Analog Pursuits: Homesteading
I live in a part of the world where a lot of agriculture takes place, but which honestly is not best suited for it, climatically-speaking. On top of that, I live in a specific microclimate that renders growing your own food a particularly difficult endeavour. In my Lanaudière region of Québec, our last threat of frost is often late May or early June, and our first comes by early October, giving us at best 3½ months of a growing season. The fact that we live on the north slope of a hill on sandy and rocky substrate that has been forest for millennia does not ease things.
The amount of labour we put into ameliorating these conditions in order to stretch the capabilities of our little spot of forest for greater nutritional subsistence means doing much else with our free time in the period from mid May to late June is a bit of a rarity, and largely to blame for the dearth of new content here this past month.
We do lots of composing and soil improvement, but it’s a long process and to limit and focus our work we’ve been building garden boxes for the past few years. This year we totally rebuilt them into a single massive labyrinthine box; a snake-like box measuring 5m x 15m including “aisles” that allow us to efficiently use the space but maximize the planting area.
We’ve also constructed paths throughout the forest, which helps us give the dogs space for daily walks and sometimes tempts us into a little hike without having to venture onto the very non-pedestrian-friendly roads of the neighbourhood. We keep chickens, which this year total 6 hybrid reds, delivering to us half a dozen daily eggs. Someone help. We are out of room. The eggs are everywhere.
We try to have a variety of food and ornamentals to keep the place looking pretty and slowly transform it year after year into something that matches what we want more and more and what the prior owners abandoned more than a decade ago less and less.
We also have a pool to prepare for the season around this time of year. Life is hard. So there you have it - an excuse for my low stationery and weblog productivity at this time of year and possibly inspiration for those who enjoy this very analog pursuit along with me.
