Dome Chronicles

The Dome Chronicles By Garry Leeson In 1972, a boxcar from Toronto containing a menagerie of farm animals and an eager young couple pulled into the station platform in Kingston, Nova Scotia. They were bound for a deserted hundred-acre farm on the South Mountain, determined to preserve the foundations of farmsteads past while constructing a geodesic dome. They were pioneers of the future, armed with respect for tradition and an irrepressible sense of humour. They didn’t call themselves farmers. They were back-to-the-landers. Farming was industry and their calling was sustainability. Over the next forty years, through flood and fire, triumph…
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The Dome Chronicles: This Was My Father By Garry Leeson My mother wanted a large garden when they moved to a small farm on the Blue Mountain outside Meaford, Ontario. Dad agreed to do the hoeing but after a couple of days of fighting the weeds, he came up with a better idea. He disappeared into his workshop and when he emerged it was behind a one of a kind self-propelled row crop cultivator of his own creation. An old make or break one-lung gas engine, belching smoke and banging away, was mounted on a wooden frame above two cast…
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The Dome Chronicles: If Dreams were Horses By Garry Leeson In 1972, a boxcar from Toronto containing a menagerie of farm animals and an eager young couple pulled into the station platform in Kingston, Nova Scotia. They were bound for a deserted hundred-acre farm on the South Mountain, determined to preserve the foundations of farmsteads past while constructing a geodesic dome. They were pioneers of the future, armed with respect for tradition and an irrepressible sense of humour. They didn’t call themselves farmers. They were back-to-the-landers. Farming was industry and their calling was sustainability. Over the next forty years, through…
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The Dome Chronicles: Forget it, Goose Man. By Garry Leeson In 1972, a boxcar from Toronto containing a menagerie of farm animals and an eager young couple pulled into the station platform in Kingston, Nova Scotia. They were bound for a deserted hundred-acre farm on the South Mountain, determined to preserve the foundations of farmsteads past while constructing a geodesic dome. They were pioneers of the future, armed with respect for tradition and an irrepressible sense of humour. They didn’t call themselves farmers. They were back-to-the-landers. Farming was industry and their calling was sustainability. Over the next forty years, through…
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The Dome Chronicles: A Come From Away Christmas By Garry Leeson   In 1972, a boxcar from Toronto containing a menagerie of farm animals and an eager young couple pulled into the station platform in Kingston, Nova Scotia. They were bound for a deserted hundred-acre farm on the South Mountain, determined to preserve the foundations of farmsteads past while constructing a geodesic dome. They were pioneers of the future, armed with respect for tradition and an irrepressible sense of humour. They didn’t call themselves farmers. They were back-to-the-landers. Farming was industry and their calling was sustainability. Over the next forty…
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The Dome Chronicles: If This House Could Speak By Garry Leeson   Beginning at the outskirts of the town of Berwick, a road winds its way up the South Mountain past a small community hall that announces that you have entered Windermere. Across the road, almost hidden under a canopy of mature trees, stands a stately farmhouse. It once stood naked in the centre of a patchwork of cleared fields, but now a comforting green growth of forest surrounds and envelops it. It’s an old house, built in 1875 but remodelled and added to in 1908 when the Kinnie family…
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