Outdoor WiFi

Shortly after moving to our current property, we decided to install a camera outside in order to keep an eye on things. We started with one camera to see how it would work. It worked quite well, so we installed a second, then a third... eventually we got up to six cameras looking out at various parts of the property.

By the time I got to six cameras I started noticing some odd behaviour. Image we've just had a power blip, so all the cameras are now coming back on from having been off. Most of the time everything works just fine, as expected. But sometimes at least one of the six cameras will just not work. So I'd get the ladder out, go visit the camera... and its lights are on and it appears to be running. Put the ladder away, return back to my desk, try to ping the camera... nothing. I can't ping the camera, it's not reachable. Or maybe it is, but only one out of every 20 pings gets a reply with terrible latency (in the order of seconds). So I go back out there and try power-cycling just that one camera. Still no improvement. Out of ideas, I move on to other things, and for the next couple days that camera simply doesn't work... but then it does! For no discernible reason a camera that was powered on but wasn't on the network for days/weeks suddenly shows up. At this point either all the cameras are working just fine, or, now that one of them has come back online, a different one stops working.

This sort of dance of having most but not all the cameras online will sometimes last for days or even weeks, but eventually, given enough time, they will all eventually work and everything will be fine... until the next power blip. Then we start the whole process over again.

I don't know what is causing this problem. Is it an issue related to the specific product? Is it related to distance? Maybe it's related to the fact that my house has a metal roof, the barn is entirely clad in metal? Maybe it is related to my router? The weather? The phase of the moon? The specific device that doesn't work at any one time is, apparently random. Sometimes it is one of the closer devices, sometimes it is the furthest one. Sometimes the bad device is against the barn, other times it isn't. There is no one device that is more often than not the one that isn't working. Distance and sheets of metal don't seem to be the culprits. Maybe two (or more) devices are trying to use the same channel and aren't able to detect the issue and try a different channel? But if that is the case wouldn't two devices stop working instead of one?

Even before buying a single camera, it had always been my goal to run ethernet around the property. I have never been overly fond of WiFi, and had wanted to run ethernet regardless. But now that I was having these issues, it did help speed up my plans to run wire. Eventually I did get around to running some ethernet to some areas. With that little bit in place, I was able to take 3 of my cameras off WiFi and have them on wired ethernet. Since that update I haven't had a single connectivity issue with any of my remaining 3 WiFi cameras. Interestingly enough the 3 that are now wired are the 3 that are closest to the house, the ones that are still on WiFi are the 3 that are by the barn and furthest away. So the biggest problem seems to have been... the number of devices? Six was too many? Does that make sense?

I look forward to the day when I can turn off the WiFi radio for my IoT/security network and just rely on wired networking for all its communication.

New Boiler - choosing a heating source

The "house" on property is more like a semi-detached: there's "the old house" that was built sometime in the 70's of field-stone, then there's "the new house" which is the addition that was added by the previous owner in 2001. They both share one common wall and a roof. Both houses have their own hot water tanks, their own basements, and their own furnaces. The old house is heated by hot-water baseboard, the new house has a forced-air furnace. Both furnaces ran off oil. Each furnace had its own oil tank; one in each basement. In this part of the world, in-basement oil tanks need to be re-certified every 7 years. Most insurance companies in this area have started harassing owners to change from single-lined to double-lined oil tanks. Both oil tanks were single-lined. The oil tank in the old house was due for re-certification within 2 years; the tank in the new house still had ~5 years.

When we bought this property, one of the things on the "needs to be replaced soon-ish" list was the water boiler in the old house. The water boiler was very old. The advice we received from every HVAC person who looked at it was: "I'm afraid to touch it. Consider yourself lucky it lasted this long".

It was time to evaluate our options. The easiest option would have been to simply replace the existing boiler with another boiler of the same type. But we decided we should at least consider alternatives, including:

1. electricity
2. oil
3. propane/natural gas
4. geothermal
5. wood

Electricity

Although electric boilers for on-demand domestic hot-water are all the rage right now, heating a whole house with an electric boiler still remains very (prohibitively?) expensive.

