The very first thing I do when I head outside for my morning rounds is to feed the yard cats, then the birds.
The yard kittens have all now come to expect it.
They are getting increasingly brave about NOT running away when I go back and forth from the sun room. The tuxedo almost went into the kibble house while I was pouring out food inside. (I believe the one on the cat house roof is Junk Pile’s little tabby that looks like Bradicous and Chadicous.)
The problem is, when one of them gets startled and dashes off, it startles the rest of them, and there is an explosion of kittens, running in all directions! :-D
When I took this photo, one bunch had returned and were eating at the kibble tray on the ground outside the kibble house, while this bunch patiently waited for me to move on!
Nosencrantz and Toesencrantz, meanwhile, where with their mom at their own private dining area under the shrine. :-D
The girls joined me for the evening rounds last night, and my daughter found a ripe Pixie melon!
I had checked them in the morning, and none were coming loose from their stems, but by the end of the day, one of them finally did. :-) It isn’t even the biggest one that has a hammock to support it. Hopefully, this means the other Pixie melons were ripen soon. While we did pick one Pixie melon to taste test, it was still under ripe (still delicious, though!), which makes this the very first ripe Pixie we have picked.
Meanwhile, this morning, I finally picked grapes. Here is our harvest for this year.
Yup. That’s it. About a week ago, I did find another cluster with a whole three grapes on it, and I ate them.
This year, we will cover and insulate the grapes for the winter. These are supposed to be hardy to our zone, as far as I know without knowing the exact variety they are. However, even the hardy ones have a hard time things like month-long polar vortexes. Not even that one cold night in May that left us with no berries and almost no crab apples could be blamed for the lack of grapes. It took these so long to start budding, I feared the polar vortex had killed them off.
While topping up the yard cat’s kibble trays last night, I actually got to pet a kittie!
The fact that Rosencrantz let me pet her, for a change, probably helped, but Nosencrantz still looks pretty unsure of the situation! :-D
The lure of kibble was enough for her to ignore me petting her while she ate.
Unfortunately, she is still the only one of the yard kittens that doesn’t run away every time we come out, though a couple of them are starting to come back faster, or watch from nearby. I hope that, as winter sets in and they start using the cat shelter more, they will at least calm down in our presence.
After giving my hips a chance to recover, it was time for more manual labour today!
Today, I decided to do a bit more cleanup around the junk pile, so I could access some dead trees that need to be taken down.
Here is how it looked before I started.
We have our ongoing battle with the spirea that’s choking everything out, so I wanted to pull them up by the roots as much as possible.
Some of them had roots so long, they started going under things. I pushed them aside after a certain point, so I could focus on clearing around three specific dead trees.
The thistles were much more of a problem. The thorns go right through my work gloves!
I did leave on thing behind, besides some wildflowers.
There was a little Saskatoon bush, at the base of one of the trees, and it’s actually trying to produce berries! Weather willing, the berries you see will turn a deep, dark purple, and look a bit like blueberries.
Once the area was cleared of tripping hazards, I started taking down the first tree, using a bucksaw. Because of where these trees are, I tried to do it in such a way that it would fall in a space between some other spruces. I didn’t want it falling towards the open yard, because then it might land on the beet bed or compost pile, or some Saskatoon bushes and an elm tree we want to keep.
It almost worked.
It fell too far to the south, and got hung up on another dead tree, that’s right nest to a still live one.
I was able to wrap some rope around the trunk and get it off the stump, but it would not come loose from the dead tree it was entangled in.
So I moved on to the next tree. This time, it actually fell into the gap I wanted it to fall into.
It still got hung up! I had hoped these trees would be heavy enough that the dead branches would break and let them fall to the ground, but apparently, they are still quite strong.
On the plus side, I was very pleased with what I saw after cutting them down.
The wood is nice and solid, with no sign of rot or ant damage. This is very encouraging, because I want to use the logs. These nice, solid stumps will later be used to make seats and tables.
Here is how it looked when I stopped for the day. I did try to use the rope and our van to try and get that first tree loose from the dead tree it’s hooked up on, but the rope kept breaking. We don’t have any stronger rope. If we’re going to need to use the van anyhow, I will pick up some sturdy rope and hook it up to near the base of the trunks, and pull the entire trees out into the yard, where we will break them down.
