Month: April 2021

Clean up: spruce grove, clearing to the dead trees

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Today turned out to be such a hot and sunny day, I took advantage of it to do a bit of work in the spruce grove. Specifically around the dead trees near where we intend to plant the mulberry tree that will be shipped later in the spring.

I normally post the before pictures at the start, and the after pictures near the end, but this time I’m going to set them side by side. It’s the only way I can see the difference 2-3 hours of work resulted in. :-/

Here is the first area, and where the mulberry tree will be planted.

They’re a bit hard to see in the before picture, but there are two steel wheels leaning against the reddish dead tree. Those have joined the “found object” art display for now. ;-) Then there was the remains of what appears to have been a bench made with two logs as support, and another log that I think was just there to sit on.

It must have been a very pleasant place to sit, when they were first set up.

Someone (probably my mother) had gone to some effort to make sure the seats were stable. I found these, under them.

These were under where the bench was, with a group of bricks under where each log would have been. It was a good idea to put the bricks under the logs, but nothing had been done to keep them from sinking into what is essentially composted leaves and spruce needles, so the logs started to rot from below.

It wasn’t until I found these that I realized the other log was intended as a seat, too.

I had to cut away what I thought were two small trees, just to access the area. It wasn’t until I tried to cut them down to ground level that I realized, it wasn’t two trees.

I had to dig out and cut away the roots to get them out, and they were both growing out of the same root, which ran under the bricks.

This was, hands down, the most difficult part of the clean up today. Partly because there were other roots running under the roots I was trying to cut! Some belonged to the dead spruce they were next to, but I later ended up pulling out about 8 feet of root, and never finding out what tree it came from!

While trimming the undergrowth, I realized I need to get thicker gloves than the gardening gloves I’ve been using.

Another reason to encourage the wild roses – they make great security barriers! Those spines go right through ordinary garden gloves!

I don’t mind cutting away the roses for now, though. They will grow back, and with clearing out the other stuff, they should have more sun and space to spread out, too.

It was really hot work, though, so I stopped for a rest in the shade. I look forward to when we set up new seating areas around the yard. It would be much more pleasant than sitting on concrete steps!

With how hot it was feeling, I just had to check the temperature. I was thinking we were certainly about 15C/59F Maybe even approaching 20C/68F

Nope.

It was 10C/50F

RealFeel, 8C/46F

Yeah. I know. You folks from the south are laughing at me right now! :-D

Meanwhile, the thermometer in the sun room was approaching 30C/86F. I opened the solid doors to allow air circulation through the screen doors, and increased the speed of the ceiling fan, so the onion seedlings would not be too hot!

One of these days, we should set up our own weather station, so we can have more accurate readings!

But I digress…

I did have a visitor while I was taking a break on the stairs.

I love how the woodpecker likes to get to the seeds on the ground by way of the bird feeder’s support. :-)

Then it was back to clearing away the undergrowth, and working my way towards the stone cross. Here is that section, taken from the same spot I took the first before and after pictures from.

I’m having a hard time seeing the difference between these two pictures. In fact, the “after” picture looks worse, because I didn’t line the angle up the same. :-/ Trust me. I did take out quite a bit of undergrowth in the distance!

In the second picture, you can see the tarp covering the junk pile. The tree beside it is dead, as is the tree my supplies are under. That whole area is full of spirea. It’s better to pull those up by the roots, but I just didn’t have the energy for that, today. Too hot! :-D

I worked more into this area.

In the before picture, I’d already started cleaning up the undergrowth a bit. The row of trees you can see on the right are part of north edge of the spruce grove. My older brother planted those, before I was born. It’s hard to believe they were planted at the same time as the huge spruces on the north edge of the grove, but there were three rows planted, close together. The further into the grove the rows were planted (at a time when the rest of the grove’s trees were in their prime), the less light they got, and the less growth there was. I’d cleaned up along the north side of the grove, taking out a lot of little dead spruces in the process. Hopefully, the more things are cleaned up, the better it will be for the surviving trees.

