Just a gardening fool.....

 July 11, 2025

We had quite the dumping of rain over Sunday night past. (July 6). This was the rain gauge Monday morning, and it continued to rain off and on for most of the day, so by the time the sun re-emerged on Tuesday, there was a solid 4 inches in the gauge.

The pond came back up to spring levels and a big puddle formed in the 'lawn' out front. Later on Monday, a pair of Sandpipers showed up at that puddle, and were enjoying wading and probing for whatever it was they were eating. I believe they were young or non-breeding Spotted Sandpipers, as they are the most common ones in Ontario. They were quite active and flighty, and it was hard to get a good look with the binoculars.

A drone shot of the garden beds taken first week of July.

Garden shed and compost bins are bottom right, pond is top right.
The Field Garden, at the bottom, is 35' X12' , the raised beds, all except two are 4' X 16', one is 4' X 14' and one is 3' X 16'. They all look so tiny, but that is pretty much 844 square feet of growing space. We leave wild areas all around the edges of the clearing un-mown, where there are milkweeds and goldenrod, and numerous other meadowy plants.

When we moved here in June of 2017, there were no gardens, so each one has been dug out by hand, or covered thickly with cardboard, left to fallow, then dug up the following summer. The Field Garden had to be dug over several times to get the Dogbane roots out. By the end of 2017, I had two raised beds and a small Field Garden. Each year I increased my growing area by a bed, or a square footage. There is another 4' X 12' bed down by the barn, which has my year's supply of storage onions growing, and the 5' x 25' perennial bed out front. Oh, and the asparagus patch, and the rhubarb patch, and the horseradish patch....Am I done diggin' yet??

The two round things in the Field Garden have a hill each of cantaloupes and watermelons respectively. The idea is that the enclosure will provide more reflected warmth to the heat loving melons. There are 6 more hills of pumpkin and squash, an early bush bean planting down the left side, and a just emerging, second planting covered by tented hardware cloth in the left foreground. The 'bean Teepee', with Scarlet Runner beans, is on the right. Beside it is a space where I just threw a lot of older flower seeds and we'll see what emerges. Below the shavings covered path at the bottom, and not pictured, is another full width hill with later planted rutabagas, just starting out. Because of the slight slope, and the amounts of rain we have experienced over the past few summers, this garden is a series of hills, and the paths are going to become permanent.

First two raised beds are the brassicas and potatoes.

In the foreground bed are the first and second, (just emerging under hardware cloth), planting of carrots, some beets, green onions here and there, herbs, a couple of zucchini plants, some chard and kale, and volunteer dill. Interspersed everywhere are marigolds, zinnias, sweet stocks, sweet alyssum, and some borage plants. (Plant dill and borage once, and you have it forever!)

The caged bed has the garlic in one end, some leeks, more onions, and lettuce under the shade cloth. Second last bed is tomatoes and the last one has the pea/cucumber fence with 22 assorted pepper plants in the far end. That is the narrow space where the deer 'scootch' by the end of the pond....hot peppers around the edge. Try a mouthful of that, my lovelies!
 

Most of the raised beds are mulched with grass clippings, or leaves saved from last fall. Yesterday, the vine hills in the Field Garden got a good layering of leaves as well. The mulch inhibits weeds and helps to retain all the lovely moisture in our sandy loam. 

If you made it to the end...congratulations! 

 

Snowing and blowing....Oh, March!!!

March 1, 2025

March is trying to come in like a lion. After a thaw, which settled the snow a bit, and melted out bare patches on the driveway, but iced the rest, the temperature has dropped back down to substantially below the freezing mark. Snow started falling last night and this morning it is going by the windows somewhat horizontally, from the north. We have accumulated a few inches, although the exact amount is hard to tell, as the wind has been gusting.

Seed orders are all sent, and now I'll be watching the mailbox. Yesterday I filled some cell packs with starting mix, ready for planting, and did plant a small container with lavender seeds, as they take forever to germinate. 

I've shovelled the snow off of the lids of the hot frames, preparatory to doing some winter sowing of onion seeds, once my seeds arrive.

The days are longer, the sun is stronger, there is that "Je ne sais quoi" in the air that lightens the spirits and heralds the start of a new season, especially on a sunny, blue sky day, when one can imagine one smells the scent of sap rising in the maple trees. Soon, but not quite yet!

