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. 



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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.

They show up. How cool is that? 

I may have planted these columbines.

I might have planted them last year.

​They might have been growing for decades, regardless my interference or ambitions. 

One of the downsides of being an absentee farmer is that things happen –– and don't happen –– without our being there to witness it. 

​Sometimes we do.

Scientific name: Sapindaceae Lichi.
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Yeah, okay, I know lychee-tinis are SO 2012.  But a lychee smoothie? With vanilla almond-milk and crushed ice? 

Lychee warm from the tree, with the leathery rind splitting under the pressure of a thumb?

Or a plain frozen slurry of lychee, gobbled straight from the cup? 

Some fruits are easy: drop a loquat seed –– Japanese plum, or Eriobotrya Japonica –– into the ground and before long, you have fifteen of the things (maybe fewer if you were a more conscientious weeder, but there you go...). And likewise, buckets of the nice juicy yellow fruit. We eat them straight off the tree, bending at the waist to avoid the unavoidable sloppy drips. 

So many shirts at our house have been transformed into "work shirts" by the application of loquat juice.

Twig is also the name of a genre of decoration. Twig tables. Twig chairs. Twig frames.

Those enormous Adirondack camps, white birchbark stuff, bent willow rustic chairs? All twig.​

I picked up a reference book on the subject at the library book sale over the winter and took the instructions at face value.

And then re-measured and cut most of them again, using my trusty loppers and a measuring jig Daddo would have been proud to see.

​Precision is not my middle name, but I was quite careful.  

Even knowing that the instructions were crap, I couldn't help but bemoan the injustice of it.

​Instructions that don't.

Measuring guides that don't.

Reference that isn't.

Jeesh.  

Eventually I wandered over to the square yard or so of good cell coverage at the Would-Be Farm –– in the middle of the field –– and Googled some help. Huh. Common theme of the Amazon reviews of the book:  

It was bound to happen. While clearing trail –– it's on the to-do list whenever we first get to the Would-Be Farm –– we found a game camera that we'd forgotten all about...16K photos of waving grass. I guess that's why we lost track of the danged thing. I'll spare you.

Here are some better photos from the game cameras:

I've since became an enthusiastic customer of St. Lawrence Nurseries, where the trees are bred to survive the harshest of North Country weather.  We made sheltered havens where we've planted heirloom apples, pears, hazelnuts, elderberries, basket willows, and, the point of the blog: aronia berries.

Aronia is the formal name for what is sometimes known as a "chokeberry." (NOT a "chokecherry," btw) It's a small, hardy, brushy tree that bears dark little fruits. They are quite astringent until ripe. 

Scientific studies show that it's bursting with super-fruit power, and I'm hoping for an aronia cordial or a mixed berry pie next fall.

​It's not an easy lot, trying to be a good sapling on the Would-Be Farm. You'll have to survive lots of rain, or not enough rain, plus biblical-level plagues of insects and marauding deer. You'll get ignored and crowded by weeds for months at a time. 

​But when fruit arrives, as this aronia did this past autumn, a young sapling can expect a bit of a party.

Hurrah the Aronia!  Nice work, little fella!

​Hope you are having a decent winter up there! You'll be getting a birthday cake of fertilizer in April! Yay you!
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