It's home now.

In 2012 Ritchie Brothers Auctioneers sold all of the farm equipment in one massive auction, Bernie and his brother rented their farm land to a neighbor and he and I put our place near Odessa up for sale. 

 
 



Bernie and I packed up everything we owned, tucked it away in storage and moved up to our 120 acres between Nipawin and Tobin Lake, Saskatchewan.  We are now calling Nipawin our home.

Wolf tracks!

 

 

We stayed in our little shack cabin or as Bernie calls it "the Grainery" as long as we could last year but once it became -20 and the snow was almost a foot deep we turned out noses south and headed to our place in Brownsville.  The winter here in Saskatchewan was one of the worst for amounts of snow and storms so we stayed south for a little longer than normal but arrived back in the middle of April. 

There was still a lot of snow on the ground but we timed it just right and the weather turned warm just as we got back.

















 Finally!  I have been talking about it and dreaming about building for 3 years now and it's almost surreal to think that it's finally going to become a reality.  We have started building our dream home.

We will live in the grainery while the house is being built and I know that it will be a challenge.  This place lacks many of the "luxuries" that most of you would call normal.  Thing like a bathroom, hot water, and a stove.  Im making due though.  We have a well and I have that cold water connected to the house.  I can boil water in the kettle to wash dishes.  There is an out house close by and a little farther away in our shop we built an actual bathroom and laundry room.  The wood stove heats this place and does a great job.  I have a barbeque, a smoker, an electric frying pan and a crock pot so plan to manage without the oven and stove. 

I have even figured out how to bake bread on the barbeque!  I will show you how I do it in a future post. 

Today the footings for the house were pored.  Our dream is becoming a dream come true but there is a long way to go yet!



 

Rain isn't that bad when you have a wood stove.

Hasn't this been an amazing fall.  It's the 7th. of October and the weather has been absolutely perfect with day time temps around 20 Celsius.  We have not even needed the fire going in the nights because it's not been that cold and my big denim quilt is very cozy.  The weather has been so nice that we have managed to cut a giant pile of wood and get a fair portion of that wood split for the fire.

Today though, we woke up to the sound of rain. Storm'n Norman, our favorite radio announcer, 94.7 "The Storm" says that it is going to rain all day.  That means a well deserved rest today. After I finish this blog I'm going to cuddle up with my book and a cup of tea.

This old cabin may be ugly but who ever built it defiantly did a fine job of insulating it.  That may be it's only redeeming feature.  I would love to find out a little history about this place.  When was it built, who built it?  Did someone ever lived here or was it just a hunting cabin?

Somebody went to a lot of work to build stairs down to the water and bury a water line that comes up beside the cabin.  There is still a connector on the end that would have allowed you to connect a pump and get water from the river.  I would not recommend trying the steps though, the wood is very old and rotten.  I think after the first step you would get down the hill in an awful hurry.

We had to do some repairs on the old outhouse this summer and when we had it out of the bush and in front of the shop where the light is much better I noticed some faded writing on the inside wall.  Some one had written a little weather report and the date was marked as September 1943.  That old biffy has been there for at least 67 years.

We have had company for the past 3 days and enjoyed walking the trails through the Maurice Street Wildlife Sanctuary that borders our property.  We also did a couple road trips and explored the trails on the north-west side of Codette Lake and followed the road to the end of the trail on the north side of Tobin Lake.  There is no end of places to go hiking or quading and I can see why so many come this way for hunting as well as the fishing.  We only spotted one deer but saw 3 Bald Eagles and lots of tracks, including bear.

I once heard that when hiking through black bear country that you should wear bells on your cloths, carry bear spray and keep a lookout for scat that has berries in it.  Of course if you are in grizzly bear country the scat would have bells in it and smell like bear spray.

Harvest is over so back we go!

Tomorrow Bernie and I will get into the cab of one of his semi trucks and go back up to our cabin.  This will be my second trip in a semi truck and this time I will remember to bring a book or some needle work to do. 

We are taking the big truck because Bernie wants to take up some power poles that he got.  These are huge and long and I honestly am not near as excited about them as Bernie was when he got the call to come and salvage them.  I think it may have something to do with him growing up in the "treeless" south of the province and me growing up surrounded by big trees but when he heard that some power lines had blown down in a storm this summer he was really hoping that he could get his hands on at least some of them.  When he got the call to come and get all he wanted everything stopped and away he went.  Now we will haul them up to the bush, where there are already lots of trees and poles... and he will be able to stare lovingly at more wood. 

