I could not resist getting a picture of David the Magnificent!
It’s good thing we hardly ever use the microwave. This is the only counter in the kitchen the cats are allowed to climb on, and they love looking out that window! Cheddar, in particular, likes to lie here, taking up the whole spot, with his chin on the windowsill, like it’s a pillow. Today, David has claimed the prime spot! :-D
David must be just dying in this heat, but he will not let us brush him! We’ve been managing to cut away the fur clumps we find. Mostly. It’s hard to get at the ones in his armpits. He keeps moving!
This morning, I saw another furry beast that I haven’t in a while.
Creamscicle Baby is back! He’s been away for a few days. He and Junk Pile (David’s sister) were very happy to see each other. :-)
She’s like, “look who’s here!”
He was clearly very hungry, but he just wouldn’t stop rubbing up against Junk Pile. :-)
Even while they were both eating, he’d rub up against her, eating at the same time, to the point of pushing her away from eating, too!
Too bad he won’t let us pet him anymore, and Junk Pile never has. :-(
The only down side is that Creamscicle Baby has been pretty aggressive with his brother, Nutmeg, of late. Not just play wrestling, like they used to, but all out fights.
Ah, well. Nothing we can do about that, but break them up with a spritz from the hose.
While the girls were doing the evening watering, I headed out to check some of the beds they hadn’t got to, yet. I thought I saw something this morning, and I wanted to check.
I did see something – and by evening, I saw more somethings!
The radishes are starting to sprout already!
“Champion” 24-30 days to maturity
“Cherry Belle” 21-27 days to maturity
“French Breakfast” 23-29 days to maturity
All three varieties were showing sprouts!
Here’s hoping these ones don’t disappear, like the ones we interplanted with our sweet corn!
I have been keeping a close eye on our summer squash, too.
This sunburst squash is of a size I would normally pick, but there is only one this big, so I will leave it until there are others to pick with it. We also have more of the green zucchini that is almost big enough to pick.
While watering the beans, my daughter noticed this…
Some of the purple bean flowers are starting to open! When I checked, some of the green ones were also starting to open, but they’re harder to see than the purple beans, with their amazing, bright colours.
While I’m excited to see them starting to bloom, I have to remind myself not to compare. I’m on several gardening groups for cold climate gardening, zone 3 gardening, and local gardeners. Today, someone posted pictures of their huge pea plants, and the basket of peas they had picked, just today.
These are our peas.
The purple peas are doing a bit better than the green peas. They are flowering and growing pods. But they are also struggling. They started out doing well, but have basically just stopped growing. By this time, they should be well up the trellises, much larger, and much closer to having pods that can be harvested.
It’s similar with the bush beans. The purple ones are doing better than the others, as they have from pretty much the start, but they are all a lot smaller than they should be. The sweet corn is also a lot smaller than I am seeing in other people’s gardens, which have corn the size of our purple corn, that was started much earlier and transplanted, or the Dorinny corn, which was seeded before last frost. Even the renter’s corn in our field is about waist high now.
I have to admit; seeing how well other people’s gardens are doing, in spite of the heat we’ve been getting right now, is sometimes rather discouraging. These are gardens in the same climate zone we are in, and many of them planted even later than we did.
I have to remind myself that these are completely different gardens, many of them established years ago. Even the new gardens are in very different situations. There are many reasons why our peas, corn and beans are looking stunted. The heat, certainly. Perhaps we’re not watering them as much as they need under current conditions. Maybe it’s because their roots have made their way through the thin layer of nutrient rich soil and into the nutrient poor soil, below, and even our fertilizing them isn’t enough to make up for it. Maybe it’s all the weeds and plants that were there before we planted. We don’t have access to good compost, we ran out of mulch and can’t get more, etc. The critter damage adds to the problems, but that’s a different issue altogether.
Plus, of course, we’re gardening in temporary locations. Even the beds that are where we will be gardening permanently will have high raised beds built in them, so the current beds are going to be completely redone.
From the start, as we planned where to plant different things, we knew that if we got anything at all from the farthest beds in particular, that would be a win.
But, my goodness, it sure would be nice to have a big basket of freshly picked peas right now! :-D
Last night, before doing the evening watering, I did a couple of things to – hopefully! – distract the deer away.
One of them went around the Montana Morado corn.
The aluminum tins spin freely on the twine, so I hope they will do as distractions. We can add more distractions after a while, to change things up before they get used to them.
