Month: June 2020

The crazy and the calm

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Heading down to visit the kitties was certainly a wild and crazy ride, this morning!

The kittens were waiting for me.

First, I had to shoo away the cats from the door in the entryway. Then, when I opened it, Beep Beep was ready to rush through, which would have been fine, except Leyendecker dashed through, too. Turmeric was at the top of the stairs, too. She was just a bit more hesitant about actually going through, so I was able to keep her at bay.

Leyendecker managed to get through the door three times before I could finally close it. Meanwhile, Beep Beep had run back down, with David and Two Face making a dash for it, too. By this time, all of the kittens were on the stairs, and with the door closed, they decided my feet and legs were fair game.

They continued to attack my feet, jump up my legs, and try and eat my shoelaces, as I very, VERY carefully made my way around.

Once I started taking care of the food and water, they started to get distracted by other things, thankfully.

Not one stayed still long enough to get a decent picture! :-D

I was eventually able to get all the adult cats upstairs, which meant I could give the kittens some wet cat food, and they’d actually get some!

By the time I was done, I was more than ready for the relative calm of doing my rounds outside.

I just had to deal with hordes of mosquitoes. Which was an improvement. !!

Checking the garden plots, it looks like more cat damage to the one plot of carrots. We won’t be getting a lot of rainbow carrots this time around. :-(

The grape vine I accidentally clipped is starting to look at bit droopy, higher up, but the lower leaves still seem quite strong and healthy. Fingers crossed that it will survive.

While walking around the spruce grove, switching out the memory cards on the trail cams, has been interesting. I didn’t do a lot of clean up here, yet. Mostly, I just focused on clearing the fence itself.

The improved like has resulted in all kinds of things popping up.

These are Saskatoon berries, and there are SO MANY little tiny bushes growing, all over the place.

I will be keeping an eye on these new ones. When I was cleaning up, a lot of the larger ones were not looking very healthy. The drought certainly didn’t help. We do plan to buy Saskatoon bushes at some point, and plan out where to put them, but if these are strong and healthy, we might end up also transplanting some of these to better locations.

I had cut back the wild roses along with all the other undergrowth, quite a bit as we cleaned things up. I know they will grow back, so I’m not too worried about them. After we’ve cleaned things out, the wild roses and the dogwood are the two things I want to encourage as undergrowth in some areas.

Even with what little clearing we’ve done so far, we’re already getting more wildflowers.

There are a few of these Lily of the Valley, scattered about, in between another one with sprays of white, star-like blossoms. My attempt at getting a photo failed, though.

The goal for the spruce grove is to open it up, get rid of the dead trees, plant some new spruces to replace some of them, have paths we can walk through, with grass or moss, areas of wild roses and dogwood, and lots of wildflowers. Here and there, I’m planning to put various types of seating around. Not boards nailed to logs, like I’ve been finding all over! Those don’t do well, over time.

But first, it needs to be cleaned out, and that’s going to involve a lot of hard physical labour!

And chainsaws. Definitely chainsaws. There are some pretty big trees that need to be cleared out of there.

I probably won’t be back at that today, though. It’s cooler, if not any less humid, and still insane with mosquitoes, but my husband is encouraging me to take a day off, and give my wrist more time to recover. The problem is, it feels pretty good. Right up until I start using it. I shouldn’t need two hands to pick up a glass to take a drink. :-/ His concern is that I’ll just keep re-injuring it. He has a point. We are both notorious for that sort of thing. I just hate wasting the time. :-(

We shall see how it goes.

The Re-Farmer

Clean up: very little progress, but gosh, that’s cute!

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I headed out to see how much I could do for clean up, before the weather drove me indoors.

This is the area we decided we will put the outhouse we are planning to make as a cordwood practice building.

The double ended arrow is a dead spruce that will need to come down, before it falls down. There is another spruce we’ve identified as a risk, near it. It’s still alive, but already starting to fall, with roots on one side torn loose from the ground. Likely from high winds. Getting rid of those before we build is on the to-do list. The last thing we need is to build what is intended to be basically an emergency outdoor bathroom (because we discovered a need for this!), only to have a tree fall on it.