Solar radiation is being absorbed by leaves and tree detritus, and they are melting into the surface of the snow, Mother Nature's collage.

Inspired by The Furry Gnome,  seasonsinthevalley.blogspot.com/   who is posting pictures from the past, I am posting some writing I did last summer, in the 'more or less' journal I keep for future reference. 

When one is surrounded by a white world, one kind of forgets how things were, and will be again, as the seasons change. 

Back in May of 2024:

Woke up a little early this morning and couldn't get back to sleep, so was downstairs between 4 and 4:30. Got the fire started. Although the temperature was comfy in here, it had rained off and on most of yesterday, so just felt it would be nice, and the outside temperature was 5C (41F). Shortly after setting a match to the makings, a Whip-poor-will started up, right outside, to the west. I carefully opened a window and listened, then got a flashlight and crept out onto the verandah. There were two birds, right on the driveway beside the lilac bush. I put the flashlight beam on them and it didn't phase them at all. Two eyes glowed in the light, one a foot or two away from the other. They must have been sitting sideways to me. One of the eyes slowly shut and reopened a couple of times. There was a flurry of wings, moving dark shadows...then silence. Shortly after, they started up again, this time echoing off of the Battery House like they were right beside it. I went out the back door to try and see them, but no luck. Meanwhile, the sky was rapidly lightening, the Robins, Wood Thrushes and White Throats were tuning up.

Then, early in July...still Whip-poor-wills. 

The Whip-poor-will has us programmed to awake between 4 and 4:30. This morning he was right beside the lilac bush on the driveway again, and as hard as I tried to peer into the dimness, I could not see him. One can hear the 'chuck' he starts each section of his song with. I watched and watched at a break in his repertoire, knowing he would fly. Darned if I saw anything, then he started up again, further to the front of the yard.  

Later with morning coffee:  

We are sitting out on the verandah and listening to my birds. The Wood Thrush is first awake, then the Hermit Thrush. Veery is close behind, and then a Swainson's Thrush, which we don't hear too often. Robin is next, then Chestnut sided warbler, then the other regulars start up in no particular order. Chipping Sparrow, (who is very vocal this AM), Red-eyed vireo, American Redstart, Song sparrow etc. etc. Hummy is humming around in the flowers that are blooming in the BBH bed out front. 

Yep....spring is on the way, if March slides along as fast as February has, the 20th will be here lickety-split! Monarchs will already be starting their journey north.....

 

Bush flora and fauna....and barrels 'o peas.....

April 14, 2024

The snow melted, the rain came...is still coming....Thankfully. The bush is now full of the vernal pools that were missing this spring. The pond has come up beautifully, the grass is greening, and when the sun comes out again....things will be bustin' out all over!

The heavy snow has broken down a lot of trees in the bush, and some have just keeled over from all the moisture softening the soil. Hubby has done a round or two of the trails, with ATV and chainsaw, and today we pulled off a few more smaller trees that have succumbed since then. 

The red squirrels have had a prosperous winter with lots of white pine seeds to eat. The stripped cones are lying in piles under trees, beside rocks, wherever the little rodent sat to eat.

The resident Pileated Woodpeckers certainly have lots of options with all the dead and dying beech trees. Apparently something edible was still in this stump after this broken tree was cut down.

More blooming things in the bush...

                                 Eastern Leatherwood

                                           Red Maple

And on the trail cameras....

A moose ambling by. It has a bald spot on its withers where it has probably been rubbing against trees to dislodge it's tick load.

(Disregard the date and time stamp.) This mild winter was probably a bad one for moose ticks.
On the gardening front, I have baby tomato and pepper plants just emerging, under lights, and there is some life starting to show up in my winter sowing jugs outside. Mustard, kale and oregano are poking up tiny sprigs of green. I've since prepped a few more containers and set them out with marigolds and several varieties of lettuce.

Perennials have been moved from the nursery bed in the end of the Field Garden, into the new bed out front, and I shovelled lumps of the remaining snow around them for slow-release moisture. It has been raining for several days since, so my timing was good. By no means is it a finished project yet.

The herb bed has had the rotten edging removed, and the new hemlock planks are being readied for insertion.

This is the first bed we made when we moved here in June of 2017. I was dismayed when I encountered this behemoth right in the middle, which refused to budge.

