It’s past 10am as I start this post, and we are still surrounded by fog!
The camera automatically cleans up images, so this photo does not reflect just how dense the fog was when I took it!
Not only does fog normally disappear quite a bit earlier than this, but it’s also pretty breezy out there. I’m used to winds and fog on the coasts. On the prairies, a stiff breeze usually blows the fog away in no time. Not today!
I just had to share this high traffic zone picture!
There are deer paths cutting through the old garden area, but most of the tracks are all long here. When we first moved here, you couldn’t walk under the spruces, because of all the overhanging branches. The deer seem to be very happy that it’s all cleaned up!
Down the middle of this area, between the spruces and the crab apple trees, we are planning to plant Korean Pine Nuts. They need to be kept shaded for their first 5 years (the transplants are typically sold at 3 years), and this location is prefect for that. We will still put covers to shade them more, but also to keep the deer from trampling them. After 5 years of being really tiny, they are supposed to have a sudden growth spurt. It would be another 5 years or so before they have edible pine nuts. We are hoping to buy them and get them started next year.
This is another high traffic zone for the deer. The open space in front, past the ring for the compost pile, is also where we plan to build the outdoor bathroom.
Not getting that started last year, as I’d hoped, may turn out to be a blessing. While taking this photo, I took a good look at the spruces in the background. There was one I had already identified as needing to be cut down, but looking more closely, there seems to be at least 6 or 7 dead spruces that we’ll need to cut down. Possibly 8 or 9, if I count the ones closer to the house (we’ll be hiring someone to take those ones down). I wouldn’t want any of them falling on our shed after we build it! Plus, if we cut them down before they fall down, the wood might still be usable for projects. Usually, by the time they fall, it’s because ants have made nests in the trunk and they are left basically hollow.
Once the dead trees and some of the underbrush (mostly spirea!) is cleared away, that is where we will be planting the mulberry tree we will be getting this spring. It will get full sun, while still being sheltered by the other trees. This is one tree we’ll have to make a point of wrapping up in the fall, for at least the first few years. A mulberry tree can start producing fruit by the second year, so that will be exciting! In the future, we plan to get a variety native to the more Eastern parts of Canada. It is becoming rare, so we will have to make sure to plant it away from any others we get, so they don’t cross pollinate. That might be 2 or 3 years from now, though.
One of the things I love about doing the morning rounds is looking at the progress made. Even though we are “behind” on getting this area in particular cleared out, it’s reached a point where it no longer seems as overwhelming, and I can get excited about the things we can do in the increasingly near future!
We are having some beautifully mild weather right now – the forecasts are still predicting we will hit a couple of degrees above freezing! (and I’m already seeing people “blame” it on climate change, as if we’ve never had warm Januaries before… *sigh*).
Our hard wired security camera is set to take a photo and email it to me when the motion sensor is triggered. With the infrared flash, that often means I wake up to a lot of pictures of precipitation. We had neither rain nor snow last night. Instead, this morning, I found a whole lot of very cloudy, out of focus pictures.
Yup. We had fog heavy enough to trigger the motion sensor last night!
I discovered something about the new trail cam. When the lens gets frosted over, we get this.
That is one heck of a pink! :-D
Even after the frost is brushed off the lens, there is a pink hue over everything.
The other cameras would go greyscale, or blue.
I find this unexpectedly cheering… and I don’t even like pink. :-D
Today we come to the close of what has got to be the most bizarre year we’ve had in my 5 decades! I think many of us will be very glad to see the hind end of 2020, even though there’s no sign that 2021 is going to be much different. :-/
[edited for formatting problems. WTH, WordPress??]
