Fall’s Here and Winter’s A-Comin’

For Winter is a coming in
And Summers’s gone away-O. 

(inverted twist on “Hal an Tow” lyrics by Damh the Bard)

It’s been a year of “megaprojects”, but we are gradually wrapping things up for the winter as the rains begin.  Soon, our lives will be turning towards indoor pursuits as the weather becomes increasingly wet and cold.

Our irrigation system is complete now, and is working wonderfully.  What we are ending up with looks something like this  … but not nearly so pretty and well-organized (and without the ground cloth underneath everything)!  Now that the system is working, I’m finding that it’s soooo much easier to just turn on a valve and water a whole section of garden or orchard in one go.  I’ve got a couple of automatic timers to install next year which  will make the system even more user friendly.

It certainly has been an incredibly fruitful year on the homestead!   I’m not sure if it’s been the weather this year, which has definitely been wetter than the previous three years, or the irrigation system that we put in, but we’ve had a lot of firsts this year:

    • first flowers on our oaks (maybe acorns next year).
    • first chestnut (only one, but that’s a beginning).
    • first male catkins on most of our hazelnuts (which are supposed to pollinate sometime in February).
    • first green Arctic kiwis on the bush (absolutely wonderful flavor, a delightful mixture of tart skin and very sweet flesh).
    • first fruit on our autumn olives (surprisingly sweet little berries that I like even better than red currants).

Additionally, we had heavy crops on the seabuckthorns and Cornelian cherries, and absolutely bumper loads of fruit on our Victoria plum and our apple trees.  All the plants were looking much healthier and happier this year, and some of our apples were huge.  Tomatoes were late, but came on strong.  I’ve been busy drying plums and tomatoes, and making lots of chutney!

Arctic kiwis (Hardy ‘Issai’).
Autumn olives (Ruby).
Cornelian cherries (‘Coral Blaze’).
Cornelian cherries (‘Yellow Fruiting’).
Victoria plum drooping like a willow under its load of fruit.
Victoria plums.
Apple tree heavy with fruit (‘Summer Red’).
Closeup of the ‘Summer Red’ apples.
Another loaded apple tree (‘Golden Delicious’).
Apples hanging from a multi-grafted dwarf apple tree.
Apples and oaks.

With our garden and orchard in full production, we are really glad for the electric fence.  We had a bear snuffling around a while back, but they usually encounter the fence with their nose once, and that is enough to keep them deterred.  If they seem “uneducated”, we put strips of aluminum foil coated with molasses on the fence, which teaches them respect very quickly.  Although Brennan does a good job of barking the bears away, the fence is additional security that lets us sleep at night.  We seldom get deer around our place (apparently they are on everyone’s menu, and are somewhat scarce), but we did have one jump the fence this fall.  Brennan made a lot of fuss (he is kept in a kennel just outside our back door at night), and the deer ran back and forth a couple times, then “sailed” away, and hasn’t been heard from since.

It seemed to take forever, but we finally got all our winter wood in.  We were late starting this year (after all the tractor adventures this spring), and are very happy to have gotten that job done.  The tractor has been very handy, as we purchased a wagon for it, and can now haul considerably more wood in a single trip that when we had to use the wheelbarrow!

Pile of split wood.
Brennan guarding the wood pile.
Work crew taking a break.
Our two-wheeled tractor with its trailer, awaiting a load of wood.
A load of wood delivered to the woodshed.
Brennan supervising the unloading of the trailer.
A full woodshed (Brennan inspecting the completeness of the work).

Boats have kept us more annoyed than busy these days.  Our two outboards have been on the fritz.  In and around all the clearing, chopping, chipping, and harvesting, Ken finally managed to get the little 9.9 outboard on the herring skiff fixed (we hope).  We had to order some rather hard to get parts, but they turned out to be the right ones and our first test run of the engine seemed to go well.  However, we haven’t had much of a chance to get out and do our usual beach exploring this year.  The outboard on our MacGregor is probably beyond hope and needs to be replaced by something new (and expensive, I’m sure) … something to sort out next spring.

