You know how it goes. Everything peaceful and chill.

Maybe the iPod is playing the soundtrack from Hamilton. Perhaps you're watching Rabbit TV (a limited lineup, but endlessly entertaining).  Maybe you're cooking on the newly functional propane stove. Anyway, it's relaxed.

When EEEEEEEEEE. and EEEEEEEEE. and EEEEEEEE!

The noise is designed to either wake you from a sound sleep or possibly drive you in-freaking-sane.

​ Whichever. It works.  

Okay, you you press the reset button. Two minutes later –– just as the old heart-rate is returning to normal –– EEEEEEEEE!  and EEEEEEEEEEE!

My handsome gallant saves us, holding a thumb over the button repeatedly. It becomes clear that the damn 10-years-guaranteed, never-needs-batteries, save-your-life-and-required-by-law has gone rogue. It will not stop alerting us.

It EEEEEEEs in the bathroom. It EEEEEEEEs outdoors.

Jeff eventually puts it into the van, so it could, as he said, "Simmer down."

All during dinner, an errant wind gave us brief hope, and then, faintly, EEEEEEEEE. and EEEEEEEE.

Dishes done (in a sink! with running hot and cold water! cabin life is better and better!), Jeff betakes himself off and the next thing I notice is that he's taken out the 50-year-old .22 his father gave him.

Whatcha doing? I ask.

He points, and I hear a faint EEEEEEing across the field.  He's put the damn thing into a tree. I admire the dispatch with which he handles tech troubles. 

A clean through-and-through, and by golly the thing has stopped EEEEEEEing.  

​The test button suggests that it's still working, but I'm taking it back to the local hardware store where we bought it.

​I don't mind explaining why.

It's a very good Scrabble day when I can play "jonquil."

Be that as it may, my sweet mother-in-law calls them jonquils, and when she proposed a big honking field of them at the Would-Be Farm, I said heck yeah!  

​Pat is a wonderful gardener, and even in her early 80s, she can out-shop, out-weed, and out-sew me pretty much any day of the week. So when she said she wanted Jeff and me to be reminded of her each spring at the Would-Be Farm, I enlisted her actual aid.

Long story short, we ordered something like 200 bulbs from Holland last fall. Thank you John Scheepers.  We hopped a plane (back in the days when people did that kind of thing without thinking about it much) once the package arrived in the North Country.

We made a girl's weekend of it, staying at my sister's civilized house, eating yummy meals, and playing dominoes at the end of the day.

And we flew South, happy but full of anticipation and the usual worries: Would squirrels eat the bulbs? Would the plants freeze to death?  Would deer eat the bulbs? Would an early thaw fool the plants? 

Springtime is brutal on hopes.  When bright flowers do indeed rise from the cold clay -- oh glory.  

We started on this Would-Be Farm adventure with the idea of novelty: new experiences are meant to  keep our brains nimble and what-not. The effort of tackling a fresh set of challenges would be good for us. 

Such as driving a tractor and putting fruit trees into the ground and helping them grow roots. 

Such as returning to the North Country where I grew up and re-learning that country environment. Plus introducing Jeff to some exotic charms: a bullhead fry, turkey hunting, snow. 

​Knowing that, unlike actual farmers, our livelihood and future is not on the line when the dam busts and the crops fail.  

So, round about January of each of the past five years, seed catalogs begin to sprout in my mailbox. Deals from on-line nurseries pop up like weeds. Calls to branch out into new crops... I won't belabor the metaphor any more than I can...bear. Muah ha ha.

Round about April, it's become our happy habit to make our ways North. I try to get there in time for my sister's birthday early in the month, and Jeff generally follows after sailing Charleston Race Week. We usually get a snowstorm or two, maybe an ice-storm, just to remind us that we are mere tourists in the North Country.

It's too early for planting in early April, and it's more than a bit nippy –– though we do have a WOOD STOVE this year! 

Still, even with a crochet throw of snow, you can see the rocky bones of the land early in early spring. And it's an exciting few weeks while plants wake up out of the cold clay and yawn hope into the landscape.

We're not sure when we'll get there this year. What with the Pandemic and all. Of course I ordered plants before COVID-19 was no more than a small cloud on the horizon.

I can't resist those colorful packets of optimism that promise poppies, lupins, chamomile. Plus garlic and seed-potatoes (thrifty hint: if your potatoes sprout in the fridge, put them in the ground --  you'll generally get a smallish bonus harvest a few months later instead of adding to the landfill).

