Summer Haze

Wow... its been a hot minute friends!! 😳

Here in Southwestern Ontario the skies are orange and filled with smoke from the forest fires up north and I feel like I'm being called to take a pause and reflect instead of just being in summer auto pilot mode. My heart aches for those closer to the fire, directly and indirectly affected. For the forest, the animals and the land. Fire spares nothing, but in its wake, the land will persevere and the healing meadow that follows will remind us all that nature will always regenerate and flourish despite setbacks.

Ok, here we go!

I'm not sure how late winter, the entirety of spring and early summer have flown by.... but here we are.

The summer season is easy for me to document through pictures but writing always gets sidelined, and so I'll try my best to catch up and stay consistent going forward. It might take a couple posts though, the last 6 months have been a wild time.

We decided in Jan/Feb that we would be expanding the homestead to include bees and turkeys. For those who do not beekeep..... the deep dive into it is intense. We spent weeks and weeks learning, discussing, choosing and then building and painting hives and learning some more only to get slapped in the face by our colonies when we actually got our bees. Haha 😄 I will expand on this journey in a separate blog post.

We also had a rough start to our meat bird journey this year too. A weasel attack took out our entire 2 week old flock in one night (50 meat chicks). This lead us to beefing up our chicken tractor set up and building skirting to go around them to stop digging predators. Although I was hesitant to start over, we did get 25 more chicks and they are doing well at about 7 weeks old now.

Arguably the best news of the last few months has been the Farm Stand flip. Last year, if you remember, I started buying old wood doors to build a farm stand for my flowers, herbs and extra produce. I still have the doors but they will be turned into another project as now I have an old chicken coop that I have been renovating for a legit cottage style farm stand. It was generously donated by my neighbour and I fell in love with it the moment he offered. At first I thought it could be used as a bee shed for all our equipment etc but the charm it had just lit up my farm stand vision and the rest is history. The project is currently ongoing and I will have to document this journey in another post as well. So stay tuned!!

On top of all of this its been a pretty steady and consistent season. The garden got expanded & planted and is starting to produce. I've been drying herbs for remedies as well as dried bouquets and I am still learning and pushing the limits of succession planting (I just planted more beans, chard, beets, squash and rutabega yesterday).

There have been many pests, predators, bee blunders and forgotten seedlings this season but we definitely also got some wins!

I'm looking forward to sharing again and making writing a consistent part of my life. (I know I say this all the time, but sometimes I just need a kick in the butt to slow down and get my adhd brain back in order. Iykyk ahah)

If you’re interested in reaching out, I'd love for you to send me a quick email and let me know where you're at this season. Has it been slow, flown by?? Are you affected by the fires? Do you keep bees? Do you just wanna say hi, even one word can spark an entire conversation worth getting into!

Talk soon!

~K