Oh, the things we find!

June 7, 2018June 7, 2018 / Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Today ended up being one of those days where nothing really happened as I intended.

First off, I decided we needed to take a day off yard work. As much as I love it, I knew I was pushing myself harder than I should. I need to remind myself that I am still broken, even if I happen to be feeling great on any particular day. If I overdo it, I’ll wipe myself out for days, and I don’t want to do that!

So I was going to finally start packing up the sun room of my parents’ things, starting after I went into town to pick up some prescription refills. My younger daughter came along, to drop off resumes and play Pokemon Go. :-D We were just getting ready to head home when I get a text from my older brother; he was just passing through the town our mom lives in, and on his way to do some work on the barn, in preparation of the electricity to be hooked up again.

He got there before we did. :-D

So I ended up hanging out with him and helping as much as I could. Being the sort he is, once he finished on the barn, he decided to patch the roof of the shed near it. That turned out to be a huge job, and that was just to patch one of the holes. Also near the barn is a collapsed building and sheets of metal roofing material that he had to scavenge to get the job done.

Part way though, I had to leave to do a dump run. The summer hours for Thursdays is now a lot later than it was during the winter. When we’d got back from town, the girls and I loaded the back of the van with our garbage, so it was sitting there in the heat. Definitely a good thing I didn’t decide to wait until Saturday!

After patching the roof, we came in to have the supper my daughters prepared, and then it was back out to fix one more thing before he headed home. He wanted to replace a melted, broken plug in the pump shack, so that we could have power in the storage shed we’re putting all of my parents’ stuff in.

While we were there, I couldn’t help but look around at all the stuff in there, that’s been sitting for years.

Which is when I noticed this bottle, way up near the rafters.

20180607.liniment

I tried to get a picture of the label, and enhanced it as well as I know how to do.

20180607.liniment.label

It’s still hard to read, but I can make out most of it.

I had to laugh when I got to the end. For horses, cattle, hogs and sheep, too! That’s some all purpose stuff, right there! :-D

Oh, and while we were there, I asked about the old wood cook stove that was in the pump shack. It turned out it’s at my brother’s place. It seems someone spilled battery acid on it, so he took it before it got damaged even worse! I was very happy to hear it was with him.

The electric pole did not get delivered today, so we will be expecting it tomorrow. Now that my brother is finished with what he needed to do at the barn, everything is ready.

It will be so good to have that over and done with!

The Re-Farmer

Front Yard Clean Up – the shrine

June 6, 2018June 6, 2018 / Re-Farmer / 1 Comment

Cleaning up the south yard, I finally got around to working on my mother’s little shrine area.

Here are some before pictures.

20180606.shrine1

That statue of Mary has been featured in a few different places in the yard, if I remember correctly.

I don’t know what the pedestal was for.

The little structure to the right is an actual shrine. My oldest brother built it for my mother; it is based on the kapliczki, or roadside shrines, in Poland that my mother remembers from her youth. Sadly, it has not been maintained over the years, and the wood is starting to rot in many places. For a while, it had a place of honour, right on the concrete landing at the main entrance.

20180606.shrine2

Another “before” view of the area, at the fence line. The post in the foreground is for the clothes line. I’m guessing the rope is to keep the post from being pulled by the weight of clothes on the line, but with the amount of slack on there, I’m not quite sure what it is really there to accomplish. :-D

The first area I started cleaning up was the tractor tire planter. It was overrun with vines! The roots had circled under the edge of the tire, with two big clumps of vines pushing their way out in such a large mass, they actually deformed the tire!

I’m starting to develop a strong dislike for those vines. ;-)

Once I was able to reach it safely, I took the statue out completely. Then started working around the back, cutting away and pulling up a huge mass of dead vines.

I then found a whole other flower garden area!

20180606.shrine3

Bricked up and everything.

I vaguely remember noticing a couple of bricks there, shortly after the snow melted away, but did not expect to find this!

It had nothing but dead vines and leaves in it. Any flowers that were ever planted there were long gone.

Feeling how my feet sank when I stepped in it to cut and clean away the debris, I figure it never actually had soil added to it. It’s all basically composted leaf debris!

Here are the after pictures.

20180606.shrine4

When the tire planter and bricked areas were clear, I pruned what I could reach of the willow trees, taking down more vines that had climbed their way up the trunks in the process.

20180606.shrine5

Then I gave Mary a good scrubbing, before returning her to her concrete block. There was moss starting to grow on her!

You can really see the one spot where a clump of vine roots distorted the tire. The other spot is hidden by the pedestal.

