It’s been a busy few days of out-and-abouting, but today I hope to get actual manual labour done in the yard.

While also being careful of my broken toe, of course.

*grumble*

Yesterday, my older daughter and I got glamour shots of the kittens, to use in our attempts to adopt them out. We got a bunch of photos, uploaded them, went out to retake some for a couple of kittens, uploaded them, looked them all over again.

And again.

And again.

Went back out to track down the kitten we missed. 😀

So working on “marketing” the kittens for adoption is on the to-do list for today, too.

There has been an unfortunate side effect of our taking extra care of the mom’s and kittens, though.

Last year, they each had a litter, and they kept moving them all over until they were too big to move anymore. The kittens also didn’t get a lot of solid food until they got to that point, and I was able to leave food out near their hiding places. Our attempts to socialize the kittens were only partially successful.

The moms and kittens, being safe and well fed, has resulted in the moms being ready for more kittens again.

It looks like we’re going to have at least 2 more litters before the end of the year. We’ve taken to chasing the visiting toms away with the hose, but that’s not going to be enough. Chances are, Beep Beep and Butterscotch are already pregnant again.

*sigh*

Gotta find a way to come up with the cash to fix the females, at least, but they cost about twice as much as doing a male.

Last night, while using the hose on Nicky the Nose, I had an audience.

There were actually more kittens, but some ran off faster than I could get my phone out to take a picture. 😀

I was able to get a nice sunset photo later on, though.

This was taken from the outer yard, and I played around with the “pro” settings on my phone.

This morning, while heading to the trail cam, I paused to pick a few Saskatoons. Our cherries are starting to look good, too.

These are the trees next to the house. So many berries! Last year, I found only 3 cherries, in total. It’s going to be a race to see if we can get the ripe berries before the birds do.

I don’t know the name of the variety; only that the original tree came from Poland. In Poland, they were ready to harvest at least a month ago.

I made a point of looking at the cherry trees along the edge of the spruce grove, where we had so many flowers this spring.

There’s basically nothing. In this photo, I found only 2. I found a couple more, farther in. One of them, the tree gets more sunlight than the others, and had an actual ripe cherry on it.

This is what I gathered this morning; the one cherry, and a handful of Saskatoons.

This little bowl of Saskatoon berries is more than we had all of last year, so I’m not complaining!

At some point, I’m going to have to make a decision about the Saskatoon bushes. They are sort of all over, but none of them look healthy. In some cases, I can attribute that to not having enough sunlight or room to grow, but others look diseased or infested. I will be leaving them as I clean, clear and thin the spruce grow and see how they do after that. I might end up getting rid of them and buying new, healthy trees to transplant in a more ideal location for growth.

That’s a decision that will be made at least 2 or 3 years from now.

When it comes to trees – especially food trees – everything is done with years and decades in mind, rather than weeks and months! We need to plan and prepare now, for things we want to do a year or two from now, so that we can harvest from them 5-10 years from now, if not longer, depending on the variety. I’ve found a site that specializes in trees that will grow in zones even colder than ours, and have been using it to plan ahead. Specifically, I’m interested in their nut trees package, and sugar bush package. Which means preparing about 4 acres of land in total, to hold a couple hundred trees, just for those. It doesn’t take into account the fruit trees and berry bushes I want to plant, plus a vegetable garden.

We can do that. 🙂

The Re-Farmer