Winter stared early this year. Temps dropped well before christmas and froze our ponds. Here’s some family and friends clearing off the pond to go ice skating. This was New Years Eve. It was so much fun. I think we ice skated 3 times in 4 days.

On another pond, a man who lived on that pond cleared a skating trail with his quad and a plough. A couple of bumpy spots but overall was very good.

After Christmas in the new year, temperatures started to warm up and we would get a good bit of rain. Then it would freeze and more snow would fall. In between these highs and lows, we did manage to get out for a couple of runs on the snowmobiles. Had some cook ups in the woods. Some nice!!!

Now, growing up around the bay years ago, made ya tough! If you were to go ice fishing, you did just that…out on the middle of the pond fishing away despite what weather was happening. But like I said, here on the Avalon is a lot windier, it seems. Ice fishing is not so nice with 80km/h winds in your face. I got Kristian an ice fishing shack for Christmas. I tell ya, nothing like ice fishing in a blizzard! It was great!!

Potatoes were the first thing to grow in the garden. Carrots and romain lettuce took a little bit longer. Green onion went crazy as did the peas. The peas and pumpkins were put in the garden as seedlings the day before we went on summer holidays…around July 11 I think. The pumpkins produced a flower or 2 but no pumpkins. So sad. Another year failed at the pumpkins…we won’t give up though.

Several times in the summer/fall we got to enjoy fresh veggies from the garden and share with our family and friends. So awesome!!!

Oh, and I forgot about the gladiolus me and mom planted in the spring. For anyone out there that has experience with this beauties, maybe you could help me. The instructions were to only plant the bulb in the ground about an inch or less, but my goodness…they grew over 3 feet tall and most fell over. Was I doing something wrong? And do they come back again the following year? Just wondering…they are so beautiful, but most were doing so laying on the ground or standing at a 30 degree angle!

It was hand work building this thing. The hardest I think was constructing most of the roof trusses and hand bombing them up…ugh, my forearms were some sore!! The greenhouse was really starting to take shape…but the old left over weathered lumber we had from building our house along with a few new pieces we bought, it looked a little ‘drab’. One day Kristian comes homes with this black paint (char smoke was the name I think….close enough to black) and thought we should paint it all one colour.

Great idea!! I thought it was starting to look real sharp! We even got my mom to help out when she was in visiting us from around the bay. God love her!!

Once the white windows and doors went it, everything started to pop!

Since we now have 2 green houses on the go, we had to distinguish them…so we have the small green greenhouse and this one….we called it the black green house. The name just stuck! 😉

While all of this was going on, we still maintained our garden….despite being one of the coldest damn summers we had in a very long time. The week we picked for our summer vacation to go camping at Terra Nova National Park, the warmest day was 11C!!! But there is absolutely nothing you can do about weather only move away….so if that is not an option or you don’t want to move away, suck it up and appreciate the great things you have in this life. And one of those great things is doing stuff outside without being eaten by flies!!!! And with the temps only reaching a balmy 11C, the flies were too damn cold to come out. So it was great weather for fly fishing which is one of our favourite things to do in the summer.

I still to this day haven’t caught a salmon!! But, lucky horseshoe up his butt, Kristian got one!!! We brought along our smoker this camping trip and so glad we did. That sucker went in there right away….oh my what flavour!! Life is good.

And in goes the seeds again…our little garden set up in the garage. Constantly back and forth with boiling water in the kettle for the plants. Pain in the arse, but like I’ve said…we love it, we don’t care. We started with pumpkins again this year. Thought we would give it another try to see if we could get more than 1 to grow this time. We also planted tomatoes and of course – PEAS! We didn’t start as many seeds this year. I was studying Office Management and Brokerage….trying to become a Real Estate Broker (passed my exam in June! woohoo). Working full time, trying to study and have somewhat of a life is tough….reminded me of university days.

Once the weather warmed a little, construction commenced on the greenhouse. We had all the window and door sizes wrote down everywhere and tried every which way to maximize the fixtures in the wall so that we didn’t have to use much material to fill it it. And that material is Lexan. We got it at a really good price. We didn’t need it yet so we just stored it in our garage-along with everything else we practically own-anyone else have a garage that has never had vehicle parked in it??

Kristian had the vision with it and I just helped out anyway I could. I knew the jest of what was happening but he was the brains of the operation.