With this area, I don’t know about planting anything there again. What I’d really like to do is get rid of the tire planter. I’d like to get rid of all the tire planters! It will be a huge job to clear the tractor tire planters, so it might end up waiting until next year.

Until then, I just want to make sure those vines to take over again!

After finishing this, it was all I could do not to just keep on going and work in another section of the yard!

Have I mentioned, I really love this kind of work? :-D

The Re-Farmer

I’m Sensing Something – or not!

May 14, 2018 / Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

While cleaning up around the yard, one of the girls reached the far post of the clothes line and called me over to look at something.

Hmm…

20180514.sensor1

So… we have a National Geographic remote sensor, attached to the clothes line post, with electric tape. (The rope is there because the post as started to lean over.)

There isn’t really anything to say what it’s there to sense. A search has turned up nothing; this thing is so old, nothing even close to it is showing up. Most of what does show up is weather related, but they look so completely different, I can’t even guess that this is also some sort of weather sensor.

20180514.sensor2

The wire from the sensor is also attached to the pole with electric tape.

This has been there long enough for that bit of lichen above it to actually overlap it!

I’m guessing it was sending a signal to a receiver inside the house at some point, though I can’t recall finding anything that could be a receiver while we were packing up my parents’ stuff.

20180514.sensor3

Though this device isn’t going to be sending signals anywhere, anymore!

I’m going to have to ask a sibling about it and find out what the story is!

In other areas…

Along with the clean up, we’re gathering a fair bit of stuff that normally would go into the burn barrel. We haven’t done a burn in ages, with good reason. There is a total burn ban in the area, and while approved fire pits and BBQs are still allowed, we aren’t going to take any chances. Sure, we could hook up a hose, now that the outside taps have been turned on again, and spray the area around the burn barrel, but why take chances? This stuff is just going to have to go to the dump.

I also did the meter reading today and sent that in. I then went back over the last 5 readings and worked out the differences from month to month on our power usage. This gives me some idea of what we can expect on our next electric bill. It was quite interesting. Our highest bill was just under $600, then the next one was about $550 or so. Those two months can predictably be our highest consumption periods, though this also included the weeks we spent heating water every day, until we could get the new hot water tank. The next month saw a consumption drop of about 1/3, and the month after that showed another slight drop. That’s when we saw bills of just over and just under the $400. This month? The consumption dropped by almost half – more than 2/3s less than our highest month of consumption. So our next bill, I am thinking we will see just a bit more than $200. It should be interesting to see how much it’ll drop when we are at our lowest consumption period over the summer.

Interestingly, I found that we have been living here long enough to qualify for the electric company’s “equal payment” plan – with monthly payments of only $44. !! Based on the last 6 months of meter readings, including the one I sent in today, I just don’t see how they came to that number. Unless I’m just not understanding something about the plan. I think we’ll give it a few more months and see if that changes, before we apply for it.

Our electric bill is much, much higher than it was when we were living in the city, which we expected. I’m just glad we’re not living in Ontario. I know someone there who got an electric bill of over $2000 – about double what they paid in the same month the previous year, with less consumption! So I’m definitely not complaining about our power bills, that’s for sure! Still, we will be examining our options to see what we can do to bring the bills down. Especially for the winter months. Options that do NOT include heating with wood, since that will increase the insurance costs. Add in the cost of buying wood, and there would be no savings at all. Theoretically, we could cut our own wood, but even if we were all able bodied enough to do the work ourselves, it’s not worth it. There are too many other things that our time, efforts and energy need to go to. Like so many other things, it’s a balance of priorities, not just about dollars and cents.

Which is how we will be looking at all sorts of things as we clean the place up and learn what work it needs. There is going to be quite a few things where we are simply going to hire people to come in and do it, rather than try and do it ourselves. Sometimes, it’s just more efficient that way, even if it costs money. I think some of the biggest problems we are finding now come down to the fact that no one wanted to spend the money to hire people to do it, but didn’t necessarily have the time, knowledge, resources, or skills to do it themselves. Sometimes, the best way to save money in the long run, is to spend money in the short run.

Of course, that requires having the money to spend in the short run, which is always its own problem, too!

