More Music

I'm becoming aware that these guys mostly write the same songs but what the heck, I love them.  I'm enjoying an evening of discovering new music.  Now if only I could find a copy of Alice in Chains' Jar of Flies.  Still looking.

Greenhouse Glee

It's so great having a greenhouse.  It was a big production putting it together but most amazingly we did it (emphasis on the we).  I had so much help and am grateful to everyone who helped.  And now from humble seedlings our greenhouse is exploding.  It went from this: 

To this:

We are harvesting peppers, eggplants, chillies, melons and even tobacco (I know it's weird--I had this urge to burn it in a smudge to cleanse people and things because that's how I heard it was used originally). 

And for no other reason than it's beauty, here's our rosemary plant.  Finally I think it's starting to thrive.  Maybe it just needed the right greenhouse.

And just today we harvested our first tomato.  The start of August is common in Ontario but out here you're lucky to have tomatoes by mid-September.  And by then you're throwing sheets on every night to keep the frost off.  So we are very blessed (thanks be to plastic).

And we enjoyed our tomato as part of a very yummy summer supper.  Store tempeh but besides that most of the meal came from our garden I'm proud to say.  Happy summer!

Chickens!

I suppose it's actually been about a month since we welcomed chickens into our lives.  We have four new ladies living the good life.  Two are brown and two are white.  The white ladies were way ahead of the brown ladies in egg production but the brown gals are working on it.  We get two to three eggs a day which is just about right for us.  Though there is much temptation to get more chickens we are pretty happy with our ladies.  

Our friends Tings and Ciaran helped us to build their house.  It's actually called a chicken tractor and moves about the garden like a tractor.  So they munch up all the plants in a bed, poop in the bed and then we move them on to the next patch of whatever.  

They have a little house which contains their food and water and a place for them to roost.  As a bonus the house provides shade for the chickens at the hot times of day.  They have a 4 foot by 8 foot run which I sometimes think is a little cruel but is probably fine for them as long as they can move and check out a new area every few days. 

It's pretty great to produce your own eggs.  I wish I could give you a number on how much it cost us to build.  The house was the biggest expense so far since we really put up a lot of fencing and hardware cloth to keep out unwanted predators.  But apart from that we feed them organic feed and our table scraps and lots of bugs and weeds and we figured it works out to maybe $2 or so a dozen with our feeding schedule.  Perhaps not very efficient but lots of fun.  

Welcome ladies!

House Show

Lots going on and seemingly little time to tell about it.  Working, ahem, selling my labour these days while also trying to grow a big garden.  So quite busy and ragged.  Isn't it funny how we equate working with selling our labour?  I do it all the time and perhaps you do too.  'I was working today' means I went somewhere to get paid dollars for doing something.  But really we are working all the time.  In fact I'm working right now, typing away.  Selling our labour and working are different things.  But we've transformed selling our labour into working and perhaps that means that all other times we should be recreating (interesting way to think of recreation).

So some things to share.  We had a wonderful house concert on Victoria Day.  Jenny Berkel and Demetra contacted me to hold a show here between Halifax and Sydney shows on their east coast tour.  It was lovely to have them and had a beautiful day with lots of wind to keep the bugs away.  It would blow and then die briefly and, then mercifully, blow again.  We had an interesting group turn out, aged 6 months to 76 years young, some folks from L'Arche and a man from Timbuktu.  I think people had a good time and it was nice for the musicians to have a homey break on their tour.

A few days ago the temperature dropped below zero and there was a super heavy frost.  I figured I had nothing to worry about since frost happens around this time of year.  I just moved the figs inside and covered them with buckets.  That was it.  Then I went to sleep.  When I woke up, I didn't even have a look around to see how everything coped.  Selling your labour keeps you busy and keeps you from noticing things.  Maybe it's designed that way.  Anyway just yesterday I worked in the garden and walking back I noticed that all the leaves on all the nut trees were black and shriveled.  Ditto the grapes.  Thankfully on closer inspection I noticed that the hazelnut trees could take such a frost.  But we planted close to 75 or so nut trees around the place.  I just checked a few but they are gone.  I'm hoping that the tree might have some kind of backup plan but I know it's hopeless.  I might take some pictures to share but it's a sad scene.

A few weeks ago I read something about southern Ontario and how the warm spring and then sudden (more seasonal) cold had ruined the apple and pear harvest there.  Actually 80% of the apple harvest is lost.  All the trees were fooled, leafed out and bloomed and then the blossoms were killed when the cold returned.  I must admit I was a little smug feeling that this couldn't happen here.  But it was 30 degrees last week.  And it happened here as well.  

We're all in this together.

Argh, blogger has changed their system.  So annoying.  I was pretty used to the old way.  I expect that this is somehow more sensible but mostly I feel annoyed.  

After a thoughtful conversation this weekend I need to get back to what this blog was supposed to be about.  Things are pretty fucked in the world but we all do small things every day that are amazing and we should acknowledge that.  

We built a greenhouse!

We're probably going to grow tomatoes and melons in there this summer and then I'm going to plant salad mix and kale in there come the end of summer to hopefully harvest over the winter.  We live in hope.

And we had a beach party with our friends on the weekend and I tried a whole lobster for the first time.  Thankfully JJ was there to basically rip it apart for me.  Our friend Ryan is a lobster fisherman and did all the cooking.  The kids loved running around with their pants falling down since they were so soaked.  It was a pretty glorious day. 

Keep celebrating life!

Darkness

Don't really know what to say about this. I can't imagine wishing this on anyone. I guess that's why I'm not the one making the decisions.