Gardening and other Diversions

Every Wednesday at seven o’clock in the evening several of us get together for meditation at the Oakdene Centre.  This wasn’t a practice that I had in my “Before Bear River” life so I’m truly a baby beginner.  The trouble was last night I kept falling asleep which is not what you should do. Ideally, meditation brings you to a higher level of awareness and my awareness was telling me loud and clear that I was dead tired. Why?

Beautiful, wild lupines were ploughed under to create garden space.

Could it be because yesterday was day three of turning the vegetable garden by hand?

The ground had been plowed and disced.  A year ago I didn’t even know what this meant. The tractor drags a bar with sharp huge metal disks that cut into the sod and break up long stringy roots of invasive weeds as well as clods of earth.

The previous day's rain made turning the earth so easy.

As laid-back as Bear River seems on the surface, what with meditation and perfect scenery and friendly folks and pot luck dinners; people like me can’t help but bring all their past baggage with them — so when I heard that Pamela and Erin who are “ real gardeners” were turning their vegetable gardens by hand I knew I had to do this too.  After all aren’t I aspiring to be a real gardener too?

No problem! I can do this!  After all I have a brand-new fork from Lee Valley and I have several generations of gardening running through my veins.

By day three the soil had dried out a lot.

Well it all sounds so romantic and idyllic this back-to-the-land-stuff but it’s a lot of hard work and I have to confess I’m not really used to a lot of hard physical work and my reality is bumping up against my vision of who I think I want to be.

After the tractor goes home there are still clumps of weeds to pull out of the vegetable patch. Oh and did I mention wheel barrels of stones to collect? And let’s not forget the black flies that are out in full force!  So I don my bug shirt that I bought last year – the one that covers my face with mesh and traps the stray black flies inside with me.

Rock picking is part of the Bear River gardening experience.

The more I dig, the hotter the sun gets and the bigger the garden looks. Thankfully there are all kinds of wonderful distractions… people come by to visit me.  I notice there are beautiful wild lupine’s growing and I have to go over and look at  them. I decide that all the rocks I’m picking out of the garden would make for a great mini waterfall feature in the unfinished, empty, future pond and that’s what I should be focusing on.  I remember being told that if I shove a piece of willow tree in wet ground that it will grow in the tree so I stop to do that. 

The drooping branch in the middle of the photo may actually root and grow a willow tree.

I go and check on Larry and his helper in the house who are now stripping the floors.  When I see what backbreaking work it  is to drag those heavy floor sanders around, I head back out to my patch of future garden.

The floors look AMAZING, but the sanding is brutal work.

When I get back to my garden patch,  I’m really surprised to see that it’s still in the same condition that it was when I left it.  This whole gardening exercise is a great study in persistence for me.  Yesterday, day three, I had almost completed turning one third of it and as a reward to myself I planted some seeds into the earth I had turned.  That part is so very easy compared to digging and turning!

Who can concentrate on digging when there are gorgeous Lupines everywhere?

 In spite of my slowness I thought I was doing okay until I went over to visit Erin’s garden which is also her first garden in Bear River..  Not only did she hand turn everything, but plants are actually growing out of it and her garden is double the size of mine.  I am working on my severe garden envy.   I am also plea-bargaining with myself to skip hand-turning all the spaces in between the plants. I’m also listening to podcasts that extol the virtues of eating organic food to inspire me and to push me along.

Even the buttercups are a beautiful distraction.

In the last month I’ve noticed that some of our gardeners have dropped away from coming to meditation.  They said it was a busy time of year but now I suspect that the real reason is they didn’t want to be caught falling asleep.

In the meantime, if you’re hankering for a authentic Bear River organic gardening experience, come on over.  I have an extra garden fork but you’ll have to bring your own bug jacket.

Late in the day and much to do.

Ground Breaking Action

Today a wonderful thing happened.

Next year's perennial bed

Well, wonderful things often happen in Bear River in conjunction with other people and this is just another example. Yesterday we had a small afternoon tea party to invite people to see the inside of this historic house and to give them a feel for the ‘before’ look. During that visit, I asked for and received some excellent advice from a few Bear RIver gardeners. They suggested that I plough under most of the growable land in order to prepare for next spring’s planting and to level off some of the hilly bumps. 

We have been getting estimates and advice about new electricity, heating systems, insulation, dirt floor basement challenges, plumbing and more and although we’ve only actually had the house for 3 weeks, it sometimes feels to me like everything is moving in slow motion. I will feel much better about it when I can see progress actually happening.

Two cords of wood for our future studio

Even my man with the tractor said he couldn’t fit my ploughing in until November. He did remember though that I said I have lots of garlic to plant now, before the ground freezes up. I suppose he took pity on me, because today as I was scraping away stubborn wallpaper, and Larry was ripping up old carpet, we heard a tractor lumber down our long driveway.

I'm Pretending to be a Farmer

Due to my conversations with the gardeners, my little ploughing job had now morphed into a major 4 hour production, but Billy was unperturbed, though he did say “I don’t want to sound mean or rude, but this is going to be an awful lot of garden for just one person…..are you sure you want to do this?” I thought that was pretty darned thoughtful of him and although I certainly won’t be able to do it all myself, it does open up other possibilities such as where I plant next summer. It also allows space for anyone else who doesn’t have a personal garden, but would like to share. I could create a park-like setting on part of the land. We’ll see.

