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!

 

Exploring the land

A couple things have happened this week to make this place out here feel a bit more like a home. The water for the house is now off the to do list! We have running water, including hot water and a working shower! It feels good. We've also been given some furniture, household items and yard equipment. We're now able to furnish another whole room with our additional small couch!  And we have a large tv, and a much better working wheelbarrow. We are super grateful to be equipped in this way, by all these extra items.

Speaking of yard work, we tackled a carragana bush one afternoon this week. It was oriented outside our living room windows, in the middle of the yard. The tree and bush plantings of the previous owners have been a little baffling to us and we've been happily anticipating some reworking. We won the battle, chipping away at shoots and roots with hoe and shovel and pitchfork. Our tools took a heavy toll - we snapped a shovel handle and broke a pitchfork tine, and hurt a back and both of us went away rather sore from it. But the ground is level and the rocks removed and the view much better.

Quite by accident we've also been rediscovering the joys of exploring, taking alternate routes home and stopping at broken old buildings (no shortage of those around here) and pretty spots.  The fields have all changed their tones - everything is dryer; the bright yellows are gone in favour of paler, grassier hues. The farmers have started their harvesting and taking the wrong road can mean parking at the edge of a field to let a parade of combines and trucks go by.  We stopped one evening to explore what we thought was an empty old house. The lighting was perfect and I was kicking myself for not having my good camera. The house looked pretty structurally sound although the back room was falling apart both from below and above. There was an old stove in what was the kitchen and some funny flooring designed to look like a rug in one of the other rooms. Every room was a different colour, and every window was at least partially broken. We were surprised to discover a stairway upstairs since the place didn't look big enough to have a second story.  We went to explore but were quickly and effectively chased into retreat by a hissing animal, which in retrospect we suspect was a raccoon.  Someday our curiosity may get the best of us and we may go back and check. The barn was also in a lovely state of decay, full of equipment and machinery and peek holes to spy on them.

 

That's not the only wildlife we've run across these days.  Drives home in the soft light of evening have found us discovering a moose browsing through some treed-in marsh, and some elk standing half hidden in a field of green. One evening on the acreage Jeff pulled me outside and we stood in awe as an owl silently glided around us, alternately stopping high on a branch and then taking a wide arch. We had been talking about wanting owls around for a while, not just because we want to encourage all creatures who eat mice to come for long visits, but because they are also magnificent. It's these moments of awe-filled discovery that make living out here really rewarding and beautiful.

These days the kinds of birds that we see around here have shifted.  we still have the swallows, but it's generally quieter, and we see (or hear) birds I expect are just passing through on their way south, like the geese every morning now consistently squawking by in their telltale V's.  There's starting to be leaves on the ground, and today I found a tree that's not just a tinge lighter but fully yellow. You can feel the season begin to change, and the shift of fall coming.

Ups and downs

We have been home from Calgary a few days now.  Here has been a taste of that time, in the ups and downs:

We had a great drive back! But we came home to the power being out.  But we were prepared with lanterns this time!  We caught a mouse (we thought perhaps we were done with mice - apparently not). We saw northern lights! The squirrel unplugged one of his holes. My tiny tomato plant has grown so much! We tripped over a new pocket gopher hole, and they re-holed and mounded the dirt floor garage. We caught a pocket gopher in the trap Jeff set!

Aphids are eating my beans, and flea beetles are eating my greens. I got to spend a bunch of time on the Internet and I got so much done! We are both fighting nasty colds. But we have extra help with the plumbing! I wanted to paint more canola, but it's done flowering. It is super cold in the house with the cooler weather. I went to a quilt shop with lovely fabrics today (buying fabric may have had something to do with the cold)!

Today my day was largely spent on garden related things - research and on my knees picking aphids off beans and discouraging the flea beetles from my arugula and now my kale too. This is not the first time I have been disappointed in my vegetables. Once I nursed a tomato plant I had started from seed into October just to get a couple fruit off it and feel like my effort was worth something. Last year my carrots were pathetically small, although this year you can barely tell I'm growing carrots at all they're so tiny (it's not looking good). So it's probably not a bad expenditure of time to sit down and do a bunch of research, plus reading is more conducive to my attempts at drowning my cold in endless cups of tea. I'm also learning things about companion planting and already thinking about what next years garden could look like (bigger, for one. Better, for two).

