Heading home

 After almost 6 weeks on Salt Spring, we expect to be heading home in a few days. It has been great spending time with old friends in an old familiar area.

Robbie and Ranger (house sit dog) are getting along but Robbie is just being polite... he clearly isn't interested in knowing the first thing about Ranger but he tolerates him.

While we were here we decided to go on a strict reduced calorie diet and we have both lost just over 10 lb so far (3 weeks-ish). Once we get home we have full physicals booked (arranged before we left) and once that is over and bloodwork complete we will be switching to a Keto diet. 

I've been doing a ton of research about it and it seems to make sense to me... other people have been doing Keto for many years and are in fine health because of it. We will be giving it a try. 3 months to start and then we will regroup and make the decision on whether or not to make it a lifestyle choice. Also, after 3 months you are able to re-introduce some extra carbs, because by that time your body will be trained to eat fat not sugar. Anyway, we're giving it a go.

Excited to get home to our friends and our home, Xmas is around the corner and the tree must go up. Dec 1st as some may recall is the day I put our tree up every year. Also, remember to change your smoke alarm batteries.

I have to say, I'll be glad to get home to the Alberta mindset too!

Oct 24 Salt Spring Island

 It was my birthday yesterday.... 55, let's not talk about that! LOL

Meanwhile, we wanted to spend some time visiting friends at our old island of Salt Spring so we found a house sitting job here for a few weeks.

Last night we went to Moby's for supper to celebrate my old age and then over to our friends (and former employers) Ian & Sandy's for a catch up and a drink.

I've been playing pickleball here with my old club as you might expect.

Not sure if I mentioned that I started a pickleball club in our new hometown as they didn't have one and that can't be allowed...

Anyway, its been fun playing with my old crew the last few days.

Today we are off to Gabriola to see Stacey and Ike for the day. Likely have supper at Woodfire but we'll see how the day progresses.

Ranger, we are looking after at our house sit.

Birthday girl

Brad

As you know Robbie thinks he's a human and has little time for dogs, especially 2 year old huskies. But the two of them are getting along fabulously and ride great together in the truck so things are going well so far.

Garden Results

 Here is a picture of what we got out of all our garden building efforts this year.....

Okay that picture is a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much... we got:

Enough garlic to fill a 750ml Jar with honey

10 tomatoes

15 potatoes

1 small cucumber

tons of herbs and flowers

So if your wondering why I haven't been posting, its because there just wasn't anything to talk about. Our winter stock of teas, herbs, flowers is set but I had to purchase a few items from the Hutterites (Amish) in order to get 12 jars of vegetables fermented for winter. 

Our Elderberry plants ( 2 of them) survived and seem to be doing well. Both blueberry plants, the strawberry plant and the cherry tree are all doing well also.

I guess this year will just be chalked up to preparation for coming years. Our infrastructure of raised beds, herb and flower gardens etc are all in place. Our intention for next year is to build a greenhouse 10 x 26 in the area where our in-ground garden and shed (shed has been dismantled and removed already) are currently. A new shed will be built on the north side of our house.

We are going back to Salt Spring Island very soon to visit friends and extend the fall season before coming home to a settled winter. For any new readers, we lived on Salt Spring 2018 - 2020.

How does our garden grow?

Not well, that's how.

The herbs and flowers are doing great but vegetables... not so much, not so much at all. Although the onions look to be doing well.

Backyard herb garden

Backyard herb garden behind the tall plants

Grass looks great and the hanging baskets have held up fantastic

Strawberries are doing well and the grape is growing but no fruit yet (1st year didn't expect any)

The largest 1 of our 3 Paste tomatoes

8 paste tomato plants and nothing, these 3 won't do anything before 1st frost in a couple of weeks.

Slicing tomatoes have a dozen or so fruits but again, not before 1st frost. Carrots seem small but who knows what lies below.

Kale was pulled ages ago and replanted with spinach... 3 spinach have cracked the surface.

My 1 lone pepper on my Thai hot pepper plants

1 lone bell pepper too and its dinky

This years garlic harvest didn't produce much of anything

Potato plants were moved into the shed to allow for drying as we've had so much damn rain.

Celery and Parsley are doing great! and my 11 sunflowers have been whittled down to 4 but they are growing well.

3 are here and...

Sunflower #4

Kidney beans don't seem to be doing much, peas and red scarlet runner beans aren't so hot either.

