I can’t see them, but at least one of them was very loud when I visited the mamas this morning.
You might have to turn the sound up to hear them.
Butterscotch seems quite comfortable in her cave. :-)
The Re-Farmer
Month: April 2020
Found it!
No, we didn’t find the source of the knocking in the van.
We picked up the van, dropping off my mom’s car at the same time, then did a quick trip to the grocery store before we had to pick Two-Face up from the vet. My daughter also made an appointment to get our original Mama, who showed up as a stray on our balcony, years ago, and brought us her baby. She has been acting very ornery lately, growling and hissing at the other cats, and sometimes nothing at all. So she will be brought in for a check up on Monday.
Then we headed home, and…
The van is running smooth as butter.
We had talked to the mechanic for a while, and we still can’t figure out what caused the knocking and shuddering. If it had been the CV joint, it would have made a different noise. Still, I’m glad that in the process of trying to track down the noise, we were able to find and fix another problem before it became a bigger problem in the future.
Two-Face, meanwhile, seems to be doing okay. She’s found a place to sleep things off, and I haven’t even seen the surgical site yet.
No, what I found today was the source of an odd pain I would get in my foot, when I wore my runners. One of those little stabbing pains that I couldn’t quite tell if something was stuck in my shoe, or stuck in my sock. Then, while I was moving things we’d taken from the basement to the barn, I happened to step on an edge of concrete, and something stabbed me in the foot again. Hard.
So I took my shoe off right there in the barn and this time, I could feel something inside my shoe. It took some hunting on the sole, but I finally found what stepping on the concrete had pushed into my foot.
Thankfully, among the things we brought to the barn from the basement was a tray full of odds and ends, including the remains of a small standard tip screwdriver. I was able to use it to pry the nail loose from my shoe. It had to be pushed in really deep before I could finally find it from the inside! I have no idea when I stepped on this but, thankfully, it went in at an angle, or it would have gone right into my foot.
Meanwhile, the girls and I were able to clear most of the stuff away from the front of the house, either to the barn, the burn pile or the junk pile that we’ll need to get hauled away with a trailer. What’s left needs to go to the dump. The van has already been filled, ready for tomorrow. We’ll have to make sure to take multiple trips this week, to catch up on all the trash and recycling we normally would have taken to the dump earlier in the week.
It feels so much better not to have all that stuff in front of the house!!!
My other project of the day meant I got to spend some time with the (still pregnant) mamas in the basement. I dismantled the hanging frame I made for the cheese and started cleaning up and sanding the wood.
Some of the wood needed to be shaved and smoothed with a knife, first. One of the side pieces had a bit of a crack in it, so I glued and clamped it. I’ll need to pick up some coarser sandpaper before I can continue working on that one. I was able to get some progress with the rest of the pieces, though.
Here’s a before and after, so far. I was able to whip the rig together in about half an hour, and it did the job. I just want to get it finished properly, now that there is no rush. My daughter has a shift tomorrow, so I should be able to swing by the hardware store and pick up more sandpaper and be able to continue.
Well. Not right away. With the van already packed for the dump, I’ll have to do that first. I’ll just have to remember to go back into town to pick up my daughter early enough to catch the hardware store before it closes.
I am so happy to have our van back.
The Re-Farmer
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Morning
One of the things I’m appreciating about doing my morning rounds earlier, is our longer days. Along with the increased light is the increased critter activity.
Along with my feline followers, I was hearing all kinds of cranes and Canada geese calling. Sometimes, I can see the geese out in the pasture behind the barn, or watch the geese and cranes flying overhead. Every now and then, I hear the thrumming of prairie chicken wings as they drum up their presence, and the staccato knocking of a wood pecker getting at some grub. :-D It’s fantastic!
The temperatures fluctuating above and below freezing so much (more below than not, lately) had an unexpected result this morning.
One of the icicles from the cracked bird bath created a hat of ice on the gnome! :-D
This morning, my daughter and I took my mother’s car to bring Two Face for her appointment with the vet. Since they are just blocks away, I dropped my daughter off at the vet and continued on to the garage to get a status on our van. Parts have been ordered and are on their way from the city. It will be ready by the time we return to pick up Two Face.
