We both continue to enjoy our lives in Collingwood in the Spring, Summer and Fall.
It’s a beautiful place to live and is a recreational cornucopia. There are a ton of fitness studios and gyms and an incredible trail system for biking and walking that starts less than two hundred feet from our front door. Georgian Bay is minutes away from anywhere in town and Blue Mountain is a short 20 minute drive. Plus, for hiking enthusiasts, The Bruce Trail, offering some of the best hiking in Canada, literally cuts though the Niagara Escarpment on it’s way to Tobermory or Niagara, depending on your latitudinal orientation and preference. It’s very easy to find something to do outdoors here.
As we’ve settled in over the last 12 years, and particularly over the last five years, Yim and I have gotten into a fitness groove and have busy weekly regimes that we both really like.
Yim takes several strength training classes at the local YMCA as well as a Zumba class and has become quite involved in a Ballet Group that she really enjoys with Sharon Fleet of Fleet Wood Dance. She also teaches Zumba twice a week and on Sunday enjoys a Burlesque class in Stayner. I go on an early morning 15K run daily followed by an hour of strength training and stretching, five days a week. Then we have lunch together and I head out on my bike ride daily for an hour and usually do groceries along the way, which I love being able to do.
I’ve written about our Bike Trail System and I cannot praise the Town enough for it. Cycling is a part of my daily life and the bike trails are one of the main reasons we chose Collingwood when we relocated from Victoria, BC.
Socially, the Town of Collingwood does a great job of putting together some pretty decent free music events in the summer and another local group organizes a Blues & Jazz Evening on Wednesday evenings in July and August at the Collingwood Museum to help support local school music programs, and the longer we live here, the more often I find myself up in front of a bunch of strangers that Yim has convinced me to dance in front of.
We’ve built ourselves a life here and our home is our focal point. It’s where we live.
Our Gardens – our property, is also a big part of our lives here.
I continue to putter away creating our gardens every year and this year in particular, I’ve started photographing the changes that occur each month so I can see how our gardens are doing at staying in bloom in some form or another as long, and without large overlaps, as possible.
And this year I’ve finally started to figure out how to grow arugula and spinach properly, as well as some herbs, so the gardens are evolving also.
For a few years, we planted a lot of different veggies but we have gradually narrowed down our focus to food we eat a lot of during the months that we can grow our own food. This year I began dedicating our three garden beds to veggies I know will grow well in each of them, as the first bed gets more shade during the days than the other two.
This year I noticed what I can only assume is some fairly obvious nutrient depletion. For example, our tomatoes did not produce even half as much as we grew in previous years. So, with a little research, I learned that plants use up nutrients in the finite space of a raised bed, which exhausts the soil’s reserves for the next growing season. Plus, there’s soil compaction and the loss of organic matter so this year, I took out half of the soil in each bed and added a mixture of cow manure compost, grass clippings, a variety of our vegetable cuttings, specifically bananas and shredded leaves and will see how and if that helps next year.
We also decided that we will not grow zucchini next year because it takes up too much space in our containers for the amount of zucchini we actually eat and they are quite inexpensive in season.
So, next year, our gardens will basically consist of Pole Beans, and a couple of varietals of Kale (at least 6 plants) in the first bed. The middle bed will have Bok Choy, Arugula, Basil, Eggplant and a variety of Lettuces. Then I hope that the soil work allows us to grow Cherry Tomatoes again as we missed them this year and had to buy them often, as well as Spinach.
As far as our fruit plantings go. our plum tree yielded an incredible amount of sweet yellow plums this summer and we finally saw some yield from our blueberry bushes and even got a handful of raspberries from our newly planted bushes. The Concord Grape grew well this year and has established some vine growth and I am hoping that we see some grapes at the end of next summer. Unfortunately, rabbits girdled the bark on our Honeycrisp last winter and it had to be cut it down.
I planted a new Hakone Grass shade garden this year by the side of the back deck. As our variegated Japanese Willows grow, the grass underneath them was looking increasingly sparse each year so the shade garden was the perfect solution.
I also added a small stone walkway with a nice stone step, especially chosen for Grace, but it’s come in handy for us as well.
Then, later in the summer, I installed a flagstone path in the back gardens as I continue to fine tune that back area. It’s turned into three separate garden beds now, one filled completely with hostas and next year, I’ll add a few more stones to complete the path system.
My ‘workshop’ is tucked away back here and my plan is to add a compost container next spring.
Georgian Bay.
I didn’t know much about Georgian Bay when we moved here but over a twelve year period, have grown to absolutely love living near it. For those of you who don’t know, Georgian Bay is the northeast arm of Lake Huron in southcentral Ontario. It is shielded from Lake Huron by the limestone spine of the Niagara Escarpment, which extends in a great arc northwest up the Bruce Peninsula. and Manitoulin Island, the largest freshwater island in the world.
At 5,792 square miles, it’s not that much smaller than Lake Ontario, earning it the nickname The Sixth Great Lake.
With more than 1,240 miles of grey pink granite shoreline, it is also part the UNESCO-designated Georgian Bay Biosphere Reserve, the world’s largest freshwater archipelago, encompassing 30,000 islands.
Now I consider myself very lucky to be able to cycle along Georgian Bay daily. Sunset Point provides us with beautiful displays almost every evening, the water is warm enough to swim in during the summer months and it’s big enough that on any given day, the clouds that swirl over the bay can put on pretty spectacular displays.
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