We have been rather entertained by our resident groundhogs under the junk pile of late.
The grog actually managed to drag some of the tarp down into the den entrance!
This tarp is one of several that I found when cleaning the junk off this pile of wood. They had clearly been used to cover and protect the wood, but had been blown aside and torn apart by the elements, along with all sorts of things being tossed into the area. Torn up as they were, I was still able to use them to cover the wood pile a bit, but the groundhogs are taking advantage of the deteriorated state. They are trying to gather it into their den for nesting material.
Last night, I cleaned it up a bit and tucked the tarp under some boards.
This is how I found it this morning.
I was able to see the groundhog in action through the living room window.
That little bugger is really working at it! :-D
I put together the videos I took from the window, too. :-)
These next photos were taken after the video was made.
It got quite a lot of that tarp down and into the den entrance!
In taking this photo, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before.
There is now a third entrance to the den in the back of the pile!
I cleaned up and tucked things away again. It should be interesting to see how long this lasts.
While I was working in a nearby beet bed (which will be in my next post), I could hear the grog trying to drag a corner of the orange trap around the back, too.
The gravel you see at the bottom of the photo is from the second entrance to the den.
I don’t think you can see it in the photo above, but there is the nose of a grog in their main entrance. It was watching me.
You’ll notice the gravel is different in this photo. I took advantage of their hard work and used it. I’ll be posting about that after I’ve processed the photos I took.
We seem to have made a truce with the groundhogs. I’m relieved, because we were getting to the point of taking some rather permanent steps. Something I won’t even consider right now, as they are nesting, and I don’t want to end up depriving babies of their mother. The cayenne pepper and covers are working, overall (more on that in my next post), and they seem content with eating the bird seed, grazing on whatever they’re finding in the grass, and leaving our garden beds alone now. From what I’ve been able to find about them, they don’t actually like to have overlapping territory, so if there are any babies, they will not stick around once they are big enough to live on their own.
For all the predictions of rain we’ve been getting, I don’t think we’ll actually get anything of substance, so I will be applying more cayenne pepper this evening. If it rains, well, I’ll just have to do it again.
For the past while, we’ve been harvesting a handful of beans, every couple of days. Just enough for the day’s meal, really. It would mostly be the yellow beans, with a few greens, and maybe three or for purple beans.
This morning, we had our biggest harvest, yet!
It is still mostly yellow beans, but they are on the bottom. It’s remarkable to me how, the plants that are the smallest and having the hardest time in this heat, is producing the most right now! Not for long, though, I think. There are LOTS of immature green and purple beans hiding under the leaves. We should start getting hauls like this more often, soon. :-)
This is the first time we had enough to make it worthwhile to preserve them. Not enough to make it worth breaking out the canner or doing some quick pickles or something, but enough to fill a bag for the freezer.
After trimming the ends, then cutting them to more equally sized pieces, I was able to use the blanching pot I’d found in the storage area of the kitchen, while trying to cat proof it (it’s right up by the ceiling and hard to get to!). This is the first time we’ve been able to use it. :-)
All those ice packs we have to help keep our food cold or frozen when we do our city trips are coming in handy. I used a bunch of them to make an ice bath to chill the blanched beans in. We don’t typically make ice with our well water, and the ice we do have is purchased, so I didn’t want to use any of that!
This variety of purple beans turn green when cooked or blanched. They are a somewhat less bright green; you can tell them apart in the foreground.
The blanched beans were laid out on a couple of trays and are now in the chest freezer, to be bagged later.
One thing about freezing produce. It’s very fast! I still hope to have enough to pickle or pressure can, so we have shelf-stable beans, too. :-)
Most of the squash are blooming like crazy right now. The Red Kuri/Little Gem winter squash is especially showy right now.
Isn’t that gorgeous?
Unfortunately, there is still just the one squash that is developing. There are so many little ones like this, but they have been dying off without getting much bigger.
Then there was this little – and I do mean little – surprise I found behind a leaf.
Our first luffa gourd has shown up!
