Month: June 2021

Early birthday gifts, and working on the kibble house

/ Re-Farmer / 1 Comment

Today, we were able to make an unexpected trip to do some shopping, thanks to my husband’s disability payment coming in early. Top of the list was to replace our broken vacuum cleaner! :-D

Of course, with making a trip to the city, even if it’s the smaller, closer one, we were going to take advantage of it and get other things we need.

I’m happy to say that we not only found a new vacuum – marketed as being particularly good for pet hair – we happened to catch a sale and got it at half the price I’d budgeted for!

We were also able to pick up more mesh for the squash tunnel. They didn’t have the same type we’d used before in stock, so we got more chicken wire. I don’t think the squash and melons care what shape the mesh they’re climbing is. ;-)

Another one of the things I really needed to get was a new pair of work shoes. Not only have I worn my old ones out to the point they’re falling apart, but the cats have discovered how to take the insoles out and have been tearing them apart!

Considering the sorts of things I’ve been doing for the past while, I also wanted to get steel toed shoes.

Much to may amazement, the very first pair that I tried on was perfect! I’d actually looked at casual shoes first – in the men’s section, because women’s shoes don’t fit my feet – hoping to get a pair of slip ons. I normally get a men’s size 9, triple wide, but I couldn’t find any wide ones. I couldn’t even get my toes into a size 11! So I wasn’t holding out much hope with the work shoes. Particularly since none of the boxes were marked as wide. So getting it right on the very first pair, and for them to be so incredibly comfortable, was like Christmas!

Then when we went to pay for our stuff, my daughter stole the box and bought them for me for my birthday. :-D

No, it’s not my birthday. It’s not even my birth month, yet. But that’s how we do things. :-D

I also got myself an early birthday present.

A 10′ x 10′ canopy tent, to replace the one that broke last year. That one was so handy when we were painting the picnic table, and didn’t have to worry about it getting rained on or whatever, I really wanted to get another. It’s just a Walmart cheapie, but we’ve had a couple of them in the past, leaving them behind when we moved. According to the box, they’ve improved the design, and added a feature to make it easier to set up with just one person.

This evening, I set it up.

And promptly discovered a problem with one of the new features.

This handle in the middle is made so that, once you have the canopy on and the legs set to the height you want, all you need to do is push up on it and it will open fully and lock in place.

Have I mentioned that I’m short?

I’m not THAT short, but still…

I had the legs at the lowest level, yet when I pushed up on the handle, I couldn’t get it far enough to lock in place. Not only that, but the entire tent would start lifting, instead! :-D I did eventually get it, of course, but I had to jump to do it.

I suspect this was designed with the average height male in mind! :-D

But I got it, and that’s the important part!

Which means we can now paint the kibble house. :-)

There is plenty of space for it! :-)

Nutmeg seems distressed that the floor is gone! :-D

You can see part of the floor in the background.

The two sections of the floor boards got a thorough scrubbing to take off many months of muddy paw prints! :-D

The rest of the kibble house got scrubbed inside and out, including the muddy bottoms of the legs.

Once it’s dry, it’ll be ready for painting.

By the end of the day, my new shoes got a pretty decent workout!

I’m really glad to have gotten the steel toed shoes. Very handy, just in case I almost, *ahem* sort of, just about, *cough* maybe, could have dropped a kibble house on them.

Almost.

I caught it in time.

:-D

The Re-Farmer

Pretty in Purple and Pink

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

I had been wondering about our variety of purple peas not blooming yet, while the green peas that were planted later now have quite a lot of flowers. Earlier today, someone on one of the local gardening groups I’m on had posted a photo of her purple peas that just started to bloom, so that was reassuring.

Then, while doing the evening watering, my daughters spotted our first purple pea flower!

Aren’t those colours amazing? Wow!

I am so looking forward to how these turn out!

The Re-Farmer

Growing things

/ Re-Farmer / 1 Comment

When we got that one really cold night in late May, most things survived (the new mulberry sapling, sadly, did not) just fine. However, anything that was budding lost their flowers. Including almost all of the lilacs.

This Korean lilac usually blooms after the common lilac, but with the warmth we’d had earlier in May, it was starting to bud, too. This morning, I found this single spray of flowers blooming on it. It does look like it may be putting out more buds, though. We won’t get the mass of tiny flowers that is usual for this lilac this year, but there will be some, at least.

Then there’s this poor mock orange, by the laundry platform. February’s deep freeze had already decimated it. More of it has died off since the May frost. Yet this thing is amazingly resilient, and it now blooming!