Our research also indicated that although our property is already fed with a 200A service, there's a very good chance we would have needed a larger service for a primary, whole-house, hot-water boiler. Getting the utility company to bring in a new feed (or updating our existing feed) would not be cheap. Plus, we would also need lots of new inside electrical work as well.

So getting this work done would be expensive, and the on-going costs of running the system would also be very expensive as well.

Oil

On the one hand we already had oil tanks in place. Simply switching the old water boiler for a newer one would have been the easiest way to go. But on the other hand, the oil tank in the old house was just about due for a new certification, and it was very likely our insurance company would have insisted on us switching to a double-walled tank. If the insurance company insisted that the tank in the old house be switched to a double-walled tank, then it was inevitable they'd eventually want the tank in the new house switched as well when its re-certification came due (in about 5 years). So in our case, continuing with oil would have required us to replace both of our oil tanks, and one furnace.

If you've ever lived in a house that is heated with oil you'll know that oil can be smelly. Even if your system doesn't have any leaks, even if everything is shiny and new... just having oil in the house is going to emit some smell, and it isn't a pretty smell.

Regardless of whether your tanks are single-lined, double-lined, or have 5 liners, there is always a chance of an oil spill. Maybe the person filling the tank messes up and overfills, maybe a tank gets knocked off its legs, maybe a connector comes loose, maybe the hose going from the tank to the furnace gets punctured... anything can happen. From what I hear, oil spills are very nasty: everything gets ruined, and the cleanup is long and costly. Although spills are rare, there's always the possibility. Plus, no matter what tank you have, it still needs to be re-certified every couple years, and every couple years the insurance companies like to change their minds on what sort of tank you must use.

Although oil is, relatively, the easiest route, in our case we'd still have to replace our tanks. Plus, do we want to continue living with the smell of oil, the constant tank re-certifications, and the possibility of a nasty spill?

Propane/Natural Gas

For most people, switching to a gas-fired boiler is the no-brainer solution. Most HVAC people will push customers towards gas: it's what they know, so it's what they recommend. Currently, gas-fired furnaces are probably one of the most popular technologies in my part of the world.

However, in our specific case, there are no gas pipes going past our house on the road. All the roads around us have gas, but not ours. When I called the gas company to ask if/when our road would get service they said there just weren't enough houses on our street to justify putting the lines in. So if we wanted to switch to gas we'd have to get our own tank, which involves having to choose a size of tank, getting it filled regularly, and (most likely) paying a yearly rental.

Gas isn't a bad choice. We actually had decided we were going to go with gas but were turned off by the lock-in. The tanks are very expensive to buy, and they must be replaced every X years, so it makes little to no sense to actually buy a tank. This means you have to rent. However, the moment you rent a tank from someone, you're locked into buying all your gas from that person. You can't get one company to rent you a tank, then get someone else to fill it. It became exceptionally messy trying to compare all the different companies, prices, and options. One company, for example, would charge nothing for the install and next to nothing for the yearly rental, but their gas prices were always 10c more than everyone else. Another company charged huge fees for the install, but their gas prices were the cheapest by 2c. Of course gas prices fluctuate wildly, and every company changes their prices at random times. Just because one company has the cheapest gas prices today doesn't mean they'll have the cheapest, or even good, prices next month.

Although this is probably the choice most people would make, in our case we'd have to replace two furnaces (if we wanted to get completely away from oil) and, since there aren't any gas lines along our road, comparing gas tanks and pricing was frustrating.

Geothermal

In-ground heat pumps have been popular for a couple years and most people seem pleased with them. They seem to provide a lot of "I'm saving the planet!" karma, but little else.

For one thing, they have one of the highest initial costs. Then, because the temperature delta is so low, very large volumes of liquid needs to be pumped through the system very fast. This means larger pumps, using higher amperages, which leads to higher electric costs to keep the system running.

Not to mention, there are a disturbingly large number of reports of people paying tens of thousands of dollars for a system, and still having to supplement with something else on those really chilly nights! Thankfully extra chilly nights are infrequent and don't last for too long, but it seems strange to pay so much for a heating system that only works most of the time.