This next one is more of a diversion than a distraction. On a wildlife group I’m on, someone had posted a picture of a deer with her fawn, in their yard. With the heat and lack of rain we’ve been having, they had put out a bucket of water for the wildlife. The mama and her baby promptly showed up and started drinking, even as the guy who posted the picture was sitting on his deck with a coffee!
We have water bowls all over the place for the cats, plus we found a way to keep using the cracked bird bath. Which is great for the cats and birds (and skunks, and probably the woodchucks and racoon), but they’re rather small for deer. I imagine they might still be drinking from them, but for the amount of water in the shallow containers, it wouldn’t slack their thirst.
It occurred to me that if we could set up water for the deer in the right place, we might be able to divert them away from the garden. The deer damage we have been seeing has been comparatively small; they seem to be just nibbling a few things on the way by. My thought it, if they can get water somewhere away from the garden beds, they won’t have a reason to go by and nibble.
The deer go through the maple grove and jump the fence at the gates along West fence line. Our kiddie pool isn’t being used right now (who knew a kiddie pool could be so useful?), so I set it up near the old willow that overhangs the fence. The rocks and bricks are there to keep it from blowing away if it gets emptied, but for little critters, like frogs or kittens, to use to climb out if they fall into the pool.
I checked it this morning, but I honestly couldn’t tell if the water level had changed much.
We’ll see if it works!
Meanwhile, here are a couple of other distractions. Some pretty, developing tomatoes!
This is one of the Mosaic Medley plants. It’s such a dark green! There are others I couldn’t get good pictures of that are a much lighter green.
More like these.
These are the itty bitty Spoon tomatoes. They’re so adorable! :-D
Last night, after setting up the deer distractions, I stayed out to do a very thorough watering of the garden beds. Last night, I ended up awake and 4am and unable to get back to sleep, so I finally gave up and headed outside to do my morning rounds early. With the expected heat, I stayed out to give all the garden beds another thorough watering.
Then I napped. LOL
This afternoon, after coming back from a dump run, I stayed out to check the south garden beds and noticed that the gourds were actually drooping from the heat. When a hot weather crop like gourds are feeling the heat, I am glad I gave everything that extra watering!
Meanwhile, as I was writing this, my daughter went out to put frozen water bottles in all the cats’ water bowls.
Any little bit to help the furry critters deal with the heat!
This big cheesy creature! Cheddar has grown to be such a big, meaty, boy. ;-)
I usually have several cats splashed across my bed, right where the breeze from my fan in the window hits. :-D
We’re at 33C/91F right now, with a humidex of 35C/95F. Tomorrow, we’re supposed to reach a high of 34C/93F with a humidex of 37C/99F. After that, we’re supposed to drop a few degrees, but then head back up to just above 30C/86F again. Not as hot as the heat wave we left behind, but definitely higher than the long range forecasts had been predicting earlier.
Which means the cats have been spending their days in furry puddles around the house during the day…
And going nuts during the night.
Somehow, flying insects are getting into the house. In my office/bedroom, I have a shelf that has a space for them (the cats, not the insects), right up near the ceiling. Unfortunately, to get to it, they can only use the back of my office chair, since their alternative jump off point is now filled with a box fan. I have a wall shelf at the head of my bed, and I’ve set things up to prevent them from getting to the top, since that is where fragile items that don’t fit anywhere else are stored. Some of the smaller cats, however, can climb straight up on part of it. I’ve tried to block the top by storing a triangular support designed to go under the knees, or behind the back, depending on how it is oriented, where they climb. Every now and then, I’m awakened by it crashing down because a cat has decided to go for it. Last night was so bad, I had to kick them out and close the door. Unfortunately, that meant they tore around the upstairs, instead. There are no doors up there, so the girls can’t close them out.
At least the cats won’t be keeping them awake for the next while. With the increasing temperatures, even with the much improved conditions after adding a box fan to the south window, set up to blow the hot air out, it gets too hot for my daughter’s computer and drawing tablet. She’ll be working at night again, which means they won’t be going to bed until something like 5am; shortly before sunrise. So they’ll be able to deal with the cats tearing around after flying bugs during the night! :-D
Time to start leaving ice packs on the floor for the cats to cool down on again. :-)
I’d been hearing on some of my local gardening groups that people were having a really bad time with grasshoppers. I knew it was just a matter of time before they moved North.
And here they are.
Do you see them on the gravel? All those specks?
The dry grass is hiding many, many more. As I was driving and walking along our driveway, I was startling clouds of them.
