Innholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2023 i Cottage Life

New host alert! Do you have a slippery deck? Is a bat in your cottage? Do you want to buy Crown land? Our Cottage Q&A video series is here to help, with videos featuring Cottage Life editors, including senior associate editor, Alysha Vandertogt (above). New videos are posted all the time at cottagelife.com/video. As seen on TV What’s better than a free T-shirt from a T-shirt cannon? The Cottage Life channel in free preview, baby. From February 27–April 30, you can watch World’s Deadliest Weather (new season, Mondays at 9 p.m. ET/PT), Engineering Catastrophes (new season, February 24 at 9 p.m. ET/PT), Mission Unexplained (series premiere, March 12 at 10 p.m. ET/PT), and more! Find your channel: tv.cottagelife.com. A familiar show It’s the most wonderful time of the year—the Spring…

It’s time for help I read “More Homes, But at What Cost?” (Winter ’22). The proposed Bill 23 is a shockingly undemocratic proposition undermining decades of efforts by thousands of taxpayers and professionals in their communities struggling to protect and plan for the future. This proposal is pro-development at all costs and seems to be a very dangerous and overly simplified effort that undoes decades of environmental progress to protect Ontario’s farmland, watersheds, and individual character. We have fought long, costly, and time-consuming battles to gain a say in our local planning decisions. If this bill proceeds, there may not be a need for local planning at all. There are many development options worth considering that would not result in the kind of urban sprawl on farmland we already see…

Q: “I host an annual party at my cottage every Victoria Day weekend—it’s sort of a ‘Welcome Back to the Lake’ kind of thing. My neighbours are encouraging me to give it a competition theme: Best Potluck Dish, for example, or Best Costume Based on a TV Character. I feel like that’ll discourage people from attending. What’s the deal with this—isn’t it enough that we all just get together and have a barbecue?” A: You should consider yourself fortunate to have avoided the irritating “competition entertaining” trend for so long because, like giant hogweed or mindful paddleboard yoga, it’s one of those things that infiltrated Cottage Land some time ago and simply refuses to die. I remember working at the meat counter of our little cottage-country store about 10 years…

JANE ARMSTRONG WAS in a canoe with her elder sister Betty, nosing up a small stream that empties into Groundhog Lake. It was 1990, and the two were setting traps for beavers in the tradition of their parents, but they were also keeping an eye out for more fantastical fauna. A few weeks earlier, a CN Rail employee had reported seeing a white moose. “He said he was sure he had seen one, but had never heard of it before, and didn’t know if he was seeing things,” says Jane. Jane was in her mid-40s at this time; Betty, her late-50s. Neither had encountered an ivory ungulate before, despite countless hours in the bush but, unlike the rail worker, the concept wasn’t new to them. Their dad, George Dingee, had…

Mark Pupo Journalist and cookbook author Mark Pupo held everyone’s dream job—a restaurant critic—for 10 years at Toronto Life, a position he got through a mix of luck and interest. “I was on staff and had been editing restaurant reviews and eating out a lot. They needed someone to fill the role.” Now, after hundreds of dining experiences, Mark is debuting his first cookbook, Sundays, a collection of 52 breakfast recipes he made with his son, Sam. (You can find one of his favourites on p. 80.) Growing up, Mark worked in restaurants and was already an avid cook and food-trend lover when he started writing reviews. “The many meals in fancy restaurants gave me a greater appreciation for unfussy home cooking.” Sundays will be available March 28, 2023, wherever…

Thanks to five temperature settings, the brand’s 20L battery-powered cooler/warmer box not only keeps cold items cold (down to -10°C), it can also keep hot items hot (up to 60°C). It would be super-useful to hold food at temperature during a long cottage commute—because, c’mon, you will get stuck in traffic—or, say, during an early-season power outage (because, weather). The unit runs on 18V LXT batteries, 120V AC (using an AC adapter), or 12V DC (using a 12V automotive adapter). An LED light tells you the internal temperature, the cooler’s USB port allows you to charge mobile devices, and the bottle opener…is a bottle opener. Sure, this cooler’s not cheap. But it’s also a lot more than a cooler. 18V LXT & 120V AC Cooler & Warmer Box, $1,159 (suggested…