Wood

Between electricity, oil, gas, and wood: heating with wood can be many times cheaper than the others. This is especially true if you are able to source and process your own wood. However, if all you can manage is to buy small quantities of seasoned wood, then wood has less of a cost advantage over other sources of fuel. But if you have the space and time, coupled with a little bit of planning, you can buy "green" wood and have it delivered early in the cycle so it seasons on your property. This is significantly cheaper than having to buy seasoned wood.

But wood has its downsides. Wood is a lot more work, and it's messy.

If you're buying wood it'll be delivered in a big jumble, which you then have to move and pile. There goes an afternoon.

If you're cutting your own wood there's a lot of manual labour associated with processing a tree. Plus there are additional costs associated with processing the wood on your own. You need to buy wood-processing equipment (chainsaws, saws, axes, wedges, sledgehammers, splitters, etc), then there's the cost of their maintenance and upkeep.

Then, to use the wood, it has to be brought into the house to where your fireplace is located. Moving wood around always leaves a mess. When you put wood down in a pile then pick it up later, some amount of mess is always left behind. Bringing it into the house from the snowy outdoors means tracking snow around and/or having to put boots on and off continuously.

Lots of insects enjoy hibernating in piled wood. When you bring cold wood into the house, inevitably some number of critters will be brought in as well, critters which will then warm up, wake up, and start crawling or buzzing about the house.

But not only is handling wood messy, using a fireplace is messy. Ashes are very light and drift around easily. Moving ashes around, or cleaning your fireplace of ashes, always causes some amount of ash to become airborne allowing it to spread and settle about the house.

Fireplaces are often relatively small and need to be fed regularly. Plus, to get optimal heat from a fire, and optimal efficiency from the wood, dampers need to be adjusted frequently during the burning process.

Depending on your fireplace, lighting a fire can take a bit of skill. If the air in the flue is significantly colder than the air inside the house, when you first light a fire, the smoke will have a tendency to come into the house rather than go up the flue! So if you don't first heat up your flue properly, you can end up smoking yourself out!

Wood can be a really cheap source of fuel, but is it worth the work and the mess? What if there was a way to get the benefits of wood but with a lot less downside?

Outdoor Wood Boilers

In rural areas outdoor wood boilers are becoming more and more popular. An outdoor wood boiler is like a fireplace that is designed to live outside your house. Its job it is to heat up some quantity of liquid to some temperature. An outdoor wood boiler allows you to use wood as a relatively cheap source of fuel, while mitigating many of wood's downsides.

But, like anything, outdoor wood boilers do have their downsides too.

For one, they're more complicated to install. Unless you're handy and will be doing all the work yourself, there's a chance you're going to need to coordinate a bunch of people to get the job done, rather than just working with one person (e.g. your HVAC person). If your experience is anything like ours, you'll have a hard time finding an HVAC person who is willing to take this job on. Sad to say, but for most HVAC people who I've encountered, the answer to every question is "get a gas furnace". So the moment you show them something new, instead of just saying "sorry I don't know anything about outdoor wood boilers" or instead of wanting to learn about something new, they'll say something silly like "that'll never work, you should install a gas furnace".

Another downside to an outdoor wood boiler (although I consider it rather minor) is that you have to go outside to feed them, and they have to be checked several times each day. I live on a horse farm, so waking up at the same time every day and going outside several times every day, 365.2422 days a year, in every weather condition imaginable, is something I have to do anyway. Adding a pit stop at the wood boiler isn't going to inconvenience me that much, but maybe you feel differently? When it's -20 outside on a Saturday morning, you can't just decide to roll over and sleep-in until noon before bothering to check the boiler, otherwise you'll be getting up to a rather chilly house!

Due to the nature of how they operate, if you're going to have an outdoor wood boiler, it would be a smart idea to have a thermostatically-controlled automatic backup system of some sort. On the one hand it makes sense to have some sort of backup system "just in case". In case you want to go away for a holiday, in case you get stuck at work and can't get home in time, in case you underestimate how much wood you need, in case you underestimate how fast the wood is going to burn, in case you underestimate how cold it's going to get at night, in case you forget to check the boiler before going to bed, in case a storm blows in and shuts down the highway while you're out shopping, in case there's a bad accident on the roads and it takes you longer to get home than anticipated... On the other hand, many jurisdictions, local by-laws, and insurance companies will require you to have a backup system when your primary heat source is from wood. So, in a way, you end up installing two heating systems instead of just one. Therefore some sort of extra expense or additional planning should be anticipated if you want to heat from wood. However, having a backup system does mitigate some of the other downsides such as not being able to sleep-in on Sundays!