I want to transplant this to a more protected location, once we figure out where that is. There is another on the East side of the house that didn’t get as damaged by the May frost, however it isn’t thriving there, either. Too dry against the house, and sunlight only in the morning. It is also starting to bloom, but like its leaves, the flowers are much smaller. We can water it regularly, but there isn’t much we can do about the lack of sunlight, so I figure that one will get transplanted, too, at some point.

The little furry flowers are growing, too! (The fourth one was playing the the bushes, so I couldn’t get a photo of it.)

When I put food out in the mornings, Butterscotch is at the kibble house along with the other yard cats, but these guys are learning to come out to their own food and water in the mornings now, too.

At the squash tunnel, I found our first Pixie melon flower!

We definitively need to get more mesh soon for that last section of the tunnel. The Halona melons are getting tall enough that we’ll need to start training them up the tunnel walls, in a very short while.

These are in the carrot bed in the old kitchen garden. They are growing where the white kohlrabi was planted. I’m hoping that’s what they are, and not just some similar looking plant of my mother’s, pushing its way through! :-D This little garden always had a variety of things growing in it, but mostly flowers. Very determined flowers! When we first cleaned out this garden, then laid down cardboard and layers of straw, leaf litter and grass clippings, many still managed to push their way through. In digging out by the house to make the path, then building the beds we planted in this year, during which I removed many, many roots, you’d think that would have set them back, but no. They’re pushing their way through soil paths, the straw paths, and even the deeper soil of the new beds. It would be rather impressive, if they were not so invasive, and crowding out our vegetables!

Still, it’s nice to see all the growing things. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden bed prep, and dealing with the heat

/ Re-Farmer / 6 Comments

The weather forecast said that we would be cooler today.

They lied.

When I did my morning rounds, it was already above 20C/68F, and we easily hit 28C/82F this afternoon, with a humidex above 30C/86F. Which meant that we spent as much of the day indoors, out of the heat, as we could. Thankfully, the way things are oriented, we can keep certain windows open to allow a cross breeze without heating the house up.

The cats appreciate that.

Yes, we leave the little step ladder at the door, just so they can look out the window! It was so funny to watch these to, with their matching positions, heads turning and tail tips twitching, in unison! Hard to believe that little Layendecker is now just as big as Cheddar! With the smaller cats, three of them can fit up there, but these big boys fill up the whole stop step! :-D

I did have to make a run into town, as we ran out of kibble for the outside cats. While I was there, I picked up some ingredients for my daughters. Yesterday, they finished off one of the giant bowls of spinach to make a spinach soup.

We’d already finished off one giant bowl, mostly through dehydrating (using the screens in the sun room didn’t work, so we did batches in the oven). When making the soup, that huge bowl cooked down to a remarkable small amount in the stock pot! :-D With my trip into town, the girls have enough to make a huge batch of baked spinach dip, which we plan to enjoy while watching watching Sherlock Holmes, with Jeremy Brett and David Burke.

It’s going to be a late one, though. We didn’t get back from working on the garden until past 10pm. I had tried going out a bit earlier to start prepping the spinach beds to plant in again, but those beds are in full sun. I wasn’t interested in getting heat stroke! It didn’t get cool enough to head out again until past 8:30pm.

The girls did the evening watering while I worked on the beds.

The logs were added after we’d started making the beds, so once I’d cleared away the remains of the spinach plants and the weeds, I took advantage of the situation to level the beds out, and create a bit of a ridge around the edges, to help keep the water from draining down the sides – and taking the soil with it. I used a garden fork to loosen the soil, to more easily pull the roots out. I was most pleased with how keep the tines could go, without any sort of resistance. This bed would handle root vegetables very well!

I had “help” while I was working.

Nutmeg could not get enough attention! :-) While I was pulling out roots and weeds, he kept getting under me, demanding pets, and rolling around in the freshly turned soil, sometimes rolling right off the edge of the garden bed – just like his brother does on our beds, indoors! Unfortunately, when I was using the garden fork, he had a terrible habit of suddenly lunging at the fork to “catch” it, even as I was stabbing it into the soil.

This bed was surprisingly different from the first one. When pushing the fork into the soil, I would quickly go through the raised part of the bed – about 8 inches – then hit solid. I wasn’t hitting rocks. Just rock hard soil! The last bed was much the same, though not as bad as this one. There is a difference between them. The first bed I worked on had been a squash bed, mulched with straw, last year. These two beds were a last minute change. When I’d prepped the area last fall, I’d made three smaller beds oriented East-West, where three pumpkin hills had been. This spring, I decided to make these two larger beds, oriented North-South. The soil beneath would be a mix of soil that had been turned in the fall, and walking paths. It’s remarkable what a difference that one season of use the previous year has made in the soil of that first bed.