To complicate things further, we have my mother, who owns the place, and siblings, telling us about things that will need to be taken care of, like covering holes in shed roofs. Which we do appreciate, since we haven’t spent a lot of time looking at the outbuildings, with our focus being the house and yard. Then we go to look at what they are talking about, and all I can think is, this shed is not worth patching. It’s not worth fixing. It should be torn down and gotten rid of. The stuff inside that’s worth keeping needs to be moved elsewhere, to protect it, and the rest needs to be turfed. Heck, some of the sheds I’ve gone into, I’m reluctant to even walk across the floors. I’m no light weight, and there’s a good chance the rotting wood won’t hold my weight! Meanwhile, things that could have been salvaged, like the log cabin out by the fire pit, has a roof that was allowed to cave into all the stuff that had been store inside it.

Ah, well. Little by little, we’re figuring it out.

The Re-Farmer

Oh, the things we find!

May 11, 2018 / Re-Farmer / 3 Comments

My daughters have been diligently working their way around the yard, methodically raking leaves out of the edges of the trees and the many flower beds all over the place, picking up wind blown sticks, and generally cleaning things up.

I was called out to see what they found next to the small people gate.

We’ve walked past this many times, of course, and saw the dried and matted plants at the base of a tree.

20180511.mystery.vine1

Those two sticks on the side were stuck in it. Just a mess of dead plants to clean up is all. Right?

Oh…

20180511.mystery.vine2

So… that’s wire fencing, all stuck in there. We’re guessing the sticks had held the wire up for the … vines? … to climb.

Hold on. What is that, under there?

20180511.mystery.vine3

A glass bowl, with gold trim. Hidden under the dead mat and buried under more leaves.

20180511.mystery.vine4

A bowl with no bottom.

Not a broken bottom. There’s no sign of the broken pieces. Just… a bowl. With no bottom. Half filled with dirt and leaves.

20180511.mystery.vine5

My daughter used on of the sticks to prop the mat up and hold it in place, while they rakes around it. We’ll have to figure out how to get it, with the wire mesh it’s grown around, out of them. Most likely, we’ll just have to cut it.

My siblings have been cutting the lawn and whatnot, since the house has been empty. This does not look like something they would have planted and set up. It looks like one of my mother’s projects. Which means, it’s been like this for quite some time. Maybe 5 years? Just a guess, on my part. I have no way to really know.

And what’s with the broken bowl under it?

I wonder if any of my siblings know anything about it? I doubt I’d be able to get anything from my mother; after all this time, I doubt she would remember. If it’s been there as long as I think it has, I doubt any of my siblings ever bothered to look.

Or, someone took the time to do this last year, when no one was living here, and that doesn’t make much sense, either.

Hmm.

The Re-Farmer

A Day of Progress

May 11, 2018May 11, 2018 / Re-Farmer / 3 Comments

A few more steps forward, today – and the girls are still outside, working on cleaning up around the yard, so the progress continues even now.

The most exciting thing for me is, the septic guy came! Yay!

Oh, the things that excite me in my old age… LOL

Seriously, though… it’s one less worry, and I already talked to him about coming back in the fall, as part of his regular route in the area, as we go back to doing the regular routine cleaning in the fall.

20180511.truck

I can’t help but admire someone who can back up a vehicle like this, through our gate into the yard, between the spruce grove and the flower garden along the East side of the house, and turn into the North side of the house – without hitting the downspout (which was screwed in place, unlike the others) or hitting the low hanging branches.

Dude’s got mad reversing skills.

20180511.tank.hose

While chatting with him, I learned he is not a fan of this type of septic tank.

Typically, a septic tank is a large reservoir with only one chamber. The solids naturally sink to the bottom and, once it reaches a certain level, the grey water drains out to the septic field. It’s all gravity based.

This system is much smaller and has two reservoirs. The one for the solids is smaller and has a smaller opening into it. The grey water eventually fills the second, larger, reservoir until an ejector pump sends it out to the septic field.

He needed to get that hose into the solids reservoir, which not only has a smaller opening, but the hoses from the pump (which is inside the basement) run over it.

He knew the place had been empty for the last couple of years, since he’s been servicing our tank for quite a long time, and had assured me it wouldn’t be a concern. Still, he was surprised by how much was in it. I did explain that, though empty, there were still people using the house. Add in 4 people and 6 months… I’m really glad we got it done.

20180511.tank.capped

All done!

The straw on the left is what covered the lid for the winter. I was going to pile it elsewhere, but I couldn’t find a pitch fork anywhere.

I checked the garage, the pump shack, the barn, the garden shed – even the basements. No pitch fork to be found.

What farm doesn’t have a pitch fork?

Like most of the lawn on the North side of the house, the grass here is pretty much all gone. Not even just dead, like in other parts of the lawn. It’s basically just dirt and weeds.

