the Walnut Diary

It’s been an exciting year on Young’s Hill.  The landscape has changed a bit, new toys and buildings have arrived, and we ended the year with a puzzle left to us by a surveyor in 1956.

The most prominent event in the scrapbook seems to have been the Canada-Russia gold medal game on the first day of sugar-making.  Robert Ewart’s photos of the crew chewing knuckles in the living room during the overtime period will remain in our memories as long as these remarkable photos survive online at http://www.flickr.com/photos/rewart/sets/72157623383980467/show/

Sugar making ran for five weeks at the farm.  The guests provided great entertainment during cabin fever season.  I trust Dr. Armand Leroi returned to England and the BBC without ill effects from eating venison cooked on the corner of the maple sugar arch.  Chef Matthew Swift has continued his experiments with salty pork in Toronto, winning contests on a regular basis and gaining column inches from appreciative food writers.

After sugar making Derek Dunfield dropped in to help pour the garage floor, then headed for Boston to post-doctoral studies in behavioural economics at MIT.  Charlie and Roz are at Derek’s on a Christmas shopping expedition as I write this.

Martin and Charlie came back to put up the trusses after Bet and I lifted the wall panels into place with the tractor.  Putting the roof on was a grind, but the rest of the garage project has gone well.  Along the way Bet assumed the role of event photographer, and to her delight Howie Crichton ran one of her shots in the Review-Mirror.  Bet had joined the rest of the gang as a published photographer.

In late April Jane McCann and her crew planted 8000 new seedlings at various locations around the property in a single frenetic day.  These little trees provided many happy hours of mowing last summer, and the excuse to buy yet another diesel tractor.

On the subject of gardens, the toy-of-the-summer had to be the ancient Troy-Bilt tiller I found near Peterborough.  As long as I followed the 180 page manual’s advice and walked one row over from where it tilled, the machine created a “dust mulch” on the surface which weeds seemed unable to pierce.  For the first time in memory the garden remained quite neat throughout the year without extraordinary efforts on Roz’s part, hand-weeding.

This summer the raccoons did not raid the corn patch.  At the time I credited the electric fence, but in retrospect it was probably the family of coyotes defending their field adjoining the garden.  Petless dog lovers are easy marks for young coyotes, and Erin and her two siblings kept us amused all summer with their antics in the field and nocturnal concerts.

Just before it got cold we poured a second concrete slab for Charlie’s workshop.  All of the Kingston crew were in the fall-madness phase of their working year, so we had some tricky scheduling to do.  Graduate students seem to have the most flexibility, so Martin and Jess showed up to help Charlie and me with the initial pour.  Jess had earlier impressed me with her construction smarts while shingling Martin’s roof in Kingston.  At the farm she gave an excellent account of herself with shovel, rake, and trowel, as well.  But she and Martin had classes in the afternoon, and Charlie had a meeting in Toronto, so they had to leave before we were finished.  So Rob Ewart came to lift the power trowel onto and off the slab and do the hand finishing.  Rob’s massive strength came in very handy that afternoon, as we couldn’t get the concrete to set up to where it would support the trowel.  It took many tries, but then late in the afternoon the mix set and smoothed up to Charlie’s specifications.  The frame and roof can wait until spring.

Last August for the first time I left the farm to do an interview for this column.  The day on Michael Ignatieff’s bus had to be my highlight of the year. In person the Ignatieffs are a delightful couple, and I greatly enjoyed the day as part of their entourage.

Since its first adventure at the Santa Claus Parade in Westport last year, the Ranger has dutifully performed in seven more parades, culminating in the season’s finale in Merrickville this coming Saturday.   Marjory Loveys and her husband Tony Capel have become adept at decorating the long-suffering brute. Evening parades mean the decorations have to go on and come off in the dark.  Hours of idling in line are the hidden cost of parade participation.  After the snow for the Mallorytown parade last Sunday, Marjory sent me an email: “The decorations are spread out to dry all over the basement floor.”  Tough work, politics.

Transfer of the title to the farm meant a look through deeds, PIN diagrams, and a treasure we discovered in a file in Smiths Falls, a 1956 survey of the property.  Then I tried to make sense of the documents with the help of Google Earth software.  Over three days of puzzling, the surveyor Mr. Berkeley’s work has gone from bewildering to puzzling, to generally competent, but with a couple of gaps or errors which need correction.   Maybe in a couple of more days it will all make sense, if the snow hasn’t covered the iron bars by then.