Thankfully, one of the side benefits of 1) living in the boonies and 2) living on my husband’s disability income, is that not a whole lot of the crazy affected our everyday life. We were already living on a tight budget, and disability payments are not affected. We were already doing things like stocking up in bulk purchases once a month, so that changed only because suddenly, everyone else was stocking up, too! My “job” is taking care of this place, and only one of my daughters had to stop working outside the home because of the crazy. The other was already working from home, so as long as we’ve got internet, she’s good to go. We got to focus on taking care of the property and each other, moving forward as much as possible on our long term goals, and basically be hermits. Which is kinda how we like it! The only real negative thing affecting us is my husband not getting the medical care he needs, but honestly, I don’t know how much of that can be blamed on the virus response. We’ve been here for 3 years now, and he still hasn’t been able to get the same level of care he had access to when we lived in the city. :-(
For me, one of the things I’ve tried to do is keep up with daily posts here on the blog, even if it’s just posting a photo. I’ve learned long ago that if I don’t get at least some writing in every day, it’s not very good for my mental health, but I also hope that the things talked about here will be enjoyed by, and useful to, others.
Though I am making no efforts at all to promote the blog, somehow, people are still finding it and following along. I don’t know how you all are finding us, but I really appreciate you stopping by and giving it a read, liking and commenting. Thank you so much!
In celebration of the end of the year, here are the top 10 most popular blog posts written in 2020. I skipped over any that were written in previous years, just because I want to focus on 2020. All links should open in new tabs, so you won’t lose your place here. :-)
So here they are, starting with number 10.
Comparisons. As this was our first year gardening, it comes as no surprise that we are starting with a gardening post! This one is from early August.
This year, I did something new, with a series of “Recommended” posts. These ended up getting their own permanent page, with a tab at the top menu. Number 9 is one of these posts. Recommended: Justin Rhodes. There is a massive number of videos on their YouTube channel! If you have any interest in self-sufficient living, do check them out!
This year, I finally started to do some more creative things with all the trees we’ve been cutting down, other than sticking them in huge piles for future chipping, or burning them.
The Wonkiest comes in at Number 8, showing off my first ever carving of a fork… and it truly is the wonkiest!! :-D
Every now and then, a post becomes popular, and I have no idea why! Like this one, at number 6: Let’s give this a try. It’s just a mix of all sorts of things, but apparently, people found it interesting!
Another Recommended post on the list. Number 4 is Recommended: Kris Harbour Natural Building. This YouTube channel is filled with years of videos, following along as Kris Harbour builds off grid in Wales. Well worth checking out!
And now we reach our number 1, most popular post of 2020.
This one blew away all the other posts, with almost triple (!!) the hits that number 2 got! In fact, it still gets hits almost every day. It’s another from the Recommended series of posts. Recommended: XiaoXi’s Culinary Idyll It’s another YouTube channel, and there are some really awesome videos to check out. Yet, I have no idea what makes this post stand out more than any other, that it should get so many more hits!
If you have discovered this blog through this post, I’d love to hear what brought you here! Please feel free to let me know in the comments. :-)
Well, there you have it! The top 10 must popular blog posts written in 2020.
I look forward to joining you again in the New Year! May 2021 be a year filled with many blessings, growth, healing and above all, normalcy!
God knows, we could all use some plain, boring old “normal” right now!
Well, here we are, at the end of 2020. This is our 3rd full year, and 4th winter, of living on the farm.
We set up goals to accomplish the task of getting this place cleaned up and fixed up. Of course, goals are always flexible, since life has a way of blowing right through any plans we might make! So it’s good to take a look and see where we stand.
Of course, the first priority was getting the house itself settled. While we did get most of my parents’ belongings stored away, with some of it staying to be used, there are still things that need to get done. They are not a priority, though, so they can wait. I don’t think anyone wants to go into the attic over the old kitchen to clean that up, for example! Some day, we will have to, but it will wait.
After getting a good look (or so we thought!) of what needed to be done outside, we set yearly goals. The first two years were to be focused on cleaning up the inner yard, then moving on to the outer yard in the third year, before finally moving beyond the outer yard, where we could start looking at clearing out the vehicle graveyard and large junk piles.
In the first year, focus was on clearing out the maple grove and the south and west yards, while year two was supposed to focus on clearing out the spruce grove and east yard. The old garden area in the north was basically in limbo until we decided on what we wanted to do for gardening. The big accomplishment there was getting a new push mower that allowed us to actually mow the overgrown old garden that had been badly plowed some time before we moved out here.
