While doing my rounds this morning, I made sure to check where I’d found wasps while trying to clean up yesterday.
I was surprised by what I saw.
First, there was the hole in the ground. I didn’t expect to see an actual hole like that.
Also, do you see the light brown stuff scattered around? Particularly in the grass to the left?
Those are pieces of nest cells.
When I was spraying the area with the hose, I couldn’t see any of this. I’m not sure if it was because I was so focused on the wasps, themselves, or if some critter came through during the night and dug things up even more.
I also zoomed in to the root or stick across the hole in the ground.
The wasps on the stick/root itself were quite still and just sitting there. Like they were sleeping or something. The other wasps were more active.
I don’t know what kind of wasps these are. They are smaller than the yellow jackets I’m used to seeing, and have more black to yellow on their bodies.
Well, whatever they are, we have to get rid of them.
I used the hose again, filling the hole. I saw a lot fewer wasps flying around than before, so I hope that means they are moving on to somewhere else. Until they do, we’re going to have to be careful. Especially when trying to interact with Butterscotch’s babies.
Which one of my daughters was able to do, last night!
I saw through the window that all 4 of them were out and playing, so my younger daughter went out, sat on the ground and wiggled a stalk of wheat (self-sown from the straw we’ve been using as mulch this year) at them.
Two of them even came close enough to sniff her sandal, and when one of them turned away to start eating, she was able to pet its back – until it noticed that she was touching it! *L*
It was a little bit cooler today, so I decided to do a bit of clean up around the spruce grove perimeter. Eventually, we want to clean out the junk pile, but it’s got kittens in it, so I am just working my way towards it.
Here is where I started working.
All those thistles and crab grass are growing out of a pile of … dirt? I’d already cleared a path to the chokecherry tree behind it, and now I wanted to clear the pile itself.
Which meant pulling the thistles and crab grass up by hand.
Yes, the row marker I used in the spring was still there!
It is now leaning against the garage, where there is at least a bit of shelter from the elements.
As for the pile itself, I’m not sure what it is. Stuff was pulling out of it easily, so I thought it might be an ash pile from cleaning out the old wood furnace over the years?
It’s really quite sandy in texture, though.
I’m sure this pile was made for a purpose, but if it’s not an ash pile, I just can’t figure out what that might have been!
After clearing most of the pile from both sides, I continued working my way towards the junk pile. I had seen branches piled there early on, and had added a few myself whenever I needed to clear something but didn’t have a chance to take the wood to one of the piles outside the yard at the time. Like part of the cherry tree by the house that broke off when I tried to move it around the post with an old bird house on it. In the above photo, I’d already cleared that out – and dragged out a length of those tiny decorative wire fences for around flower beds, in the process. It was pretty bent up, so that ended up on the junk pile that will eventually be hauled away.
My first load of very old branches that I dragged out after pulling away more thistles and years of crab grass.
I never did get another full load…
The closer I got to the junk pile, the more old branches I uncovered – as well as something yellow. It looks like a large piece of very thick plastic… tarp?
It was at about this point that I got stung, and found a small, yellow and black wasp stuck in my shirt.
After brushing it away, I kept a close eye out while pulling out a few more branches.
Aaaaannnddd… yes. There were more wasps.
To the left of centre in the above photo is the remains of a log. The wasps seemed to be coming out from under it.
So I took a hose to it, then eventually used a long metal pipe we use for poking around when doing a burn, to lift it over.
Yup. It looked like the opening to a ground nest was right under it.
I hosed that for a while, too. I don’t know if it was enough to drown out the nest, but there were quite a few wasps flying around. They don’t show up in the photo, but they’re there!
At which point, I was done.
I have never seen so many wasp nests in my life, before this summer. They’re all over the place! There is the tree in front of the kitchen window, and one beside the beet and carrot beds, that are nests. Then there are 3 active paper nests in various places, plus the one above the garage door that I got rid of, and the one under the eaves of the house at the old kitchen that I got rid of. There appears to be a nest inside the branch pile near the garage, and now this ground nest by the junk pile.
And those are just the ones I know of.
