Ready for Rover

Posted on May 28, 2013 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

Matt and I are ready to expand our family. But not in the way you might think.

We’re expecting a furry, four-legged bundle of joy in the next month or so. Last year we were distracted by our four furry, four-legged feline bundles of joy. This year we’re hoping for something of the canine variety.

We haven’t met our new addition yet. We’re planning to adopt, so we’re keeping watch on the local shelter and foster web sites.

In the meantime, we’ve been readying his or her room. There was already a dog run behind the driveshed, but it was a little run down.

Homey, no?

Matt and my Dad spent an afternoon clearing out the barn doors, pallets, rocks and weeds. They patched the siding, built a sun shade/elevated perch and made the gate swing the right way.

My job was the house, which is an insulated box inside the driveshed. (Ignore the clutter around and on the house. Cleaning up the driveshed is on the summer to-do list, right below playing with our new dog.)

I converted the house from a duplex to a one bedroom and blocked off the second entrance. I also had the pleasure of cleaning out the interior. I don’t know who the most recent residents were, but no self-respecting dog would create such a mess in its den. In addition to the… mess, there was a piece of carpet, a few bones, a couple of toys and some hunks of ropes. Cleaning it out was a lovely job.

However, the job is done and now our doggy will have a lovely home.

Doggy won’t be expected to spend all of his or her time outside. We want someone relatively energetic who will go for runs, hikes and long walks with us, but also someone who is relaxed enough to be inside the house when we’re cooking dinner or watching TV.

Anyone have any suggestions on breeds with a good balance of energy and calmness? I’d like a big dog (the bigger the better in my opinion), but Matt’s a fan of the smaller varieties (not tea cup or handbag size, but a funny looking Boston terrier is his ideal).

What about advice on adopting a dog? I like the idea of helping a dog who needs a home, but I’ll admit that I’m concerned that we might end up with a dog that has behavioural issues. I’d appreciate any tips anyone has.

Manure manouvering

Posted on May 26, 2013 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

So how was your weekend? Mine was crappy–as in filled with manure.

We’d made some progress on the turnaround so far this spring, picking up the rocks and rubble and flattening out the piles of dirt. However, I wasn’t very confident in the quality of that dirt, so before I started to plant anything, I wanted to give it a boost of nutrition. Like any decent farm, ours came with that barnyard fixture, the manure pile, so we have lots of natural fertilizer.

The turnaround is the size of some people’s backyards, so a decent quantity of manure was required. Likewise, there’s a decent distance between the pile out behind the barn and the turnaround at the front of the house.

My Dad left his trailer here a few weeks ago, and with the help of Wiley and his front end loader–my skills are much improved over last year–I brought three full loads of manure up to the garden.

The manure isn’t smelly anymore, but the lesson of the weekend is that it can be a bit slippery. I had a couple of close calls standing in the trailer shoveling it off.

This probably wasn’t quite what my Dad had in mind for his trailer when he left it with us, but he’s a good sport. So good in fact that he brought his rototiller up to the farm and went back and forth over the turnaround mixing the manure into the soil. My Mom pitched in too spreading the soil around the edges and picking out the rocks–lots and lots of rocks.

Thanks to my parents, our tractor, the trailer and our convenient manure pile, the turnaround is now ready for planting, so I guess my weekend wasn’t that crappy after all. Pretty productive, in fact.

How was your weekend?

Memories of Muriel

Posted on May 23, 2013 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

I’ve said that I didn’t do any gardening last year, and that’s not entirely true. I planted one thing: this lilac.

This lilac came from our first house. It had lived for six years in the flower garden Matt and I made in the front yard. It never bloomed. It didn’t really grow very much. But I nursed it along because this plant is another one of my special treasures.

This lilac was a shoot that I transplanted from a beautiful bush my grandmother had growing in her backyard. She was always very proud of her lilac and its prolific double blossoms. A few of the grandchildren took shoots to plant in their own gardens.

Last spring as we sold our first house and moved to the farm, I carefully dug up the lilac, cleared a space in the overgrown garden at the front of the house and transplanted it.

Over the past year, it has finally started to thrive. It’s grown taller and bushier. And for the first time ever, it’s blooming.

This is a banner year for lilacs at the farm and it turns out we have lots: a large bush outside our bedroom window, others scattered around the gardens, a hedge stretching nearly from the house to the pond. However, this, our smallest plant, is my favourite.

Landscaping… the long list

Posted on May 21, 2013 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

I cannot bring myself to write a list of everything I want to do for renovations in the house, but for some reason I have no problem doing a master list for the landscaping outside.

