Image: A Kipperfull of wood. We now have a Kipperfull of wood …
Image: Trailing blackberries. Although we are itching to start work on our homestead, we are still waiting for the last of the legal paperwork to be done, and the property to be transferred into our names. So instead, we spend ...
Image: Snowdrops. Today we celebrated Imbolc in our little cabin in the woods.
We started our homesteading project back in June 2015 … and finally, nearly 4 years later, we have hot running water in the cabin, and can take a hot shower!
Our well ran dry this week. Not terribly surprising, given the lack of rain. In fact, it was quite amazing how long it did last.
Image: Rays of sunlight shining on our homesteading site. Over the last couple of years, I’ve talked to a lot of people who thought that our crazy scheme of going OTG and developing a “permaculture homestead” was a really good ...
We need to build a woodshed. Up to now, we’ve stored our wood under the house – the house is on pilings and there’s lots of room for wood under there. However, the minks, martens, and rodents have been building ...
Coming to the homestead, we had to downsize massively. Now that we’re here … well, things are beginning to accumulate and there is a need for more “specialized” spaces around the homestead, places where certain activities can occur, spread out, ...
Image: Our home in Prince Rupert Wow! How do we accumulate so much stuff? Having sold our home, we now had to pack all our belongings (or at least the important things) into the fish hold of our old fishing ...
Image: Tree of Life Fractal. I’ve recently learned that people like us are referred to as “OTG” – for Off The Grid. Good to know that you can apply a simple abbreviation to our peculiar type of eccentricity. Almost sanitizes ...
Image: Solar dehydrator built from left over bits and pieces from our house construction. The summer solstice is past and summer’s finally here. The weather has become typically hot and dry, with no rain in sight for weeks. It’s time ...
Gosh! Winter Solstice is just around the corner, and I haven’t written anything in our blog for quite awhile!
Image: “The Snow Queen” – a print from the original painting by Emily Balivet, 2012. Winter solstice has passed, Christmas has been enjoyed, and here we are … we’ve gained a whole entire minute of daylight!
Image: Rainbow over “Tir Ceòlmhor” – the Singing Land. It seems to me that I can’t remember a day in the past month when it hasn’t rained. What is this – global warming, or global wetting?
Image: Gardens and Cabin. Certainly not with silver bells, and cockle shells, and pretty maids all in a row. But grow it does … at least some of it.
Our neighbours picked up our mail from the post office, and the new Kuwfi 4G hub arrived, even sooner than I’d expected, given that it had shipped from China (I wish Canada would make decent electronics so that I could ...
Image: The Awen calmly waiting for the tide to go down at the Port Neville public dock. A couple weeks ago, we picked up a new propeller for the Awen while we were in Campbell River. Now, we finally have ...
Image: Loveable Loo. When you live in the city, getting rid of human waste is as simple as a flush. When you are living off-grid, things get just a wee bit more complicated.
Image: Cutting firewood. Having spent much of my life driving some form of gas guzzling vehicle around, I have become very aware at how inefficient these large gasoline engines can be, especially when used by single individuals for commuting in ...
Meet Brennan! He’s an eight week old Border collie puppy, and he’s joining our family (pack).
Image: Plum blossoms. Sometimes you get so busy that you miss beautiful things happening right in front of your nose … like plum blossoms outside your window.
Image: The Grizzly. Dusk is fast approaching, and we are winding down our day, now aboard the Awen, anchored just offshore from our home site. Ken sees something moving along the shore. This “something” resolves into a rather large, gangly-looking ...
Image: Compost Bins. We’ve been invited to a deconstruction party.
Image: Towing the Awen out from under the clouds We’ve been preparing for this moment since December. Finally, we are underway. Everything has been packed. Our two boats, the Moody Blue and the Awen are ready to go. Our newest ...
Image: Saskatoon tree with bird netting. We love our birds … they are, after all, what gives our land its voice, makes us the “tir ceòlmhor” – the singing land. However, sometimes there are conflicts …
Image: Pine marten in a live trap. Round XX goes to us in the pine marten battle. May the war be over …
Image: The repaired greenhouse in its new location. From a state of near wreckage, the greenhouse rises again, a peaceful zombie composed of broken aluminum struts and strangely resilient sheets of polycarbonate …
We’ve been away from home for two weeks, and sometimes things happen when you’ve been away. This time, it was a dreadful smell associated with the sinks.