And, because the larger fruit have not flourished under our neglectful stewardship, I have ambitions for Chinese chestnut trees, red currents, bush-cherries, and yet more elderberries. Although elderberries are not a favored deer browse according to experts, empirical evidence suggests that some deer will "sample" an elderberry bush to within inches of its life. 

As with so much recently, we'll just have to wait and see. We'll shelter in place and I'll let my farming daydreams slide me along a little longer. I'm not complaining. 

Ah, mulch.

Mulch is the collective noun for material that evolves into actual soil. It's organic material (leaves! bark! wood-chips!) that gets defined by function: it's used to protect tender plants, and add good stuff to the soil.  By etymology, it comes from a word for "soft."

​Wood chips are my preferred mulch at the Farm.

It's super-neat-o how it works: you apply a layer of wood chips around the base of your plant.

​It smothers weeds and –– rather faster than you might imagine –– the mulch turns into rich, light soil in a sweet ring around around young fruit trees and asparagus. 

The mulch provides extra insulation over the winter, and gives emerging plants a little additional opportunity to stay safe in the chancy spring weather. ​

Where else to pitch coffee grounds and carrot peelings and used chicken bedding from the neighbors' coop?

​Where else to pile grass clippings and weeds?

I took an actual composing class a few years ago. I'm not an expert, though I am a believer.  Long story short: a smart gardener just keeps heaping stuff onto the compost pile, turning it from time to time, and using the finished, good-looking stuff from the bottom of the pile to improve the soil under the plants.

Lucky for my trees, a friend had an enormous pile of chipped tree –– the remains of a big ole maple –– to share for mulching purposes.

Truckload by squatting truckload, we've conveyed chips to the farm over the past couple of years. I used square yards of it to coddle my young trees and the asparagus.  A few chips made it into the compost heap, along with mule-loads of grass clippings and eggshells. 

Alas, all good things come to an end.  Even the remains of a big ole maple. 

With chips thin on the ground that autumn, I toted a couple of bales of straw to the farm to bed things down for the winter.  

Always an experiment.  

​I figured straw was a better option than hay.

The terms are used interchangeably by some: after all, both are some sort of dry vegetation that come packaged in bale form and are used in animal husbandry.  

But straw (like the plastic ones we now think of first), is generally the hollow, dry, stalk of an oat or wheat plant. The middle of the plant. Hay, meanwhile, is the tops of various grasses and plants ––  cut green and allowed to dry. Hay might include clover, timothy, broom, alfalfa, and any manner of meadow plants.

Naturally, hay is full of flower-heads. Any gardener will tell you, the point of flowers is seed. So if you aim to smother weeds (and weeds are just plants growing where you don't want them to grow), you do NOT want to spread flower-heads around.

Ipso dipso facto macto, you'd think straw would be a pretty solid choice to protect plants and not compete with the resources at root...

Surprise surprise surprise.

​The wheat straw made a miraculous rise from the cold soil this spring.

Wheat is a lovely crop. I am not knocking wheat. I'm good with gluten, and I admire wheaten gold waving on an autumn field.  

​But as a crop, it's not a good match for the Would Be Farm. Or a good mulch. I'm guessing it will continue to pop up around my daffodils and plum trees for years. Probably not enough, however, for even a single loaf of artisanal, hand-ground-grain bread.

I vowed not to be caught chipless again.  I've been checking Craig's List a little too regularly. So far, none of the chippers are just right for our needs.  

In the parlance of our friend Curt, the going rate for a pickup truck-load of dark brown landscaper's friend is a pizza and a half.  ​

​I'd rather have the pizza and make my own dang chips, but as Mumsie used to say, if wishes were horses, and horses could fly, there'd be nothing but horses in the sky... 

As it happens, the husband is connected to parents of classmates of ours.

And their daughter-in-law? Turns out she is my vacationing real-estate agent/high-school classmate. We trespassed on her land.

Hours later, our unexpected hosts raid my real-estate agent’s fridge for beer and my sister gets them to take pictures of the two of us in the ATV, playing with my real-estate agent's dog, and lounging on the porch with our purloined beers.

Those photos of us having our disreputable way with other people's porches, off-road recreational vehicle, and beer might possibly have been taken on an early cell phone that was unable to resist water when it went swimming.

But maybe one of those images will resurface, possibly on the tee-shirt of one of the great-grand nephews or nieces, who will point to it while trespassing and say, "Perhaps you know these two characters? Our aunts?"

And here's hoping it will parlay into a free pass, a tour, an anecdote. 

As some visitors have noticed, I have been away from the keyboard. Thank you for coming back after the long, not-planned hiatus.

Turns out that when you have a wedge of time to work on a dried-in (squeeeee!) building, you make use of every waking moment to work on said dried-in (squeeeee!) building.

