He’s been running around all over the house, but I managed to catch him and lure him with some cephalopods.
It’s not the squidlies he’s hunting.
It’s my phone!
:-D
As a side note, my spell check dictionary does not recognize the word “cephalopod”. Which is weird enough on it’s own, but the alternative spelling it suggests for the plural is “hydrocephalus”, while the suggestion for the singular is “cephalic”.
Excuse me while I “add to dictionary.” :-D
I dug up the patterns to make more of these. I am in error. Neither of these are squids. The pink one is a cuttlefish. :-D
The cats love them!
But not as much as Ginger loves to attack my phone while I try to take his picture. ;-)
My younger daughter and I took advantage of it and built a new garden bed in the area we plan to plant tomatoes.
The tomato seedlings are doing well, as are the luffa.
They have roots starting to show out the bottoms of the pots already!
The onions in the sun room are doing well, but not to much the ones planted more recently.
As for the gourds, none have sprouted yet but, from what I’ve read, they do take a long time to germinate.
Here is where the tomatoes will be going.
We did absolutely nothing to the ground before we started. There really wasn’t any point of even trying.
The first step was to cover the grass.
Actually, the first step was to cut down that maple. I’d already noted that it was creating so much shade when in full leaf, that a unique lilac in the flower bed beside it was being killed off. The stump was left high and will become the support for a seat. The main trunk and some of the larger branches are being kept for future projects.
We’ve been saving the cardboard boxes from cat litter, and their flaps were placed against the fence as a short barrier to hold in the soil.
Well… after spending some time removing all the tape. It took more time to get all the tape off than to lay out the cardboard!
Those and some moving boxes were enough to cover the entire space between the flower bed and the fence. :-)
Then, we broke out the new soaker hose! :-)
We will likely be going below freezing tonight, so the water will still need to be shut off from the basement when we’re done, but for a warm day like today, we could use the hoses for a while.
The soaker hose is 50 ft/15m, so we’re looking at approximately 25 ft/7 1/2m for the new bed.
While letting that soak, my daughter and I began bringing loads of straw over from the bale in the big garden area.
We probably could have left the water running all day to soak it thoroughly, but we didn’t bother. We did move the soaker hose over by the haskap berry bushes, though, and left the water running while we moved on to the next step: spreading the straw.
Actually, I spread the straw while my daughter filled a couple of wheelbarrows of soil and brought them over. Once the cardboard was covered, we tromped back and forth on it, stamping it down, then lay the soaker hose back over it.
We left that to soak and took a walk around the big garden area and talked about changing a few things.
The above image shows the existing beds from last year’s garden, in green. The three smaller beds in the middle were going to be where our three varieties of spinach would be planted. I was thinking we might change those up completely. Instead of three short beds oriented East-West, it would probably be better to have two longer beds oriented North-South, like the two we already have. One of the North-South beds was supposed to have shallots planted in it, but the shallot seedlings failed, so we’ll still have three beds available to plant spinach (and whatever else we interplant with them).
Eventually, we will be building accessible raised beds here, so nothing is permanent at this point, anyhow.
There’s also the two small beds – the shorter green rectangles in the above pictures – where we’d planted potatoes last year. There’s nothing stopping us from making those longer, stretching into the skinny bit that’s marked in orange.
So that’s what we’ll do with those areas.
By the time we went back to the new bed, my older daughter was done work for the day and was able to join us.
The first thing they did was stop using the larger wheelbarrow, because it sucks. :-/ Actually, they both do. We need to get a new wheelbarrow! Just one good one is enough. :-)
So one daughter had shovel duty, filling the smaller wheelbarrow, while the other brought it over and dumped it, then I spread the soil until a new load was brought. The job was done very quickly!
The area of straw left uncovered will be a pathway. At some point, we’ll put in some pavers or something, but for now, the straw and cardboard will keep the weeds and grass down. That and lots of tromping it down with our feet. :-)
Each of the haskaps got a load of soil around them, too.
Then, because the hose was handy, the soil got a brief watering, more to keep it from blowing away than anything else.
