Harvesting pears

There's always something to harvest on the island this time of year. So even if my garden didn't exactly rise to meet my aspirations, if I look around I will easily spy something else that's ripe or nearly ripe. The pears, for instance.

There are two pear trees in the back orchard. I think one of them is quite old -- from the time of the Perrys or the Gouldens -- and the other about twenty five or thirty years old -- from Elizabeth Hyde's time.

In the fall of 2007, our first on the island, the pears simply dropped from the trees when they got tired of clinging to the branches. We did not pay them any attention that fall. I imagine that our neglect made the sheep and the deer very glad, as it continued the seasonal windfall of apples and pears they had gotten used to and come to expect during all the years when the house was empty and nobody cared for the fruit. Except them.

Last fall we were eager to pick the pears. But we didn't know when to pick them, nor did we know to let them ripen off the tree. We learned those basics last fall. We pressed the pears and ended up with a few gallons of perry, which is the old name for pear cider, and also the name of the first family to live in this house. It was an extraordinary experience to drink it; it tasted like fall.

This past spring Greg pruned the pear trees. The older one, which was very tall, got a radical pruning. It will be much easier to pick the pears now that the tree is smaller. But, maybe at least in part because of the pruning, the older tree did not bear very many pears this year.

Greg pruned the younger tree, too, last spring, but not as drastically. This fall its pears have been plentiful. They seem like a bosc of some sort.

Today Greg went up into the tree to pick the pears.

It was a day that contained a bit of everything: sun and shadow, racing clouds and wind, rain drops, splotches of bright blue sky, more clouds. The wind swirled around from east to west and the temperature dropped. The weather kept changing all day long so you never could decide what kind of day it was. It was a good day to be up in a tree.

He stood on the short ladder to reach the pears hanging from the upper branches. You have to pull upward with your hand to snap the stem without tearing the flesh of the pear. You need to keep the stem on the fruit. So picking them requires some attention and care.

In the end he harvested about a wheelbarrow full. We'll press most of them for perry, but we'll keep some to eat later on, when they are ripe, and to give away.
We are grateful to the Perrys and the Gouldens and Elizabeth Hyde for planting these trees and for taking care of them for so many years.
Last year we saved the last two pears for Skipper and Radar to have with their lunch on the first day of the lobster season, which is around December 1st. I remember how amazing the next-to-last two tasted then. I hope that on December 1st we will again be tasting the fullness of ripened pears.

Culling day

On Tuesday and Wednesday the shepherds were on the island to cull the flock. On Tuesday they gathered all the sheep into the corral at the south end of the cove.
Most ewes will remain on the island, but the oldest ones will go.
This pen contains the ewes and lambs that will be culled.
The flock's owners, Leroy and Mary d'Entremont, are pursuing a long-term strategy for the production of wild island lamb, by increasing the presence of the Scottish Blackface breed.
One of the rams on the island this past winter, the one we call The Major, was Scottish Blackface. His lambs are quite distinctive. And this week Leroy brought a couple of Scottish Blackface ewes over from Blue Island to add to the breeding capacity of the McNutt's Island flock.
The Scottish Blackface breed produces a larger lamb with more meat. It's also hardier, better able to withstand the rough island weather.
For the past several years, before Leroy and Mary bought the flock, it had been bred primarily to North Country Cheviot. The rams we call Bertie and Balzac are North Country Cheviot. Here's one of their lambs.
In the pen on the right are the sheep to be culled; to the left are the lambs that will remain on the island as ewes. At this stage in their lives they are called weanlings.
On Wednesday morning the shepherds returned to the island to begin the labourious process of loading sheep into the skiff.
The sheep are funneled, a few at a time, into a small pen that can be constantly rearranged by opening and closing any of its four sides. The shepherds align the pen with the skiff so they can get the sheep onboard.
From left to right are Joel, Leroy, Chad, and Jason.
Once the pen is in place, the shepherds pick up each lamb and put it into the skiff. Meanwhile, Mary and Ingrid keep the skiff stabilized. They and the border collies are all on the alert to prevent the lambs from jumping out of the skiff once they are inside it.
The loading is a painstaking process, also requiring brawn.
A lamb did jump overboard. Ingrid plucked it from the water and returned it to the skiff.
Chad reaches for his next lamb.
Joel with Leroy.
Once a few lambs are safely in the skiff, the others will follow them and settle in more easily.
There will be two trips across the harbour today in a skiff loaded with lambs and ewes and shepherds and dogs.
On the mainland, the shepherds will load the lambs and ewes into a trailer. Later, Mary and Ingrid will drive the trailer down to Pubnico and release the sheep into Mary and Leroy's field. Then Mary and Ingrid will return to the island for the rest of the day's work.
Every step of this process requires great concentration. Something can go wrong at any minute. And there's so much that needs to be considered: tides, currents, weather.
At last the skiff is loaded and underway. They will cross directly across the harbour to Leroy's truck, which is parked next to the water at the end of a road in Carleton Village. There they will reverse the process to get the sheep loaded into the trailer.
There was a tough moment later in the day when they tried to gather some sheep that were still up on the north end of the island. That group is wilder than the rest of the flock and more resistant to being gathered. One ewe panicked and swam into the water and drowned. This is the kind of thing that makes the management of island sheep so challenging. But at the end of the day Mary and Leroy told us that it had been, overall, a very smooth gathering.

islands on the air

Today we are having a visit from Martin Atherton, a ham radio operator and instructor from England. He came over to the island this morning in Brown Eyed Girl, carrying the equipment to set up a radio signal on McNutt's. Straightaway he extended a telescopic fibreglass pole thirty feet high in the middle of the back orchard, with long guy wires radiating out from its centre.
Then he ran an electrical cord through a back window, attached it to his transceiver and his computer, and began signalling. On islands where there's no electricity he brings along a small generator.

Here are a few things I've learned since this morning. There are ham radio operators around the world who focus on islands. They're called island chasers. The island chasers participate in contests in which they try to be in contact with as many islands as possible. So when somebody like Martin begins to signal from an island that does not have a permanent ham radio operator, the island chasers rush to signal and receive a return signal. Later, at home, Martin will send a postcard to every operator who contacted him on McNutt's, to verify the contact. The postcards themselves become a nice collection.

On this trip, Martin set up a signal at Miquelon, one of a group of small French islands south of Newfoundland, before he came to McNutt's. He has radioed from many islands over the years, including islands off Newfoundland and Labrador, and in the Arctic. He came to McNutt's in the mid 1980s to signal from here, and stayed in this very house with Elizabeth Hyde. He'll spend the night with us, sitting at his transceiver late into the night. He'll continue to signal in the morning, then break down his equipment and take off for Halifax and his flight home.

It's really a way to promote international friendship, he told us over lunch. It does sound like a fascinating interest that connects people all around the world.