Here’s the thing: country living in an old farmhouse = mice in the house.

We’ve seen several mice hiding in the basement woodpile this winter so my husband set traps. (Country living tip: rodent traps are more effective set perpendicular to the walls along which the mice run.)

My three-year-old grandson has a toy snake that he threw down the basement several times without explaining why (and people brought up each time they fed the furnace). Crying, he explained, “I keep throwing my snake down and somebody keeps bringing it up. It needs to be down to catch the mice.” We couldn’t argue with the logic, so left the snake on the basement floor.

After my husband checked his trap-line this morning, here’s what Steven found.

He could not believe his eyes (after all, he knows it’s a toy snake), but once he took things in, he was delighted! Ah, the joys of grandparenthood (in the country).

Pretty, isn’t it?

It’s been snowing lightly since before dawn – and it’s slippery out there!

Look how gray the sky is!

But for a few glorious minutes just before noon, the sun burst out from the clouds at the back of the house and made everything glow. You can see the shadow of the roof peak in the bottom right.

I’m so glad I captured this moment – have a wonderful weekend!

I know I’m a day late but I do have an explanation.

Heavy rain started here in Nova Scotia about midnight Thursday and continued on until supper time Friday. In all, about 56 mm (just over 2 inches) came down in that time period. I took this photo Friday morning from my office window, thinking that the rain was benefiting the view: making the sere colours of November deepen and glow.

We had a dinner reservation with some friends in Halifax (about a two hour drive) and were amazed to see the water on the way: ditches running white water rapids, streams flowing through fields and down hillsides where there had been no streams a day earlier, standing water making hay fields resemble rice paddies, but the roads were fine even through Truro which sits on a flood plain at the end of the Bay of Fundy (highest tides in the world!)

Truro is located at the far right end of the water in this diagram (just off the map) – past where it says tides are 49 feet (15 m).

Ah – but supper time was low tide. By the time we traveled home at 10 that evening, matters were different. We saw a car abandoned in the Sobey’s parking lot, water up to the middle of its doors. And we found all the access roads through & around Truro closed because of flooding, necessitating some quick thinking and back roads to get home.

None of my photos turned out because it was too dark – but trust me: what looks so benign in my front yard was anything but at high tide in Truro.

Our three-year-old grandson has a pretty happy disposition and not much gets him down, but he was in tears this morning. We’re having a bit of a blow here on the east coast – a nor-easter with lots of rain and winds that are gusting to 100 km/hr (60mph). The ‘breezes’ caught the tree that held the start of the tree-house that Grampa is building for Steven – and took it out by the roots. Tire swing’s gone, too.

The silver lining? As Steven, who never cries for long, says: “I can fill up that hole with water and jump in the B-I-G puddle!”

Summer is fast drawing to a close & I realize that I’ve not shown you a full summer view from my window. (Oh, I wish I had a new camera!)

Despite the warmish weather of the last couple of weeks, the grasses and trees are losing their vibrant summer green, so I thought I’d concentrate on the mountain ash tree in the front garden. It volunteered itself there about four years ago and this year, for the first time, displayed the glossy orange berries that characterize it. (And, yes, the sky is really is that blue.)

We spent yesterday afternoon at the beach but it rained all night and today it’s 13C/55F with a NW wind blowing at 60km/35mph that makes it feel much colder. But the sun is shining – which it’s supposed to do all weekend. Have a good one, wherever you are. I’ll be back with book-related posts next week.

I first posted about the great Community Supported Agriculture project in Tatamagouche in June, when we received our first box of vegetables. Since then, there doesn’t seem to have been a lot of change in what we get each week, although the last few weeks we’ve seen such diverse food as broccoli, kohlrabi, fennel, and kale.

The problem is the wet weather we’re experiencing here in Nova Scotia this year. It seems like the rain started in early May and hasn’t stopped since. For instance, last week we received 4 inches (100 mm) of precipitation. Then, after a couple of sunny days on the weekend, it started raining at seven o’clock Monday morning and continued steadily all day, giving us another 2 inches this week. And there’s still no sun in sight.