On the positive side, wood boilers have a lot going for them. Wood can be a very cheap source of fuel. An outdoor wood boiler can let you use a cheap source of fuel while eliminating or reducing some of the downsides that are associated with using wood.

Wood never needs to be brought inside the house. You can pile your wood once, by your boiler, and never have to move it again except to feed it into the fire. Any mess that is created by having wood piled and handled, stays outside. Any bugs that choose to nest in the wood get thrown directly into the fire without coming (and waking up) inside the house. There's no "moving the wood multiple times", there's no "tracking snow into the house".

A wood boiler, just like any other wood-burning appliance, needs to be cleaned regularly of its ashes. But if you spill a bit of ashes on the ground outside, or some ashes become airborne during the cleaning process outside, so what? Those ashes aren't landing on the floors inside your house, and the airborne ashes aren't settling on any of your indoor furniture.

Compared to an indoor fireplace, outdoor wood boilers are electronically controlled so there's no fiddling with dampers; they do all that themselves automatically. You don't have to open the dampers manually when you add wood, then check and close them off as the fire gets hot in order to maximize the efficiency. A wood boiler's job is to heat a quantity of liquid to a certain temperature. It's intelligent enough on its own to be able to monitor the liquid's temperature and open itself up or closes itself off as required.

Having a large wood chamber means the boiler doesn't need to be filled as often. It still needs to be checked a couple times a day, but it is a lot less frequent than a regular fireplace would require. Compared to an in-house fireplace, an outdoor wood boiler requires a lot less feeding and fiddling.

Outdoor wood boilers are usually lit just once a year, then burn continuously for the season. Therefore there's no "smoking yourself out" every time you light the fire. Besides, by being outside, there's no temperature differential along the flue before lighting your fire, so even if you are re-lighting your boiler frequently there's no downdraft. And even if there was a downdraft, it isn't smoking you out of your house!

The liquid from the outdoor boiler can be used not only to heat your house, but, with the right equipment, can be used to heat up your hot water tanks as well. If your domestic hot water tanks are electric, for example, using your outdoor wood boiler to heat up your domestic hot water will save you on electricity.

The pumps that are used to move the liquid from the boiler to the house don't need to be large. Therefore the electricity cost of running the pumps is small. The boiler itself, although it needs electricity, doesn't need large amounts of electricity, so the on-going costs of operating an outdoor wood boiler are low.

In a power-outage situation, all you need is a small generator to keep a couple small pumps running, and you can still enjoy a completely warm house and all the domestic hot water you want for however long you can keep the generator and pumps going.

Should you ever have any sort of chimney fire or accident with your boiler, it all happens outside and away from your house. Most jurisdictions and insurance companies will mandate a minimum distance away from your house that your wood boiler needs to be installed. By having a decent space between them, you can reduce the risk of a fire destroying your home.

With an outdoor wood boiler all the combustion required to heat your house occurs outside. When a furnace inside your house fires up, unless it specifically takes its oxygen from outside (not all of them do), it will need to take oxygen from inside your house for its combustion. That oxygen needs to be replaced from somewhere. The only way that oxygen can be replaced is to pull it from outside, which brings cold air into your house. Also, unless you have other furnaces that need them, or a fireplace, when you switch to an outdoor wood boiler any chimneys on your house can be capped, leaving fewer ways for cold air and critters to enter your house. If all your combustion occurs outside, then the air inside your house is less susceptible to drying out.