All I know is that I was so mesmerized by watching the plough turn the sod up, that I urged him on like he was spreading gesso on a huge blank canvas. Tomorrow Billy’s coming back to dump 2 loads of manure and I’ll soon be planting garlic.

Delicious, organic hardnecked garlic. From Pamela's garden to mine.

Finally there is some real action happening here. Some ground-breaking action!

Preparing for the future.

Living it up in Bear River with $16-a-litre Organic Apple Cider!

  

Fallen apples in a Wild Rice Pottery bowl

One of the wonderful things about living here in Bear River is trying to figure out how to grow your own, make your own, and create your own food. People here love their fruit and vegetables and are always trying to either extend the growing season and/or preserve some of the harvest for the wintertime. Bear River is loaded with apple trees and you often drive past trees that are dropping their bounties on the edge of the road. We have about 10 apple trees at our new/old house so we decided to get in on the ground floor of a group purchase of a new, but authentic apple press. After all, the apples are ‘free’ and it would be a great chance to spend time with friends in a worthwhile pursuit. Eight households are sharing this apple cider press.

Apple crushing machine

It’s a bit late in the season to be picking apples; they’ve mostly already dropped on the ground. This actually made our job easier because we only had to spend time picking up the most recent fallen apples. I felt a bit squeemish about the worm factor, but friends here assured me that a bit of organic material in the cider is no big deal. As it turned out, the apples were pretty good and it was easy to cut out the ‘non apple’ bits.

Sweet, fallen apples

What surprised me about the day was how much time it takes and how much work it is being authentic and all! But not to get ahead of myself….we arrived at Don’s and Norma’s house. They had graciously suggested that we work together there and they’d been up since the crack of dawn putting drop cloths on the kitchen floor, taking doors off hinges to fit tables into the kitchen so that we could set up the production line.

Don inspects the setup

You see, the 5 bushels of apples that we had all gathered had to be scrubbed, quartered, inspected, crushed, pressed and then put in containers and frozen.

Beautiful red apples

The 4 of us worked steadily for a total of 10 hours, including the time spent apple picking. At the end of our efforts, we had pressed 60 litres of ‘free’ apples. I figured that if we were paid $20 an hour for our combined 40 hours of labour and added in our share of the cost of the apple press, that would equal about $1000. Divide that by 60 litres and the actual retail price for a litre of Bear River Organic Apple Cider is a mere $16. Think of the money we saved doing this ourselves!!

Around about the 10th litre of juice, it occurred to me that we hadn’t thought about where we were going to put the finished product. Now we have 25 litres of fresh pressed cider sitting in a huge pail in our cold car and no containers to put it into and no freezer space for that much cider either. In the morning I’ll be racing into Digby to buy containers and then mooching space in Norma’s freezer. But hey, if you want to help me out here, you can have a litre of the tastiest organic, free range cider I’ve ever tasted, for $16, no, make that only $10 a litre!

Only 20 more litres to go!

Cape Breton – on top of Old Smokey

There is not a part of Nova Scotia that isn’t beautiful and one of the prettiest places is Cape Breton. Most destinations in the province are only about 3 hours away, but Cape Breton is a 6 hour drive from Bear River. Because this province of less than one million people is so underpopulated, there is very little traffic on the highway so the drive is always scenic and not at all stressful.

Near Ottawa Brook, Cape Breton

Dianne’s friend Wilma, who would soon become our friend too, was a back-to-the-lander who moved here from Manitoba back in the 70’s. She raised her children on a small farm where she had ducks and hens and a few pigs and lots and lots of gardens. About 18 years ago Wilma and 2 girlfriends who were also part of that 70’s wave, sat around a pot of tea and talked about their shared dream of having a commercial greenhouse. After many discussions and research, they opened the Harbour Greenhouse.

Dianne and Larry watch Wilma checking out the coldframe.

Wilma was able to take the skills she’d learned as a 20-something farmer and turn it into a business. The greenhouse was closed for the season, but I was still able to come home with a climbing hydrangea for our new house, which will always remind me of Cape Breton and Wilma’s entrepreneurial spirit!

We explored Wilmas island-within-an-island and it was quite visually stunning. (CapeBreton is connected to the rest of Nova Scotia by a causeway so its inhabitants consider it to be an island.)

Cape Breton looks like a fairy-tale

Unlike South-West Nova Scotia, Cape Breton had way too much rain this summer and the ground was spongey everywhere we walked!

On our second day we took a drive around the famously scenic Cabot Trail. 

Margaree Valley

Once in the National Park, we stopped for a picnic lunch and enjoyed our food at the best table in the house while listening to crashing waves on this rugged shoreline.

One of the places we stopped at was my namesake store. It is so rare to ever come across my name so it was fun to get a photo.

Flora's craft store

An even bigger surprise was when THE Flora’s daughter presented me with a bag bearing my name..a lovely gesture which they do with anyone who bears the name

On top of Cape Smokey

Cape Breton is so reminiscent of Scotland and geological theories hold that the two places were once physically joined together. It certainly looks like a believable theory!

The farther up the trail we got, the chillier it became and we kept adding another layer of clothing!

Dianne and I saw moose, fox and eagles.

Three days flew by and it was time for us to make the 6 hour drive home…all with visions of celtic mountains and end-of-season plants in our heads.