Alright, I’ll admit it. That’s a little overwhelming.

There’s obviously a lot to be done, so it’s a matter of prioritizing what part of our 129 acres we want to focus on. This year, it’s the residential area.

And just to make things a little clearer than the animation above, here’s the plan for this year.

That’s manageable, right? As you saw at the beginning of the week, we’ve already made some progress on the turn around, the flowerbeds and the pond shore. Maybe by the end of the growing season, we’ll have the property in shape.

The long term plan will take who knows how long.

I’ve decided my goal when it comes to outside work is to transition from landscaping to gardening. Weeding flowerbeds is much more manageable than building them.

How do you handle renovations and landscaping at your house? Do you write everything down or just keep a mental list? What are you hoping to accomplish this summer?

Death by landscaping

Posted on May 19, 2013 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

I am dead.

I’ve been working on a lovely introduction to this post referencing the Secret Garden and the joy of tending a neglected garden. But it’s not coming together for me, and I lack the mental power to make it work. Because I am dead.

You never heard any of the characters from the Secret Garden say, “I am dead. This garden has killed me.” Let’s be honest here, Ben probably said it, but Frances Hodgson Burnett did not include it in her story of love, childhood and horticulture.

In my story of love, adulthood, responsibility, country living and horticulture, landscaping has started.

The turn around has gone from mountain goat terrain to a blank slate, thanks mostly to our farmer with his heavy equipment.

I’ve weeded one flowerbed and my mother-in-law tackled two more. (All of the plant pots were left by the last owners. The plants are still alive, so I’ll be planting them soon on the blank slate of the turn around).

My father-in-law trimmed some of the trees and stumps around the pond. We still have a ways to go before we can actually mow the shore, but I’ve staked out the new fire pit, and we have lots of wood ready to burn.

Matt, my Dad and I dismantled one of our biggest rock piles on the property–and it only took us four hours.

I started building a new flower garden around the well head. And this is when I died.

Last year’s landscaping efforts were limited to some very cursory grass cutting. The property was unkempt when we bought it, and our neglect over the past year while we focused on the basement reno made it worse.

The amount of work required to bring a garden back after years and years of neglect is never mentioned in the Secret Garden. Sure there’s a bit of pruning and weeding, but mostly it’s romance and roses.

In the category of things get worse before they get better, even our efforts at clean up have led to more mess. Drilling the new well and trenching new waterlines destroyed one established flowerbed and left lumpy piles of very hard dirt in its place. Burning brush and scrap lumber as we’ve tried to pick up around the property resulted a mountain of ash and a half scorched spruce tree.

Landscaping was at the top of the list on my home goals for this year, and I will get a handle on the situation outside, even if it kills me.

How to match seams across an invisible zipper

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

I have a different type of how-to for you today, completely unrelated to home improvement or farming (not that I am any particular expert in that area yet).

This how-to is related to the dress that I sewed for my sister’s wedding. The bodice on this dress is made up of lots of pieces with a zipper in the side seam. The challenge when putting in that zipper is to line up all of the seams from front to back.

I’ll admit that the first attempt was a big fat fail. Horizontal seams were stair stepping down the zipper. Not attractive. In fact, I couldn’t even bring myself to take a picture.

Second attempt was much more successful. So, here’s my tutorial on how to line up horizontal seams across an invisible zipper.

Sew the first side of your zipper to the dress, having the zipper open and leaving the other side free.

Close the zipper and, using pins, mark the seams that you need to match. Insert the pins horizontally in the tape on the unsewn side of the zipper.

Unzip the zipper, and pin the unsewn side to the dress, starting at each of the seams.

Baste the zipper in place and stitch. When you close up the zipper, all of your seams should match.

Or at least match close enough.

Next week, I promise a return to our regular program of home improvement and country living. We’re heading into the first long weekend of “summer” and I have big plans. Chainsaws–not sewing machines–are involved.

Hope you have a good weekend. Happy Victoria Day to my fellow Canadians.

Celebration

Posted on May 14, 2013 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

This past weekend, my extended family came together to celebrate my youngest sister’s wedding.

Another sister and another wedding mean another special dress. Given that my post about my bridesmaid dress for my middle sister’s wedding last year is still the most popular post on this blog, I of course have to write about the dress I sewed for this latest wedding.

This is Simplicy 2253. When it came time to choose bridesmaid dresses, my sister the bride said, “Whatever you want.” My other sister already had a dress that she liked, so I just had to find something that complemented her dress.

My Mom, who taught me to sew, also sewed her dress (Vogue 1182). If you want the details on my dress, here’s my review.