Image: Salmonberry blossom. Today is the spring equinox, and we finally finished cutting a trail from the cabin up to the center of the property. This trail will allow us to access the old logging road that runs through the ...
Image: Hakai Institute. We finally took a vacation. Well, a working vacation at least.
Image: Freeze-up We’ve been in for a bit of a suprise – on January 3rd, the end of the Port Neville Inlet froze up.
People always ask us if we have problems with bears. The last two summers, our answer was “no”. This summer, we have a little black bear …
Image: A Cougar in My Garden. You could say it was all my fault … but there was a cougar in my garden today.
December is nearly over, and we’re still getting rain, even though most of the southern half of the province has been snowed on. Go figure? Actually, I don’t mind an absence of snow – we can still hike about on ...
Another year older, and thankfully, not deeper in debt!
For the last four years or so, our back door has opened out onto a set of rustic cedar steps built for us by a friend. They were meant only to get us by in the short term, but, like ...
Boats seem an inevitable part of our existence, living up near the head of an inlet as we do. Every year, I think, “Well, the boats are in good condition this year, we’ve done lots of work on them, and ...
Image: A 17 hole golf course. “We haven’t got our cabin built yet. But we have the most important thing … a 17 hole golf course,” Ken jokes.
Image: Potatoes, carrots, and sunchokes harvested from our garden today. Traditionally, we usually harvest our root vegetables in the fall and store them in a root cellar over the winter. However, with our high water table in the winter, a ...
Image: Looking down Port Neville Inlet towards Robber’s Knob. It’s been a bright, blue-skied day, with the temperature hovering around 0°C, and only a slight breeze (in spite of continued warnings of cold outflow winds) – a perfect day for ...
Image: Porphyra. Call it nori or laver or slake, by any name Porphyra is not only delicious, but good for your health as well.
I’ve been having a few discussions with people regarding the safety of the mRNA vaccines being used to vaccinate against COVID-19. As the pandemic has worsened, the need to combat COVID-19, especially for those people who are particularly vulnerable to ...
Image: Winter at the cabin. We celebrated our first winter solstice at the cabin today. From here, we can look forward to the days getting longer. I’ve always struggled with the short, dark days of winter, and always feel uplifted ...
Image: Artistic Rendition of Our Cabin. Kennard and I have often given our homes and our boats Celtic names, as a reflection of our Celtic ancestry. For example, our home in Prince Rupert was called “Creag Faoiltiarna Fitheach“, which is ...
Image: White caps off of Collingwood Point. After two weeks of “deep freeze”, I woke up last night to the rain pounding down on our cabin roof. We were supposed to go visiting friends today, taking the Draiocht out towards ...
You’d think, with the degree of isolation that COVID-19 has imposed on everyone, that people would tend to be more communicative rather than less. However, strangely enough, I’ve had fewer people viewing our blog site (and this observation has been ...
Image: The Draiocht. We’ve had the Olivia K. for nearly two months, and it’s now time to give her a new name, something that will be meaningful to us.
We’re still going strong this year, even into November. Looking forward to some winter “rest” …
Image: Newly terraced garden with supports for climbing beans in the top terrace. Coming from Prince Rupert, I’ve always been concerned about getting my garden to drain adequately. We used raised beds in our gardens there, largely to keep the ...
Image: A Cabin in the Woods (‘Lyle and Owen’s Cabin’ by Debbie Reusch) We’ve really done it now! The reality came home with a shock that left me feeling momentarily breathless, slightly panicky, elated, and excited all in the same ...
Image: Our cabin with edge trim and soffits installed. Well, we finally won the marten war. We managed to get the soffits (shiny black material located in the eaves in the above photo) installed in and around weeks of rain. ...
Image: Moody sunrise over Johnstone Strait. Why is the hardest question you will ever ask. It will change your perspective, and ultimately, if you choose to seek the answer, it will change your life.
Image: Our cabin with windows and walls. We’ve been busy critters. As it turned out, all the materials required to build our house took three loads (Moody Blue towing our herring skiff) to get to our site, rather than the ...
