Big City, Little Homestead

Living rural in the city is great – you can do it, too.

Revising the front yard and green driveway

Whelp, it’s now been 10 years since I converted my driveway to a green one, and laid an infiltration gallery into the front yard. I’ve written about it in Harrowsmith Mag, and I’ve been interviewed about my yard and its expansion in Modern Farmer.  And of course I’ve written about it here, sometimes just in passing while observing the progress of my endeavours, my pets and the creatures that use it, and the changing seasons.

Objectively, when I look at the house from the street, the yard, the landscaping right up to the front door, seems to have both vertical and horizontal depth. It holds so much more, it just feels bigger than neighbouring properties. But as…it holds more… the gardening is as necessary as housework. I find both rewarding, but gardening is like therapy or meditation or something productive and relaxing at the same time. It never ends (except for winter’s recess), and it never gets boring, because something’s always changing.

Plant community changes

The first few years after the entrenching and conversion work, I did as much food-gardening as the garden would let me. The plan was to maintain the box hedge at the sidewalk perimeter, have a long box garden down the property line with the welded wire fence, and regular yard in between. Other plants could grow where they wanted to, or where I had room to fit them. I got quite a bounty in my first year.

As the shade from the growing tree dwindled the harvests, I tapered off growing vegetables and just cultivated as many flowers as appeared. And they did, in fact, take over. I had, and still have, big pots and balcony planters for a small potager of vegetables and bunny food. I literally grow more for my rabbits than for humans. (And yes, I absolutely did get lazy about cultivating a potager garden.)

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Happy World Frog, Sparrow, and Rewilding Day! (March 20th)

So, over the past year, I’ve been updating this website by paring down and consolidating, but also elaborating, on blog topics. Mostly I stuck to the context of what was going on at the time of their publication, but sometimes I added a quick update in the post. And sometimes I overhauled and republished it anew. I now have a lot more visitors than before (still modest, though), because it’s good to enjoy the simple life!

Now that I’ve combed through my content history and brought it up to a certain standard, I’m thinking about what else this Big City, Little Homestead website could do. I’m having trouble coming up with a new name, or even a reason to change it.

I expect to continue making 4 to 6 blog posts a year, usually projects to build and observations I make about nature or whatever. But that’s just holding a pattern, and I’m looking to shake something up. I have an upcoming new-roof project, and last October, I changed up the basic configuration of my front yard so I have some new ideas to update the landscaping. I’ll blog about both of these when they’re underway. But I want to do something else, something more.

A photo archive-and-use project

I got to this present state through an effort I began during the pandemic. That’s when I began organizing, harmonizing, and sometimes publicizing my photos and other resources  – and I did so exhaustively. It continued on a monthly basis, for years, because I was going through 20+ years of digital and scanned photographs. Finally knowing where all my photos were helped me massively improve my photos here. Even considering they were the same pics I used at the time, I could use them at higher resolution.

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February’s Snowmageddon (and its removal)

I thought about writing this type of post ages ago, and then thought “no way ugh” and then last Sunday’s absolute deluge compelled me to write something. I was actually happy to have such a big storm, because the snow hasn’t been this deep in years.

The above two pics and the header might not be the last time we had snowbanks 3 feet deep (but they might). I kept these from a 2012 post I’ve since deleted, when I blurbed about a big storm. We must have had one more big-snow winter since then, but it really is that rare.

Here’s what this year’s storms (two in the space of a week) left on everybody’s doorstep:

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Jul-o-rama! Make the Yuletide extra hygge this year

Warning ⚠️: this blog post has more exclamation points than I utter during the rest of the entire year. Also, super long.

hygge (huu-geh) for those who were living under a rock when this word took the world by storm: Hygge is a Danish word (as is Jul, for Christmas) that means cozy, fun, and satisfying. Vi hygge os means “we are amusing ourselves together” – except it’s opposite of robot-speech. To say something is meget hyggeligt (mile huu-ge-leet, drop the t if it’s plural) is to say “it’s a lot of fun” or “very cute and cozy.”

When I first started writing this blog, I might not have thought I’d be the one to say this, but I love Christmas. If the featured pic of me-as-Mrs.-Claus isn’t proof enough, please indulge my running mania a bit, before I go on to the apologia and the deco-rama of this post.

Last year we overran a corner, so the Santa Hat had a loose thread (not shown here)

I usually go on a streak called “The Twelve Runs of Christmas” – every day from the 13th–24th, or any twelve days. It’s to run the remainder of the annual goal, so that any distance done between Christmas and New Year’s is a bonus (or remedial). Some runners do it by running 1, 2, 3, all the way to 12 kms (78 km in total) in any order that they see fit. This year I will surely do the any-twelve-days-1-2-3… series, because I’ve been super-consistent with my training this year. I don’t have any catching-up to do.

One of those runs is the 10K Santa Hat run, which is a route I saved on Strava. You don’t need to know me to use the map, but you can message me if you do want to join us. Conspicuous Santa running is a way to bring joy to the world!

Another run I go on is for the Christmas Bird Count, which is 8-11 kms along the Canal and through Pointe-St.-Charles. The point is to cover a territory and report all the birds I can see. There are a lot of pigeons, especially around the grain terminal, but sometimes I see a black-backed gull or a pair of ravens, or a woodpecker makes an appearance.

The ghosts of Christmas Past (apologia)

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