Some pics of our place (British Columbia)

[Britesea]

beautiful... looks so cool and restful

 

[Denim Deb]

Nice.

 

[frustratedearthmother]

Awesome!

 

[MoonShadows]

What a beautiful place! What brand of greenhouse is that?

 

[Joel_BC]

What a beautiful place! What brand of greenhouse is that?

The make of the greenhouse is "BC Greenhouses" - a company that was started about 200 road miles to the west of us, but has now relocated part of its operations even further west (in the Fraser Valley, as I recall). They manufacture pre-fab kits for domestic and commercial greenhouses. Our G.H. went up in less than three hours, once the kit was here on our place.

I have to admit that it didn't get as cold this past winter as the one before. But with no supplementary heating, we overwintered a variety of greens in the G.H., despite outdoor temps below freezing for months. True, a percentage of plants died, but the real majority of them survived.

 

[MoonShadows]

Thanks, Joel. Just visited their site at http://www.bcgreenhouses.com/

 

[Joel_BC]

On another thread I posted to recently, after my long absence, Beekissed mentioned she was eager to hear about what's happening on our homestead. Not all that exciting, really - we're more or less in maintenance mode this year.

Very late spring season, as we had a lot of cold, some late snows, a huge amount of snow accumulated on the ground to thaw and drain away. So the food gardens have been waterlogged. We've just started planting within the last 10 days, and are behind.

One maintenance thing is that the rototiller broke down. I had to tear it down to some extent, then getting the needed part involved time/patience. Once I got that, I spent the better part of a day putting the machine back together again.

I'll have to re-do our electric fencing, as bears have been getting in, in the fall. Our big shed needs work in its under-structure.

Also, over the last year and more we've had raccoon problems. Did a lot of damage here, and no effective way to fence them off all our land. The whole neighborhood has been plagued with a big infestation. We have a live trap, and (since our valley folks, us included, love wildlife) through a period of months I was relocating the first four we trapped.

Then we caught another one, quite large. I'd felt that probably there was no place in the woodsy, creekside areas I'd been taking them to that was far enough from people's home sites and homesteads. So I shot this last one. Goodness!... since then, we've seen no sign of raccoons. I think they sense something when their species' blood has been spilt on the land and (maybe... hopefully) stay quite distant from the execution spot. But we'll have to see.

Now maybe, besides the pretty ordinary stuff I'm mentioning, our year will turn out to involve some new and interesting things. But, especially on a day when the sun is in the blue sky, just living here is fine enough. Trees are leafing out. All sorts of birds have returned.

 

[frustratedearthmother]

Thanks for the update! I can't even imagine dealing with bears! No bears in this part of Texas, thank goodness!

As for raccoons - I guess my LGD's keep them away. Haven't seen one on the property in quite some time.

Hope you get your garden in. Lucky that we have a long growing season. I'm harvesting zucchini, yellow squash and lots of radishes. Should start getting green beans in another week and have lots of green tomatoes presently.

 

[sumi]

I'm going to have to go back to the start and catch up!

 

[Joel_BC]

Our seasons are running a little late this year... maybe three weeks. But one of the joys of late spring and early summer here rests in a bowl like this.

I guess I haven't usually taken pics of strawberries, but a couple weeks back I did shoot this one (first pick of this year). Mmmm-mm! We eat some fresh, but wind up freezing a lot of the annual crop and have them until the following year's crop shows up.