Gardening and Thoreau (by way of Gaspereau)

With Tim in London for the triplets birthday this weekend I had little to distract me - so I put on my gloves and rolled up my sleeves and got down to weeding and doing some other gardening tasks.  I am happy to say that all of the things that I planted from seed directly into the garden are doing exceedingly well.

My scarlet runner beans (in the front) are growing like gangbusters! I'm hoping the corn in behind can keep up since the beans are supposed to use the corn as a support.

In fact the snow peas are doing so well that I had to scrounge about for the materials to make an impromptu trellis, as they are already putting out their little feelers.

The snow pea trellis, a.k.a. the Spider's Web. I didn't want to have to buy a trellis system so I scrounged around the yard for dead branches, stuck them in the ground and kitchen twined it up good! It's not pretty but its free and soon enough it will be covered in the snow peas so it will grow into a beautiful thing.

 I also thinned everything out in order to give seedlings more room to grow into big hearty plants - this was exciting for me, as it meant I got to have wilted baby rapini and swiss chard with garlic for lunch....mmmm mmmmm good.  It was delicious but its probably because I grew them myself.

There is just something so satisfying about the results of ones own labour - can you tell I've been rereading Thoreau's Walden. I was reminded how much I love the book by a recent lecturer at Willowbank Andrew Steeves- one of the partners in the small publishing company Gaspereau Press (in the news semi-recently because of The Sentimentalists).

He came to speak about the traditional methods that Gaspereau Press uses in the very modern world of publishing - yet the lecture had very little to do with the use of older technology and much more to do with taking great care in what you do. In Andrew Steeves case that means understanding the needs of the book that you are publishing - from the cover art or lack of it, to the font style, to the sewn binding, so that you create something that conveys the message of the book and will survive to do so for the next century or so. It is really about being respectful and responsible about what you create - which if you've read any novels recently, has not usually been the purview of the huge publishing corporations out there.

Steeves just mentioned Walden in passing within the lecture but it got me to thinking about the book again and how much I liked it when I first read it. I also figured that if I read it again now, it would help to put the summer in perspective i.e. the growing of our own food and saving as much money as we can.  When it comes down to it, I don't think I could give up as much as Thoreau did when he was living on Walden pond (although I don't think that's his point - since he repeatedly pleads for people to live authentically - the lives that they want to live and not the lives their families or society dictates.)  BUT I do think that I can do with much less than many people do and I think I've got my priorities straight when it comes to stuff. That's not to say that we don't have a lot of stuff (much more of it is Tim's than mine!!) but it doesn't drive our lives in anyway and there isn't much that I couldn't part with if and when we move into a smaller place.

On that note, here's a picture of one of the gorgeous peonies that are just beginning to wain from too much rain and wind in the front yard. They were gorgeous while they lasted.

Bring on the weeding!

So, despite the fact that it blustered and thundered and blew our plants around yesterday, the garden is looking pretty darn good and it's finished. I just went out and picked up a few more plants (zucchini and eggplants) to fill in some remaining space. I had made a last dash decision to not try to grow the romaine lettuce seeds that I had gotten. I didn't think they would still do well - seeing as it is already getting super hot and muggy so I needed something to put in their place - tiny "kermit" thai eggplants it is - should be a cool experiment.



Here ares some pics of the finished garden, notice that I made a few more paths out of some more scavenged rocks and some barn boards:

Yes there does seem to be a lot of empty space...BUT those have seeds in them which will hopefully produce a beautiful cornucopia of edibles!

This is my little corner herb garden. It's so cute!