Most of the rest of Canada is having an extremely dry summer and although rain threatens, there hasn’t been enough. When we were in southern Ontario in late July, we saw lawns and gardens, ditches and roadsides burned brown by the sun. Although I’d rather be here with too much rain (at least it’s not enough so far to cause serious flooding), it’s getting to be too much of a good thing – and it’s having a drastic effect on the vegetable crops.

Cammie, who runs the local CSA, advised us in late July that she had lost about 70% of her early crops in the wet and muddy spring (peas, beans, cabbage, broccoli, spring turnips, beets, salad mix, pac choi, Chinese cabbage, & radishes). But the summer really hasn’t been much better weather wise. This is the first week we’ve received beans in our harvest and there have been no peas at all.

But that’s the risk of a CSA program: farmers and members share in the risk of a bad year, as well as the bounty of a good one.

This week we received carrots, ruby-stemmed chard, a lettuce head, cilantro, broccoli, green & yellow beans, and fresh garlic.

Even though the weather and the resulting harvest have been a little disappointing thus far this year, I’m still keen on the CSA program and will join again next year (providing we have the cash in March). And I’m looking forward to many more weeks of superbly fresh and interesting vegetables this harvest season.

There’s thunderstorms somewhere around here this evening – we hear them in the distance and every so often see a faint flash of lightning. The dogs are not happy, as unused to the sound of thunder as they are.

Meanwhile, sunset came and went behind the clouds, lighting up the western sky with these gorgeous colors.

I never tire of sunsets; in the city, we seldom saw them as the buildings blocked our view.

Since I took up gardening in my late twenties (30 years ago!), I’ve never been successful at growing vegetables. I can lose myself for hours pulling weeds and transplanting among the flowering plants, but five minutes in a bean patch seems like drudgery. Consequently, I never developed a sense or an affinity about growing edibles. They remained strangers to me.

So I’ve been stuck buying produce at the supermarket, which has been an increasingly expensive proposition, especially here in rural Nova Scotia. Last year, I was thrilled to hear about a local Community Supported Agriculture co-op, and this past spring sent part of my tax refund to buy a share.

In a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, members sign up and purchase a “share” at the beginning of the growing season which helps to cover the farmer’s cost of operation and production. In return, they receive a portion of the farm’s harvest, distributed throughout the season in a weekly box of fresh, seasonally available, and typically organic, produce.

It’s been a cold, wet spring so the harvesting is off to a late start, but today I picked up our first weekly box of greens. This week we got lettuce mix, spicy mix, Swiss chard, salad turnips, green onions and radishes, along with a recipe for Swiss chard au gratin that I’m eagerly looking forward to trying.

I’m very excited about this program. I get farm-fresh (really & truly farm-fresh) produce straight out of the garden without any of the weeding, and without needing to know how to grow these things. Perfect for the residual city-person in me! (Not to mention the benefits to the local economy.)

If there’s no CSA program in your area, consider contacting a vegetable crop farmer (or even an avid gardener) and starting one.

It’s commonly thought that small towns are safer than cities. And I think Maritimers, particularly, pride themselves on being honest. Even so, people are imperfect, and reality sometimes bites.

So you can imagine the trepidation my husband felt today, after discovering that he had left his cash withdrawal in the bank machine at the SuperStore in Amherst, a town of about 9,500 people. He very nearly didn’t go back to check whether it was there, when he discovered his loss after about an hour.

But go, he did. He spoke to the cashier at the Customer Service register, sheepishly admitting that he thought he had left his money behind. She asked him how much he thought he’d left. When he told the amount, she happily handed him this envelope, containing the cash that an employee had turned in. That young man, who was on his way back in from the parking lot with a load of shopping carts when he spotted the cash, can stand very tall tonight. (Thank you!)

I know that honest people can be anywhere, but I worked in banking for many years in Ontario and, more often than not, when cash was left behind in an ATM, it was pocketed by the next person in line.

It was a small amount today, but it reinforced our belief that living in a small community is the best place to be.

We moved to Nova Scotia eight years ago this week, at the beginning of a month of perfect summer days. I thought we had landed in paradise. But as the year(s) passed and the reality of country living became clearer, there were many times I realized that paradise has indeed been lost.