I think the man is obsessed with his wood and then I think of all the things he has been able to make for me with all that wood. I think of all the art and craft supplies I have in bins and boxes and baskets around the house.  I have a tendency to get a little obsessive myself. Maybe this is why we get along so well!

After harvest everyone is so tired, Bernie from going forth and back across the fields all day and half the night and me from cooking and baking and waiting for him to come home at night.  We both need some well deserved r and r.  So off we go to our favorite spot, the cabin at Nipawin. 

Now if only we get some rest, how much you want to bet he comes up with some work that needs to be done?

Let me tell you about my garden

First of all I understand that everyone is proud of their garden.  It takes a lot of your time and toil.  Well my garden is different.  It takes hardly any work at all.  I only spend a few minutes, yes minutes weeding, planting is a cinch, and I get more produce from it that we could possibly use.
What makes it so different is that it is in raised beds, raised about 40 inches actually.  Let me explain how this garden came about.
Bernie and I moved to an old abandoned farm yard and set up house and home 4 summers ago.  There was not much here, an old barn, a few old wooden bins and a couple half dead maple trees, oh and the house we moved into was an old mobile home that Bernie found abandoned and had moved to this less that ideal location.  If I tell you that story I will never get to the garden so let me skip ahead a little and get to the dirt of the subject.
We had discussed a garden and had agreed to make raised beds and we were starting from scratch.  The yard was empty, well except for the weeds.   We cleared a fairly large area and I drew up a plan of how I wanted the garden beds laid out in it.  Then I left to visit my grandkids and Bernie was going to start building the beds for me while I was away.  A man should never be left alone with such a monumental task.  They all need supervision at such times.  I came home to one huge wooden box full of dirt sitting in front of the house.  I asked if he was planning to bury someone in it as to me it looked like some kind of coffin but with the dirt on the inside.  This box of dirt was 8 feet long and 4 feet wide and as high as my waist.  He took " raised beds" to a whole new level.  He proudly told me that he had filled it with blow dirt and I nodded my city girl head as if I knew exactly what that was.  I didn't want to hurt his feelings by telling him how silly it looked sitting out there all by it's sore thumb self so I set about planting it.
I made a few rows in the blow dirt and planted some peas, beets, beans, radish, lettuce and carrots.   I remember thinking that this dirt was nice fluffy stuff.  The fact that I could stand up and dug the rows with my little gardening trowel was pretty cool too.  Once planted I set the little sprinkler in the middle of my coffin garden and kept the pressure down pretty low so the water stayed in the box and didn't sprinkle out over the edges.  A half hour later when I went to shut off the water I was shocked, devastated actually.  The entire thing had sunk, caved in, there must have been a huge air space under the soil and the water caused it to collapse in on it's self.  Where were my cute little rows? Bernie admitted filling it with the tractor bucket and never thought to pack it down.  Well, I decided that I had 2 options.  Either top it up with more of this mysterious blow dirt and replant or just spread out what was there and let nature take over.  I decided to trust mother nature.  What will grow will grow.  Sure enough a few days later I had little baby sprouts all over the place. Canola, lots and lots of canola.
Blow dirt is the soil that blew up against the fence lines back in the days of summer fallow when farmers tilled the land and as it dried and the wind blew it ended up caught in the weeds and grass below the fences  between fields.  My farmer doesn't summer fallow anymore, hasn't for years, the fences have been torn out to make room for bigger fields and bigger equipment but these ridges of "blow dirt" have remained.  You would have to look real close in a field now to actually see them because they only look like a slight rise or bump but if you drive over it with a seeder, sprayer, swather and combine every year you know exactly where it is.  Bernie had taken the front end loader out into the field beside the house and removed the top of that ridge.   The year before it had been planted with canola and I now had a big funny looking, dirt caved in, box garden full of volunteer canola, oh, and wild oats, I had wild oats too.
I took my coffee out the next morning, set it on 4x4 corner of the box and started plucking out those little devils, they came out really easy in that light soil, no effort at all.  No bending down, no reaching, no sore back or aching knees.  Maybe Bernie's idea of a garden 3 and a half feet off the ground wasn't such a bad one after all.  After I had the canola and oats pulled out there where little baby peas and beets and beans and carrots and lettuce left. Baby radish looks like baby canola.  No rows but they were all happy living together and I actually got a fairly good supply of fresh veggies from what I thought was going to be a disaster.
That was a couple of years ago and I now have five more boxes, all as high as my waist and all four feet wide.  Two are twelve feet long but all the rest are eight feet long.  I no longer plant in rows but in 2 x 2 foot blocks.  Each block is a different vegetable and I use crop rotation to get the most out of my space.  I put my plants between 1 and 12 inches apart depending on the type of plant.  It's pretty easy, I just think about how big the veggie is when it's full grown, a radish about an inch across, a beet about 3 inches, a cabbage 12 inches and I put the seeds that far from each other.  I have a handy stick 2 feet long with 1 inch measurements marked along it and make a hole then drop the seeds in each hole.
I can start planting about 2 weeks earlier than most because the soil warms up so much faster above ground level.  The soil never gets compacted because no one ever walks on it so it never needs rototilling.   I do top dress the boxes each spring with compost or well rotted manure if I don't have enough compost and that is all the work I have to do before planting.  This spring I had major surgery and was warned not to do anything strenuous.  Gardening and vacuuming were both no no's.  Well I didn't vacuum.... but I did garden.  Remember, no bending, no digging and no lifting at all when your beds are waist high.
I love my funny looking garden boxes and thank Bernie every spring for his strange but great idea of raised bed gardening.  They may look weird sitting out in my yard but I can plant, weed and harvest with minimal effort and they are a great conversation starter as well.  