Here is a list of the veg we are growing this year:

- Tomatoes... of course, they are all cherry varieties, including the more exotic yellow canary and zebra striped but including Sweet 100 and Juliets
- Basil...and lots of it! pesto here I come!
- Herbs - parsley, lemon balm, rosemary, sage, thyme, oregano and dill
- Snap Peas
- Rapini
- Brussel Sprouts
- Cabbage
- Bok Choi
- Swiss Chard
- Collards
- Carrots
- Jalapenos
- Red Chilis
- Corn
- Scarlet Runner Beans
- Squash
- Cucumbers
- Cantaloupe
- Zucchini
- Eggplants - Sicilian and Kermit Thai
-Potatoes

I have high hopes for this garden. I'm really hoping to reel in a big harvest come the end of the summer and stock it away for the winter, plus its just fun to putter around in the garden. Tim seems to be all for the garden but I'm not sure if he knows what he is getting himself into - he did plant the parsley and then complain of vertigo after standing up. It might be a long summer of weeding.

The Garden...So Far

So down here in Niagara, April showers turned into May Showers and I've barely been able to get into my garden over the past month. On the few days when it didn't rain, we got out there, taking out the sod and putting up rabbit board along the bottom of the fence but its been slow going. Apparently all of this rain has been good for growth and flowers and all that, and all of the bulbs and perennials on this little plot of land have been coming up beautifully. If only I'd been able to get in there and plant my veggies a little earlier, alas, like the rest of the country I am waiting for the May 2-4 to plant all my veg (though in reality, because we will be in Orillia and London over the weekend it will likely be done on Monday or Tuesday of next week).

We went to a local nursery today to get our plants, because I know there will be a mad dash for them this weekend and I don't want to be stuck with slim pickin's after the long weekend rush. I had planned on starting most of my plants from seed but that was an experiment in FAILURE. After my first failed attempt, I thought that I had just left them under the clear plastic lid on the seed starting kit, but my second attempt hasn't been much better. I just don't think they've gotten enough light - its not that bright in here on the best of days and all the gloomy rainy days over the past little while haven't helped. I have not given up though, next year we will definitely try again but with a grow lamp.

Failed seed attempt #2. These are the basil and tomatoes, most of them are at least still alive, but they are still quite small. This is not even the worst batch, all the cruciferous veg I tried to start got really tall really quick, then they got all droopy and died. Boo.

With all of our plants bought and sitting on my kitchen table. I figured that I had best do what hardscaping I needed to do in the garden before the long weekend, because I won't have much time afterwards before the plants all need to go in. Thankfully, it was a nice day today - we didn't even get any of the scattered showers they were calling for and it was even sunny in the late afternoon - hurray!! So I got to work organizing stones and turning over soil. Yes that's right you heard me - organizing stones.

Here is the garden pre-hardscaping and with bags of composted manure all ready to go. It's a good picture that shows the rabbit board we've put around the garden (all sawn by my own hands I might add) and the potato planter outside the garden - apparently potatoes don't like amended soil so, I've put it outside the garden and filled up a couple of buckets of soil for when I start hilling the potatoes.

I was determined to keep this garden on as low of a budget as I could by seed starting (fail) and by using free materials when I could. Luckily, I was able to get old barn boards from a barn that was being torn down and have used that for rabbit board. And as you'll know from all our house pictures we've got a big stone ruin in the back yard that has provided us with piles of stone (don't worry heritage friends, they had all already fallen out of the wall and were in various piles about the yard - or buried in the garden), so I was able to build a little pathway and a bit of a dry stone retaining wall to keep the slope where the melons and squash will grow from tumbling down into the rest of the garden.

 A nice sunny after picture in the afternoon. My pretty little path and all freshly turned over soil. Unfortunately I've run out of stones, so my other paths will have to be leftover barnboards. Not as pretty but it'll have to do.

Another view that better shows you the wee stone wall - it's only about a foot high. 

Now all I need to do is get the plants in and then we can begin to weed in earnest. Tim has no idea what he is in for!

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter Everyone! It's my favourite holiday of the year.  And this Easter Sunday has turned out to be a beautiful day - chockful of blooming flowers! (See the picture above.)

We were in London for the Easter weekend, which was great because we got to see Tim's side of the family; meet an interesting family that's living our dream by living in rural northern ontario with five home-schooled kids (ok, maybe my dream, 5 kids seems a little much for Tim); and we also got to spend the Easter Triduum (well Friday and Saturday) at St. George's which was a great Easter present to ourselves.

