L2O2 » » Our Garden

Marcelin Quarter er, Stewart Quarter, or what about L2 Lake & Land?

Lynn — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 14:59:54 +0000

We have this quarter section an hour north of Saskatoon, about 10 miles from the town of Marcelin. It has 60 acres of lake, 60 acres of cultivated land and the remaining 40 acres are lakeshore and forest or bush (all approximate). No buildings, almost nothing for discarded farm equipment (we did find a short section of disks and a small frame just beside a field) and no ruins. All good features if you ask me. We can start from scratch with where to locate any buildings we might want and there isn’t anything for clean up that needs doing. But we don’t exactly know where the quarter starts and finishes exactly. It would be good to get that established … make sure we have the right lake!

Could be next summer we build a tent platform and spend some weekends camping out there. Living on, and walking about the land would help us decide where exactly we want to build ‘Stoneview’, a small octagonal cordwood/masonry cottage. We can dream! We can also build an outhouse for starters …

Click here to go to a Google map!!! This link may give you an idea of where we are. The lake in the middle with the little penninsula is ours. I would say it looks like polar bear that is upside down?

Fall Colours

Lynn — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 05:25:29 +0000

While we don’t live in the eastern part of Canada where there are brilliant reds and oranges in the fall, we have, for a northern and western part of the country, had a beautiful fall. The cotoneaster hedge in the garden has been a beautiful red for almost a month. And these past two weeks, the current shrub by the address sign has had a lovely colouration that I find most fascinating!

Even our temperatures have been reasonable. Only two mornings with hard frosts back in early September and then the mildest of temperatures ever since. Granted, when it rained last weekend in Whitehorse, there was snow in the mountains around us.

We have started to clean up the gardens, but are really reluctant to get too carried away when there are still flowers to enjoy. They aren’t here for a long time so why chop them down just to get ready for winter? That will arrive when it does and if the flowers die then, well, spring clean up will be the next opportunity won’t it!

Clean up and Composting

Lynn — Mon, 05 Sep 2005 02:41:05 +0000

This is a very sad time in the garden. Plants start to die back, fragrant flowers aren’t fragrant anymore, the bees quit visiting, birds vanish, flowers fade and fall off, leaves turn yellow and brown or maybe red if we are lucky.

So it is time to roll up sleeves and trim things back, mulch a few more tender plants, feed the mulcher/leaf shredder and build a second compost pile. We used to always scrub out the terra cotta pots and bring them inside to the basement for the winter. Two winters ago though, we emptied the pots as soon as they started looking sad early in September and put them into the shed to dry out thoroughly before the frosty season got started. We haven’t had a single pot break yet so I’m thinking that they only break if there is moisture in the pot when freezing temperatures arrive. I’m sure this would be the right time to say which plants did exceptionally well and what needs to be moved, but I think I need to ponder this a bit more. Maybe next week I’ll be more definitive than what I feel right now!

Zone 2?

Lynn — Sat, 02 Jul 2005 00:05:32 +0000

We love gardening! And it is a challenge here in this zone 2 part of the world. We can grow many zone 3 perennials, but they often don’t thrive and reproduce like they do in places further south. Our soil is very sandy so there aren’t drainage problems, on the other hand the nutrients are nonexistent or unavailable. So making compost in our backyard is good for the local landfill and our garden. We also happily go fetch horse manure once a year as well. The big thing you will notice is that though we have a very short season, we also have major sunlight hours. As our cousin Martha would say … it’s a good thing!