So the winter season is upon us again. Only for all the love I get out of gardening, winter would be my favourite season. But here on the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland, the snow isn’t consistent, it doesn’t usually stay very long. Could be a blizzard with 50+cms then it normally turns off to rain because temperatures rise. All that snow starts to melt a little and with the rain makes it very slushy. Then, as it usually happens, the temperatures fall and all that slush turns to ice!!! It turns out for a very big MESS! No wonder a lot of people hate the winters here. I don’t remember these type of winters growing up around the bay in Central Newfoundland. Then again, that was 20 something years ago…our global climates are changing. Not sure about warming….I saw somewhere that on average NL was one of the coldest places on earth last year. Don’t quote me on that 😉

This year, we upgraded our ’91 and ’82 machines to a couple in the 2000’s. We got a good deal of the Grand Touring, a Vmax and an enclosed trailer for $3000!!! We did this at night. The next day we realized the Vmax didn’t have reverse. Now I didn’t have reverse on the Phazer either but if you needed to turn around, you could just pick up the arse of her and flick it around in the trail. This thing weighs a tonne (…or is it ton?). Ha anyways, we had to sell it. So, we sold it and bought a Polaris 550 Classic Touring. I think its a 2003. Don’t matter, it works AND has reverse. I never had a snowmobile with reverse before, I felt rich! We also fixed up and sold the trailer too for a super price. We already had an enclosed trailer from a couple of years ago. It was all good.

We had a decent winter that year. Got to try out our “new” machines a few times. This one evening I was noticing that my machine was a little “boggy” when we were going slower in the trails…almost shutting off. But when we got to the open fields, I’d give her the gas and she flew. I am a careful driver and when we would get to the open fields, I would carefully drive around it first to see what the lay of the land was like. Making sure there weren’t any big rocks or anything like that. When I seen what it was like, I would drive around it fairly fast, making sharp turns, stuff like that…just having fun. Well back to this particular evening when my machine was acting weird when driving slow, it was really getting on my nerves! Sometimes it WOULD shut off. Anyways when I did get out into the open field (one that I hadn’t checked out yet) I gave her the gas and passed everyone I was with! I came upon a spot that looked like a couple of small trees and a rock under the snow so I kept to the right of it a bit. Within seconds I was airborne!!! I didn’t see the big gaping hole about 12′ wide and about 8-10′ deep until I was upon it. I didn’t try to steer away I knew I would flip. I didn’t try to break, I knew I would end up in the hole so I just kept going. I almost made it too….Dukes of Hazard style, but I guess the weight of the machine and gravity brought me down a bit before clearing to the other side. The machine hit the other edge of the hole and tossed me like a rag doll. The machine kept going another 30′ or 40′. Everyone came over quickly as they all seen what happened. I knew I was hurt but nothing too serious. My right knee hurt a bit as did my left middle finger. I realized why….my knee hit the reverse handle and cracked it right off (I now use my reverse with a thick string to get it to work) and my hand went through the windshield. I took off my glove and seen I had the top nearly torn off! But with lots of Polysporin and good bandaging it healed up perfectly! I tried to continue the ride that night but I was a bit shaken so we headed back home. It did not stop me from going again though. I just love it so much!!

We did get to experience snowmobiling on the west coast of NL this particular winter. We rented proper machines for this place. You do a lot of mountain riding and there is a lot of powder. You need the right machine to get through it and handle the climbs. Real fancy schmancy machines. I used to make fun of them as I thought they looked funny. But once I tried it, I totally took back everything I said about them. THEY ARE AMAZING! Going through the powder is like riding a seadoo in the water. If you ever get an opportunity to snowmobile on the west coast of Newfoundland, you really should do it!!! You won’t be disappointed. But get someone who’s been there before to show you where to go. You could get lost!!

