Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2024 i Cottage Life

The shows must go on Hey, eastern Ontario, it’s your turn! The Ottawa Cottage Life & Backyard Show is happening April 12–14 at the EY Centre. Come get your merch in the Cottage Life booth, sample drinks at the Dock Party, and see your favourite experts on the Main Stage, including senior editor Alysha Vandertogt, Cottage Coach Adam Holman, and estate planning lawyer Peter Lillico. For full show details and to get your tickets, visit shows.cottagelife.com. SPRING TV PREMIERES The Cottage Life channel is still in free preview until April 28. Take advantage and watch a new season of Mysteries from Above, Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/PT, and Weird Earth, a brand-new series premiering April 1 at 9 p.m. ET/PT. Find your channel: tv.cottagelife.com. Attention: music lovers Tall Pines Music…

GOODBYE AND HELLO In case you missed the news on cottagelife.com, the Federation of Ontario Cottagers’ Associations’ long-time executive director, Terry Rees, stepped down this spring. The Lake Kasshabog cottager had been head of the organization for 20 years; he’d also been a trusted Cottage Life expert source for those two decades, weighing in on a range of issues important to Ontario cottagers. His successor, Lesley Lavender—the former CEO of Prince Edward County’s Chamber of Commerce—will begin full-time in early April. All the best for whatever comes next, Terry. It’s been a slice. And we look forward to chatting with you, Lesley! It’ll be a slice. A TIME TO GRILL? The future of barbecue is here. And it’s…weird. In January, Seergrills, a U.K.-based company, debuted the world’s first AI-powered grill…

TO HUMANS IT’S a culvert. But for beavers living near Todd Weiler’s Emsdale, Ont., driveway, it’s a poorly built dam with an 18" hole, just begging to be plugged with mud and sticks. That’s why, on and off for almost two decades, when Todd cleared his blocked culvert, a new dam would soon appear. Trapping didn’t work, because new beavers replace the old ones. “If you’ve got the right geography,” Todd says, “beavers are going to find it.” Rushing water is a trigger for the powerful dam-building urge in Castor canadensis, explains Glynnis Hood, a professor of environmental science at the University of Alberta and the author of The Beaver Manifesto. Plugging leaks is so instinctive, young beavers raised in captivity assemble dams near speakers broadcasting water sounds. When these…

Q: We have a man-made frog pond at our cottage, which has been home to many frogs since we bought our place in 2007. This year, we arrived in the spring to find the water murky, with green slime floating on top. There are no frogs to be found. We have never done maintenance of any kind from year to year, but I did trim out some cedars that were filling in too close to the pond. What could be the cause of the disappearance, and how do we go about restoring the quality of the water to bring back our frogs?—Sandy Spence, Tobermory, Ont. A: You’re right that something’s up with the water. “The green slime is likely algae, which could mean the water quality in the pond has…

featuring The one who fell in love at first sight The long-distance lovers The enduring love The love triangle The ones holding on to first love the buyers Sandy Hunter Richard & Heather Jones Kristin Cripps Justin & Ali Bellon Jacob & Ben Morris including the storyteller Writer Andrea Yu These cottagers bought in a rocky pandemic real estate market. Four years on, are they still in love with life at the lake? it’s a familiar script Through the Covid years, the cottage real estate market moved at a breakneck pace. Properties were changing hands fast, prices were inflated, bidding wars ensued, the rental market exploded. Beyond the conditions of the purchases themselves, people were doing deals in ways we had never seen before, just to get into the market. Whether…

Julia Galotta When illustrator Julia Galotta was deciding what career to pursue, she knew she wanted to do something creative. “At first I thought I’d explore animation, but I was more drawn to illustration.” Julia got into the highly competitive illustration program at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ont., and has been honing her craft since graduating in 2020. She’s already illustrated one children’s book, I See! I, Pi, Ti, Ki, about Inuktut sounds and syllabics, and has another on the way. She’s also illustrated for outlets such as NBC News and Reader’s Digest Canada. Julia’s graphic for this issue’s Cottage Q&A (p. 33) depicts frogs mysteriously disappearing from a cottager’s pond. “I sketched about 10 rough illustrations,” says Julia. “I felt like I nailed it pretty early on though. You…

THE NEW, 65,000-sq.-ft. home of the Canadian Canoe Museum, opening May 11 in Peterborough, Ont., has more room to display the artifacts, better HVAC to preserve them, and a café. But the most exciting part to its executive director is something any cottager can relate to: “I can’t wait to be on the water,” says Carolyn Hyslop. That’s right: after spending the past 27 years in a revamped outboard motor plant on Monaghan Road in Peterborough, the collection has moved into a stunning, purpose-built facility on Little Lake, part of the Trent-Severn Waterway. “A lot of people have been talking about paddling to the museum, and even people in powerboats can dock at one of the locks and walk over,” says Hyslop. Those who do will be strolling a short…

LAST YEAR, THREE of my balsam fir trees looked awful—brown needles, tunnels in the bark, piles of sawdust near the roots. A local arborist identified a sawyer longhorn beetle infestation. Unless we cut down the trees—which were dead—the beetles could kill neighbouring ones too. We’d seen these creepy insects before—many, but not all, longhorn beetles are native to Canada. Only some longhorns—including some native species—damage trees, and usually only trees already under stress, says David Dutkiewicz, the entomology technician for the Invasive Species Centre in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. “Healthy trees have defences against beetle infestations, but there’s no way to prevent the beetles from attacking stressed trees,” he says. In fact, trees affected by lightning, heavy snow load, or drought release a stress scent the beetles can detect. Sawyer longhorn…