I am so looking forward to having our van back!!!
I just don’t like driving my mother’s car. I don’t like how it feels. I don’t like the noises it makes (and I don’t mean the noise from the differential that I will be getting checked; just it’s normal car noises). I don’t like the small size. There is so little leg room for the back seats, it may as well be a 2 seater.
It actually is a good little car. It does have a decent amount of space under the hatch, and the spare tire is easily accessible. Also, the front seats have butt warmers. :-D I’ve just been absolutely spoiled by minivans. Living here, having two vehicles is more necessity than luxury, but if I had any choice in the matter, our second vehicle would be one of those big, ostentatious, jacked up trucks.
With a plow attachment and a trailer hitch.
Funny how priorities change when you’re living in the sticks. :-D
The Re-Farmer
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Lemon cheese, end result
Here is how the lemon cheese turned out! :-D
This photo was taken right after the bag was taken down from the hanging rig.
Of course, I gave it a taste.
It has very mild in flavour, as to be expected with a cheese like this. Lightly salty – I probably could have added maybe an extra half teaspoon, instead of the quarter teaspoon or so I added, to adjust for using 4L instead of 1 gallon. It has a light, almost creamy texture to it.
Because it’s so loose, I squeezed it together in the cheesecloth a bit, then put it back into the colander over the bowl, put a plate over it and weighed it down with my stone mortar. Just for a couple of minutes, to make it easier to transfer into a container.
Since it’s such a fresh cheese, it will need to be finished quickly.
I don’t think we’ll have a problem with that! :-D
Then, because I had a big bowl of still-warm whey handy, I made up a double batch of bread, using whey for the liquid. This works out really well. Yeast seems to really like whey. The dough has a softer feel to it while kneading, and the finished bread is lighter, with a delicate crumb and a lovely flavour.
We’ll be storing the rest of the whey in the fridge to use in other baking. It would be awesome in a sourdough bread!
I’m quite pleased with the end result of this cheese. Definitely something I will be making again, and maybe playing around with adding things, like fresh herbs, to it at the salting stage.
The Re-Farmer
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Van update
I just got a call from the garage about our van. Apparently, he’s been trying to call me since yesterday, on both the land line and my cell phone, and couldn’t get through. I have no idea why; my mother phoned earlier, and got through no problem. I had just got off the phone with her when my cell phone started ringing. There wasn’t enough of a connection and the call got dropped, but I could see that it was the garage and called back on the land line. Weird, but not too unexpected out here, really.
Anyhow.
He gave me estimate for 2 options. One was to fix the boot, the other was to replace the axle. He said that a small amount of dirt has gotten into the grease. I started talking about replacing the axle right away, which was going to be his recommendation. It would cost less to fix the boot, but we’d end up needing to do the axle later anyhow, so we’ll just get that done now, before it becomes an issue.
It still shouldn’t be the cause of the knocking and shuddering, though. It just wasn’t that bad in there. Still, I’m glad it’s getting done now, before it’s a major problem.
He might be able to get the job done by the end of today, but we have an appointment with Two Face and the vet tomorrow, so we’re going to combine trips. When it comes time to pick up Two Face at the end of the day, we’ll drop my mom’s car off at the garage and pick up the van. I’ll be leaving my mom’s car there so he can check it out whenever he gets a chance, and see why there is still a noise coming from the differential. There is no hurry on this. In fact, I’d prefer it wait until the end of the month, when pay comes in, though that decision will be made after he’s had a chance to figure out what’s going on.
Ah, vehicles. They are such a necessity, but such an expense, too! :-(
The Re-Farmer
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Making lemon cheese and a hanging rig
I’ve been planning to do this for a while, and finally had the chance today: making lemon cheese. I’m using a recipe I found here. Do check this site out. Especially if you’re interested in different ways of preserving food, though there is lots more there, too.
After sanitizing my equipment, I started heating the gallon of milk.
Well… not quite.
This is Canada, and our “gallon” of milk is actually 4L, as you can see on the very handy measurement inside the stock pot I am using. A litre is just a bit more than a quart. At 4L, the difference is enough to warrant adjusting the quantities of the other ingredients.