The other arrows point to tree stumps hidden among the underbrush. The ones I’ve spotted so far, at least. I’m sure that, as we clear things away, we will find more. Hopefully, the roots of these trees will not be an issue when we start clearing away sod to a depth of 6 – 8 inches.

This is all the progress I managed to do.

Basically, I cleared a bit of an old tree stump. Some of the stuff I cleared last year was starting to grow back, so that had to be gotten rid of. Then there were some cherry trees that are spreading. The cherry trees in this area have still not started to bloom yet, unlike the one near the house, which has already completed it’s flowering stage. I did keep some larger pieces of cherry.

I checked the weather about an hour after coming inside, and it was 26C/79F, with a “real feel” of 32C/90F, and a humidity of 62% – and it would have started to cool down by the time I checked!

They’re predicting thunderstorms again. Go figure.

While trying to clear around the old stump, some grasses pulled away much easier than I expected.

It turns out that there is an ants nest in it. We have two common types of ants here (though I don’t know what their proper names are). Black ants, which build their nests in the dirt and in open areas, like lawns, and red ants, which like to build their nests of spruce needles and in trees. These ones are NOT carpenter ants. That much, I do know. But they will take advantage of a dead tree stump, if it’s rotting enough.

The other thing I was able to do was clear away the piles of old boards we’d used to mark out the garden beds and hold down the protective plastic. I didn’t want to just stack them on the ground, where they will just rot, but where to put them that will keep them off the ground?

Well… there are these two old dog houses by the old outhouses, that we will cover in the fall again, so little critters can use them for shelter.

May as well use those!

We are going to need to clean up the rest of the wood in the junk pile, so I figure we can add more of the better boards onto here, to create a sort of roof. Who knows if they’ll stay here, but it’s one way to keep them off the ground, and that’s all I’m really after, right now.

Once I got inside with my chunks of cherry wood, I went into the cool of the basement to debark them, and keep the babies company.

I misjudged my ability to work with them around.

This would be Big Rig, under Leyendecker, both of whom got all sleepy on me. As I was trying to maneuver my phone to take this picture, Big Rig’s head just flopped over like this as she feel asleep!

Then Beep Beep climbed up, waking them both up, so she could curl up on my chest and demand attention. !!

For I while, I had Saffron perched on my shoulder, just watching the world go by, Big Rig, Leyendecker and Beep Beep, curled up on my arm and chest, snuggling and falling asleep, while Turmeric climbed my leg and tackled the tip of Big Rig’s tale. Only Nicco left me alone, preferring to explore the table behind me, then curl up for a nap on the platform bed frame they like to sleep under.

Thankfully, since I was able to reach my phone, I was able to let the girls know about my predicament, and they came down to assist me after they finished making supper. I did manage to detach most of the cats off of me – temporarily. Saffron was just sitting on my shoulder, so I left her be, but even as I worked on a piece of cherry with a large knife, I soon had kittens back on my lap to watch!

Thanks to the girls distracting the kittens, I did manage to debark two pieces completely – and even get the bark off in one piece!

The thicker, shorter section was only partly done; more than half of it seems to have been in the process of dying or something. You even see where the colour changes in the photo, from fresh to dry wood. The bark just would not come off, and with my wrist still giving me grief, using the knife to take off the bark was not a good thing!

My daughter looked it up, and it turns out cherry is poisonous to cats (except the pulp of ripe berries), so all the little bits and pieces went into my sawdust bin, which has a seal-able lid. The pieces of wood are now drying in the rafters, and the bark I was able to remove all in one piece are now laid out on a shelf in the sun room, drying next to my seed trays (where a single squash of some sort has germinated!).

I do hope it we finally get a solid rainfall, instead of having the systems swoop right past us again! It’s not like we’re dry right now, but it would be wonderful for that humidity to finally be reduced! I would love to be able to work outside for longer! There is just too much to get done out there.

