It has been eleven years ago today since we began our off grid adventure and spent our first night in this house on this island. I awoke this morning to a text from Word Press telling me that this blog had just reached the milestone of 100,000 views.

I began sharing my stories when we first moved here, originally to keep my Mom up to date on our life, but then it evolved to keeping in touch with old friends and making new while recording our journey. Wow, haven’t we had a journey. There have been 964 posts covering a variety of topics. Everything from unique moments on the nature channel to major renovations, heart transplant milestones and a horrifying fire. There have been 30,023 visitors and I think I have tried to quit the blog itself, four times. Most of you don’t comment but I know you are out there and I really appreciate those of you who financially support the blog to keep it advertisement free.

When not staring out the windows, the garden, of course, is my favorite place to spend time. My current project is growing the seeds for the summer vegetable garden. The cabbage, both red and green, have now been moved to the garden, as have the three colours of cauliflower.

The tomatoes, cucumbers, pumpkin and squash are still in the greenhouse. Last year I tried to grow pepita pumpkins. Their seeds are hull-less and more suitable for roasting for salads and snacking. It was a disaster, none came up. I ordered more Pepita this year as well as another type of hull-less pumpkin. Only one Pepita came up but four of the other. I am really looking forward to roasting my own green pumpkin seeds, so fingers crossed.

With any luck there will be lots of plants to share with friends at my second annual garden party. All of the plants have now been moved out of the house, and heating pads and grow lights to the greenhouse. They are easily a month ahead of where we were last year.

E is plugging away at his ditch. As part of the project to move our propane away from the house and bury all of the pipes and wires out of sight, a ditch needed to be dug from the house to the new gen shed. Not an easy job to do. Big rocks, old back, you get the drift. Slow going but he is almost there.

The blog post with the most reads over the last eleven years was titled Naked April. I guess searching naked off grid is a popular thing to do. Let’s see how we do if I tell you that the new pepita style pumpkins I am growing this summer are

called Naked Bear.