Land below the sea - waking to the flood

One of the facts of life when you live in the Netherlands is that unless you are lucky, you live below sea level. When 2/3rds of the country is recovered from the sea, it's kind of a given. Where we are, the land started to be recovered in the 17th century with windmills lifting water from polder to polder - so it has matured and grown a broad eco-system. In some of the areas around the Ijsselmere, which were recovered as late as the 1980s, the plant variety is still surprisingly low and there is a real dearth of mature trees. The water has been removed, but it still has to be continuously cleared out and  the Dutch have built the most comprehensive system of interconnected ditches and dykes you have ever seen. As a land owner whose land abutts a drainage ditch, by law I have to have it dredged and cleared every year unless I build solid shoring along the edges of the land.

It's been raining. Quite a lot, in fact. Yesterday, the riding ring had standing water in the sand - this morning we woke to flooded fields . With a set of cold frosty nights approaching the last thing I wanted was the newly planted fruit trees to be sat in a pool of icy water and have frostbitten roots. I want that orchard, and it needs roots to be able to grow! As so often in this house, an emergency task rises to the top of the list and everything else has to go on the back burner until the situation is resolved. We pulled on our yard boots, prayed they were waterproof enough and headed out to the fields with poles, a drain cleaner, and a spade.

Between the two fields there is a deep ditch, which seemed to have been deliberately dug, so our assumption was that there should be a drainage pipe buried in there. After much paddling and digging around with frozen hands in ice cold water, turned out to be correct as an assumption. We headed down to the edge of the field to see if we could see an outlet : no visible pipe. What we could see were bits of broken plastic pipe, spread along the bank along with this autumns dredgings.

W to the rescue - initially digging out where we think the pipe should be until we found the shattered and collapsed remains of it.

Once we'd found both ends and cleared the collapsed exit, it was clear that the collapse had caused the rest of the pipe to back up with silt and mud - and that no water was going to come through any time soon. So we set to work with the flexible drain cleaner and an extended plastic pipe trying to ram the mud blockage through

We plugged away for about 40 minutes with absolutely no joy - it really wasn't shifting. The Dutch gods of the waterways were not happy and not willing to help out until W provided a blood sacrifice to satiate them. The pole that he was jamming into the top end of the pipe snapped and sharded, cutting his hand deep into the webbing between finger and thumb. I was down at the ditch end, and as he cursed and jumped around the field making pained noises, I heard the wonderful sound of rushing water as it came tumbling through the pipe .



The water's draining away steadily - let's hope that by tomorrow morning my fruit trees have dry toes again. We will have to re-lay the pipes again - its pretty clear that the current pipes are pretty knackered and worn. Given the frost forecast, I want to leave that til the spring if we can!

Organizing paint

When you set out to paint a whole house in a very short space of time with a large and changing number of people, organisation is pretty key. I'm not the world's most organised person  - I describe myself as chaotically tidy, in that I've a passion for a clean and tidy house, but I have never mastered the art of replacing everything immediately in its home location the second it is finished with. I have done project management for many years as a trade though, so I know that planning is key to success.

In an earlier post, I talked about the importance of having an idea of the character you want to build in a home, and what colors you plan to choose. I spent a lot of time in Pinterest looking for design ideas, created my own boards, used Design Seeds for color palette selection and used Evernote for co-ordination.

Having the color palette and design ideas early, meant that we could take advantage of flash sales on paint in DIY stores  and start to build stock up before we had people on the ground. It was also pretty vital to have a good stock of paints early : regular runs to the DIY stores are fun, but highly time consuming and definitely eat into your action run rate. We didn't avoid them completely - far from it, but we definitely improved on our ratio from the summer before at the old house. However this left us with a small mountain of paint tins, generally in exactly the same design bar a small printed sticker from the color mix machine.

I came up with the idea of making a couple of small binders  with room colors and instructions. Each page had one room :  the primary areas called out (ceiling, walls, wood, accent wall) and matched with the paint color details - and a swatch from the paint chips in the store taped to it. These were stored at strategic locations ( the kitchen, near the kettle & tea, near the coffee maker) so that people could check what their next color or task would be. It's a little battered now from being well thumbed, but it is still super useful for reminding myself of exact colors for touch ups and fixing small boo-boos that appear over time. So far, I haven't run out of paint, but in previous homes it has enabled me to go and get new pots long after I would otherwise have completely forgotten my choices. Each paint tin was marked with an outsized strip of masking tape on both the side AND the top, with a clear statement of room name, and what area it was intended for. Initially it was in big bold black, but as we ran through tins, and had to relabel, it was what ever writing implement we could find. It's important to have it on both side and top : they do get stacked and having to lift off 3 other pots to see if it's the right one at the bottom is a nuisance, having it on top makes it much more eye catching. Having a a common nomenclature for rooms and paint areas helped a great deal, although we still ran into the odd hiccup - mostly when I changed the room name on the fly!

