why is this here?

Yard Tires

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I was talking to a friend who brought up something that has shown up in some of the photos of our yard that I’ve shared.

The tires.

So, I figured I would explain, because there are so many of them!

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Tree tire is tired and broken.

This is from one of the pictures I posted yesterday.  The pair of trees on either side of the sidewalk at the gate are in tires like this, as is the tree by the kitchen window, and others I’ve been finding, buried under leaves, in unexpected places.

At some point, many years ago, it became a popular thing to re-purpose old tires in yards.  With trees, the saplings were planted inside the tire, and the tire served to protect the planting from damage.  Like getting accidentally hit by a lawn mower, or backed into by a car or something.  As time went by, of course, there was no way to remove the tire once the tree grew.  In this case, the trunk outgrew the tire itself, which was old enough to split under the pressure of the growing tree.

Which gives you an idea of how many years this has been there!

As you can see, an attempt was made to pretty up the tire by painting it.

Then there are the tractor tires.

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I find myself perplexed as I see something like this.  Obviously, someone cared enough to create and protect a little flower garden at Mary’s feet, and even paint the tractor tire to pretty it up.  But they didn’t care enough to remove the tree that started growing at it which, if it were left to continue growing, will eventually push aside the tire and destroy the garden inside it.  I can understand the leaves in the garden still being there; there was no one here to tend to such things while the place was empty, but you’d think someone would have removed the tree, long before it got this big!

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The garden gnome is now back where it was found.  This was also a flower garden planted under the bird bath, though there is nothing but grass and weeds inside it now.

Slowly but surely, we are working our way around the yard and cleaning this stuff up.  It will be nice to clean out the bird bath and start using it for its intended purpose again.

Then there are these contraptions.

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This is a car tire that was cut in half, decoratively, then flipped inside out.  The other half, without the decorative edge, was left right side out and is underneath.

It cannot have been easy to cut the tire, never mind flipping it inside out!

I’m more at a loss over what it planted inside it.  They appear to be little trees or bushes.  Perhaps they are self seeded?

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This second one has even more of them.  There is nothing to show that anything else was ever planted in there.  If these were deliberately planted, why were they planted off to the sides like that, where the soil is shallowest, instead of in the middle?

I have questions.  Many questions.

This planter is in a particularly bad location.  It’s right up against the platform for the clothes line, which is on a pulley system.  There used to be three lines, but now there is just one.  The clothes can be hung on the line from the platform, moving the line on the pulleys from one spot, rather than having to walk along the line and reaching high up to hang things.  This allows the line itself to be much higher, too, and less in the way.  I tried hanging the king size mattress protector on the line from the platform and quickly discovered that the bushes planted in the tire planter are right under the line, and taller than the hand rail, which means anything hung on the line gets dragged through the bushes.

The planter and its contents is going to have to go.  We don’t plan to use the clothes line often, but we do want to have the option!

While walking around and taking these photos, I found something very amusing.  Remember this, from winter?

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This is a path the cats made through the snow, from whatever shed they’ve been using out back.  There is also a small hole under the fence between the pump shack and the other house, near where there used to be a gate, many years ago.  It had been buried by the snow, so the cats made this new path to the gate to get into the yard.

Cat paths in the snow are an easy thing to understand.

Then there’s this.

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A cat path worn into the grass is a whole different thing! :-D  You can see Butterscotch, sitting at the hole in the fence.

Many, many cat feet have created this path. :-D

The Re-Farmer

Oh, the things we find!

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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.

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

Oh…

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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?

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

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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.

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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

Oh. That’s how that happened

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While out with my mother yesterday, I ended up finding out something I had been wondering about.

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Why this is here.

This little patch of bushes seemed so random.  The size of it, the location – even the odd angle of it – just didn’t make sense to me.

Then my mother mentioned some lilies in the yard and asked me if they were coming up yet.  Where did she mean?  It turned out to be in this area, along with the bushes.  Which reminded me to ask her, how did she end up planting things here?

The answer?

Because of a van.

You see, for many years, the younger of my brothers had a van parked there.  I even remember it being there, as do my daughters.  It was there for a very long time.

I do believe I’ve spotted it in the old hay yard by the barn, among the many other vehicles sitting there.

After the van was moved out of the yard, there was a patch under it, where the grass had died.

So my mom planted things in it.  She tells me there’s a lilac bush, as well as a white rose, there, along with the lilies.

Well… I guess that’s one way to fix a damaged piece of lawn. It certainly explains the size, shape and location!

The Re-Farmer

 

Shaggy friends, a new bird ID and… a mystery!

