“Still Crazy After All These Years”

Early June is a demanding time for us. We still grow most of our own food in the Laurentian Mountains – a region that Barbara Kingsolver described as on the tundra in her book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. The weather has changed over the 47 years we have been caring for our soil. We fear a frost on Friday 13^th, just after this short article is uploaded to Substack. Precautions taken, it means that only after that can we actually plant beyond the protection of our small greenhouses. Back in early 2012, we sent the story below to Mother Earth News, where they honoured us under the heading Still Crazy After All These Years in their very first “Homesteaders of the Year Award,” and at the time we were the oldest of the posted participants. Our other passions have to bend around this fundamental aspect of celebrating the miracle of food coming out of our own soil and feeding us each year.

We couldn’t sleep that first night, December 21, 1978. Five months of 14-hour days building the house, seven days a week, and we were finally lying on a mattress on the floor upstairs with our baby in his crib not far away. There were no partition walls and the stairs were dangerously rudimentary, but we had achieved our first objective: to live on our own home north of Montreal on the rocky Canadian Shield, and to do it without a mortgage.

As a teenager, I had built a log cabin, ten by eleven feet, in the woods far from any roads. Since that time a road had been built closer and electric power was available although not hooked up to the cabin. With the crib on the main floor and our room in the loft, we lived in the cabin until a falling beam caught Sheila on the leg. Crutches slowed her down but she could still finish designing the house.

That first day in our new home the snow was waist-deep, but the pump wasn’t drawing. Without water it was only a larger version of the cabin.

I carried a gas-powered pump the few hundred feet down to the well, shovelled off the snow, pulled up the concrete cover and dropped the pipe in. As I poured water into the priming chamber, it froze solid. Back to the house to thaw. When I returned, I primed with rubbing alcohol. Scaling down the ladder into the well, watching as water froze on the concrete wall, I discovered we had been given a defective foot-valve.

Once we had water, the cow, the calf and the chickens moved into the log cabin. In the spring we would plant asparagus next to the septic field.

***

Two children, two grandchildren, poultry, greenhouses, four outbuildings and six gardens later, we now face the new challenges of homesteading in our sixties. A passion for chocolate, coffee and other ‘essentials’ as well as the need to feed our birds, keeps us from being self-sufficient, but between the last frost date of June 12 and the first risk of frost in early September we manage to grow everything else. Over 34 years, the chickens have helped us create real garden soil. Our red meat comes on the hoof from like-minded neighbours and the trapper trades fine wild meat for chickens, providing us the exquisite delight of beaver, moose and others. Even trout and bees have figured into our projects.

We worked off the homestead for 25 years, maintaining our gardens and never losing track of our priority, preparing for the day we could park the car and stay put. But self-reliance must fit into a greater community concept. As the years slow us down, Sheila, always the designer, conceived of the benefits of Wwoofers. Over the past five years, they have joined us from four continents – a dozen different countries. They have come to learn, teach and share, and our homestead community has joined its spirit with others around the world.

In August 2018, we celebrated our 42^nd wedding anniversary with a Wwoof reunion (choosing that anniversary as a nod to Douglas Adams). Twelve Wwoofers came from six countries beyond Canada to join us for a week-long celebration. Some brought partners, and one brought her young son. Our own grandchild immersed herself in the festivities as well. Now we also have four grandchildren, and many more Wwoof ‘grandchildren’ around the world.