ADVENTURES OF THE CANADIAN FAMILY ROBINSON

Today was a great day, we got lots done despite the POURING rain! Did I mention how happy we are to have a cover over our heads?? We picked a bunch more apples off the ground next door last night. We tried some maybe a month ago and they were horrible, now they are tasty! So we canned another dozen apple butter and 6 apple sauce.

We have been filling/packing tires with dirt for the base of a table we are building in the greenhouse. Curt mixed a batch of cob up with the bobcat today and we started cobbing over the tires, using some cans for fill as they do in the earthships. Not sure this style of has been done before, figure it would speed up our time building a cob table base! The tops are going to be these huge rounds cut off an end we had down on our land. We have quite a bit of lumber down we will be able to use with the house.  The table we are building will have cedar benches and it will be used in the greenhouse/outside space for eating and hanging out! It is on the south side of the trailer beside the greenhouse wall so should work as some thermal mass too.  I will get more pics in the light tomorrow, Curt is still out there finishing up!

The last month the kids and I had been working away slowly to fence the front field for the goats and a jersey cow when we find one for a decent price locally. We are going with Tbar fencing because we would like to eventually get organic status which you can’t get with treated fence posts, I came across a scary statistic about the amount of arsenic in each treated post, yikes! The other advantage to the Tposts is I can put them in on my own with the kids, my Dad lent us this great fence pounder for them! SO we strung the string line and started pounding away.. We have also been doing alot of reading about goats and goat care, the girls are learning it for homeschool this year. We found out that Buttercups are poisonous to goats , took a closer look at our field and it is MAINLY buttercups, not just a few here and there, ALOT…More than there is grass. They aren’t in flower right now so I confirmed with our neighbor who knows her plants! It shows us that by the number of buttercup the soil doesn’t drain well and is not great growing soil right now. So we had to make some decisions about what to do, personally I really don’t want to risk killing the kids goats! They usually don’t eat them but do sometimes and then will get sick. We have another field further back that is a bit smaller closer to 1/2 acre, they will go there for now. It has better quality grass in there. So we will be pulling posts and repounding. Curtis and I are getting in good shape! Our front field that we started fencing will be torn up and replanted this spring, most likely as spelt. We are going to take a shot at growing our own grain. On our back part of the property we are going to be planting and in one section will plant oats with a grass for animal feed. We have been drawing out a farm plan and map to try and wrap our heads around it all. It is overwhelming at first but exciting all the same!

We are putting a goat barn shelter up that is made from recycled lumber the neighbor gave us, and some OSB and shingles they had too many off. We are thrilled to be building with recycled materials !

I will post some pics of our greywater system we installed soon too

PS Cedar is still on the mend, he had another quite day today hanging out in our bed watching the little portable DVD player and a stack of movies I got him from the library! The only way to keep him in one place resting!

Autumn has arrived! It is cool and crisp, the leaves are falling, the rains have begun, frogs are out and the kids are into the mud! We are so happy to be warm in our home in the greenhouse. Apple and Pumpkin pies in the oven and more of our apples in the canner as apple sauce and apple butter! On the downside the fall bug is lingering! Cedar and Indigo were hit hard with a nasty bug about 5 weeks ago and it lingers on and on.. Cedar seemed to be better last weekend for 4 days then took a turn for the worse. Yesterday I made a trip to our Asthma Specialist and Cedar has a chest infection. I know, it sounds scary, and his night cough is scary! He prescribed some antibiotics for him but said we could try without them (he is awesome and totally supports our “alternative” health choices!), I went to 2 places and they were sold out hmm.. So we have decided we are going to fight this off without them. He is not running a fever at all, he is happy and playing, at night he coughs, but last night he was WAY BETTER! and today even better! We have been feeding him fresh juice (made in the new VitaMix!!) and vitamin C and garlic and some homeopathic remedies.  I have his prescription on hand if needed but I think we are over the hump and getting better!