With oil or gas there's always the question of delivery. We have a hilly, gravel, driveway, and our property is located on a country road at the bottom of a hill. Although we do our best to keep our driveway clear of snow and ice, it's always getting snowy and icy in the winter. When does it get icy and snowy? When it's cold. When do we need the most frequent deliveries of oil or gas? When it's cold. So when our driveway is the iciest and snowiest is when we need the delivery person to come the most frequently. When it gets really cold is when they get really busy, meaning it gets harder for them to get around to everyone in time. There have been times when we've had to turn down the thermostat because we weren't sure the oil was going to last until the delivery truck could make it to our place! That's assuming, of course, that they're confident getting to our property at all. After a particularly bad storm, or a nasty bout of freezing rain, our little side road isn't very high on the municipality's list in terms of being a priority for getting ploughed. In short, I'm not fond of relying on someone to drive by with a truck to refill my heating fuel throughout the heating season. I really like the idea of using wood for heat because I have all spring, summer, and fall to gather up my wood, and before the first snow falls I know that I have, on property, all the fuel I need to last the entire winter.

Conclusion

Everyone's situation is different; and for every different situation, a different solution is possible.

In our case electricity would be too expensive and future/on-going costs too uncertain. We didn't want to continue with oil (smelly and potential of spillage), and would have needed to replace our tanks anyway. Since we don't have gas to the door, renting a tank and being locked-in with a vendor means our future costs are unpredictable, so we didn't want to go with a gas furnace. In-ground geothermal is trendy, but even after huge up-front costs there's still larger operational costs and a chance you'd have to supplement with something else for up to a month or two per year. With any of electricity, oil, or gas, their prices fluctuate wildly, and being locked in to any one can be costly.

Outdoor wood boilers don't eliminate the labour involved with using wood but they cut down on the number of times you need to move your wood, and they significantly reduce the mess. Heating from wood can be very cheap, especially if you have your own land from which you can cut and process your own trees (which is true in our case). An outdoor wood boiler allows you to take advantage of a cheap source of fuel and, by living outside, eliminates many of wood's downsides.

In the end we decided to go with an outdoor wood boiler; it's what made the most sense to us.

LoRa - first steps

I'm blown away! I'm amazed!

It took all of (maybe?) an hour to setup 2 Adafruit Feather M0 with RFM95 LoRa Radio devices and have them ping each other using the simple getting started guide and default code.

One device is sitting on my desk in my office, the other is in the barn. What's amazing is the two are separated by about 80m (~260'), my office is in the basement (underground), my basement walls are roughly 17" thick stone/concrete, and both the barn and the house have metal roofs.

The device in the barn is in a weatherproof enclosure, and is running off a 1000mAh LiPo battery. Both devices have 3" wire antennas.

Farm-Buying Tips: soil investigation

I didn't grow up on a farm, so buying our first farm was very exciting, but also daunting. I thought it would be an interesting exercise to write down some of my thoughts, in case it helps anyone else.

Introduction

I would assume that if someone were buying a farm to grow crops, it would be obvious to them to have a soil test done before considering buying any property. However, since we were buying a horse farm, this didn't occur to us. But now that we've owned this farm for a couple seasons, it becomes more obvious to me that the quality of the soil should be an important consideration for "livestock" farms too (and probably is for people who grew up on livestock farms).

In retrospect, I can think of at least two good reasons for doing a soil analysis before purchasing a horse farm: grass quality, and for working with and on the soil.

 

Grass Quality

The quality of the grass on a livestock farm is quite an important consideration! I like to ironically refer to myself not as a horse farmer, but rather as a grass farmer! (However, with all the recent things going on with the legalization of grass, this joke doesn't usually have the meaning I would like it to have.) The reason is: I personally spend more time maintaining the grass and soil of the property, than I personally do directly taking care of the horses. (Which isn't to say the horses aren't very well taken care of by other people!) If the soil is properly taken care of and well maintained, the grass will be of a better quality, which will lead to happier, healthier horses.

Getting a soil test done is quite easy and fairly cheap. But we stumbled into it backwards.

We had noticed that there were some (small) areas of our paddocks that wouldn't grow actual grass; the only thing that grew in some areas were weedy, crabby (albeit green) garbage plants that the horses wouldn't eat. Plus, we also noticed some buttercups growing here and there. As it turns out, the presence of certain plants gives a good indication of soil type! With the right knowledge (which I don't claim to posses) it should be possible to evaluate a soil's condition with just a visual inspection. Pretty though they are, the presence of buttercup is an indicator of acidic, poorly-draining soil.