Most of the large spruces in the pictures are dead, so once those are cleaned up, that will allow a lot more light into here. If their trunks are still solid enough, I want to turn them into supports for benches and maybe a table or two. Over time, more spruces will be transplanted into the spruce grove, as well as more food trees – the mulberry tree being our first – that need the extra protection these spruces will give them. The mulberry tree should grow quite large, and will provide quite a bit of shade, so we need to keep things open around where we plant it. Long term, I want this area to be a pleasant, park-like setting. I will have to keep in mind that the benches and possible tables that I hope to make on the tree trunks nearby will end up covered with berries when the mulberry tree gets bigger! I’ve read warnings that mulberry trees can be quite messy. :-D

I’m sure the birds will clean it up for us, though. ;-)

I probably won’t get a chance to work here again for a while, as we are supposed to start snowing tomorrow evening, and it will be a few days before the temperatures warm up again. I want to get the spirea out, in particular – they’re lovely, but very invasive, so we’re keeping them in one area of the yard, and taking them out everywhere else. I know some of what I’ve already taken out today were chokecherry trees. We have lots of those, and it turns out they can be invasive, too! What we really want to clear up around are the Saskatoon bushes. These ones are still healthy, and keeping the area around them clear and open will help keep them that way. They are crowded by spirea and chokecherry right now, so when I work my way to where they are, I will back off until they are in full leaf, or even starting to bloom, so I don’t accidentally cut any down, mistaking them for chokecherry.

Today has been a very deceiving day! It got so hot, and when I was shoveling around those roots, I didn’t hit any ice or frozen ground at all. Quite a few of our garden seeds say to direct sow “as soon as the ground can be worked.” Well, that would be now, but it’s still another month an a half before our last frost date. Not only are we expected to have snow starting tomorrow evening, but we could easily get more snow later in the month, or even in May, so anything we tried to sow would likely not survive.

Which is fine for now. We can’t do anything until the garden soil is delivered! I keep forgetting to call about it. I’m sure the soil is thawed out enough to load into their trucks by now, and I still need someone to come by so we can look at where would be the best places to drop the loads.

I get excited, just thinking about it! :-D The girls and I are so looking forward to gardening this year!

The Re-Farmer

Someone lost a shoe…

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My daughter and I made a dump run today, and as we were unloading the back of the van, she noticed one of the access panels in the side of the van had fallen off. This is where the jack is stored. She popped the panel back on, and off we went.

As we were turning into our driveway, however, we heard a noise in the back that was rather alarming. At least for us, after having so many things go wrong on the van. So while my daughter unlocked the gate, I took a quick look in the back, thinking maybe something got knocked loose behind that access panel.

Once in the garage, I just had to get a picture of what I found.

The jack had been visible before, and we had seen part of the back with the pieces to use the jack. I think one of the plastic pieces I found was originally a bracket to hold the jack in place, so it wouldn’t get knocked about, but I have no real idea what it’s for. Then there was the pliers. And odd find, but I can go with that.

The child’s shoe, on the other hand, is a bit harder to explain! :-D I know the previous owners had kids – when I test drove it before buying it, and before it was detailed, there was still ample evidence to be found! :-D I do find myself curious how the shoe ended up tucked under the jack and the tools! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Technical difficulties: still figuring it out

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First up, many thanks to Fyreglass and her hubby for all the help with my technical difficulties! So far, the problem hasn’t been solved, but my goodness, my computer is working much more efficiently! :-D

In fact, as I type this, the text is showing up as a combination of black and magenta. I am also still getting things like this.

Which isn’t too bad, compared to the neon green I usually get.

I spent hours last night, trying different things. This is what I’ve been able to figure out.

It’s definitely a Firefox issue, more than anything else. I did sometimes see it in Chrome, while in my email, for example, but getting the new monitor somehow solved that. Things actually appear on the screen faster than before, which is not something I expected to see a difference in. That’s usually an internet connectivity issue, but apparently, my old monitor – which was much older than my current computer – didn’t process as quickly.

Re-installing Firefox did not fix the issue. I’ve noticed that Firefox is a data hog, compared to other browsers. I use it for this blog and under my Re-Farmer profile simply because I don’t like having to log in and out repeatedly in the same browser, and I use Chrome for my personal stuff. I’ve also used Explorer in the past, and tried several other browsers. They all have their issues, and I keep finding myself going back to Firefox and Chrome, because the issues they have are easier to work around than the others I’ve tried.

I’ve used Glary and cleaned up all sorts of things. By this morning, when I double checked with my husband before deleting a couple of games he’d installed on this computer, before he was able to replace his own that died during the move, I’d freed up about 100 gigs of space.

I checked my drivers, and they are up to date. My video card is working fine.