After the tank was done, I went back to working on the wood pile in the garden, but not before getting a picture of something that was a mystery to the girls. A mystery I actually knew the answer to, for a change!

20180511.tree.extension.cord

It’s one thing to find extension cords all over the house, what with the lack of outlets, but an extension cord up a tree? The tree itself is probably 60 ft high, or close to it, and the cord runs almost all the way up.

I remember when it was run up there. My late brother, who was an agile climber, put it there. He also carried up a star shaped frame with Christmas lights in it, and installed it near the very top of the tree. The cord is to plug in the star.

I can’t see if the star is still up there, but I can’t imagine anyone climbing up there to take it down. Nor can I imagine it ever being replaced since it was first put up there, which means that is a very old extension cord.

We have no plans of ever using it again!

Meanwhile, back to the wood pile in the garden!

This is a pile of deadwood and prunings that had been put there before we moved out, and my family had wanted to burn in the winter. I didn’t want it burned, so we now have the job of cleaning it out of the garden area. Most of it will be used as fuel for the fire pit, but some I’m keeping for future crafting purposes. My mother is still adamant that she wants the garden plowed, as soon as the pile is cleared.

I’m glad we put our collective foot down about not burning this. Earlier, I’d already pulled out a bunch of fibre glass insulation that was buried in it. There are more bits and pieces we are still finding.

I also found this.

20180511.broken.birdhouse

Apparently, no one had a problem with burning this, then plowing the remaining metal and glass bits, into the garden.

Nor with this…

20180511.woodpile.finds

I’d already pulled out a margarine container. Today, I found the two lids and some mystery plastic, along with the bits of insulation.

Lovely.

As I was writing this, my daughters called me out to see a discovery they made while cleaning around the yard.

That one is getting its own post. After I make supper.

Oh, the strange things we are finding!

The Re-Farmer

What is this? A guessing game

May 7, 2018May 7, 2018 / Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

Here’s a question for you, dear readers.

Can you guess what this piece of equipment is?

Here is a view of most of it…

20180507.found.equipment1

And this is what’s buried in the dried leaves.

20180507.found.equipment2

Do you know what it is? Leave your guesses in the comments. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Checking things out

May 3, 2018May 3, 2018 / Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

This afternoon, I took advantage of pleasant temperatures to walk around the yard and the spruce and maple groves. There was snow on the ground the last time I went into these areas, so I was able to get to areas I couldn’t before.

Walking through the spruce grove, it continues to strike me, just how many dead and dying trees there are. Quite a few have already fallen, but many have not. It’s slowly being taken over by broad leaf trees, but a lot of them are dead and dying, too.

This is from one of the spruce trees.

You can certainly see why it fell. This is caused by carpenter ants. They nest in wood and can cause all kinds of damage and, in this case, weakened the trunk enough for it to fall, probably in high winds. When I was a kid, splitting logs in the basement for the furnace in the winter, I would sometimes split a log with a hibernating nest of ants in it. They’d fall out into a sluggish mass on the concrete.

Then they’d go into the fire.

You don’t mess with these guys.

Thankfully, we’ve never seen signs of them nesting in the house itself.

Walking through the row of apple trees, which are just barely starting to show leaf buds in a few places, I discovered why the mystery box jammed into one of them hasn’t blown away.

It has a mystery bucket inside.

I’m sure someone had a reason to put it there. I just can’t think of what it might be!

I started going into the maple grove next. It used to border the garden, but at some point, a couple of rows of spruce trees were planted into what used to be garden. The garden area was slowly made smaller and smaller over the years, with tree plantings.

So many are dead or dying. What you see on the bottom left is where there is a water tap. That used to be at the the very outer edge of the garden border.

This row of trees was planted some time after I left the farm. Like so many others, they were planted way too close together. Most seem to be dead or half dead.

I don’t think there’s much left to salvage of this old willow, but we’ll see better when it’s in full leaf. I remember it being huge and healthy, when I was a child, as was a second one behind it. That, too, has many dead branches on it, but it’s not as broken as this one.

I eventually made my way to the fence side of the house in our yard. I was noticing some wasp nests, and remains of wasp nests, under the eaves when I suddenly realized I was looking at something that didn’t make sense.

That’s an electrical cable running from a hole into the “basement”, up to the roof.

When I was a kid, I spent many summer nights sleeping in this building, and even had sleepovers with my friends – back when it was still is decent shape. There was no power hooked up to it. We used candles and kerosene lamps for light.