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Early this morning, I spotted some movement at the edge of our spruce grove.  It turned out to be a bird, enthusiastically digging and pecking at the ground.  A surprisingly large bird; not as big as a grouse, but certainly bigger than a blue jay or crow.  Not something I recall seeing before.  Unfortunately, it was too far to identify by eye, so I got some pictures zoomed in as far as our lens can go.  They’re not good pictures, but enough to identify it.

From what I can find, it appears to be a Northern Flicker, though there are different kinds that can look quite different.

The most distinctive thing about it was the splash of red at the back of the neck.  The other distinguishing feature is the black bib.

A number of the photos of Northern Flickers I saw also had a splash of red on the cheek, but this one did not have that.

As it later flew away, I was able to see the underside of its wings, which appeared to be a bright yellow.

The Norther Flicker is a member of the woodpecker family, so it’s interesting that this one was pecking, not at wood, but at the ground.

Later on, my younger daughter and I got some progress done on the sorted wood piles in the garden.  We’ve now removed all the wood we’d already sorted, except for the pile I set aside to keep for potential projects.  More will be added to it as we finish going through the original pile.  When we got to the larger pieces, we had to saw most of them in half so they would fit in the wheel barrows.  We could really tell when we were cutting apple wood!  The wood is so much harder, and the patterns in the rings are so distinctive and lovely.  Even the ones I didn’t choose to keep, I set them to one side in the piles we’re making near the fire pit, for use when we’re cooking or, if all goes well, able to do some smoking.

My poor daughter.  By the time we were done for the day, she was just wasted.  She was really too sick to be doing this sort of work, but she did it anyways, and I really appreciate it!

After that, I went to the post office and, along the way, I found our shaggy neighbours were closer to the road, so I pulled over to get some photos.

Zooming in with a cell phone doesn’t get very good pictures, unfortunately, but still.  Bison!

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We got some unexpected people visitors today.  First, my brother and his Lady Fair, who live nearby, came over to pick up the last of some stuff he’s got in our root cellar.  I was all excited because his beautiful dog finally allows me to pet him!  Then my older brother came by, just as they we leaving.  My mother’s car has been stored here for the winter, and she wants to register it again soon, so he came to put the battery back in.  It turned out to need charging, so he started doing some stuff at the barn.  When I went out to join him, I stopped to take a look at a pile of wood that is sitting in the barn yard.

Only to discover, it’s not a pile of wood.  It’s a pile of something else, covered in wood.

What on earth was I seeing under there?

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Whatever the wood is covering has moss growing on it, and there’s a layer of plastic.  Something is showing through holes that I at first thought was ashes?

So I asked my brother.

It’s insulation.  My youngest brother had put it there.

My youngest brother died in 2010.

Why is it there?  My brother didn’t know.

The wood on top showed up more recently.

What on earth are we going to do with a plastic covered, moss covered, wood covered, pile of insulation, sitting in the barn yard?

The Re-Farmer

Checking things out

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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Straight through the branches…

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

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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.

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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

Hello, Shaggy Friend

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Heading to town, I paused on the side of the road to get a picture at one of the neighboring farms.

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Until today, we’d only seen them way in the back, in a corral. This farm has been raising bison for many years now.  I was happy to see they still are.

I like our shaggy friends. :-)

Today, we had a visit from someone in home care.  As part of my husband re-establishing the medical and other specialists he lost in the move, we was referred to home care for assessment.

As far as direct home care services, nothing is needed at this point.  Not with three adults in the house to help him.  He will, however, be getting a hospital bed.  Some time within the next two weeks, though it could be as early as Friday (two days from now), depending on the delivery drivers.

Which means it’s now urgent to get my mother’s dressers out of the master bedroom, and we have to figure out what to do with the king size bed.  At least we’ve got a spare twin, so I’ll still have a bed.

Unfortunately, we are now all sick.  Though I am recovering from the cold quite a bit, I’m still coughing a lot.  My oldest daughter seems to have gotten over the worst of it, while my younger daughter is just getting into the worse of it, and now my husband is starting to come down with it, too. :-(

Which means that, at the moment, it looks like I’m the healthiest person in the house!

As we spoke with the woman from home care, I brought up about wanting to put in a ramp outside.  It turns out Occupational Therapy assesses for stuff like that, so she will start that process for us.  OT has been here for my dad before; that’s why there’s arm bars all over the place.  Though my dad did have a wheeled walker, he usually used a non-wheeled one.  At least for inside.  His wheeled walker had a seat on it, with storage underneath.  He kept his tools in there, so it was handy around the yard. :-D

We still have that walker.  I intend to hang on to it, should I ever need one.  I’ve been doing really well, as far as mobility goes, and haven’t needed to use a cane in ages, but I never know when something will suddenly dislocate again, or a knee will bend sideways.  Better to be prepared, just in case!