Which are lemon juice and salt (I used Kosher salt).
For a gallon, the recipe called for 8 Tbsp of lemon juice and 1 Tsp of salt and I adjusted those quantities up slightly when I measured them out.
After heating the milk to between 185F – 190F (I got to break in my new candy thermometer. :-D ), the milk is taken off the heat and the lemon juice is added. (I used 3% homogenized milk.)
It curdles immediately.
It then gets covered and left to sit for 15 minutes.
Which is when I dashed downstairs to do a quick build. The cheese would need to be hung to drain later, and we don’t have a good set up for that. We’ve made do with whatever we could come up with when making jelly or yogurt cheese, but we plan to be doing more of this sort of thing in the future, so having a rig to hang things to drain would be very useful.
Since we have also finished the basement and have some pieces of wood handy, I can actually do something about it!
When my timer went off, I’d reached this point.
There was just enough of the wood we used to build a frame to block the entry into the old basement, to cut 2 ft long side pieces. One of them is missing a chunk at one end, but it’ll do. I then cut a matching 2 ft long cross piece for the top, and a pair of base pieces.
Then my timer went off and I headed upstairs. Thankfully, my daughter was handy, and she took over with putting the curds into a cheesecloth lined colander over a bowl, to drain for 10 minutes. That was just enough time for me to finish my rig.
I used what screws I had that were long enough, which were really way too long for the job, but whatever. I also added a cup hook to the centre of the cross piece to hang things from.
It is a pretty ugly rig right now. Normally, I would have sanded the pieces and used more appropriate screws. It’s kinda wobbly, but steady enough for the job.
By the time I took it upstairs to give it a good cleaning, it was time to add salt to the cheese curds.
Here they are, after salting.
This is basically cottage cheese, really. My daughter had given it a quick taste after salting it and says it tastes quite different from cottage cheese, but we’re not washing the curds or anything like that, either.
The recipe then says to hang it for 30 minutes for a spreadable cheese, or up to 2 hours for a dry and crumbly cheese.
We were using a fresh cheese cloth, without cutting it down to size, so I ended up tying the cheesecloth around the cross bar instead of using the hook.
We checked it after half an hour and decided to let it hand for the 2 hours. We’ll see how it looks, then!
When we’re done with all this, I will probably take the rig apart and finish it properly. Give the pieces a good sanding, then screw it back together, with some wood glue to make it more stable.
I am so loving having that space in the basement to be able to do projects like this!!!
The Re-Farmer
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Destructive cats, and a winter tree casualty
So… that didn’t take long.
In re-arranging the living room, the girls and I also moved around the plants. The living room is the only space we have for our bigger plants – and some have gotten very big since we’ve moved out here! – so it’s a bit of a challenge.
One of the things we have a lot of is jade plants. The jade plant that we thought might not survive the move is now a massive, healthy beast of the tree. We also have lots and lots of aloe vera. I knew that aloe propagates itself easily, but I didn’t realize how easily jade plants do as well. It turns out any leaf that breaks off can grow into a new plant.
Leaves break off easily. Especially with our cats. They keep trying to get into the pots, lying in the dirt, and generally wrecking havoc. I recently ended up using the extra legs of the plastic utility shelf we got as supports for the big one, because it was almost completely flattened. (As a bonus, because these are tubes, I can now water the plant through the tops.) This is not a good thing, since jade plants are poisonous to cats.
One of the treats I’ve started to get at Costco are these large plastic containers of Cheese Balls. I’ve been keeping the containers because I thought they’d make great cloche coverings in the garden at some point. When the cats were determined to use one of the plant pots as a bed, mashing the jade plant flat, I put one of these over the plant to protect it. It worked well, but when we arranged things, I figured the plant was big enough to not need it any more and took it off.
Well… they did leave that one alone.
Another smaller one, not so much. The pot was knocked over, the poor little jade plant was on the carpet, and there was soil all over.
I’m glad we thought to put that plastic over the shelves to protect their tops!
I put the soil back and replanted the jade plant. It should actually survive this, but we’ll see. Meanwhile, this and another pot are small enough that I cut the tops off of two of those plastic containers, so that they are not straight sided, and they can completely cover the pots and their plants, with room to grow.