Now that I think of it, I do remember one time when there was electricity being used in there. My brothers also used the house, for parties. I recall there was a stag held there one, and the next morning, I’d joined them to watch a movie on the TV that was brought in. I also remember lights and music playing. I had completely forgotten about that until now. I wonder if this wire was the source of the electricity?

So where does the line go?

Straight through the branches…

Over this dead tree on the other side of the fence…

Then it disappeared into the grass.

So I went around the fence and pulled it out of the grass to see what I would find.

There was far more length then I expected, before I pulled up the insulator – then there was even more wire before I found the plug.

From what I can tell by the electrical tape at the insulator, the wire is spliced.

And that plug… well. You can see the inner wires are exposed.

I am guessing the insulator was attached to the pump shack, then the cable continued into the pump shack to one of the outlets inside.

It’s basically a giant extension cord.

I’m starting to wonder how no one ever caused any electrical fires and burned this place down, over the years!

Speaking of burning, as I was walking around, I could smell smoke. I couldn’t see smoke anywhere, and have heard nothing about any new fires, but then, I didn’t see smoke or hear anything about the last two fires out here, for some time.

Meanwhile, my wonderful, awesome daughters got 4 van loads into the shed today, while I brought over my mother’s dressers from the bedroom, taking out the drawers and removing the mirror off one of them. Even without the drawers, they were surprisingly heavy. The mirror alone weighed more than any of the others we hauled out. This bedroom set of my mother’s is of amazing quality! It’s a shame she left them behind when she moved out, though I suppose they would have been too big for her current apartment.

By the time they were done unloading the last of the stuff into the shed, their bodies let them know, in no uncertain terms, that they were still sick. I am so grateful that they got it done. While they did that, my husband and I decided on how we’d arrange things for when the hospital bed is delivered, and I switched some things around. We are at the point now that, once we get the call that it’s on the way, we need only to take out the bed we’re using now.

Once the box springs we are borrowing are loaded into the shed, we have nothing else that will need to go through the main part of the house into storage. There is just the Old Kitchen and sun room to work on, so things can go straight outside from there.

Little by little, it’s getting done!

The Re-Farmer

Windblown

April 29, 2018April 29, 2018 / Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

Oh, my goodness, what a windy day it is today! As I sit at my computer, I can see the trees behind the other house in the yard, swaying back and forth. This is the sort of weather that brings trees down!

I’m rather concerned about that.

Oh, I just heard a door banging. Excuse me while I go check that…

Back. I’ve just had to tie down one of our screen doors!

Our sun room has two pairs of doors. It was tacked onto the Old Kitchen, which had its own inner door and screen door, plus there is another inner door and screen door to enter/exit the sun room from outside. The screen part of the screen door has no glass, so the wind has been pushing the inner door open. When I went to close them, I found the inner door of the Old Kitchen had also been blown open, held in place only by the security latch on the inside.

The doors and frames are in need of repair and/or replacement, and there was no way I could keep the inside door of the sun room from opening, so I blocked it with my dad’s walker for now.

In the process of moving it, I found a corded weed wacker! Yay! I hope it works.

The walker is at least keeping the door from swinging, but the outside screen door is also being blown open, so I just tied it to the arm bar in the door frame.

We’ve learned to appreciate all the arm bars installed around the house, just for the aid in mobility, but I never thought I’d appreciate them as something to secure a door closed!

We’ll have to find a better solution soon, though, since that exit is our only remaining fire escape, now that the front door at the dining room is stuck closed.

The wind had also blown the metal roof pieces off the dog house the cats have been using. Turns out, they’re not fastened in any way; the pieces just got placed over the shingled roof underneath.

*sigh*

I did a walk around to see what else might be blowing in the wind, and discovered this.

The back door to the garage can only be fastened shut from the outside. Which means, when my daughter went in to open the main garage door from the inside, after the handle broke off, she could only close the door, but not latch it. So no surprise that it was being blown around, too.

It takes a bit more to blow open the outhouse door, though.

I don’t recall ever looking inside the outhouse, since moving here. I did not expect it to be so colorful!

Also, it has a mirror.

Why is there a medicine cabinet in the outhouse?

There’s also a fluorescent light fixture stored on one side of the door, and some shelf boards on the other.

As far as I know, the last time anyone’s been in here was back in late November, when the guy who tried to find an internet signal somewhere in our yard had to use it, because we only have one bathroom, and my daughter had just got in the shower.

That poor man.

I’m fascinated by the effort taken to decorate the inside of the outhouse like that.

The stacks of books reminds me of back in the days before we had indoor plumbing, and we used old catalogs as toilet paper. I don’t think we ever bought toilet paper until we got an indoor bathroom.