But this morning dawned a beautiful day 20C/68F, sunny and with a soft breeze from the southwest. After my shower, I went out on the side deck in my robe to hang my towel on the line – and paused to count the wonders of the day in the country:
• I was outside in my robe – and no one was around to see me
• I was hanging my towel on the clothesline
• The air smelled fresh and I knew my towel would come in with the same scent
• The only sounds were the birds singing for their mates

In the city, I would never have ventured outside without being fully dressed – there were too many people around. We didn’t have room for a clothesline and the clothes would have come in covered in fine black soot anyway. (Many urban areas have bans against clotheslines.) And in the city, the traffic and sirens were constant, and the neighbors’ music often reached us when we didn’t want to hear it.

Small blessings, perhaps, but they feed the soul and remind me again why we want to live in the country.

URGENT:

Controversial Drilling Method Threatens Nova Scotia

So reads the front cover of a leaflet being distributed in our community by concerned citizens. Concerned about what?

Fracking – or hydraulic fracturing, a method of extracting natural gas from deep underground. Energy companies drill deep wells, then pump in water mixed with sand and chemicals at high pressure. The water shatters the rock bed below ground and the sand keeps the cracks open, thus allowing natural gas to escape and be captured.

Fracking has been in use by the energy sector in the U.S.A. since 1947, and an estimated 90% of the natural gas wells there use hydraulic fracturing. So why the uproar?

Opponents of the process assert that very little research has been done on the long-term impact of fracking on human and wildlife health and on the environment. What are the problems?

1) The chemicals used in the fracking process (many of them carcinogens) and the natural gas itself can contaminate ground water – and in communities where most people rely on their own well for drinking water, that’s a tremendous concern.

The producers of the film Gasland show many examples of ruined wells, including one where the water actually burns when lit. America’s Natural Gas Alliance (ANGA) maintains that these wells were contaminated by other sources, and prior to fracking activities in the area.

2) Fracking requires millions of gallon of water – local water – and thus could lower our ground water levels. Some home water wells may run dry and need to be re-drilled.

3) Much of the water used in the process returns to the surface, now contaminated with such hazardous chemicals as kerosene, benzene, toluene, and formaldehyde, and must be disposed of. The rest of the water and chemicals remains underground.

4) As in all mining operations, large areas of land (4 to 6 acres for each well pad) would be levelled, and roads for heavy equipment built. In a rural environment that depends on its natural beauty to draw visitors, as Nova Scotia does, tourism could decline dramatically.

5) Occasionally, a well will explode, spewing millions of gallons of hydraulic fracturing fluid and combustible gas into the air and onto surrounding landscape.

According to the New York Times, the NYC Department of Environment Protection refused to allow fracking within the NYC watershed, citing “an unacceptable threat to the unfiltered water supply of nine million people”.

And therein lies the rub: in the country, we’re not nine million people. We are only a few, and in the eyes of big business and government (and of people who do not live here), a few whose quality of life can be sacrificed.

This is one of the hazards of country living: unless you own ALL the land, potentially dangerous commercial enterprises can become your close neighbours. Sure, in the city, land might be cleared for a new mall or big box store but, as unattractive as they are, they don’t pose the hazard of a natural gas well, fracking the earth beneath you.

In Nova Scotia, there will be a demonstration held in front of Province House in Halifax between 1 and 2 p.m. today, to mark Earth Day and to officially register the groundswell of protest against fracking in Nova Scotia.

The home page of our regional library proudly displays the headline:

Excitement in Tatamagouche!

The first steps have begun toward building the new Tatamagouche branch.

I’ve been by the site and the earth where the building will go has been dug up, although nothing more seems to have been done in the last couple of weeks. It’s very exciting for our village, although it has not been without controversy.

The location of the new structure was the biggest issue under debate. Many favoured a location on the main street next to the Raven Gallery, where a burned out variety store has been razed.

The chosen building site is considered by many to be out of the way, being half a mile down the road and out of the village centre proper. I believe that parking availability was the strongest deciding factor.

It is exciting to see this project finally off the ground and I’m curious to watch as the building goes up.

But I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that many will miss the old site, as tiny and impractical as it is. The size has never bothered me, since I reserve books on-line, and can read books from all over the province through the inter-library loan system.