Image: Kiwi fruit arch looking into the old golden plum grove. This year, we decided it was finally time to begin planting trees on our site – the start of an orchard. So, early this spring, we began the project ...
Image: 3D model of our cabin. Building a cabin in a remote location, even if the cabin is “prefabricated”, is not a simple task. As we start to build our cabin, I am reminded that this is the end, not ...
Since I have written quite a few journal entries about foraging or wild harvesting, I figured that now would be a good time to post this presentation I gave a couple years ago, titled “Ethical Wildcrafting”.
Image: The Kipper’s Folly. Having sold the Moody Blue, we now have a little bit of money in the bank to deal with boat issues…
Image: My Singer Sewing Machine. I’ve been looking in second hand stores for a set of small curtains to cover the shelves in the bathroom. Our bathroom is very small, and traditional drawers and doors would take up too much ...
An oceanographer needs a seadog … and it looks like I’ve got one!
Image: Our second marten guest. Martens 1: Determined Cabin Owners 2. The war continues …
Image: Collingwood Bay. This line, from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, truly sums up one of the more serious problems facing the world today as a result of poor resource management and global warming.
I was messing around on the Google Earth Engine the other day, and discovered that their Timelapse site finally had satellite images available for our region. So here is our homestead from 1984 to 2016 …
Image: Red tide in our bay. It’s definitely been a summer for unusual events. Harmful algal blooms, often called HABs or red tides, have been one of these.
I’ve been doing a bit of research on the next step in our homesteading … bringing in animals.
Image: Single Delight (Moneses uniflora), a Wintergreen. We had another great low tide today, allowing us to hike the beach around the tip of Collingwood Point, and walk on the “wild side” of the narrows.
Wow! Things got a little scary here! Just recovered from a chimney fire. Thankfully, the cabin (and the two of us) survived!
Need I say more?
Image: More solar panels added to our array. After being away in Campbell River for two weeks, it was time to get caught up on a bunch of fall projects, before the rainy, drear weather of winter settles in.
Image: Our creek flows again. Autumn is upon us, the temperatures are cooler, and the rains have started to fall again. Along with the almost instantaneous sprouting of mushrooms throughout the woods, this wetter, cooler weather has brought another pleasant ...
It finally happened – we got two days of non-rainy, non-windy weather and, making the best of them, we got the Awen up on the grid and put the prop back on. Yee haw!
Image: Golden plums from our site. During our clearing of the land, we have been careful to preserve any fruit trees that we find. So far, we have discovered a Saskatoon tree and several crab apples.
I don’t write many negative posts on my blog, but sometimes life can throw some really serious s**t at you. I guess it’s all in how you cope. And, by the way, don’t stress out!
Image: Our front yard, a wild and busy place. I’m not going to write much in this post – just let the photos tell our story. The summer has been busy, but we are beginning to see the results of ...
So, I’m 55 and I think I can be allowed just a tiny bit of nostalgia. For those people who knew me in Keremeos, when I attended the Similkameen Secondary School, can you remember a grade 12 course called Community ...
As it turns out, we’ve made quite a few trips this summer with “dog in tow”, mostly to Campbell River, but also to Qualicum Beach. It definitely gives us a new perspective on dog ownership!
August flew by some time ago, but here is some of our summer trivia.
Image: The Moody Blue at Anchor. Today, I watched the Moody Blue pull away from the dock without me. I felt oddly out of place, not being aboard her as I always had in the past. As I watched 12 ...
Image: Overview map showing Port Neville, Sayward, and Campbell River. I’ve been a little more active on the “social media” scene these past couple of months, and this had led to a few old friends contacting us and asking the ...
Fortunately Brennan is pretty much a “wash and wear” puppy, no dry cleaning or pressing required. However, he can also be a pretty dirty fellow, who loves splashing in the intertidal mud and digging under the house.
Image: Let there be light – new lights installed in the cabin. We purchased a bunch of lights for the cabin last spring, but then we got busy, and of course the days got longer and sunnier, so who needed ...
Image: Elderflowers. All over the hillside above our house, the elderberries are in glorious white blossom. The sweet smell of the flowers carries on the breeze, tantalizing. I had read that a syrup could be made from the blossoms.
It’s been a cold, slow spring, but gradually the signs of its impending arrival are starting to show up.
