Today was a wonderfully productive day.

Also, I’m really going to pay for it tomorrow. But I don’t care. It was worth it!

The first order of the day, after dropping my daughter off at work and picking up prescription refills for my husband, was the transplanting. I combined the 3 bags of soil mix, plus a bunch of peat, together with water in the kiddie pool (that thing is coming in really handy!), then left it to give the peat a chance to absorb water.

It had warmed up enough by then to uncover the squash. Unfortunately, there was some frost damage.

We might lose a few, but I think most will recover.

I decided not to put the new transplants near the previous ones. My initial thought was to have the two beds near each other, with a walking path in between, but I decided to put the new ones at the opposite side of the area we mulched last year. That left a wide open space in the middle.

I was able to measure, and mark with flags, where the transplants would go before I headed back into town to meet my daughter for lunch. Before coming home, I broke down and picked up something I’d spotted at the pharmacy this morning, but hadn’t picked up. A Pulse Oximeter. My husband has severe obstructive sleep apnea (on top of everything else), so being able to measure his blood oxygen levels at home is a good thing. I’d looked for them about a month ago, but none were in stock. When I saw them this morning, there were two. I wasn’t sure I could justify the cost in the budget, but figured if I didn’t get it today, who knew when I’d find one again.

Of the two that I’d seen in the morning, the less expensive one was already gone.

We now have a pretty high end Pulse Oximeter. 😀

Once back at home, I added the wet soil mixture to the flagged spots, then transplanted the squash. I ended up with another 18 plants in.

There are still some left that are not ready to transplant, and it is looking like most of them are the gourds! Whatever is left will go in one long row along the north side of the area we mulched last year.

I mulched the new transplants with straw, and remembered that I still had those pumpkin seeds my mother gave me. Three little packets.

And there was this wide open space between the squash beds…

I used some of the wet soil mixture to create three mounds and planted several seeds in each. It is really late in the season to be planting pumpkins from seed, but we’ll see how they do!

The pumpkin mounds got mulch around them, too. 🙂

That done, I had time to uncover the other garden bed (no sign of frost damage there! 🙂 ) before heading back into town. I left early, so I could stop at the grocery store and refill a couple of our big water bottles.

While there was no line up outside the store, but by the time I was ready to go to the checkout, the line up was all the way to the other end of the store, and heading up the freezer aisle! After searching for and finding the end of the line, a guy carrying one item came by and ended up behind me. Thankfully, the line was moving rather quickly, but he and I ended up chatting with each other.

The topics ranged all over, but after a while it got closer to home as he talked about what he did. He ended up asking where in town I lived, and I told him I didn’t live in town, but in our little hamlet.

He got a very interested look on his face, and asked where I lived there. I told him, more or less, where the farm is.

It turned out he knows my family. He went to school, and was friends with, my late brother!

Well, that got us talking to each other like we’d know each other for years! 😀

Then I found out that he is a scrap dealer, and also hauls junk.

Yes!!!!

When we were done in the store, I followed him over to his truck so he could give me one of his fliers. He says it’s not worth trying to get rid of scrap metal right now; nobody is buying. That is a longer term thing for us, though. In the shorter term, I now have someone I can call to get the junk pile hauled away! Someone with a family connection, too.

That was awesome!

After picking up my daughter, it was back outside for me. I wanted to get a path mowed to the barn. We are expecting my brother to come over tomorrow and work on the trailer frame. Knowing him, he will be loading his truck with everything but the kitchen sink – and the only reason he doesn’t pack a kitchen sink is because, while all the useful tools may have disappeared from this place, we have plenty of kitchen sinks all over.

Also, bathroom sinks.

And laundry sinks.

I guess they go with the toilet collection. 😀

The grass in front of the barn is incredibly dense. The riding mower struggles to get through it, and the clippings left behind make it even harder. Now that I can collect clippings with the push mower, that’s what I was using today.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but I really enjoy mowing. Whether it’s a push mower or a riding mower, I just love it. It’s almost a meditative thing, and I get a great sense of satisfaction from it. It was one of my favourite chores when I was a teen, and one my parents never needed to ask me to do.

Once I started mowing, I just couldn’t seem to stop. I kept trying to see how much further I could go, beyond the limited areas I could do with the riding mower. Since it will be easier to move the trailer out the back door of the barn, bring it around the barn and pull it through the “gate” on the side, I wanted to make sure that area was clear. Then, I decided to see how much further I could go along the fence. On the other side, I decided to clear a path to the shed.

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By the time I was done, I’d reached the collapsing log building near the old chicken coop, was working my way along the fence to the hay yard, and was even starting to go down the driveway.

Every loop I did, I stopped the mower to empty the clippings. I’m not finished, but when I could no longer pull the cord hard enough to start the mower after emptying the bag, I figured that was enough for the day! 😀

I am so loving how it is looking.

I’m going to pay for this tomorrow. Big time.

It was so worth it!

Also, I now have a lovely, huge pile of grass clippings to help build up our garden beds!

It’s the little things that make me happy. 🙂

The Re-Farmer