Still, it must be quite difficult, if not impossible, to have a kids’ story-time session in the current premises, or for more than one student at a time to research or study (do students still use libraries?)

Always trade-offs. That’s progress – and life.

My news update e-mail from The Globe & Mail newspaper landed in my e-mail box this morning with an invitation to “Watch more than 300 videos in the Globe Life how-to library“. Thinking I might find some tips on shocking the well water or even wood heat, I clicked through.

Hmmmmm…categories are Fitness, Chef, Wine & Spirits, Beauty, Hair & Fashion. If I want to know how to pair wine with take-out meals or what three coats every woman should have (definitely need that bejeweled evening number to wear to the fracking meeting), I’m set.

But since there is no take-out within 30 miles except chicken balls or donairs not worth wine, and an appropriate “investment” coat for the country is more likely to a ski jacket to be hung on a rack than a camel hair trench, I’m feeling a little out of the loop.

Not enough to move back to the city, mind. Just a little.

In the first part of this article, I discussed the cost of heating our house with wood or oil through the Maritime winter. But we have other spaces that require heating too.

When we moved here, we renovated part of the large garage/barn on our property into my husband’s home office, and a hobbies room. Both are fairly high ceilinged, and represent about 700 square feet of living space. It’s necessary to keep at least the hobby room heated at all times. Since the building is a short city block from the house, it wasn’t feasible to install a wood burning stove out there, since we wouldn’t be available every day or night to tend it, and heat needed to be constant. So we installed electric baseboard heaters.

Keeping the temperature about 65 degrees F (about 18C) costs us about $250 per month in the coldest winter months. That wouldn’t be so onerous if it was our main heating space, but add it to the cost of heating the house (and the added granny flat/visitors’ suite that is also heated with electricity) and we’re looking at a desperate situation.

What are our options?
1) Geo-thermal heating. Geothermal heat pumps use heat from the ground to heat the home. This would be the ideal system since one installation could heat both buildings at a very low cost and with almost zero impact on the environment.

However, since geothermal heat pumps are considerably more efficient than air-source heat pumps, they are also more expensive to purchase and install. To have an adequate system installed here would cost us about $30,000.

2) An outdoor wood furnace or wood boiler system.These heat water by burning wood very efficiently and can tie in to existing hot water baseboards, forced air, or in floor heating. This unit could also possibly heat both buildings and has the advantage of needing to be fed only once every 12 hours or so. In addition, the firewood pieces can be much larger than what would fit into a wood stove (or even the basement wood furnace) and would save on chopping/splitting – either in time or money.

To heat the outbuilding, though, would require installation of ducting and so the cost of installing one of these would be about $12,000.

3) An indoor wood stove on the main floor. This would seem a quick and easy solution except for the fact that we can’t use our existing chimney for it because of the oil-burning backup unit in the basement. (Insurance regulations prohibit a wood burning device above an oil-burning device on the same chimney.) We would have to install another chimney and also take down some inside walls on the main floor to allow for better heat circulation. I’m not sure of the cost of all this – renovations, installation of a hearth, the stove purchase and installation and the new chimney, but I’m sure you get the idea…and that doesn’t address heating the rooms in the barn or the suite.

Either wood-burning solution still leaves us vulnerable to the rising cost of firewood and to guilt whenever we see a clear-cut hillside.

4) Wall mounted air-exchange heat pump. Again, this doesn’t help with the heating of the granny flat or the barn, and would require renovations to the inside walls of the house for air flow. Add that to the cost of the pump and installation and we’re likely in the $10,000 range – and we’re not confident that the lay-out of the house would allow adequate heating on the second floor.

As you can see, we must spend money to save money and right now the capital for any of these isn’t available. That was definitely something we overlooked before we bought.

LEARN FROM OUR MISTAKE. Pay attention to the heating system if you’re moving outside the familiar infrastructure of a town or city. And don’t be swayed by the romance of heating with wood.

Do you have any other suggestions we might consider for heating our buildings? I’d love to hear from you.

Last week, we were on a road trip to southern Ontario where (then) it was balmy and spring-like. While we were gone, most of the snow here melted too and the first three days this week were wonderful and left me full of hope. Then I woke up this morning to this–and still snowing.