Anything on WordPress – especially the editor – is the most affected, but it also affects things like Facebook and Pinterest. I’ve gone back and forth between browsers to test things out and, while there are definitely loading issues in general, which would be an internet issue, it is only on Firefox that the weird colours and text issues are showing up.

In fact, I’m going to pause and take a screen capture, just to show you what it looks like right now, as I work on this post.

WordPress is one of the platforms that I have the most loading issues with. Especially the editor, but just about every WordPress blog I try to visit has major issues, from the “like” button never loading, to the formatting going completely haywire, to simply timing out and not loading at all. Over and over and over again. Anything embedded in a post (like a video, or a reblog) generally fails to load, and trying to leave a comment is almost impossible. While using Chrome, the loading issue seems more limited to the editor and admin pages, than while visiting blog pages. The stats in particular reeeeaaaallllyyy don’t like to load, even though everything else around it (side bars, headers, etc.) will load just fine.

It’s not just WP, though. I get it in Facebook and Pinterest as well, though not as bad, nor as often. Since doing some PC maintenance, and my computer is working faster, I no longer have the problem in my gmail, as in the screen capture I’d posted yesterday. I might even be able to catch up on my emails now! :-D

And, just to make things even more confusing, it will often change, right before my eyes. For example, if you click on the above image to see it larger, check out the text in the bottom left corner. Before I took the screen capture, that’s what the text in my side bar on the right looked like. After capturing the image, then resizing it before uploading it, that text went wonky again. As I am writing this right now, the text in my side bar is messed up, not clear and legible, as it is in the image I screen captured just a little while ago.

Oh! Now it’s blinking back and forth!!

So now I’m thinking the problem is a combination of two things.

One: it’s a loading issue. Even though I have a WiFi booster (which I even moved to a different location, in hopes it’ll get the signal better), something about the corner my “office” is in does not connect with the internet as efficiently as other parts of the house.

The other is Firefox: while I have problems loading things on other browsers, it is only on Firefox that the weird colours and disappearing text is happening the most. Where other browsers just take longer to load, Firefox does the weird text and colours.

*sigh* I’ve even saved my draft and reloaded this several times while working on it, but that magenta text just won’t go away – and it’s only happening here, in my editor, as I write this. It’s not happening when I load a published post.

It’s getting very hard on the eyes, so I’ll go ahead and post this. I might have to just stop using Firefox and find another browser to use for my Re-Farmer profile. Trying to use the WordPress editor has been even worse in other ways, in the various browsers I’ve tried, which is why I kept coming back to Firefox.

*sigh*

The Re-Farmer

(ps: I just edited this post to fix a typo I missed, and the magenta text is gone, as is the weird blocky, unreadable text in the side bars. No consistency at all!)

Our 2021 Garden: onions – to trim or not to trim?

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I remembered to get a photo of our onions in their new location in the sun room.

I ended up removing the plastic on the mini-greenhouse frame, so it wouldn’t get too warm, and so there would be air circulation from the ceiling fan.

This is early enough in the morning that the room is still “dark”, but once the sun comes around, it gets many hours of sunlight. The ceramic heater is just enough to keep the seedlings from getting chilled overnight. We’re supposed to get snow starting tomorrow night, at with point I might put the plastic cover back on.

There should have been trays for three types of onions in here by now, but the shallots died off and I had no seeds left to try again, and the reseeded bunching onions are still in the aquarium greenhouses inside, for a while longer. By the time those are ready to be moved over, we’ll be bringing the tomatoes and gourds into here, too.

I have a question for those who grow onions from seed.

Should I trim these?

I’d read that onion seedlings should be trimmed when they reach about 6 inches, to about 3 inches, while they await transplanting. I would have done it by now, however, I’ve since heard from people who say to NOT trim them, because then you get smaller bulbs. They were pretty adamant about it, while others were just as adamant about the opposite.

I’m inclined to trim them, but I wanted to hear from anyone with more experience than me with growing onions from seed. I am more than eager to listen to the advice of others!

Did you trim them, or not?

What do you recommend?

The Re-Farmer

Some Ginger beef

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Last night, we decided to close the other cats out for the night. Not because there were any issues with cats not getting along, the night before, though. The other cats are really liking access to Ginger’s food and water bowls (as well as his litter box). With the other cats around, he spent most of the night in his bed at the bottom of the closet, and by the time he came out in the morning, all the food and water was gone. He does the stairs to the basement really well, but I’d rather he didn’t have to do that because the other cats were too lazy to! :-D

The bonus was, morning cuddles with Ginger!

