Tidying the junk

There's not many glamourous things to report this week.  We've spent a lot of time dragging junk around. The piles of firewood, useless naily wood and just plain forgotten wood that we left in the yard when we trimmed the grass will be an obstacle in the spring (if not now) and so needs to be moved. We've moved some, burned some and still have more left to take care of. We also still have wood lying around from taking down the porch.

Toward the goal of finding a place to put all that wood, we've begun to empty our nearest outbuilding. It's in rough shape. It was home to some swallows over the summer - they took full advantage of the many options for entrances and exits through the roof.  The missing cedar shakes fell to the interior, growing moss and just generally being a soggy mess. Along with the holes galore in the roof, a couple of trusses are missing - presumably removed when someone decided to put a taller door in. But for now the building stands, despite it all still respectably sturdy, and it'll do fine for our storage purposes.

In the first bit of the summer, when everything was intimidating and new, one of the first things that made me feel like maybe this project was doable after all, was when Jeff turned all the junk and garbage out of the dirt floor garage beside the house and made it a usable space. This time I'm participating in the emptying of a building, ambitious though it still seems to me. Emptying this outbuilding has been a matter of pulling out from the half-mulched fallen in leaves and branches and roof all sorts of things. Here is some of the unenviable loot, all covered in dirt and rust: old tires, boxes of empty coffee cans, a sink, a pile of cupboard door samples, filing cabinets, previously white plastic patio chairs, disintegrating plastic pails, an old cooler, a half deflated and cracked soccer ball, car batteries, and other various tools and chunks of metal.  We raked and shovelled, we sorted, we rearranged, we swept. I would like to say that now everything is clean and in its place, but what really happened is that we thought "we are going to have to take a load to the dump, we should find more junk." And so into the house! Pulling out old furniture and carpet from upstairs! And then to the pile behind the other red building (the pinnacle of intimidating refuse). Throwing wood around trying to get to the old TV, the mattress, the couch, the broken windows, surrounded by stinging nettle, thistles and grass growing through the pile. So now we have not one load but two to take and still the work of putting everything back together.

It is not just looking ahead to the return to Calgary that's been giving us our job list, but also anticipating reappearing here in spring. We are trying to make things easier for ourselves. Landscaping may seem like a low priority right now, but when I consider the ticks we could encounter in the long grass later, I'm all for the short haircuts now.

Towards other spring prep I've been doing some planting in the garden.  At the weekly farmers market here I overheard a grey-haired woman ask about winter garlic. So I bought one, googled it and am diving into that. I also planted some spinach and kale that hopefully will happily pop up first thing in the spring. Sometimes gardening feels like a wild experiment and for all my enthusiasm I sure wish my results were better.  My current gardening disappointment stems from the frost we had about a week ago that managed to end the season of my tomatoes, cucumber and arguably my beans. They are shrivelled and dead, but I am clinging to hope that the few still-green leaves will mean at least 1 ripened and edible bean by the end of the week. I pulled the spinach and kale - if they're any good they're destined for smoothies. There's still some hope for the carrots too. It's hard not to compare my sad small garden to the mammoth homegrown produce that we've been given by family and neighbours, although the deliciousness of said produce does help to soften the blow. My herbs have been tucked into the  garden bed for winter. 

After a week or two of colder weather the land is certainly feeling it: today I suddenly realized that most all of our trees are now yellow. And the geese have been stop-and-go around and over our house, in beautiful large squawking numbers. Apparently this area is a good one for goose hunting - the geese don't just stop, they hang around and rest awhile. We see them often in the fields too, munching away.  Harvest still goes on, giant colourful machines move at a snails pace down country roads and through the fields. The beautiful pale oat field across the road is all stubble now and I'm sad to see it go.  It won't be long now until we're off to our winter home.

The hunt for old buildings

Since we explored that broken old house those couple weeks ago, I now find that my are eyes constantly on the lookout for beautiful abandoned old buildings.  Old grey wood peaks out from the built up tree fortresses that protect nearly everyone's yard here from wind and obscure them from sight. The question is always "what is behind there?", as we peer down driveways and crank our heads as we pass by.  Sometimes it's a beautifully well kept or lovely house, sometimes it's a simple place, often there are a variety of farm buildings, usually there is at least one leaning building, sometimes there are many.

