Saturday, September 17, 2011

A Very Dirty Summer or How I Spent My Summer Vacation

I spent the summer on my Dad's farm in Manitoba, Canada. I spent the summer, in a word, dirty.  Dad owns a greenhouse so my hands were in dirt, soil, and manure about 75% of the time.  Which is nice, actually. I find weeding in the garden very calming, kinda zen.  Sunburns resulting from too many hours in the garden, not so zen.  This summer was also the year of the big Flood.  In over 100 years the area has never seen a flood like this and we kept busy sandbagging neighbors houses and building dikes around their farms.

Here is a neighbors farm that I spent the day sandbagging at.  They brought in four huge trucks full of the sandbags.  Each bag weighs about 40lbs, about 2,000 bags per truck and I am not that strong of a girl.  I was working at a desk for the last 5+ years, the heaviest thing I had to pick up was a stapler...


I also inherited 12 chickens for the summer.  The owners were evacuated from their farm and asked if I could watch over the chicks.  Yes, they started off as tiny, cute, fuzzy yellow chicks and by the end of the summer were almost grown-up red hens.  I was disappointed that I didn't get any eggs from them before I left.  Chickens are dirty.  But I love these chickens!  And they loved me.  I swear.  They would all run to me and eat of my hand and jump on my shoulders.  And often poop on me.  That's the dirty part.

This is the corn, taller than me!  We had two gardens, each about the size of a football field that required watering, planting, weeding, harvesting.  It's a huge job!  Not to mention the two greenhouses full of flowers and vegetables as well.

That's just a bit of how I spent the summer.  I spared you the before and after pics of the outhouse that I cleaned, repainted, and decorated...

1 comment:

mom said...

Sure looks like you had a great summer! You should post more pics!!!

love ya