This morning, I ended up using the cut off tops to put over a couple more plants that showed signs of cats bashing their way through them.
Meanwhile, while doing my rounds this morning, I remember to check on the pair of trees my mother planted right against the chain link fence. One of them had looked like it was dead, but I wasn’t up to slogging through the snow to check it. The snow is mostly gone now, so…
Yeah, that is one very dead tree. Both of these were fine in the fall.
I had wanted to transplant them away from the fence, but my mother demanded they stay right where they are. When I pointed out that they would eventually grow big enough to damage the fence, and were too close together, she said they were exactly where she wanted them to be, and she didn’t care if they damaged the fence.
Now that one of them has died, knowing my mother, she’s probably going to think I killed it because I didn’t want them there.
Ah, well. I’ll deal with that when the time comes.
One of the things that has really hit home for me as we’ve been cleaning up around the yards, is how incredibly important it is to think years ahead when planting trees. We intend to plant many, many trees, with a focus on food trees, and this gives us an opportunity to learn from what my parents did 10, 20, even 40 years ago.
The Re-Farmer
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Our mysterious van
I got a call from the garage today, about our van.
Once again, he drove it around and examined it on the lift.
Nothing.
Not a knock. Not a shudder.
The van is running fine.
The only thing he could find, after going over the entire front end, was a minor tear in the front driver’s side boot (bellows). It’s something that is good to get fixed before it causes problems later, but it could not be what caused the knocking and shuddering that was happening before I dropped it off, because there wasn’t any at all when he drove it.
He cannot find anything that could have caused that noise or shuddering. Anything that normally could have caused it, is fine.
I asked about our theory that mud had kicked up in there and got into something, but after the van sat as long as it did, things melted and whatever it was had simply fallen off. He said it was possible, but he didn’t sound very confident about it.
So I asked him to let me know how much it would cost to fix boot, since I may as well get that done while it’s there! He said he’d get back to me, but he wasn’t able to before he closed, so I expect to hear from him tomorrow.
I was able to describe to him more about how it handled throughout the day, and how it went from some odd noises to suddenly being so bad, it was alarming just to drive across the road. How could it have been so bad, so fast, and now nothing? He is very perplexed as well.
I just don’t understand it.
I do hope we can get this done and fixed tomorrow, because we need to go into town, and I don’t want to make multiple trips with my mother’s car.
Thank God the things we do need to do aren’t urgent or anything! I will be much happier when we have our van back, though.
What a mystery our van has become!
The Re-Farmer
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Starting seeds indoors
Well, I’m glad I’d already written out which seeds needed to be started indoors and when. For some reason, I thought I’d need to be doing 3 starts, but I will only need to do 2.
At about 4 weeks before last frost (give or take a few days, depending on which town I look at), I had 2 things to start. Cucamelons and fennel.
I’ve never grown either, so this is a complete learning experience.
I got a couple of those domed seed starter trays with the pellets. These are self watering trays with a capillary mat between the pellet trays and the main trail.
For this seed start, I don’t need to use an entire tray.
The cucamelons will be planted in the chimney blocks currently sitting in the old basement. I have 8 of those left. With the spacing needed, I could plant 1 cucamelon per block. Maybe 2. So I am starting seeds in 16 pellets and will hopefully get at least a 50% germination rate. If I get more, I’ll figure it out when the time comes! It’s a completely new plant for us, so I don’t even know if we’ll like them, so I didn’t use the whole packet. I know we like fennel, so I kept more pellets for those. Then I added water to start hydrating the pellets while I looked at the seeds.
Hhhmmm…
With how few pellets I’m doing for the cucamelon, there are enough seeds even if I put in a couple in each one, but fennel packet turned out to have fewer seeds than I expected.
So I took a few of the pellets out.
Then I had to wait for the pellets to hydrate. I was also waiting for a call from the garage (more on that in another post), etc., so I kept myself busy with something that could handle interruptions.
I crocheted a basket. :-D
Once the pellets were hydrated, I used a pair of shorter bamboo skewers to lift up the mesh at the top, because I know my clumsy fingers would just tear things. *L* Then, I used the blunt end of a skewer to push the seeds to the right depth into the loosened pellets.