So, temperatures are starting to warm up a bit and its time to move all of our crop out of the garage, into the green green house and into the pots. Everything was doing well. The pumpkins, peas (as I’ve mentioned before), tomatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, green onion, chives, and peppers all sprouted and some already transplanted. We had a good growth on them until one very windy rainy morning. I hadn’t made it in to the office yet this particular morning. I had some work to do on my computer before I headed in. I had my hair all curled, makeup on and all dressed up in my business skirt suit. I was sitting in my office (spare bedroom) when I heard a crash. Looked out the window to the backyard and the green greenhouse had blown down. MY BABIES!!! I ran so fast, to get out to see the damage. By the time I made it to the plants I was soaked! Curls all gone, panty hose torn… I didn’t care. It’s funny now, but I was almost crying then. I stayed out there trying to very gingerly pick up every single plant and put back into every single pot. The pumpkins were already transplanted before this so they were ok. As were most of the peas and some tomatoes. The green onion and chives rebounded. The broccoli, cauliflower and peppers didn’t make it. It was a sad day.

The wind here is unbelievable! I wish this province would use some of this wind for energy. There’s got to be a way for us to benefit from this!!! Anyways, I thought there must be a way to secure this green house to the ground better. I did what I could and it worked but it was frustrating always trying to fix it up and each windy day kept trying to knock it down. Stressed out at work on windy days wondering if everything was tipped over again. Oh my!

One day  Kristian comes home with a boat load of damaged windows and doors! Big smile on his face…..”I thought these would be great for a greenhouse!!” Woohooooo! I was so excited. We won’t have to worry about our little Costco greenhouse blowing down anymore! Once we sized up the windows and doors, we designed our future greenhouse…a permanent structure. It was towards the end of August when we got the permit to build one and we were on our way. September 6 at 8am, up the road we went to get our concrete. Buy 1pm, we had our footings poured for our new 10’ x 14’ greenhouse!!!

So excited! Once the concrete dried, we only put the bottom plate on all around and 1 and half walls. That was it for this year. We already had another project on the go….our back deck. We moved into our home in June of 2013 and by December 2014 we still weren’t finished the deck…its a big deck. I think 18′ x 24′. We did finish our home by moving day but the outside was total roughness. No paved driveway, no deck, no landscaping. We put all our money into the house. So all of those things had to wait. We didn’t care. We were in our home and have the rest of our lives to finish outside.

I think it was around the end of March, early April when we started that years crop. Everything from seed again (this time in the garage on a couple of camping tables).  It is very rewarding to have it grow right from the seed you planted and also, you know everything that went it to the growing. We don’t like to use any chemicals whatsoever. We continually boil the kettle to give better water to our plants. We didn’t always do it. It was very time consuming. We later figured out a better way to water our plants, but at this time, we boiled the kettle.

We found that it can get pretty costly to be buying those kits for starting seeds as we wanted to plant several different types of seeds. So we tried different things to be a little more resourceful. We cut up paper towel and toilet paper rolls and placed them in last years plastic trays and the rest on a board. I used a small piece of OSB that was left over from building our home and continued to plant some Peas and Morning Glorys in these little things.

Well, when it was time for transplanting, I realized this was a bad idea…the roots of the Morning Glorys had grown into the board. I couldn’t pull them out, I was afraid I was going to tear the root. So, I planted the whole darn board in the ground hoping that they would continue to flourish. They didn’t! They did grow a little bit longer, but eventually died.

The peas worked out good though. I transplanted them into bigger pots right away. They grew so friggin fast, I was amazed!! Peas became my favourite thing to grow…probably because its super easy, but mostly because they amaze me with their little vines and how they grab ahold of anything to stabilize themselves. Blows me away.

This was the year that we started our vegetable garden in our backyard. We purchased some organic soil at the local farm to add to our mixture of dirt we got from the woods next to our house. We have a screen that we sift the dirt to get rid of the rocks and stuff…and boom-beautiful dirt. We added some manure to it too…stinky but so worth it. Oh and all the pots that we had the previous year for all of our planting was dumped into this garden as well. I must say, it turned out pretty good for us.

