Hello from Digging

[digging]

o I just thought I might say a new hello since I was gone for so long. I thought you might enjoy hearing as to where I was! You see we decided to change our life and get 100% out of debt, so we sold our moraged place and move back here to my home town after talking to my parents who agreed to allow us to move into thier basement. Us and our 3 children, not an apartment suit, just 3 rooms and a bath we had to share the kitchen upstairs. We then bought an old oil trailor camp shack that we slowly remodeled in to a small 1000sq ft home. We paid as we went. After two years we had it finished and we set the home up on the back end of thier land without permit from the town we were squatters. We had to build a 10,000 gallon water tank to hold water over the long winter here. We never had a phone or computer service the whole time. Then we found our land which I talked about in old posts here. We paid cash for the land $20,000 for 3 acre. Luckly we are within the town limits. Just last month we have moved our home onto our land and now I'm connected again to the net! We have cleared 2/3 of the place leaving a 20 ft wide forest edge all around. I have a 475 m2 garden built already with more planned and a small pasture and of course trees! However my challenge is finding hardy food bearing trees and shrubs, but there are some! I have about six months of snow per year.

Digging

[pebble]

Lovely to hear what you've been up to! It sounds very exciting.

What latitude are you on?

[digging]

I live just above the 60th if you look at a map of Canada and find the province of Alberta go straight up and there is my town just on the bottom edge of the NWT. I'm very happy the main thing I've come to see is how much I need to learn about plants in general beyond garden veggies!

Digging

[sun burn]

I guess it will be challenging to grow enough food when you live in that sort of location.

[digging]

Well you would be surprized how much I can grow! All the cabbage family, carrots, beets, greens, onions, garlic, leeks, peas, beans & fava, radish, turnips, potatos, J artichokes, corn (small early types)tomatoes & peppers in my poly hoop house, pumpkin and squash most kinds, I've even grown wheat & barley.
Oddly here were have very low garden pest probles, there are more bug that want to eat us than our gardens! Also because it gets cold here I keep my freezer in an unheated outbuilding and then I don't pay for power & I try to blanch and freeze as much as I can. I'm lucky because we are just inside the tree line so we still have soil on the other side of the lake where the NWT capital is they have mostly bare rock and only pockets of soil, they have to build walled beds and create soil. I am building a very special winter greenhouse that I hope to beable to use almost most of the winter, just heated with burning wood.

Digging

[sweetpea]

Wow, digging, good for you! That's a lot of hard work, but it sure paid off! I wanted to remodel an old trailer, kind of the Lucy and Desi kind, but other things became a priority instead. Do you have pics?

[pebble]

Did you see the glasshouse on the PRI blog, where they reticulate excess heat underneath and thus use less fuel?

[digging]

I do not have any pictures put into my computer I'm still learning all of that remember i just go back on-line about about 3 or so years. This winter when the gardening and now harvesting is stopped I'll try to get some posted for you all. what's PRI blog?

digging

[pebble]

http://permaculture.org.au/2010/08/16/clever-rocky-mountain-greenhouses-give-major-season-extension/

[digging]

Oh yes I've spent a lot of time studing that system! If I had a greenhouse over bare ground that is what I would do. My land was all full of permifrost and once we took off the trees it started to melt but it will take a few years of melting and then draining befor I could use a ground system like that. This new greenhouse will have an insulated floor and built raised beds inside. I think I'll run hot water tubing in the beds for winter heating directly of the soil.

Digging