Anyhow.  A ramp wasn’t included in the mobility improvements done for my dad, though one of my brother’s had intended to build a ramp for him, himself.  Instead, my dad ended up in the nursing home, so it never happened.  She’ll put in the paperwork for OT to come and assess the house and confirm if we qualify to have a ramp put in.  Even if it can’t get done this year, at least we’ll have the information we’ll need.

Tomorrow, however we are feeling, we have to start hauling things to the shed and get those dressers out of the way, so the hospital bed can be put in.  The delivery company will assemble and install it.  We just have to make sure the space is open.  We have been forewarned that it comes with a basic hospital mattress, so we might want to pick up a mattress topper for it or something.

It should be interesting.

This afternoon, I figured I was feeling well enough to start working on moving the wood piles in the garden.  I started in the area I wanted to put the wood, near the fire pit.  There were already dead trees and branches I needed to clear up, so I’ve started one pile for logs and larger branches, and another for the small branches and twigs for kindling.  While working, I kept seeing beyond into the maple grove, with all the dead branches and trees, and was just itching to start cleaning up in the yard.  Unfortunately, my mother has been obsessed with getting the garden area plowed.  I don’t want it done, and it’s far from a priority.  I can’t help but feel a bit angry, because I’m having to focus my limited energy working on the garden, instead of cleaning up around the yard, which needs it so much more.  But it’s her place, not ours, and two out of three of my siblings agree with her, so we’re outvoted, too.

With the snow completely gone, we can finally see the condition of the garden area itself.  I had been told it was very rough (another one of the reasons some family members are insisting it get plowed; it hadn’t been done properly last year, so for some reason, it’s now really, really urgent to do it this year).  Like so many other things, it was even worse than I expected.  Not so much because of how rough it is, but because of how full of rocks it is.  I spent many years helping my mother in the garden, and while there have always been rocks, I don’t remember there ever being THIS many!  Unfortunately, plowing it is just going to dig up more rocks.  Geologically, we’re on the bed of an ancient glacial lake.  This entire area has shallow soil, with lots of gravel, clay, sand and rock below.  What I want to do is build the soil up, not tear it up even more.  I much prefer to use no-till techniques, for many reasons.  Plus, if we do get chickens, they will be kept in the garden area and can help keep the weeds down and build up the soil, too.

So we will continue to work on removing the wood pile from the garden (thank God I was able to prevent it from being turned into a bonfire!), before we start cleaning the yard itself.  There is a lot of work to be done, that’s for sure.  I don’t mind.  I miss the manual labour. :-D

I didn’t get too much done in the garden before I had to stop.  Instead, I started working around the fire pit area.  There are three maple trees in a group with an old awning under them, among other things, that has been sitting there for many years.  I wanted to get the dead branch that’s overhanging the fire pit, which meant clearing that stuff out.

It took some doing to get it out.  It turned out to have been there long enough for soil to build up over the bottom of the frame!

After moving it, I found this…

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… in between two of the maples.

I wonder how many years it’s been there?  Probably longer than the awning.  That’s been there long enough that my daughters used it to get into the trees when they were little, so we’re looking at probably around 20 years.

At least it wasn’t another fridge or freezer! :-D

I did get part of the dead branch down.  I basically just reached up and pulled.  It’s been dead and dried up for so long, it broke quite easily.  Now, there’s just half of it, and it’s too high up to reach, so it’ll wait until we bring over a ladder.

I found another odd thing while working around the fire pit area.

Old cow poop.

I found it in the area where I’m putting the wood piles, but I was also finding it around the compost pile, as I cleaned up what had fallen out as the snow melted.  These are two very different areas of the yard.

Now, the farm has been rented out and the renter rotates his cattle here, but this is a fenced yard.  They should not be getting into the yard.

Also…

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That’s not cow.  That’s horse.

The only person I know of with horses nearby, is my own brother.  I don’t know if the renter has horses, but even if he did, why would they be with the cows?

So both cows and horses had gotten into the yard at some point, and not that long ago, either.

Oh, along with cow poop around the aluminum ring that contains the compost pile, I was finding small branches and twigs in the pile itself.  Plus a plastic container of the kind sour cream or cottage cheese comes in.

I seem to remember that the wood pile in the garden had originally been put on the compost pile, and one of my siblings was going to burn the whole thing until another said not to.  I don’t understand why anyone with do that, since the compost pile itself is right next to trees.  Burning the pile means burning the trees.  That would explain why there’s so much wood in the compost pile.

*sigh*  Even our compost pile is in worse shape than I expected!  And why would anyone burn it, when it’s right next to trees?

Ah, well.  Little by little, we’ll get it done.

One thing’s for sure.  By the time we are done cleaning up all the dead trees and branches in the garden area, yard, spruce grove and maple grove, we’ll have enough fuel for dozens of wiener roasts!

I’m hoping I didn’t push myself too hard, too soon, by working on this stuff today, but gosh, it felt good to finally be doing it!

The Re-Farmer

Windblown

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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

This is what we have now.

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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

 

 

 

Slowly but surely…

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… spring is working its way here.

Which means the Asian lady beetles were out in full force again.  Ew.  One of my tasks of the day, after vacuuming my office window again, was to take the screen out so I could clean it in the bathtub, as well as clean the glass in the window.

Unfortunately, pulling the screen out meant all sorts of things fell on the window ledge.  More of the lady beetles – some still alive – dead flies, seeds from the Chinese elm in front of the kitchen.

Ew.

After using the shower on the screen, I returned to find even more lady beetles had come back.  At least I could just open the window and toss them outside.

Then, as I sat at my computer, some movement in the window caught my eye.  What could it be?  It showed up again.  A quick flash of something, at the very bottom of the window.

I took a look, and it was Squishum!  Directly under my window is the window to the basement, where we used to throw in the wood for the winter.  It’s sunken a bit below ground level, so there is now a makeshift “roof” over it to keep moisture from collecting and draining into the basement.  Squishum had gone on top of this.  It’s not high enough for a cat to see into our window, but when she tried, I was seeing the tips of her ears!

As I was looking out the window, I spotted the new cat, back at the food bowls!  The other cats didn’t seem to mind it being there.  Not like when the Mothman comes, and they get all freaked out.

When I mentioned the new cat was there, the girls decided to head outside to hopefully see it (it took off behind the other house in the yard), and to say hello to the kitties.

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Beep Beep decided to get vicious and attach my daughter’s leg. :-D

I took advantage of the slightly warmer weather to walk around the house and check how things were – with several cats following me.  With more of the snow gone, there were a few more “why is this there?” moments!

There was a squirrel under the picnic table, and Butterscotch decided to try and hunt it.  Which is funny, because she’s so small, the squirrel is almost half her size!  She just ended up chasing it up the maple tree in the photo below.

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I do wonder about those seats along the shed.  They look like they’re from old cars, and they’re sitting on top of logs and pieces of wood.  I am guessing they were put there so that my parents could sit down when they were working in the garden.  Neither of them is straight, so it would not have been comfortable sitting in them, even if they weren’t all covered with leaves and dirt.

I went and checked out the pile of stuff under the tarp near where we put the deer feed.  It is, indeed, a pile of old pallets.  Quite old.  Whoever put them there took the time to cover them with a tarp, then threw old branches and other things on top, to keep the tarp from blowing away.  And there is sits, with a dead tree fallen at it, as well as branches that look like they’ve fallen from the trees above.

Not sure why the tire is there.  It’s not holding down the tarp.

Just one of the things to clean up, once things warm up.  We’re going to need someone with a pick up truck to haul some of this stuff away for us. :-/

Stuff like…

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… this table.  It’s behind an area where we used to cut and stack wood, then store it until we needed to take more into the basement.  The area now has a makeshift wall, part of which is covered with landscaping cloth, and the old doghouse that is now used by the cats.

It’s odd enough for the table to be there, but it’s been there long enough that a tree died and fell over it, held up by the brush that has grown up around it.

Considering the location, I just can’t figure out why it’s there.

I can now see what’s under the dog house.  It’s sitting on a pallet, which has started to rot and collapse in the middle.

Another thing for the list.

Along with this.

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At first, I thought it was a broken handle and tried to lift it.  The rake part was buried in the grass and is frozen to the ground.

It also look like it’s partly under that old scrap carpet.  Carpet that has been there long enough for moss to be growing on it.

So if the rake is under the carpet, then it has been there at least as long as the carpet.

Why are either of them there at all?

So strange.

There were a couple of other curious things around the house.  Some curious cats!

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Coming back to the house, I found Beep Beep and Butterscotch, checking out the inside cats! :-D

My younger daughter and I headed out into town to stock up on some things for the freezer, since we’re not making our Costco trip this month.  This reminder is now completely uncovered by the melt.

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This is where the movers got stuck in our driveway.  There are several others in the ice along the driveway, heading to the gate.  Those ones, at least, didn’t go all the way into the ground, like these.

I’m hoping we can get more gravel for our driveway soon.  Maybe not this year, though.  We’ll have enough to deal with just with the house and yard!

The Re-Farmer