 Paint brushes and trays were the next organisation hurdle. With a couple of professional decorators in the team, we took on board their advice that since we had colors that would span multiple rooms, and multiple coats of the same color, we shouldn't clean out the equipment at the end of each painting session, but instead to wrap in airtight plastic bags until the next use point. It saved us a great deal of time (and wasted paint) in clean up but we learned a few lessons along the way :

• Don't forget to label the plastic bags with the color. They get moved around and it's super hard to identify the different tint shades the next day if you paint in shades of white as I do. And realizing you are on the wrong color halfway across a wall is super frustrating!
• Do plan to have a lot more brushes, rollers and trays than you originally thought neccessary. I had assumed that one per person would be enough with a few spares, but with people painting multiple colors in a day, that number rocketed up. 
• Do have a clear plan to decommission and clean up trays for paint colors which are complete : we had quite a few trays that could have been cleared up earlier hanging around, and since we ran out people would wander around grabbing bags that looked out of service in order to equipment themselves with the expected infuriated result when the original painter came back off tea break. 

Masking tape is important for stopping paint from travelling too much, and we used a lot of reels on windows and doors. But there is always a little bit of travel and clean up. I tried again to do accent walls in much darker colors, but I still can't get straight clean lines down the edges. I've tried all sorts of tiny thin brushes, and even masking off areas, but so far it's still smudgy. I've just heard that there is a new decorators masking tape by Frog, which stops the paint from running underneath it - maybe I'll try to do some touch up with that. How do you get straight lines in paint? What is your tip for success?

Fall maintenance

Until I moved to this house, fall maintenance was not something I spent a lot of time on. If I remembered, I serviced the boiler, if not I just hoped it kept running through the winter. I move a sleeping bag, a paperback and some cereal bars into the car, because the first snows of the winter always cause crazy traffic jams.

Here in North Holland, we've found so much more to do and with winter closing in, W has been super busy. All the gutters around the roof have to be declogged every few weeks to make sure they don't block up and flood the house.He's been shifting garden furniture into winter storage, and making sure that the thatch looks in top condition. The spiders have been crazy busy all autumn and the windows are covered with cobwebs - so, cleaning time, to make sure we get the most possible light into house during the dark winter days.  The olive trees and other tender plants need to be brought in to avoid frost damage, and the stables need closing up now that the swallows have left.

What are your autumn rituals? How do you prepare for winter?

Luca's New Name

I've always been bemused by racehorse names, and pedigree animals are pretty much the same. Strange multilevel names that seem to have no connection to the animal.  After a couple of pedigree animals you'd think I'd be used to it but today I received Luca's papers. 

May I introduce Giant Angel Ultimate Edition!

I think it suits him!

Crumble 'n' cream

This summer has been all about trying to reduce some of the rampant weeds that have taken over the house garden. We've been digging and weeding and cutting and trimming .....and cussing politely lots as we suck prickled fingers or chew on stung forearms.

I took a call pretty early that we wouldn't clear the brambles near the main shed - I could see we had quite enough to do with the rest of the property. This was a source of wild food as soon as autumn came around - our first crop of  own fruit in North Holland.

Blackberries are quite pippy, but they have beautiful rich flavours that are just divine baked in a crumble served with a nice dollop of cream. In fact, a fruit crumble is my go-to recipe for resolving any fruit glut, when the freeze just can't take anymore.

Crumbles come in two parts : the topping and the filling.

Let's start with the topping - the classic 'mix' calls for 1 part flour to 1 part fat and 1 part  sugar by weight. The drier and 'crumbier' you want your topping to be, the more fat/sugar you should add until it is almost equal parts in weight. If you love the crispy biscuity topping style  but want to keep the calories down, increase the fat, and not as much of the sugar.  I personally try and always use butter for the fat, unless I have friends over who can't take milk/lactose products - I find that margarine and other such products produce much less crispy results.

You can also mix the plain flour with other ingredients to give it texture and flavour - replace some with a replacement amount of almond meal or oats to give a nuttier or crunchy top. A touch of cinnamon or ginger in the topping to match with a flavoured filling gives a little zing.