Image: Ken’s new Cromach. Another first for us here – we just met with an old friend from Prince Rupert who was traveling down to Victoria. Being so far off grid, it can be hard to schedule meetings with people, ...
Image: Awen with an outboard attached to get us to Campbell River. Well, the time finally came. We had sold the old Moody Blue, so we now had a little bit of money to deal with boat problems. We had ...
Image: The fleet at anchor. You know the old saying – “A boat is a hole in the water into which you pour money“? Well, two boats are two holes, so I’m singing the boat blues …
Image: View from the Above Tide Motel. We were starting to run out of supplies again, and our list of required building materials was growing, so it was time for another trip to Campbell River. However, no more dark drives ...
Image: A new ramp leading up to our yard from the intertidal zone. Mabon is past and Samhain is on its way, and as usual, we find ourselves engaged in the fall scramble as we try to get through our ...
We have considerable rain catchment – something around 20 blue barrels that collect rainwater from the house eaves. Last year got really dry, and we ended up taking some of the blue barrels down to a creek to refill them, ...
Image: Summer solstice. Today we celebrated summer solstice – the longest day of the year. Although a somewhat odd way to begin a solstice day, we started by washing a load of laundry. Recent rains had increased the flow of ...
Image: A Wood Cook Stove. When we were still living in Prince Rupert, we had become quite interested in getting a wood cook stove as an auxiliary source of heat for the upstairs of our house, and also as a ...
Image: ATV and trailer at the house site. “You’re going to need a tractor”, one friend advises sagely. Another friend, who owns a remote piece of property up in the Hazelton area, tells us how useful his ATV has been ...
Image: The Awen and the Moody Blue tied up to our float. What a week of chaos! It started with an “emergency” run to Campbell River to get new starting batteries for the Moody Blue. Then, immediately afterwards, the northwest ...
Image: Common bird’s nest fungi (Nidula candida). Today is Samhain, or as most people know it, Halloween. What better way to spend a Halloween afternoon than on a hike through the damp fall woods, battling through spiderwebs and hunting weird ...
Image: Our Cozy Home Gradually our little cabin is becoming our cozy home.
We had an interesting “wolf event” towards the end of January. The wolves started howling early in the evening (and it was neither a full moon, nor a clear night), kept going all night, and only stopped sometime after dawn ...
Image: Apple blossoms. Beltane is the name for the Gaelic May Day festival. which is held on May 1st, or about halfway between the spring equinox and the summer solstice.
Image: Vintage gardening tools. We’ve been busy gardening and trail breaking, now that the rains have finally stopped. I’ve definitely developed some tool preferences …
Image: Launch of the Oliver Clark in 1925. On the top of a bookshelf, not too far from where I am sitting now, is a wooden model, made by my father 20 or more years ago, of a boat named ...
Things are finally quieting down a bit, but I’m still in catch-up mode with our blog. So, here’s September at a glance …
Image: Hoar frost on moss. Originally, when I started out with the idea for this journal entry, I was going to tell about our concepts for microhydro on our site, but … water froze and became ice, and the story ...
Image: Hairy cat’s ear (Hypochaeris radicata), also known as false dandelion. When we purchased our property, we knew that it had a history of human use – hand logging and pioneer homesteading around the turn of the century, then more ...
Image: The foundation for our cabin. Houses, like relationships and careers, need to have a solid foundation if they are going to be able to stand the test of time. Unfortunately, foundations are often under-appreciated. Most people take them for ...
Going back in time a few years, here is laundry day on summer solstice, 2015. We washed the laundry in the creek, in buckets, by hand, and hung it on ropes strung between the trees.
Image: Sunlight beaming down on our new home. Finally the northwest gales had caught up to us. We had deeked into the Broughten Archipelago, avoiding the worst of the gale winds, but now we were trapped. Just around the point ...
Although this year of COVID can be depressing, I always find beauty and a sense of centeredness amongst nature. Here are a few shots of our early summer garden.
Image: Our Back Yard. Hogmanay is the Scots word for the last day of the year, and is the Scottish celebration of the New Year. One of the most widespread customs associated with Hogmanay is the practice of first-footing, which ...
Image: Bull kelp in a tide pool off Collingwood Point. We had our first family members visit our new home this week! What a wonderful and crazy week it was. We were both happy and exhausted when it was over, ...
