Oh it's a fun filled weekend indeed.

Early Saturday morning we were off for a Pot Party. No, not the brain addled kind. Rather the ones where you take multiple plants, split them up and pop them into pots. The Garden Club, which seems to be spearheaded by the Millers, a nice couple originally from Ontario but who now live here, breeding lilies, each year, has a fund raiser whereat they sell off potted plants that are donated by the members. The pot party is the prelude to that where all the little shoots get dunked into their new temporary homes. I sure hope that folks like hostas because I think that we spit up and potted over 60 of them.

Back on the home front we have more or less finished the raised garden beds. All we are looking for now is the garden soil which I will have trucked in as soon as we get our next paycheque. In the meantime we have planted the six day lilies that we got from the Millers and marked out the spots where we will be planting the peach trees. Yep. Peach trees! Apparently the climate here is suitable to raise peach trees. But there's no such thing as Global Warming.

We also are on the prowl for some wine grape vines. I want to replace the decorative vines along one of our borders with wine grapes and I am planning two different ways to do it. First, we will plant the root, but secondly I plan to cu way back the existing vine and use its root structure to graft the new vine onto. Then in, oh, five to six years, we will be harvesting grapes to make wine. Grapes, too, grow well here, but our biggest challenge will be to keep the birds and racoons off them once they are approaching ripeness, and if we want enough to use ourselves we have to punt them off.

Our friend Ian has stirred the curiosity pot about property boundaries and we were out with the tape measure, measuring off from the available survey points. The thing about old towns like this one is that houses built 100 to 250 years ago were built before they hammered in the steel markers so we have some of them overhanging the town streets, some of them were built a little skewed, and, indeed, some of the survey markers were not where they were supposed to be according to the deeds. Makes for interesting discussions with the neighbours. In our case it turns out that the fence down one side of our yard is positioned too far into the neighbours and on the other side it is too much into ours. What fun! Fortunately we are on good terms with both and we really don't care, but our friend Ian has found that one of the back parkers is off by as much as five feet, so he wasn't too happy. There is an old saying that good fences make good neighbours, so I guess a corollary would be that bad fences cause confusion.

Hiatus on the Hard 2011-?

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Here we are at the end of the week and already we have next week all set up. We are taking the MoHo and new propane tank in for certification on Tuesday night and we will continue on into Halifax and RNSYS to work on Nelleke and get her ready for launch. Hurrah! Salt spray soon to be in my face again! I figure that half of Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday should be enough since we did a lot of it last summer when we brought her out. Then, probably the following weekend, we will bring her down to Shelburne, weather permitting, and put her on a mooring in front of the yacht club. Sigh! At least we will be able to get out on weekends for trips and in the evenings for work aboard. On any day that might not be weather enabling we can do more work on the house and garden.

This weekend the Shelburne Harbour Yacht Club will be putting in the docks and mooring field. One more step. Tonight there will be a dinner at the club accompanied by numerous libations and jocularity all round. We might go.

Speaking of the garden, we have the raised beds pretty much done. All we are waiting for now is the next payday so we can afford to get the gardening soil to put in them. We have a large one for veggies and a smaller but triangular and two layered for herbs and such.

We have also been drawn into a measuring chore for the depth of our property. Certainly this is a far cry from our life aboard where our property was measured by the dry bits between the stem and stern.

Shorter one today. Bye!

Hiatus on the Hard 2011-?

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G'day all. My head was nodding so I feel like blogging.

First things first: Barb`s recover has made a great stride forward. Instead of going up the stairs dragging her new knee behind her and lowring it ahead of her on the way down, she is now, albeit slowly, walking up and down the stairs one foot in front of the other in normal fashion. In fact she has directed me to make her a single one step so she can practice in place. Progress! Hurrah! She needs to have her new knee in good shape so they can get to work on the other this fall. This whole process has been a learning experience for both of us but obviously more direct involvement from her. It is very interesting to see just how long the recovery process actually does take. One thing that we have discussed is that if for some reason her second knee surgery is delayed it won`t stop our departure in the fall of 2013. All it will mean is that we may have our cruise cut short if we need to pop back for her second knee installment. We`ll zip home, she`ll have the hack and chop, spend a few months getting back in shape and then back to Nelleke. We may have to arrange the schedule a bit and have the old girl (Nelleke, I mean, not Barb) up on the hard a little longer, but it`s all doable.

If you have been following the comment postings from the post a few days back you will see that our pals Jim from Connecticut and Duane from Punta Gorda, Florida have fed the fires of my excitements and angst about missing the cruising lifestyle through tales and recommendations about fishing. Jim has even gone so far as to offer to mail me a crab trap. This is kindness to the extreme and if he is able to do that I think that I will take his design and replicate it a couple of times so that when we are sitting on the hook in the Chesapeake we can have a couple or three of the little traps out trying to snare dinner. I have eaten King Crab legs so I know how to go about that, and the claws from Stone Crabs, I think they're called that our pal Snoozer caught for us in Florida so I know how to prepare that, but these smaller crabs that have smaller claws and not much to the legs that you get in the Chesapeake, does anyone know how you prepare them? I have been in a processing plant up here where they have machines to sweep out whatever meat is in the body and squeeze out the tiny little threads of meat in the legs, but is that what you do on your dinner plate? If we aren't going to be able to eat them I'd just as soon not catch and kill them for nothing.

On our last trip south when we stopped at Canaveral one of the Florida Fish and Wildlife guys told us about catching shrimp at night and how relatively easy it was. Apparently all you need is a dip net and a strong light, the latter to attract them to the surface and the former to scoop them out. Oh, and you need a large bucket to put them in. He told us that the locals do it from the shore and can easily fill up a five gallon container with the little devils. I don't think that we would take that many. More likely we would toss back all but the larger and only hang on to about five pounds or so which we would bag in half pound lots and toss in the freezer. That would make ten meals for us. No need to be greedy.

The propane tank has been installed in the MoHo and we are expecting the radiator to be repaired today so we should have the lawn ornament back either today or tomorrow. Since we are doing all sorts of work in the back yard for which I need space and a flat surface lay down area, our friend and neighbour Ian has offered to allow us to park the MoHo up on his project house on the next street which is very kind of him and most useful.

Tonight I will be planting some daylilies that Barb and I bought from the local Garden Club and finishing off the construction phase of the first of the raised garden beds. I think that Barb is getting quite eager to get gardening and I have to keep pointing out that we are still having frosts on some mornings. Some of the wee shoots wouldn't take too kindly to that if they were to come up too early so she is contenting herself with growing starter sets in our living room. She will be heading out today to buy some more seeds and some topsoil to make more starters and aid in the daylily planting respectively.

Doesn't that sound all domestic?

Hiatus on the Hard 2011-?

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