While closing up the door, I could hear the sound of another door banging, so I checked the front of the garage.

It’s even more surprising to see this door open, because of these…

It takes a fair bit for this type of latch to come undone.

Since I was there anyhow, I took a look at the main garage door, thinking I might be able to install the new handle.

It looks like we won’t be able to use it.

The mechanism works by pulling on cables on the inside that unlatches the door at the sides. The cable runs through a hole in a squared post that the handle is attached to. Turn the handle, turn the post, which pulls the cables.

The new handle’s post doesn’t have a hole the cable can run through. It’s obviously designed for a different mechanism. Which would be fine if we could just remove the squared post on the new handle and use the old one, but it’s all one piece.

Looks like we might have to make a trip to the city to find the right kind of handle.

As I checked around the yard, I noticed something else that’s concerning. The smell of smoke. This time of year, it’s common for people to do controlled burns. The municipality, for example, might burn the dead foliage along the sides of ditches, or farmers might burn last year’s stubble. We’ve seen some areas along the sides of roads that had been done earlier in the month. Right now, however, it’s so dry that there are a lot of burn bans. Coupled with the wind, it’s unlikely that someone would be doing a burn. Which means, if there is a fire somewhere, it’s not a controlled burn.

There is no visible smoke, at least. In these high winds, if there was visible smoke, it would mean there’s a really large fire somewhere. According to the weather app, the winds are south winds at 57kmh (35.4mph), with gusts up to 74 (50mph).

I think I’ll go check the government fire maps right now, and see if anything’s been reported that we need to be concerned about!

The Re-Farmer

Walkabout – the East yard

April 25, 2018April 25, 2018 / Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

I had done a walkabout yesterday, through our East yard, some of the areas just outside the fenced yard, and explored around the old gravel pit and pond. I had my phone with me and took plenty of pictures, but then had technical difficulties uploading them to my desktop. My husband was able to see them fine on his laptop via the USB cable, so the problem had to be with my desktop. This morning, I tried one thing. Usually, I have my USB cable attached to one of the front ports of the tower, but my husband had moved it to one of the back ports, so he could access the front ones for something he was doing. Could that have made the difference?

Turns out, yeah. That seems to have been the problem. I was able to upload the pictures without getting the weird error messages I was getting before.

Unfortunately, in my attempts to access and transfer the photos yesterday, some were lost, while others were corrupted or damaged.

So today, I did the walkabout again, this time using the DSLR (Nikon D80) and an 18-55mm lens.

I ended up taking 308 pictures! :-D And I didn’t even go into the other house in the yard, this time!

Basically, I am documenting the way things are right now, that we will have to deal with as time goes by. Anything outside the house and immediate yard are lower on the priority list, but they will still need to be dealt with, eventually, so I want to maintain a photographic record of it all.

For now, I will just talk about the East side of our yard – and not even all of that.

When I first came out, Nasty Crime Boy was there to greet me, but he did NOT like the noise the DSLR made when I took pictures! :-D

The first area I went to was around the other house in the yard. This house used to be a church rectory, and my dad bought it and moved it when they wanted to build a new one. It was put into our yard temporarily. The plan was that it would be moved to one of the other quarter sections of the farm and be a home for whichever of the boys inherited it that section.

That never happened.

I’ll post about the house itself, another time.

This is next to it.

When my parents’ freezer died, they gave one of my siblings the money to buy a new one, which we are currently using. The old one, for some reason, got dumped in the yard. They took the door off, so nothing could get trapped in it, but that’s it.

I hadn’t realized that even the baskets were in there until I came over to take pictures.

I could do posts of nothing but large household appliances, abandoned in strange places, and have no shortage of material. Especially washers and driers. It’s amazing.

Then I went around the back of the building.

That largish black pipe you see? It’s placed through a hole in a partially boarded up window. That means it was deliberately placed there. I find myself wondering if there is something under the house that is being propped up.

This house had had a full basement in it. Now, the areas with the bricks are what used to be the top of the basement walls, and there is basically a crawl space underneath.

Then there’s this.

A toilet. Just sitting there.

Another rain barrel. I don’t know what the 6 sided plastic thing is. A wire shelf.

Just. There.

Why?

This is some sort of mini garden, near the fire pit. I can see no rhyme or reason to it being there, and can’t figure out what’s in it – that will have to wait until things start to grow. It needs to go. Seeing what’s there will help me decide whether it’ll just be torn up, or if there’s anything in it worth transplanting.