The Re-Farmer

Morning battles! and, a rescue?

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The kittens now being able to climb to the top of the stairs makes visiting them in the morning rather treacherous!

Getting into the basement is difficult enough as it is, with the door opening over the stairs the way it does. Doing it while juggling a pitcher of fresh water, a bucket for the old water, while dodging kittens who want to climb my legs or dash into the entryway before I can close the door makes it that much more challenging! :-D

The cats upstairs, and the kittens downstairs, have discovered the space under the door.

Oh, and to make things even more challenging, I had Beep Beep trying to climb me, too!

Thankfully, the lure of wet cat food was enough to draw them away, so I could leave safely! :-D

While doing my rounds outside, I had to check out the grapes.

Because I may have killed one. :-(

Now that they are leafing out, a couple of evenings ago, I took the pruners to cut away the old, dead growth that should have been pruned away last fall. A piece I cut away twisted as it fell, and I suddenly realized that a fresh vine I thought was growing from behind and below, was actually growing out the back of the piece I’d just cut.

I was so upset with myself. This was a strong, healthy vine I’d just killed.

Could I save it?

I cut the live vine from the stem and tried to see if I could bury the end, so it would root itself. Attached to the trellis as thoroughly as it was, I couldn’t pull it down far enough.

Well, there’s a tire planter right there, with a giant insulator I’d used as a shallow planter last year, in the middle of it.

I attached the vine to another piece to hold it in place, then added soil from the planter to the bottom. Once the cut end was buried, I watered the whole thing, thoroughly.

Can you tell which vine got cut?

I came by, fully expecting the cut vine to be drooping and dying, but it’s looking as fresh and green as the others!

It’s the one on the far left of the trellis.

Here is the base of it. There are even fresh new leaves, still strong and healthy looking.

Could I have actually have managed to salvage my mistake?? Does anyone reading this know much about grape plants? Will this root itself and survive?

I certainly hope so!

The rest of my rounds included checking the garden plots, and I was disappointed to find one area of carrots looked like something had dug them up. It turned out a cat had used it as a litter box. :-(

It also looks like we lost at least one more sunflower to something, but in total, there are more seedlings today than yesterday.

My rounds, however, were very fast this morning. The mosquitoes were insane! While we did not get the predicted storms – they swooped even further south than I thought they might, and we didn’t even get much rain – it is hot and muggy and perfect conditions for mosquitoes.

Once the morning rounds and chores were done, I had to make a quick run to the post office, then into town for some errands, so I’m a bit behind on things I intended to do outside. I’m going to have to start on clearing away where we’ve decided to build the cordwood outhouse, and since it’s too wet to continue working on the lawns, today would be a good day to get into that.

I will have to slather myself in bug spray, first, and hopefully not sweat it all off in the first few minutes. :-/

The Re-Farmer

The Culprit

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A couple of days ago, I mentioned that our riding mower had stopped.

It didn’t stop running. It stopped moving.

Of course, I looked around at anything I could see to try and figure out why it stopped. The only thing I couldn’t do is look under it, because we can’t see under there without lifting it or removing things, and it’s too heavy to lift more than a corner. It’s not something we can just pick up at one end/side and tilt, either, due to the design.

So I pushed it into the garage and left it. The plan for mowing still involves using the push mower to get into areas the riding mower can’t, so I saw no issue with letting it wait until the end of the month, when we were already planning to take it in for some general TLC.

Then I got an email from my brother. He had needed to pick up a ball hitch, so he’d bought an extra one for out riding mower. This way, we can use it to pull the trailer, when that’s all fixed up.

In my response, I mentioned what happened with the riding mower.

Well, my brother – being the awesome person that he is – decided to pop over today. They were already on the way when my SIL phoned us to let us know they’d be going straight to the garage, and not going to the house (practicing physical distancing for my husband’s health), to install the ball hitch and check out the riding mower.