When we discovered this, we decided to get some fertilizer to remedy the situation. If we had gone to our local, big-box, hardware-type store, we would have simply found the fertilizer isle, read a couple descriptions, then bought whatever sounded and costed the most favourable. However, we were lucky to have visited, instead, our local feed mill. Since he carried a couple different formulas, the first thing Steve asked was: "what blend would you like?". We had no idea, so he directed us to the local co-op. We visited the co-op, they asked the same question. We said we had no idea what we needed. So they gave us a little tool, a bag, and instructions on how to go about getting a good soil sample. Having obtained the sample, the co-op sent the soil out for analysis. If I remember correctly, I think it cost somewhere in the ballpark of $40. With the actual analysis in-hand of our soil, and having told them the rough size of the area we wanted to fertilize, the co-op then created a batch of fertilizer perfectly matched in formula and quantity for our exact soil's needs.

One of my biggest concerns with fertilizing, is getting the coverage (or density) right. More often than not, over-fertilizing can be more of a problem than under-fertilizing.  Having the co-op give us the right formula and the right quantity meant that we were in a much better position to get the coverage right. For the first pass we simply made sure to under-guess the spreading rate. When we were done the first pass we noticed we were only about half-way through the quantity they had given us. Meaning all we had to do was repeat what we had just done and we could be reasonably sure of having got the coverage right.

As it turns out, it's highly unlikely our soil had been fertilized in a long time, if ever. Decades of being a horse farm caused the soil in all our paddocks to be very acidic, most likely as a result of all the urine. When the analysis of the soil and the recommended fertilizer formula came back from the lab, the people at the co-op had a good laugh. They had never seen such a bizarre formula; most likely because they usually deal with farmers who regularly fertilize their fields and whose soils are probably not so out-of-balance.

We've fertilized our paddocks once, and already we've seen results. There's no doubt we'll be doing a couple more rounds of analysis, formulation, and spreading again!

 

Working With And On The Soil

One frustrating thing that we very quickly discovered after working on the farm shortly after moving in, is the fact that so much of our soil is heavily clay-based, despite the fact that most of our neighbours have sandy soils. I think it's because we're in a bit of a hollow that our soils are predominantly, and very thickly, clay-based.

Working a farm with a clay soil is just yucky.

Clay doesn't drain very well at all, so all surface water (rain run-off, melting snow) has to be directed by, and into, swells, drains, and ditches. That means you'd better make sure whatever tractor you buy has a good backhoe attachment! Otherwise you'll be paying someone an arm-and-a-leg to make your water courses. Plus, even well-made surface drainage has a tendency to "fill up" over time, so just because you might have good water flow now, doesn't mean those structures won't need maintenance every couple of years.

But to add insult to injury, trying to dig in clay-based soils is outright nasty! Unlike regular mud or a sandy soil, clay will stick to your shovel and bucket, making it all that much harder to do any digging. You'll scoop a full bucket of clay, lift it out of the hole, flip it over... and nothing comes out. All the clay you just dug is now stuck in your bucket! So for every bucket you dig, you'll have to spend 3 minutes trying to shake it out. At worse, you'll have to get off your tractor and try to dislodge each bucket-full by hand with a shovel! Also, once you have clay on the surface, every time you try to walk around, the clay will stick to your boots making them extra heavy! And wet clay can be almost as slippery as ice! The short of it is: working in clay is just downright greasy!

Having a lot of clay also means the grassy areas will stay muddy for a lot longer in the Spring, and after a heavy rain, than they should. So while everyone else is out riding in their grass fields come May, you'll be lucky to be riding on your grass by the end of June! It's a fact that all paddock gate areas are prone to being muddy, but on a clay-soiled farm the gate areas will be even muddier.

In an effort to off-set all this muddiness, we ended up trying out a product called Eco-Raster in some of our muddier paddocks and at some of our muddier gate areas. That's a topic for another post, but the purposes of this post, Eco-Raster isn't cheap. So it adds to the financial and maintenance costs of the farm.

