It’s just towering above the others! I figure it’s getting close to 7 ft tall. :-)
There are a couple of others that are getting really tall, too. Like this one.
You can really see the huge seed head developing on this one – and it should get much, much bigger!
But… something’s wrong with another tall one. It’s head is gone?
Nope.
Just fallen over.
It looks like some sort of grub got in there.
This is actually above my head, so I am seeing it better now, in the photo, than I could while looking at the sunflower. The head is still alive, so I’m hoping it’ll survive. It’s the only one that has this.
While going through the squash and harvesting some – the sunburst squash is very prolific! – I spotted an odd looking squash and took a closer look.
This green, bulb shaped squash is a sunburst squash! It looks completely different from all the others on the plant.
I left it, and look forward to seeing how big it gets, and if the shape changes. :-)
The girls and I have been talking about what we want to plant next year, and sunburst squash is definitely staying on our list!
Yesterday, I moved the metal ring the compost pile was in to its new location. I ended up using the same wires to hold the seam together; they’ll just be much easier to undo in the future! That allowed me to simply roll the whole thing over.
This is where we decided to put it. I’ve trimmed around this old tree stump many times, but those little trees (several kinds of them) keep coming back.
In the background, you can see part of what was cleared to get at the chokecherry trees, including another tree stump, and the pile of spirea and thistles from clearing towards the junk pile.
Now that we’ve discovered her babies, I fear Butterscotch has already moved them somewhere else. I hope not!
After taking a pruner to the saplings and adding a pile of dried weeds and grasses I’d pulled up when clearing here earlier, it looks full already!
The tree stump does take up a lot of space.
Time to start burning!
I needed to burn out all around the stump, to hopefully kill off the root systems those saplings keep growing from.
By the time I was done, several hours had past, and it was completely dark when the girls came to help me make sure all the coals were out and put everything away.
I had the hose going so much, spraying around the fire and keeping the sparks from getting far, it was actually muddy by the ring.
On the plus side, I got rid of the pile of spirea and thistles in the process.
Of course, I needed dry wood to keep the fire going, since much of what I was burning away was pretty green. So I raided the pile of branches by the garage that’s waiting to be chipped.
I couldn’t see anything, but I am convinced there is a wasp nest somewhere in that pile. I can hear them, and the sound is NOT coming from the nearby Chinese elm.
!!
This is how it looked this morning.
Hmm. I am thinking I might need to do this again, before we start using it for compost. The stump didn’t burn much, but that’s okay. It’s the area around it that has stuff I want to kill off, so they don’t start growing into the compost when we start it.
I’m thinking this will be a good location. We’re happy enough with the nearby garden beds (even with the deer decimating our beets) that we will continue growing there, so having a compost pile nearby will be handy. It’s closer to the house – but not too close! This is near where we plan to build the cordwood shed to use as an outdoor bathroom with a composting toilet. It might be in the way during construction, but the way things have been going, I’ll be happy if we can just dig out the sod where we want to lay down gravel and level things, first.
Though we plan to have a composting toilet, the contents will NOT be used for compost in any of our garden beds. I’ve seen many sites talk about how great human waste is for compost, and it absolutely horrifies me. It’s not the waste itself I have concerns with, but what might be in it. Not many people are in my husband’s situation, having to take more than a dozen different prescriptions, but even if it’s just OTC pain killers, hormonal birth control, or other prescriptions, it will be an issue. So we will have a separate dumping site, well away from anywhere food will be grown.
So that is how things are progressing with the new compost location.
One of these days I intend to get some dual roller composting bins. They are supposed to compost a lot faster but, for me, it’s more about accessibility and mobility. We may not need it now but, at some point, it will be more of an issue.
That’s one thing I learned about living in the housing co-op we were in before moving back here. It was one of the few places that had a lot of wheelchair accessible housing, and many of my friends and neighbours had a variety of mobility issues. Now, I see everything with different eyes. It did make the transition to my husband becoming disabled much easier, to be honest. It can happen to any of us and, as we age, it’s almost inevitable. One woman I know uses the term TAB to describe people without disabilities: Temporarily Able Bodied.
Accessibility is now an almost constant thought in the back of my mind as we work on things and plan ahead.
One of the clean up goals that got shifted back a year, due to my husband’s hospitalization and other issues last year, was to clear the spruce grove. Not all of it; parts of it will be left overgrown to shelter critters. I do want to get most of it cleared. This will be a multi-year project, but at the very least, I want to get the perimeter done.
