All the unnecessary gardening

We've been here almost a week now, and although we haven't made as much progress as we had hoped, we have managed to make the acreage a more comfortable place to be.

Work on the acreage has consisted mostly of getting the grass cut, prepping and planting a vegetable garden and little flower bed, rummaging through outbuildings for useful things, making the deck and yard a nice place to be and thinking about cleaning.  Country dwelling means we have mouse related disinfecting and problem solving to do to make the place livable.  I definitely hate mice and would love it if every trace of a mouse would be gone before I even thought about living in a place.  Alas, this is a diy.

In the face of this somewhat overwhelming project, we may have unreasonably tackled a good deal of unnecessary and yet enjoyable gardening projects.  We hadn't really planned on planting anything other than a small veggie garden, but it's been a more palatable task than the alternatives and has given us a bit of an opportunity to process it all.  So here's the garden report: There's a great grassy space to the south that gets a lot of sun. We borrowed a rototiller and some garden implements and Jeff turned a small strip of it into workable dirt. I planted (less than half) of it with greens and carrots.  Mission: find more veggies to plant that will grow quickly.  Also, next to the deck stairs there's those great ferns you saw in the last post, but nothing on the other side.  So now it's a modest garden bed, cobbled from the pansies I brought, a plant I found in the grass that's a mystery and some pretty blue things we found at a store.  We found a great deal on hostas as well and rummaged up some old canning pots (ie planters) from one of the outbuildings, and I'm trying to decide where they should sit. The growing zone out here is reportedly a two, but it's wetter.  It's a bit of a puzzle trying to figure out shady and sunny areas and apply my mostly untried Calgary garden plant knowledge to this place.

Speaking of this place, I am discovering what people mean when they say big skies. It's very cool to see the sunset last for hours or to see the full movement of clouds across the sky, or lightening as just the small part of the storm.  There's more water than I'm used to here. It seems everywhere there is a roadside marsh or stretch of informal pond. The birdsong on the acreage is amazing and it's very humid - sometime mist stretches across the fields.

We did, in the end, get a start on the cleaning and are sort of half moved in. Today we expect to finish it and sleep there, at our acreage.