My Greatest Talent

I don't consider that I have many special talents. I make good lasagne. I've managed to keep a blog fairly up to date for almost two years, which is somewhat of a record, as most literary projects fizzle quite quickly. I drive a stick shift quite well. I haven't hit the house with the tractor for several months.

The area where I really excell is in spotting four-leaf clovers. I can be standing outside having a nice conversation with someone and suddenly bend down and pluck a mutant stem of clover. Find me a clover patch, and I'll find you a four-leaf clover lickety split. There are testaments to my clover finding talents in several of my large heavy books. I used to press them. I'm not very superstitious, but when it comes to luck, I'd like it on my side. My paternal grandmother was intensely superstitious, according to my dad. One quarter of my genes also belonged to her, so maybe it did rub off just a little.

Here are two specimens, picked fresh today.

To Catch a Thief...

This little guy frequently raids the bird feeder, but gosh, he's cute. We don't have a lot of squirrels around since we've done some clearing and lost so many pines to beetle kill, so I don't mind having him (her?) around. He devotes most of the time he spends hanging out around the woodshed to tormenting Molly and Lucy. Molly's not the best hunter yet, but she's starting to bring some dead mice home. We once had a cat (Abigail, who was also black, and had a horrid wailing voice) who left a squirrel tail on the back doormat every morning for weeks.

Fruits...er...vegetables of our labours...

We've been enjoying great success with the garden, and have plans for a big garden expansion for next year. The garden is going to be on the east side of the driveway, and have its own fence. Some stuff will have raised beds, but a lot of the root veggies will go straight into the ground.

A cabbage head forming

Peas. We've only been able to have wee tastes of these as I didn't plant enough. They're very delicious!

Hey...hay! Scenes from a hayfield.

Three trips to 70 Mile, and 9 hours later, we have 150 bales of super nice hay crammed into our hayshed. Here's me...I got to do the easy part for the first two loads. On trip #3 we didn't need the trailer, so I had to drive and pick up bales while Mike stood in the back of the truck and stacked bales.

Here are Dennis and Dennis loading the truck on our first trip.

And here's Ken, raking the hay before baling. We took all the already baled hay on our first two trips, and when we got back for load #3, we picked up bales that had been made only minutes earlier.

And here's the hayshed crammed full. We have sore, scratched forearms, and we're more than a little tired. The baler was acting up and was making the bales too large for the bale-picker-upper to use...this is a good thing for us, as the bales are almost twice as heavy as last year!

From Planning comes Progress

Give Mike a list, and he leaps into action! He's crossed about a zillion things off it already.

We believe we have found a builder for the house! We will do the contracting ourselves, and as this guy is extremely versatile, all we'll need to go elsewhere for is the drywalling and mudding. We'll do our own painting and clean-up. That will begin next spring. Unfortunately we didn't have foresight to place the raised beds and greenhouse elsewhere (that's where the house is going!), but we will move them this fall so the ground is clear.

We spent the morning working on the west fence. We have page wire all around the perimeter of the property, topped with a strand of barbed wire to stop Buck from leaning over. The wire has loosened due to windfalls coming down on it. While Mike was tightening, I was cutting aspen and willow suckers away from the fence. Were you aware that for every aspen tree you cut down, about eight thousand aspens pop up to replace it? Well, perhaps that's a slight exageration, but holy crap there are a lot of them to contend with.

This afternoon we had to drive up to Williams Lake to get a few things unavailable in 100 Mile. We spent a hellish fifteen minutes trying to get someone to help us in Canadian Tire, and eventually gave up and went to Home Hardware. I have come to despise big stores.

Mike took on the cooking tonight...grilled wild salmon, zucchini sauteed with garlic and oregano, spinach and chard sauteed with garlic, parsleyed baby potatoes, and a tomato bocconcini salad with basil. Most ingredients came fresh picked from the garden...it was divine. Being married to a former chef has its definite advantages.

All plans for tomorrow have been bumped ahead...we got a call this evening that our hay is ready in 70 Mile, and we have to go and pick it up. Imagine us tomorrow humping 150 bales of hay around.

I charged the camera today, so will be putting up pics tomorrow or Monday.

Planning...

Mike and I had a long and at times slightly heated discussion this evening about just how we're going to be able to accomplish all that we need to get done this year. I'm getting frustrated with lack of progress, and he's getting frustrated with me for getting frustrated. And so on. And so on.

Mike's work schedule this summer has been horrid. Abysmal even. There's no predictable routine, days off have gotten changed at a moment's notice, and days scheduled for one and a half trips have been arbitrarily bumped up to two trips. This has made it hard to get things done. Next week should bring a positive change, as his bosses' trucks are switching companies.

To address the stuff that needs doing we've made a giant list and prioritized everything. Now that it's down on paper, a lot of it will get accomplished in short order. And then I won't get frustrated. And so on.

The main focus of this blog has always been to document our progress in developing our property, with a bit of rural lifestyle stuff thrown in for good measure. When I look back through the archives and see what we've done, it's pretty impressive. We're kind of in the doldrums right now, with not much happening on the visible progress side of things. Now that there's a definite plan of attack, I should have plenty more to post about. Stay tuned...

Garden Centre Therapy

To be blunt, work today sucked. And so, enroute home I took a little detour to the garden centre and bought some new perrenials. They were on sale, which was nice, but at this time of year, they could have knocked off more than 20%. I am just in from planting them, and feel a lot happier.