Our last frost date is June 2, so this will have more than a month for the straw to settle. We’ve got one more warm day, then we’re supposed to get snow. Long range forecast sees more snow and rain into the first few days of May. Any precipitation we get will help settle it more, and we’ll be able to see if we need to add more soil or not.
If all goes well, I will use tomorrow to dig a new bed next to the garlic beds, before things cool down again. That one will be a lot more physical labour than this one was!
My daughter’s orchids are looking beautiful this morning!
They have been doing very well since she starting using kokedama, though finding a place to hang them where the cats couldn’t get at them was more of a challenge!
Unfortunately, one of them seems to be struggling. You can see some of the dead leaves behind the flowers in the above photo. My daughter has figured out that, when we had the polar vortex hit us in February, it simply got too cold for them at the window, and one in particular is having a much harder time recovering.
Now that we have the aquariums converted to cat proof greenhouses, next winter we will be able to move them into one of those to keep them warmer.
I also saw some fluffy, furry flowers this morning. ;-)
I was able to bring them some meaty treats from the kitchen this morning, and they were very happy!
I love how Creamsicle Jr. is licking his chops! :-D
We’re supposed to have a nice, warm day today, and I’m looking forward to getting some garden preparations done outside. The cats have already discovered the soil my daughter moved to the old kitchen garden. They LOVE rolling around in dirt. We have several trees with bald patches at their bases, because the cats roll under them so much. One of them is an ornamental apple tree in the old kitchen garden, and now they have bonus dirt to roll in.
I don’t mind them rolling at the bottom of the tree. We can’t plant anything under them, anyhow – but it’s going to be a problem if they decide to roll in the new soil after we’ve planted!
I just finished switching the new keyboard with my husband’s old keyboard. I was wrong about his keyboard, though. It’s identical to my old one. It doesn’t have lit keys.
Here is my new, old keyboard! :-D
Believe it or not, I actually cleaned this a bit, already… :-D
As for the broken leg, it turns out the legs are exactly the same height as the width of an old tape measure I had on my desk. Something I’d found while cleaning out my late father’s desk and kept handy. The clip on the back even fits into the space the leg used to be in, so I can slide the keyboard around, and it goes along for the ride. :-D
My wrists and hands are already thanking me! :-D
My husband, meanwhile, is quite happy with the new keyboard. He doesn’t type anywhere near as much as I do, so the issues I was having just don’t bother him. Plus, I’m the one with arthritis in my wrists and fingers.
I suppose I should pop the keys off and clean them, but honestly, I don’t think I care enough to bother. It works. That’s all the matters.
The new keyboard was the closest my husband had been able to find like what we already had, in a split keyboard. Since my husband had to place the order a second time, he missed a sale price, so the new one was pretty expensive, too. Quality wise, as far as construction goes, it is nowhere near as good as the old keyboards, which are both from Microsoft and well over 10 years old.
Considering how much use my keyboard got, I’m rather impressed that it lasted this long. I’m still going to keep it. It may be a bit janky, but it still works well enough that it would do as a back up, should something happen to one of the others that are in use. Now that I think about it, the light up keyboard I remembered my husband had was one that came with a desktop system he’d bought, years ago. That one died after a cat knocked a drink all over it, which is why he was using the one I have now.
My wrists are thanking me. My thumb, in particular, is much, much happier now! :-D
I made a quick run to the post office/general store today, as we were expecting packages. After picking up the package at the post office, the store owner came up to me, asking if I was expecting a package from somewhere “far off”. I wasn’t, but my daughter was. She wasn’t sure how it would arrive, as they wouldn’t accept a PO box, but delivery companies have a really hard time finding our physical address.
She brought over a box that had the strangest label on it. In the address area, it said it was to the post office. There was no name, but our phone number was in it. I figured it must be my daughter’s package and brought it home.
It wasn’t for my daughter.
It was for me!
My new keyboard has finally come in. The one we had to reorder because the first order was cancelled because they didn’t accept PO boxes.
I am now typing on it for the first time.
It is SO different!
This is my old keyboard.
As you can tell by the worn off keys, I’ve had it a long time!
I love that keyboard!
Unfortunately, some of the keys were getting janky, and it was getting time.