My school year is over, which means that I am trying to find myself a summer job (if anyone knows about anything either construction-y or planning-y in the heritage field let me know! Will travel for work!) But while I am on the hunt for the elusive awesome summer job experience I will be working on the garden. We started cutting out the sod a few weeks ago when it was warmer but its been raining ever since. Here's a sneak peek of what we are working with, there will be more to come in the next little while.

Ulli eating grass in the garden area that should not have grass! We'll be getting to that this week.

The $9.00 Sideboard

We've been working on the dresser/sideboard for a while now. It has taken quite a lot of work to get it to somewhere where I actually like it. We've sanded it and painted it and then sanded it a bit more. I was hoping to get a distressed look, with white peeking through the grey. Unfortunately when I went to sand the final product instead of white peeking through, there is a weird green tinge wherever I have sanded. It doesn't look too bad from far away or in the not so great lighting of our living room, so we are going to live with it.

Here's what it looked like before:

And here is the finished product:

And in situ:

We will now be able to hang pictures in the room if we can figure out what to put in here. Not bad for a free dresser off of kijiji and an 'oops' can of paint that cost $9.00. I'll take a $9 sideboard anyday.

Moving in and Painting Some More and Unpacking...and painting some more...

At the end of August we moved into our new house!

We got up super early and with the help of Tim's dad, brother-in-law and some great friends (Thanks to all!) we had everything in the house by 3 pm. After we'd squared away the moving van and gotten our bed set up on the floor :( we collapsed with visions of paint rollers and drop-clothes in our heads.

We were able to finish the master bedroom almost immediately within the first couple of days. We painted it a yellow that's a few shades off from the kitchen. I really like it. When the sun sets at night it goes this lovely buttercream-y colour.

Here's a picture of the semi-finished product:

We still have a few things to hang on the wall and a have to find a couple of area rugs for beside the bed. I'm not looking forward to cold floors come winter.

After the master, I figured the next most important room was the kitchen. So we tackled the kitchen next. Here's the outcome here:

The only thing that I am unhappy about, is the bookshelf. I really would like a hutch type piece that can store our bigger countertop appliances below and our more decorative items at the top.  The only problem is this thing that sticks out on the baseboards of the wall. It's probably some old heating pipes or something but it sure is a pain in the neck. We've looked at all kinds of units and all that really will seem to work is a desk-y type thing, I was looking at this one from Ikea. But that doesn't really fit my country home. So we are going to keep our eyes open and maybe, fingers crossed, we'll stumble across something at an auction or antique store. The only criteria will really be that it has four legs with no crossbars and is high enough to fit over the 'bulkhead on the floor.' I don't really care what kind of shape its in because I'll likely paint it.

The other angle in the kitchen. You can see the 'bulkhead on the floor' in behind the rolling island, that's the area I would ideally like the hutch to be, since the other wall seems a bit crowded with the freezer and bookshelf.

Next came the study and the living/dining room. The study is pretty much done except for a pile of things to sell. I think that alphabetizing our books has been probably one of my favourite house chores to do so far. There is something so satisfying about organizing them all. There were a few arguments along the way, such as where to put multiple author, oversized, collected and special interest works but we figured it out. And arguing was half the fun!

The study is probably the room we've been spending the most time in. We're really digging the coziness of it.

Tim is especially happy with the wall of bookshelves - his idea! I'm particularly pleased because it didn't cost that much. We snagged the bookshelves on sale at Home Depot for a song - the smaller ones were $25 each and the larger were $40 each. That brought the total cost of the room to $225 since we didn't change the colour and had everything else given to us at some point. I'm very proud of our frugality!