As soon as he realized all the other cats were out of the room and the door was closed, he jumped upon the bed and started roll and stretch and squirm, while demanding face skritches. :-D He did eventually go back to his “cave” in the closet for the rest of the night, but by morning, he was back for more cuddles.

After a leisurely breakfast from his still-full food and water bowls. :-D

I think he enjoyed the break from the other cats! He is certainly enjoying people time, too.

I was talking to my daughter about one of the things I noticed about him. He and his sister, Cabbages, are the youngest cats in the house. Yet he is bigger and burlier than her, and even his older sister (half-sister, I suppose), Nicco. The spice girls are both downright tiny compared to him, and even Tissue, who is about the same age as the older kittens, is smaller than he is. Our Ginger is a beefy boy! He’s about as big as his Aunt Beep Beep, who has been filling out since coming indoors. He hasn’t caught up to Big Rig, but then, Big Rig got her name because she was so much bigger than the other kittens. I don’t think he’ll get as big as Cheddar or Leyendecker, but I’m sure he’ll be at least as big as David and Keith, soon.

He was always a bit bigger than his brother, Nutmeg, but Nutmeg is definitely filling out, too.

So is their mother, Butterscotch (on the left).

Who is looking decidedly round in the belly.

*sigh*

Rosencrantz is another beefy one. If she’s pregnant, we might not even be able to tell until we start seeing kittens running around again.

Thankyou to Wolfsong for passing on the name of a vet that does a barn-cat spay day. It’s a long drive for the cats, but we’d be able to do 4 females for about the same price as the local vet doing only one, so it would be worth it. We will definitely be contacting them to find out when their next spay-day is. The only challenge will be to catch yard cats like Junk Pile (I haven’t actually seen her in a little while), and I’m sort of assuming Rosencrantz’s baby, the sort-of calico, is female. It’s not like we’ve been able to see her well enough to confirm, either way. Just like Junk Pile; we didn’t know for sure that she was female until she showed up with kittens following behind. In fact, because she never looked pregnant, I had thought she was a he!

At least we’ve been able to get the indoor males snipped for now, including Ginger. Can you imagine the poor boy being intact, recovering from an amputation, and surrounded by a house full of female cats in heat? LOL

The Re-Farmer

What is this? (question for the techies)

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Okay, so I thought my monitor was the problem, we got a new one, and…

The problem hasn’t gone away.

This is what my gmail looked like a little while ago.

I use the past tense, because when I go to another tab, then come back to it, I see the text, only to have all the text disappear when I try to click on an unread email.

It’s not just gmail. I went to another tab after embedding that image, came back, and now I’m seeing nothing but a neon green block instead of the image. Oh, and the text in all my tabs have disappeared (all WordPress blog posts I’m trying to catch up on), but the icons are still there.

So it’s not the monitor (though I do now have a bigger, better monitor out of it…). It does seem to have improved since I got it, though, which is odd.

I at first thought it was our crappy internet, but I’m the only one in the household having this problem, and it’s only on my desktop.

My husband thinks my computer might be the problem. While I think it’s possible, I don’t think it’s likely.

Is it WordPress not loading properly? WordPress always has more trouble loading than anywhere else, it seems. It does seem to happen almost exclusively on pages hosted by WordPress… except it also happens when I open my gmail.

Is it my browser? I use Firefox for this blog, and Chrome for my personal stuff (I’ve tried others but end up going back to these to, for various reasons). In fact, I just went to my other browser, logged into WP, and browsed around. Images still take forever to load, or sometimes don’t load at all, but I’m not getting that neon green thing happening. Nor am I getting the magenta text that sometimes happens. I also have no problems with my gmail.

Okay. So Firefox is definitely part of the equation. When things don’t want to load in Chrome, they just don’t load. If they don’t want to load in Firefox, I get weird colours or missing text.

Maybe I should try using Tor again. It had issues with WP’s block editor, but WP has updated since I last tried it. I’ll have to test it again.

So… It could be Firefox, plus our crappy internet, just messing me up with blinding green and magenta, and disappearing text that can only be read if I highlight it with my mouse.

Whatever it is, it’s very frustrating!

And occaisonally blinding.

The Re-Farmer

Slowing it down a bit

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We got some furry visitors last night. :-)

They tend to show up near the end of the day, when the light makes is hard to get good photos! You can still see, at least a little, the growing antler nubbins on the deer on the right.