The ergonomic split keyboard is a must for me, but having a light up keyboard was also preferable, so that I could see it without having to shine my desk light on it, blinding myself every time I looked up.
This is the new one.
Very pretty!
Nice, big legible letters on the keys. I love the lit keys too. The colours available are blue, red and green.
Now that I’ve typed with it for this long, I can already say.
I hate it!
The dimensions are different. Even though the keyboards are the same width, this one is narrower. The keys themselves are smaller. The difference is just enough to be a problem. My hands are cramping up, trying to type.
The worst is, the space bar is split. My thumb keeps hitting the end, and it doesn’t depress. To depress the space bar, I have to tuck my thumb under my hand. Which is causing it to start cramping even more.
My husband just came over to see how it was. When I told him, he offered me his. He says he can type on anything. His keyboard is basically my old one, except lit up and with one broken leg.
Oh, which reminds me. This keyboard doesn’t have legs at the back. The top of the keyboard is lower than the bottom, adding more stress to my wrists.
Excuse me while I end this post and switch keyboards!
This morning, none of the kitties were cooperative about getting their pictures taken, so I had to settle for something that didn’t move.
Much.
;-)
While doing my rounds these days, I check all the areas we planted things in the fall. I found more garlic coming up under the mulch, but we’re still leaving them covered. Ideally, we’d have plastic row covers over them, but we don’t have any sort of hoops or frames to hold it up right now. They’ll be fine; a cover would just kick start them a bit more.
This morning, I decided to clean up the old flower stalks in the bed our two haskap bushes are in. Those flowers are among the things my mother insists we keep, but I wanted to open up the space around the bushes more, so if a few fresh roots came up with the flower stalks, I didn’t mind.
This meant I finally got the first good look at how the haskaps were doing.
I had to hold the branches to get a photo, because of the wind! :-D
This is the male plant, and it’s starting to leaf out quite nicely! It did well last year, too.
It’s the female plant that I am more concerned about.
Last year, I was sure it had died, but it did grow and even managed to produce a couple of berries. It’s still very weak and spindly, with branches so thin, the camera on my phone couldn’t focus on them! There’s the tiniest bit of green showing, though, so at least I can tell it’s still alive. We need to pick up a couple more of the female plants. I never saw any last year, so we will likely have to order them in.
I want to side dress the ones we have with our nice, new garden soil, but probably not today. It started to snow while I was out there. The snow has already stopped, but it’s going to stay chilly today. We’re supposed to warm up a lot over the next two days, then get snow again. During those two warm days, I’m hoping to start prepping the areas at the chain link fence, so we’ll be able to tend the nearby haskap at the same time.
We’ve been saving our cardboard for the past while, and will be laying that over the grass between this bed and the chain link fence, then adding a layer of old straw before topping with soil. This is where the tomatoes will be planted, with the fence to use as support. On the other side of the person gate, we’ll lay cardboard down as well, but that side is where we’re planning to put the remaining old chimney blocks to use as planters. This year, they will be used for the cucamelons but, in the future, they will be good for anything we need to keep contained. We still need to get those blocks out of the old basement. We ended up having to use them to barricade the screen “door” we made over the opening between the two basements. The cats were managing to push their way through, so we’ll have to find an alternate way of bracing the frame before we can remove the blocks. Unfortunately, the opening is basically just a hole that was cut into the wall around the time the new basement was built, so it’s oddly shaped, plus the floors are at slightly different levels. It makes creating a barrier the cats can’t push through much more challenging! Once we figure that out, we can haul the blocks out. I do want to keep one in the new basement, though. I found it was the perfect height to use as a hard surface to brace on while I was rough shaping wood to carve. The rest will be set up along the chain link fence. We want to transplant the grapes to the chain link fence, where they will get more sunlight, but not this year.
I keep forgetting that we also have some chain link fence on the other side of the vehicle gate. Just a short stretch to the garage. Part of it is shaded by the garage in the morning, but it does get full sun overall. It’s another area we can keep in mind for any future garden plots for things than need support. There’s a lot more of the chain link fencing towards the west, but that stretch doesn’t get much sunlight. Once we clean up the dead branches and trees on the outside of the fence, it’ll be better and we’ll have more options.