All three beds are now prepared and ready for planting! We will be planting lettuces in succession along one side of each bed.

Since the radishes we interplanted with the corn all disappeared, and I ended up picking up more. Three different varieties to try, though I couldn’t find a daikon type that my daughter likes. They are fast maturing, so we should be able to grow some radishes, and still be able to grow more spinach in these beds for a fall crop.

We’re not actually fans of radishes in general, so we won’t be planting many. I do want to leave some to fully mature. I’ve read that radish pods are very tasty, but it’s not something available in stores, and I’d like to try them. From what I’ve read in the past, radishes used to be grown for their pods, not their roots, and the pods can be canned as well. It should be an interesting experiment. I’m still disappointed that none of the ones we planted earlier survived, even though they did germinate so quickly. I had specially ordered those varieties for my daughter. :-(

We’ll just have to try them again, next year!

Well my other daughter had just swung by to inform me that the baked spinach dip is ready! I am really looking forward to it! :-)

The Re-Farmer

New babies!

/ Re-Farmer / 7 Comments

While heading out to start the evening watering, I spotted Butterscotch’s babies coming out to play.

Or should I say, my daughter spotted them. I’d gone out to help my mother with errands, then did a few of my own, so I pulled up to the house to unload the car. My daughter later parked it for me, and spotted them while returning to the house. She plunked herself down on the ground with a long stick to wiggle at them, and they were very interested! :-D Not enough to come close, though, but she’s working on it!

While we were finishing up the evening watering, I happened to see movement in the junk pile by the chain link fence.

Rosencrantz had brought her babies!

I didn’t dare get too close, so zooming in with my phone was the best I could do.

It looks like she only has the two of them. They are so adorable! I don’t know where she has her “nest”, other than it was not in the junk pile, so I am glad that she is starting to bring them closer to the house.

So this is now two litters accounted for. I know Junk Pile cat has had a litter, and from the looks of her teats, I’d say she has a litter of six. Until she starts bringing them to the yard, we won’t know if she has six surviving kittens. There’s also Ghost Baby, who is too feral for us to even know if she’s female. We’re just assuming she is, and that there is another litter somewhere for us to discover.

I suspect we will be finding out fairly soon!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: first pea blossoms!

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Woo hoo!!!

Our first peas have started to bloom!

While doing the evening watering, I found two pea plants with flowers on them. Both among the green peas. Nothing on the purple peas, even though they were planted earlier.

Most of the green peas aren’t even tall enough to start climbing the trellis! :-)

The Re-Farmer

Garden finds, mystery squash, and pretty things

/ Re-Farmer / 3 Comments

Heading out to do my morning rounds, it was already getting really hot. As I write this, we’ve reached 28C/82F, and we’re still about 5 hours away from when the hottest part of the day usually hits. We’ve got forecasts for possible thundershowers this afternoon. I hope we at least get some rain, but I doubt it.

The spinach we set out to dry in the sun room was… wimpy. :-D I set them up outside, covered with mosquito netting, to dry in the sun and wind. We’ll see how it works. Meanwhile, once the oven is available, after making a spinach frittata, I plan to set some up to dry in there.

I had a very pleasant surprise while checking the garden.

The bigger Crespo squash plant has flower buds! Quite a few of them. It looks like it’s all male flowers for now, just like with the other squash.

Speaking of squash, we have some mystery squash!

These have popped up in the old compost pile. I’m not sure what they are. When we cleaned up the squash beds last fall, we used the old compost pile instead of dragging everything across the yard, but I didn’t think anything went in there that had mature seeds. The only think I can think of is the pumpkin. They were planted very late, and the few pumpkins were quite small and green when the first frost hit and killed them off.

It would be cool if they were pumpkins! Whatever they are, I’ve been watering them, too. :-D

Then we have these, near the pink rose bush in the old kitchen garden.

I had spotted them last night, when they were just little bumps breaking through the ground. They tripled in size, overnight.

In setting up the old kitchen garden beds this spring, one of the things I made sure to do was make paths that allowed us to enter and exit the garden in several places. The straw covered path that runs across the far end of the garden, near the beets against the retaining wall, continues around one of the rhubarbs and out the middle.

