Those tiny dots in the filed are cows

Greetings from Knowlesville, New Brunswick!

It's cloudy with some light rain this morning but calm & mild and we will take that when the alternative would be windy, cool/cold & snowy. I've mentioned this before but on the year that we arrived here in 2014, on November the 2nd, we received 50cm of snow, yikes!

Yes that was an exceptional year as it ended-up being the coldest & longest winter that year. Even the locals told us that. However, this fall has been the mildest year ever. We are still about 15 degrees warmer that we should be by this time and we are yet to see a single flack of snow.

The lovely weather has afforded us an extended time to work on our raised beds and we are ever grateful for that :)

It is a lot of work but one that I do with a smile on my face as I do it. A restful night after a nice shower & a lovely meal.

Our Calendula plants are still flowering even after a couple of nights of frost. Although we are surrounded hundreds of evergreens around the house, popping yellow flowers like lightbulbs, are such a boost to the the spirit, especially now that the deciduous trees have all lost their leaves.

In town about once a week for grocery shopping, music lessons, dentist or car appointments, I still see and hear folks super-busy with work and just as stressed out as ever. Yet as they are also making so much more money, it all seems worth it.?

I don't know as I can't relate. At this point though, I would probably take the money as well.? So no judgement, I just think that we should recognize that sometimes there is a trade-off.

As for our property for sale, we are still receiving lots of inquiries. Everything from lowballers, the unrealistic, the insane(I know) and the disappointed to nonsensical and some that I fail to even find the right words to describe.

So at this point, I either just not reply or cut and paste a reply from a previous inquiry.

Nearly all start by being complimentary. That's nice but we already know that we have something unique here. We designed it that way, it was no accident that it ticks 99% of everyone's boxes.

Everyone loves the forest, the community, the work-from-home elements, the yoga studio, the airbnb guest-rooms, the organic farm-to-table restaurant/catering option, the organic 33 raised beds, the hens, the off-grid system, the new structures, the solar positioning and yet it seems that everyone is happy to sell their current properties for $750,000-$1,000,000+, while imagining buying our property for a fraction of those numbers because they are clever and we are.....

We even have at least three local individuals/families that constantly beg us to sell them some land, as we are currently the only property that has land for sale. Unfortunately we simply cannot sever 40 acres to sell at $10k/acre because of closing costs etc. Last week, we finally offered to divide the land into the sizes that would suit their family's needs, only it would be at the cost of $13-$15k/acre. Although that number is still far below the $60,000+k/acre elsewhere in NB, that it's more than they would like to pay.

My answer to all inquires from near of far is " There are plenty of properties in the vicinity, still available that are priced far less than than ours". Of course they all also offer far less than our property but them clever folks are well aware of them.

Funny because I've been emailed by many disappointed folks who did not act fast enough just a year ago only to now be faced with prices 100% higher.

So, we're planning our lives here with our gardens, our yoga sessions, neighbours and other connections. There are worse places to live than the place where everyone wants to move to, lol.

Anyway, on my way back from town, I try to collect as many bags of leaves that I can from the city-folks who have these bags of gold nicely raked and conveniently left at the curb-side for me :)

We added one to two bags a month to the chicken run for the ladies to scratch, keep busy and fertilize. Now this absolutely gloriously rich soil as the result. Then that I add hardwood ash and more mulched leaves before topping the raised beds with them.

I also use mulched leaves to layer our compost beds with. That is also very rewarding when we go to empty the compost bins next year :)

We are still letting the hens out of the run, on any dry afternoon. Much of any insects are long gone but the ground is still very green with clovers, wild grasses, moss and strawberry foliage. It's just something for them to do/scratch as they drop their nitrogen bombs, lol.

I can only imagine how much more fertile, & green the grounds are going to be next year. Something to look forward to.

Science fact and/or fiction. ?

Growing up in the '70s, I remember seeing ads from the '60's & the '50's, predicting our future lives in the next century and beyond. The futuristic gadgets, cars, robots, landscape and homes, work, clothes, power sources etc.

The predictions were very exciting indeed!

Nothing really happened until oh about 2010's? as they slowly made their emergence. Of course even now in the 2020's, cars are still pretty archaic, even with the promise of electric vehicles. One would have thought that by now we would be hovering over the ground, eliminating tires/rubber/asphalt/potholes and all the petrochemicals required to make & maintain them.

The renewables energy sources that are still very inefficient. Robots that have not made our lives so much easier.

Landscape that is at best either under water or being turned to deserts as we continue to clearcut our forests.

Homes and buildings that are 97% typical & conventional with the remaining 3% astronomically expensive or material completely unavailable to most.

Clothes that are made out of the same old heavily pesticides and water intensive raw material as the past century.

I'm happy to see some folks able/willing to work attend school from home, though with increasingly lower internet speeds etc. that should not have been an issue by now, making it difficult, which in-turn may return them to the old ways of commuting.

So how much longer must we wait to have better transportation, clothes, work, communication, power source, homes,...options? Well, some argue that those options are already here and have been for some time, only we are not provided access to them.

Some argue that the.....are busy working on viruses and the pharmaceutical are busy working on "vaccines" for them. Others take this idea a bit further and throw in the tech industry into the mix, as they include their nano technology's experiments in with the cocktail of vaccines.

Who cares? Does anyone care?

I mean for those busy working their daily grind or even the fortunate who earn more at their privileged positions, either there is little time to think about such scenarios or the lure of money is so powerful that it trumps all else.

So the aforementioned efforts are jointly subsidized by the governments around the world, put in place by the.... AND....as the ad says " Brought to you, by YOU!", "Thank You!"

Me? I/we removed ourselves from as much of it that we could when we moved here and hopefully we can be free of the listening/spying devise and the internet one day too?

Well, that's it for today. Hope that you are also finding inspiration and some nature-time where you live :)