There is one yard that we often drive by and we get a long look at what clearly used to be a large and beautiful barn of excellent quality. Now it's a sagging, rippling, somehow still standing tired thing that has long outlived its glory days. But it is still beautiful. And it belongs to our neighbour who issued us an invitation to go take a look at it sometime. We didn't drag our feet on that one, and while the barn was just as interesting close up, we found even more of a treasure back further from the road; a two story house. It had been built with the same eye to quality as the barn but left so long that we couldn't enter through the front door - it was barred by the curl of the kitchen tiles. It was the most stunning old building find yet: wallpaper cascading off the walls, plaster crunching under our feet, and light streaming as we open doors and entered the colourful rooms through beautifully trimmed doorways.

We also spent an afternoon church hunting.  We set out to find the oldest synagogue in Saskatchewan (1906) and discovered more than one country church and accompanying graveyard (as well as a pretty winding road along a river valley). These churches, established when the farmers established themselves in this land, seem largely unused now, although some of the buildings are kept up. They are overwhelming Ukranian.

We've been checking off some projects this week. Jeff has been relentlessly tackling the weeds and cutting and tidying the areas of long grass on the west side of our property. It's revealed more space and it looks a lot better (except for the piles of old and rotting wood it's uncovered). I've been coming behind and eagerly gathering much of the clippings for my compost/mulch pile thinking of now and of the spring. Our garden tools now have a home again so it's not a game of hide and seek every time we need one; I created a garden storage area in the garage. Also, I've been busy adding colour to all the handles, so that when they are trying to hide say in a bush or a pile of grass, they're easier to find.

Destruction project

This week Jeff and I took a nice hot day and our crowbars (he insists that they are goosenecks and there are also flat bars and whatever else but to me they're all crowbars) and worked together to deconstruct the porch.  The porch was a sad, rotten thing.  It was situated at the main entrance of the house but it sagged and tipped and pulled away from the house and had a hole in the floor that we had to remember to avoid every time we entered or exited.  Not to mention all the spider webs. We've been eyeing the porch all summer, and just awaiting the day when it's turn would come.

We took off the siding, removed the boards, cut out the window, knocked out the vertical 2x4's and watched the roof fall!  It was a satisfying thing to be sure! So now we have sunshine coming in the front door in the morning, a surplus of rusty nails and a bunch of wood we can reuse.  Some of it is quite lovely (we're open to suggestions for reclaimed wood projects)!  It was nice to be able to roll up my sleeves and get in there on a project. Because I don't have much by way of construction/renovation/plumbing experience usually Jeff works on house stuff and I play the supporting role and do the other stuff, whatever that may be. I don't always feel useful doing the background things, especially when the goal for being out here is 'work on the house.'  So it was good to get dirty and sore and tired tearing something apart.

We've also been working on the garden, but these days "working" is mostly a lot of book reading. Books on plants and planning and composting and soil...  We decided that we would really like to have some kind of compost built. What kind of compost to build is apparently a less than simple question - one we could spend a long time figuring out (and with our lack of gardening experience and our general indecisiveness we probably would). In the meantime to discovering the perfect compost system(s), I took a rummage through the sometimes junk, sometimes treasures of our outbuildings and found some wire mesh. So I've thrown together a probably too small, but at least functional compost that will do us for the moment.

In other garden news, we ate our first garden cucumber! It was juicy and crunchy and sweet and delicious.  I don't think I've ever tasted as sweet a cucumber before.  The garden is beginning to reward us for our efforts, although it still does look tiny compared to every other garden I have seen around here.  The race is now on to be able to harvest the fruits of our labours a) before it gets cold, and b) before the time we plan to return to Calgary.  The carrots are still very small and the beans are only just beginning to form fruit.  Fertilizer has become my friend, and I am trying to be especially diligent to water everything regularly.  I have my eye on the next to ripen cucumber though and I think today may be the day for it!