Spring 2019

It has been quite a while since I last posted, I do realize. Over two months this time. Two months ago we were still buried in snow. That has changed now, thank goodness. Let me tell you about it.

Back at the end of March we got ourselves a new toy to improve our lives.

This is a Berkey water filter. Previously, we were buying large bottles of spring water from the store for drinking purposes. Now, with this new doodad, we can just pour rain water in it and fill our glasses from the spout, so no more buying water. Just don’t be in a big hurry for a drink if you just filled it. The filtering process can take quite a long time. We’re talking hours here, not minutes.

Moving forward, April 10th turned out to be a really nice day so we took some pictures.

Yup, still lots of snow.

The sun was out in full strength though, which our solar panels loved. We still had quite the pile of snow up against the plastic shield at that point.

Here are some random sunshine-in-a-snowy-forest pictures.

After a bit of digging, I found the drain pipe for our pond. Here you can sort of see it with a tiny bit of snow across it’s rim.

More snow and forest. Pond too, but you can’t really see that for the snow.

Remember that picture from back in the previous post with the bench buried under the snow? Well, on the 16th of April it looked like this.

We were out snowshoeing that day. It doesn’t look like there is much snow there by the bench, but just behind me there was plenty.

Apparently there was a crazy Kat lady behind me as well. The next one is a picture of where the Earthship will be.

So yeah, April is always a big transition month for us. Easter was in late April this year and we rented a car and drove out to PEI to surprise my Mom and Step-Father for their birthdays. That trip went quite well, but it rained a lot going there and on the way back. Fortunately, we got back before they closed large portions of the highway due to flooding.

Unfortunately, this meant that when we got back home we had another trench through our driveway.

Seeing as we already had the trench dug, we decided to put in a second emergency drain going through there for when the water gets too high. This project was another one of those use-what-you-have-on-hand kind of things. I happened to have some 4″ (10cm) PVC pipe lying around gathering dust so I glued them together to make a long pipe.

I added the tape because one of my pipe joiners was a bit cracked. I’m not super concerned about it leaking, as it’s just going to go in the ground.

Anyway, I put the pipe in the trench and started to bury it. I also had some pieces of 2×10 lying around that I put over the pipe after I had filled in around it to try and give it a bit more resilience. It’s not perfect by any means, but hopefully it will prevent the pipe from being crushed if a heavy vehicle drives over it.

Here you can see it all filled in with dirt.

After I finished that part, Kat came out and gathered some of the gravel that had been washed down the ditch and used it to cover the dirt. It has been driven over quite a bit since then and we haven’t had any issues. Hopefully it will do the trick.

Obviously with all of that rain while we were away, most of the snow that was left had melted so it was time to take the shield down from the the front of the trailer.

We just roll it up and keep it in place with some bungee cords. This makes it easy to reinstall in the fall.

This is what it looked like down our driveway near the end of April.

As mentioned previously, our truck died and we were looking for a new one. Well, after roughly seven weeks of searching, we finally ended up with this.

Yup, it’s a big red truck. In case you’re wondering it’s a 2008 Dodge Ram and it had about 328,000km on it. We were on a limited budget so it’s difficult to find a perfect vehicle. We thought this one was pretty decent for what we paid, which is why we have it. It drives and feels quite a bit different than the old GMC, but I’m sure we’ll get used to it.

We’re well into May now and we’ve had the usual frantic bird activity at our feeder this spring. The humming birds have been back for a while too. You know when they show up because they hover right in front of our big window wondering where the hummingbird feeder is.

Speaking of said hummingbird feeder, some of the larger birds get a bit confused.

That’s a rose breasted grosbeak trying to figure out how to get the feeder to dispense some goodness. Unless he can drink through that red patch on his chest, I don’t think it’s gonna work out.

Now that we have a truck again, spring time firewood processing has started. We have borrowed a chainsaw from a friend due to the fact that the recoil spring on mine broke while we were doing our initial harvest. It is smaller and only has a 16″ (40cm) bar on it so we got Kat suited up and we cut up all of the stuff that we dragged out of the forest.