By the time I realized they were here and joined my brother at the garage, he was already done installing the ball hitch. He had also given the mower a once over, and couldn’t see anything wrong. Since I was there, he asked me to give it a try, while he watched. So I pushed it out of the garage, first, then tried starting it.

It wouldn’t start.

Then my brother noticed I forgot to turn the shut off valve on the fuel line. :-D He turned it for me.

Which is when he saw it.

The wheel was almost off the axle!!!

The back wheels are held in place by a bolt that runs through the axle, like a pin. We had to look at the other side to even remember what it was supposed to look like.

We propped the corner of the mower up on whatever we could find to support the weight, and my brother managed to hammer the wheel back on. Then he tried to make sure that the holes were still lined up.

They were, but the narrow screw he was using to check, couldn’t go through.

This was the culprit.

This was still stuck inside.

So, somewhere in our lawn, is the head of a bolt, and a nut, still on the other end of the bolt.

After much scrounging in the garage by all of us, my brother found another nut and bolt the right size, and got it on.

Once that was all fixed, he got me to test it out again.

The mower runs fine now.

Basically, once the wheel got loose, the mower acted as if it were in neutral, regardless of what gear it was in. When I stopped the mower to talk to my daughter, my getting on and off of it must have loosened the wheel just enough to trigger this.

Which is awesome, because if it didn’t have that fail safe, I would have kept on going right up until the wheel fell off, never realizing there was a problem. Just pushing it to the garage is probably why it was as far off the axle as it was. If my brother hadn’t picked up a hitch and decided to come over to install it, we likely would not have discovered it, until it fell off as we moved it around to load it into the van at the end of the month.

Neither of us had even thought to check the wheels as a reason the mower stopped moving. The only reason my brother spotted it at all, was because I’d forgotten about the shut off valve on the fuel line, and he turned it for me. That’s when he could see the bright, shiny, silver part of the axle that no longer had wheel over it. It I had turned it from my seated position, I wouldn’t have seen it. If it had been the other wheel, neither of us would have seen it.

Sometimes, it amazes me when so many tiny things line up like that.

The awesome thing is, my brother has once again saved the day! :-D The riding mower moves again.

I also got to see my SIL for the first time in way too long. She is allergic to cats, so we were planning to visit their place for a change, when the pandemic lockdowns started and all such plans went poof. So it was really, really great to be able to see them both. I just wish it could have been for longer!

And for just a visit, and not to fix yet another thing. :-D

The Re-Farmer

Today’s roundup: they want out!

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I’m glad we got as much of the mowing as we did, yesterday. It has been raining on and off since last night, and today they are predicting thunderstorms, with possible hail and tornadoes (?!?!) this evening and overnight.

We may get high winds, but tornadoes are not an issue where we live. Water spouts on the lake, maybe, but these weather systems tend to move to the south of us. I checked the weather radar and it looks like we’ll probably get hit by the edges of the system. So I am expecting rain and high winds, but the main body of the system looked like it’ll hit the city. Which means my brother and sister’s places will likely get hit harder than us.

While doing my rounds this morning, I spotted a Rosencrantz.

We think she has a litter of kittens, somewhere, but so far have seen no sign of them. She comes here for food, then disappears.

I had both Creamsicle and Potato Beetle joining me this morning, but they were not happy with each other. Moments after I took this picture, Creamsicle attacked Potato Beetle! I actually had to break up the fight. :-(

I checked the gardens, and the sunflowers. There are now about 26 sunflowers sprouting, that I can see.

The one on the left is an Early Russian, the one on the right is Giganteus.

Then there is this one.

Deadeus.

Looks like something just bit the top off!

Back in the house, I had to help my daughter with the kittens.

They can climb to the top of the stairs, now, and they want out!

So we spent some time, distracting them.

Dave came down to babysit, while Beep Beep went upstairs. :-D

They really like the lilac branches, and my box of wood chips. This, it’s okay for them to get into. I have a separate, sealed, container for sawdust.