If I felt the need, I could have marked the skewer for different depths, but I was only doing two. The cucamelons needed 1/2 – 1 inch, while the fennel needed 1/4 inch.
I made sure to mark the packets for their seed status, because I know I’ll forget. :-D While I had extra for the cucamelon, I used up all the fennel seeds, and most of the pellets have only 1 seed in them. Hopefully, they will all germinate and be strong little seedlings.
Though the tray comes with its own cover, it will still go into the mini-greenhouse my daughter bought for me. That’s more to protect it from the cats, at this point!
My daughters and I ended up finally rearranging the living room, since my husband moved his computer set up out, before setting the mini-greenhouse up where we knew it would get direct sunlight.
Which is basically in the middle of the living room! :-D
I will eventually move the mini-greenhouse outside, but it’s still way too cold for that.
In one week, I will start the squash and gourd seeds. The remaining seeds we have will be direct sown outside, once it’s warm enough.
While I was working on this, my husband did some research and found a relatively local company that sells gravel and soil, with a price calculator on their website. Using that, we calculated that the amount of garden soil we would want to get, which is quite a bit, we are looking at about $650. We could probably get away with about half of that amount, though, and get more in another year. In time, we’ll have enough organic material to build up the soil ourselves, but we’re just not there yet, and probably won’t be for another couple of years. Buying garden soil would be a short cut.
Then we looked up their driveway gravel.
To get enough gravel for the driveway from the road to about the gate into the yard, including all of the front front of the garage, we’re looking at about $2100.
Ouch.
The main thing, though, is that the first batch of seeds are started for our first attempt at growing food since we’ve moved out here! It took a lot of work to get to this point, so it’s pretty exciting. :-)
Now, if we can just have a good weather year, this year, and not another drought!
The Re-Farmer
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Morning kitties
So many kitties!
Of course, I visited the mamas first thing this morning.
They are much more comfortable in their new surroundings, and quite eager for human attention.
Just look at those round, round baby bellies!!
I’d kept the cardboard box from the hot water tank, and it’s now serving as a rug on top of the concrete. :-D I’m also finding Beep Beep on top of the chairs, and she’ll even go up on the table. Butterscotch, likely because she if farther along that Beep Beep, makes no attempt to jump up onto anything! :-D
Going into the sun room, there was little sign of the skunks. They’d been in there, but I don’t think they stayed long. All the kibble was gone, but it was already low in the evening and we didn’t top it up, so there was not much left for them to get into.
It did mean, however, that the outside cats were quite hungry.
I was happy to see Big Jim hanging out in the sun room. The blood I’d seen on his face previously is dried up and disappearing – he is such a filthy boy! – and I was unable to spot where it came from. It may have come from a scratch on an ear, near the head. Wherever the wound is, it’s too small to be seen through his fur.
Also, Rosencrantz! We’ve started to see her a bit more often of late.
The kitties were hungry enough that Junk Pile cat almost came inside while I was there.
Usually, when I add food to the outside bowls, Junk Pile and Pump Shack cats are pretty skittish about eating until I leave.
They were still skittish, but hungry enough to tolerate my nearness more than usual.
The only outside cat I didn’t see this morning was Potato Beetle. Even Nicky the Nose was hanging around.
Waiting for me to leave, before he comes to the house to eat.
In the sun room, I started to take the rigid insulation off the south facing windows. We’re at a point were the passive solar heat would be more beneficial than the insulation We’ll take the rest down when we can finally start emptying the room out to clean it.
I also removed some of the insulation around the base of the house to uncover a couple of windows to the basement. This way, Butterscotch and Beep Beep can have natural light. When we can start hauling stuff we removed from the basement to the barn, we’ll take all the insulation around the base of the house to the barn for storage until next fall.
One of my goals for today is to start some cucamelons indoors. :-) They apparently take a very long time to germinate, compared to other things. I’ve worked out the timing of when to start different seeds, and even those I plan to start 2 weeks from now might actually start germinating sooner than the cucamelons. It should be interesting to see how these all turn out.
Time to get back at it! :-)
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 