Well hello there

Hello!  My name is Tanya and I have a little farm in Eastern Ontario.  I am not a writer but I would like to be so I’m starting this blog to tell you about my farm and my life here.  I am a working mother of two with a stay at home husband.  Having the farm is an existence we’ve always dreamt about, living on a property with no neighbour's in sight, with a few chickens and a garden.  We moved to the farm mid-September 2013.  All but a few onions, some squash and tomatoes remained in the garden that the previous tenant’s had left behind so I haven’t even had the chance at a growing season  yet.  And I’m excited.  I’ve picked out my seeds from Stokes, and decided that I don’t care if they are organic or not, they will do for this first attempt.  My plan is to grow potatoes, onions, squash, cucumber, lettuce, tomatoes, zucchini, jalapeno’s, basil, green peppers, cantaloupe, kale, green beans, sunflowers (for the horses), carrots, garlic and cilantro.  How I will actually do that without a green house and while working 40 hour weeks remains to be seen.  I’m still excited.  I’m excited for the bon fires, the sun sets, and the work.  It’s been an exceptionally brutal winter already this year.  An ice storm has brought down numerous branches on the property, that will keep Donny busy far into the spring with clean up.  The biting cold temperatures of -20 and -30.  The sticker shock of our monthly electricity and oil bill.  The way you can never really keep a 100 year old farm house warm.  These are the new challenges in my life.  The girls beds have three blankets on them (as does ours) and I’ve taken a note from another blog to provide hot water bottles and a heating pad at bed time.  Oh I’m not complaining, just sharing our brave new experiences.  I believe that you always get what you wish for in life.  My husband and I often travelled from the city to my aunt’s house in the country on the weekends.  We’d take different routes to keep the 1.5 hour drive interesting and we had this game where we would come across a particularly gorgeous view and point out – “not THAT would be a nice place to build a house.”  It was just the other day that I said to Donny – “all that wishing for the perfect view and look outside, it’s exactly what we’ve always wished for.”  And I can’t help but see the coincidence that we happen to have a LOT of blankets.  Before we moved to the farm I considered paring down our collection, we really do have far too many.  It made me question why linen closets were so small.  Then I realised that we have an unusually large amount of blankets.  The funny thing is, I’m not entirely sure why we have so many.  We were given quite a few of them and I don’t recall buying more than three of the 12-15 blankets we have.  Perhaps it was my aunt or my mother who saw that eventually we’d need them because a majority of them came from them.  But I digress….

I did mention horses didn’t I? This was a very nice bonus to the farm that we weren’t sure about.  We board horses in the winter and when our neighbour is travelling.  Having never owned or cared for horses we were a bit hesitant but the owner was confident we could manage.  So with a little help from google we have successfully kept alive two horses for three months now.  Dan and Rose have finally accepted us as their care providers and I am very happy with this extra addition to our lives.  And I daresay their stalls are clean, their hooves are picked and their manes are bur free. 

So there it is, an introduction to our little life on the hill.  I hope to entertain you with many more stories and pictures as we enter into what I’m calling the third phase of my life.  First phase was life before kids, second was life with kids and this third phase I’m going to call Living.