Bog Blog

Happy World Wetlands Day!

World Wetlands Day is an annual event to help raise awareness about the importance of wetlands. It is celebrated on February 2nd – the day in 1971 that the Convention on Wetlands (often called the Ramsar Convention) became an international treaty. Learn More

Frozen wetland covered with a sheet of ice and snow drifts

At fenlife, our wetland is mostly frozen but it doesn’t mean that we forget about it! Underneath all of that soil and ice the fen is still holding water and storing carbon.

As you’ll learn through our blog, we work to both protect our wetland and enjoy it all year round. Through our upcoming blog posts we’ll hope that you’ll learn a bit about the science of wetlands while also gaining an appreciation for the many natural surprises we enjoy while we’re there, like hearing the owls and frogs hoot and chirp under the starry skies, seeing the sandhill cranes as they stop on their migration and stopping to wonder who made the latest set of footprints.

Is it a Cabin?

It’s not uncommon to have a vacation property in Canada, but it seems that there is a lot of variation in what that property is called. The folks at www.the10and3.com have done some research on the subject, and they’ve found that the distribution is a bit like this:

Source: http://www.the10and3.com/this-is-how-canada-talks/

While our particular cabin is somewhere near the cottage/camp geographic boundary, you’ll find that we refer to it exclusively as “the cabin”. Why? We find that referring to it as a cottage evokes pictures of cabins nestled in the trees along the shore of a crystal clear lake complete with a pair of Muskoka* chairs positioned invitingly on a wooden dock. That’s not what we have. Truthfully, we DO have the chairs, but there’s no view of the lake and nobody is going swimming.

Why not a camp? While the cabin is in northern Ontario, we live in Southern Ontario. For most people in the area where we live, camping involves a tent. For some it involves an RV, camper, motorhome, fifth wheel or some other form of hard-shelled, semi-insulated, electricity powered mobile shelter. This is also not what we have this is a blog about fenlife, not vanlife!

Perhaps we’re just Western Canadians at heart!

*Some people know Muskoka chairs as Adirondack chairs. We thought that this was a nomenclature thing and went looking in hopes that the10and3.com included it in their survey. They didn’t. But we did find this detailed explanation of the differences.