Be careful what you wish for

The biggest mistake I've made since moving to the country was making a plea to the weather gods for "lots of snow this winter".

I was raised in Montreal, Quebec, where weekly 30 cm snowfalls are a common occurrence. I even spent a part of my early childhood near Quebec city, where I can remember lovely winters with snowbanks towering over houses. The joys of winter... skying, snowshoeing, building forts and making friendly snowmen, slipping and sliding, tobogganing, examining the magical intricacies of snowflakes, getting your tongue stuck on the chain link fence, losing your boots in the snow to joyfully find them in the spring when the snow melted...

Ever since moving to Ontario I've missed the good old snowy winters of my youth. Back in Toronto, on occasions where I voiced my delight about the few and far between snow "storms" that would blanket the city, my happiness was met with bewildered frowns of disapprovement by my fellow Torontonians, who absolutely abhor the white stuff.

Snowy winters in the country... beautiful and magical, right? An absolute winter wonderland...

Let me tell you that I will never wish for snow again (except for a few flakes on Christmas Day - maybe.)

This winter brought us a fair amount of snow. Nothing like what I was used to back in Quebec, but enough to turn me into one of those people who have a deep-founded hatred for the stuff. Sure, it looks pretty for a minute. But it also makes your duck pen cave in onto your ducks. It leaves you stranded at home for fear of ending up in the ditch (see earlier post). It makes your piles of firewood wet and difficult to burn (unless you spread two layers of tarp over your stacks, which you then have to manoeuvre under like an idiot to collect armfuls of wood). It prevents you from going for walks in the forest because you can't afford snowshoes. It fills the ditches and covers the shoulders so that you can't walk safely down the roads. It makes your barn doors difficult to open and close. The horrid stuff covers your roof and then falls on your head in a big sheet of ice when you decide to finally venture out on a sunny day. You have to plow 100-feet of driveway over and over again. It also provides a wonderful cover for mice, moles and rats, allowing them to multiply happily and readily while they run amok in little snow tunnels, safe from hawks and other predators. Your small Jack Russell terrier doesn't even want to perform his ratting duties anymore because going outside means being swallowed in snow as though it was a big blob of quicksand. Shall I go on?


Okay, I will. The worst is when spring thaw is on its way and you breathe a sigh of relief, imagining how it'll soon be all gone. Then, 20+ acres of snow melts from the neighboring fields and heads straight for your old house in the form of lakes and giant spring rivers. This means you have to spend days digging trenches in the rain to re-direct the nasty stuff away and dig holes in your dirt-floor basement to collect the water that's seeping in through your 150-year old stone foundation. All your boots are so wet that your wood stove can't dry them in time for tomorrow's efforts. Your toes get that crinkly look like when you spend too much time in the bath except they're numb from being in freezing water. When the awful stuff melts, it also heads straight for your chicken coop and floods it, so that when you happily go feed your critters one morning, you find them walking in a stew of chicken poop and floating straw. All you can do at this point is add some more straw to the mess to soak it all up. Then, when it's all gone and some blades of grass are eagerly starting to turn green and you tentatively put a smile on your face, you wake up one morning to an ugly, cold, bland and bleary white landscape.




It was a hard winter in the country. This week is the first week of Spring and I should be overjoyed but I still can't find it in my heart. Maybe it's post-traumatic stress.

From now on, I shall be careful what I wish for.

"The Ditch"

Since we've moved out to the country, I keep hearing all these stories about people driving their cars into ditches. The way I understand it, it happens constantly. Especially in Winter, for obvious reasons.

When you live in the big city, there are a lot of driving hazards - and that's why car insurance is so darn expensive - but one thing you never have to worry about is... "The Ditch". There are cyclists right, left and center, wanton pedestrians darting from between parked cars, escaped dogs running wild, a myriad of confusing and often conflicting traffic signs, enraged drivers and countless other distractions.

By comparison, country roads offer only two dangers: ditches and animals (even domestic ones - cows, goats and chickens often do escape).  When you drive on a country road, you're mostly in a very calm state of mind, especially when driving at night in a snow storm, when snow flakes shining in your headlights transport you into an hypnotic voyage of intergalactic dreamy relaxation. And even more especially when you're driving The Spaceship, which is what we nicknamed our comfortable silver minivan. I can see how easily you could lose sight of the road edges during this kind of absent-minded traveling or even have to suddenly react to a night prowler running across the road and end up sliding into the ditch.

Last night, I was invited to a Tarot card reading with the gals and was asked to be the driver. On the way there, when I was cautioned to slow down on a sharp curve, I proudly expressed my confidence in The Spaceship and our expensive snow tires. Once inside and sitting around the table eating munchies, someone mentioned "The Ditch" and I innocently asked if everyone ends up in it at some point or other. Wylene laughed when she said "Well at least once, my Dear!". I suddenly felt a strange feeling of false confidence that I would never be one of them. You can guess what happened next.

