Pot of gold. Pot of shit.

Photos on real estate listings lie and lie.

Fall is crazy is here.  For us, work has shifted from a trot to a gallop, and we are engaged in time tetris to trying to build in weekend trips to properly property search.

At first the real estate listings on our selected search sites came thick, fast and unfiltered.  It was like opening up my computer to an Ontario Mandarin buffet.  Feasts for the land lusty and the peckish. But after a couple passes at the land buffet all is not as advertised. Like the food buffet.  Take my word for it and pass on the golden fried fish.

We are slowly starting to savvy up.  What the rural zoning codes mean. What nine acres with easy access to a main thoroughfare means (it means that the bulk of the property line is right on a busy highway that is a main route for semi trucks and RVs.  So noisy.).  Character 1930’s farmhouse. ( A shabby warren with misguided electrical and plumbing upgrades.) 80 acres with livable home. (Squatters den with a one burner hot plate for a stove and fetid root cellar for a fridge.)

This was one of the properties we looked at.  80 acres set off a 48 kilometre back road that was mostly gravel; I think an old logging road The entrance to the driveway beckoned like a teaser to paradise.  It was a curvy kilometre long and I had to jump out of the car at the start of it to walk its length and reach the farm pot of gold. My heart bursting with every step singing this is the one!  This is the one!

The outbuildings were stories in themselves.  The kidding barn. 

The Bengal cat breeding house.

The tractor shed.

The sauna.

And then the house at the end of the driveway.  Ugh. If one could call it that.  Dark and dirty with cat pissed plywood floors and tiny, inoperable windows.  No plumbing on one side.  The property had been tenanted for ten years by a smart, hardy young couple happy to raise, goats, chickens and rare breed cats on a piece of paradise with no internet and sketchy power.  They shared the place with coyotes, bears (we came across a mum bear and her two cubs munching on the fruit of a rogue apple tree) moose and beavers.  The tenants were good just using a couple of the acres for their breeding setup. The actual owners were from Switzerland. They bought the land with a homesteading dream but had enough after two years of cold winters and a withering dearth of creature comforts and headed back to Europe.  The tenants loved the land but were excited about buying their own even further north and roughing it there.

But the land.  The property!  Most of the acreage was in hay but fertile with a running creek and water rights.  Backing on to crown land.  My mind was racing with all the possibilities.  Not in the ALR and zoned as multipurpose.  Market garden with farmstand.  A destination sanctuary with cabins.  A managed woodlot.

I was inspired, too, having just read The New Farm by Brent Preston.  Building a profitable organic farm selling to first farmer’s markets, then restaurants and grocery stores then also hosting fundraisers and concerts.

So many possibilities. Dreaming big.

When I was eleven my parents bought a 10 acre run down horse property.  The barns were serviceable but the former owners seemed to have given up on land stewardship. Some acres were fallow (fine), a couple overgrown by bramble thickets, a couple polluted.  I guess then it was ok to dump your solvents, unused paint and garbage down the gully to spill into a fish bearing creek.  Out of sight, out of mind.

Wendell Berry tells a story in his book The Gift of Good Land about a guy in Ohio who worked six years trying to reclaim farmland from a former strip mine.  In the essay, A Rescued Farm, Berry describes the work of Wally Aiken. “They made rubble out of a farm.  His aim is to make a farm out of the rubble.”

Berry writes, ‘Why has he done it?  I can only take him at his word – for what he had done is not ‘practical’ or ‘economical’, as things are now reckoned, and certainly not easy.  He has done it out of devotion to a possibility once almost destroyed in his place, and now almost recovered.  …. But at the start of that possibility lay as much in the mind and character of Wallace Aiken as in his land.  The work, he says, has been satisfying all along, but, ‘the final satisfaction will come when the place can produce, support animals, have fences, and begin to resemble some sort of agricultural operation.  This is the goal I work toward.’ “

I can attest absolutely that my ambitions are not even remotely that worthy. 

But I can also say that as an eleven year old kid transitioning into teenhood the joy of seeing our farm chaos take shape with love and hard work.  Cleaning the junk out and whitewashing what became the chicken barn and filling it in with fresh sawdust for the birds.  Pulling up the toxic garbage from the steep slope and letting nature take its course there.  Tilling, composting, mulching the fields for gardens and bringing back the pollinators.

That’s my thing.  I love to build dirt and I love to build.

That 80 acres was by no means land that needed to be salvaged.  But it made me think of its grand potential and mine.

Hey.  A girl can dream

Potato Land Update