I don’t think my phone picked up the sounds, but while walking paste the garage, I could hear the metallic noises as they bounced off the door.
I remember the grasshoppers being bad last year, but not as bad as this!!
As for why I was back and forth on the driveway, I had a very frustrating morning.
I heaved out very early to get to the court house in a nearby city – applying for a restraining order doesn’t get dealt with in the small, local courts. I was met by my brother, who was technically still at work. We had time to go over my papers a bit while we tried to figure out what to expect, and he kept up with work on his phone. We were told things would start at 10, so we walked over for 9. Always before, we had been able to come in and wait.
But then, always before, things turned out to be cancelled.
I think we were the first people to show up. The security guard recognizes me by now. No issues with my Mingle Mask. Because we were so early, we were told to wait outside, or come back closer to 10. So we walked back to my brother’s care and we went through our papers some more, trying to figure out what we might need – if anything at all – and he continued to work. When we walked back again, it was shortly after 9:30. There was another security guard there, and she asked our names. It turns out my name was not on the docket; just our vandal’s. After clarifying what we were there for and our connection to the file, she took the list and left to talk to someone about it. When she came back, she told us that they would not see our file until after 11, explaining the order that things were going to be taken, starting with federal files. As my application was done by me, as an individual, and not a crown case, it would be among the last files addressed. We talked about coming back at 10:30 and she said we could, but we might be waiting as much as an hour.
So we left again. That’s when I mentioned I hadn’t had breakfast yet, so we started to think about where we could walk to. As we did, we saw our vandal and his wife drive by, so my brother wanted to get a move on, so as not to cross paths with them. Our province is still locked down, despite never having had a need to be, even over the winter, so I wasn’t sure where we could go that I would be allowed in. We finally decided to try a restaurant across the street. Signs said groups from one household only. When we went in, they didn’t say anything about the Mingle Mask and were going to seat us, but then we were asked if we were from the same household. My brother said we were family, but not the same household. We were then asked if we were vaccinated. Which is actually illegal to do, as it falls under the Privacy Act, but I didn’t think of that right away. My brother just got his second shot (which is a problem, because now I have to stay away from my family as much as possible for the next while), but not me.
I was then told I would have to eat by myself.
My brother was willing to, but I walked out. I will not comply with medical tyranny, any more than I will put up with our vandal’s abuse.
Speaking of which, as we left, we saw our vandal walking into the court building.
There was a nearby grocery store. Unfortunately, I had already heard that they illegally discriminated against people with medical exemptions, but things had supposedly eased up in our province, so maybe that changed?
When we first walked in, no one said anything, so I thought we would be fine. We were walking around to find where they had sandwiches or a deli, but before we could, a manager looking person walked up to me, demanding my papers. Meaning, my medical exemption note. Which is illegal to ask for, not required, and which doctors have been ordered not to give out. I just walked away. He kept talking at me and, while I shouldn’t have done it, I flipped him the bird over my shoulder. His response was to wish me a nice day, in the most sarcastic voice ever. I don’t comply with discrimination, either.
After that, we went to sit in my mother’s car, which I used because it has working air conditioning. My brother was taken aback by how I was treated. He’d never seen anything like it before, but then, I’m apparently the only person he knows that can’t wear a mask.
What I wish I’d thought of was to point out that they had no problem with me in the court building, so why would a restaurant and grocery store have a problem with me?
So we stayed in the car while he worked and we talked, until I could no longer stay seated, as I was starting to have troubles breathing and needed to be upright again. Which is why we were on the sidewalk, heading back to the court building, to see our vandal leaving the building and crossing the street with someone we assume to be his lawyer. We figured he was told to wait outside until 11, too. My brother wanted to avoid him, so we walked around the other side of the block to get to the court building.
When we got there, there was a whole bunch of people waiting outside, but not our vandal. I looked where the car we’d seen him to do had been parked, but didn’t see him there, either.
Since we were still early, I popped in quickly to asked the security guard what the status was.
August 6, he told me.
???
Yup. Our vandal and his lawyer had been taken in, and it was over and done with. Judging from when we saw them outside, they would have been taken in shortly after 10. The time we were told our file would NOT be seen.
I asked what happened to the 11:00 thing, and the poor guy could only slump and shake his head. He looked so defeated, even with half his face hidden.
My poor brother. This is now the third time he got himself away from work to be there for me, only to have this happen.