The end of the night brought with it one of my country "christenings". As we were pulling out of Jenny's driveway, Terri yelled out "Watch out! You're gonna end up in the culvert!!!" I,  so innocently again, asked "What's a culvert?" when the right front end of the car dropped two feet down with a big clunk. I spun my tires and muddy water flew up into the air and Terri yelled "Don't spin your tires, we're gonna get stuck! You've got to rock the car back and forth!" So I did, or at least tried to. All that did was send more mud flying twenty feet up in the air. We were stuck.

Fortunately, I was amongst some very strong and independent women who knew all about ditches. It took half an hour, but resourceful Jenny got some cables from the house and succeeded in pulling The Spaceship out of the culvert with her truck. If I had been alone on a dark country road, I would have had to walk all the way home and possibly get eaten by one of our neighborhood bears. Thank you, Ladies! (Oh and I'm terribly sorry for ruining your beautifully white, postcard landscape just before Christmas time)

Now I know what a culvert is. The only problem is that I think it might be slightly different than a ditch, which means ... this story is to be continued.

Gone to the Dogs

City dogs and country dogs are two completely different beasts. Their daily lives differ in so many ways... and so does what we expect of them.  My two dogs were born city dogs, but like me, are now in the process of being countrified. It's been over a year since we've left our big city life behind and, just when I had convinced myself that my dogs are so much happier now and completely adjusted to their new freedom, something happened that made me reconsider the whole situation.














Emma was rescued from the Toronto Humane Society almost six years ago. She was a biter. Out here in the country they call biting dogs "ugly". With a lot of love and a little bit of discipline and a lot of avoidance (and some blood drawn on a few occasions), Emma became better and better over the years. And since we've moved to the country, Emma hadn't bitten anyone. Until today.

Today Emma bit "The Walker", Archie. Archie is an older man who lives down the road. He only walks during the Winter. Last year, we had a few issues and Archie had to wave his walking stick at Emma a few times until she got used to him and would only bark to warn me that a stranger was on our bit of road. We somewhat got along like that throughout the Winter months.

 
   

 

In the city, dogs are often confined to apartments all day long while their owners go to work in office cubicles. If they're lucky, they get to "own" pathetic little concrete backyards which they can protect against the occasional raccoon or squirrel. Their owners have to take them to the dog park twice a day, where they get to meet all sorts of people and play with hundreds of different dogs wearing pretty clothes who end up acting as their extended pack.

 

In the country, space isn't so limited. There's loads of it, all around. The pack is smaller - it has its main original four (Stuart, Karina, Emma and Chico) plus a few chickens and ducks. There is also the extended pack, consisting in human and dog friends, but we only see these other pack members during dinner visits, as opposed to meeting them twice a day without fail at the dog park.

Out here, there are all sorts of intruders the pack needs to be protected from. There is the rare trespassing non-pack-member dog. There are coyotes. There are wolves. There are bears. There are fishers and minks. There is a multitude of field mice and rats.  Most troubling is, there are also Winter walkers, like Archie.

In the city, your dog is on a leash until you reach the safe zone - the extended pack meeting place - the dog park. Country dogs have a different lot. Some live outside in a dog house (animals don't belong in the house), some are chained in place to ensure that hound noses don't lead them astray. Some have a job, like guarding a herd of sheep and live in the barn. A few have a similar life to that of city dogs and get daily walks on leashes. Most are free as a bird and come and go as they please. 

I should walk my dogs on leashes more often. Cesar Millan, The Dog Whisperer, insists that it's the best way to establish yourself as a pack leader and that walking together, exploring uncharted territory, is what actual packs do. Pack leaders don't send submissives out on their own to hunt and protect the den and surrounding territory, which is what I've been doing, I guess. When I let her out, Emma goes around the whole property and checks that everything is secure, after which she sits in the driveway and barks at the mail man's car, or at tractors that roll by pulling shit spreaders (giant trailers full of cow manure), or at other dogs barking in the distance. Once in a while, she threatens a "walker". 

One would think that all this "freedom" would be doggy paradise, but to be honest, I think my dog is bored. Last year she went on a lot of "errands" until we found her in the neighbor's cow field. This is not good. A farmer can legally shoot a dog found bothering his livestock. What's worse is that if, for example, a dog makes a cow trip and break its leg, the (likely dead) dog owner's got to foot the bill (I imagine approx. $1500 for a cow).

I'll admit that I don't walk with my dogs as much as I should due to my fear of all the animals we share this beautiful land with. The coyotes, the bears, but mostly, the neighboring dogs who are just like Emma: if you walk in front of their properties, some *will* bite you. So I sometimes walk with them to this corner, and to that corner, but it gets boring pretty quickly, especially in the winter when all is dead and still.

After Emma bit Archie this morning, I resolutely put her on a leash and went out onto the road to meet him. I figured that if she got to walk with him, he might become a part of her extended pack. Archie showed me the puncture wound on his leg. He said it was okay, that since she was a rescue dog, somebody must have done something bad to her in the past, that he understood, that he loves dogs. Archie is a very kind man. I assured him that I wouldn't let her loose by herself anymore. He warned me that if she ever bit a kid, we could lose her. I asked Archie if I could accompany him on his walks sometimes, and he said that he wouldn't mind. 

My new year's resolution (starting right now) is that I'll get myself a walking stick just like Archie's, and I will walk Emma every day. Maybe that way she'll be good and tired and won't have to protect our bit of road from walkers or even worse, from the lady who rollerblades by with her stroller during the Summer.

Homegrown

I worked as a gardener back when we lived in the city - but aside from small herb gardens and container cherry tomatoes, I never really had the opportunity to grow any food. Last Winter, I wrote in an early post about all the seeds we had ordered for our very first vegetable garden. It almost seemed like a dream at that time, with snow on the ground and a fire in the wood stove.

With the help of some very helpful books, we planned and "designed" our gardens and got to work starting seedlings indoors. It was difficult to find enough window space with adequate sunlight to get these little plants going. I had to bring tables up into the guest rooms to accommodate the many flats we had set up.

The seeds that were started indoors were leeks, tomatoes, peppers, spinach, thyme, rosemary, lavender, basil, broccoli and potatoes. Every morning, I spent about an hour spritzing the small pots with water and checking on the little seedlings' progress. Some seeds sprouted, some did not. Some seedlings survived, and some did not, but all in all, it was an exciting success!

Springtime came along and it was time to dig out the garden plots. This is where the real work began. Without any machinery, we had to remove all the sod by hand. What a thankless job. You get absolutely filthy trying to shake most of the dirt out of the grass roots and then you get stuck with all this heavy plant material that you have to dispose of. We also had to hand-till all this bare soil. We de-sodded and tilled just under 1,000 square feet of garden space. Beatrice and Charlotte kept me company and got paid in earthworms.

April came along and it was time to put some of our seedlings into the ground and plant some onion sets. The first salad greens were such a sight for sore eyes! What a delight... Our first salad consisted of lettuce, chives and radishes and I don't think I've ever tasted anything so fresh.

 

 

The garden grew and grew and we enjoyed the fruits of our labour. Stuart and I were in a constant marvel at the wondrous taste of the vegetables we grew. It is just incomparable to the taste of grocery-store bought veggies. We would often just walk by the garden and pick a spinach leaf and eat it right there on our path... the pure taste of the water of life (with a bit of dirt). 

Of course, there were some successes but also some failures. Despite being under the impression that I had used correct spacing between plants, the garden grew some more and became quite crowded!

One interesting experiment was trying to grow food completely naturally - no pesticides or any chemicals (organic or not). This of course led to some unwanted pests, but I told myself that there was enough for everyone and that these little guys were also the foodstuff of some other, welcome visitors. So our lettuce had holes in it. The cabbage didn't do too well despite my efforts at handpicking those horrible green cabbage worms (which I would bring over to the chickens as treats). It never really recovered from the infestation and ended up looking like lace. Our potatoes were not perfect but they were delicious. The tomatillos and ground cherries got eaten a bit by flea beetles, but they made it and bore wonderful fruit. On a particularly flea beetle busy week, I did concoct a mixture of onion juice, garlic juice, cayenne pepper and natural dish soap to spray some vulnerable plants but that's as far as I got in terms of pest management. 

What hit our garden the worse were the incessant thunderstorms that plagued our Summer. The 6-foot tall tomato plants got flattened more times than I care to remember. Our cucumber plants grew to satisfyingly monstrous proportions, baring hundreds of fruit-producing flowers only to be attacked by some sort of fungus just as the fruit were starting to grow. The disease killed the plants in just about a week and I only got to make two jars of pickles.

The goal of growing all this stuff was partly to enjoy it during the Summer, and partly to help us along in our attempt at a more independent, sustainable way of life. The idea was to grow enough vegetables to sustain us over the Winter. Well, I did expect that there would be pitfalls and that it would take a few years to figure out exactly how much of each veggie we consume and have to grow to reach this goal. We did quite well with the tomatoes, but we didn't grow nearly enough root and winter storage vegetables. We didn't even get to building a root cellar this Fall because aside from a few small squash (not enough compost), about 50 carrots and a few onions, we have nothing really to put in it.

When you grow more food than you can consume before it goes bad, you have to learn ways to preserve it for later use. This is where my new-found love comes in: Canning. I love canning. It kind of makes me understand how a squirrel feels, putting food away for the coming Winter. It gives me such a warm feeling inside. When we're all snowed-in, all we'll have to do is open the cupboard door and pull out a jar of crunchy dilly beans, close our eyes and be taken back to the fresh taste of Summer!

My friend Terri, who is a wonderful cook, taught me how to can. It's great to have someone to talk to and have a drink with while you spend hours chopping and dicing vegetables for relishes! I also bought a few books with recipes and got to work, making a cornucopia of canned goods: sauces (hot pepper, spicy plum, cranberry ketchup, peach and tomato ketchup), hot pepper jellies, pickles (cucumber, baby carrot, beans, onions), relishes (corn, zucchini, swiss chard), chutneys (rhubarb, peach), jams (blueberry, peach, raspberry, strawberry, blackberry), salsas (tomatillo, pear and pepper), conserves (peach, rhubarb in honey syrup, blackberries in red wine)...

I also made soups and pestos with roots, squash and leafy greens for the freezer, and froze piles of produce for later use.

The garden has now been cleaned-out and leftovers have been given to the chooks. The soil has been tilled with  manure and old straw and turned over for the Winter. The garlic bulbs have been planted. And I am waiting for our first snow, thinking about next year's garden delights.

Our First Summer on the Farm: DUCKS

When we first moved to the Farm last Fall, our friends Anthony and Sarah generously gave us some birds from their flock to start us off. Among those were three beautiful ducks, who initially lived with the chickens in the coop.

This Summer, Stuart fixed the old concrete pond that used to be filled with weeds and built a duck house/pen to provide our friends with a much-desired waterhole.

Moving the ducks from the coop to the pen wasn't as easy as I thought. These ducks are extremely skittish and shy and therefore, instead of traumatizing them by trying to catch them I thought we could just neatly shew them towards their new pen through a coral. Not so easy. The whole thing turned into a comedy of errors and we were chasing ducks all over the place. The ordeal catapulted the birds into a molt and they instantly stopped laying, which threw a wrench into our plan of having them raise some ducklings for us to eat (we still haven't gotten our hands on an incubator.)


Indiana, Gwendolyn and Batman loved learning how to swim in their pond! They say that it's easier for a drake to mate in water. After a long two-month molting period, Indiana started laying again and instantly set up a nest and began setting. Gwendolyn quickly got the picture and followed suit. After about 30 days of exhausting setting (ducks sit on their nest all day and all night, with only about 10-15 minutes' break to go eat and drink), the little ones hatched - what a magical sight to behold!

Out of approximately 35 eggs between the both of them, 14 hatched, and 11 ducklings survived. These little ducklings took to the water instantly (it is said that ducklings hatched in an incubator cannot go into water when they are young as they will get chilled, but ducklings reared by their mothers get a protective coating from mom which renders their feathers waterproof).

Both ducks and even the drake were endearingly good parents, protecting them from me, herding them together, letting them eat before themselves, teaching them to muck about in the mud, showing them the ropes so to speak....

And they grew - astonishingly fast! Which meant that their time was coming.... a chilling thought at first. The problem with ducklings is that as they grow, so does the amount of duck poo in the pen and pond. Anyone who has raised ducks will tell you what filthy creatures they truly are. They poo copiously and their excrement stinks like nothing else... So after a while, I just couldn't wait to go through with the butchering.

Catching these young birds was even more heart-wrenching than catching the chickens because these were my darling ducks' children! And just as they were good parents in rearing their young, so were they at trying to shield them from capture. They painstakingly tried to protect them from me and it broke my heart to steal them away. It was so sad and awful that I decided to be a kind killer and leave them two of their daughters. It just seemed too cruel to have them do all this work and be left with nothing but terrible feelings of fear and pointlessness. Call me crazy. That just means that we'll get more duck eggs this winter.

Nine ducks were slaughtered and eight of them are resting in the freezer. The ninth will be cooked as Stuart's birthday dinner in a cranberry and orange sauce. The skins of the younger ducklings have been rendered into fat (since their feathers were virtually impossible to pluck and they had to be skinned). Their heads are drying outside in the sun (I think Stuart wants to make art with them). Their stunningly beautiful feathers are being saved for some later artful use as well. Their giblets' fate is to be used in my very first terrine (which is a kind of pate). Their feet have fed the dogs and their guts are feeding the compost.

But by and by, my husband echos my feelings when he says "gosh, killing them wouldn't be so hard if they didn't make them so darn beautiful!"