As of today, the full brunt of black flies and mosquitoes has yet to arrive. That will likely change this week as we are expecting some warmer weather. We have been having fairly cool evenings which helps to keep the bugs away, but it only lasts so long.

Well, now you know what is going on, for the most part. I don’t have any news to share yet on the job front, but some opportunities have been coming my way so something is bound to happen soon.

I will leave you with this lovely picture of the daffodils we have in our garden.

April Activities

So with Kat away for this month doing the Earthship Academy in Taos, NM, I’m left here at the trailer to maintain the fort, as it were. There is all of the regular things to do: cook, clean, feed the cats, melt snow for wash water, bring in fire wood, those sorts of things. However, with Kat away, I have also been tasked with feeding the horses.

We have our two Arabians currently boarded at a nearby facility, and they do get hay, but one of them especially needs a bit extra as he seems to lose weight otherwise. I have been out with Kat to do this numerous times, but this is the first time I had to do it by myself. Fortunately, the boys didn’t seem to mind.

They paused a bit when I showed up, probably wondering where Kat was. But as soon as I showed them the buckets, they wandered over and proceeded to eat their portions. Nothing too difficult to handle, they are very well behaved.

As you probably noticed in the above picture, the ground is looking mighty white. We did have quite a bit of bare ground, but that all changed Tuesday evening. First we had wet snow, then we had ice rain which switched to regular rain and then back to snow. After it was all done, we ended up with this inverted Oreo cookie type situation. That would be where you have two layers of frosting with the hard cookie part in between. Why someone hasn’t come out with cookies like that yet, I will never know.

In any event, it has made everything very white again, and quite crunchy too. Fortunately, it’s not all that cold and with the sun shining, it clears the roof pretty quick. Here you can see all the snow piled up in front of the trailer’s plastic shield that fell off the roof earlier.

These are also excellent conditions for spotting animal tracks.

That’s just a picture of our garden bed and most of it is squirrel tracks, though there is what seems to be cat tracks going through the middle of it.

With it being such a nice day today, I decided to take a wander through our forest. This is a great way to spot trees that we will be harvesting for firewood, the time for which is rapidly approaching. I did come across this interesting specimen.

I can’t say for 100% certainty, but it looks to me like a porcupine had a major noms festival on that tree. They are notorious for stripping trees down to their underwear, as it were.

Here is exhibit number 2.

This tree didn’t have as much of it’s bark stripped, but it was also a much smaller tree.

I wandered for a while and eventually came up to the pond at the top of our hill.

You can see by the far shoreline just how full the pond is. We’ve been fairly fortunate that we haven’t had a tonne of precipitation or otherwise we’d be facing a lot of flooding like last year.

Finally, here is a picture of some snowy spruce trees.

Things are pretty quiet here otherwise. Most days it’s above freezing so there is a fair amount of melting going on. Hopefully as that progresses I’ll be able to start the firewood harvesting.

Getting back outside

It’s the start of May now and things have warmed up considerably since my last post. April was all over the place in terms of the weather. The last you heard from us we had just had a big snow storm. I took those pictures on a Friday morning as we were clearing the fallen trees from our driveway.

The next day we woke up to full sunshine and it was quite warm. Everything started to melt. This is what it looked like in the morning.

By 16:00 that day, there wasn’t a tree left that had any snow on it. Sunday was nice a sunny too and by the end of that day, the driveway was clear of snow, though still mushy. The following day, on Monday, we hit 24C (75F) and it was really humid. We had a huge thunderstorm in the afternoon too, with some really loud thunder and close lightning strikes. So in the space of five days, we went from heavy snow fall to serious thunderstorm.

With all of that snow and rain, things have not been dry around here. In fact, all sources of water in the area have exceeded their banks and there is a lot of flooding. Fortunately, most of it is flooding the forest. There are a few cases of people who are near the York river who are having difficulties.

This reminds us of spring 2014 when we first came to look at the property. The other pond we have at the top of the hill was over flowing. Don’t remember the picture? Well, here is what it looked like back then.