Image: Sheds for storage. Originally, we had planned on getting some sheds erected on our property shortly after our arrival. Our hope was to be able to unpack the hold in the Moody Blue, thus lightening her load and giving ...
Image: Front Windows in the Cabin. Our weather hs been alternating between snow (we had our first snowfall a few days ago) and southeast gale with torrential rain. Today, however, dawned beautifully blue and clear.
Officially, this post is about the pine marten that has been determined to share our cabin with us, but in actuality, it’s more about all those little things that have been happening in my life, and my head, since my ...
Image: Draiocht on the grid this spring. It must have been a really good summer for barnacles. When we put the Draiocht in the water this spring, she was freshly cleaned. Now, only four months later, she has multiple layers ...
Image: A roof on our cabin. Friday, November 13th we finally got the roof on our cabin. For some people, this may have been considered an unlucky day, but for us, it was a very lucky one indeed!
Image: A start to our cabin. It’s been a long, hard week of hauling. First, we hauled all our furniture and belongings out of the hold of the Moody Blue and up to our sheds. Then, we took the Moody ...
Image: Our home, a little bit of paradise. Winter solstice has passed, and the days are getting longer, albeit it is still hard to notice much change. The weather has been a bit crazy – periods of icy cold, but ...
Some many years ago, back when I was an instructor of first and second year biology at a British Columbian college, I used to give my students genetic problems. These are really exercises in logic, brain teasers, if you will. ...
Image: A Christmas Scene. We were invited to a Port Neville community Christmas dinner at Ransom Point today.
Image: The Blue Rocket. My husband, Kennard, affectionately calls our old truck the Blue Rocket because it can go faster than 8 knots, the speed at which he is used to travelling on the Moody Blue. Today is our first ...
October came, with its glorious colors as the maples, apples, and oaks put on their fall displays. Time to bring in the last of the harvest and watch the rains start in earnest.
The long days of summer are here, and I find myself thinking, as I have before, that this is a rather strange year, following up on a growing number of peculiar years in the recent past.
Image: Finally got our greenhouse out of the box. Ah … spring is here at last … sort of. In between deluges of rain, we’ve been working on a variety of projects in the yard.
Image: Potatoes (taken from Wikipedia) I had our potato harvest stored in bins of sand under the house, but I obviously wasn’t prepared for -9°C weather.
Just a few of the things that show up on our game camera …
Image: Bloody sunrise in Johnstone Strait. We are heading across Johnstone Strait to Kelsey Bay, and the day is just breaking. This is not your usual sunrise, however. The sun peers over the horizon like the bloodshot eye of some ...
Image: Bantam eggs. Years ago, as a child growing up on a farm, I used to have a flock of bantams and sold “organic free range eggs” at the local health food store. However, as I grew older, eggs and ...
Image: Industrial Rape of Flora Bank by Pacific Northwest LNG (image provided by PNW LNG) Sometimes I can go weeks without remembering my past life of over 20 years in Prince Rupert. This week was not one of those weeks.
Image: Full moon over Johnstone Strait. The full moon is shining brilliantly just above the horizon. Wearing my rubber boots, I am standing in 10 inches or so of water in a tidal marsh grass slough armed with a 12 ...
Image: Landfall. Today, we celebrated the first anniversary of our arrival at our homestead. We decided to call it “Landfall Day”, since we arrived by boat a year ago, and landed on the shore in our little skiff, hoping that ...
Image: Towing the Awen around Cape Caution Just as in rock climbing, every journey, like every ascent, has a “crux” point, a passage through the eye of a needle, a time of greatest struggle or danger. Although I didn’t know ...
I hope you all had a happy Valentine’s Day!
Image: Start of a garden. I finally got all the herbs and berry bushes that we brought from Prince Rupert planted. This is the start of our garden. The bush flowering in the center is a Saskatoon.
Brennan’s about 14 weeks old now, and has he ever grown since we got him! You can almost hear his bones creaking as his legs stretch outwards.
Image: Wood Cook Stove Installed. Although we now had our wood cook stove in our cabin, we still had a long ways to go before the cabin would be warm enough for us to move in.
What’s it been like on our homestead during the COVID-19 crisis? Well, some things remain much the same, and others have become strangely different.