There have been plenty of male flowers blooming, so there should be no pollination problems when this one finally blooms. It should be interesting to see if we get mature gourds, this late in the growing season!
The girls had gone through the garden beds earlier and picked a couple of big zucchini, as well as some sunburst squash. Which tells me that cayenne pepper seems to be working. In yesterday’s garden cam files, I actually saw a groundhog by the summer squash in a couple of videos, in between files of me going by while tending the sprinklers. It was just grazing something next to the summer squash. It did not try to go into them at all. Which is very encouraging. With the watering, I should probably add on more cayenne pepper, but there’s a 60% chance of showers this morning, so it would be washed off if it does. We shall see.
Well, I’ve cleaned up the mess in the Montana Morado corn.
There isn’t much of it left. :-(
I decided to shuck what cobs I could find.
Get a load of this little mutant corn!
There are three tiny cobs growing out the base of the main one – and they were all developing kernels!
What a loss. :-(
I considered the possibility that the damage was done by raccoons, but they would have actually eaten the corn, not just knocked over the stalks. None of these have been nibbled on. Which puts me back to thinking “cat fight” as the most likely cause of damage.
When I first ordered these seeds, I thought I was getting a variety of corn from Peru that was being successfully grown in the US. However, the info on the website changed, and it turned out this is a variety that was created in the US from glass gem corn. In the cobs on the left, you can see that some are more blue than purple, and others are more red.
I found a source for the Peruvian variety that I thought I was getting. For next year, I want to get those and try again.
With better critter protection!
That purple has some real staying power. It won’t wash off! :-D
Today has turned out to be – so far – not as hot as predicted. On the down side, the smoke came back with a vengeance this morning. It has gotten better since then, thankfully.
While heading out to move the sprinkler, yesterday, I spotted Butterscotch and her brood.
I’m not sure if this is Bradicous or Chadicous. Either way, he’s adorable!
While tending the furthest garden beds, Butterscotch and her babies went through the squash tunnel on their way to the neighbour’s farm across the road. So much space they could have gone through, and they chose the squash tunnel! :-D
I also saw a lot of birds in the garden. They were appreciating the water on the ground from the sprinkler!
I decided to pick the two biggest, oldest melons to check them out. The one on the left is a Halona melon, and the one on the right is a Pixie.
Here, the Halona is at the top, and the Pixie at the bottom.
First thing I could tell is that they were not fully ripe yet. So we knew, when we taste tested them, that they were harder and less sweet than they should be.
They were still very tasty, though. General consensus is that we like the Pixie a bit better than the Halona, though it was really hard to pick one as better than the other.
With the weather predictions including thunderstorms over the next few days, I decided it was time to harvest the rest of the onions.
The canopy has been moved over the picnic table, so that’s where we set up the screens to lay them out on.
The screen with the fewest onions on them are the ones grown from sets I bought locally. About half of those had already been harvested earlier and are hanging in the root cellar.
The red unions are the sets we got from Veseys, and the screen in the middle has the onions we grew from seeds. These will stay outside until the soil is dried enough to brush it off and trim the roots. At that point, I will decide if I will leave them under the canopy to cure longer, or set them up in the root cellar. It will depend on the weather.
This morning, we are finally seeing yellow petals on the sunflowers! Most don’t even have heads developing yet. The Mongolian Giants are the only ones with developing heads right now. Given we’re in the second half of August right now, I don’t know that we have enough season left for them to develop. The sunflowers in the fields we pass are not only in full bloom, but today I drove by a field where the seed heads are already past blooming and starting to dry up.
In checking the rest of the beds this morning, I found this carnage in the purple corn.
Quite a number of stalks have been knocked down to the ground. From the looks of it, I think there may have been a cat fight in here or something. This is not the damage of a critter trying to eat the corn. I had to head out, so I left it until later today, when we’ll head out to clean up the mess. Hopefully, when it’s a bit cooler.
*sigh*
Anyhow.
