mukai…
By moving to Naramata I’m living that quintessential Canadian literature dream that began somewhere around 1852 with Susanna Moodie’s Roughing it in the Bush. I’ve found the nature I’ve always craved and in a full-circle, coincidental, ‘wee de wee de’ way, a ton of bears in the process, none of which I have gone near enough to touch let alone…
Our property is in the middle of a well-travelled bear super highway. On one side is a large treed acreage and on the other a creek that brings them down from higher country to look for food in late summer and fall.
Here is a small selection of the many photos I’ve taken in our yard.
The Naramata Cider Company is making some magic. Miranda and Del Halladay have found a way to distill the essence of summer in this special part of Canada’s Okanagan Valley into a refreshing, sparkling drink best sipped resting in a hammock.
The couple who founded Elephant Island Winery in 1999 have been trialling cider since 2005 and felt ready to open the sister company in 2014 to get in on the ground floor of an exploding craft cider movement. The Naramata Cider Company is the first cidery on the Naramata Bench in British Columbia, so well known for its many wonderful wineries.
“Our craft ciders offer a richer, more diverse experience for visitors to the area,” says Miranda. “It allows us to create something else great from what we grow here. When you look down on Naramata you see a quilt made up of vineyards and orchards with all the pieces weaving into one another. We have added another agricultural element to that tapestry.”
She says the Naramata Cider Company is perfect fit with Naramata’s special status as a member community of Cittaslow International. Born from the slow food movement, Cittaslow’s main goal is to promote the philosophy of Slow Food to local communities and governments, applying the concepts of eco-gastronomy to everyday life.
Made from either apples or pears, it tastes lovely. As I’m not a tasting expert, I’ll defer to someone who is. The Vancouver Sun’s noted wine critic Anthony Gismondi describes the Naramata Cider Company’s Dry Apple Cider Rest Easy as: “Effervescent with spicy, ginger, light floral, grassy cooked apple aromas. Dry, light, fresh style with good bubbles. Flavours are light with green apple and grass with a bit of lees. Elegant, but very simple…” He had me at effervescent.
Crushed, pressed and bottled in Naramata, the company produces dry pear cider, dry apple cider and cider maker’s (Del) select which was a limited production of apple meets blackberry this past season. Production is growing from 7,000 litres in June of 2015 to 20,000 litres beginning this April.
Some of those litres will be sold in single-serve bottles this year in addition to their current 750 ml bottles and others in a new type of recyclable keg made by Petainer.
There are now about 25 licensed producers of cider and apple wine in British Columbia and half have been licensed in the past two years. What’s the big deal? It’s all about the craft that is going into making them, says Miranda. Gone are the days of sweet, syrupy “alcopop” so-call ciders that are made from concentrate with added sugar and artificial flavours. According to noted wine writer and critic John Schreiner, so much care goes into making these new craft ciders that they are as complex as wine. An added benefit is cider’s moderate alcohol content of seven per cent and the fact that they are gluten-free.
Miranda says the cider’s branding is a fun way to tell the story of Naramata.
For example, we have a peacock that calls Naramata Village home. “We love it…especially when it’s chasing the blue recycling truck down Robinson. Another reason to slow down and appreciate the joy.”
Castanet used my blog post. Check it out here.
Clever marketing or quelle horreur?
Wines with funny names are cropping up all along the Naramata Bench and in the Okanagan Valley. A French friend once said she only buys bottles with standard labels and classy names respecting the French tradition where the Chateaux was of prime importance. Deeply suspicious of the quality of a product with a name like “Well La-Di-Da”, (Church and State), said friend felt the name was a key indicator of how seriously the winery took itself and its product.
A more recently made French friend brought the above pictured bottle to us a gift. “Names like this would never fly in France, but this isn’t France.” She appreciates the more light-hearted approach and we enjoyed a very nice glass of Carpe Diem Bitches, merci beaucoup.
A forerunner of fun names and well respected Naramata winery, Therapy Vineyards has gone to town with its wines dispensed from its Farmacy wine shop. Freudian Sip and Freud’s Ego are two of their world-class wines. On the doctor’s couch I would confess to a bit of pinot envy about their naming genius.
Another winery, staggering distance from our house, Van Westin has gone a bit haywire with “V” names: Voluptuous, Vixin, Vulture and Vrankenstein are Very fun, particularly the latter as volunteer pickers harvest the grapes at Halloween in costumes and proceeds are donated to charity.
More ominously, Black Widow offers a very nice Phobia, Red Eyed or White Knuckle are Monster Vineyards’ offerings, Tightrope sells Vertigo and Tip-Toe and Laughing Stock sells lots of Portfolio and Blind Trust.
A short drive to OK Falls and you can taste OMG, Hatfield’s Fuse and Big Bang Theory from some bottles featuring some very cool, award-winning artwork.
Misconduct’s wine tourers can decide if they prefer Misfit or The Big Take. Can’t decide? Quidni suggests, Why Not Red or Why Not White.
If you think bubbles up the fun quotient Therapy’s solution is Fizzio Therapy. Too many bubbles and you see Pink Elephants from Elephant Island. Ruby Blues pops your cork with Peace & Love & Bubbles.
I’m with my new delightful French friend. It’s all in good fun and inside those cleverly-named bottles is some very nice wine. Oliver’s Church and State really does take the cake though with: Oh Bloody Hell, Tonight is the Night, I’d Shave My Legs for You and You’d Better Delete That. I think they have their demographic nailed. I dare any 20 to 30-year-old to buy Oh Yeah Post This and not.
Castanet used my blog post. Check it out here.
How pretentious is it to name your house? Oh, very, so let’s up the ante and choose a latin name.
The Handyman hails from England where house naming is a thing. Think Primrose Cottage, Two Hoots, Crumbledown, Nudgens, Wits End, Tweedledum, or Creeping Snail.
We have neighbours with house names like Ironpost Guest House, Apple D’Or and Fox Ben but they are guest houses with a good reason for a name. Also nearby is Rancho Costa Plenty which has been sale for awhile. Maybe the naming isn’t working out so well for them.
We could have chosen another dead language name like Cave Canem (beware of the dog) but that would have dated us our two pals lived to ripe old ages and are now planted in the garden, or Nessum Dorma (none shall sleep) with the idea of discouraging visitors from overstaying.
A week after our gate and name went up a neighbour pulled his car over to chat and said, “You know, I drive by your gate every day on my way to work and think, seize the day, yup, good idea.”
As hokey as it sounds, it’s become a mantra for our house that is often welcoming visitors with wine, zip lining and evenings on the deck.
If we lived in England in say, Bognor Regis where we have wonderful relatives I would want a house here and would call it Disturbia.
naramata-blend 