So it looks like today will be an inside day. Time to catch up on little projects I need to finish. Maybe even spend some time with the kitties, and practice carving on that spoon blank that came with the carving kit. :-)

And mabye playing a bit of Civ VI. I used to play Civ II, years ago, but didn’t like the newer ones. Loved Alpha Centauri. Then I moved on to Age of Empires, and others in the series. I stopped playing completely for a while, because the games user interfaces changed so much, I couldn’t figure out how to to the most basic things. The tutorials were no help at all. Civ VI became available for free recently, and I am finding it has become user friendly again, and actually fun to play. Perfect for a rainy day.

Well. Until it starts storming, and we shut all the electronics down! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Outer yard progress: more reclaimed

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My plans to continue mowing and, hopefully, reclaiming more overgrown areas nice and early got delayed a bit. We had an unusually heavy dew this morning, and cooler temperatures kept it from evaporating until well into the afternoon.

However, progress was made!

Remember this area?

I hiked up the lawnmower, and was able to clear the area all the way to the storage building around behind the pump shack that’s in the photo.

Eventually, I will continue on beyond this, making access to the back gate, but for today, I focused on the area around the maples.

The last time any of this area was NOT overgrown was when the renter’s cows discovered his electric fence wasn’t working, and broke through.

Two years ago.

By the time they finished grazing, the entire outer yard looked awesome! :-D

When I was a kid, the fence to the inner yard at this location was on the other side of the maple trees. There was a small gate near the pump shack, for when we went to get water for the house, or took baths with water heated on a wood burning cookstove that used to be in there. When the chain link fence was installed, it was done in a straight line, rather than turning a corner to include the trees.

I miss having a gate there!

I had to be really careful working through here. I’ve tried to keep up on removing any fallen branches over the past couple of years, but knew there had to be more, hidden in the tall grass. Plus, who knows what else would show up.

Like the lone brick I found, half buried in the dirt.

Thankfully, raising the lawnmower meant I didn’t hit many of the larger buried branches, like the one in the photo above, that I pulled out of the thatch.

It’s only a start. We’ll have to go through the area to clear out any other branches and whatnot that is still buried in there, prune back the trees (there is now lilac growing in the space we used to walk through to get to the pump shack), and get in there with a weed trimmer. Some of the trees have fence wire around them, though one of them is just a stump that has some suckers growing out of it. Since we don’t have to protect the trees from cows, I want to clear away the wire, and salvage it for something else.

I’ve been wanting to get into this area for the last two summers! It feels so good to finally start cleaning it up. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Morning critters; a bird attack?

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As usual, in my morning routine, I visited the kittens.

David dashed downstairs to visit them, too.

It’s so funny to watch how he interacts with them! The kittens are quite happy to include him in their play, while he seems torn between “I wanna play, too” and “stay away from me, you strange creatures.”

Speaking of strange creatures…

… Creamsicle was in fine form this morning! What a drama queen. :-D

After dropping my daughter off at work this morning, I decided to play a bit of Pokemon Go before heading home. I was parked by a gym and playing the game when I heard something hit the side of the van.

It was a goldfinch, at the middle window.

Now, my first thought was that the bird was disoriented by reflections in the window and accidentally flew into the glass.

But it stayed, fluttering away at the glass, making its way across to the front door’s window, and sat there, at the bottom of the glass, looking at me.

When it seemed to be staying there, I opened the camera on my phone. I thought I’d lost my moment when it seemed to be flying away, but nope.

It went to the front windshield and proceeded to try and peck its way in!

This went on for several minutes! I did try and get video, but my phone’s camera does not do zoom well, and the video was horribly pixelated.

I don’t know why the bird did this, but it certainly made my morning! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Reclaiming space

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Well, it’s a good thing I was planning on using the push mower more.