Today I made a run to the nearer little city to do a Walmart run and pick up some more cat kibble, among other things. The smoke actually got thicker the further south and east I drove; most of the smoke we’d been getting before was from fires to the north. We are now getting predictions of possible thunderstorms starting tonight, which would go a long way to helping with the wildfires. I’m debating whether we should do an evening watering of all the garden beds or not. Some beds, like the tomatoes, got done already. Though we didn’t reach the predicted highs, I still had to run the hose into the rain barrel for a while, to get rid of the hot water, first. Otherwise, it would have scalded the plants. After letting it run, our well water still is not getting cold like it usually does. Even our ground water is warm! Which means there’s no danger of shocking the plants, I guess. I watered the potato bags, and those looked like something went crashing over them, too. Those, at least, can handle it better than the corn!
This year’s gardening has certainly been a learning experience.
It’s been a long time since I was able to stop to get pictures of the bison while they are at the fence!
There are so many babies this year! <3
Gosh, they are beautiful creatures!
Though I think they lost a bull. I saw a local notice being shared on Facebook, warning people in the area to be on the lookout for it, and to stay well away from it. This is the only bison ranch I know of in this area, so I’m guessing it’s theirs. Hopefully, it has been found and brought home by now!
Well, the forecasts have changed again. Instead of things starting to cool down starting today, we’re now supposed to hit 33C/91F with a humidex of 40C/104F this afternoon, and hit 30C/86F over the next couple of days. Thunderstorm warnings are back for tomorrow, but now extending over two days.
I really hope we do get them!
Overnight temperatures are high, too, making it hard to sleep. Especially since the box fan I had in my window broke. I suppose I could take the one we’ve got in the root cellar, but I think our curing garlic needs it more than I do.
The cats, meanwhile, are melting.
David is just so… magnificent!
Layendecker spent hours in my butt spot, splayed out like this, until I had to claim my chair.
We were able to have our very first BBQ (grilling, for the purists) yesterday.
This is the first time we’ve used the BBQ my brother gave us. It was insanely hot, even in the shade, but being able to cook everything at the same time, and not heating up the house, was worth it.
After the meat was set on the warming grill, I took the zucchini strips and put them directly on the grill, just enough to get some char on them. It was awesome! Unfortunately, the photos I took of the finished meal did not turn out, but it was as pleasing to the eye as to the palate. The purple corn was interesting. The kernels were far harder than I expected. I liked them. I look forward to growing enough for both fresh eating (or making chicha morado) and to make corn flour. That will be a few years, which will also give us time to pick up a decent quality mill.
The steaks are the sirloin steaks from the meat pack we got from a local ranch. I kept it simple. Just a bit of oil (okay, maybe not so simple; I used (fake) truffle oil), salt and pepper. Oh, man. It’s been so long since we’ve had steak! My husband and I even made a “date” of it and ate at the table. He usually isn’t able to sit at the table for very long, but he put up with the pain for steak! :-D
We got a nice little haul of tomatoes yesterday evening; these are mostly the Spoon tomatoes.
I am quite enjoying having these, but have found I still can’t eat fresh tomatoes. About the best I can say when I tasted one last night is, at least I didn’t gag.
Much.
Which is weird, because I like tomato in things, to a certain extent. I just can’t handle eating them fresh. My younger daughter is much the same. No loss, though. We planted these for my older daughter and my husband. They enjoy tomatoes!
As the temperatures started to drop a bit, yesterday evening, my husband opened up various windows and the inner door in the dining room – setting up the little step latter so the cats can look out the window of the outer door, of course. We still have food and water set up on the concrete steps for Butterscotch and her kittens. Even though they have moved to the empty property across the road, she still brings them over.
Not long after things were opened up, I heard a commotion outside the door, and the cats were very interested in whatever was under their perch. So I popped over to the living room window to see what was on the steps.
I never saw anything on the steps, but I did find a shadow on the post for the hanging bird feeder! It was getting dark by then, but I could tell it was a raccoon. Not the big one we saw the first time, but a slightly smaller one.