The living/dining room is the room that I'm least pleased with so far. We've debated about recovering the sofa. It's sorta nice with the paint colour, but it doesn't really match the chair that I had upholstered before moving to especially fit in this space. We're also waiting on the 'sideboard' to be finished. It's really a dresser that I'm painting for the room but it isn't finished yet. And since it's not in the room yet we can't hang any pictures. So this room is still semi-semi-done. Here's the work in progress:

That's The Witten sittin' profile perfect! Anyhow, the sideboard will be going along the wall in the right hand side of the photo (the straight back chair with the phone on it is place-holding).  I am actually really quite pleased with the way the coffee table turned out. It was an old, old table we got off of kijiji for $15. We cut the legs down and voila, a gorgeous, shabby chic coffee table! We're debating on making it smaller (tabletop-wise) but the room is pretty big and I think it can take it.

Please don't mind our mess...we still have to find homes for some of the things in the background.  But from this picture you can see the couch, which I think goes well with the blue but doesn't really go well with the upholstered chair (see below).

You can see that the chair has lots of red in it, which I like, and some pink, which is also in the couch colours, I'm just not sure they go together.  Also, you can take a bit of a closer look at the coffee table and it's total awesomeness.

One of our last rooms was the guest bedroom. If you'll recall it was a bright blue. We toned it down with a taupe-ish colour and then added green accents. I'm quite pleased with the finished product. The only part that still needs work is the hanging rack unit. We'd hoped not to need it, but in a century house with no closets, extra hanging storage was definitely necessary. (I have a lot of coats, Tim has a lot of suits.) I have an idea for covering it but that will have to wait until all else is squared away.

Here's the spare room:

One of the on-going projects was finishing the accent pieces in the bathroom. The bathroom is quite big; we have been figuring that before indoor plumbing it was likely another bedroom.We weren't painting the room but I still wanted there to be an overall feeling of it being a casually blue room. Bathroom = water = blue. So we added a shelving unit and a screen to hide The Witten's litterbox and her food (we have to feed her in the bathroom otherwise Ulli eats it all).  I had made the shelving unit out of older pine planks that Tim's dad had, and the shelving unit was made with halved cedar louvred closet doors (the other halves were used to make boot boxes for our mudroom, which will be a much later project).

Here are those accent pieces:

You'll notice that The Witten has her own window (behind the screen), so she can eat her food with a view. 

Lastly is an area I've organized for some extra work space - the landing between the bathroom and the bedroom. It's mostly just storing all my artsy/crafty stuff. All we have to be on the hunt for is a light fixture and it will be perfect:

So that's the house so far. I'll keep posting on how it's going, as I'm sure we'll continue to adjust things. But it is feeling much more Home Sweet Home.

Background. Our house search and our house.

After getting accepted into school at The Willowbank School for Restoration Arts in June, our search for a house began in earnest.

We had looked around casually before my admissions and had many discussions on how far away from the school we could really live feasibly. After deciding that I wouldn't be able to work while going to school everyday from 9-4p, we had decided we needed to live right in Queenston or within the ride-able/walkable vicinity, so that I could get to school on the days that Tim was out of town.

So we began our house search and unlike when we'd looked around before, there was nothing - nada! zilch! zero! Well, okay, there was a terrible two bedroom apartment in a building that looked like it was going to fall down, but with a cat and a dog, we thought that that might be a little tight. Plus, it didn't quite fit with our romantic visions of the country life we had been anticipating living.

My best friend, who also lives in the area, had been told to keep her eyes and ears open for any For Rent signs that we wouldn't come across living two hours away. And no sooner, had I almost resigned myself to the apartment I received a call from her, asking me if we'd like to live in a farmhouse that her in-laws happened to have vacant, just a few concessions away from the school.

Isn't the house adorable?

We gave a resounding "Yes!!! Hooray!! Yippee!!" and rushed back down to Niagara to take a look at the house. The house had everything we were looking for and more - not only was it huge for us - with a room we could dedicate to a full-time study and our very first guest room (we'd always had to split our guest room and office) but it had a huge fenced backyard for the dog, and area for a large garden AND was only minutes from school.

Before moving in we were lucky enough to be able to get in there and paint a couple of rooms and move in some boxes of books. Here are the pictures of the house nice and vacant, and newly painted (in the living room/dining room and kitchen) and just vacant everywhere else.