The problem it, we don’t actually know what happened. Only that there is a new date. Is it a trial date, because he’s contesting the application? Or did they defer because I wasn’t there? My name wasn’t on the docket, which suggests they didn’t need me there, but I keep getting told by the court office that I do need to be there.
This is so, so frustrating.
After my brother and I parted ways, I took advantage of being in the city and swung by a Walmart to pick up more cat food, and a bagel to eat on the way home. Like the court building, this Walmart has no issues with me. From there I went home and unloaded, then got my husband to call the pharmacy to let them know I was on my way to pick up his refills (he forgot to request delivery) in town, that it would be a parking lot pickup, and give them permission to put it through the till. Because, unlike the court building, the pharmacy still discriminates against people with medical exemptions and I’m not allowed to go in.
When I got back and gave my husband his medications, he found one of them had not been included. We weren’t billed for it, either. So he called them back about it.
It will be delivered on Monday.
Meanwhile, I’ve called my LegalShield firm. My file is updated, and my lawyer will call me about it. I don’t know that there’s any more advice he can give me, but hopefully by then I will have got through to the court office (my call went to voice mail, and the mailbox was full, so I couldn’t even leave a message) to find out what actually happened.
Oh, how I wish LegalShield still had a firm in our province! If I needed to, they would find me a local lawyer at a discounted price, but not as good of a discount as I would get if I were working directly with the firm. Mind you, we probably couldn’t afford even the discounted price, but at least we’d have a better chance of it.
*sigh*
I think I’d rather deal with the hoards of grasshoppers, than with all this garbage.
While doing my morning rounds, I found that something had tried to get under the floating cover on a beet bed.
It seems than an onion did its job of guard duty!
This particular union had been falling over on its own before, and when I picked it up, I could see it’s roots were gone and it had started to rot a bit.
There is now a brick where the onion used to be. LOL
Unfortunately, other things were not so lucky.
While our Crespo squash has not been bothered since we put distractions around it, for the first time, I’ve found some of our Montana Mordao corn has been nibbled on. Just two little ones, right at the corner, suggesting a passing deer. The flags I left from marking where to transplant seem to no longer be enough to keep them away.
Project for this evening, when things cool down a bit: place distracting things around the purple corn.
I got a couple of photos of what we did yesterday, to try and protect parts of our garden.
There is plenty of slack in the cover for things to grow, and if it ever reaches a point where it needs more, we can unroll the netting wrapped around the scrap wood weighing it down on the ends. It won’t stop small critters like skunks or the woodchuck, but they don’t tend to go here, anyhow. Deer are the ones that seem to find beet green delicious. :-D
While walking towards the Crespo squash mound, those tart tins were flashing away, and there was hardly any breeze at all, so that was good to see.
As for the woodchuck, I’m now 99% sure it has a new den under the garden shed. The only reason it’s not 100% is because we have no way to see under there to confirm.
A couple of times today already, the brazen bugger parked his adorable furry butt under the bird feeder and was eating sunflower seeds. Which, I guess, is better than him being in the garden and eating our vegetables! Still, I went out to chase him away, startling a skunk away from the cat kibble. :-/
On a more positive note, I saw Junk Pile’s kittens again. It does seem like there are 4 of them in total, but they ran off as soon as they saw me. The only one I did not see was the little grey and white one. The tuxedo dashed under the storage house, while two mostly grey kittens ran past the fire pit and out the yard near the old threshing machine.
Those little guys are FAST!
Most of the kittens are getting braver, and wandering around the yard more. Butterscotch’s kittens were seen around the old compost pile. No surprise that they went in that direction, as Butterscotch frequents the old farmyard across the road. Rosencrantz’ kittens have been playing in the white lilacs and climbing the willow tree.
It would be good if we can convince them to stay close to the protection of the house and inner yard!
While doing the evening watering, I had found an unpleasant surprise.
The larger of our Crespo squash vines got a substantial portion nibbled off!
Unlike the summer squash, these don’t have spines on them that would dissuade being eaten. I am guessing this was done by a deer, but I really have no way to know.
It was just part of the one plant that was eaten; the other is untouched. The nearby Montana Morado corn was also untouched, and I saw no damage in any of the garden beds on this side of the house.
When the watering was done, my daughter and I rigged up the last three hula hoops to make a “fence” around the mound. The ground is so hard, we couldn’t push anything into it, so we had to use the pointed metal bar we found, to make holes, like I did to drive in stakes for the summer squash. After setting up the open hula hoops around the mound, we threaded some aluminum tart pans onto twine and tied them between the hoops.
