Hello! My name is
Tanya and I have a little farm in Eastern Ontario. I am not a writer but I would like to be so
I’m starting this blog to tell you about my farm and my life here. I am a working mother of two with a stay at
home husband. Having the farm is an
existence we’ve always dreamt about, living on a property with no neighbour's in
sight, with a few chickens and a garden.
We moved to the farm mid-September 2013.
All but a few onions, some squash and tomatoes remained in the garden
that the previous tenant’s had left behind so I haven’t even had the chance at
a growing season yet. And I’m excited. I’ve picked out my seeds from Stokes, and
decided that I don’t care if they are organic or not, they will do for this
first attempt. My plan is to grow
potatoes, onions, squash, cucumber, lettuce, tomatoes, zucchini, jalapeno’s,
basil, green peppers, cantaloupe, kale, green beans, sunflowers (for the
horses), carrots, garlic and cilantro.
How I will actually do that without a green house and while working 40
hour weeks remains to be seen. I’m still
excited. I’m excited for the bon fires,
the sun sets, and the work.
It’s been an exceptionally brutal winter already this year. An ice storm has brought down numerous
branches on the property, that will keep Donny busy far into the spring with
clean up. The biting cold temperatures
of -20 and -30. The sticker shock of our
monthly electricity and oil bill. The
way you can never really keep a 100 year old farm house warm. These are the new challenges in my life. The girls beds have three blankets on them
(as does ours) and I’ve taken a note from another blog to provide hot water
bottles and a heating pad at bed time.
Oh I’m not complaining, just sharing our brave new experiences. I believe that you always get what you wish
for in life. My husband and I often
travelled from the city to my aunt’s house in the country on the weekends. We’d take different routes to keep the 1.5
hour drive interesting and we had this game where we would come across a
particularly gorgeous view and point out – “not THAT would be a nice place to
build a house.” It was just the other
day that I said to Donny – “all that wishing for the perfect view and look
outside, it’s exactly what we’ve always wished for.” And I can’t help but see the coincidence that
we happen to have a LOT of blankets.
Before we moved to the farm I considered paring down our collection, we
really do have far too many. It made me
question why linen closets were so small.
Then I realised that we have an unusually large amount of blankets. The funny thing is, I’m not entirely sure why
we have so many. We were given quite a
few of them and I don’t recall buying more than three of the 12-15 blankets we
have. Perhaps it was my aunt or my mother
who saw that eventually we’d need them because a majority of them came from
them. But I digress….
I did mention horses didn’t I? This was a very nice bonus to the farm that
we weren’t sure about. We board horses
in the winter and when our neighbour is travelling. Having never owned or cared for horses we
were a bit hesitant but the owner was confident we could manage. So with a little help from google we have
successfully kept alive two horses for three months now. Dan and Rose have finally accepted us as
their care providers and I am very happy with this extra addition to our
lives. And I daresay their stalls are
clean, their hooves are picked and their manes are bur free.
So there it is, an introduction to our little life on the
hill. I hope to entertain you with many
more stories and pictures as we enter into what I’m calling the third phase of
my life. First phase was life before
kids, second was life with kids and this third phase I’m going to call Living.
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