There isn’t much we can do to stop them from building under the eaves, but this is just more reason to get rid of the junk piles, debris and branch piles!
And those Chinese elms.
Meanwhile…
This is the pile of thistles and quack grass, with a couple of spirea I pulled up near the end, that I cleared up and added to the new compost pile. With so many thistle seeds, I plan to give them a few days to dry, then burn them. That will help with breaking down the old tree stump in the middle, and making sure more saplings don’t start pushing their way through again.
So, I think this is going to be it for clean up in this area for a while. I’m not sure what to do about the wasps, other than hosing the area down repeatedly. With the kittens living in the junk pile, I don’t want to be using wasp poison.
I think it’s time to pick up another wasp trap. The one I got before is currently being used to catch fruit flies in the house, which suddenly became a problem.
Well, a bit of progress is better than no progress at all!
Little Braveheart was willing to come closer for a wiggling flag, than a wiggling stick. :-D
The bit of fur visible at the bottom of the picture is Potato Beetle, who really, really wanted cuddles!
I didn’t stay too long, though. Tabby was hanging around, and I spotted their even more elusive sibling making several attempts to get to the freshly refilled food container. I didn’t want to keep any cats from being able to eat!
Today was another hot one, which made it a good day to finally go into the basement and see what I could do with the various pieces of wood I’ve brought down there.
Since getting my wood carving kit, I haven’t had much chance to make things with it. I used the spoon blank it came with for my first attempt. Then I used some of the lilac wood pieces to make a hair pin for my daughter. I have since made a longer, plainer lilac hair stick for my daughter, and tried to make one out of cherry for myself.
I say “tried” because when I got a bit decorative at the thick end, it ended up breaking, twice. The inner core of the piece of cherry I was using was rotted just enough that when I tried shaping the wood, it was just too weak. This was true of the lilac wood, too, but I hadn’t tried to carve anything that would affect the integrity as much, so they were fine.
Today, I wanted to make something with some of the maple pieces from the tree I had to cut part off, earlier this year, so it would be safer for my brother to move around on the shed roof he was patching.
I had a branch of it set aside, waiting for a day like today, and I cut a short piece to work on.
I was thinking of going very simple, and making a spreader or something like that.
Thinking of the lilac and cherry wood, though, I decided to split the piece and see what it was like on the inside.
Well, crud.
I’m not going to be able to make a spreader out of that.
So I cut a piece from a larger branch I had set aside.
Dangit!
I really hope it isn’t all like this. The stuff I want to make uses the heartwood. For the larger pieces, I’m thinking of cups or bowls. Stuff I plan to actually use.
In fact, there was a particular piece of dead maple I’d found while cleaning up the maple grove, I think in our first summer here, that I was looking forward to using.
It doesn’t look like much on the outside, but when I cut it, this particular maple had red rings inside it.
I cut a piece off the end and took a look.
That does not bode well.
So I split it.
*sigh*
Yup. The middle is rotted.
However…
What about the edges? The parts with the red it in still looked solid.
So I split it again.
It did not split well, but the wood did seem pretty solid. Could I do something with this?
I wasn’t sure.
Over the next hour and a half or so, I hacked at it with a giant knife (which I’ve been using in lieu of a hatchet), decided to try the sloyd knife to carve out a spoon bowl, gave up on that and tried the Dremel (the two different tips I tried did the job, but the friction actually charred the wood!), finally broke open my new set of rasps and used a bar rasp with 4 different surfaces, and yes, even the carving knives.
Part way through, I dragged one of the chimney blocks from the old basement to use as a lower, solid surface. Especially for when I was hacking away with the big K-bar.
So that hunk of wood up there?
This is what I got out of it.
I didn’t stop to take any photos while I was working on it because, to be honest, I didn’t think it would work!
So here, I am at the stage of using my coarsest grit sand paper.
As I moved up to finer sandpaper, I would sometimes use my little vice.
You can really see the gouges left by the rasp. The vice made it much easier to just use a narrow strip of sandpaper around the handle and pulling back and forth.
Working my way through ever finer grits of sandpaper took probably another hour and a half.