It feels great to finally be able to start these preparations now, even though we can’t plant anything for almost another month, at the earliest. Getting the soil delivered yesterday means we can work on different areas a little at a time, rather than rushing to get it all done at once, later.
Of course, the best part was getting the garden soil in. I figured I’d call and it would be brought in after a few days or something. I never imagined they’d be able to bring it so quickly!
We now have a load both in the outer yard, and by the old garden area, near where we were be doing most of our gardening this year.
It’s absolutely gorgeous soil! I’m so incredibly happy with it!
I want more.
:-D
In truth, we probably will end up using both piles up this year. We will be using it judiciously, but once a load was no longer in the truck, it suddenly looked very small! :-D We were already expecting to finish on one load and use at least part of the second, so this is not too unexpected. For the price we got it for, we will be able to get more if we need to, when the permanent raised beds are built.
Just a little while ago, my daughters and I scrounged around in the barn and found a tarp that could mostly cover the nearby pile. Then we brought over some of the old tires that were stacked behind the pump shack after I cleaned up there and fixed a window. May as well get some use out of them! There’s also a rock pile with some trees growing out of it, nearby, so we grabbed some of those. Hopefully, it’ll be enough to keep the tarp from blowing away – and the tarp will keep most of the soil from blowing away! We’ll cover the other pile, too, but not tonight.
Along with the soil delivery and the septic tank getting cleaned, we kept getting phone calls. One was from the place I’d bought our baby chainsaw from. The spare battery I’d ordered had come in! Which was a very pleasant surprise, all things considered. I was fully prepared for it to take weeks, or even months, before it came in.
Then we got an odd call from the tax preparer. We’d dropped off my older daughter’s papers. We did TurboTax last year, but they are so messed up this year, we just gave up. My daughter does her transactions through PayPal, and the Excel spreadsheet she downloaded from there was not something that could be printed out and make any sense, so I put it on a memory card and included it.
The tax preparer had no idea what it was. Her computer doesn’t have a port for it. That never even occurred to me!
So we were going to put it on a thumb drive and bring it over, but my daughter went back to her PayPal to try and find something that made more sense. She ended up finding a sales summary that we could print out. So my younger daughter and I headed out to run some errands and I swung by to drop off the printouts.
I ended up talking to the tax preparer, who seemed totally lost. She had a hard time understanding that everything my daughter does is digital and online. She took some notes and said she would call if they had any more questions.
By the time we got to our next errand, we got a text that the tax preparer had called and left and exasperated sounding message, but no details.
I don’t get it. This should be a very simple return.
*sigh*
We’ll call them back tomorrow.
We ran the rest of our errands in town, including picking up the spare battery – it’s a good thing we had to drive by the place because I almost forgot! – then paid for the garden soil on the way home.
After we got home, my older daughter was finished work for the day, so we went outside and ended up covering the one pile of soil. My younger daughter has already started to move soil over to the old kitchen garden! :-D This is one of the areas we can start adding soil to right way, as we’ve already been building it up for the past couple of summers.
The chives we transplanted into two of the old chimney blocks making up the retaining wall are coming up quite strongly. Which is nice, because they’d been pretty spindly, before. Prolific, but not a lot of substance! The rest of these blocks, where we had planted cucamelons, were topped up with soil last fall, so they’re already good. :-)
Along the south edge of this garden, my daughter planted bulbs, and it looks like one or two of her irises has emerged! It’s hard to tell with one of them, they’re so small, still. We also found more garlic sprouts, and my daughter found more snow crocuses. Everything is so tiny, but it’s still very exciting to see them coming up.
While checking the areas we planted all the grape hyacinth and snow crocuses, we can also check out the wild strawberries.
They have been visible through their leaf mulch for a while. Such tiny, delicate things, yet very hardy! They get quickly overgrown with wildflowers, so the plan it to transplant them as soon as we can.
It was good to get all these big things done, but I usually like to have them more spread out, not all in one day! :-D The one thing that didn’t get done, was taking my husband to the lab for some blood work. He’s been in too much pain to go to the clinic, so late last week, I asked and they faxed the requisition to the lab that’s closer. With so many things going on, we’ll just do it tomorrow. It’s already a few months late. One more day isn’t going to make a difference! :-)
For now, I think it’s time for a nice pot of tea, while I daydream about dirt, and plan all the things we’ll be doing with it!