Will winter never end? It makes me so down….

Here in Atlantic Canada, winter goes on and so do the heating costs. In fact, we’ll likely be heating through the month of May. It’s a constant search for an affordable method of doing that.

In southern Ontario where we spent the first fifty years of our lives, I always lived in houses heated with natural gas. It was just always there and I admit that I didn’t give heating in Nova Scotia the thought it deserved before we moved here.

Our Nova Scotia home is a renovated, but still old and draughty farm house built in 1878. It’s heated by an old wood furnace in the basement, and backed up by an oil-burning unit down there as well. The oil furnace is necessary and kicks in when we’re away for the day–or more–, when I’m too sick to negotiate the cellar stairs to feed the wood fire, sometimes in the wee hours of very cold nights, and for heating in the shoulder season when wood is just too warm.

When we moved here in 2003, firewood was $90 a cord. Since there is no ambient heat from the furnace the way there would be with a wood stove on the main level, we found we needed eight to ten cord to get through the winter. Clear cutting is allowed here so our hillsides are quickly being denuded of their woodlots and this year the price of firewood has crept to $200 a cord. Wood heat seems worth it, though, as it is a toasty warm.

In addition to the cost, wood heat is a lot of work. The basement will hold three or four cord but first the wood has to be thrown through the basement window one junk at a time. Then, of course, it must be stacked in the cellar. The wood that’s left outside has to be stacked & covered until such time as the basement needs to be filled again and the wood restacked once more. More than once, we have been caught short with no wood in the basement and no access to the woodpile because of snow and ice.

When that happens, we fall back on oil. We have a small (half) tank that holds about 300 litres (approximately 80 gallons). At the time of last week’s fill-up, oil was $1.02 litre (about $3.85 U.S. gallon). Translated, that means that a tank of oil that costs $295. will last 7-10 days. That’s anywhere from $900 to $1,100 per month–and it’s not even a comfortable heat.

Are there alternatives? Oh yes – and other parts of the property to heat. I’ll explore that in another post.

We’ve had rain and temps above freezing all week, and last night when I went to bed, there was no snow to be seen. I thought I’d show you a real contrast from last week.

Alas, this is what I awoke to. That’s a main highway out there. There’s a wind gusting to 50 mph from the south (?!), which is the other side of the house, that blowing a icy mist of snow across the roads.

An e-mail invitation has me thinking about getting a group together this weekend and going sleigh riding. There’s more than one place within 20 minutes of our house where we could do this, but one of my favorites is the Sugar Moon Farm.

Husband and wife team, Scott Whitelaw and Quita Grey have a thriving maple syrup business in the Cobequid Mountains in Earltown NS. They use these gorgeous draught horses in the sugaring work and in winter, before the sap starts to run, for sleigh rides through the woods. There are also hiking trails for snowshoeing and crosscountry skiing.

We often take friends to the “sugar shack” for breakfast, and sometimes go, just us, if we have a weekend morning available.

In the city, one can just keep warm in winter, at a movie theater or a bowling alley or a mall. Those venues are at least an hour’s drive from here.

Want to sleigh ride, snowshoe, or hike in the beautiful outdoors? No problem. This is the sort of winter activity that is often easily available in the country.

What about you? What kind of winter activity do you enjoy: city or country?

Disclaimer: I am NOT an affiliate of Sugar Moon Farms nor am I in any way compensated by them. I received an e-mail about the sleigh rides from them today and decided to share because I simply love the place!

[tags]Sugar Moon Farm, draught horses, draft horses, maple sugaring, sugar shack, maple syrup, sleigh rides, all-you-can-eat pancakes, Chef’s night, hiking trail, Nuttby Mountain, Earltown NS, Rogart Mountain Trail [/tags]

One of the things that makes me feel so cozy here in our little village is the presence of a full-time dentist. And, serendipitously, she is also a really good dentist.

Last night I broke another tooth (it seems that my teeth are crumbling away on me, but that’s another story) and needed emergency “looking-at”. Unfortunately, Dr. Whitman was booked solid with a waiting list of ten already. That’s the risk of Read the rest of this entry »