Village Squire, 1977-09, Page 21The joys and miseries
of being a hobby farmer
BY ADRIAN VOS
It was in the early sixties and we were living in the city of
Galt. Thanks to a prosperous Canada, we had been able to
save up sufficient money for a down payment on a modest
house. All in a period of less than 10 years of residence here.
However, our yearning was for a bit more breathing space
and we were continually on the lookout for a place in the
country. We wanted to join the growing number of hobby
farmers, and in 1964 we found the place we had been looking
for. A neglected stone house, a log barn and 80 acres of poor
land and swamp. We knew that4t would take a lot of work and
effort to make it worth living there, but that accounted for one
of the reasons we could afford it, the low, low price.
So we sold the house in town again and began fixing up the
new one. Proudly we showed it to friends and relatives, but all
we heard, was non -committal grunts. Later we heard that
they didn't want to say that we had made a mistake, but when
they got away from out of our sight, they cried for us. That
was understandable, for a casual inspection revealed holes in
the roof that were patched up with everything, from pieces of
tin to rubber inner tubes. One of the upstairs bedrooms was
black with soot, as the stove -pipe from the kitchen stove had
come loose from the chimney, at some time in the past. The
kitchen was so dirty that the brown paint had turned a bright
yellow by the time Toni got finished with soap and bru. h.
The heating and cooking was centred in the kitchen
woodstove, one of those insatiable wood gulping monsters of
a bygone era.
There was still a great pile of stove wood when we moved
in, but to my chagrined amazement, that lasted only a few
weeks. To cut the amount of wood needed was enough
persuasion to have an oil stove installed before another cold
season came around.
Anyway, we fixed the roof, cleaned the whole house,
painted inside and out, installed a pressure pump and
bathroom, burned the old outhouse, rented a water heater
from hydro and put in a garden. Before long, the same friends
and relatives that had shed tears over our foolishness, now
congratulated us that we had made such a good buy.
The house had a date in the front gable that said 1898. As I
usually like to know as much as possible about the place
where I live in, I asked some of our older neighbours what
they knew about the house. It seems that two Scottish stone
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VILLAGE SQUIRE/SEPTEMBER 1977, 19.