We made 5 drills. Planted 2 types of potatoes – white and yukon gold, turnip, orange carrots and coloured carrots.

For those who lived in Newfoundland and Labrador in 2014 will all remember too well….#DarkNL. Practically everyone experienced some power outages. And some poor souls went without power for hours at a time in one of the coldest winters we’ve had in a long time. Here in this province, our weather can go from a beautiful summer’s day to having 10cm of snow. But this was a tough winter.

This one day during a blizzard, we experienced temperatures at around -25C with the wind chill. We have a basement apartment and try to keep the driveway clear of snow as often as we can. I managed to quickly take a snap of Kristian snow blowing our driveway that day. The clouds cleared a little tiny bit for a few short minutes and the sun blasted out. It was the weirdest thing to see in a blizzard!

The driveway got cleared but only for a short time, it quickly drifted in again. So, we waited until the storm had passed to do anymore snow blowing/shovelling. We got a lot of snow that day!!

We absolutely love the winter season and getting a big dump of snow like this.  The cats don’t like it so much though. But we enjoy it to the fullest. Snow shoeing, down hill skiing, snowmobiling, ice skating, sliding (tobogganing), building snow forts, etc….there’s just so much to do.

Here’s a pic of our snowmobiles we picked up for very cheap…1991 Yamaha Phazer and a 1982 Citation SS. Both were extremely fast machines. You may laugh, but they gave us great joy…we used these beauties for 3 winters, then upgraded to something in the early 2000’s.

I wanted to show you a little of what our winters are like here in Newfoundland and what we do when we’re not gardening, farming, harvesting for the rest of the year.

Ok! Let’s see how this goes. My first blog. I am a Realtor (nearly 13 years)…however, gardening and photography has ALWAYS been my passion. Not that I’m not passionate about my career, I love it!! But, I feel my true creativity and love for something that I do is with nature and capturing it on ‘film’. I’ve taken 2 photography courses in the past with my 35mm camera and did take some really nice shots too (so I think) but never did go anywhere with that passion. Over the years I kept at gardening…flowers and shrubs. But 3 years ao, hubby and I, decided to try and grow some tomatoes. We picked up this cute little greenhouse from Costco and placed it in the 360sqft concrete pad of a backyard at our semi-detached home. We used to chuckle as we often referred to it as the green greenhouse – yes, we are nerds.

So, we got some dirt and planted everything by seed…tomato, peppers, dill weed (I heard this was a good fly repellant), chives and sunflowers. We did do pretty good with it. The tomato plants grew well and they yielded a fair number of small tomatoes. The pepper plants grew pretty good too but not much of a harvest. Just one or 2 little tiny ones. Dill weed did fantastic and I think they did keep some flies away. Hard to tell, we get so many!! Chives did great. And the sunflowers did awesome. I read that they attract earwigs so, we kept them on the back of the property away from the house and garden…just in case. Well, that was the last year I grew sunflowers. Earwigs love them!!!! And I don’t like earwigs.  What I did like, was going out to the garden in the mornings. The fragrances were so fresh. We would cut chives and dill weed, bring them in the house and cook with the scrambled eggs. THAT smell going through the house was so delicious!!!

So, let me back up a little….in the spring of 2013, we were in the process of just finishing up the build of our new home during evenings and weekends as we both have full-time jobs.  And we added growing a little farm on top of our busy lives. But its something we both wanted to do. Plus, sometimes vegetables can become very costly at the grocery store!! So, thought we’d give it a shot on a very teeny scale, save a few dollars at the supermarket plus its very relaxing, therapeutic!

The end of June was moving day for us, plants and all. The green greenhouse was set up in the middle of the back yard along with some small raised planters we built and purchased some pots at the dollar store. I was so in love with our little garden. It was an amazing feeling. We were completely addicted. And it just kept getting better.

I hope you do continue following our site. I never really thought I’d be doing this but I must say, I’m really enjoying it. I cannot wait to share our gardening experiences since we started in 2013 up to today. AND to show you how we got our name, the Black Greenhouse!