Finally, the extra softness of the grassy areas means that getting around will be more problematic. Trying to drive a pick-up or tractor to someplace on the property to do some work will be more challenging. If the soil is too soft you'll get stuck, or at the very least you'll leave nasty tire tracks everywhere you go.

 

Redeeming Qualities

On the flip side, clay soils aren't entirely without benefits.

A couple summers ago we had a lengthy drought where it didn't rain for nearly 2 months. While everyone else's paddocks were hard mud from one end to the other, we continued to have lush, green, grassy paddocks. Many farmers in our area had to resort to buying rounds for their fields in the middle of summer since all their grass was gone. We didn't.

Secondly, it is claimed that the frost doesn't penetrate anywhere near as deeply in soils that have a lot of clay. Meaning underground water lines are safer and don't have to be buried nearly as deep in clay soils as they do in, say, rocky or sandy soils.

 

In Conclusion

The point is: if you're looking at a couple farms to buy, a strong deciding factor might be to have soil samples done on each of them so you'll have a better idea of what you'll be getting yourself into, even if you're not just doing crop farming. Plus, at $40 a pop, the cost of a soil analysis is virtually nothing compared to the cost of the farm.

It might change your idea of what tires to buy for your tractor. Or it might tell you to get a backhoe attachment. In any case: forewarned is forearmed!

What's In A Name?

Phew! The hardest part is always finding a good name. Now that the hard part is over...

A couple years ago I started a blog to talk about things that I was doing of a more technical nature; things related to computer programming, open-source, etc. That's one side of who I am. Another side of who I am is: Trevor the Farmer.

I have an undergraduate university degree in Applied Computer Science, and by day am a Senior Software Engineer (the truth is, I tend to do a lot of this in evenings and weekends too, because I love computers, programming, and electronics so much!). Additionally, my partner, Vanessa (who, incidentally is also a Senior Software Developer) and I own, live on, and run a 30-acre hobby horse farm North-West of Toronto. So when we're not slinging code, you'll often find us slinging manure (which, in many ways, is basically the same thing)!

Lots of the things that I'd like to blog about don't quite fit into the theme of my other blog; things that I've learned from, and that we're doing on, our farm. So I've started this blog as a landing-site for more of the farm-related things. Which isn't to say that farm-related things aren't or can't be technical! I hope to blog about a lot of technical things in and around the farm, but in a different way than I would were I blogging about them on a technical site.

I grew up in the city (Toronto). I lived a large part of my life there. When I was a teenager my family bought a cottage (Hemlock Point) on a lake just South of Parry Sound (Horseshoe Lake). I enjoyed that cottage quite a lot, I enjoyed the country, and getting out of the city.  Vanessa grew up on the outskirts of a smaller, northern-Ontario city, and has always been a huge fan of the outdoors, horses, dogs, etc. We met at university in Toronto and moved in together in 1998: the city boy and the country girl. After roughly 10 years of living together in the city (East York), we moved to the country in 2008. Then, in 2014, we bought and moved to a 30-acre hobby horse farm.

For a period of time while attending University, I lived right in the most downtown of downtown parts of Toronto (Yonge and Carlton area). At the time I enjoyed it somewhat. But now that I've lived in the country for the last decade or so, I can't image ever living in a city again. I'm not saying I'd never do it again, but I can't imagine it. Although I don't live too far from Toronto, I haven't been past the very border of its city limits in a very long time!

As for the title of this blog... When I told my parents that I had met someone new and that Vanessa and I were dating, my mom asked me to tell them something about her. After thinking about it for a moment, the best I could come up with on the spot was: "I'll tell you this: if Vanessa and I stay together, I can guarantee you that over our time together we will end up owning a dog, a horse, and a farm!".

All of this has come true: twenty years on Vanessa and I are still together, we had one dog (Twist!) for a long time (she passed away), now we have two: Sandi and Brinley. We've owned a couple horses (Lexi and Joker), and now we have Glory, Roman, and Perri (we sold Lexi, and Joker passed away). In 2017 Perri gave birth to Ohneka, which brings us up to four horses. This winter both Glory and Perri are pregnant, so hopefully there will be two more horses to add to the family next year!