So I went outside to shoo it away.
Now, normally, they run off as soon as they hear the door open, and I come around the corner just in time to see them dashing away.
Not this time!
As I came closer to the feeder, making shooing noises, the raccoon was far too busy eating to take off. It was sitting with its lower body on the bird perch – what used to support a platform feeder on the post before we cleaned it up and painted it – and was grabbing the base of the hanging feeder with its front paws. When I got to the post, it just froze.
And stared at me.
So there I am, standing RIGHT next to the post, face to face with a raccoon.
Before anyone starts, yes, I know what to watch out for re: rabies and so on. I am very aware that wild animals are unpredictable and can F you up, in general. I was being cautious and giving it plenty of opportunity to jump down and run away.
I think, however, the way it was hanging onto the feeder, it couldn’t just let go, and with this big human standing there, it probably didn’t want to off balance itself and drop to the ground.
So it froze.
And stared at me.
With that adorable face.
Since it wasn’t moving, I carefully reached out and poked the end of its tail.
Nothing.
I poked it again.
Nothing.
I wiggled its tail a bit.
Still nothing!
I poked its hip.
It just kept staring at me.
I even gently poked at its strange little man-hand foot.
Not a twitch.
Finally, I reached out and began to pet its lower back.
It let me.
The only time it really moved was then Potato Beetle started weaving around my feet. I paused to pick him up and the two of them stared at each other for a bit, but Potato Beetle was far more interested in being held than in the creature on the bird feeder post.
So I pet the raccoon some more for a while, the left it be. It took a minute or two before it finally got down and ran off.
I got to touch a raccoon. !!!!!
The rest of the family missed all this. I didn’t even have my phone with me to try and take a photo, though it was probably too dark for one. I certainly wasn’t going to use a flash on the poor thing. When I told them, I got chastised by my daughters, first for taking the risk, then for terrorizing the poor raccoon. :-D
Meanwhile…
With today’s heat, the garden beds are getting a thorough watering. Instead of standing out there in what is already 28C/82F, I’ve been using the sprinklers, moving them every 45 minutes or so, and will be finishing with the spray and soaker hoses. Though someone had already put kibble out for the cats, I did have to top up the containers by the junk pile and concrete steps already.
The kittens were out and about.
Toesencrantz won’t come anywhere near us, but she will watch from a distance.
I was watering the tomatoes and cucamelons from the rain barrel, going back and forth, and in one of my trips, I found I had an audience!
I love how Toesencrantz has her toes on the log like that. So adorable!
Since the rain we did get, and now the heat being back again, the squash are all blooming like crazy.
I really like the luffa flowers!
Still no luffa, though. For those who grow luffa, is that normal? Shouldn’t there be gourds by now?
The ants really like the luffa vines. I’m not sure why. They seem to just be climbing them. As long as they are not damaging them, I don’t mind. Ants are pollinators, too. I find it odd that they are only climbing the luffa, though, and nothing else growing at the squash tunnel.
The one Red Kuri squash is getting bigger. :-)
I am starting to think we can harvest some of our melons, but I’m not sure. The bigger ones don’t seem to be getting any bigger, so I figure we can at least start harvesting those.
Maybe I’ll pick one of each type, when I hook up the soaker hose, later on. :-)
As I write this, in the early afternoon, we have reached 30C/86F, with a humidex of 35C/95F. Our high of the day is expected to reach 35C/95F with the humidex at 40C/104F. Thankfully, this is supposed to be the hottest day for the next while, but it means that we’re back at watering the garden at least once a day.
At least this time, I had a full rain barrel to use in the garden beds by the house, while the sprinkler was running in the furthest beds.
With the upstairs so hot during the day, the girls are still staying up all night, so my old daughter can work on her commissions. They still have to put ice packs around their electronics – and themselves – to keep things from overheating.
Since they were still up during the cool of the morning, they did a bit of harvesting, and this was waiting for me when I got up.