Image: Carrot freshly harvested from our garden. Having just got in from chopping wood in the forest (hence the wild woman look complete with twigs and moss in the hair), I decided to pick some vegetables from the garden to ...
Image: Full Moon at the Summer Solstice. Summer Solstice has rolled around again, and this year it occurs in conjunction with a full moon.
Image: Satellite photo of our site with the trail shown in yellow. We have family coming next week, so we really wanted to finish a project that we have been working on for some months now. We wanted to complete ...
Image: Ruffed grouse (Bonasa umbellus) in our front yard. Our yard has been taken over by ruffed grouse, or “yard chickens”, as Ken calls them.
Image: Our Gardens. We finally got all our gardens planted. It was tough, slow work, as the ground was full of roots – wild rose, salmonberry, thimbleberry, alder, and worst of all, English ivy. However, we now have four patches ...
Image: Gem-studded puffballs (Lycoperdon perlatum). With the start of the fall rains, mushrooms are popping up everywhere. It’s time to go shroom hunting.
Image: Our new home. A vibrant green triangle – that’s my first impression of our new home as we pass through the narrows near the head of Port Neville Inlet. A vibrant green triangle pointed uphill towards a background of ...
Image: Solar Panels. We just got our first couple of solar panels hooked up and charging the batteries. It’s great to get off the genset…
Image: A Surfer boat Have you ever had an event in your life where destiny played a hand? Man, I can’t shake these boat blues … what the heck is a Surfer Boat?
Table of Contents
Newest entries, 2021
- Imbolc 2021
- Don’t Judge a Book by its Cover
- For All Those Who Are in Love …
- Mobile Again!
- COVID-19 Vaccination Questions
- Live from Boris the Spider
December, 2020
November, 2020
October, 2020
September, 2020
August, 2020
July, 2020
June, 2020
May, 2020
April, 2020
March, 2020
February, 2020
January, 2020
December, 2019
November, 2019
October, 2019
September, 2019
August, 2019
July, 2019
June, 2019
May, 2019
- A Genetics Puzzle – Coat Color in Border Collies
- A New Addition to Our Family
- Brennan and the Back Porch
- Laundry Day
April, 2019
- To Have a Hot Shower …
- The Saga of Water Storage Tanks
- Signs of Spring
- Misadventures When Worries Become Reality
March, 2019
February, 2019
January, 2019
December, 2018
November, 2018
October, 2018
September, 2018
August, 2018
July, 2018
June, 2018
May, 2018
April, 2018
March, 2018
February, 2018
January, 2018
December, 2017
November, 2017
October, 2017
September, 2017
August, 2017
July, 2017
June, 2017
May, 2017
April, 2017
March, 2017
February, 2017
January, 2017
December, 2016
- Water and Ice
- Our Winter Wonderland
- A Stormy Winter’s Day
- Still a Little Piece of Paradise
- Potatoes, Potatoes, Potatoes
- I Love My Eggs
November, 2016
October, 2016
- Now That’s a Carrot!
- North Coast Tidings
- Fall Projects
- Shroom Hunting
- Ethical Wildcrafting
- A Gen Xer Goes Homesteading
- Yard Chickens
- Eating Our Weeds
- Samhain Walk
September, 2016
August, 2016
July, 2016
June, 2016
- Our Garden is Planted
- Landfall Day
- The Kipper Gets an Engine
- Water, Water Everywhere, Nor Any Drop to Drink
- Summer Solstice
- Me and My Singer Sewing Machine
- A Cougar in My Garden
- Solar Panels At Last
May, 2016
- Beltane
- Our Cozy Home
- Harvesting Seaweed
- A Walk on the Wild Side
- Saying Goodbye to an Old Friend
- Naming the Draiocht
April, 2016
March, 2016
February, 2016
January, 2016
December, 2015
- Moved In At Last!
- Mad Shopping Spree!
- Winter Solstice
- All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Windows
- A Community Christmas
November, 2015
October, 2015
September, 2015
August, 2015
July, 2015
June, 2015
- Out from Under
- Rounding Cape Caution
- The Sign of the Awen
- Home
- Fetching the Blue Rocket
- Black Bears and Blackberries
- Summer Solstice
- The Grizzly