I LIKE TO SAVE money and the environment by keeping my footwear in the game a little longer. Shoe Goo is just the ally for many repairs I do. As a glue, it tenaciously bonds a variety of shoe materials, and it’s viscous enough that I can form and shape it to replace missing bits. Soles often separate from the shoe body. After cleaning and drying the surfaces well, I apply masking tape to protect the surfaces adjacent to seams where glue could squeeze out. Then I use a thin putty knife or a feeler gauge to spread Shoe Goo between the layers. Try to avoid excess glue; although you can trim hard, cured glue with a sharp knife, you risk creating more damage. Wipe excess glue off the masking…

WHEN WE FIRST went looking for our cottage on Georgian Bay, my husband, Anton, and I asked a cousin and veteran cottager if she had any advice. What questions should we ask of the current owners? What should we look for when we visit the property? We expected some tips on water systems, or maybe critter control. “Look beyond the property, get to know your neighbours,” came the reply. “Meet them before you make an offer, if you can.” She made a good point. The thing that makes a cottage special is not so much the property itself, but everything that surrounds it: the water we swim in and boat across, the islands we visit, the forests we hike, and, of course, the people and the other animals we meet…

YOU EXPECT TO find some flotsam in the spring, especially on a lake as big as Panache—my lake—after a freshet as intense as the one we got in 2023. But generally, it appears in a prosaic form: bleach bottles, dog toys, plastic drums sprung from the underside of docks. What I spied from my own dock last May was poetic—a slender craft with fine, upswept ends, adrift in the very centre of the lake, like a dream. From a distance it resembled a mini gondola or the kind of skiff an impressionist painter might have captured on the Seine. It turned out to be something even more exotic, yet at the same time familiar. As I paddled out with my girlfriend for a closer look, I saw that, unlike my…

POTHOLES IN COTTAGE roads are best remedied with diesel and hydraulic muscle. But they can also be fixed DIY-style with your own time and labour. Resist the urge to simply refill a pothole with more crushed rock. This is an exercise in futility, because when a tire hits the repaired hole, especially in wet conditions, it displaces aggregate toward the edge of the hole. The next set of tires will then be hitting a dip, bouncing more material out and up, making the hole bigger. Repeat 500 times and your old pothole is back, bigger than ever. The solution, which may seem counterintuitive, is to first enlarge the pothole by removing the sharp edges of the “pot” itself. The idea is to make a smooth transition across the hole, with…

PAINTING A CONCRETE or brick exterior wall starts with some quiet meditation. Take a deep, cleansing breath and ask yourself, “Do I really need to paint it at all?” Unpainted masonry needs very little maintenance, while slapping on the wrong paint adds regular upkeep and can cause damage. As latex and alkyd paints dry, they polymerize—small molecules hook up to form a film. That’s ideal for many materials, but in masonry, the film traps moisture, which freezes and can pop off, taking some of the surface with it. Just because film-forming binders are common doesn’t mean they’re the only option. Limewash and silicate mineral paints are two masonry-friendly products that bond very strongly to a porous concrete and brick surface while remaining vapour-permeable—they breathe. Limewash paints—think white stone houses on…

LAST SUMMER, AT the start of Canada’s worst wildfire season on record, our insurance provider informed us that they wouldn’t be renewing the coverage for our home in Atlin, B.C., a small, rural town and cottage country to neighbouring Whitehorse. We’d recently built a new house on our property and were told that it would be no problem to add it to our existing policy. However, when it came time to move in, the insurer balked, asking us to confirm our postal code more than once, which made me wonder if their reluctance had something to do with our rural location. It was early June and already wildfires had burned more than 50 times more acres than the 20-year average for that time of year. No amount of protesting (or…

IT’S HIGH NOON on a nearly cloudless August day, and a father and son are on their PWC, making their way through a lush, narrow inlet at the edge of Baptiste Lake, near Bancroft, Ont. They slow down as they pass the marina and raise their hands to block out the sun, trying to catch a glimpse of an unassuming boathouse and the hubbub happening on top of it. The duo linger for a few minutes, watching a steady stream of people working on a large deck atop the structure: there are giant speakers to set up, a small cache of instruments to ferry up the stairs, amps to carefully manoeuvre. The PWC riders know what day it is, as do the other cottagers along this edge of Baptiste Lake.…

A sunny day in May is ideal for spying a smiling Blanding’s turtle catching rays atop a log or a muskrat lodge in Ontario, western Quebec, or southern Nova Scotia. Solar charging is vital in the weeks after ice-out for the cold-blooded, high-domed reptile, newly arisen from winter torpor at the bottom of a frigid marsh, bog, or beaver pond. Other times, the turtle plods unseen through weedy waterbeds, probing beneath debris with its extra-long, yellow neck, to suction up crayfish, tadpoles, insect larvae, fish eggs and fry, and snails. Blanding’s are the only Canadian turtles whose shell can completely close after they retract their head and legs, thanks to a specialized hinge. They’re also more footloose than other turtles, most changing locales several times per year for sustenance or…