And what about that "building"?  Is it a cabin? A camp? A cottage?

We're going to try calling it the Woodbee.  Maybe a twee moniker option, but there is sits, a 600-square-foot building in the midst of the Would-Be Farm. The Woodbee. Buzz buzz.

I'll return to other topics of interest: Mr. Linton's fishing and sailing adventures, for instance, and what books I am currently reading, but not quite yet...

My miniature shingled cottage sits unfinished –– without him it wasn't much fun –– but Daddo and I used his power planer to make itty-bitty hardwood floors, and we constructed nifty little jigs and clamps scaled to handle the delicate woodwork of the house. He helped me fabricate plaster fieldstones for the chimney. We had a ball.
 
At one point, when I had decided to scoot the dormer windows of the cottage a fraction closer together, Daddo looked at me and said, "You're going to make a contractor tear out his hair."

Not exactly a life goal, but...

I like to think I know my mind, but the thing is, it's hard to visualize construction until it's up... 

We returned to the Would-Be Farm in June and were not disappointed to see progress.

The trusty stone-quarry guy had installed a nice gravel driveway right up to the build, including culverts and a sweet level parking area that will be ideal for our friends with motorhomes.

And by the beard of mighty Hephaestus himself, the contractor and his gang were busily putting in trusses.

Ahhh. Trusses. With trusses, a girl can visualize what the place is going to look like...

So when planning a big capital improvement –– like a cabin! Squee! –– to your Would Be Farm, let me suggest scheduling it around a year without record-breaking floods. 

Of course, given the state of the world, that might be too much to ask. 

Not that we know any different: we arrived at the Would-Be Farm in April hoping that the contractor was going to surprise us with a big serving of progress at the build.

​He's been a little stingy with photos, and while neither my favorite skipper nor I actually speculated aloud, we'd cherished hopes. 

Instead, the spring was wet. Like twice the amount of rain as usual. Crazy high water on the mighty St. Lawrence River. All doubling down on mud season.

The mud situation was kind of dramatic. Deeper than the hubs on the contractor's big work-truck. Deep enough to engulf muck boots. Deep.

I grant you, the contractor had kind of spaced the part where we said, Hey, you might want to have the gravel guy put the driveway in first thing.

​So that was –– what's the word? –– frustrating.  

​But the remedy was easy enough: apply cash and earth-moving equipment to the problem.  Only, well, we'd have to wait for the mud to dry up a little. And it kept raining. Lefty-loosey righty-tighty, Mother Nature.

Meanwhile, the build was stalled. Subfloor in place. A few walls tacked into place. But no roof because no trusses. No trusses of course because, you know, mud. And no workers because no trusses.

​As anyone might guess, a Wizard-of-Oz style windstorm came next.

At one point in the middle of the night, a mighty whomping noise –– like an enormous, damp pterodactyl shaking off sleep –– arose.  Snugged under covers in our bunk at Base Camp, we speculated that the blue tarp was taking the whole build off to see the wizard.

But come sun rise, the build was still there, flapping but solid. 

By the end of the month at the Farm, we learned to keep our eyes averted from that end of the field. "It'll be great when it's done," we reminded each other, "They will get to it when they get to it." 

We had plenty of springtime chores –– clearing trail, working on the gazebo, making cool chairs –– to keep us occupied. But still. 



​

Oh, they say, peering in from the doorway and sniffing gingerly. Oh, I see.

Base Camp –– a slightly tarted up camper-trailer that's perched on a bluff at the Would-Be farm –– has served our housing needs with economy.  Five years into this adventure, the initial cost and renovations make Base Camp work out to something like $250 a year.  ​​

Well, a couple of things, but the one thing about which I shall complain this day?

An elderly camper trailer has very little insulative chutzpah. Wind whistles through the windows. When it's chilly, an optimist would call it excellent sleeping weather.

But in the morning, when the time comes to emerge from that cozy nest of down-filled comforters, hot-water bottles, and wool blankets?

We've lived through a large home improvement project, but we never hired someone to build from scratch before. Or at this kind of long distance.  

It proves a predictably nerve-wracking experience.
 
​I send a check and got a description of the new well (420 feet deep! Dang!) and the pump. Months pass.

​The contractor is abstemious with the photos, which might be a strategy for managing his customers.

I send a cheerful, encouraging text: "Don't be afraid to send photos, even if nothing is going on!"
The contractor replies "K!"  And maintains radio silence. 

For a Christmas present, my sister takes a field trip to the site and snaps some photos.  

Late in January, the contractor sends an exciting visual update:

The suspense! The planning! Ooo la la.