I completed my second year with the Sundre Round Up in March, and more recently at the start of July celebrated my first full year as a homeowner in this spectacular municipality.
Where has the time gone!
Almost seems as though my better half and I barely finished moving in, yet here we are already more than 12 months later still as excited and proud as ever to call ourselves Sundre homeowners.
Before we ever had a place to call our own, we were never particularly keen to put any effort into endeavours such as gardening. Although we haven't the means to landscape our yard to the same professional-looking extent as some phenomenal properties in town, we decided to at least try growing some basics by starting with a couple of planters.
Our lettuce and cherry tomatoes have some ways to go yet, but they're getting there. At least the green onion bulbs we planted have been sprouting nicely for some time. And I'm crossing my fingers that I properly transplanted a pepper and jalapeÒo plant that I just recently got at the Sundre Municipal Library, courtesy of a patron who adores gardening and decided to anonymously donate spare plants that were available for an extremely modest price to support the facility.
There's undeniably an extremely satisfying element to seeing the fruits ó and vegetables! ó of one's labour materialize. Additionally, the knowledge that homegrown produce was not coated in pesticides or trucked in from thousands of kilometres away is rather rewarding.
We hope to along the way introduce more features to our fledgling garden, adding a new planter here, and perhaps another one there as the years go by. Who knows, maybe five to 10 years from now our yard might even hold a candle to some of the impressive gardens I've seen in this community, although that bar has been set quite high.
Aside from actually being able to get excited about home projects, owning our own house in such close proximity to Snake Hill and the Red Deer River ó each barely a 10-minute walk away ó offers a major additional bonus. Especially in the kind of hot weather we've recently experienced. The river might be cold, but the nearly crystal clear water provides an extremely refreshing way to beat the heat.
For these reasons and more, we remain just as confident about our decision as the day we agreed to buy, and look forward to spending in Sundre many more years, which we don't doubt will fly by!
