Ra Kenworth

Hi everyone! It's nice to know there are a decent number of us in the area. Certainly an opportunity for seed swapping and plant trading!

I am Quebec side about an hour north of town, with an acre (1/2 of it virgin forest,) practicing permaculture for about 12 years. I have almost completely replaced the lawn around the house. It's fairly flat but I'm at about 1000', water table about 15' down, excellent drainage (rocks, sandy dirt , more rocks,)
and lots of snow, a moist zone 4.

I replaced lawn with neighborhood cardboard, kitchen compost, grew a bee and butterfly garden over the tile bed but haven't seen monarchs for 2-3 years. They used to love the echinacea and I recently added a wild cherry which they can't resist if they're around.

I have a large staff of free range pigeons for soil building and there is lots of wildlife. Willing to part with some, trade, etc.

I have a fair variety of perennials and more thimbleberries blackberries and raspberries than I need, so I'm happy to give away some.

My son bought in Cantley and I am going to transplant some goodies and play with his nice big parcel of land. It's probably 2 acres, I'm not sure. He gets deer too and I am going to plant red clover from my supply.

I've mainly been concentrating on summer squash for a calorie crop and have discovered that the scallop squash preserve better just on top of cardboard over the basement slab

My veg varies greatly from year to year. Sometimes I am in iqaluit but things seem to grow fine no watering in the compost.

I have a ton of barrels and collect rainwater off the 1000 sq ft roof and use pumps to relay water from barrel to barrel around the yard: low tech solution, no gravity feeding.

No till, hugelkulture, compost windrows, fall-winter planting. 2 dogs, my old boy is an excellent livestock Heinz57 rescue.

No farm livestock (zoned forest)

no cell reception but finally the phone lines have been upgraded and there's Internet. I'm early retired on a teacher's pension and putter full time.

There's over 2' of snow here. Lucky I like snow and don't mind rocks too much!

I hope to meet a few of you sometime in the future.

I just cracked 24 eggs for my bread pudding (diced stale bagels, a layer of discount grapes individually cleaned up and diced, over ripe pears, diced day old sourdough loaf) no sugar necessary and enough room for a baked lunch beside it in the oven!
Those egg shells go directly into cold water, then rinsed, and dried on top of the stove, ready for crushing for my soil building staff (a large flock of pigeons)
I try not to waste any shells at all, but I boil a lot of eggs and unless they are promptly dunked into cold water and peeled right away, the egg sticks then it needs to go in the compost. That's okay though, I usually start tomatoes and peppers on top of the compost pile, protected by a wire cage to keep away scavengers, and they can benefit from the discarded eggshells.

Bread pudding is also a great way of using up undercooked / lead weight homemade bread that didn't quite turn out as expected!

I haven't cut a tree for a few years but I look for one crowded out by a big tree that's conveniently flat one side, pop it in a #10 can, and secure it to the wall to keep it from falling over. It simply gets planted in the deep snow over the current compost pile, and the birds perch on it between picking at newly dumped visible compost. By Spring, it just gets lain against the hill to help stabilize the defrosting pile. There have been a few times I've been able to pull roots with one and then of course it gets replanted in a better spot and watered a bit.

What size are the spaces where you want to put boxes?
You could put cardboard boxes, nested one inside another to be more robust, and they will last a while, ideally just for one batch, which makes ideal compost, or if the size is appropriate, pick up some used plastic milk crates with or without a cardboard box inside. I use them sometimes and to clean leave them in the rain then pressure wash them once I've harvested most of their composting resources. Crates are nice because they stack.

I am pretty sure the sharing of regurgitated food the couples perform does double duty of sharing their immune systems, helping to ensure the pigeons are getting the same mix of beneficial microbes and pathogens from each parent.
I've found by the time I have had purebred giant runt stock for two generations they have become healthier, hardier, and smarter and the males always get paired with a healthy robust female before I decide if they are purebred breeding material. I limit the breeding of all of mine, collecting the eggs for my dogs.

Being that I forage fiddleheads most springtimes, but I flash boil then bake (liver cancer from fluke being a concern, also salmonella.) usually I make a soufflé.

I know when it's fiddlehead time because the trilliums blossom, the black fly are chronic, the wild leeks are poking up, and the angelic dragon flies have yet to arrive.

I freeze all my fiddleheads until the ferns have matured then go back to my collection site and ensure there are only edible ferns in the spot where I collected. Then I go ahead and start dipping into my frozen fern heads, a couple weeks later or so at my convenience.