Year one went to plan, but year two had other plans for us, as my husband ended up in the hospital for 3 weeks, followed by trips to the city for medical care, and other such things. The weather also did not cooperate, with drought conditions and heat making heavy physical labour outdoors potentially dangerous. So that whole area got pushed back another year, except for one thing. I managed to clear out the old wood pile, uncovering the only good and soft soil in the entire inner yard! We also set aside an area where my mother’s garden used to be for future gardening, covering it with mulch, then using the giant black tarps reclaimed from the old wood pile to cover most to the area over the winter.
Between those two accomplishments, we ended up planting an actual garden this past summer. This was not something we expected to be able to do for some time, but really, if we waited until conditions were just right, nothing would ever get done, so we went for it. In that respect, this past year had us ahead of the game a bit.
Another plan we had for this past year got pretty much zero progress. We wanted to build a cordwood shed to use as an outdoor bathroom. Having what we thought was the septic tank backing up into the basement, and having to use a honey pot until that got cleared up, showed us that we don’t just need a second bathroom. We need a bathroom that does not rely on our septic system. The old outhouse we’ve got here has a growing hole to the pit developing under the door, and we don’t consider it safe to use. We want to move away from having a pit and use a composting toilet, instead. Sure, it means having to empty the contents regularly, but in the long term, it means the shed could someday be used as something else, just by removing the toilet box.
At the very least, I hoped to get an area dug out so we could create a level “foundation” to build on top of, that would allow for drainage while also holding the weight of cordwood and mortar walls.
This past year, we had a wet spring followed by some pretty extreme heat (well… for our area), and the only thing we managed to accomplish to that goal was clear away the last of the little trees that had sprung up by the old wood pile. I think not getting any progress on that is my one real disappointment for the year’s plans gone awry.
At the same time, even with the setbacks of the previous years, there were things that needed to get done in the outer yard. Thanks to my brother, gaping holes in the roof of one the sheds were patched with pieces of metal roofing left over from when the barn and garage were done, years ago. Windows were replaced or fixed. Some trees cleared away from other roofs. These were things that were part of the original plans, so in that respect, they were being done on schedule. The other things that need to be done in the outer yard will be slowly accomplished over the space of years, but some things were just more urgent than others.
The summer heat made working in the spruce grove severely limited. Plus, while we were glad to have an actual garden this past year, tending them did take time away from the goal of clearing out that grove. It is a fire hazard, which increases with every tree that comes down in a storm, or any branches that fall. Plus, we want to take down the dead trees and plant more spruces in the spruce grove!
So that area has been pushed back for yet another year.
Which brings me to our updated plans and goals.
For 2021, we’ll be focusing even more on gardening, having picked up a ridiculous number of seeds, with more things to arrive in the spring, when they can be planted right away. This is going to rather force us to get the spruce grove cleared up faster! Areas of the spruce grove are being taken over by poplars, and these will be perfect to use to build trellises and arbors for the garden. We even plan to build a gate/arbor combination to set up next to the main gate, so people can come in without climbing the locked gate. The taller poplars would probably be useful in building temporary, deer proof fencing to protect our garden, too.
There’s at least one large dead spruce I want to take down. Not starting on the cordwood shed may actually be a plus, since I would be cutting it to (hopefully!) fall in that direction, where there are no other trees for it to fall on top of. With the old chainsaw we have breaking at one of the switches needed to start it, the very first time I tried to use it, we will need to invest in a new one to get the spruce grove cleaned up. There’s only so much that’s reasonable to do with a buck saw! Plus, we have a mulberry tree coming in the spring. It’s a zone 4 tree, so we want to ensure it is growing in a protected area that also gives full sun, and that’s going to be in the spruce grove.
