Learn more about the people that live* in the fen
Full Disclosure: we don’t actually ‘live’ in the fen, but we do visit often. What we lack in residency, we make up for with enthusiasm!
Why we have a fen
We’re just your average married couple with two kids* and a dog. Most of the time we live in southern Ontario with 13.5 million other people. What makes us a bit different is that we like wetlands. A lot.
Like most people, we also like our privacy, so for the purposes of this blog you can know us as Sphagmom, Fengineer, Flux and Boots (and our dog, BogDog).
A long time ago, we started wondering if it would be possible to get a cabin in a wetland. In Ontario, it turns out that the answer is mostly no – and for good reason. In most municipalities wetlands have been zoned as ‘Environmental Protection’ zones or more simply EP. This means that you can’t build a new cabin in a wetland per se, but you can build wetland adjacent as long as you respect the specified setbacks. Fair enough.
A few years ago we found the magical unicorn property: close to fifty acres with about 20 acres of wetland (some swamp, but most of it what can be described as a poor fen) complete with a fully permitted 500 square foot off-grid cabin built on an adjacent granite outcropping. As an added bonus, it was even accessible directly from a gravel road that is cleared of snow in the winter. It was perfect, so we bought it.
As for location, let’s just describe it as “nestled on the Canadian Shield” a 3-7 hour drive from the GTA. (If you’re from Toronto, you know what we’re talking about. If you’re not, understand that if you leave on a Friday afternoon in the summer your in for loooooooong adventure).
*According to Statistics Canada, In 2021 the total average fertility rate for Canada was 1.43 kids per mother. Technically, we’re slightly above average.
Why we started a blog
We love our time at the cabin, but what we didn’t expect was how few people would understand why. A typical discussion:
Random person: What did you do on the weekend?
Us: We went up to the cabin.
Random person: That sounds fun. Where is it? (always expecting to be some fantastic lake)
Us: In a wetland in the middle of nowhere.
Random person: Um…nice? I guess. What exactly do you DO in a wetland? Aren’t there…a…lot…of…bugs**?
We created this blog mostly to answer those questions. Our hope is to share all of the fantastic parts of visiting a wetland so that more people would understand. Along the way we hope to share some of the science of our particular wetland (Sphagmom’s area of expertise) as well as the challenges of off-grid living (the domain of the Fengineer)
**Yes.