It's Starting to Feel Real

      A couple friends and family members have suggested I write a blog about our experience building a house in Cape Breton, so here it is for those couple people, and anyone else who cares to follow along. 

   

     It's been just over a week since we moved from our friends' farmhouse to our new property where we'll be building our small-ish house this summer. And by "we" I mostly mean."Chris." I'll hold as many 2x6's in place as I can while he builds,  but the domestic arts of family life and homeschooling will likely take up the majority of my productive hours each day. So far there haven't been any major mental breakdowns. 

     Our setup right now is pretty rustic.  We originally  planned to live in a camper trailer that some lovely friends out here very generously gave us, but we thought since it will likely be several months for our new house to be livable we would want a bit more space, so Chris managed to build a 10x16 cabin in about three days the week before we moved out. The door and windows are all second hand. It's not insulated, so our first few nights here were quite chilly, till he built a platform for our mattress.  Rowan sleeps on the fold-down couch that came with the camper and our piano and dressers share the space as well. We use the camper for kitchen and bathroom and tool storage. 

     We haul water from the nearby creek to heat for bathing and washing dishes and I wash our laundry once a week at the laundromat in Cheticamp and line dry it at home.  As soon as we get our well drilled we'll get a washing machine and run it using our generator to power it. We run the genie a few hours each day to keep fridge ane chest freezer cold as well as charge our phones and the deep cycle battery we use to power the chickens' electric fence at night. Oh and the instant pot occasionally and the coffee  maker, the most essential of appliances. We usually use a French press, but have found a coffee machine requires less water for cleaning and water conservation is name of the game at this point.  Showers are done with a hanging 5 gallon solar heated camp shower (fancy name for a black bag that warms in the sun and has a small hose and sprayer.) It's a slower pace of life,  but a nice change. 

   Our original plans to build an off grid house have changed, mostly due to the fact that there's a power line that runs right through our property and a pole about 40 feet from where we will build our house. And we realized it would be cheaper to connect to the grid than set up a solar and wind array for making our own power, but electrical self-sufficiency is still something I want to work towards in the future.

   

     The limited indoor space means the kids are outside for the majority of the day which means they sleep well as soon as the sun starts going down. Thankfully we're getting out of the grey Cape Breton winter/spring and into the beautiful sunny days of summer. Blackflies just popped up about two or three days ago (a couple weeks early according to one of our next door neighbors) but we have a bug tent for eating outside in sunny weather and there's  been a good breeze today to keep the blood suckers at bay. 

     Today's minor mental breakdown was by me, feeling sorry for myself for not having instant hot water when I needed to wash dishes before dinner with a cranky toddler who wanted to get into everything, but it was quickly remedied with clearing our four square feet of space beside the sink, heating some water on the propane burner, Chris taking the kids out to the beach and leaving me alone with my dishes and dinner preparations (and writing this post) in blissful solitude with one or two or three glasses of wine. Tonight's menu is instant pot garlic ginger beef and broccoli over cauliflower rice. 

     Since writing this a few days ago we realized we hadn't been to the beach once in the first week and a half since we'd  moved and last night's trip there made us realize we must go more often. Juniper slept through the night (therefore I did as well!) The following saying really is true, especially the the sea part:

"The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea." -- Isak Dineson

Mid-summer Musings

     As I dressed Juniper the other day in a cute little t-shirt covered in raccoon faces after changing him out of his sleeper with foxes on it, I thought what a strange relationship a farmer has with these wild animals. We dress our children in clothes covered in the creature that just a few days before had killed an handful of our meat chicks and three of our hens before Chris shot it trying to get another dinner from the coop.

     On the road we take to get to the beach near us we often see a very tame fox along the roadside. It's always a treat to see such a beautiful creature up close. On one especially hot day last summer he lazed in the shade on the side of the road and didn't even move when Chris and Rowan pulled up right beside him (or her.) I think foxes are lovely looking creatures but that wasn't my first thought about the one that boldly stole one of our ducks not 50 feet away from where I was on the porch hanging laundry. We called her Mabel the wonder duck after that because as I sat outside waiting to see if that fox would come back before the chickens and ducks went in their coop for the night, I counted two brown Khaki Campbells. I couldn't believe it, she must have put up a good flight for the fox to have let her go. She had a minor cut on her wing from the foxes teeth, but made a quick recovery and continued to give us eggs along with her sister Hazel till their time to go to freezer camp arrived.

Thankfully we don't have dinos to contend with

     Foxes and racoons are curious and beautiful when they are not trying to steal food from my family. From a distance I love to watch them, but if they step foot on my property you can bet I'd shoot them on sight. That's the odd dynamic I found interesting this week. Thankfully we haven't had losses to predators every year, it seems to only happen every second year. The first year we lived here there were none, the next year was the one that gutsy fox failed to take one of our two ducks but succeeded in snatching a handful of our hens before we started leaving our dog Bear outside whenever the flock was free-ranging. Last year all the creatures survived the jaws and grasping paws of death, but this year again we've had casualties. Here's hoping next year they will be safe when we move to our little house in the big woods.

The triumphant chicken defender

Back at it!

          Hello Interwebs! I laughed when I read my last post on this blog about how I wanted to resurrect my failed blog attempt from aeons ago. I guess that didn't happen.

          But I thought since we are embarking on the crazy adventure of building an off-grid homestead next year I should start documenting our journey. We planned to list and sell our house and move up to our new property near Combermere this summer, but I finally accepted, at around 34 weeks pregnant, that it would just be too much to do that and build an house with a newborn. Everyone else had already assumed I'd come to that conclusion, but I stubbornly held on to that plan for a long time. 

          So this summer is being spent adjusting to being a family of four, growing a bunch of brassicas and squash, tomatoes, cucumbers and herbs, swimming, renovating the house, raising meat chickens and pigs and continuing to plan our future homestead with the goal of being ready to list our house late winter/early spring of next year and building our tiny house in a few weeks next summer.

Rowan Kalebane

So. Much. Kale.

Broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage and baby

Getting ready to tour the gardens and hang laundry on the line while Juniper naps in the wrap

Nothing like fresh air to keep a baby asleep

           Our meat chicks arrive on Thursday so look forward to cute, yellow fluff cuteness in my next post!

The Phoenix Post

     Inspired by a friend's lovely blog, I've decided to resurrect this old one of my own. Same plan as before, but hopefully I'll actually post regularly as a record for myself, and maybe even to inspire anyone striving to live, or who is just interested in, the homesteading lifestyle.

Beautiful little eggs in a shrub near the old gardens

     Some things we're looking forward to this summer are growing veggies in our 60x60 ft garden, kids from one of our goats who's due in a couple weeks, fresh goat milk, 80 meat chicks arriving on August 2nd, many hours spent at Quarry Bay beach down the road, and exploring our beautiful area of Kawartha cottage country by canoe.

The Three Musketeers on Whale Island, Stoney Lake

Let the journey begin!

Well here I am again...starting another blog. Maybe this one will last longer than the couple posts of my previous attempts.

My purpose here is to provide myself with a record of all the goings on of my homestead and also to keep myself accountable to getting done all that I can. If I get lots done, I'll have lots to blog about, right? And maybe I'll even have some insights or inspirations to share with others along the way.