With having varieties of corn and sunflowers that need to be kept away from each other to avoid cross pollination, we’ll be working in areas of the old garden that are well away from the house. All of that will be temporary as, in the long term, we are looking to plant nut trees in there, and move most of the gardening into the outer yard, south of the house. So any gardening we do around there in the upcoming year will mean breaking up the hard, rocky soil and amending it, which will make it better for any future nut trees we plant out there.
One of the goals we had for this past year was to hire the tree company to come out with their massive chipper, and get rid of the piles of wood we’ve got all over. We couldn’t do it this year, but it still needs to be done. It may be worthwhile for us to just buy a chipper instead, though the cost of one that can handle what we’d be putting it through would be considerably more than the cost of hiring this company to come out for 6 hours. From the estimate I got at the time, he figured 6 hours would be enough time for them to do all the piles, too. Hiring someone would be more efficient to get these big piles done. We can invest in a chipper of our own, later on. We will always have branches to clean up and get rid of, so it would be worth it.
So the past year has been an odd mix of goals delayed, while others were accomplished faster than expected. One thing that has been delayed for way too long is getting the junk pile hauled to the dump. This is something we will be hiring people to do, so it basically comes down to whether or not it’s in the budget at any given time. So far, it hasn’t been! It would be fantastic to get rid of that unsightly mess, though.
Aside from time and weather dependent things that will need to get done, like all things garden related, our goals and plans for 2021 have become a lot more loosey-goosey. Timelines have become much more vague, and we’re still at a loss on how to accomplish some vital goals, like replacing the roof.
Still, we’ve managed to accomplish enough in the past year, that we can spend more time building things up, rather than taking things down, in the next year.
Which is as good for the psyche as for anything else!
We had a light snowfall all night, with almost no wind. This morning, the trees looked like they were covered in frost!
It’s enough to almost make the junk cars in the old hay yard look pretty.
Almost.
Fresh tracks at the feeding station, and around to the ornamental apply trees in the old kitchen garden, show we had quite a few deer visits in the night!
As promised, I got a picture of the wonderful gift from my brother and his wife.
Well. The box, at least! No point in opening the box until spring!
Being the incredibly thoughtful person he is, on noticing the spikes into the soil are not very long, my brother included a length of angle iron we can pound into the ground, and wired to tie the post to it, for extra support!
I find myself thinking… if we have a fire, that might thaw out the ground enough to install this, and we can have some winter cook outs! With the fire bans, we aren’t using the fire pit in the summer anywhere near as much as I had expected to.
It’s supposed to be pretty mild for the next while…
Yeah. I’m just looking for excuses to get this set up out there! :-D
While they don’t come around when we’re around to see them, there are plenty of signs that the deer are coming to the feeding station.
The snow was absolutely trampled this morning! You can see it all the way back to the corner of the spruce grove, before the tracks start splitting up into smaller trails.
Here, you can see their trail coming from inside the spruce grove. More tracks go through the gate and towards the barn.
We may not be able to leave much feed out – and the birds eat a lot of what we do leave out – but at least they know they can come here for a winter snack!
The suet we have right now seems to be a bust, though. When I bought it, the Walmart I found them in was out of stock except for packs with 3 different “flavours”. All mixes of seeds, nuts and fruit. Usually, the only ones I can find locally are basic seed mixes, or special mixes for specific birds. The brand is the same, though.
The individual packs were not labelled, so I don’t know which is which. The first one I put up was, as far as I could tell, completely ignored. Usually, the chickadees and nuthatches are all over it! After several weeks of it looking completely un-pecked at, I decided to put a different one in. I put the first one in the snow in the bird bath (which I am not trying to keep with water this winter; it is just too damaged for that, and I’m amazed it actually lasted another summer!).
Since then, I’ve seen Blue Jays on the bird bath, pecking away at that piece of suit, but none on the hanging feeder!
I’m thinking the larger birds don’t like the little feeder basket as something to land on, and the little birds don’t like these mixes, so they’re not bothering. Not with delicious black oil seeds for them to eat, instead! :-)
I might wait just a bit longer. I’m sure the critters won’t mind staying sheltered a bit longer, either.