Talking about boats, we had two weird and scary moments with our boats recently, largely due to strange winds.  Two of our boats, the herring skiff and the MacGregor, are tied up close to shore, rising with the incoming tide, and then beaching on the falling tide.  They have ropes securing them to the shore, and then a tail-hold rope that is attached to some large rocks in the lower intertidal by a chain.  Well, one day in our much too recent memory, we had a strong onshore wind and waves rolling in, bouncing the boats up and down on their ropes during a high tide (so they were floating).  Suddenly, the whole system came loose and the boats were being pushed onshore against the rocks … not a good situation.  Turns out the tail-hold chain had broken.  Ken ended up sitting out on the Kipper in nasty weather holding the two boats off the rocks with a pike pole until the tide went down enough to land them on the beach.  Of course, at that time, neither of the outboard engines were in working condition, which would have allowed Ken to motor away from the beach safely (ha, ha, with a cynical twitch of my eyebrow).  Finally, well after dark when the tide was low enough, Ken was able to get out to the tail-hold rocks and replace the chain.  A few scary moments there!  If that wasn’t enough, the weird winds got us again a couple weeks after that.  It had been raining very heavily, and the Kipper was filling up with water quite rapidly.  This is not usually a problem, as we just pull the drain plug when the tide goes down, and the skiff drains.  It can hold a lot of water before there is any real worry of it sinking.  But this time, as the Kipper was filling up, we got those onshore winds blowing up cresting waves on the beach, which came right over the stern and started sinking the skiff.  So there was Ken, out in the pouring rain bailing for all he was worth.  Luckily, at some point, the winds and tides turned in our favor, and he started making headway on the water in the boat, but still, another unexpected and scary moment in a year of weird winds!!

We’ve had several visitors to the homestead this fall.  This is very unusual, as some years we get no one at all.  Three of the visits were friends that we hadn’t seen in quite a long time, and who hadn’t been to our homestead.  It was great to connect, and it really makes us feel good about how far we have come in ten years, as everyone seemed quite impressed by the place.

I was on Google Earth a little while back, and there is a very recent satellite image of the homestead.  Wow!  For a long time, Google was using a very old image in which the cabin was barely visible amongst the trees.  Now, with all the clearing we have done, and the higher resolution of the new image, it almost feels as though we are naked.  As Ken said, “You can count the barrels of potatoes in our garden”.

Recent Google satellite image of the homestead.

It seemed like a fall for catching up on repairs … I ended up fixing leaks on the cabin roof, the “She Shed” roof, and the Awen’s cabin.  Here’s to hoping that all my patches hold up to the winter rains!  We bought a whole new set of tie up ropes for the Awen, and Ken replaced all the chains on the float … after our other boat misadventures, we really wanted to make sure that the big boat was secure for the winter.  Oh yes, we also replace the interior section of the stove pipe in the cabin … it was getting thin and starting to leak smoke in a few places.  We didn’t want to have any problems with the heating system in the middle of winter (I’ve camped out at -10°C, but didn’t like it enough to want to make it into a habit).

As the last “megaproject” of the year, we extended the electric fence to include another area that needs to be cleared.  Much of this will done sometime in the future, but we did clear enough this year so that we could erect a large 10’ x 20’ tent that will serve as the garage for the tractor and its implements until we can build a more permanent structure.  Now that the tractor is under cover, and the rains have begun with some seriousness, I’m happy to sit back and do some writing!

Tractor stowed away in its new garage.
Brennan checking out the new structure.
The view of the tractor garage looking out from the cabin.

2 thoughts on “Fall’s Here and Winter’s A-Comin’”

  1. Hi Mona:

    Good to hear from you!!  We are indeed living the life we have chosen.  It can be hard work at times, but very rewarding, especially now after we have put 10 years of love into it!!  Hope life is treating you well!

    Cheers,

    Barb

Comments are closed.