Gardening is the mother of all therapies

I would like to suggest to anyone with a lot of stress in your life...take up gardening. Yes, you can't really do it during the winter (maybe herbs in pots), but during the stressful, busy summer months, a garden is a panacea of positivity in a world drowning in disaster. It reminds us that God still sends rain in due season, peas still come in a pod, radishes still grow like crazy, and tomatoes love the sun!
Many people may be unaware, or perhaps only vaguely aware, but a food crisis is developing, slowly but surely. As the West gradually falls into Depression (yes, no recession here), our ability to grow enough food to meet our needs is falling further behinds. We are mining the goodness right out of the soil, and I only have to look out my window to see the results...genetically modified crops, a desperate attempt to avoid nature's loathing of monoculture. Nature (which is to say God Himself) prefers a huge variety of plants, which feed each other in healthy competition. Add some animals, and we have a harvest for ourselves, and the land does not starve. God never intended for 10,000 genetically modified canola plants to exist in the same 1 acre of land!
I love my garden, small as it is this year. I have about 14 broccoli plants, which are doing quite well, about 10 cucumber plants, which got off to a late start, thanks to frost kill of the first batch...live and learn. We just pulled a whole schwack of radishes, and some beans are climbing up. I purchased some tomato plants, which are now flowering and attracting bees. My daughter planted sunflowers, which grew (without much watering at all, I might add), and are now more than 1 foot tall! Everything is growing fast, and strong. Weeds have been beaten, and the tiny ones sprouting at this stage are nothing. Only the carrots did not germinate well, but the seeds are old, so, I suppose a new batch is in order...next year.
We are well on track to bringing our friends out here to live, the bank will loan the money, and we will have a barn with plenty of water for winter (and a root cellar!)
None of this happened without generous blessing from God, and lots of agonizing, praying, sweating, and selling things I didn't really need to get the things I wanted.

Here are some photos for those who like the visuals:
Blueberry bushes! We now have 21 bushes in total, all about 2 years old (I think), about 1.5 feets tall. They were on sale for about $2.50 each, and in very good condition, so how could I resist? I just love blueberries, and so does the rest of the family.Broccoli, peas, and tiny asperagus plants growing in tires filled with soil and manure. The asperagus are in a circle around the broccoli, and I'm going to move them somewhere else soon.
Radishes and beans in the same tire. The radishes will be harvested long before the beans ever get going, so I can use the same space twice. Companion planting!
Not pictured: Tomatoes and pickling cukes in several tires, getting VERY big!

Hot weather...sort of

Well, it's the middle of the hottest part of summer, yet we have not used either an air conditioner, nor a fan at night or even during the day! I'm sitting in our house right now, and it's 29 degrees C outside, but inside it's only 23, and very comfortable. I'm pretty sure that I can thank our lack of windows on the south side of the house. All of our big windows are on the north side. It does affect our heat gain in the winter, however ie, we get almost no heat from the sun at all!

Although it's now more than halfway through the growing season, I came across some blueberry plants at a local supermarket for a bit over $2 each, which is waaaay cheaper than they normally are! So, I crammed as many as I could fit into my car, and I'll be going back for more, if there are any. I got 15 this time, and I just planted them. Eventually, I'd like to have an acre or more of berries, maybe several acres and I'll make a U-pick farm out of it all.

I also got a gas-powered weed whacker for $50, although it didn't have some of the parts (it was a demo model). I found a new spool for it, and it works great! So much more powerful than the electric variety, and I don't have to drag around the stupid cord. I use it to keep the weeds away from my trees and shrubs, and I've also declared war on thistles. I've pulled more than a hundred just around the house. I'm not pretending I can beat them entirely, but I don't want them to go to seed, so I whack the big ones.

I booked a digging machine for me to fill in some big holes, and make some new ones. I didn't book it for a week like I originally thought to, just 24 hours. I figure I can probably sit in the thing for 16 hours straight, and just get it all done in one day. Saves me a bit of money, and if I don't get it all done, I can always rent it for another day later. I'll have to anyway, to backfill the trenches and holes in, once the cistern is in place. For the cistern, I purchased a plaster sprayer for a couple hundred $, but it should save me many, many hours of handtroweling, and slopping the plaster one bit at a time, when this thing just blasts it at the wall in a few seconds.

That's it for now, remember, winter is coming!

Springtime during summer?

We've been getting some strange weather lately...it's been raining quite frequently, and it's almost the middle of July! I thought that this was normally the dry, hot season, but it's already rained more in the first 10 days of July than in all of June! Not that I'm complaining about the rain, it's good for my trees, but it's just odd.

I also sold my motorcycle today, for a couple thousand dollars, which is terrific, because now I can rent a very expensive machine, and start digging all of the many different projects that I've got planned for the summer and fall! I didn't get as much as I would have liked for the bike, but I got a quick sale, which I'm glad for. It was difficult to sell, because we don't live in the city anymore, and I had to come in to let people test drive and such.

I've come up with more new ideas, and I've also got a few decisions to make, just some small ones really. I can't decide whether to put the jet pump for our water in the barn, or keep it inside the house. I can see good points to doing either one, but I've got to make a decision one way or the other.

This year, I'm planning ahead for winter big time. I've already started cutting firewood, and I've got almost a cord cut already from a giant schwack of packing pallets that I picked up for free. I use a chainsaw to slice the flat parts out, then a mitre saw cuts the rest into manageable pieces. It didn't take more than 2 hours, which is good. I've kind of perfected the woodcutting process, I can strip a pallet down in about 10 minutes or less. In extremely cold weather, a good size pallet is about a day's worth of wood, so the further ahead I can get in this chore, the easier my winter will be!

I've also been planning a small car shelter for the end of our house, which could probably for the basis for a small garage when I get around to it. I need somewhere to keep a vehicle out of the cold, something that could be heated with a propane heater (supervised of course) and I'd like to store some of the firewood there as well, because it tends to get quite piled up with heavy snowfall, and it would be easier on my wife if it were sheltered. I plan on cutting and storing most of the wood in the barn, but I'll bring a weeks worth at a time to the shelter for easy access. I may use the skeletal remains of the canvas shed that I bought last year, which died an early death from wind. This time she'll be bolted together at every joint, and the walls will be OSB or some sort of stronger material. A canvas roof would be fine, it's just a temporary structure for shelter after all!

I just noticed I tend to start all my paragraphs with "I've". Is that egocentric of me? Well, "I've" got to go now, thanks to the couple of people who read this. I know I'm long winded, and I'm working on it. Maybe. With limited success.