Monthly Archives: August 2010

michael visits the farm

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Now that I’ve been out on the farm for a few weeks, I’m starting to get visitors.  Last weekend, I had a VERY special visitor – my dear friend Michael.  Mike and I have been friends since studying Russian language together in 2002.  We were also flatmates together in Glasgow from 2005-2006.  We have a special history of sharing many meals together as friends and roomates, so it was FANTASTIC to have him come out and have a meal with me on the farm, especially since we haven’t seen each other in years (he lives in Europe most of the time, and spends the rest of his time traipsing around the world to exotic locales).


Also exciting is that Mike and his girlfriend recently spent a few weeks living and working on a permaculture farm in Portugal, so they’re both going to come back out to this farm while they’re still in the Canada to give us some tips and pointers that they picked up during their short but intensive farming experience.

Photos of Mike at the farm as well as a few circa 2005/06 in Glasgow thrown in for memory’s sake.

Love you, miss you, come back again soon!

ripping out the bathroom sink

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So, the motorhome I bought didn’t come with a toilet. 

Yep, you heard me right.  No toilet.

At some point in the past 30 years, the motorhome was renovated, including the bathroom. The original toilet was removed to make room (I’m presuming) for a nice shower (fully tiled in slate – very nice, although still very small) and a full-sized sink and cabinet. I’m sure that was great for the last tenants who clearly (I hope!) must have had access to a toilet somewhere else, but living with a toilet is a pretty standard pre-requisite for me, so putting one in has become one of my priority renovation tasks.

However, the ‘newer’ shower and sink/ cabinet left no room for a toilet (unless I wanted to sit on toilet while using the sink and step over the toilet while getting into the shower – which I don’t), so my parents and I decided the thing that made the most sense was to remove the sink and cabinet and put a new toilet in their place. We’re a little iffy on the plumbing details since we don’t have any experience in plumbing. The access pipe to the black water tank is somewhere under the tiled floor in the bathroom, so we’re probably going to have to rip it up and hope to goodness that we find a clear pipe that we can connect the new toilet to.

Luckily, we haven’t reached that daunting task yet, so in the meantime, I thought I’d get to work on doing something I figured I could manage on my own – removing the sink and cabinet. It was pretty fun to take a hammer to the whole thing and bang away on things until they broke demolition is fun! I managed to get the cabinet out on my own, but the sink, counter and plumbing pipes were a bit tougher so I invited my friend and colleague Jeremy out to help me clear away the heavier stuff.  Thanks Jeremy!

Now that that stuff is out of the way, I’m hoping the next steps of toilet installation will get a bit clearer. Photos of the step-by-step demolition as well as Jeremy standing next to the displaced sink are above.

PS – During the process, I think I discovered the motorhome’s original wallpaper on a bit of exposed wall under the sink!  Kinda fun since I have no idea what the thing looked like in it’s original state.  Photo of that included too.

PPS – Jackson, the farm dog, did not get harmed during the demolition process. He just fell asleep next to the cabinet junk pile waiting for me to finish so I could take him for a walk ;)

My Grandmother & the Women’s Land Army

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I found out from my dad this weekend that my grandmother, Mary Manton, was in the Women’s Land Army in Britain during WWII. I’d never heard of the Land Army before and now that I know a little bit about it, it feels like a really special thing that that was something my grandmother was involved in – like maybe some of my own interest in agriculture was somehow passed down to me from her. I’d like to think so anyways.

The Women’s Land Army (WLA) was a British civilian organization created for WWI and WWII that placed women in agricultural jobs around the country while the men were away at war. During WWII, women were first called upon to volunteer their time to these agriculture efforts in order to help with food production, but as the war continued, women were conscripted to fill the need for agricultural hands. According to Wikipedia, Britain’s WLA had over 80,000 members and it continued until its official disbandment on October 21, 1950.

My dad scanned and emailed me these fantastic photos of my grandmother taken during her time as a member of the WLA. The black and white shot is an image of her in her WLA uniform. The sepia coloured photograph was taken in 1943 while she was working (in her work clothes) at the Ley Farm.

In his email my dad included some of his own memories, “When I was a little kid my mother would take me to Ley Farm and we would walk back home with eggs and vegetables. I lost contact with the farm owners, the Trenaman’s, when we moved into Plymouth when I was 10 years old. I remember that the farm house had slate floors and cooking was on an open fire in the kitchen. It was a basic stone and wood building. All of the barns were stone with slate roofs”. 

I can’t really express how cool it is to know this. It makes me really happy.