The draft that I forgot!

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Today is February 16, 2014! The following is a draft which has been sitting since ….

Today is December 28, 2009… the year that seems like it wasn’t! Where did it go? Perhaps it was the succession of unpleasant news stories about the environment; the endless litany of concerns that never seem to be addressed… in any case, here I am, nearly at the end of the year…wishing I had better memories of 2009… speaking strictly for myself it is a year, the memory of which, I will not treasure! Perhaps the coming year will bring the changes I wished for…. all for the better!
I expect to be moving and starting up a new garden. we were supposed to be doing this last summer…and I had hoped to be preparing my next garden by now, but all my plans are still on paper.
A lot depends of the place we find. I’m hoping for a south facing gentle slope…with trees or a wall for a wind break on the north and west side. If these features are not extant …then I’ll have to construct/plant them…so as you can imagine I’m hoping to find the ideal place where I can just move in and start to dig!!! The most challenging part of the plan is to situate a solar greenhouse on the property… I know there are new age materials available which are lighter than the stone, metal and glass structures I’m familiar with; and I’ll be looking thro magazines…surfing the ’net, to see what I can find. Part of the plan is to sink it into a hillside…or position it beside a building, for heat retention and shelter from wind. it will not be in use during the coldest months…but I would like to be able to keep it warm enough for plants at least ten months of the year.

I had decided to erase this blog. Then I realized that it presented me with an opportunity to appreciate a little better the results of that period of wishing and hoping…because most of the things I wrote about have come about and in ways that I would not have expected. I wrote the first part of this blog 4 years ago!! Almost exactly one year, to the day, before we moved to our place here in Matawatchan. The purchase of our house and hillside, the net surfing, the costing and purchase of the greenhouse all happened. The greenhouse has been situated and moved and now I’m planning to re-situate it on the “southerly” aspect, connected to the house, which I was hoping for.
Luckily for me…I don’t have to plant any trees unless I choose to do so! I have trees mature enough to tap for sap in spring…I have seven apple trees which, with a little tending, will give us apples for cider, and two nut trees (black walnut) and a number of beech trees and a grove of hazel which could also provide us with nuts from trees in the forest .
The plan has evolved to the point that I now have the best growing area mapped out and almost clear of the prunings, limbings and culling of undesirable trees along the forest margin that were stacked to dry in the areas which will become the vegetable beds. This spring I will finally buy the cultivator I’ve been hoping for and the digging of stones will be at an end. ( I have a feeling that if I come back five years from now and read this blog…I’ll be laughing at that! I don’t think there is ever going to be an end to stones on this property! ) As a result it might be more prudent to say that I hope to put all the naturally occurring stone to good use perhaps as foundation material for the cabins or the observatory. Yes, I’m still dreaming about that…been here three years and it seems like I’ve hardly scratched the surface of the plans I made. At the point of making this blog, I was worried that I would never find the place of my dreams and would have to “make do” with something which required a lot more work than I had ambition. To a certain extent, I was lucky…but I’m still short of ambition and energy.

The decking will be placed at the corner of the house and a porch/solar room will be constructed with the existing greenhouse as the walls and roof. That way I hope to be able to heat the greenhouse earlier in the year. at present it sits out in the middle of a windy spot which is very cold in early spring (March) when I need to start my veggies. And perhaps I should add that the following picture was taken before the snow came…It’s now under 2 ft of snow! That’s the main reason why I’m dreaming on paper….er …well you know what I mean.

• 16 Feb, 2014
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