Sanding the inside of the bowl was the most difficult. While I could use the curved sloyd knife a bit, the wood was really too small for the blade. What I really needed was a wood gouge, but I don’t have one. So that’s where the Dremel came in handy, to get the bulk of the wood out of the bowl, but I still had to cut out the bits that charred from the friction and shape it. I ended up using the other carving knives more than the sloyd knife, because of that.
Here it is, after final sanding.
You can see on the scrap wood, where the knife was hitting while I was chopping away the excess wood on the spoon. :-D
I also included the bar rasp, to show the different surfaces.
Of course, I just had to get a picture of it next to a piece of the wood it came from.
I still can’t believe I was able to get this out of that chunk of wood!
As I was sanding it, I noticed black showing up in the non-red parts of the wood.
Having done my research before I started with my first attempt at carving, I recognized it as spalting. There are people who go out of their way to use spalted wood. It’s basically a sign of the wood’s decomposition.
It was very faint as I sanded, but how would it look after being oiled?
And how would that red show up after being oiled?
Let’s find out!
Wow!! What a difference!
I could have cut this part out, but I kind of like it.
Unfortunately, I find the spalting makes it look like it’s dirty. :-(
On the back, you can still see some of the roughness of the would that I didn’t quite get rid of completely. They look a bit like scratches on the lower part of the spoon. The part that became the outside of the spoon bowl had some chunks missing from how the wood split. It meant less excess wood to remove in that area, at least.
So this experiment was a lot more successful than I had dared hope! Not only was I able to get something out of a partially rotted piece of wood, but I was able to start and finish a spoon in one sitting!
One of these days, I want to try making a fork. :-)
It was on the same plant as the other mutant squash that I’m leaving to get big.
Such an adorable little mutant. :-D
There have not been as many squashes to pick lately, but there has been a surge of male flowers blooming right now – and the pollinators are just loving it. So I am expecting another burst of new squash before the season ends. :-)
While doing this morning’s rounds, I got to see all of Butterscotch’s babies!
My apologies for the terrible picture. :-(
I was zoomed in from the far side of the lilacs in the flower garden to get this. Thankfully, after clearing out the spreading cherry saplings, I had a perfectly positioned window to watch them through. As soon as I moved, however, they were gone!
I was just finishing up and starting to go into the house when I saw Little Braveheart was out, so I sat on the steps and tried to lure her closer.
This was as close as she would get. She was curious enough to come out, but content enough to just sit there!
After I while, I did see a little Tabby face peering at me through the spirea, too. :-) Not quite as brave as Little Braveheart!
I really hope we can get these bebbies socialized, at a little bit!
Last night, a massive storm system passed over us. In parts of the province, there were tornado warnings.
Here, we had rain.
Finally.
It started to rain somewhere around 2am, and didn’t stop until about 7am, and we might still get more, later.
For all the watering of the gardens we’ve been trying to keep up on, it couldn’t match last night’s deep soak, and it really showed!
We now have several of the self-sown, tiny sunflowers under the platform bird feeder with seed heads opening up.
The pumpkins had been starting to bloom for a while, but I was only seeing the odd male blossom here and there. This morning, there was an explosion of flowers and new buds, and…
Our very first baby pumpkin.
This is on one of the first pumpkin plants that sprouted. I found a second one, on the mound that took so long to sprout one of the 5 seeds planted in it, that I had begun to think none would come up there.
We’ll keep an eye on them to see how many more begin to develop, then select one or two on each plant to keep growing. It’s still highly unlikely they will have a chance to fully ripen, but who knows; we might have a long and mild fall this year.
The big sunflowers have been pretty remarkable.
More and more seed heads are developing, which I would expect with these ones that are well above my head.
There are others that are quite a surprise.
This is one of the deer damaged sunflowers. You can see the dark spot in the middle, where the original top of the plant had been eaten off. Two branches have now developed into stems, and have their own tiny seed heads starting to develop among the new leaves.
Which is impressive, but this next one shows resilience at a whole new level!