Since the wood is in such good shape, these will be used to make the high raised beds we will be building in the main garden area, where we currently have the low raised beds we’d planted spinach, onions and carrots in. I’m thinking of cutting the logs into 10 ft and 4 ft lengths, and I figure it will take about 4 logs to get the accessible height we are after, though of course, that will depend on how big the individual trees are. We don’t have a lot of time left, if we want to get these ready for next year. I’m hoping to get at least a couple built for next year. By using whole logs like this, we won’t have any concerns about the sides bowing out under the weight of the layers of wood, compostable materials and soil they will be filled with.
Once these dead trees closer to the edge of the spruce grove are down, we’ll be able to feel the other ones towards the yard, and there will be no other trees for them to get hung up on!
Once all the dead trees in this corner are down, and the area is cleaned up, we will be able to convert the trunks into seating and surfaces. Then we can start planting food trees that need a protected microclimate. I will be testing the soil, and if the acidity from all those decades of spruce needles is high enough, I hope to be able to plant blueberries. We do still want to grow a mulberry tree, since the one we got this spring got killed off by that one cold night in May, and it was in here that we originally intended to plant it. I think, this time, we will try and get a Canadian variety we found out about, that is increasingly endangered. We will still need the microclimate for it, but if we can help keep a variety at risk going, that’s what we prefer to do, if we can.
There are a lot more dead trees further to the east and around to the south, inside the spruce grove. Some will also have their trunks converted to seating, but as we go further into the grove, I want to start transplanting more spruces into the spruce grove! :-)
While we are getting rid of the spirea, we will be leaving the wild roses and red bark dogwood as underbrush. I will probably take out most of the chokecherries I’m finding in here, as there are so many, to make room for the Saskatoons to spread. We will also be transplanting new spruces in here, though more strategically. Lots to do, but I am really looking forward to when we have a lovely little sanctuary in here, where we can sit and enjoy the outdoors, somewhat protected from the elements by the trees. :-)
For now, however, I’m going to get some tweezers, and get that thistle thorn that got through my gloves!
Well, it is getting decidedly cooler when I do my morning rounds! Fall is just around the corner, but things are still holding out in the garden.
Here are the gourds growing on the south facing chain link fence. The yellow flowers that you see are the Ozark Nest Egg flowers.
If you look at the bottom right, you’ll see a white flower!
This is a Thai Bottle Gourd flower. The Ozark Nest Egg plants are going so well, they sort of hide that there is another type of gourd growing here. The Thai Bottle Gourd has leaves that are more rounded, while the Ozark Nest Egg leaves have points on them.
These gourds are not the only thing bursting into bloom.
This is the Crespo squash, recovered from critter damage and growing enthusiastically! I was not able to get all of it in this photo. All those arrows are pointing to flower buds, some of which are starting to open this morning. There are probably another dozen or so on the rest of the plant off the left side of the photo.
Hidden away in the middle, I found the first female flower!
I couldn’t get any closer because of the critter barriers, but that flower bud the arrow is pointing to has a baby squash at its base. Hopefully, it will get pollinated and not die off. Under the current conditions, I would hand pollinate, but that would require moving the critter barriers. Mind you, there’s no way any fruit that develop will reach maturity.
More on that, later.
There are only a few Halona melons left on the vines, but there are probably a dozen Pixie melons that have not yet ripened.
This is the largest of them. Since it has a hammock, I check it in the mornings by lifting it at the stem, to see if it is starting to separate, but it’s still hanging on tight!
The rest are more like these two.
I’ll have to double check, but I thought the Pixies had a shorter growing season than the Halonas. They are taking much longer than the Halona to fully ripen. I’m sure the drought conditions over the summer have something to do with that, but since we’ve started having rain fairly regularly now, I would have expected them to mature faster. Ah, well. We’ll see how they do!
This is the largest of the developing Teddy winter squash. This is roughly half of what it’s mature size is supposed to be, so they may still have time.
Our weird mutant Red Kuri is noticeably bigger! It makes me smile, every time I see it.
We’ve got a couple more that are getting bigger, too. This is what the mottled green one should be looking like, which is why I suspect it was cross pollinated with the Teddy squash.
Here’s something that is NOT getting bigger!
The one luffa gourd is just… stalled. The plants are still blooming, but also starting to die off for the season. I started these quite a bit earlier, indoors, and they should have had enough time to develop gourds and reach maturity, but this summer was so rough on everything, I think we’re lucky to have even this.
We even had something to harvest! Not every morning, but at least every few days. We even still had a few beans left to pick. In the photo, I’m holding one of the mutant green sunburst squash. :-D I’ve been trying to let the sunburst squash have more time for the fruit to get bigger, but they seem to be developing more slowly than they did last year.