I had never heard of eating the shoots, but where I live ostrich ferns are dominant and there aren't many spots where bracken grows -- probably too cold, too wet, perhaps too acidic. (Moraine, poor soil, and mixed forest Quebec)
Edit: reading below, NOT because it's wet, cold, acidic, perhaps just providence,!

Thekla, I would check out the oehler greenhouse book -- he has one on a slope with a north facing glazing ai really interesting, where drainage is well explained and taken into consideration.
You could also review all that wapiti resources on permies, with the trench idea in mind
Adapt the two to meet your needs

The subsoil is so poor where I am that earth berming would be my best option for most trenching ideas

Myself I can use this idea to collect red clover dry seed heads next spring and grow them in my son's drainage trench
He has a mound at the back that filters his drinking water and I could add a berm to that on the east side

I'm making pumpkin soup out of a medium pumpkin I was given, for lunch, before getting outside, wet, sweaty, start going in and out like a cat but changing clothing

... while I do the main job right now, which after freezing a bunch of pumpkin purée, I am now dealing with all the skin and tougher outside flesh, which is roasting in the oven at 200F with rice and red split lentils and ground fennel, for the dogs.

I will add some Mexican spiced veggie páté to my soup once I have finished with today's dog food  on the stovetop

... Dog food du jour made out of some of what's in the oven, some water and frozen dog dinner. My old boy is almost finished, and his 6 month son is complaining about the
slow service lol!

Edit: my soup was really blah so it got a can of chipotle beans and turned into ragout!
Edit: I should add the roasted seeds in the middle got sautéed until the stringy "meat" came away, and about 2tbsp went in with the dog food, and I have a container of seeds which easily peel away from the outside crust so I will be snacking on seeds later. All the juice went into the dog bake.
Nothing wasted except the stalk and a bottom flat 2" disk went in the kitchen composting.

Nothing fancy for me but there is a ton of snow with a crust of ice to move outside today! I have to see how my pumpkin purée plus vege páté  mix is going to taste with a little ginger... I eat pretty well anything

I have since learned that bringing live plants across a line on the map is not a great idea, sorry. Mine are at 650' in Quebec. My comments can be deleted if desired.

Thimbleberries: there are two types
Rubrus odoratus grows along the dirt road roadsides and tastes way sweeter than any other berries around here with the smallest seeds, and black raspberries are nicer than blackberries.
The wild blackberries are small and full of large seeds! I don't bother with them.

Pearl that sounds like a perfect thanksgiving!
What makes more sense than spending Thanksgiving to put away food preserves! All those pumpkins! Like wow!

Trampoline parts: gotta love roadside scrounging! I have one being used as a tarp this winter, and a platform for a tree hammock tent next spring! I am hoping to use some of the supports to rig up an ama to a damaged canoe to make a prototype proa while fixing the canoe sidewall damage with a makeshift belt and trampoline springs -- also for a platform between the ama and the canoe !

Things have changed a lot since I got my music degree and teaching degree in the mid 80s in Canada.

I didn't have the ability to pursue biology and geology and I was expected to get a degree, so after the first year, I transferred I to a 3 year program which put me almost half finished because I had taken music performance on top of my required credits, requiring 2-3 hours daily practice and keeping me out of trouble, and I took a music education summer evening course while I was working as a teaching assistant, having volunteered as one the previous summer. It was suggested I take the concurrent education that was new and I did.

I never regret that I did this, and had many fun years teaching music.

Now tuition is even expensive in Canada, but I have a friend who worked as a store manager up.north before it's reorganization, and he doesn't have a high school diploma. In his case he asked and I recommended he try to get in to any college program as a mature student, because then he won't need the high school diploma. I suggested he might consider personal support worker, a thankless job but in high demand and some colleges are even offering it free. The main reason would be he wouldn't likely need any upgrading courses. So why spend time doing high school credits when you can at least be employable which is his main concern.

So it depends. If you are new to your country or didn't finish high school and need credentials, yes, get some post secondary  courses. I also told him about all the open university courses available throughout the world, plus Athabasca university offers the option to challenge for credit which is way cheaper (it turned out I was a computer programmer whiz so I took a bunch of credits by reading the text book and writing the exam -- and made some real cash doing that in between music teaching cintracts)

I really don't know if getting into debt is wise though. I went the gert route as soon as I could in my early 40s and have been debt free for 20 years.

I would say every situation is different, but if you think you can handle nursing, that's a great skill that is guaranteed to provide a job in the rat race but also has transferable skills in an alternative lifestyle. That's what my son did, but tuition is as close to free as is possible in Quebec (called CEGEP) and we did it debt free.