The Kitchen:

We painted it this yellow colour, it used to just be white. They had recently put in new cupboards and appliances. 

   The Living/Dining Room:                        

This is the view of the living/dining room from the front of the room. Note the gorgeous (original!) hardwood floors, we've been told that all the wood in the house used to be painted a horrible dark brown colour before they were stripped. The pine staircase was actually painted as well and was beautifully and painstakingly stripped by hand.

The Study:

The study, which is awesomely called 'The New Parlour'  on the breaker box, was already painted this deep dark red, which we really liked. So we've kept it, and think it is a nice contrast with the bluish colour in the living room.

The Landing:

The landing at the top of the stairs, is quite big. Note the beautiful pine floors and incredibly low but historical railings! I'm putting a little Crystal nook in there (where I can sew and keep all my handy/crafty things). I've already called this cozy spot, since Tim's already got dibs on the study being 'his spot.'

The Master Bedroom:

This is the master bedroom. Aren't the hip walls awesome! This is the same colour/suede finish that the living/dining room was before we painted it the bluish colour. We have plans for painting the master a yellow colour similar to the kitchen. So it'll be nice and sunny every morning!

The Guest Room:

This is the lovely shade of blue that the guest bedroom was, we've since painted it a bit more of a calming tan/taupey colour.

And the bathroom:

The bathroom isn't much to write home about. It's pretty modern, is humongous, and has a spot for a washer and dryer and an extra utility sink. So it's got everything we need. The standup shower is just to the left of the door when you walk in (it's just poking into the left part of the picture). That's me,  in my lovely painting clothes, reflected in the mirror!

Welcome! My very first post! (Eek!)

Hi! Welcome to my blog! My name is Crystal and I may have just died and gone to heaven!

Since graduating from university I've been searching for something that would re-ignite my passion for life. After a failed attempt at a personal chef business and life as coffee-slinger at a major soul-sucking coffee corporation, I've happened into something that truly captures my attention and my heart.

I am returning to school at the Willowbank School for Restoration Arts in Queenston, ON (close to Niagara Falls, ON and Buffalo, NY). The school focuses on both the theoretical and practical understandings of the almost-lost arts and skills that are necessary for preserving, conserving and restoring heritage buildings. The program promises to allow me a chance to use both my hands and my head in the pursuit of something I find truly valuable: the conservation of our built heritage.

To top that off, we'ved moved into a century old farmhouse in Niagara wine country. Our new home is a rental, (hence 'The Country Tenant') and will definitely be a spoiling factor for any future homes. From the original hardwood and pine floors to the ruins (yes, ruins) of the original homestead in the backyard, this home is everything we've ever dreamed about. Over and above all that, we are also surrounded by vineyards and peach orchards. It is truly idyllic and I keep having to pinch myself to make sure I'm actually awake!

This is the best view of the house. You can see the ruins that are right behind the house and the vineyards directly behind that, with peach orchards in the distance. The best part is that this is the view from the bathroom!

It's not just me here though - you'll have noticed the repeated 'we' and 'our' above. My fiance Tim has graciously moved with me, even though he's completing his Ph.D. two hours away and he'll have to commute weekly. But I think he's also super-excited about living here, especially because I keep making fun of his very 'city' ways as we continue to adapt to country living.

We've also brought our doberman 'Ulli' along with us, as well as our cat 'The Witten' (yes, she gets her own personal pronoun! it has always been that way). Ulli is thrilled to have a huge fenced backyard, complete with baby bunnies (more on that in a later post) to run around in. The Witten is less pleased, since she is no longer allowed to go outside and has to content herself with looking out windows. She doesn't seem to appreciate our concerns about coyotes and hawks as much as we do.

Anyhow, that's us. And this is our blog that will hopefully help to chronicle our new life in Niagara. I'm not sure all that it will contain - but it will definitely be about our lovely new home, my new academic pursuits, and our new life in this beautiful countryside.

xoxo

Crystal et. al.