Long springtime weekends in COVID-19 times

Our first post in a while! It’s been an odd 6+ months, with my dissertation (not) wrapping up, an odd but wonderful trip to Chile, me getting a big-kid job, and now the COVID-19 thing. I now work with the campus educational development centre, and so we’ve got our hands very full with panicked instructors trying to move all of their teaching online, moving exams online, moving summer (and maybe Fall) term and training online…

So, some nice long weekends at the cabin have been amazing. We’ve been alternating between super active (digging, building), mildly active (walking, paddling), and laaaaaazy (sitting, sleeping). Here are some pictures of the most recent weekend.

This is our new friend, Deer. He/she/they showed up one day and just hung out around that area for a while, sniffing around and munching on our flowers (probably – I don’t mind). There were also a few deer in our driveway days earlier. It’s nice to see them.

Liam has been feeding the birds delicious, rich sunflower seeds all winter. But we’re running low and with COVID-19 closures, we couldn’t easily get our hands on more for spring feeding. Now the poor muffins are getting the cheap-o mixed stuff and it’s attracting a whole new crowd. Liam keeps chasing off the “deplorables” – cowbirds, grackles, doves, etc. – so the precious nuthatches and chickadees can get in there. Chubsters.

On the theme of caring for birds, Liam’s been building bird boxes for nesting. Note the amazing patina of the wood – it’s barn board we took from (/aggressively ripped off) the barn on the new property.

A sneak peek at our future outdoor kitchen. Maybe. Liam did all this rock-lifting to test out how many rocks it would take if we built stone cabinet bases. Answer: a LOT…

… but it looks really cool. I think most of these rocks are from old rock walls near the cabin.

Our garden boxes (also made of barn wood) are filling up! The soil is from my latest project (coming up in later photos). Below are a few close-ups – note the budding rhubarb peeking through the shredded paper in the last two.

All the dirt for the garden boxed came from…. here! Ta-da! It doesn’t look like much, but this was a whole lot of digging and shovelling and dumping and tamping – and it’s only the very beginning. Backing up: over the last year or two, we’ve (including Mumma – thanks!) been smothering the grass around the cabin with newspaper, landscape fabric, and sand/gravel. That was step one in Operation Tick-Free Zone. Over the past few weekends I’ve been digging up that now-dead grass (about 6-8″ deep) and filling it in with gravel. It was a lot of work – all I had was a one half-sized shovel and an old wheelbarrow. with a mostly-deflated tire. Womp.

 

 

Here you can see the almost-done gravel path (foreground), the covered future garden beds (left), and the un-dug path (background, including a random stretch of grass that wasn’t smothered for some reason). I’m aiming for a solid 4-5′ wide path, taking into consideration that the geraniums (right) get pretty bushy in the summer and spill out of their bed. I’m debating transplanting some of the geraniums (gerania?) to the new garden beds flanking the gravel path. Ticks don’t like geranium scent.

This whole path-digging started when I decided to clean up this garden. I’m a terrible gardener but I figured it was within my skill set to dig up and de-weed-ify the stone border. Then I decided to just keep going and going and going. Later in the summer I’ll get some mulch and really clean up the actual garden.

I also fixed the front deck stairs. OK, not ‘fix’ exactly – I just ripped off the top stair and put the bottom one back down. They were too tall and uneven before. Better now. We’ll eventually need to redo the deck since every visit we seem to stomp through another rotted board.

Here you can really see the gravel texture – not smooth underfoot, but not terrible for now. Later in the summer I’ll order a load of stone dust for the top layer. We thought about pea gravel and pavers, but crushed stone compacts super well (aka less chance of grass poking through) and it’s easy to run the wheelbarrow across, which is a surprisingly important feature to us.

This is what it looks like now leaving the cabin. Much better! The board in the middle of the path is where I was putting cool things I dug up: broken porcelain, lots of metal bits (including two horseshoes!), and chunks of bone that are suspiciously big and human-looking. Either someone buried their dislocated, amputated limb or a blood feud between the early Irish/Scottish farmer-settlers turned ugly. We’ve been watching a lot of Death in Paradise, so as I was digging I was having all kinds of imaginary conversations with Detective Inspectors and Sergeants etc. about the bone, who it belonged to, how it got there, etc. Liam said I was ruining the crime scene.

Last one and totally unrelated: this is Emma. I made her mostly at the cabin. She’s going to be sent to Germany for my friend Lena’s soon-to-be-born baby. She’s not done yet – I’m going to try making a wild-haired wig of red curls to make sure Lena (who looks like Pippi Longstocking with a lion’s mane) knows it’s for her child.

That’s it for now! Liam is heading up again soon for another week of working from the cabin. He’s been able to get the Internet he needs through his phone, so he’s a happy camper. I prefer to work from home, so I’ll hold down the Perkins St. fort.