As fancy as we all look here, it was a construction themed evening, as my sister and her new husband are building a house together. The message of my Mom’s speech was how building a house is like building a marriage. Her take away quote: “When the mud gets deep, celebrate. Buy a great pair of rubber boots and celebrate that you have each other and you can handle whatever comes your way.”

The wedding was a great celebration for our family. Congratulations to Cynthia and Dave. I wish you a great marriage and minimal mud.

Battling the litter bugs

Posted on May 12, 2013 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

Our property is situated so that we have three road frontages. What this means is that we have about 2 kilometres of ditches that to passing drivers apparently look like one large trash can. A recent notice in the mailbox for a community clean up was the motivation I needed to pick up after all of these litter bugs.

The saddest thing about this photo is that I didn’t stage it. I simply set the notice down amongst the trash.

Outfitted with my rubber boots, work gloves and multiple garbage bags, I headed out. I had two bags on the go at a time, one for recycling (mainly cans and bottles) and one for garbage. I could have probably separated the garbage a bit more, but two bags was about all I could wrangle. The most common finds were takeout coffee cups, plastic water bottles and cigarette packs.

There was lots and lots of plastic.

We have a creek that runs along the front of the property, and while it is set farther away from the road, it was still full of trash as well.

These particular pieces of plastic turned out to be a very big sheet of bubble wrap and a large jug which had formed a dam.

Some of the more unique finds included a shoe, two gloves (not a pair) and the remains of a wine glass.

Sometimes, I wasn’t sure what things were right away. As when I first spotted this item a few feet back in the reeds along the west side of the property.

It turned out to be a small photocopier. Yup. Someone went to the effort to carry a photocopier out of their office, put it into their car, drive it to our property, pick it up out of the car, carry it across the ditch and heave it into the marsh. They didn’t even just open the car door and push it out. They put work and planning into this–I know, because I climbed into the marsh and dragged it out and it was heavy and awkward.

Fortunately, I was able to leave the photocopier, other large items and even the full bags of garbage on the shoulder and our amazing garbage men took them away on our regular pick up day. The recycling I carried home and dumped into our bins.

The final tally on the clean up was

5 1/2 hours (over three days)
7 1/2 bags of garbage
5 bins of recycling
One awful sun burn
Multiple scratches
Numerous ant bites
One ruined pair of gloves
A general feeling of disgust towards my fellow humans

Some people were encouraging–one driver honked and gave me a thumbs up as he drove by and another pulled over to say how great it was that I was cleaning up. However, I probably was not as gracious as I could have been to them as I spent most of the clean up being royally ticked off. Who finishes their coffee and decides the correct action is to roll down the window and pitch the cup into the ditch?

My irritation went to another level when Matt and I went out and passing by two of the garbage bags I’d left on the side of the road I saw that someone had pitched a Blizzard cup and two plastic spoons onto the shoulder–and they’d obviously aimed to get them right beside my bags. Who is that rude?

Fortunately, our garbage men are incredibly considerate, because not only did they pick up all of the trash bags and larger items I’d left on the side of the road, they also picked up the cup and spoons.

Out of the whole clean up, I only found one item worth keeping.

You better believe I tucked that 5 cents into my pocket and brought it home with me. I need some new work gloves!

Finally forsythia

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

Our forsythia is finally in bloom. It’s more than a month later than last year, which shows just how long spring has taken to arrive. I think with the appearance of the bright yellow blossoms we can safely say that spring has finally arrived.

Happy birthday, Easter

Posted on May 7, 2013 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

Our fluffball, our baby, our idiot, our kitten, our Easter turns one year old this week.

She snuggles like a baby.

She has the attention span of a toddler.

She has the ambition of a teenager and is keen to get her driver’s license.

She wrestles with her mama Ralph, errant stones on the driveway or the strings on my lawn chair.

She’s always starving and has been known to break into the house in order to get to the milk at the bottom of my cereal bowl (seriously, she’s crafty). She has also learned to hunt for herself.

She thinks she’s a dog, chasing sticks, digging holes and coming when Matt whistles.

Her voice is still her squeaky kitten meow unless she thinks we’re abandoning her–going down the driveway to take out the garbage or walking around the corner of the house out of her line of sight are cause for very long loud meows.

Around the farm, she’s known as baby (my label), BH (Matt’s holdover from when we called her “Big Head“), DB (“Dancing Bear,” Matt’s label for her tendency to rear up on her hind legs so that you can scratch her head), and occasionally Easter.

Happy birthday, Easter.