I just had to get a picture of the sunflower in the old kitchen garden. We can see it from the bathroom window, through the sun room, and it makes me smile, every time. :-)
As the season winds down, I’ve been keeping a close eye on the long term forecasts. Yesterday was our first frost date for the area, but it continues to look like we are not going to have any frost here, for a while. Of course, the forecast constantly fluctuates, and different sources have different forecasts. My Weather Network app has a 14 day forecast, and with today being the 11th, that puts the 14 day trend between the 12th and the 25th. The lowest overnight temperatures I’m seeing is for the 25th, at 6C/43F, with variable cloudiness.
My Accuweather app, however, is very different. The long range forecast on that one goes up to October 5. Up until this morning, all the overnight lows were above freezing, but this morning, there is now a single night – the 25th – where it says we will hit -2C/28F. It is also predicting thunder showers scattered about the province in that day.
If that is accurate, we have only two weeks before frost hits (which is 2 weeks longer than average, so I’m not complaining!). If we do get a frost, that will be it for the tomatoes, squash, gourds and melons. We have no way to cover any of these beds, so if we get any frost warnings, we’ll just have to pick as much as we can the day before. We should get plenty of sunburst squash, but I’m really hoping the Pixie melons and winter squash ripen before then. The gourd and Crespo squash just don’t have enough time left. Except the Tennessee Dancing gourds. They are so small, we should have quite a few to gather before the frost hits. We may be lucky, though. Aside from that one night that one app is predicting will go below freezing, overnight temperatures are supposed to stay mild into October.
The sunflowers will be a lost cause, though. There is no way the seed heads will be able to mature in so short a time. So many haven’t even opened, yet. Starting some of them indoors would have made the difference (well… except for being eaten by deer), had they been under better conditions. Not just with the weather, but the soil quality where they are growing. Had our only reason for planting them been for the seeds, they would be a failure, but they were planted there partly for a privacy screen, partly for wind break, and mostly as part of our long term plans to prepare the area for when we plant food trees there. Which means we had a success with 3 out of the 4 reasons we planted them. I do want to get more of these seeds to try them again, elsewhere.
For now, every night we have without frost is a help.
Not my usual feline cuddle partner, so I was really enjoying the snuggles.
Hard to believe this was a yard kitten that wouldn’t let us anywhere near her for the longest time! She still has some of her more feral habits, though, as you can tell by the scratches on her nose! This is a girl that stands her ground. :-D
I was just heading back into the house after a quick version of my morning rounds, when I realized I was being watched.
The Potato Beetle was all tucked in!
For those who are new to this blog (welcome!), one of the things we did to help the yard cats over the winter, was create shelters in the bottom two shelves of a shelf we’d removed from upstairs while cleaning out my parents’ stuff. This remarkably heavy shelf was left outside the sun room until we could figure out where to haul it for storage, since the shed we’ve been using to hold all my parents’ stuff is now full. It ended up being so handy where it was, we left it.
The cats liked it, too.
Last winter, I used rigid insulation to create little cat caves in the bottom two shelves, and even left a cardboard box in one for an extra cozy little space. The cats love it, and one of their favourite things to do is just sit in the opening, watching the world go by. :-)
Speaking of shelter, when I came out this morning, I saw at least two kittens were inside the cat’s house. They are starting to come together into one big litter, rather than three little ones! :-) With the cooler nights, I’m glad they have discovered the cat shelter as a warm place to sleep.
I also found another sign of our changing seasons.
It looks like a squirrel has been building up a cache of pine cones for the winter! Usually, they do that in log piles or whatever, not at the bottom of a tree like this, but I think their usual places are now occupied by other critters! ;-)
On a less pleasant note, today was our teleconference court date for the civil suit our vandal filed against me, in retaliation for my applying for a restraining order against him. It was nothing but a call to set a trial date.
At the end of January, 2022.
*sigh*
Apparently, he is now going to have four witnesses, and asked about how to submit things like pictures. Which is pretty pointless, since he’s suing me over stuff I don’t claim ownership of. It’s vexatious litigation, plain and simple.
After the call was done, I tried the court office again about the status of our restraining order, and finally got through. Last month, my application was put on hold as our vandal agreed to undergo a psychiatric assessment, so this month’s court date was just to follow up on that, and the judge said I didn’t need to be there. That was a week ago. When I explained this to the clerk, she was surprised I was told I didn’t need to be there, and I had to explain several times that it was the judge that told me that.