The temperatures plummeted last night! It’s now almost 10am as I write this, and it’s still -27C/-16.6F with a wind chill of -35C/-31F out there.
The app on my phone says we’ve already “warmed up” to -25C/-13F with a wind chill of -28C/-18.4F
It’s supposed to continue warming up but we won’t be getting warmer than -20C/-4F for a few more hours. So I’m going to have to get out there and get some warmer food and water for the outside cats soon. There will still be both food and water out there right now. I just want to make sure they have some that is a bit more pleasant to ingest!
The plan for today was supposed to be clearing enough snow in the yard to drive the van to the house tomorrow, so we can load it up and make a trip to the dump. We haven’t been able to make that trip in way too long, but with temperatures like this, it might have to wait again. :-( We could postpone clearing the snow in the yard until tomorrow, but the dump is open for only a few hours in the morning on Tuesdays, and it will probably be closed by the time we’re done. It’s supposed to reach an absolutely tropical -7C/19.4F tomorrow, bringing a couple of centimeters of snow along with it.
Yeah. I think we’ll do the clearing tomorrow afternoon and make the dump run when it’s open again on Thursday evening. They are open for a full 8 hours on Saturdays, but that’s New Year’s Day, so they’ll be closed this weekend.
Definitely one of the downsides of living in the boonies. Maybe this explains why we’re finding so much garbage as we clean up around the farm!
Yesterday, I made a quick trip out to deliver some turkey dinner to my mother. She tried to tell me I didn’t need to, but when I mentioned potatoes and gravy, she couldn’t hide how excited she was. :-D
It was just a quick stop, as she met me at the side door of her building, but she had a surprise for me, as well. It seems lots of people have been giving her sweet food gifts – far more than she can (or should!) eat. While the tin of shortbread cookies I gave her will keep well (I told her to have them with tea, when her lonely neighbour sneaks over for a visit), but some needs to be eaten more quickly.
So she gave me a bag with a box of chocolates someone had given her to take home. It wasn’t until then that I saw that these were a type I’d never seen before!
The writing on the package was in Polish!
Thankfully, the pictures that showed what the different chocolates were, had both Polish and English, though some of the translations still didn’t tell us what they were. At least, I hope not. I’ve never heard of avocado as a chocolate filling before…
I’m willing to try it, though!
My daughter picked up two 5 pound boxes of “ugly” chocolate from Purdy’s this year, so we won’t to into this box until those are done. :-D
I got a call from my sister this morning, letting me know that my mother wasn’t feeling well, so I called my mother to check on her. She was feeling pain in her bones, having trouble moving, but also stomach discomfort. So far, we’re not looking to take her to the hospital or anything; something she does not want to do again. She must have been feeling better by the time I called, though, because she began to lecture me on my gravy in the dinner I brought for her. Last year, she complained that I included “so much” bacon, which clearly meant we eat massive amounts of bacon, all the time (I’d included, at most, 2 slices from what I put on top of the turkey before roasting it). So I skipped the bacon completely this time. Now she’s complaining that the gravy is white instead of brown, and that I should have browned the flour first, but clearly I didn’t and just wanted to do things the “easy” way, and so on. I told her it was done exactly the same way as I did it last year, and turkey gravy is a white gravy. Because it’s turkey. But no. Gravy is supposed to be brown. It tastes better when it’s brown. Then she talked about how she learned to brown the flour in a pan, first, from her mother and describing how she did it. I told her I knew how to do it, because I’d learned how from watching her when I was a child. I just don’t do it. She sounded surprised by that. She always sounds so surprised that I know how to cook – even as I give her meals that I’ve cooked!
So… I figure she can’t be feeling too ill if she has that much energy to complain about the colour of the gravy that came with the Christmas dinner I brought for her.
*sigh*
Well, we shall see how she feels as the day goes on.
Meanwhile, she was kind enough to give us these beautiful chocolates from Poland that she didn’t want. Which I don’t mind at all! :-)
So we had a couple of issues with the new camera, but they’re only partly related to the camera itself.