We actually have summer squash to pick! The cayenne pepper seems to be working and keeping the grogs (groundhogs) away. This is the most we’ve been able to gather all summer.
They also picked a single red crab apple for me. <3
It was delicious.
The summer squash bed now has one of the sprinkler hoses I found by the grog den a while back, so they can be watered from below more easily. I set the other one up through two bean beds, but half of the hose seems to have clogged holes. I think they will clear as the hose is used more often.
I’m rather encouraged by these tomatoes. The wilted one is the branch that broke off in the wind, and that I just stuck into the ground. The leaves may be wilted, but the stem is still strong, and the tomatoes that are on it are ripening.
I found a surprise while watering the tomatoes.
This cluster of seedlings has emerged from the new garden soil we recently added!
My initial thought was more sunflowers from the bird feeder, but these actually look a bit like squash seedlings.
We’ll leave them to see what they turn out to be.
Unless the grogs eat them, first.
The sweet corn may be small, but they are maturing. The middle block is maturing the fastest, while the northernmost block the slowest. The southern block has one half maturing faster than the other. This area gets shade in the morning, but at least 8 hours of sunlight per day. The Eastern side, however, would still have shade longer than the rest, and that is likely why the plants are shorter on that side.
It does not seem to matter as much for the sunflowers.
The earliest Mongolian Giant flower heads are progressing nicely.
Even the ones that got chomped by deer are recovering. These are the Hopi Black Dye sunflowers, transplanted next to the Dorinny corn, where the entire row had lots their heads.
You can see the cayenne pepper on the sunflower leaves. Since we are using the sprinklers to water things, we’ll need to reapply it at the end of the day.
On the garden cam, I spotted a big raccoon headed towards the summer squash. It reached a plant, touched it with its nose, and pulled back its head like it got bitten, then ambled around the squash bed, avoiding the plants.
When setting up the sprinkler on the purple corn, I noticed a cob with husks that looked quite dried up. I took a chance and harveted it.
It’s ripe!! Small, not completely pollinated, but still pretty full, and the deep, dark purple it’s supposed to be. I found one other little one with dried husks and picked that, too.
With only two of them, I went to the Dorinny corn and picked what I could there, too.
It isn’t a lot for four people, but enough for part of a meal!
I’m thinking of moving the BBQ my brother gave us to the canopy, so we can grill in the shade. Corn on the grill would be awesome! We’ve got some sirloin steaks from the meat pack we got thawing out, and the summer squash are prepped for grilling. I don’t know if we’ll be up to grilling in this heat, but if not, the vegetables can be roasted.
Either way, I’m looking forward to an excellent Sunday dinner!
Starting today (Sunday), we’re supposed to get hit with high temperatures again, and the thunderstorms that were predicted for Tuesday are now forecast for Wednesday or Thursday, depending on which app I check.
Yesterday evening, I decided to check on the gravel pit and see if there was still water from our last rainfalls.
The water level is definitely lower. Between the cows drinking from it, and the return to hot and dry conditions, I’m almost surprised there’s water left at all. There may even be groundwater seeping into it by now, too.
I neglected to write a post yesterday, so I will make up for it today. ;-)
Starting with some inside cats for a change. :-)
Cabbages and Tissue needed to nap after their battle with the deadly flip flops.
Ginger, meanwhile, took advantage of the girls for some double cuddles on the couch.
Later, I found these furry shrimps on my bed. Cabbages, Turmeric, Beep Beep (or Big Rig) and Susan.
It was so fabulous to get a visit yesterday, and I’m so glad he was able to make the side trip to our place while on his way home. He was able to stay for a couple of hours, and even my husband was able to join us and visit for a while. Sitting at the picnic table did a number on his back, but he says it was worth it. :-) It was great to be able to sit outside and enjoy the breeze; something we had never been able to do before our move. Of course, we gave him the tour. He got too meet some of our new kitties, and reunite with our old mama cat that moved out with us, too. :-)
It was a good day, and I’m glad we were able to spend so much of it outside, before the heat came back!
The Re-Farmer 