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Showing posts from 2014

The Year Of The

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Exactly.  What happened this year?  The well ran dry. For the first time that anyone can remember our spring fed well ran dry.  It was an extremely dry summer with very little moisture following a winter with far less snow.  Nothing says work like having to truck water in.  And pack it to the animals.  It happened just as we were transitioning from mud to ice.  The well has made a comeback but we are still taking usage waste prevention measures.  Like " if it's yellow let it mellow ".  Next spring will bring the start of water year where we explore separating the house water from the animal and garden needs.  Eave troughs to collect any rainwater that falls for the garden.  Changing three toilets to the low flow type. The biggest project just might be a water line from our pond down to the barn connection.  That's a whole lot of digging but we will be assured of water.  Hopefully a lot of snow and a wet spring will bring the water table back up.  I actually pa

Spring has Sprung

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I can tell 'cuz I have to have the truck in four wheel drive to get it around my driveway. We are transitioning to Berkshires.  The Royal Pig.  Here are a couple of princesses having a late morning nap.  Having found a plentiful supply of nice gravel on the property we built an all weather road to the loading ramp at the barn.  Had some scary moments trying to extricate the skidsteer from the late spring mud bog that was there previously.  Now, with the addition of a new gate customers can drive right up to the loading dock.  Makes loading piglets a whole lot easier.  Mind you with the P.E.D. scare down south and now back east in Canada we may have to re-think our bio-security procedures. Of course any road bulding job requires a supervisor..  The road goes to this loading dock.  This is just the graded underlay before the gravel was applied.  20 loads of gravel and a road that won't suck your gumboots off when you walk on it.  The skid steer can get supplies to the

Foggy Hollow

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We are having a very strange weather pattern.  It's deep January but the temperature is only around 5C ( 41F).  We've had over a week of fog.  The old timers say they have never seen anything like this.  The ice fog precipitates and turns the most mundane of objects into graceful art work. I think it is astonishingly beautiful. The tree's become studies in black and white: We're prepared for snow.  It's not really a bother.  But the warm weather causes our carefully plowed kilometer long driveway to turn into a sheet of ice.  Ice that at times has a film of water on it.  Treacherous.  I tried six times the other day in our 4X4 truck equipped with brand new studded winter tires to make it up a right angled hill.  I succeeded on try number six, and it was touch and barely go. Today we've got some snow coming down. If it keeps up it will add weight to the already ice covered trees.  Fortunately the ice on the trees are crystals and not the thick

Reflections

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It's been quite a while since I've updated this blog. It's not that I haven't been up to a few projects this year its simply that l been doing updating on various social media and not aggregating it in this blog. We've just come out of our first cold snap- a couple of weeks of -20, with its usual pipe freeze ups. A trial run before the deep chill of late December through February. However,  I was reminded just recently that "only fools and newcomers predict the weather." We've been here coming on 10 years now,  so we're still newcomers.  I think it takes at least two decades before were living in the Blomquist place- but what the heck, we're not going anyplace. I think there comes a time when a Homestead needs to make a decision about where it is going. We seem to have reached that point. Expand the farm,  or shrink it back to a hobby farm.  Our worry was that we wouldn't be able to sale what we could produce.  Thankfully, so far that&#