A car crashed next door

Yesterday evening, while waiting for my husband to arrive home from a bit of overtime after his regular shift, Little M and I noticed a small pickup in the alfalfa field next door. I thought it was strange, as there was a guy standing up in the back, and through binoculars I noticed they seemed to be looking up the hill towards the road at something. There were a couple trees in my view, but I didn't see anything on the road, so figured maybe it was a deer or something. I kept my eye on them as they backed out, but then my husband pulled into the driveway and I didn't think anything more of it.

A half hour to an hour later, I was walking back up from the garden, and realized what they must have been looking at. There was a car over the edge on the hill! The driver must have veered off the narrow road and went straight down the hill until the nose of the car got stuck in the bottom of the old irrigation ditch. I ran up to the house and got my husband to call in to dispatch and make sure someone had already called the car in. No one had. So my husband walked over and checked to make sure no one was hurt inside - it was empty and locked, so whoever was driving it had crashed, then locked their vehicle up and left the scene. My husband decided he was going to wait over there until first responders arrived.

Little M and I got loaded up into the stroller and headed down the road to see what was happening. While we were walking down, Fire & Rescue showed up. The first guy on scene made sure that the car wasn't going to start a fire and checked the damage. A couple other fire & rescue guys showed up and kept an eye on things.

You can see the car down the hill, but this picture also shows where the car went off the road, you can see the flattened weeds on its path from the left corner and down into the center of the picture. Scary ride or what!

Then two police units from the nearest town showed up to keep an eye on things (and chit-chat with my husband) until the county deputy made it up. Fire moved on once they established that no one was inside & the car wasn't a danger to the tow truck or any one else. Then the cops all waited for the tow truck to arrive, after having an involved discussion about whether a normal wrecker would be enough or if they would need the bigger vehicle to get the car up the hill since there wasn't anywhere to tie the smaller wrecker off to. While they were waiting Little M and I headed back to the house to get her down to bed, as it was definitely after her bedtime already. Once the tow truck arrived the town cops headed back into town, and the tow truck started the process of attaching to the crashed car and pulling it up.

I didn't get any pictures of the car coming up the hill as it was getting fairly dark by then. But they did get it up and towed away successfully.

I can't imagine the ride down the hill - how scary that must have been. It's pretty likely that the driver was under the influence, and may not really have registered what was happening. Since we moved in here I've always worried that one day I would look out in the winter and there would be a car off the road down that hill, as the road is quite narrow and really has no shoulders at all before you are straight down over the edge. I never thought it would be in broad daylight in the middle of summer! Luckily it doesn't seem like anyone was hurt, so it seems that it all ended well.

We rarely see emergency services actually responding to a scene up our road (we do see emergency vehicles more regularly, but typically they are just dropping by to say hi!), and it definitely caused a bit of commotion with our neighbors. We met our soon-to-move-in new neighbors up the road as we were waiting for the tow truck to arrive, and another neighbor dropped by the house while I was putting Little M down to bed & the tow truck was pulling the car up. Apparently another neighbor just up the road had visitors arrive who mentioned driving by the scene, so she called the other neighbor, who came down to see if I knew what was going on. I know this makes it seem like there are a lot of people further up our road, but in reality there are only 6 full time places and a couple of cabins up past us.

I love that we have great neighbors around us, and that we know them well enough that they aren't shy to stop by after 9 at night to make sure things are ok & get the gossip :) Knowing my neighbors, and having everyone know everyone else's business is very familiar to me - after all I grew up on a dead end dirt road in a very rural area of Ontario. I love that even moving across the country and down into the US, I've still found a place like this where I know my neighbors for a good ways around on all sides.

Storms-a-coming

Monday evening, while my husband was making supper, Little M and I had to rush around collecting chicken eggs, feeding & letting the dogs out, and picking some strawberries for evening smoothies. This storm was fast approaching, complete with flickering lightning and rumbling thunder. We got everything done in the nick of time, and then got to eat supper while listening to the rain pour down.

 

Nothing like early summer thunderstorms to remind me of growing up back east! Today skies are clear, the ground is drying up after our week of rainy skies, and so far as I know no forest fires have been spotted. Its nice to be able to enjoy the storms and not have to worry about our safety; my thoughts are with those in Florida cleaning up from their weather.

We're getting a pig!

Its official! We're getting a pig :)

Our neighbor E, who watches Little M a couple days a week when the Mr & I's work schedules overlap, has a registered Berkshire sow. This is her first litter. In the past, E has raised pigs purchased as piglets from others, and fattened them up and sold halves. Last year we didn't get any, but the year before we got a quarter, and it was just delicious. After that experience, I wanted to raise a piglet to slaughter size ourselves, but last year with adding the chickens we had enough going on. We were undecided until this weekend when I finally managed to convince the Mr about it.

The past couple of months we've been trying to narrow down where we will put our yard fence in, which has led to thinking on what we will have going on on the rest of the irrigated areas. There are some fences already in place that might be useable for other animals, but some aren't in the best locations. Surveying over the weekend helped us see where fences could go vs. where fences already were, and look at the lay of the land without seeing all the trees and other obstacles that could in theory be removed if they weren't in the ideal spot.

We've come to the conclusion that sheep may be our animal of choice (I've always wanted to raise sheep, and do the fleece to knit process all myself!), but a couple of cows or a pig or two might cycle in too. Next year I'm hoping we'll be able to buy a lamb to raise and slaughter, and see how that process goes, which will give us a better sense of whether sheep farming is something we want to get in to. Raising a pig or two a year, or even having a sow and selling piglets occasionally, might be something we would consider down the road too. But for the next couple of years, I suspect raising a piglet or lamb here and there to slaughter will be plenty of additional work on our plates.

In the more near future though, we've got about 5 weeks until our already castrated little male Berkshire piglet is ready to come home. Hopefully that is long enough to get ready! We'll need a nightime secure pen with some shelter from the elements, a larger area for foraging, a feeder, a freeze-safe waterer, a normal waterer for the summer months, and a place to store bulk food for him. And likely some other things that I haven't yet thought of or learned about!

Yay for the next step in our journey on this land!

Surveying our Property

Well we had a busy weekend, and one day spent almost the entire day outside surveying our property. I borrowed the survey equipment from work, and we set up the total station and went to town, mostly getting topo shots (ground surface elevation), but mapping out our buildings and other features as well. It was exhausting, especially given that the weekend was also devoted to beginning potty training with Little M, but we felt very good about what we accomplished.

For those of you wondering why we were getting detailed survey, I'll import our points into AutoCAD software and be able to create a surface layer of our property, which will let us better plan fence locations, the new garden & chicken coop area, and scheme about where we might want a barn to go in the longer term :)