So onto the VitaMix. I have read SO MUCH about them and have been reading lots on Raw Food and they always pop up. I have been looking for one used with no luck! I am not one to go and buy stuff new or much of anything unless its food or essential. BUT our girls and myself are all vegetarian now and we will have lots of produce next summer so I figured I could justify it as a purchase. Mind you I still feel a bit guilty about buying it.. I bought it from Costco so I can take it back if needed..The only bummer is we need to buy at least one more solar panel to run it! But it is amazing, you should see how fast we can make hummus, and guacamole and apple sauce and rice milk and rice flour and smoothies, this thing rocks! Right now Cedar is drinking a Cucumber, Carrot, Orange, Ginger smoothie and lovin it! Thats all for now. Hope you are enjoying your fall!

Oh yeah..On the construction side, we still need the end on the greenhouse with a door, but we are all baled in with straw bales (Thanks Chris and Alison), we have a garden in the greenhouse for winter greens and a cob/tire/cedar table and stool eating area in the greenhouse!

Here are some pics and yes that’s a pic of Indigo after her swim in a mud puddle (NOW that is why I don’t buy my kids NICE NEW clothes!!)

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We have been very very busy for the past few weeks! We have been racing against the weather trying to get a cover over the trailer before the fall rains hit! We have had INCREDIBLE weather this fall, we are so lucky!! We built a greenhouse over the trailer which will give us some warmth and shelter as well as an outside covered area for the kids and dog to play away from the weather! I have added some pictures but those before we got the cover on.. I will post those soon!

We have put together our rough plans for our home design and met with the wonderful architect Cindy as well. She is taking our plans and putting them into AutoCad to go to the Engineer.. We were hoping to do load bearing cob but that will most likely be changed somewhat, we want to do passive solar with a fair number of south facing windows so that will most likely need to be post and beam.
We were going to do 2 kids rooms but after talking with family they convinced us that someday the kids will need their own space. We have mixed feelings on it, right now they love sharing space with each other and when asked say they always want to share a room. Then Summer who is with us part time is ALWAYS asking when she will get her own room at our house so my guess is once they hit the early teens they may want their own space. So we drew up a plan to have 4 smaller bedrooms (8 x 10) coming off a central play area.. But Cindy talked with us about how each room would need a 2 x 2 window at the smallest, which we don’t want because that is on our North wall and we are trying to minimize windows on that wall and that would mean at least 5 windows with bedroom windows. So together we came up with a plan to make 2 bigger bedrooms (16 ish x10) that will be prepped to be split into 4 rooms so in the future when the kids are ready we can build walls in there, or they can. We will have a mud party when they want to have their own rooms, which I am sure will be quite a few years down the road! I included a pic of our building location on the rock where we marked it out with sticks for now.

I also had an excellent meeting with the Chief Building Inspector in our district. It went VERY WELL! Sounds like they are very open to working with us as far as a composting toilet system as well, so we will keep you posted on that! Very exciting if we can get it through!

Indigo has found a tame farm cat, our chickens are glad! Indi was mauling them, taking them down the slide etc! SO here is Boots, a Tom Cat born in a boot He LOVES Indi and she LOVES him!

We collected a bunch of walnuts of our tree and we are drying them and are also in the process of making Walnut stain.
I included some pics of our straw before we covered it to keep it dry from the rain and our clay pile..

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving with family and Summer made it over for the weekend too!
That’s all for now!

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We have been watching the weather forecast for weeks and counting our blessings as we have woken up to sun every morning! For those of you who know Vancouver Island in the fall you will know this is not what every fall is like! I will give you a big update and some pictures in the next day after we catch up on sleep , we have been pulling long hours trying to get closed in before the rain hits but we did it! We have a greenhouse over the trailer now! We will be warm and dry this fall and winter and spring And the kids will have some covered outdoor place space too! I will be back to updating more regularly now too!