It now has a “gate.”

An asparagus gate!

It always amazed me that these are still coming up at all. There were more of them, when I was a kid. My mother had asked about them, not that long ago, and she mentioned that these were here before my parents bought the property. Which means they’ve been growing here for at least 60 years. I’ve never seen spears suitable for harvesting, but that’s okay. I love the ferns!

Now, they make a lovely gate across the path. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: first harvest!

/ Re-Farmer / 9 Comments

Today, we harvested all three spinach beds!

Looking at them this morning, I thought we could just harvest the plants that had started to go to seed and leave the smaller ones, but when we were ready to start, we realized that the smaller ones were going to seed, too!

We ended up using our three biggest baskets to hold it all.

Yes, these are our Easter baskets, and one of them still has its decorations. The flower garland is woven through the basket, so it doesn’t come off. :-D

Each of those baskets is filled with a different variety of spinach, though to be honest, I can’t tell any difference. They were even supposed to mature at different rates, but between the deer, the heat and the lack of rain, they all matured at the same time.

Nutmeg was hanging around while we were working, and my daughter noticed he was playing “cat and mouse” with something. It turned out to be a frog!

She rescued it.

We see frogs fairly regularly in the garden beds. That makes me happy. More frogs means less bugs eating our produce! :-)

We used shears to cut the spinach, so all the roots, along with the plants that weren’t suitable to harvest (like the teeny ones the deer got to), are still there. The beds will get a thorough clean up, probably tomorrow, so we can plant lettuces, next.

We dragged out the screen “door” that fits at the top of the old basement stairs, and covered it with the mosquito netting we’d been using to protect one of the beds. We also brought out a couple of our largest bowls. The spinach got washed in the bowls in batches, which also gave us a chance to start taking out any weeds that came along for a ride, and removing some of the yellowing or damaged leaves. After being washed, they got dumped on the mesh and got another rinse with the hose.

Then it was time to start picking over the spinach and destemming them. I set up the wagon to hold the screens I’d washed earlier, to dry spinach on.

My daughter and I then started going over the whole pile, picking out the best ones for dehydrating or into bowls, and dropping the rejects with the snipped stems for composting. We worked for about an hour, hour and a half, before my daughter went in with a filled bowl, to start supper while I kept working on the rest of the spinach.

The filled screens were left on the roof of the kibble house to drain for a while. They went into the sun room when it started to rain a bit, though we never got more than a smattering.

After about three hours, here are two of the three bowls that were filled. They are all really big bowls. Big enough to mix a 6 loaf batch of bread dough.

I’m hoping to be able to set up more batches to dehydrate out of this, but it depends on how well it works in the sun room. I’ve got the light I used to keep transplant trays warm on for the night, plus the ceiling fan. Tomorrow we’re supposed to get really hot, which means the sun room will be even hotter. I’m hoping that means they will dehydrate fairly quickly, and I can set up at least one more batch.

As for the rest, we might blanch some for freezing if we can’t use it up fast enough, but mostly, we plan to just eat it. :-D The girls have been looking of recipes for things like spinach soup to try, or maybe make another batch of their modified palak paneer sauce. We don’t have paneer, though.

I’m rather happy with our first garden harvest – and with being able to have one so early in the season!

While it may have taken a long time to clean it all, we were most entertained.

By skunks.

We had a whole parade of them, coming and going, including the mama and her babies.

All SIX of them!

I don’t know where she’s getting them all from! She started coming by with two. Then we saw her carrying a third. Today, she showed up with five – or so we thought. I took some video and, after I uploaded it and watched it, I realized there was six.

If you wish to see the video, click here. :-)

Gosh, they are so adorable! They came back several times, including just to run around an play.

As for the other skunks that showed up, I did end up stopping to take a hose to them. From where I was sitting, I couldn’t see them in the kibble house, but I could hear them, and they were not getting along. It turned out that only one of the containers had kibble left in it, and they were all trying to get at it. Then there was the one greedy guts that just wouldn’t stop eating.

Oh, and a question I had was answered. In the mornings, when I would go to refresh the cats’ water bowls, I would find one of them with kibble half dissolved in the water. It was always the bowl closest to the kibble house, but they’re far enough away that it couldn’t fall in by accident, as I had assumed was how it got into the heated water bowl, when we were still using that. The skunks, of course, use the water bowls, too. This evening, I saw one of the skunks come up to a water bowl, drink some water, then basically pick its teeth with its claws before drinking some more.