That was supposed to include clearing around and into the junk pile, but now that we know Butterscotch’s kittens are in there, that will wait.
We never did get a chance to clear things out to reach the Saskatoon bushes near the junk pile, but I still wanted to get that done so we can reach them, and the chokecherry trees beside them.
Here is how it looked when I started.
The spruce tree in the foreground is still alive, while the tree on the left of the photo is dead, as is the one by the junk pile on the right of the photo.
(Also, I set up containers for kibble and water for the babies, and yes, they’ve already discovered them!)
There had been quite a few bushes and spirea at the base of the live spruce tree, and crowding the horseradish, that I cleared away a couple of nights ago (it was too dark for photos at the time), so a start has already been made in this area.
The first thing to do was cut away the elms that have been growing in the old wine barrel planter that used to be such a favorite place for the kittens to nap and play in. Then I began working a bit towards the junk pile. Not too far, though, as the spirea in there creates places for them to hide in.
I’d forgotten about that tire rim that was buried in there… :-D
After moving the tire rim into the old wine barrel planter, I discovered something else.
Those are concrete blocks, buried in the soil!
When we first moved here, the wine barrel on its side in the bushes was intact enough that the cats would sit on it. It was another favorite spot for them, until it rotted out enough that the staves collapsed! :-D
It looks like the tire rim was placed on top of the blocks, then the barrel on top of the tire rim until it eventually got knocked over. Unlike the planter, this was a whole barrel, not one cut in half to be a planter. I don’t know what it was set up for.
I’ve left the blocks for now, and did not clear further around the remains of the barrel. I figure this makes a nice spot for kittens to play in!
I didn’t want to go any closer to the junk pile – I don’t want Butterscotch to move her babies! – so I started working around the other side. Some of this area, I’d cleared before, but it doesn’t take long for spirea to spread out again!
Here is how it looked when I stopped for the day.
I would have liked to continue, but even working in the shade, it was just getting too hot.
The Saskatoon bushes are still loaded with – now dried – berries. I’m sure the birds will enjoy what we could not harvest. The chokecherry trees in there should be ready for picking fairly soon. It is likely too late in the season to make a difference this year, but clearing up around them will likely result in better growing and fruiting conditions, too.
Here is another view.
For this photo, I’m standing near the horseradish and facing right into the Saskatoon bushes, with a few chokecherry branches hanging over from the side.
This is how it looks from further in.
All those skinny little trunks you see on the right half of the photo are chokecherries and Saskatoon bushes.
When I worked in here previously, I’d cleared away the spirea up to a spruce tree with an extension cord hanging down from it. So most of this area had already been done. I only worked closest to the Saskatoon bushes and chokecherry trees for now. Eventually, I want to clear all the spirea out of here. There are wild roses growing not far from here, and I would like to encourage those to spread, instead.
As for this area near the edge of the spruce grove, I want to keep it clear of undergrowth. It’s one of the areas I want to eventually set up a bench and create a little haven, near the stone cross my late brother set up at the very edge of the grove. If possible, this would be an area I’d like to encourage moss to grow as a ground cover.
It was a fairly small area that got cleared, but there was a lot in it! I was able to pull most of the spirea out by the roots. With some of them, there was a LOT of root coming up with them! The topsoil here is decades of decomposed spruce needles, so it’s quite loose, making it much easier to get those roots out.
Eventually, we will have the tree company that cleared our roof and power lines come back and take out the two dead spruce trees here. We were supposed to get that done this spring, or at least get the chipping done, but we ended up spending all our money fixing vehicles and replacing appliances. We probably won’t be able to get it done this year at all.
Which gives me more time to clean up the area, which will make it easier for them to get at the dead trees.
When we moved here, the compost pile we’ve been using was already set up in a metal ring, near the old garden. It’s been pretty full for a while, and well past time to start another one.
Today, I decided to dig out the metal ring in preparation for that.
The first thing I did was use a potato fork to lever under it and loosen it from the soil, and clear away some of the mulch around it or things growing out from under it.
The ring is made of two pieces put together, and this is one of the seams that I cleared.
It’s held together with a combination of electrical wire and barbed wire (without any barbs).
Between my dad and my brothers, I think we ended up with a whole lot of scrap electrical wire available, because I’m finding it used for stuff like this, all over the place!
The barbed wire, however, is a new one. :-D Not that I haven’t seen it all over; just that it’s usually limited to jerry rigging barbed wire fences, so it make sense for them to be there.
It took some fighting with it, but I managed to get the wire unwrapped and back through the hole. Yay! I can move the rings now!
Or… not?
Ah. Of course.
Even though I’d lifted the ring out of the soil earlier, it wasn’t enough to reveal the second set of wires, holding it together.
*sigh*
The electrical wire was easy enough to get loose, at least.
Hmmm.
At this point, I got a pair of pliers.
A pair of pliers that also had wire cutters on them. Which I needed to use, after I unwrapped part of it. The wire ran under the ring itself, with no way to finish unwrapping it from this side.
Finally, it’s clear! I could leave the other seam as is, and lift the whole thing out from the compost pile.
I don’t actually have high hopes for the compost we’ll get out of this. What we added to it should be fine, but when I tried digging into it to turn it, earlier it the summer, I was still finding lots of wood (the summer before we moved here, my sister and her husband had piled pruned branches into it, with plans to burn it, until my brother pointed out that it was too close to an apple tree!). I also found plastic garbage and pieces of fabric rags. What else might be under there, I don’t know!
It’s free!
Plenty of roots were hung up on the wires at the seams.
After talking about it with a daughter, I think we will move this over a tree stump near near where the old wood pile used to be. The stump itself is in the way of things, and having a compost on top of it will encourage it to break down faster. Once the ring is in place, I’ll use it to burn some of the stuff I’ve been clearing out of the edge of the spruce grove. Things like thistles and spirea don’t belong in the wood piles we’re planning to have chipped. Before, I’d put them in the fire pit, but there’s so much of it, plus we’re actually using the fire pit for cooking, now. Some of the saplings I cleared away from around the tree stump are already growing back, so starting off with a burn will ensure those are killed off, too.
I hope I can find a better way to close up the ring than using those wires, though.
With yesterday’s rain, it wasn’t until today that the rain barrel set up by the squash beds was dry enough to try patching again.
The silicon sealant is white, and so is the Plasti Dip spray, so it’s hard to see! Especially after I spread the sealant into the cracks.
Hopefully, this will do the trick and there will be no more leaking. Though, to be honest, the amount that was leaking was so minor, I’m not too worried about it. It’ll just water the spruce tree it’s sitting next to! :-D
I’ll leave it to cure for at least 24 hours before refilling the barrel. Then we will see how well this worked. :-)
Yesterday afternoon, we had a constant, light rain.
The perfect time to light a sketchy fire!
Of the several fungus infected tree stumps we need to burn out, I started with the only one that isn’t cut flush to the ground. I figured I should get the bigger one done first; the rest will get done very quickly, in comparison!
The metal ring I rolled over from where I found it by the storage shed was just the right size.
You can see some of the fungus from last year, dried up on the side of the stump facing me. On the other side is the remains of an ants nest. When we cut what was left of the tree down and left the short length of trunk next to the pile of diseased branches we’d pruned earlier this summer, the ants moved with it!
So no killing of ants involved. :-)
Of course, I made sure to have a hose handy, even with the rain. The wood used as fuel is from the stack of diseased branches, which all need to be burned.
I set myself up with a chair and an umbrella, too. :-D
It took a while to build the fire around all of the stump, partly because I needed to keep the fire small. It wasn’t directly under another apple tree, but close enough to potentially damage some of the branches.
I’m not too worried about that particular tree. Of all the apple trees, that one has the smallest, least edible apples on it.
The birds and deer like them, though, so that’s good.
This tree is one of the ones I want most to protect.
It’s at the far end of the row of trees, and next to one of the stumps cut flat to the ground that we found fungal growth on, too. This tree already has tasty apples! It has the wonderful combination of sweetness and tartness that I love. There is one other tree, at the very end, that also has really good apples, though they take quite a bit longer to ripen. The main grafted part of that tree died, and it’s the suckers from the base that are producing such nice apples. Usually, it’s the other way around.
So I’m rather motivated to keep this fungal infection from spreading! We really should have done this in the spring, but the weather was not at all co-operative. Spores for these emerge in the fall, so we have a bit of time, yet.
When I stopped for the day, I scrounged for something to cover the stump with. The fire was out, but might still smolder, so I wanted to make sure it couldn’t flare up or spread.
