Another Chapter in Our Lives
According to my daily journal entries between the months of June and September, the weather pattern changed. In the early hours of every morning a wet deck gave evidence that a small rain-shower had just passed over. You know the type; enough to hamper lawn mowing and settle the dust on the roads, but not enough to make any difference in the level of the dug-out. We caught what we could in 45-gallon drums that in our area have been tagged rain-barrels. These, we strategically placed by any building in which a flow of water followed the same direction; some roofs just naturally sagged toward one end, others held eaves troughs.
During the summer months, we have daylight creeping in around 3:00 in the morning, so that by 10:00, our temperature reaches into the high twenties degrees Celsius. I could not accomplish much outside during the hottest part of the day. That summer heat zapped my energy completely and forced me indoors where, in every room, we had an electric fan circulating its cool breeze. It wasn't long and I had a regular routine, where inside homemaker's chores were done between these hours.
I contracted work from a carpenter to make repairs to a porch that had been added onto the trailer. Before they arrived each morning by 9:00, I had put in two hours or more of outdoor work. Work that varied from the pleasure of garden care to the heavy exertion of clearing debris that one does during landscaping. Whereas the carpenter's day ended at 5:00 in the evening, our day, mine in particular, was only half-done. By the cool of the evening, we worked diligently felling more trees, bucking them into lengths and hauling them and other stumps away.
When we first arrived, . Surrounding the yellow-faded-to-cream colored trailer were small willow shrubs and tall trees; trees, Aspen poplar and Sitka Spruce, taller than I had ever seen before. A neighbour of ours first said they were over one hundred feet in height. But, after chopping a few down and with the use of a 25-foot measure tape, we can safely say the majority of them were between sixty and seventy feet tall. The willow shrubs were kept low by the moose that loved to nibble at the young new growth in early spring.
Within this forest we were to find fallen trees left behind when a fire had nearly wiped out the area and came within a couple hundred feet of the trailer. I've been told that planes water-bombed the area with both water and pink chemical fire-retardent. The first three years that we have been here fire threatened and created anxiety for us. And again the sky was filled with planes and the air resounded with the drone of their engines. And the temperature was increased from the heat of the fire to a whopping thiry-four degrees Celcius.
From the previous owner, roots and bucked up logs, too pithy for use, were pushed into mounds when a few acres were cleared for a yard, a garden, and a lagoon. Out of seven of these piles of varying size in height and length we have sifted through three of them. It is amazing the amount of virgin-soil we have moved into the gardens. I can smell, at this very moment, the earthy-scent of that luxurious black soil, fluffy with organic compost and loaded with fat earthworms. It was great.
From the beginning I struggled with a clay base and if we were lucky three inches of topsoil that was very acidic. This is why it was so imperative to get at that 'virgin' soil from those piles.
To be continued
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