Q: We have a totally rusty handsaw and cross-cut saw. Is there any way to restore a rusty blade to make it usable again, or is it okay to use it as is?—Stella Traveller, Huntsville, Ont. A: Well, it’s okay to use a rusty saw. And the rust will start to come off as soon as you start to use it, says Peter Nietlispach, the owner of Peacock Woodcraft in Temagami, Ont. “After about eight cuts, a lot of that rust will disappear.” So, problem? Solution! But rust will make the saw’s teeth dull. It’ll be harder to push back and forth. In other words, “the sawing would be a less-than-enjoyable experience,” says Cottage Life project builder Wayne Lennox. “Ideally, one strives to prevent tools from getting rusty in the…

THIS OLD COTTAGE is like a ship. Walk across the slightly tilted floor, and the whole structure creaks to mark your passage. In a high wind, the corners keen a moaning sound that makes me think of a gale blowing through the rigging. When we bought it, the adult children of the previous owners told us how much their parents had loved the place, and their mother’s parents before that. My brother did the paperwork on the deal, and when it was done, the two siblings handed him a bottle of brandy. They told him they wanted the new owners to toast their parents the night they moved in. “We buried their ashes under the fireplace last week,” they told him. So there’s that. I’m not worried about ghosts, but…

MY WIFE, LYNN, and I purchased a cottage in November of 2019, back in the final, carefree weeks of the Before Times. It’s not a cottage anymore. The property we bought was unusual, the kind we never expected to encounter. The living quarters were nothing special: a modest, seven-year-old, one-storey build with a small kitchen, three bedrooms, and an open-concept living space. The location, however, was perfect for us. It was surrounded by forest with no neighbouring cottages in sight and just a short bike ride to the lake. But it wasn’t on a rural road, nestled amid acres of wilderness. It was located in a forgotten Huntsville, Ont., subdivision six kilometres east of the city centre, a quick jaunt down Hwy. 60, and it featured the full suite of…

THE FUNGUS RESPONSIBLE for white-nose syndrome, an infectious disease that’s decimated bat populations across eastern Canada, is making rapid gains across the Prairies. Pseudogymnoascus destructans was detected last summer along Alberta’s Red Deer River, says Cory Olson, the coordinator of the Alberta Community Bat Program with Wildlife Conservation Society Canada. The fungus expanded more than 500 km in a one-year span, setting the stage for wider distribution into prime bat habitat in the Rocky Mountains. P. destructans was first identified in eastern North America in 2006, likely arriving from Europe on clothing or equipment, or from an infected bat on a cargo ship. The fungus spreads from bat to bat and thrives in cool temperatures. The infection irritates bats’ skin and disrupts their hibernation, depleting their energy reserves and leading…

WHEN YOU SAW boards to length, getting the cut ends to be smooth, accurate, and square will help them fit more tightly with other parts, taking your projects to another level. Build yourself a shooting board to act a guide for a sharp hand plane to slice across the end of the workpiece. It will make your parts true, even if your saw cuts aren’t perfect. 1 Start with the base—a 16" by 16" piece of ¾" MDF is a versatile size for the base, but you can also customize the length and width. One end of the base needs an open track for the plane to ride on its side. The track should be the width of your plane’s side cheek, and the depth should be equal to the…

AS A DOCUMENTARY filmmaker, I’m often telling stories from far-flung places, but last summer I uncovered one in my own backyard—the lake. Our log cabin looks out on the far end of Smoke Lake in Ontario’s Algonquin Provincial Park. It has a massive deck, perfect for watching the seasons change from spring to summer to fall and for soaking in the quiet. Often, our nearest neighbours are the resident loon pair, who seem to appreciate the isolation as much as we do. At night, they call to each other, a haunting sound that somehow embodies the Canadian outdoor experience. By day, in early summer, they parade their chicks on their backs as if showing them off for us. And by late August, those chicks have grown enough to practise liftoff,…

Lend a hand What would possess us to draw in permanent ink on the walls of our Hess Lake, Mich., cottage? I’m not sure. But we’ve always been a little rebellious here—no TV, no WiFi, eating sugar-filled cereal—so it seems to fit. We first started 10 years ago, when I was eight years old, and my younger brother and I thought it was incredible we were being encouraged to draw on the wall. Every guest traces their handprint (paws get pawprints) and turns it into something meaningful, such as their favourite animal or lakehouse activity. We’ve got trees, ducks, and even cheese! It’s a fun way to revisit the many memories we’ve shared with family and friends. Share your guest “book” photos on Instagram with #CottageLifeSub, or email us at…