While using the riding mower in the inner yard today, I stopped at one point, to go over to talk to my daughter, who was using the push mower. When I returned to the riding mower, it started just fine, but wouldn’t move. !! There were no issues at all before. One minute, it was working fine. The next, no go. Forward or reverse.

Well, we were planning to take it in for Maintenance next month, anyhow…

After doing most of the inner yard, I switched to cutting the outer yard, as there was so much of it that hasn’t been done at all this year. I quickly stopped using the bag to collect grass clippings. It filled so quickly, and the mower just doesn’t like to restart very well.

That did mean I was able to reclaim more areas of the outer yard.

For the first time since we’ve moved here, I was able to clear the area in front of this old shed.

Do you see where the colour changes from nice and green, to more brown?

While the clippings blur the line a bit, there is a clear demarcation where the colour changes. The brown is where I had not been able to mow, until today. Where I’d been able to mow for the past couple of years, the grass is green, thick and healthy. Where I hadn’t been able to get in with the riding mower (and it’s so rough, I still won’t be able to use it there), the grass was choked out by its own thatch.

I’ve now been able to reclaim pretty much all of the outer yard on this side, and I’ve started to reclaim the area leading to the collapsing log house and chicken coop.

I feel like I should have been making hay! The grass was starting to go to seed.

I will work on this area tomorrow, weather willing. With the push mower, I’ll be able to reclaim even more of the outer yard, little by little. I’ll be mowing a path to the other gate, as before, but will have to be very careful as I go beyond what I’d been able to do with the riding mower. Who knows what is hiding in that tall grass! Rocks and rough ground is one thing, but there could be chunks of wood, metal and small kitchen appliances, for all we can tell.

Since I was walking back and forth so much, I took advantage of it and opened up Pokemon Go on my phone. There is a feature in the game where you have a “buddy” Pokemon that walks with you. While it is your buddy, the game records distance, even when the game is not active. After you walk a certain number of kilometers, your buddy “finds” a candy.

The buddy I have right now is a Meltan. While most buddies need to be walked for 2, 5 or 10 km before finding a candy, Meltan needs to be walked for 20km. Once a candy is found, the meter restarts for the next 20km.

Based on the distance measured in the game, I walked at least 12 km this afternoon. And that doesn’t count the distance this morning.

My phone came with one of those “health” apps that I can turn off, but can’t get rid of. These apps irritate me, since they all basically measure “health” as “lose weight”. It doesn’t matter how good your other health measures are, or how much exercise you get, if you haven’t lost weight, you’re a failure. It does, however, have a pedometer. I’m curious to know just how many kilometers I am actually walking while doing basic yard work.

The Re-Farmer

Morning smiles – and kisses!

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I had some extra company when I visited the kitties this morning.

Both Two Face and David came down with me. It’s the first time Two Face has been in the basement for a while.

She immediately began grooming kittens.

They, however, were far more interested in climbing me, and wrestling each other, on my knee!

So she started grooming Beep Beep, instead. :-D

Also, that’s all 5 kittens climbing one leg. Only Leyendecker kept climbing, so he could tackle my hair. The other 4 battled each other with kitten ferociousness, all at once, on my leg.

:-D

The last while, I haven’t seen the outside cats much while doing my rounds. With so many of the cats ending up indoors, I suspect they are going where there are more cats around outside.

This morning, Creamsicle came to join me, and boy, did he want attention!

He was very affectionate.

I got Creamsicle kisses! :-D

What a beauty he is!

Just look at those gorgeous eyes.

He even let me carry him around as I continued my rounds. He’s such a sweetie. We’re still hoping to adopt him, but once they get big, no one is interested in cats anymore. :-(

Today has turned out to be a much cooler day. Downright chilly, compared to the last few days! Perfect weather to work on the lawn. :-)

Time to get outside and make some noise! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Garden progress: finally!!

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Yes!!!

It’s finally done!

Everything we started from seed has finally been transplanted.

At least, everything that sprouted…

These are all the pellets that didn’t sprout. The tray in the background was the squashes tray. I’d say most of those empty pellets are the gourds. The ones in the foreground are mostly fennel, with maybe a cucamelon or two.

