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Showing posts from November, 2007

Company's Coming

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My daughter Sara and here husband Kevin came up from the Coast for a couple of days of R & R. If you count cutting up a cord of wood R & R.. We are checking out the carrots in the tire garden. Actually they have managed to form baby carrots. I wonder what would happen if I left them till spring. I suspect they won't last through the -30c tempertures tho.. Xena the wonder dog loves Kevin. It was Kevin that taught her the " food on the nose trick" Here she is snuggled up. She still thinks that she is a lap dog. Sara likes to bring me "weird" items from the oriental food markets. Not a lot of choice up here. She replenished my hot sauce supply and brought these " chicken snacks". Actually they were not bad. Crunchy!

How does your garden grow..

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Quite well thank you.It is -10C here today. It's mid November and I have been harvesting greens from the tire garden. I can't beleive how well these cold frames made from logging truck tires work. We planted in Mid September. Just as an experiment. Cabbages, Kale, Turnip, Radishes, Daikon, Carrots and Swiss chard. They grew like crazy. Straining at the plastic covers on the top tires! We arn't getting any rooting on the roota-veggies, theres just not enough light in the day but we sure have a great crop of greens. The chickens gobble them up. We will start planting for this years crop in early May, maybe even a few test plantings in February. And we are going to add another 80 cold frames. I am very popular at the tire shops around here. I was talking to a local gardener the other day and he's offered to supply me with some asparagus rootings in the spring. Cool. They take a couple of years to come up if I just use the from seed method.

Progress not Perfection

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We were going great guns with the siding. Untill the starter motor packed it in. Managed to get a new one orderd from the local AutoSense store and will be able to get it back up and running today. Might even get the rest of the upstairs wall done. Could be my imagination but it even feels less draughty up there. Certainly less noisy in the wind with no metal shingle dangling in the breeze.

A bit of a Lift

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Honest, the roads fine. As long as you stay on it. If your a lowbed semitraier hauling a 17 ton man lift it's best to stay on the road. 'Cuz if you don't it is going to be an all day job digging you out. If your fortunate to have a hoe on the property. We had to take the man lift off of the semi trailor then drag it out to the road and then pull the tractor out. Pull the Man lift past the tractor ( it's only two wheel drive ) and then hook it all back together and back it a kilometre down the drive way to freedom. Then we used the hoe to drag the manlift up the road and position it so I can start working on replacing the metal shingles. While I am doing that I am going to change the 1/2 inch insulation ( actually I think it's just white styrofoam) with 1 1/2 inch Pink building insulation foam. It's the West weather wall so every little bit will help. And I had help of course. Xena "the HOLMSTER" the wonderdog..