If all goes well, this will be the last bag of feed for the deer that we buy until the fall. Looking at the long range forecast, we’re expected to dip below freezing again, with snow on Monday (three days from now). They’re predicting 3-6cm. After a couple more days, the temperatures will be back above freezing during the day, though we’ll have below freezing temperatures overnight for a while longer.

I’m hoping we actually get that snow, and that it slowly melts. The deer should have fresh growing things to eat after that. We were supposed to have rain over the past couple of days, but once again I watched on the weather radar, as the system moved right past us. We didn’t even get a sprinkle.

Yesterday was a very lazy day for me. There is something about it being overcast that leaves me feeling like I’m ready to fall asleep, all day. Plus, with the cooler temperatures and hopes of rain, I didn’t want to be working outside with power tools. ;-) I did make a trip into town, though. Our darling daughter treated us to pizza for our anniversary. My husband and I celebrated 33 years together this month. :-) While driving into town to pick it up, there actually was a bit of rain, but it was nothing but a tease!

Today, I finally made the trip to the smaller city to pick up the last few things I wasn’t able to get during my Costco trip. They were actually sold out of cat litter, of all things! While there, I started chatting with another customer, who is also feeding a lot of cats. Mostly outside cats. He estimates he spends about $3000 a year on cat food – and spent another $5000 to get 40 cats fixed. !! That’s through some sort of program, where getting a female done is only about $80-$100, instead of the $350 we’re paying. I’ve had all sorts of organizations recommended to us, but either we can’t get through to them, or they don’t operate as far out as we are. :-(

(Oh, just got a phone call. The people who are adopting Two Face are on their way to pick her up. :-) )

While talking to the other customer, he mentioned using wood pellets instead of litter. I’ve heard of people using them, and talking about how much better it is, so I asked him more about it. It turns out that these are just the wood pellets sold as fuel for pellet stoves. He told me that when the cats use the pellets, they absorb all the moisture and break apart into sawdust. They also absorb the odor, so the only thing you smell is wood. When cleaning the litter pans, you simply dump out all the pellets in the pan and replace it with fresh – and the old pellets can still be burned. !! I don’t know that I’d want to do that. At least not in the fire pit (or a pellet stove, if we had one!), but we do still have a burn barrel. Or compost them, while burn bans are in effect. That would save us from having to haul those heavy bags to the dump. He told me the pellets are a lot cheaper, too, and they come in 40 pound bags, so they last a long time, too.

I think it’ll be worth trying it out. Maybe start with just a few litter pans, first, and see how the cats like it.

The conversation got me thinking about just how much we spend on critters. With the cats, it’s about $350-$400 a month in wet and dry cat food, plus litter. So, about $4,800 a year, on the high end. Plus the deer, which we do only for about 6 months, which works out to about $300 a year. Then there’s the bird seed, which we do all year, and works out to about $1000 a year.

Which we’re doing my husband’s disability payments.

Thank God for private health insurance!!

There are a lot of things we are doing without, to keep the critters fed. We include it all in our grocery budget. If, however, we were just setting that money aside, we’d have been able to save enough to replace the roof in only 2 years.

Now, we’re not going to stop feeding the animals, but we really need to find a way to address that expense. This is not sustainable. The problem goes back to my not simply being able to go out and get a job, since any income I would make would get deducted from my husband’s disability payments. If I ever made enough to bring that replace my husband’s disability payments, he would lose his insurance entirely (since he would no longer “need” it) – and he’d no longer have coverage for his prescriptions. So it’s a lose-lose situation. That’s why we had to be so careful when fund raising for Ginger’s vet care. We can accept gifts. We can’t have additional income.

*sigh*

Reducing the costs will help, which is why I want to try the wood pellets instead of cat litter. Cat food isn’t going to get any cheaper, though. It’s another reason why we want to grow and preserve as much food for ourselves, as well.

Slight interruption in writing this, as the people adopting Two Face arrived. As a thank you for Two Face, we were gifted with a bag full of brand new, still in their wrappers, Tupperware! Looks like the lady is a distributor. :-)

I hope Two Face is happy in her new home. We’re going to miss her!

Well, with the weather getting colder again for the next while, we’ll be slowing things down as well. At least, outside. Not so much, inside. The tray of bulb onions are now in the sun room. It’s warmer in there, but with the cooler temperatures coming, we’ve got them heated from below. By the time things warm up again, we should be ready to move more seedlings from the aquarium greenhouses to the sun room, then use the aquariums to start the summer and winter squash.