It’s entirely possible some might eventually sprout, so I’m just leaving them out.

Today, both my daughters were able to help, at the same time! Things went very fast with three people working at once.

The first thing we did was transplant the cucamelons in the chimney block retaining wall. It had been our intention to bring up the remaining blocks from the basement, to use as planters in another location, but there is no safe way to take them out. At least not while the kittens are downstairs. So we planted them here, instead. With the ornamental apple trees growing nearby, they won’t have the full sun they should be getting. There are 3 metal posts I couldn’t take out, when I removed the fence that used to be here, so we will use them to hold a trellis. Hopefully, that will help them get more sunlight as they grow bigger.

The few fennel that sprouted were planted in the soil beside the blocks. All 6 of them. They are so leggy, I don’t know that they’ll even survive, but we’ll see.

That done, we moved on to the squash garden.

We had exactly 11 transplants, so we marked a spot in the middle of the row, then measured and marked out every 2 feet in each direction.

In this photo, each has been transplanted into its “pot” of soil mix, and we were starting to add the mulch. These would mostly be the zucchini mix and pattypans (it’s all a surprise mix now, after the tray got knocked over!), but some of them are the birdhouse gourds. We’ll figure out which is which, as they grow! :-D

I had intended to build some rather heavy duty trellises for the squashes, but things aren’t quite working out to get that done, so I picked up some bamboo poles. We’ll use them and, if I can find some, some plastic mesh instead of the chicken wire. The wire, I want to reserve for when I finally do make something more heavy duty.

After we finished mulching and watering, I set out the poles.

I’ve mentioned a few times, how rocky this area is. Just pushing in those flags typically involves readjusting a few times, to get around rocks we hit, inches into the soil.

When pushing in the bamboo poles, I made a point of pushing the narrower ends into the ground, as they were more pointed. I had to make several attempts on pretty much every pole.

Including this one.

I still managed to hit a rock hard enough to break the end off the pole!

This is how it looks now.

It’s hard to say how many of the frost damaged squash will survive, but I still put poles in to trellis whatever makes it. We’ve got the mixed squash on the far right and far left, three pumpkin hills in the middle, and now a row of mixed squash and gourds along the back.

And it’s all done! No more planting!

While working in the area, we also took the time to water various things, including the gooseberry bushes.

Which are not gooseberry bushes.

While cleaning in the maple grove, two springs ago, I uncovered several gooseberry bushes. They were not doing well, with the lack of space and sunlight from all the overgrowth and closely planted, some dead or dying, trees.

Last year, they started to recover, but with the drought, there were almost no berries. Of the few there were, I noticed they were much smaller and darker than I expected, but with the drought, that was true of many of the berries we had.

It was when I was going through the Vesey’s catalog that I saw photos of gooseberries, right next to currants, and realized these might not be gooseberries at all. The leaves look much the same, but the berries are slightly different.

When I had the chance, I asked my mom if the gooseberry bushes really were gooseberries.

Nope. They weren’t.

So what are they?

She had no idea.

My sister had brought them and planted them, but my mother did not know what they were. Since she didn’t know what they were, she figured they were poisonous (as if my sister would give her poisonous berries for her garden???), so she’d never tried them. I happened to mentioned I’d eaten some of the very few berries we had last year, and she was all “oh… you’re okay, so I guess they’re safe.”

*facepalm*

So I think we actually have currants, not gooseberries.

This year, we’ve been better able to water them, and they are looking much better. There are lots of flowers, so I hope that means that, this year, we’ll have lots of fruit!

It had taken a lot of work, but we found quite a few fruit and berry bushes as we cleaned up many years of neglect. After a couple of years, now that these foundlings have space and sunlight again, they are all looking stronger and healthier. Hopefully, that will mean higher yields, to go along with our first attempt at gardening, since moving out here!

I’m looking forward to it. :-)

The Re-Farmer