You can see, lower down, where the original top had been eaten off. Of the two new stems that developed has also lost it’s top, and basically all the leaves have been eaten off – and yet there it is! A seed head, developing among the tiny cluster of new leaves.
You know those times when you suddenly think of someone, and how you should talk to them… and then the phone rings, and it’s that person you were thinking about?
Yeah. That happened to me this morning!
Just as I was thinking that I should call my mother and ask if she needed help with grocery shopping or something, the phone rang. My mother was calling, to see if I were available to help her with grocery shopping!
Perfect timing.
So we arranged that for in the afternoon.
I had another nice surprise when I did my morning rounds. When I do the outdoors part, I always start with putting kibble out for the cats. The cats usually aren’t around in the mornings anymore – likely because it’s been getting so hot, so early! The last thing I’ve been doing in my rounds is going through the garden to pick what vegetables need picking.
As I came around the corner of the house to go to the garden, I saw this.
The tiny little calico was hungry enough to come out in the heat, all by herself!
Unfortunately, she ran off as soon as she became aware of me.
Ah, well. We’ll get them used to us, eventually!
At least, I hope so!
Meanwhile…
I got to my mother’s place, just before 2pm. So I was quite surprised when she told me she hadn’t had lunch yet! She wanted to go out to eat, and was waiting until I arrived. !!! She asked if one of the local restaurants was open again, since I had to drive past it to get to her place, and that’s where we ended up going.
This place used to be half restaurant, half convenience store. They’ve had to completely change everything, and the convenience store side is pretty much empty now.
Hopefully, they will get enough business to stay open. The shut down has been decimating small businesses like this. :-(
While we were eating, my mother started talking about garden sheds.
She has got it in her head to replace the old garden shed that’s here now, even though it’s a very low priority item. It’s come up a few times since we’ve moved here. However, there are a couple of places that have garden sheds in different sizes and styles on display, and she really likes them.
So we drove across the street to a hardware store to look at the one they had on display near the parking lot. She then asked me to go in and get information and a price for her. I ended up getting the information for several different kinds, including a couple of shed kits (which were decently priced) that we would have to put together ourselves, and several more fully assembled types (which are MUCH more expensive), as well as information about delivery and set up.
She then wanted to see where there is a display of 5 or 6 sheds, in the parking lot of an empty building, not far away.
Forgetting that today is Friday.
There’s a Farmer’s Market there, every Friday.
Which was fine, since both of us have been meaning to check it out, but hadn’t gotten around to it.
It was quite busy, but I did find one last parking spot – and found myself looking at the younger of my brothers! He was there with his chainsaw carvings. :-)
I made a quick dash to one of the display sheds to pick up their pamphlet, then rejoined my mother…
At my cousin’s honey display, right next to my brother!
She bought herself some honey, and I placed an order for a 9kg bucket of liquid honey.
We’re finally going to be making mead again!
I’ll be going to their honey farm on Monday to pick it up, as he didn’t have any buckets that big at the time. I keep driving past there and thinking I need to stop by and get some honey, without being able to stop during that particular trip! So I’m extra glad we stopped for the market.
We checked out my brother’s display, of course, but he was with customers, so we didn’t stay long. He’s been making some really nice mushroom lawn ornaments lately. I love his morels, of course, but the fly’s bane he’s been making lately are just adorable, with a tall one surrounded by little ones. My mother was thrilled to see them. As a child in Poland, she remembers picking mushrooms in the forest, and they had these. They could grow to knee height, she says! Now, that might be knee high to a child, but that’s still really tall! She says her mother would cook them, then leave them on the window sill, for the flies to land on and die. I knew they were used that way, but had never heard of them being cooked, first!
Once we were done at the market, we did her grocery shopping, then I stayed for a while as we talked garden sheds.
After going over the information I got and explaining things, I did offer an alternative.
That’s a lot of money, and we don’t really need a garden shed right now. With the roof on the old one covered with strips of metal roofing, the old one no longer has a leak, and is adequate to our needs. What would be more useful for us right now would actually be a gas powered wood chipper, so we can get rid of all those piles of branches all over the place.