The reason it isn’t good for skunks to eat kibble is because of how their jaws are hinged. But they’ve got that figured out. The skunk was getting kibble stuck in its teeth, and was using water to get it out. The kibble would then fall into the bowl it was drinking from, for me to find in the morning.

They’re smart little buggers!

They also made what could have been a long and dreary job quite fun. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: how things are looking

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Just a few pictures of the garden beds that I took while doing my morning rounds.

This is the newest bed in the area where the old wood pile used to be, and these beets were the first ones planted, so they are larger than the others. Well. Some of them are. We are curious about the one end there they are smaller, and not as many came up. There is no sign that deer have been eating them – the onions seem to be working! I recall that we had issues with birds digging in the garlic beds. I wonder if they were digging in here, too? I don’t know.

The onions are yellow onions we bought as sets locally, when it looked like the ones we started from seed might not make it.

Luffa, actively climbing the mesh of the squash tunnel! So far, they are the only ones long enough to reach/climb the supports.

I was thrilled to see this, nearby.

Several Halona melons are starting to bloom! So awesome! Nothing on the Pixie melons or winter squash, yet.

This bed has the two types of carrots – Kyoto Red and Napoli – that came in pelleted seeds. This allowed us to plant them further apart, so no thinning will be needed. That also meant that, even though they started coming up quite a while ago, their thin, feathery leaves were hard to capture in a photograph! :-D

These are the Norstar onions we started from seed. Size wise, they are much the same as the ones started from sets, including the red onions that share this bed with them, however none of the others are starting to bulb as much as these ones are.

Looking ahead to next year, sets are definitely easier than starting from seed, and they don’t take up the space indoors that seeds do, but I think the ones started from see seem to be doing a bit better. We shall see when harvest time comes.

Speaking of harvest, the spinach is starting to bolt. The three varieties we have are all supposed to mature at different rates, but all three are ready for harvest, now! We’ll pull the biggest plants first, and leave the smaller ones a while longer, simply because there is so much. I dug out more window screens from the shed and washed them, so we can use them to dry spinach in the sun room. Doing it in the oven worked, but the trays are smaller, and we can only fit two in the oven at a time. We have four screens in total, and we’ll be able to fit a lot more leaves on them.

We finally have a decent amount of lettuces, though some blocks don’t seem to be doing as well as others. After the spinach is cleared out, we plan to do more lettuces in those beds. Just on one side, as we will be planting more spinach for a fall harvest, later on. The lettuce seed packets were in a Ziploc bag and spilled, so most of them are now mixed up, but that’s okay.

The greens to the left of the blocks, past the plastic, are 4 varieties of beets, that my daughters planted. Not visible is the larger L shaped bed, in which we planted all the remaining beet seeds, including from last year, all mixed up.

The potatoes are doing really well! If those bags weren’t twice the height they started off at, I would think they hadn’t been “hilled” at all!

I am really happy with how the garden is looking, though we do have some failures. None of the purple kale came up at all, and it looks like the purple kohlrabi is a total loss, too. There *might* be some white kohlrabi coming up in the old kitchen garden, but I’m honestly not sure if what I’m looking at are kohlrabi seedlings, or weeds. There’s only a couple of them.

The strawberry spinach seems to be a loss, too. We thought they had started to sprout, but now it looks like there’s nothing but weeds. If they did sprout, they didn’t survive. It looks much the same with the poppy seeds, except for one little patch. We’ll see how they survive! They’re still really small. Ah, well. Whether they make it or not, I plan to get more for next year. Possibly in another variety that I’ve found, too.

It’s only June, though. I’m quite looking forwards to seeing how things grow over the next couple of months!

The Re-Farmer

Criminal!

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

Just look at this criminal beast!

I was just heading out to do my morning rounds, when I discovered crime had happened, and the criminal was watching me. Nicco, this time!

I let my daughters know, and when one of them came down to the old basement, she found FOUR cats had gotten through! Once the Spice Girls figured out how to unblock the top of the screen, all the other smaller, lighter cats are following their lead. :-(

I really wish we could find a way to stop this. There are just too many fragile and dangerous things in the old basement. So far, they have managed not to cause destruction, but I’ve found stuff on the floor showing that they are climbing the shelves. Shelves full of glass bottles, vintage canning jars and cleaners. And I’m always concerned that one of them will knock aside the cover to the sump pump reservoir. At least it’s dry in there right now, but still…

As I write this, I hear noises from the basement… The top is blocked off again, but I suspect we will find a cat in the old basement again.

*sigh*

The Re-Farmer