My routine with the trail cams is to switch memory cards every morning (weather willing). The first time I switched out the micro disc on this camera, I wasn’t able to see the screen inside very well, which distracted me from something important. It wasn’t until I switched cards again the next day, and tried to view the second day’s recordings on the desktop, that I realized I had not formatted the card before using it. When I first set up the trail cam, I formatted the card right in the camera, but with the screen not working when I changed to the new card, I completely forgot, and hadn’t thought to do it on the desktop earlier.
Then we got hit with a blizzard and temperatures plummeted, which meant I did not get out to switch memory cards on the cameras for 2 days.
Yesterday, Christmas day, we actually hit -1C/30.2F!
That gave me the chance to get out, shovel paths to the cameras and switch out the memory cards.
The card on the new camera had nothing on it.
It was completely blank. Just like the screen inside, when I switched it to set up mode, turned it off, turned it back on.
The other camera had recordings on it, but only for 1 day, really. I got to see our angel driving past our driveway in his tractor, slowing down… then backing up and opening the door to look down our driveway… then pulling into our driveway and getting out to climb our gate to come to our door. What a pleasure to then watch as he later cleared our driveway! I was very impressed by his ability to maneuver that beast of a front end loader in reverse. That boy knows how to handle that machine! :-D
With the other camera, as the batteries drain, it shows up during night shots. White lines begin to appear, streaking across the frame, becoming more severe as the batteries drain more. It does not affect daytime shots, since the camera doesn’t use extra battery juice to power the infrared flash. In this older camera, there were a couple of night files, then nothing until the morning I switched cards. Which tells me we had nothing going by to trigger either camera for a day.
I ended up bringing the CamPark T40 inside, opening it up and turning it on and off, every now and then, as it warmed up. After a while, the screen inside did try to flicker to life, only to immediately go dark again. Once, it finally flickered on long enough that I could see the battery indicator.
It had only 1 bar!
I decided to put in fresh – room temperature! – batteries.
The camera worked just fine.
After having to reset the time and date again, I set it up outside again. I just checked the files this morning, and it worked beautifully. It even caught a deer that walked under it; it had to have just jumped the fence behind the camera, then used the path I’d shoveled to walk to the driveway. With the other cameras, it would never have been caught. The other camera did not catch the deer at all, even though it walked across the driveway. The motion sensor range on this camera is so much broader! This is a huge bonus.
As for the other batteries, because they were new, chances are they are fine now that they’re thawed out. I don’t have a battery tester, though, so we’ll find out when we try to use them in other things.
With the other cameras, the batteries are dropped in from the bottom, 4 wide and 2 deep. This camera has all 8 batteries in one flat row. It seems that this makes them much more susceptible to the cold!
As winter progresses, we will see how much of a problem this will be. I think, as soon as we can afford to, I’ll invest in a solar charged battery pack for it, and we shall see how those handle the cold.
As this point, I am glad we still have one of the old cameras going, as it kept recording in the cold, even as the new camera’s batteries froze and failed.
Right now, that is the main thing that makes me hesitate about getting another CamPark T40. At least for winter use.
That just doesn’t happen. Especially with a locked gate and snowed in driveway!
It was the renter’s farm hand. He had been driving by with their tractor and noticed we’d cleared a few paths in the snow, so he stopped, climbed the gate, and offered to clear the driveway for us! Last year, he happened by while I was out with the electric snow blower, working on the driveway. The gate was open, so he drove right in and cleared it for me! He did in a few minutes, what would have taken me hours.
What an absolute sweetheart!
I quickly got coat and boots on and unlocked the gate for him.
What a beautiful sight!
The picture looks blurry because the window I was taking it through was frosting up faster than I could clear it and get my phone ready to take a picture!
I had started to lock the gate up when I figured I should take a picture from the road. He even widened the sides of the driveway at the road before he left!
Isn’t that amazing?!!
So now we just need to do the part inside the yard. He saved us so many hours of work!
We have some wonderful neighbours. What a fantastic Christmas present, too!
The Re-Farmer 