To think, when we first moved here, I thought we would be able to use the wood I cleaned up in the fire pit, during cookouts. Aside from not being able to actually use the fire pit more than a couple of times, due to fire bans, we cleaned up far more wood and branches than I ever imagined. Even without a fire ban, there’s just too much to burn. I told her about the estimate I got, to have a company come out with their huge wood chipper. They estimated 6 hours to do the job, at $750 (though, after all this time, I would expect it to be more now). But if we had our own chipper, we could clean out the piles, and have something we could use, year after year.
Unfortunately, when I mention that we can also use the wood chips, she gets upset, because she’s never heard of anyone doing this before, she didn’t do it, so why do I want to do it?
…
*sigh*
Still, a chipper would be less expensive than a shed and, for us, more needed at this time.
I left the suggestion with her to think about. She told me she would talk to my older brother for advice. Which she has actually done before, at least once, that I know of.
In the end, I honestly don’t expect it to happen. If it does – either a shed or a chipper – I’ll be happy, but the likelihood is very low.
And that’s okay.
In the end, it turned out to be a very good visit. My mother got an outing she really, really needed, she got her groceries, and we even got to enjoy the market and see other family.
I headed out to water things this evening, but got distracted.
Junk Pile and two of her babies were out!
I ended up lying right on the ground, in hopes that would make them less intimidated by the tall(ish) human.
Creamsicle took full advantage of the situation.
What a silly boy!
Tabby didn’t come any closer than this, but did spend some time rolling around under the grapes, in between watching me.
Little Braveheart did come a bit closer to the stick I was wiggling, but not close enough to actually touch it.
It was funny to watch Little Braveheart and her mother. They share many of the same mannerisms, and often mimicked each other’s movements.
They also have the same eyes! Even though the markings in their fur are different, they have the same facial structure and many other similarities.
The grapes, meanwhile, did eventually get watered, and are looking really good.
The more shaded ones at the back of the trellis are noticeably darker than the ones that are more exposed.
While tending the rest of the garden, I found this.
The tallest of our sunflowers is starting to open up its seed head! So far, it’s the only one at this stage.
Awesome!!! I can’t wait to see how big the seed head gets.
Meanwhile…
My husband and I had our medical appointments today. Heading out two days in a row was really hard on him. Thankfully, we got in quickly, and didn’t have long to wait.
I learned one thing today that my husband forgot to mention after yesterday’s appointment at the pain clinic. The doctor there was going to phone our doctor here to discuss recommended pain medications.
Another reason I’m unhappy I wasn’t allowed to go in with him yesterday. He forgets things more often, these days. At least he remembered this while with our doctor!
The doctor had a couple of concerns. For one, he will be referring my husband to an endocrinologist, so we’ll be getting a phone call about that. He also wants to adjust my husband’s prescriptions, but will wait until he talks to the pain clinic doctor, go through his current medications, and think about it. Once he’s done that, he will fax any new/changed prescriptions directly to the pharmacy.
As for the rest of my husband’s bloodwork, it was all fine.
Then it was my turn. My bloodwork was fine, across the board. During the physical, we did get a laugh. After testing my reflexes, he did the usual putting his hand on my knee while flexing the joint, as he started to ask if I had any issues with pain, etc. When he lifted my lower leg, he cut himself off in mid sentence with a startled “Oh!!”
To which I responded to his half-finished question, “yes. Arthritis. You felt that, did you?” :-D
Yeah, both my knees do some interesting things when they’re flexed!!
One thing with both my husband and I was, what we thought were heat rashes turned out to be fungal infections. !! So we both got prescriptions for creams to treat that. When we were done, I dropped my husband off at home, picked up a daughter, then headed into town to get the prescriptions filled before the pharmacy closed. A stop at the mail on the way out found a letter from the heart clinic, with my husband’s rescheduled appointment, early next month.
I’ll have to remind him to phone them about it right away, to arrange some sort of accommodations, like having a stretcher available for him, for an appointment they say might take up to 2 hours.
So while nothing much changed at today’s appointment, steps were taken and others are being put in place, for the near future.
The Re-Farmer 