The rural life is for me

Some of my favorite memories from my childhood were made on my uncle's daylily farm near Orono, Ontario. Henry Lorraine and his late partner Doug Lycett started the business to breed daylilies, and once a summer hold a public open house to debut and sell their new flowers. Several times when I was a child, my mom and I travelled to the farm to lend a hand during the open house and visit family.

I lived in the suburbs but even as a child, I knew I preferred wide open spaces and through these occasional visits to the farm, I discovered I enjoyed working on the land. My cousins and I were "runners" — whenever a customer placed an order at the farmhouse, it was radioed to the gardeners in the fields, who dug up the plants, bound them, and gave them to one of us to run back to the farmhouse.

Daylilies only bloom for one day, so at sundown we would walk up and down the rows of plants, deadheading the day's blossoms to make room for the buds that would bloom the following morning. It seemed to me an idyllic way to live. That may be a little naivety on the part of a city girl, but it inspired in me a lifelong dream to marry a farmer — which, as I've grown up (and fallen in love with a man without a single rural bone in his body), has translated into a dream to at least own land someday.

Until I gather the capital to make that dream a reality, I have to settle for events like the one pictured above: a celebration of the newly-approved carbon-free village in Leduc County. The project is not expected to break ground until the fall, but the designers held a potluck on June 27 to give the project partners — and potential future residents — an opportunity to see the property.

We also helped plant some donated trees on a section of the land designated to become a future nature reserve for all the residents of the village to enjoy.

I may have unnerved Leduc County councillor Reinhold Ortlieb with my enthusiasm for digging holes, as he kept cautioning me not to break the shovel in the hard clay ground. I can't help it — give me dirt and an open field and something green to lavish with TLC, and I'm good to go.

Bobby will have some more photos from the event in the July 3 Rep.