I planted radish and winter squash in this box, got wonderful radish and my squash should be good too.

If you have any questions about my strange garden then leave a comment and I will answer as best I can.

Well we are back at the farm to start preparing for the harvest. Keep your fingers crossed, it has not been a very good year for farmers, what with the late spring then all the rain, hail, wind and flooded fields. I am still trying to get used to a business where you take $300,000 and bury it in a hole in the ground in the spring and then hope that you can dig it up in the fall and find more $$.

Anyway, that is another story for another day. We left the cabin on Monday and it was a sad farewell. As we drove away Bernie and I promised ourselves and each other that we would do what ever it took to get back there in the fall before we left for Texas and our winter. We didn't manage to do that last year and really regretted not being able to spend at least a weekend when we could enjoy the crisp weather, the trees changing color and No bugs!

We did not get started on the "big cabin" like we had hoped too, it just didn't seem like a good idea until we are more certain that we will have a crop to sell this fall. Instead we spent our summer working Bernie's sawmill and making a small mountain of wood siding for the interior walls and boards that will be used for trim around doors and windows inside the cabin when we do get building. The plan is to have a contractor build the cabin, putting on the metal roof, installing the windows, doors, basically take it what they call the lock up stage. Then Bernie and I will finish the inside. That will include covering all the inside walls, floors and ceiling with wood. Hopefully wood that we have cut on our sawmill from the trees that came down to make the road into our property.

Working a sawmill was certainly a new thing for me but I'm game for new things and actually really enjoyed the physical labor. A pair of work boots, some comfy pants, t-shirt, leather gloves and a hat was my wardrobe. Bernie had a pair of coveralls. You know the kind, full sleeve, step into the legs and pull the zipper up to your neck. Well when we get to the Brownsville flea market this winter I'm going to look for a pair of coveralls for myself. I won't look pretty but I will be much more comfortable. You see pants and a shirt is fine but I get covered in sawdust, again that is ok until you have to make a trip to the biffy (aka outhouse). It is impossible to keep that sawdust from falling off your cloths and sticking to your hot sweaty skin. Boys don't have to worry about this problem as they never have to actually pull anything down to use the facilities, not that they would ever use the facilities, the world is their urinal after all, but us girls are not so lucky.

First of all the biffy is a long way from the sawmill so planning is pertinent but very rarely done. That means a brisk walk, well waddle if I waited to long and then getting those pants down as fast as possible once I'm in there. I never though about dusting off the sawdust from my back, I did the front, arms and knees, but who thinks of dusting off their back? I did mention that this was physical work right and, well, I sweat, really sweat, not a lady like kind of sweat but the kind that soaks into your shirt and runs down your back to catch in the waist band of your pants sweat. The kind that soaks the band in your hat and then runs into your eyes sweat. The kind that leaves your whole body wet and the kind that sawdust likes to stick to.

Working with Bernie milling the logs that will eventually become the walls of our cabin is a lot of fun, working with Bernie milling the logs that will eventually become the walls of our cabin while I have sawdust stuck to my butt and itching me like crazy is absolutely not fun!

A grainery with Windows.

We were lucky I guess because there was a cabin of sorts on the land when we bought it. Bernie calls it a grainery with windows but it never was a grainery and someone at one time did stay in it. It's only one room and I think about 16 feet by 20 feet. There where a couple kitchen cupboards, a counter and a kitchen sink. No water to the taps of course and the drain was straight into a bucket under the sink. I was very excited to see an old wood cook stove in the cabin as well. Heat and a place to cook, what else did I need?

Bernie got out some tools and built me some shelves so we had a place to put all the important things, like the bottle of Lemon Hart and some bug spray. He got some pipe and redirected the sink drain through the floor and under the cabin. We raided the old barn back at the farm and found a hide-a-bed. I wasn't really thrilled with the evidence that the last users had left behind but I cleaned it as best I could and hoped that they had all moved out during the 4 hour trip north. We also found a chrome table and chairs in a shed that belonged to his Grandma Rist so we brought that
along too.

I got a lesson on electricity and wired in a bunch of plug ins and light switches. Before there was one hole in the wall where someone pushed an extension cord through and plugged it into the electric panel box out on the transformer.

The most important thing we did right away was extend the little front porch and enclose it with some screen. A Bug Proof Room!! Well almost bug proof, a lot of them little suckers hitchhike in with the dog. But during the worst bug time it is the most used room in the place. Ok, I only have one other room but still we use that screen room a lot.

We have now moved the old cook stove out, it had a badly cracked firebox so on cold nights we were putting wood in every 15 minutes just to keep the frost off our noses. Bernie's #1 son had an accident with his wood stove, something about the stove being to small for the logs he was putting in and the log going through the glass door. Anyway, I pulled all the broken glass out of the door and Bernie put a piece of tin over the hole. It works wonderful. I can't cook on it like the old cook stove but it will heat a kettle of water for washing just fine.

I also found a real bed so we no longer have to sleep with our heads lower than our legs and that hard bar across our backs. Why can't someone come up with a better design for a hide-a-bed?

An old fridge and a small freezer have also found their way into the cabin so it really is getting comfy. We even put down some carpet that my #1 daughter took out when she moved into her new shop.

There is now a very long garden hose running from the well we had dug last fall to my kitchen tap and a second deck outside that has the smoker, a barbecue and the coleman stove. I call that my summer kitchen.

All the comforts of home, well maybe not, but enough for Bernie and me.

I will try to get you caught up on the adventure.

In 2009 Bernie and I found the most amazing piece of land for our dream retirement home.  We bought 120 acres of  land between the town of Nipawin and the resort village of Tobin Lake right on the edge of the Saskatchewan River.  What makes it so special to us is the amazing view of the river from the top of our ridge.  Some of the land had been cleared way back in the 40's but there is enough forest to keep us happy as well.
In 2010 we spent 7 weeks on the site and had a large pole shed ( 40 feet x 60 feet) built.  The shed is going to be our work shop, storage for toys ( my quad and Bernie's toolcat)  and a fully functional bathroom and laundry room.  That last part is very very important!  Staying 7 weeks in the bush with no bathroom, shower or flushage is do-able but not necessarily the most desired of circumstances.  I did brag last summer that I had running water but it was when I asked Bernie to run and get me some.  We managed with a black bag shower and a wash basin that summer.  I would heat water for washing either on the wood stove inside the cabin or on the fire.  I spent all summer doing that and on the way home it donned to me that all I needed to do was buy an electric kettle, we have power on site, and I would have had hot water much faster and more convenient.  Some times these things just don't occur to me until it's to late.
Before we left to go back to the farm for the harvest we cleared the spot for the house and sent the floor plans we designed off to be turned into blue prints.