A couple of years later, I decided to dedicate this bed to herbs. To make the soil deep enough for planting, we cut an old water barrel into sections, and I positioned one right on the rock and filled it up with soil. I made the mistake of planting mint in it, but the rock did help stop the spread. We rolled the mint barrel out, put it on an old aluminum toboggan and pulled it to a spot over near the compost bins with the ATV. I'm sure it will be happy and thrive there! The other piece of water barrel in the foreground has oregano plants in it. The rock is marked on my garden plans every year, and again will be a place to plant very shallow rooted stuff.

A few days before the rain started, I dumped the soil out of these two barrels onto a tarp, revitalized it with some moisture control soil and a good pail of my sieved compost from last spring.

This morning, in the rain, I donned rubbers, waded out along the edge of the overfull pond, cut willow sprigs for uprights, then wove and tied a few more around for supports. A not too tall variety of pea is planted around the circumference. When the rain stops, I plan on putting just a few lettuce seeds in the middle.

Spring sunshine....

March 13, 2024

Spring is surely springing...so say the flocks of northern geese who are going over today in flock after flock. They are so high up, their wavering chevrons are like faint pencil lines in the blue sky, their calls so faint that it takes a bit of looking to spot them. 

The temperature hovered around the freezing point last night, after rising to 15C (59F) yesterday afternoon. There are still lumps of snow around where snow banks were, and on north-facing and shady spots in the bush. The ground is still frozen and hard, but look!!

The first tulip nubs are showing up in the Triangle bed!

On the agenda this morning was re-mounting the Tree Swallow nest box. 

Hubby lagged the board with the nest box onto the cedar post in the corner of the Triangle bed so it overlooks the pond, just a bit further toward the barn than the clothesline post it was on last summer.

We sunk that new cedar post well down into the earth the first summer here, when I dug out the few choked and scraggly perennials that were there around an old, rotting post. It should easily support having the board lagged to it. The triangle bed delineates where the road goes curving around in front of the barn. Last summer, we had hurriedly put a Tree Swallow nest box onto the far clothesline pole when they arrived, then realized what a bad idea that was when I couldn't use the clothesline for fear of disturbing them until the swallows fledged. Once they did fledge, all the little bodies lined up on the clothesline, teetering back and forth to keep their balance.

Other critters had obviously been using some of the Bluebird boxes, a squirrel had packed in shredded bark,

and probably mice had packed in leaves and dry grasses.

On a wander around the clearing in this morning's beautiful warm sunshine, the perennial beds are looking unkempt and my fingers itched to get at clearing them out, but....not until we get into consistently warm temperatures and all the bugs and pollinators who are overwintering in those hollow stems have exited.

One other bird thing was to tie a clump of wool roving encased in a net bag to the branch of a tree for the birds to access for nesting material. We are planning to mount a trail camera aimed at this in the near future.

The pond is still firmly iced in, and we are hoping for more moisture, as it's surface is about two feet short of where it was last spring.

Lifestyles, contentment and thankfulness....

Leigh's post over at 5acresandadream.com has got me thinking, about  lifestyles, thankfulness and contentment.

Over 5 years ago, we retired from our jobs, packed up and moved here, to the hill. After a couple of years of fruitless searching, we found this property on-line, came to see it, and knew.

We downsized our living space from a 2 and ½ story house

with basement, dining room, living room, kitchen, back porch, verandah, (I loved that verandah!!)

and 3 bedrooms, to a square log cabin with no basement, unheated back porch, a bigger verandah, and the Battery House.

August 2017

It involved absolutely getting rid of 40 years of stuff we wouldn't need. We were never on the consumer bandwagon, but one does acquire stuff, especially as members of one's family pass on, and there are important family things one cannot bear to dispose of. I don't know how many truck loads of stuff we hauled to the auction barn. We filled two storage units, one small and one regular sized one, with the stuff we were keeping. Knowing that we were going off grid also contributed to the clear out...how many electrical appliances does one own, griddles, mixers, blankets, etc.? I knew how small the kitchen was, and what little cupboard space there was. When all was said and done, I don't really miss any of it, really, (although on recently making Christmas fruit cake, I wish I'd kept those cake tins with the removable bottoms!!)...but, bread pans work. A cake is still a cake, no matter it's shape, and the fruit cake pans, bundt pans, angel cake pans etc. all went. (can you see that I like to bake?)

