A Different Season

I've always thought it a bit of a shame that in Toronto there are only two seasons. The snow starts melting, the Loblaws car park gets a garden centre built in the middle, my colleagues switch from playing winter league ice hockey to summer league ice hockey and, suddenly, it's hot and the air is gritty with particulate matter. The government stops designating days as dangerously cold and starts declaring smog days. A few months later it starts snowing again.

It's different in the country. Just now the trees have buds but not much in the way of leaves,



There are flowers coming out of the ground (we didn't go and buy these, they just, like, popped up)





the pasture is dotted with pretty yellow flowers



(a bit of forestry in progress here, dragging a fallen branch out to make firewood. It would have been better to do this before tightening the barbed wire).



Chores continue apace. We've now shovelled as much inherited shit as we're likely to and would like to get on with the production of new manure. We've trudged all over with a wheelbarrow removing all objects likely to endanger man or beast (this seems to be some sort of agricultural implement, perhaps the museum would like to have it)



and harrowed the area around the barn



The previous occupants returned for their tractor trailer full of tractors. I feel we're missing something in this story but, what we know is that when we first saw the house the trailer was on the property and was being used to store historic farm tractors and parts, it didn't belong to the property owners so there was no possibilty of them selling it to us. They said they would remove it.

They did drive away from the dock arrangement where it had been but it seems that they only got deep into a field before getting stuck in the snow, not altogether surprising really, people don't often go offroading in winter with a 53' trailer. This being the spring and the ground being firm they came back and tried driving out across the sloping back field. This didn't work well either, they got part way up but then the tractor trailer went into a slow motion jacknife and slid down again. At this point they fetched Farmer Squirrell and his big league tractor (the same one he used on our driveway last winter).

They have some torque them tractors: