Month: October 2020

Frosty morning – and a rough start to the day!

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This morning, I was awakened by my husband, asking me if there was some trick to starting the washing machine.

I think it was a rhetorical question.

Our new washing machine, which we’ve had for only 2 1/2 months, simply stopped working. It won’t turn on.

Of course, my husband went through the usual check list. Breaker? It was fine. Outlet? Tested both plugins. Meter reads fine. While I went through the manual’s trouble shooting chart (which basically said, check the breaker, check the outlet), my husband went online and found that there’s a hard reset you can do, so we tried that. Still nothing. It simply will not turn on.

So I started looking at how to contact the LG to get it fixed, since we’re well within the 1 year limited warranty. I tried their website, first. Made an account, registered the item, started a request for getting warranty work done…

Got a note saying we were not under warranty, and we would be billed for the service call.

???

So I finally just phoned.

The good news is, the person I spoke to confirmed we are still under warranty; their website glitches sometimes. She was apologetic about that. Since I had just made an account on the website, she was able to find me in the system, so that made things faster.

They didn’t have any technicians available for where we are, but there is a local company that does warranty work for them, so they will contact this company on our behalf, and we will get a phone call from them.

Soon, I hope!

While I was working on this, I heard the well pump turn on and the noise it made really threw me. Since our plumber hasn’t gotten back to us, and I happened to catch the name of another plumber being recommended on a local Facebook group, I asked my husband to try contacting them.

It turns out that, this time of year, a lot of people are closing up their cottages for the winter, so he’s really busy with those jobs right now. So busy, he recommended we try someone else, because there was no way he could come in within the week. I don’t imagine other plumbers will be any different, so we might have to just wait until after Thanksgiving, which is next weekend.

By the time we got all that done, I was still earlier than usual to get the outside rounds done. I figured the cats wouldn’t mind being fed early! :-D

It was -1C/30F at the time. The cats’ water bowls had ice on them, and the ground was covered with frost. It was quite beautiful.

  • Cat paths!
  • Frosted burdock

Rosencrantz was not impressed.

While going through the garden areas, I noticed the one sunflower with the seed head that was killed off by grubs looked… odd.

It looks like the grubs continued eating their way down the stalk – and then got killed by the frost!

Die, grubbins, die! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Fall clean up: I think I went overboard!

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When I cleared out the old wood pile from the yard last year, the soil I found below was a very pleasant surprise. Still, there was a whole lot of clean up that needed to be done this spring, before we could plant anything. We were still finding some pretty strange things in there! The biggest challenge was all the tree roots crisscrossing the area.

Now that we’ve had our first vegetables growing in there, it was interesting to see what was coming up along with them! After being buried by a wood pile for decades, there were still seeds and root systems that managed to survive and sprout. There was plantain (the weed, not the banana!), which is not surprising; that stuff can grow anywhere and is very hardy. Clover was more of a surprise, but there was also a lot of some long, delicate green plant that I didn’t recognize at all. I thought it might be a flower of some kind, but it never had any. There were flowers that came up, too, and since they came up where the khol rabi failed, to, I let them bed until today, when they were basically done blooming, anyhow.

All this meant that in digging over the beds, I was basically stopping with every fork full to break up the soil with my hands, so I could pull out as many weeds with their roots as I could.

I also found tree roots I’d missed in the spring!

While fighting with the roots, my feet sinking into the soft, soft soil, I kept thinking about where and how we would plant the garlic. The spaces to walk on, in between the beds of carrots and beets we’d planted, was packed down harder than the rest, of course, and it almost seemed like wasted soil!

Also, I discovered that, like the girls had discovered when planting deep bulbs, it seems even here, there is only about 8 inches of topsoil before I started hitting a lot of rocks.

We’ve got three kinds of garlic coming, which meant three beds. How and were did I want to arrange them?

Then I remembered I still had a 4’x8′ frame from the goat catcher we’d built.

Those are coming in very handy!

I dragged it over, and the area I’d worked on turned out to be almost exactly the size of the frame!

That’s when I started to go a bit crazy.

I started to dig out the soil inside the frame.

Hitting more roots, of course.

By this time, plan had started to form in my mind.

All the stuff I’d added to the compost a little while before?

It ended up in the space I’d shoveled out, along with some damp straw that I raked up from around the old dog houses, where they had been used as insulation around them.

When it came time to return the soil to the space, I kinda went overboard again…

I kept digging.

The vague plan in my mind took into account walking paths, and I didn’t want to be sinking in the soil. The pieces of wood I’d used to walk on weren’t very stabled, but what if…

What if they were laid down on an area that was dug down and leveled to just above the gravel?

So after I used a hoe and rake to even out the mound of soil, I used them to even out the pathway and started laying down boards.

This is how far I got before stopping for supper.

This is where I pause to say how much I appreciate the girls. While I’m outside doing stuff like this – which I consider fun – they’re inside taking care of the cooking and housework – which I loathe.

Then I went back to finish the job, and this is how it looked.

The wood I was using was salvaged from the junk pile in the spring, and some of if was slightly wider. I used the wider ones to make “walls” on either side of the path, then laid down three layers of boards in the middle. This made them a lot more stable to walk on, and also made the path the same thickness as the height of the “walls”. I had to cut a few to size to fill in gaps at the ends, which worked out all right.

This is old wood, some of which was already starting to rot. If I’d had the option, I would have put down gravel or something. These will do the job for now, and perhaps some day we’ll replaced them with flagstones or something.

When the girls came out to see how it looked, I snagged one of them to help me move the frame to the other side of the path.

This is where the second bed will be.

With 3 varieties of garlic, it looks like I’ll have to make three of these. It looks like there is just barely enough space to do that, before reaching the metal ring around the compost, though I could put the third one at a right angle to the others, instead.

I don’t know if I’ll be up to doing three of them! I don’t know how many cloves we’ll get out of a pound of seed garlic, each. If I do only two, I could split one variety between the two beds.

We shall see, after the second one is done.

I made a whole lot more work for myself by doing this, but… I think I like it better!

The Re-Farmer

Harvested: what I expected, and what I got

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Today, I finally got to harvesting the garden beds we planted where the old wood pile used to be.

This is what we started with, in the spring.

You can read about how the garden plots were doing by August, here, so I won’t repeat myself in this post.

One of the things I’ve been thinking of, while working in the rocky soil of the old garden area, is that we need a soil/compost sifter. That would make clearing the rocks and debris out much easier.

While looking up different design ideas to build one, I suddenly realized…

We already did build one.

The screen “door” we made for the old basement doorway is basically the same idea as the steel mesh sifter my dad had made for gravel, decades ago. It just uses 1 inch mesh instead, and has a support bar across the middle. I’ll just need to reinforce the mesh before using it for something bigger or heavier, since it’s basically just stapled on in between where the wood holds it in place.

Last night, I realized it would also be great to use to lay out the carrots and beets after I harvest them.

It turned out to be perfect for the job.

Here is how I set up to start.

The saw horses were too narrow to support the screen, so I laid out a couple of 8 ft boards we didn’t use when building the goat catcher this past summer, to support the frame. I set up near the new compost pile, as I figured there would probably be a lot going into there!

It turned out to be less than I expected.

The few kohl rabi plants went straight in. That was a disappointment. So few came up and, between the bugs and the deer, only two got big, and then they got eaten. For those, I knew there would be nothing to harvest, so there were no expectations in that regard. I do want to try growing it again, but I’m not sure we’ll try again next year. I think it would benefit from a cold frame to plant earlier, and definitely something to protect from deer. Nothing we grew got attacked by insects the way these were, so we’ll need to keep that in mind before we try growing anything in the cabbage family again.

Of the one remaining musk melon, the frosts killed that off, and it didn’t even make it to the compost pile. It just shriveled away to almost nothing! When clearing away the bricks that were supporting the cloche that doubled as a slow watering container, I found some … friends…

Slimy friends!

That left the carrots, beets and parsley.

As far as expectations, I figured we would get a decent amount of carrots. We’ve been nibbling at them all summer, so I had a good idea of what I would find. I wasn’t expecting many, though, and not very many large ones.

With the beets, I was expecting nothing. Not long ago, the girls picked the biggest ones they could find and cooked them, and with the deer continuing to eat the greens, I didn’t expect any worth keeping at all.

I was pleasantly surprised!

We actually got quite a few decent sized carrots. Not the full size the varieties had the potential to grow to, to be sure, but still more than I expected.

As for the beets, I did actually find some of each variety that were big enough to not go on the compost heap. The smaller ones, this late in the season, were pretty leathery and not salvageable. I expected that of all of them, so getting the few we did was bonus. There’s basically enough for one meal, if we combine then all together. :-D

The last thing to harvest was the parsley.

Parsley is something that I could have left alone. They would come up next year, and I do plan to do that eventually. When I do, I will choose a permanent location for the plants. We don’t actually use parsley all that much, so these will be dried.

Since these were not hidden underground, I got exactly what I expected. A whole lot of parsley! I had to do some cramming to get them in that crate!

These all got left outside while I worked on cleaning up the garden beds – which ended up being completely different than planned, so that will get its own post! At the end of the day, because it’s been getting pretty chilly at night, we brought the entire screen into the old kitchen. The beets will be cooked soon, but we have to figure out what we want to do with all the carrots. :-)

The parsley, on the other hand, will have the greens picked over and trimmed, washed, then laid out on trays to dehydrate in the oven overnight. The new oven has a “warm” setting, which should be the perfect temperature for the job.

Once everything was harvested, the beds needed to be prepped for when the fall garlic finally comes in – hopefully, not too late!!

And… I went a bit nuts on that.

You’ll be able to read about that in my next post…

:-)

The Re-Farmer

Morning kitties

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Some feline adorableness to make you smile. :-)

When I go outside in the mornings, Braveheart is usually the one to come running towards me. Then she stops and acts surprised that she’s so close to me and starts backing off. :-D This morning, however, she came up to me – and let me pet her! She even started purring! This is the first time she has allowed me to pet her, without her being at the food bowl and eating.

What a crowd!

I was very happy to see Butterscotch’s kittens hanging around – and to see a Creamsicle Jr. and the calico hanging out with the bigger ones! The two orange babies were with their mom at another kibble container, but I didn’t want to potentially scare them away from food, just to get a picture.

Rosencrantz and her baby, keeping their distance!

I got to pet both Braveheart and Nostrildamus while they were eating. Mystery kept running off and coming back before finally settling in to eat. The calico was doing much the same, but once she saw all the others staying to eat while I was so close, she finally joined them. I didn’t try to pet her; this was progress enough for now!

What a great way to start the day. :-)

The Re-Farmer