It was very strange to lock the back door on the way out (oops, almost missed the kitchen clock on the wall), the last time, and be homeless for a week until the sale closed. We lived in a tent with a screened dining tent alongside it, on a friend's acreage for that week, no bills, no commitments...it was very freeing...just let the lawyers do their thing.

Our house is small, there is a place for everything we need, and mostly, everything is in it's place. The bonus is all the space we have outside, to watch the changing seasons, and the surprises that Mother Nature dishes out. To have free sight lines (within our treed boundaries) to the sky, to the morning and evening sun, the moon rise and set, to see the clear swathe of Milky Way across the night sky, to watch the sun throughout the seasons on its inexorable journey along the horizon, to the south in winter, and (yeah!) after December, head north again.

My garden THEN

Only part of my gardens NOW

I am content. We have our good health, food I can grow, heat from the wood we harvested, electricity from our panels and battery bank, and a source of good water. What else does one need? I am so thankful that we live in a country where this is possible.

 

Heating with wood....

Recently, Mama Pea over at http://ahomegrownjournal.blogspot.com/ made a post about how they manage their fuel for heating with wood. It has inspired me to post about how we manage ours. 

In the spring of 2018, less than a year after we moved here, after some thought, Hubby finalized the positioning of the woodshed we knew we needed to keep our wood piles out of the weather. The east end of the barn was the place.  

The east barn wall was reinforced by diagonal braces on the inside, attached to the side walls of the barn, to take the added weight of the attached roof and the snow load. Hubby then harvested some straight spruce and balsam fir for the rafters, sizeable hemlock for the beams, and some sturdy cedars for supporting posts at the front end for which he dug the holes and sunk them in. He positioned the heavier beams with the aid of a tripod and a chain hoist.The metal roofing was scavenged from a scrap yard.

Under construction (piles awaiting splitting)

The trees for wood are harvested in the fall, winter or early spring, depending on snow depth, and hauled to the wood yard behind the barn with the ATV trailer. The rounds are piled until we have a splitting bee, usually early in the spring before the flies get too active. The split wood is then piled under cover. We keep about a two year's supply, so it is well seasoned. 

After the splitting bee, I rake up and collect all the detritus from the splitting, in pails and bins, and keep it in the barn, as it is great small stuff for starting a quick, hot fire.

spring...working on filling

The barn woodshed is about a hundred yards from the house. We fill the house woodshed which is beside the (unheated) back porch by trailering loads up from the barn with the ATV.

ATV trailer load

House woodshed by the back door

 

Inside the porch we have a whole end divided off for wood.

A bench seat under which we store our off season footwear

It is brought inside to the stove as needed in a little plastic bin with sturdy handles. It is just a few short steps to get wood from the back porch.

This winter, we have emptied the house wood shed once, and have only partially refilled it since. Yes, heating with wood warms you more than once!!

I love trees.....

 I have a thing for trees. The bigger and older, the better. I love the bush on our property, as there are lots of large, old trees. There are two stands of mature hemlock, one on the west side, and one on the east side.

There are lovely big, straight cedars in the wetter areas, their lowest branches high above the deer nibbling range. They must have grown up before the deer became as plentiful as they are now, as there are no cedar seedlings anywhere. There are also lots of gnarly cedars, with a lot of character.

Here and there, interspersed in the bush, are some big white pine that must have been too small at the time, to fall to the logger's axes and saws.

Our bush has a lot of beech trees, some quite large in girth, but sadly, this year they are really succumbing to 'beech bark disease'. The disease becomes very evident as the trees reach a certain size. Last summer, we started to notice the leaves browning and dropping long before they should, in the natural scheme of things. There will still be young beech trees growing, but they will never reach the size of the huge grey trunks we are seeing around us now.

On the east side of the pond, there is an huge black ash tree. We created a little walking trail to go past the base of this behemoth, and on around the pond, crossing over a split log bridge at the exit stream.

In past years, we have traveled and paddled many miles to see the remaining stands of virgin white pine in Ontario. In Algonquin Park, we visited the pines at Dividing Lake on a long, August weekend, portaging up the Golden Staircase from Livingstone and Kimball Lakes to set up camp on Rockaway Lake, where the following day, we paddled over to the portage into Minky and Dividing Lakes, and walked in to see the trees, some apparently over 400 years old. One of my favorite pictures is of our son, quite young at the time, leaning against the bole of a Dividing Lake white pine.

