DIY

DIY

When we first came to our North of 54 farm it was not a farm and we were not farmers. The land had a small five acre field and an attached field we called the "L shaped field" (and still do though it's rectangular now). Fortunately, a relative of the family from whom we purchased our 1/4 section hayed those two fields during the many years the land was unoccupied. Otherwise the fields would have been reclaimed by the bush. Along with these small clearings, there was a little lake, a large beaver dam and the resulting watershed, and lots and lots of trees.

 

 

We, along with a friend who a year later decided to return to BC, came here in June of 1974 with a 6 week old baby, a dog and a cat, and our few worldly possessions including an old plain Jane Enterprise wood cook stove. We lived in a quickly erected poplar cabin with an outdoor kitchen until the snows were flying steadily in December and our 25 foot square log home was more or less ready to occupy (top logs weren't chinked yet).

Not being farmers or house builders we had rather a large learning curve to accomplish (still working on it). Though we sought advice whenever possible, we mainly learned by using reference books and by trial and error. My husband built the first half of our house with a chain saw, an axe, a 1 1/2 inch auger, a chalk line, some books (B. Allan Mackie, "Building With Logs" was one of them) and some advice from a few locals.

 

Books were survival manuals for us. I remember standing by our little goat barn, reading step-by-step instructions on how to milk a goat. We used shepherding manuals, again me reading aloud while my husband followed instructions on how to turn a lamb in a difficult birth. We have books on keeping rabbits, storing vegetables, building feeders and corrals, growing raspberries, training dogs, making simple clothing, and........... the list goes on. Bit by bit we learned. We built. We raised goats, sheep, horses, rabbits, chickens. We logged fence posts and trees; picked pine cones; trained a team of horses and used them for logging, field work, and cultivating the garden. Our main farm product turned out to be Border Collies. My husband learned how to use and train them starting with a book ("The Farmer's Dog" by John Holmes). These amazing dogs became our love, our joy, our job, and our income. From them my husband gained a fair amount of notoriety in the sheep dog world and yes, he did end up writing a wee booklet on how to train a Border Collie.

 

We remained fairly small. We added a couple of fields on the home quarter, obtained a grazing lease and fenced it carrying spools of barbed wire on a pole between us through bush and muskeg (no road there at that time). The Alberta government cleared about 40 acres on the lease. The remainder of the farm remains in forrest, lake and watershed. After 10 years we added a second half to the house and upgraded to indoor plumbing and solar electricity. We also built a log barn and a shop. It's been a lifetime project with more stuff left to do but we have a lot less ambition now.

We couldn't have done all this without our books! We are still using books to learn but these days we have an entire library at our fingertips - an iPad and the internet. We still have all our hard copy reference books though. I could never bring myself to get rid of them. A book is a solid object you can hold on to. The internet depends on the "system" remaining viable.

Out of curiosity I surfed the net today for "How to milk a goat". Wow! I got a beautiful pictorial step-by-step finely detailed description, as good or better than that old book we used so many years ago. I also looked up "How to hang clothes on a clothesline" and got numerous sites to look at. It seems like both these questions yielded answers that were overly detailed and a bit over-the-top on complicating the issue. But I have done these things for well over 40 years. Sometimes a person who is quite familiar with a task can oversimplify instructions and leave questions in the mind of the person asking for help.

I was wondering to myself the other day, What would happen if the world fell apart (a thought many have after the US election)? Grandmothers have not gotten around to teaching the youngsters (and the youngsters don't seem to want to learn) traditional skills like cooking from scratch, gardening, preserving, making wine (I use a book for my famous Honeyberry and Raspberry wines), sewing, washing dishes without a dish washer, hanging clothes on a line, etc. Grandfathers haven't taught youngsters how to put in and take off a crop, put up hay, cut down trees for buildings or for firewood, erect buildings, hunt wildlife for food, fix machinery, be a good shepherd, etc. Would everyone starve? Could they live without all of today's conveniences? Hell yes! They'd just have to download and print a bunch of DIY books before the grid died, or go buy some how-to books (if hard copies are available), read, try things out, succeed and fail, try another way, learn, share what they learn, and help one another.