All in all, given the work we put in to building the gardens this year, it is a massive disappointment. We console ourselves with the knowledge that it is the same for farmers and growers everywhere this year.

We will have to go to the big city for some organic produce so that I can at least get enough ferments made for the year.

I will update after onion harvest and by then I will have the potato count also. Some people have grown potatoes in bags as I did and got diddly squat out of it, so I'm not getting my hopes up.

Next year: Greenhouse 10' x 20'+

A bit of rain and family trips

We built a garbage container for the front yard. Tired of forgetting to put out the garbage bins every week, we finally decided to use some remnants from around the property to put together this beauty! It actually looks pretty damn good. I don't have a front pic of it as it wasn't my intention to talk about it but as I was publishing this photo to show the 3 ft wide strip of rain running down the side of the road during a storm, I thought I'd mention it too. 

Heavy rains, only minimal and tiny hail this time

and our amazing new garbage bucket (every container is a 'bucket' to me)

We went fishing at a local lake not far from the house

Brad caught a little fish (Trout, I think) which he caught by the tail presumably when he yanked the line in an attempt to set the hook in the fish's mouth. Fishy was released back to the water.

Our raised beds at night with our little garden twinkle lights on the fence

The gazebo at night

Relaxing with a book with my feet in the grass

A few days after Meg went home, we were experiencing a rainy spell here and it was getting us down so we decided to go to Saskatoon for the weekend and get some sun. Unfortunately, my mother came on ill the morning after we arrived and was taken to hospital. She spent about 5 days there and we drove back here once she was home safe and sound.

Yesterday, Mum called to ask me to come back and look after her, she isn't doing well again, so I'm off to the big city yet again to get her set right once more.

Meg came for a visit

Brad's Mum came for a visit, I didn't take many pictures though - really just this one when we were over visiting some friends.

The two Margarets.

Meg and Maggie (Joan's dog)

We did a lot of shopping, Meg, my friend Joan and I spent a couple of days gallivanting around the shops in ours and a few surrounding communities. A bit of touring around and generally enjoying the backyard so I didn't think to take too many pics.

We have had a very nice visit the last week or so.

Another addition to the deck

We ordered a gazebo for the deck as the bugs were more than we wanted to manage

Largely made of screening, it maintains the views

Major storm expected, we put all the flowers under the gazebo and just as well as it turns out. However, since then....hail. 

Hopefully the return of the sun will liven things up again.

On a lighter note: my zucchini has doubled in size since this picture was taken last week.

Also, we found a great deal on a fire table through Amazon and are currently awaiting its arrival, will be a nice addition to chilly evenings on the deck.

Getting the Pickleball up and running

Things are progressing in my efforts to get Pickleball started here in our new community. We have a place to play, a basic list of players and have ordered the equipment we will require, a lot of which has already arrived... just waiting on the nets now.

I have begun putting teasers out on our local Facebook page and hope to build up some excitement, enough to get people out to try it at least. I expect that attendance will ebb and flow until it finally settles on the die-hard types with a few once-in-a-while-ers popping in.

We just can't help ourselves

We continue to buy plants/flowers... I'm running out of buckets to put them all in (still have a few :D) In our defence, we had several large bags of potting soil left over from the last raised bed and we wanted to use it up.

Re-homed the plants we had in these and replaced with lovely flowers

Brad found this massive flower planter and had to have it

Brad's Mum bought us this garden planting stand and with everything planted now we decided to fill it too!

Re-homed the 8 Lemon Balm plants that were in this garden bed (as it is a spreader) into pots for the deck and replaced them with more Rosemary & Thyme, then added Spinach seeds. The hope is that this cooler shaded area will allow the spinach to thrive during summer but either way we will be planting spinach also in the fall.

My Zucchini ( I grew from seed) hasn't budged at all.

Amish Peas have cracked and are doing well

Kidney beans are doing well

Scarlet Runner beans are doing well

We went for a drive the other day which took us through the area where the forest fires were threatening our community. Its a mess and thats just the small bit you can see from the road.

The biggest take away from these pictures is just how fast Mother Nature recovers, the fields are filling in already. The fires in our area are still burning but are 'under control'.

Yet another garden.

We put in another garden, just a little one. There were some leftover flowers that needed something doing with, so… 

I also did up some more pots… These are all just pretty not edible or medicinal as far as I know, although I will check - with t(e exception of the first one which is a 12-18” variety of cherry tomato called Red Robin.

The view from my kitchen window.