The above picture is of what is directly North of the mystery planting. There used to be a playhouse here, built by my oldest brother. It was basically a shell of a building, with a door and windows in the front. I was too young to remember it being built, but as a child, I helped my late brother, who was just a few years older than me, frame out bunk beds inside it, and we used old couch cushions as the mattresses. In the summer, I would sometimes sleep in there, with a tiny kerosene lamp for light. It was glorious.

I don’t know what happened to the playhouse. For a while, one of my brothers had some bee hives here. Now, there’s nothing. I am thinking this is where we will start a wood pile from what we’re clearing out of the garden now, and what we’ll be clearing out of the trees around the yard. I am looking forward to when we can have the fire pit going in the summer, and have some wiener roasts!

This is the fire pit that’s there now.

Yeah.

Believe it or not, there is a metal ring in there.

It’s not where the fire pit was originally. That was about where I was standing to take the picture. It was made of loosely stacked bricks, on top of an old tree stump that had been cut to ground level. I only discovered the tree stump when I took it upon myself to “rebuild” the fire pit, because the walls were being knocked out of place.

One thing I noticed that you can see in some of the photos, is that this area now seems to be mostly moss! As I was the one who took on the chore of lawn mowing, I know there was no moss at all in there when I was living here. I don’t know when the moss started taking over, but this is not a sign of a healthy lawn!

I am thinking we should move the fire pit back to where it was, and farther away from those trees in the background.

We will first have to trim away the a dead branch overhanging it, from one of the maples in the area. There are a lot of dead branches that will need to be dealt with.

Eventually, I want to build a cinder block cooking pit in the area, but that’s a few years into the future.

This old log cabin is near the fire pit area. (note the amount moss in the foreground! That used to be all grass) From what I’ve been told, the family that owned this area before my family bought it – the ones who built the original log portion of the house we’re living in now – had built this and lived in it.

I am hoping we can salvage it. The one side wall has logs that are sagging in the middle, which may be a problem, but the rest of the walls seem sound. The roof is almost completely collapsed, and it’s filled with junk – including large household appliances, of course. At some point, I want to hire someone to empty it, including the remains of the roof, and haul it all away. Then we can see what can be done with the remains.

There is one thing about it that has me wondering.

See that tree at the corner?

When I was growing up here, there was a gooseberry bush growing there. I used to love picking and eating the berries right off the bush. I don’t know that anything else was ever done with the berries. Which might have something to do with why, years after I moved away, I came back to discover it was gone. In its place were a couple of spruce trees.

Now, the spruces are gone, and there is this tree.

I don’t know if it was planted, or if it seeded itself, but it’s going to have to go, along with the other trees that are growing too close to the building.

I am seeing this all over the place; trees were allowed to grow right next to buildings. No one bothered to cut them away. Did no one consider how much damage they can do to buildings? Did they not think of it? Or did they just not care?

So much of what I’m finding around here smacks of “no one cared.” I’m not talking about things that were left as they were, as my parents aged and weren’t able to take care of things themselves, either. It’s really quite disheartening.

Well, that’s part of our East yard. I’m expecting that, this year, we’ll be able to do some clean up and improvements in this area. At least the smaller stuff. The big stuff will have to wait, as they will require hiring people, and fixing up the main house is the financial priority. Still, we should be able to get the East yard to the point that we can use it and enjoy evenings around the fire.

Well. Maybe. That will depend on how bad the mosquitoes are this year!

The Re-Farmer

Hoop Jumping, discoveries and tech upgrades

April 23, 2018 / Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Since moving out here, there have been quite a few things that we’ve tried to do that needed unusual hoop jumping. The most severe being our issues with transferring our identification, but another has been getting an internet connection. Since we couldn’t afford to have a minimum 60ft tower installed, we had to go with satellite internet, and then ended up needing to get two accounts, because it was cheaper than going over our data limit. Satellite internet has more speed limitations, too. Our internet provider, however, recently gained access to another satellite and could offer higher upload and download speeds, with less interruptions, so we signed up for it. Someone was scheduled to come in this afternoon to switch it for us.

Before that happened, we got to work on our daughters’ taxes. In Canada, we have until April 30 to file. Normally, we just do the TurboTax thing, but it had issues with my husband’s disability information. So he and I have taken our tax information to the tax preparer in the next town. This guy (it’s a family business) has done the taxes for my parents for as long as I can remember, and still does them for my mother. Probably my brother who lives out here, too. We’d gone to him when we lived out here years ago, so it was a bit funny to be going back to him again, after all these years.

Our daughters, however, should have been able to just do theirs as usual, right?