Then he promptly tried to catch and eat my phone. :-D
I’m happy to say that, for a past couple of night, we have not been closing the other cats out, and have found Ginger curled up and snoozing with other cats. He’s always been more laid back about accepting other cats, and now it looks like the other cats have gotten used to their new family member. :-)
Unfortunately, other critters are getting used to things.
When the girls went outside to drop the bags of litter into a bin we have for them, they found THREE skunks in the kibble house! If things were warm enough to have a hose out, we would spray them with water from a distance, but that is not yet an option. My daughter tried to shoo them away with a stick, but they just ignored her. They didn’t even threaten to spray. The little one even ignored her when she actually poked at him with the stick!
We’re going to have to leave less kibble out for the outside cats, since they’re not finishing it all during the day, and the skunks are starting to rely on it as a source of food.
Oh, my goodness!!! I just got interrupted while writing this, and I am so excited!!!
I called about the garden soil this morning. I was expecting a call back, to arrange for one of the guys to come by and figure out where to drop the soil off. Before then, I’d called to have our septic tank emptied, and the drive wanted to do that right away, while the ground it still hard, so I had gone ahead to open the gate for him. Instead of the septic guy, we had someone else come knocking on the door about the garden soil.
We walked around and I showed him the easy one, first; in the outer yard, near where we will be building the permanent raised beds in the future. For this year’s garden, however, I was right. They won’t be able to get their truck under the tree branches to where I had hoped the soil could go. I showed him an alternate area I was thinking of, and that one works out perfectly. There is a gate to the garden in the fence there, and they can use our secondary driveway to come right in to it.
Then he said they could deliver it today.
!!!
The ground is still frozen, which makes it better for the trucks.
When I mentioned I didn’t have cash on hand to pay for it, he brushed it off and told me I could swing by and pay for it later.
!!!
So we now have both gates open and waiting for very large trucks to come through! :-)
I am just thrilled!
Okay, back to topic. Where was I?
Ah, the skunks. LOL
When I headed out to do my rounds this morning, I saw the skunks had been after more than kibble.
This is near the kibble house and cat shelter. I’m not sure what they were digging for, this early in the spring, but I guess they found something!
I’m a bit disheartened by how dry the soil is, though, even with most of yesterday’s snow melted away.
Heading into the outer yard, I was watching the large numbers of birds in the pile of branches when I noticed a patch of ground that looked different.
Here, at least, the ground is a bit moister. There used to be a large pile of snow, pushed up by a tractor when our driveway was kindly cleared for us. That snow finally melted away only recently.
Well, that area now has a pile of soil beside it! The first load was just delivered!
The next load should be here in about 20 minutes, so I’d better get my butt off the computer. :-)
The girls had gone out for a walk and excitedly told me I needed to go outside – with a camera!
You know those garlic in the snow I got a picture of this morning?
There’s more of them now!
The two on the left where not there this morning!
We also have a first appearance.
One of our muscari (grape hyacinth) has emerged! The first of (hopefully!) 200. :-D
Though today has stayed just below freezing, it was enough that a lot of areas warmed up and the snow melted. Including roofs.
Long before we moved out here, the storage house got a new roof, but the eaves troughs were never reattached. In fact, the other side has none at all. So most of the snow melting off the roof just drips straight down.
(Also, that wasp nest is a couple of years old and empty)
Which made for an interesting double layer of icicles on one of the step below. :-D
Unfortunately, ice has also formed directly on the grape vines at ground level.
If these have survived the winter, we really need to find a better spot to transplant them!
The nearby spirea can handle the ice just fine!
It’s like the cross bar on the grape vine support is exactly under the drip line! :-D
The cats, meanwhile, are wisely staying out of the wind! I was surprised and pleased to see Butterscotch in there, with her boy Nutmeg. :-)
It’s so awesome to be seeing anything growing in the weather we’ve been having! Talk about resilient! :-)
The Re-Farmer 