Spring on Wolfe Island
Warning / note / advisory – this is a boring post. And – ha! – I don’t mean the post in the above picture. I mean this blog post is not full of adventure, not exciting … it’s just a snapshot of what things are like at this time of year on our patch of Wolfe Island.
This is the path through the hayfield that leads from “the cottage” to “the house.”
It was a busy weekend – we had a bathroom to paint, and there was a sailboat, tied down under about three feet of crazy high St. Lawrence water, that we had to rescue. But just before dinner on Saturday, the greens and blues made me say, “Let’s go for a walk!” and I brought my camera. All these photos are things we can see from our driveway.
See the wind turbines in the background of the above photo? There are 86 or 87 of them (I always forget the exact number). There are lots of farmers on Wolfe Island, and many of them have diversified their incomes by having wind turbines or solar panels on their land.
We have to! These are our solar panels. They feed into the grid and Ontario Hydro pays for the energy they generate. When our contract is up with Hydro, we may use them to power our homes. The only problem? These two panels generate about enough electricity for four homes. We don’t have four homes to power!
The above photo provides a better view of the panels as trackers – that is to say, they’re not fixed; they track the sun. They’re moving all day, always seeking out the strongest of the sun’s rays. This makes them much more efficient than fixed panels. And, when it’s too windy, or when the sun goes down, they tabletop. So if we look out and the panels are flat, we know either it’s really windy, or so grey they can’t find any sun, or both!
The field across the road from our driveway a) has the most beautiful oak tree imaginable in it and b) has been, in past years, planted with soy, then with corn. It looks like this year it will be fallow.
A better view of that oak tree.
I even found the dandelions pretty last weekend!
The island will be beautiful all summer, and all year, but the colours will never be so lush as they are now, when there’s been lots of (too much?) water, and everything is growing.