For the fillings you can use combinations of most berries and orchard fruits - household favourites are apple, plum, blackberry, and rhubarb. Spread into the base of the baking tin, sprinkle with sugar or sweetener of choice ( honey, agave syrup, maple syrup) and spice up as desired ( cinnamon, ginger, cloves). Here in the Netherlands, I use speculaas spice - a lovely premixed winter cookie flavouring.   I rarely pre-cook the fruit unless they are particularly hard or particularly acid  as my circle like quite sharp, solid fillings - rhubarb and hard cooking apples are the only two that get a quick zap in a pan with water and sugar beforehand.

When you fill the baking dish with your filling, be aware that the softer the fruit you use in the filling, the more crumble topping you will need as the base of the crumble (crumble DMZ!) will absorb liquids and become a sweet flavoured doughy textured mass. So make sure you make lots of topping - and don't worry if you have too much as you can easily freeze it and use it straight out of the freezer later on.

Pop into a pre-heated oven at 180C/350F and cook for 30 minutes or until bubbling and crispy. If you have little volcanic explosions through the crumble, you either cooked it too long or your crumb was spread unevenly and too thinly. Never mind, they taste divine anyway!

Lastly devour with cream, or custard or evaporated milk. Be careful if it's just come out the oven - the sugar stays hot quite a while!

Autumn's gold

Some of these posts may seem a little bit out of sequence because I am playing catch-up on a summer's worth of work in my blog. But the autumn weather has been beautiful - grey clouds shooting across the sky, winds whipping around corners, catching leaves and scattering them across the garden like stolen treasures. It's a constant battle to keep the concrete clear of leaves so that the cars have grip and grass disappears overnight in a golden blanket. 

I just had to share a few pictures of my 2 favourite men playing in the leaves. Luca's been having a complete blast and is burning up so much energy kicking up the leave piles, that he's curled up asleep from about 6 in the evening onwards. As you can see, it's not just Luca having fun!

Quick tool update - the  Stihl kombisystem has come into play again. We were super excited to find that it has a leaf blower attachment. It's cheaper than buying a standalone leaf blower - and because the base engine has to be capable of cutting brush, it's much more powerful than most blowers on the market. I'm also grateful for the ear defenders - it doesn't get any quieter!

We've been using an old silo bin as storage for our compost and garden waste - it drops about 2 feet down below ground level and is well contained to stop leaves from blowing out. With every run to the silo, I feel more and more like Smaug the dragon building my own personal gold mountain.

Montreal

As it's been cold rainy and grey, I've decided to take a quick look back at somewhere much sunnier (then) !

Just before I got the keys to the new place, work kindly sent me to Montreal, Canada  for conference. This is always a busy time, but I decided to stay on for a long weekend and meet up with family and friends in the area.It's been a long time since I've been to Canada - the best part of 15 years  and a lot has changed. Montreal's economy has clearly struggled in the interim and this lack of cashflow has definitely left it's mark on areas of the city.

As I was in the centre of the city, I couldn't resist a visit to Notre Dame Basilica in Place D'Armes Square. It is Gothic, colorful and unmissable as you walk in through the front doors. This amazing photograph by Adrian Hu gives you a sense of how you drown in color and light as you walk down towards the ornate altar at the nave of the church

At the rear of the building there is the Sacre-Coeur Chapel which is like stepping out of a kaleidescope and into an autumnal frieze. It was destroyed by arson in December 1978 and has been completely rebuilt in a modern style. I adored this winding staircase that just meandered up into heaven.

It was also the Montreal beer festival that weekend -I really couldn't pass up on the opportunity to test out some local food and drink in a sunny cheerful environment full of happy people.Firilst up was a beavertail or 'queue de castor'. its a lovely gooey doughey deep fried pastry - a lot like a doughnut - covered with a choice of sweet toppings. I tried the apple & cinnamon; as well as the chocolate and maple syrup - both divinely calorie laden treats. 

I had the chance to sample a few of the local brew - this one was light and refreshing - perfect for a sunny summers day.

 To deal with the post beer munchies I sampled 'Poutine' - a French-Canadian fast food favourite of french fries and cheese curds topped with a rich gravy. It's filling, tasty, filled with salt and really quite addictive. The curds are 'squeaky'- not made in the traditional way by weighting and pressing to release whey but by cooking and allowing to mature to develop their unique flavour and texture. 

 It is quite a heavy dish for summertime, but the queues speak to the enthusiasm the Quebecoise have for their national dish - even in the middle of the afternoon the Poutine vans had long trailing queues that stretched across the grounds with people waiting for their chosen dish & toppings. 

Lastly I'd love to introduce you to a new friend of mine - 'coons run wild in Montreal, a lot like the urban fox in London. This chap had no fear at all, running around and through the tourist to dig through bins and explore for tasty titbits for dinner.

Montreal is beautiful - and a wonderful place to visit - don't forget to say hi to Charlie, here!