That top of an oil drum is something I fished out of the edge of the nearby spruce grove when I cleared the north side of it. The metal sheet was just one of those things among the garbage we dug up near the old garden shed.
The fire got quite a bit of it cleared. I don’t know how far into the wood the fungal infection gets, but even if the fire killed that off, I still need to get the stump down to ground level.
For now, I’ve taken an ax to it to break it apart a bit. We’ll start another fire on it later and repeat the process as often as necessary.
I had a much more pleasant surprise this morning, besides finding myself face to face with a wasps nest.
While walking past the junk pile, I suddenly saw a white, orange and black face looking at me!
I quickly grabbed my phone to take a picture, but by the time I looked back…
There was an orange face staring at me.
A playful little orange baby that did not run and hide from me.
Then Butterscotch came over and let me pet her before jumping up on the junk pile herself. I got to pet her some more before she moved further away.
There is the little calico beauty!
So adorable!
Oh? Is that orange movement behind the calico?
Why, yes it is! Hello, orange baby!
The babies ignored me and started going for Butterscotch and climbing to the top of the pile.
I just switched to video when another orange baby showed up?
They are so big and fluffy!!! They would be quite a bit younger than the other kittens, and yet they’re not that much smaller!
Oh? Did I hear something scrabbling around in the junk pile?
Number four!
They just hung around at the top and played while I stood just a few feet away. I got closer to these guys than with any of the other kittens, except Little Braveheart.
Just look at the smug expression on Butterscotch’s face! She’s all like “see… I don’t kill ALL my babies. I’m a good mama… when I’m outside!”
Going past the junk pile later, I saw the calico and an orange baby playing at the top. With Mom not there, they ran off when they saw me.
That makes 3 litters of yard cats. I’ve only seen one of Rosencrantz’s 3 babies lately, so that makes a total of 8, for sure. Possibly 10.
It’s a good thing Beep Beep is content to stay indoors. Otherwise, there would probably be another litter on the way!
This morning I went to get a meter reading to submit to the electric company.
Being rather short, I tend to see more glare on the cover than the numbers themselves. My solution has been to hold my phone up and take several pictures. The display cycles, with a short blank period in between, but after taking 3 or 4 shots, I can be pretty sure at least one of them has the reading in it.
What this means is that I’m fiddling with my phone to open the camera as I walk up to the power pole.
I really should pay more attention.
After I took the pictures, I looked down and found myself staring at this, maybe a foot and a half away from my face.
There were no wasps flying around, so I took pictures.
Because I’m like that. :-D
But why were no wasps flying around?
I think this is part of my answer. These are not the aggressive yellow and black wasps. I couldn’t see much, but they look a lot like the docile bald faced hornets in the Chinese elm trees.
From what I could see, they wasps were not so much “docile” as “sluggish”. It was a bit cooler this morning, so maybe they just weren’t warmed up yet.
We are actually going to leave this nest. We go to the post once a month to get a reading, and since I’m using a camera to see the numbers anyhow, we don’t disturb them in the process. In the winter, after they die off, we can carefully remove the nest. Who knows. We might Ebay it or something. There is apparently quite the demand for the nests!
I just wish I’d noticed it before I took the meter reading. It would have been much easier on my heart! :-D
No, none of our giant sunflowers are blooming, yet. In fact, we didn’t even plant these ones.
Bird seed and deer feed we’ve been leaving at one end of a flower garden have been sprouting. Much of it is in the grass and gets mowed, but right under the platform feeder, we’re letting them grow.
I was surprised to see a sunflower blooming this morning. They are all really quite small plants! From the seeds I’ve seen in the mixes, I expected them to grow much larger.
Another sunflower will be blooming soon! The oats beside it are from the deer feed.
Then there’s whatever this is. Millet, maybe? I don’t know.
There are some other plants that I find myself looking at and wondering; is that from the bird seed? Or is it a weed? :-D
For now, I’m leaving them. We’ll find out soon enough!
Zucchini and sunburst squash I gathered this morning.
Yesterday, I made a sort of hash, first browning potatoes, cubed small, in butter, then adding leek and frying until softened. I cubed sunburst squash, a green zucchini and a grey squash (the lighter coloured, kinda striped, kind of zucchini; our grocery stores label them as grey squash). Once those were cooked until soft, I added seasonings and maybe half a cup of whipping cream. It turned out awesome!
I’m out of cream, though, so I think I’ll just pan fry them in butter with leek.
The Re-Farmer 