While watering the haskap bushes, near the tomato plants on the south side of the house, I noticed something else. The bed we planted the haskaps in have a lot of flowers that grow quite tall before producing bright yellow flowers. We’ve pulled them up around the haskaps, but at this stage, they are taller than the bushes.
Except for some of them.
A whole bunch of them at one end of the flower bed have lost their heads! Given the height, this had to have been doing by deer. Looking more closely, I saw or were missing their tops on the south side of the flower bed. Which means deer have used the path between the flower bed and the new tomato bed.
No tomatoes were damaged, though.
My daughter had watered the old kitchen garden, so before I went inside, I decided to check it as well. I found more nibbled beets in the bed along the retaining wall. These area has different beets planted in sections, unlike the big bed where they are all mixed up. At one end is a type of beet that has lighter, all green leaves, without the red stalk and veins that the other types have. Only that one was nibbled on. There wasn’t a lot of damage, and I am wondering if maybe it was a skunk? It definitely wasn’t a deer, given the location and the netting nearby, and I would have expected the woodchuck to have done far more damage. There’s no way to tell.
At least the Epsom salt treated carrots nearby have no new damage to them.
The loan beet bed by the garlic was a concern for me. It’s recovering quite well from being thoroughly nibbled on by a deer. I trimmed the onion greens that surround the beets, so today I loosely laid the remaining piece of mosquito netting over it, like a row cover, with the short ends weighted down with some scrap boards. Hopefully, that will keep the deer out of it and the beets can continue to recover.
Thankfully, what damage we found this evening was relatively minor.
I’d much rather there was no damage at all, of course!
It was a rough night for me, last night. Very little sleep, and the pain levels are just high enough to make any position uncomfortable after only a short time. Thankfully, my husband was well enough this morning to head out do all the food bowls for the cats, and refill the bird feeder, allowing me to postpone the rest of my morning rounds until later in the day.
Once I did get out, the first thing I noticed was the haze. I know we don’t have fires nearby, but we’re getting smoke. I’ll have to check the fire maps later, and see what the current status is.
The other thing I noticed was Junk Pile cat. Who looked at me and growled.
Now, why would she do that?
Because she had brought her kittens over, and they were around the cat shelter! I saw some furry little butts disappearing behind it, so I carefully went around, giving them lots of space, to check on the potatoes and grapes. I saw a little grey and white kitten run across to the storage out, while a little tuxedo squeezed under the cat shelter.
A tuxedo?
Yup. She had more kittens with her this time! There were at least three, possibly four. I was just catching glimpses of them, though later on I saw the tuxedo under a tree by the storage house, watching me from a safe distance.
I am so glad she’s bringing her babies over to the food bowls!! Hopefully, they will be moving into the inner yard now.
Before finishing my morning rounds, I got the hose going to refill the water barrel at the far beds. Unfortunately, it is still leaking. I’ll have to pinpoint exactly where, then empty it enough that it can dry and I can try sealing them again.
Once everything else was done, I came back outside to give the onions a hair cut. :-D
It was on one of the gardening groups I’m on that I saw someone post pictures of the green onions they had just harvested and bagged up for the freezer. I know it’s recommended to trim onions grown from seed, down to about 3 inches, before transplanting. I hadn’t thought about trimming them, other than to gather greens for the day’s cooking, before harvest. The gardener that posted the pictures said that trimming them meant more energy going towards growing the bulbs. If the greens start falling over, the onions stop growing for the season. I knew that last part, but it never occurred to me that the growing season could be extended by trimming. I’ve never grown onions before, and the onions my mother grew were left in the ground to come back, year after year, so I never saw her doing that, either.
The yellow onions sets that I bought locally got really large greens. I quickly ran out of space in my colander, and had to come back to do the bigger shallots, then the other onion bed. The red onions (from sets) and the other yellow onions (from seed) did not have as many large greens, but the colander still got pretty full again! All the greens completely filled our giant metal bowl. Thankfully, it has a lid, because the cats were VERY curious! It’s full enough that the lid is sitting on top of greens, but at least that cats can’t get at them. Onions are toxic to cats, but that doesn’t stop them from being very curious about them!
We’ll have a lot of washing of greens to do, and then they’ll be coarsely chopped. We will probably dehydrate a couple of pans of them in the oven, and the rest will get frozen.
We’re going to have enough to last us quite a long time! :-)
The Re-Farmer 