If all goes to plan, we should be ready to start direct sowing some things near the end of May, then do the final direct sowing and transplanting after our last frost date of June 2.

We’ll have a lot of work to do in between!

The Re-Farmer

Ginger bliss!

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I think Ginger is getting a bit spoiled.

After what he’s been through, I think he deserves it! :-D

I only saw four members of his outside family this morning.

Nutmeg has a habit of body slamming the kibble container as I’m filling the bowls, sending kibble flying everywhere! :-D Such a silly boy! I even got to pet him and Rosencrantz this morning.

Now if we could just get Creamsicle Baby and his cousin to let us come close. :-)

Oh, we got a call from the people who came to look at Two Face and Susan a while back. They’ll be coming over this evening to pick up Two Face and bring her home. They were originally going to pick her up on the way to an appointment for their dog, but had plans to do some visiting after and didn’t think she would like being in the vehicle for so long. So they’ll get her on the way home, and take her to a vet in a town closer to where they live.

Which means that, tonight, we’ll be back down to 16 cats in the house.

Time to update the posters to adopt some of the others. We still have another seven available for adoption.

Ginger, of course, is staying with us, and we’ve decided to keep his sister, Cabbages, and Beep Beep. Beep Beep was my dad’s cat, and I just can’t bring myself to adopt her out! :-)

The Re-Farmer

So much Ginger!

/ Re-Farmer / 12 Comments

Ginger was playful this morning, and I was able to get a lot of pictures.

Some of them even turned out okay. ;-)

Last night was the first night we did not close the outer cats out, and I’m happy to say there were no issues. I think he spent the night in his favorite spot in my closet. :-D

In the morning, though, he came out and demanded attention!

I was not the only source of that attention.

Turmeric decided to check out her cousin, and yes – grooming happened! Yay!

Turmeric is a couple of months older than him, yet he is so much bigger! Her sister, Saffron, is even smaller. At only about 9 or 10 months old, he’s already looking like he’s going to be a big, burly boy! Maybe not the big slab of meat Cheddar grew up to be, but certainly as big as Keith. We’ve already had times when we’ll look over to see an orange cat curled up and thinking, “Aw, Keith is so cute! … Hold on. That’s not Keith!”

His aunt came over to give him a sniff, but he was far more interested in tackling my hand and chewing on my thumb.

He’s actually quite good at “chewing” without actually biting.

He was quite enjoying the comfort of a bed for humans, rolling around all over the place while his Aunt Beep Beep watched over him. He’s already heavier than she is, but Beep Beep has always been a tiny one.

Ginger has been busy, claiming the house. He’s been going into the basement, where he has discovered the fantasy land of food bowls and litter boxes. :-D He even joined the crowd when the girls gave them their wet cat food. He’d pretty much ignored the wet cat food we gave him when we first brought him into the sun room to await his surgery, but this time, he actually ate it. So far, I think the only place he hasn’t explored yet is the second floor.

The down side of his exploring is that he decided to jump up onto the dining table this morning. My daughter and I were nearby and managed to get him off without startling him too much, only for him to jump out of my daughter’s arms, back onto the table, skittering about, knocking over and breaking a large glass mug, before jumping down to the floor.

*sigh*

Ah, well. He’s still getting used to things.

We’re pretty blown away by how active and mobile he is. He has adjusted very well to the loss of the leg, and is doing pretty well adjusting to the indoor life, and all the new cats around him, too.

It’s very encouraging.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: all gourds now started

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Oh, my goodness, but our internet connection has been bad tonight! It’s taken me forever to finally be able to load the editor to start this post! It’s not done giving me grief yet, either!

Still, I wanted to get this posted before calling it a day, since I’m basically using this blog as a journal that I can reference later on, if I need to.

The last 4 varieties of gourds have been started!

The luffa are the three pots together on the right. The one sprout at the top got visibly bigger, just today! You can see a second one coming up at the bottom. The pot inside the red solo cup is the Tennessee Dancing gourd. On the left are the Ozark Nest Egg, Thai Edible and Birdhouse varieties. The light fixture inside the tank is, as before, just there for its warmth.

Next on the list to start indoors are the summer and winter squash.

Must…

resist…

starting too…

early!!!

:-D

The Re-Farmer