As a way of comparison, here is what it looked like on April 26th.

That’s really close to the 2014 level. I should add that we just had a huge rain storm that lasted two days straight. We haven’t been back up to the top of the hill, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the upper pond has now exceeded the 2014 level. I say this because, despite having a drain pipe under the driveway for the pond we have beside it, we had enough rain to wash out part of our driveway.

The drain pipe couldn’t keep up fast enough and the water just rushed over the driveway. I’m sure there will be another load of gravel in our near future.

Going back a bit to April 18th, it had dropped below freezing the previous night and the pond beside the driveway had a thin layer of ice on it. It looked pretty spectacular so, of course, we had to take some pictures.

Needless to say, we have had some really nice weather, and some really wet weather in April. We have been trying to get out as much as we can to work on important projects outside before the bugs arrive. The project with the highest priority right now is firewood processing for next winter.

Last week we had a good run of clear weather so we were able to get out many days in a row. Unfortunately, a bunch of our time was spent clearing fallen saplings from the roadway up to the top of the hill. We did get some trees cut for firewood though.

We started off with that small pile. Anything big I buck up on site and the smaller branches we just haul back and use the saw buck I made last year to make it easier to cut. It sure saves the back using the saw buck.

Another day, and more wood. I split some of it by hand. The cherry is pretty easy, but I leave most of the elm as it is painful to split by hand. All of it is dead already, which makes splitting it much easier than if we were trying to split live wood by hand.

We cleared out the middle section of our wood storage at the back of the trailer and this is where we are piling the newly harvested wood.

It’s not a lot yet, but it’s better than nothing. We’re hoping that things will dry up this week so we can get back out and do some more.

When we aren’t processing firewood or working on other projects, Kat and I like to take walks down our road. Kat uses this opportunity to pick up all of the dang garbage that people throw out their vehicle windows. We live on a very quiet road, but that doesn’t seem to stop people from polluting it. We’ve gathered several large garbage bags worth of things people have tossed away, most of it is beer cans.

There are some nice things to see while we’re out walking too. Like some pussy willows we found growing beside the road.

You have to take advantage of pussy willows pretty quickly as they turn into fuzzy tree buds soon after they appear. Yes the buds are all out on the trees now and some are even starting to sprout a few tiny leaves.

Soon everything will be exploding with colours. The leaves will be out in full force and the flowers will be in bloom. Heck, even Kat is looking really awesome in her spring colours.

She doesn’t tweet as nicely as some of the birds we have hanging around our place, but she sure is nice to look at.

It’s always good to end with a smile 😀

Tree problems

Through most of July we didn’t get much rain and things were really dry. There was a full fire ban on it was really hot for a few weeks.

Well, that all changed on August 12th, as we got our first big rain storm that day. It came down hard and fast and left big trenches in our driveway.

Alas, that was just the beginning. On the following Tuesday we had a day long down pour. That rain didn’t fall as hard, but it fell *all* day.

As a result of this, our pond by the driveway is full again. Here you can see the drain pipe we put in doing its thing.

Unfortunately, some of the trees growing in the pond couldn’t handle the sudden change and decided to fall over… right over our driveway.

Here is a better picture as the panoramic gets a bit bright on the right side.

This would normally only be a minor inconvenience. However, my chainsaw is kaput as I burnt out the motor in it during the spring cutting dead elm for firewood. I had to walk down to the neighbour’s place and borrow theirs to do the cleanup. You can see it there in the picture above.

Or, if you’d like to see the reverse perspective, try this one.

It was only a poplar tree, so it wasn’t difficult to deal with. Interestingly though, when I finished cutting the trunk at the edge of the pond, the weight of the root ball was enough at that point to move the tree trunk back in to a semi-upright position. There was added humour to this as there were three frogs who had been sitting on that log, who were launched into the back of the pond. Unfortunately, I do not have a picture of that.

In the end, the driveway was cleared and we were able to once again leave our property via vehicular means.

All is well that ends well.