The menfolk are in the basement getting damp and working on plumbing. On the bright side, there is water actually coming through the taps now, although not all the kinks have been worked out yet. Progress!

Away & Return

We've been in Calgary for a week-ish attending an important and memorable wedding, connecting with family and friends, collecting things from storage and doing some shopping. This morning I woke up and actually missed waking up in our house in Saskatchewan.  This week I have felt like I have a foot in both places, somehow moving towards both places. We are in Calgary, but are headed back to Saskatchewan, but are also making plans to return here in September. Lots of mental jumping back and forth.





We are on our way! And I am looking forward to returning to that pretty green and yellow land. Time now feels a bit shorter and I am hoping to do some more art before its Calgary time again.  I did manage to squeeze in one bit of Plein Air painting before we left. My easel and I went exploring the country roads and in the heat of the day (an especially hot day - unwise, I know) and spent a couple hours tackling the canola fields in paint.  The rest of my panels are all prepped & ready and I am ready for  more painting. Plus every nice painting I do means a nice thing on our otherwise rather bare walls.



Somewhere in the rest between our guests leaving and our hurried prepping for Calgary, Jeff and I gave in to our curiosity about all the feathery creatures that frequent our trees and buildings and wires, picked up a book and some binoculars and have the beginnings of becoming birdwatchers.  It's a nice compliment to our anti-gopher and squirrel stance, and makes me at least, feel less like I am against every animal around. And there are so many birds! They probably even outnumber the squirrels and gophers (which, by the way, we return from Calgary eager and better equipped to counter). We had already recognized the few birds we were familiar with; robins, chickadees and woodpeckers, but we discovered that we probably have three kinds of woodpeckers (downy woodpecker, sapsucker, and a mystery one). We also spotted hummingbirds (the green ones), yellow shafted northern flickers, barn swallows and a couple mysterious fluffy brown birds. We may also have tree swallows.  Clearly more binocularing is required, and maybe I'll try to gather some photos for you instead of just feathers.



We did manage to pick up some much needed items in Calgary: gopher traps, more garden implements (to replace and supplement the borrowed), a trimmer, extra sweaters, more plants, more tea (okay - much wanted), some new housewares, and all the things we forgot the first go round (we hope).  We stumbled upon a yard sale in the wedding middle-time and even found a wheel barrow wheel at a price we were happy with, which we definitely needed.  We feel well equipped, strengthened by good company and generally eager to get back to the acreage work.

Friends!

All our missions and tasks have taken a pause this week as we host friends for a visit. It is baffling that we possess such good friends that they would choose to come visit us and spend their holidays in this (currently quite) rustic place. It is wonderful to see them, a taste of home, and wonderful that they have come and have come armed with a fresh view of this place and an enthusiasm for weeding and old things.

We spent a few days camping in Waskesiu, and it was lovely. The lake was refreshing and warm and the campground was spacious and quiet, with the sites being nestled happily in the trees.  It was good to camp, and it felt friendly and familiar. If it weren't so humid and generally wet it could have been Alberta. There were even some hikes to be had!  We explored a bog with some amazing (including carnivorous!) plants, and many plants that are unfamiliar to me, which is always a delight. Plants seem to be the theme this week and I'm going to have to replenish my library book supply on the subject to fill in some of the mystery.

Before we left for camping I mustered the courage to brave our forest of (potentially tick-bearing) unreasonably tall grass to go exploring towards our wetlands. It seems like Jeff goes exploring every other day and he always tempts me with tales of flowers that sound lovely and unfamiliar. Whether he knows it or not he's been baiting my curiosity.  So between the two: waskesiu and our marsh, my camera and I have now enthusiastically collected a small image bank of unfamiliar flora. A collection to puzzled over and slowly turned from mystery to knowledge. Just another thing for my spare time.

Now we are back home at the acreage. I have spent the day tackling things like laundry, groceries, dinner and weeding. Although my garden has been chugging along in terms of growth so have the weeds, and I am growing many more green things in my garden plot than I want to. My veggie garden had become pretty much overrun, and thus a very intimidating task.  Today I had help in the battle and two of us tackled it and made some seriously good progress.  It's not that many days until our midway through summer trip back to Calgary so it is good for the weeds to be stopped now, before we go.