Another year, we did a 10 day trip in Algonquin, starting at Magnetawan Lake, paddling, portaging and camping down the upper Petawawa River, to Big Trout Lake, then across through Lake La Muir to Hogan Lake. There, we set up camp for two nights, and on the next day took a day pack and the canoe, portaging down to Big Crow Lake to paddle down the Crow river to visit the stand of virgin white pine along the Crow river. That was the trip that we lost track of counting the moose we saw, as there were so many!

Another Algonquin trip took us into Dickson Lake, where we paddled and portaged to see the stand of 350 year old red pine. That was an experience to stand beneath the giants. “It was calm as we detoured into the shore at the red pine peninsula and walked around among the trees. Of the bigger ones, I could encircle the trunk with my arms, leaving a 10 inch gap between my fingertips. There were a few impressive white pine there as well, much bigger around than the red pines and also a few large hemlock. The red pine tower over the surrounding bush, letting lots of light down through their comparably sparse needles. Despite the light, the undergrowth is very thin, just the odd baby red pine. The ground is padded thickly with brown needles, and there are quite a few, fallen entangled dead limbs from far above. Huge toadstools stand out whitely here and there.”

Another summer trip, we traveled N and W beyond Lake Superior, to the stand of 300 year old white pine at Greenwood Lake in western Ontario. That involved a long drive along dusty logging roads, through acres of barren clear-cuts, to finally crest a hill and find the stand of white pine. Our Jeep, pulled over on the side of the road looked toy-like among the towering trees. It was an almost spiritual experience to stand among those giants. “There was total silence except for the constant 'shush' through the needles, even though there was no wind. It was a calm, warm, sunny day. We followed a barely discernible trail through the bush, over dead logs to stand among the giants. It was awe inspiring to stand beside those grey trunks which reached toward the heaven.”

I try to imagine what history a big tree has seen. If they could only speak.

Stone Fences

During the recent week of unseasonably warm weather, the willows around the pond started to sport pussy willows on their branches, young beeches dropped a lot of leaves that they usually hold onto until spring, and the bush appears more open now. You can see way off through the trees and the 'bones' of the country have become more visible.

Pussy Willows

This area we live in, up in the hills along the far western edge of the Ottawa Valley, is hilly, rough and rocky. The productive bottom lands were settled first, after the loggers had been through, felling the large red and white pine forests. Up here, it wasn't until the 1870's that settlers invaded to clear and try to make a living from the land. 

Our 'farm' was one of those places, and older folk around here say this was a working family farm until the mid 1950's. The family had horses, cows, pigs, and chickens, and scratched a meager existence from the soil. A friend in his 70's remembers when one could look across the cleared fields to the next concession. There were other farm buildings here, some burned down, some were dismantled and moved, one of which was the 'grainery' and is now a neighbour's beautiful little cabin. Ours is not the only farm here, each 100 or 200 acre section around sports the remnants of farming, some log buildings still quite intact.

All the back roads are bordered by stone fences, some easily seen, a lot that are more obscure. Each acreage is encircled by stone fences, and within the perimeters are many more stone fences, outlining what were once fields. This spring, Hubby took his GPS, turned on the tracker, and walked all the fence lines on our property, that he could discern, to make a map of the fences and try and figure out what was where. Some of the fences that were built across the wetter areas of the property have sunk down until they are just moss covered ridges of rock piles.

Other stone fences on the higher, dryer side, are still fairly high and distinct.

These rock fences fascinate me. They are beautiful, but oh, the aching hours of back-breaking work they entail! There are literally tons of rocks that have been moved off of the land and piled together.

The fences are built making two sides, a little distance apart, dry stone upon dry stone, interlocked for stable edges, and then other rocks and stones were thrown into the middle. Some rocks are very large and would have had to have been moved using horsepower. Some fences are wide and stable enough to drive on.

The exposed rocks are grey and weathered, lichen and moss covered, but upon moving a surface rock, one exposes dusty, soil covered rocks, looking as if they'd just been picked out of the sandy soil.

In places where bedrock protrudes up through the meager soil, rocks were piled on it, in the process of trying to clear the land for crops and grazing, so there are also random piles of rocks here and there.

There is one of them in our back yard, a 'design element'!  

Some large trees are encircled by rocks, obviously left as shady sentinels in a once cleared pasture.