Wrong.

Turns out that they can’t file their taxes online, because of the new address.

They can’t log onto the Government of Canada website to change their address, because they’ve never needed to start accounts on the site before, and to start one, they needed information from last year’s taxes. Which was lost when we lost my husband’s desktop computer after the move.

The alternative is to phone Canada Revenue. The website says to change the address online, or call a 1-800#, providing a list of the information that would be needed. One of my daughters called the number, got the automated system, went through the whole thing, only to have a recording tell her to go do it online.

Of course, the reason for phoning was because doing in online wasn’t an option.

Which meant they couldn’t file their taxes.

In the end, we gathered their tax stuff, drove into town and dropped it off with the same guy that’s doing mine and my husband’s.

The tax preparer’s wife took their stuff and got their information onto envelopes. As we were chatting, she made an observation on how much my younger daughter resembles her grandfather (my husband’s dad). Until then, I had forgotten that he’d done my in-laws’ taxes, too!

That done, we didn’t stay in town long. Sadly, it seems one of my daughters has caught my cold. I’m still sick as well, though I am getting better – the coughing fits are still a problem – so being out and about was pushing things.

Speaking of pushing things, before we headed out, I started to gather up some of the branches and twigs in the yard, now that the snow is gone. There is a LOT of them. In the process, I made a discovery.

20180423trees

These little spruce trees were deliberately planted, right by the fence.

I don’t get it.

First off, why are two spruce trees planted in the middle of the fence line like that in the first place. There are already quite a number of mature maples there, including a couple that will need to be pruned away from the power line to the house, as well as trimmed so that, once the leaves come in, they won’t be blocking our satellite signal. You can see part of the row of maples on the other side of the fence. The fence line used to be on the other side of those trees with a gate to the pump shack – the red building in the background.

Second, why so close together? Spruces get quite large. They should be planted anywhere from 8 – 15 feet apart. We’re looking at less than 4 feet apart here.

And finally, why are they planted right at the fence? As they get bigger, they will grow into and destroy the fence.

Yet there they are, with little support poles and tiny picket fences to protect them. Initially, I’d thought maybe they seeded themselves, but the fact that they are protected like this shows that they were deliberately planted.

Why would someone deliberately plant trees in such a way that they will destroy the fence as they get bigger?

I don’t get it.

Meanwhile…

When we got back home, the internet guy was here and busily installing two new satellite dishes.

On the sunroom roof.

Oh, dear. My old brother specifically said he didn’t want them installed on the roof. Turns out, there was no choice.

Because of the trees.

It was the only place he could get a signal.

The old dishes were already down, and he took extra care to ensure there would be no leaking caused by the satellites. It took him a couple of hours to finish up. When he was done, he tested the speed at about 35mbps. When I had the chance, I tested the wifi signal on my phone. I got 40mbps for download speed, and 1.89mbps for upload speed. The first is quite a lot faster than before – I think we were getting between 10-14mbps consistently. The upload speed is almost doubled.

That should make live easier!

We also got cool looking new modems, with the black boxes replaced with white triangles. :-D

This is what we had before.

That’s our original dish. When we got the second account, the other dish was installed above it.

This is what we have now.

20180423satellite

They are aimed in a very different direction. No wonder he couldn’t get a signal through the trees! The other satellites were aimed through a gap between threes. In the same location, these would have been aimed right into the trees. From here, they are now aimed through the gap over the big gate into the yard; the one that can be driven through. Mind you, there are still trees on either side that will need to be pruned, because they are overhanging the gate. Plus one that’s shorter, but close enough that its branches get in the way when I have to make a wide turn into the yard. Pruning is still in order.

I like trees. A lot. They are wonderful things to have, and can be very protective. We intend to eventually plant more trees in the future. Preferably food trees.

But they are also potential problems. Many of the trees that have been planted in the yard seem to have been done without much thought given to what would happen, once they reached maturity. From the Chinese Elm in front of the kitchen window, planted too close to the house with branches damaging the roof, to the pair of Chinese Elm on either side of the small gate, whose roots are now making the sidewalk blocks uneven. Even the original maples on the north side of the house have been allowed to reach too close to the house itself; they should have been cut back many years ago, when they were smaller and it was safer to do so.

It’s going to be interesting, during our first summer living here, to get a good understanding of what all is planted around the yard, what we can keep, what needs to be gotten rid of, and possibly, what can be moved. Those little spruce trees, at least, as small enough that they can be easily transplanted.

There is much to do here, that’s for sure!

The Re-Farmer

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: