That moment when you realize it was 2014 when you posted last, and it’s somehow now 2017….
How did that happen?
Looking back over all the year’s posts, my poor garden blog went from frequent excited posts to sporadic random recipes and “want to do”.
2017 has us on our own property so the “want to do” is ramped up to 11, but it’s all doable.
What we have now, is a quarter section (160 acres). Approximately 70 acres of that is hay land. Almost all the rest of it is forest and muskeg. Aka swampland. We have a little creek, and a pond (dugout).
It’s beautiful…
… but like everywhere else up here, it’s all swamp or solid clay soil. When I say solid clay, I mean less than an inch of topsoil, then you break your shovel. Digging a hole requires machinery (exaggerating, but only a little).
Our home is a kind of redneck, but cool, set up with 2 well site trailers (we do live in oil field country) sitting parallel to each other, with a living room being built in between. It’s not a typical home, but it’s great. Each trailer is self contained and able to function with only a generator and propane and water hauling, but we had power run, and a well dug, and natural gas will be added later on.
We opted for this type of “house” because once it’s all said and done, our total mortgage debt for the entire property, trailers, well drilling and everything else, is far less than just the cost of a modular or building a house. So money was a factor, but I really like the set up, and novelty, of our place.
One of the well site trailers set into place, last year.
For our immediate yard and future garden and small farming operation, we have mud. Solid clay soil.
Because I don’t want to spend the next 5 years fixing the soil to make a garden plot, I’ll be digging a big area and filling it in with good dirt (we have access to heavy equipment, yay for being married to an equipment operator)…. but this is a 2018 project.
2017 is all about finishing our house, and sloping the home site for drainage. We did preliminary work, but we’re finding a lot of puddles (lakes) when the snow and ice starts melting. It should be fixed up by the end of summer, but we can’t do anything, not even build a greenhouse or chicken coop, until it is done.
In the meantime, I have my husband and kids, my handmade soap business, our ocd cat, Elvis, and our Rottweiler, Artemis to keep me busy.
Gardening can wait one more year, but 2018 will see it happen.
Artemis at our pond/dugout.
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