She was able to look up the file and let me know that it was remitted to next month. (These court dates are always on the first Friday of the month, I notice.) There was no information on file to explain why it was remitted. My guess? He wasn’t able to see a psychiatrist within the time frame. Either way, I plan to be there for the next court date, so I can at least hear for myself, what’s going on.
I first filed for a restraining order in October of last year, and our vandal filed his civil suit against me a few weeks later. Thanks to all the restrictions and shut downs, nothing has been resolved in almost a year. About the only good thing is that he has a criminal lawyer defending him about the restraining order, and I think the lawyer is keeping him on a short leash. I haven’t seen him on the trail cams for a while, other than occasionally driving by in one of his many vehicles, or on his quad. As for the civil suit, he was representing himself on the call. While the trial date was being set, he said he would have four witnesses – previously, he’d said he would have three. To what, I have no idea. He also asked about how to submit things like photos. Again, I don’t see what he’s trying to gain, here. I don’t claim ownership of any of this stuff (most of which is junk, anyhow). Plus, in my response, I included an email I’d sent where I told him he could take the stuff he could provide proof of ownership of, like a bill of sale or a receipt. He had his chance, and he didn’t take it. This is all just a waste of the courts’ time.
Part of the frustration is things like today. It seems these court dates do nothing but book new court dates. It just keeps getting pushed forward, and nothing gets resolved.
No wonder our court system is so backlogged, even without courtrooms being shut down due to government restrictions. :-/
Okay, before I get into it, I just have to share a laugh.
The phone rang just as I was about to start this post. It was clearly from a call centre, from the noise I heard in the background. After the usual greetings, the very polite person told me he was calling about our Visa or Mastercard… provider? I can’t remember the exact word he used.
Of course, I found this incredibly funny and started laughing.
I don’t have a credit card.
Too funny!
Anyhow.
While doing my rounds through the garden this morning, I found some new growth happening.
After seeing flowers for a while, now, there is finally an Ozark Nest Egg gourd starting to form! This is the first female flower I’ve seen. Hopefully, it has been pollinated and the new baby gourd will actually keep growing.
Meanwhile, among the sweet corn, I found…
… our very first green pea pod!
These peas were planted among the corn, late in the season, for their nitrogen fixing qualities, but peas are a cool weather plant, so we might actually have a decent amount to harvest before our growing season is done.
Looking at the long range forecasts, our overnight temperatures should be cool, but it’s not until October that we’re looking at temperatures just above freezing. If that holds out, that means our garden has another 20 days or so for things to grow. The beets and the surviving carrots can stay in the ground until it freezes, if we wanted to leave them. The few chard that made it are doing quite well, though I don’t think the radishes will have a chance to reach their pod stage. If they’d been planted for their roots, we’d have a whole three radishes to pick, but none of them seem to be growing into full sized plants. The lettuce that was planted for a fall crop is just reaching a size worth harvesting baby leaves while thinning things out a bit. The seeds were well spaced to begin with, so not a lot of thinning is needed.
It’s new growth like the Ozark Nest Egg gourds, the sunflowers that have not yet opened their seed heads, and the new squash and melons that I am hoping the weather holds off for. The Halona melons have been ripening nicely, and there aren’t a lot left on the vines, but there are still lots of Pixie melons. I picked the one melon to taste test, before it was fully ripe, and have just been waiting on the rest to reach that point where they will fall off their vines. It seems to be taking an oddly long time! There are a lot of little Red Kuri squash that just won’t have time to fully mature before the cold sets in, but I hope the Teddy squash will have time to mature. They are so small, they should be able to.
A lot of people on my gardening groups have already brought their green tomatoes in to ripen indoors. With our tiny indeterminate varieties of tomatoes, I don’t know that we’ll bother. We have ripe tomatoes to pick every two or three days, and that is working out quite well.
On the down side, while I’m glad I was able to finish the extensive mowing around the inner and outer yards, by the time I was done, I was in massive pain. Especially my hips, where I have bone spurs. I’m still in a lot of pain today, so that limits what I am physically able to get done outside, as far as manual labour goes. The temperatures are supposed to remain pleasantly cool for the next while; perfect temperatures to get caught up on the heavy work outside.
A little while ago, I posted a photo of a mystery critter hole we found by the outhouse.
The small size and lack of a mound of soil had me wondering what critter made this. My husband suggested that it was a back door for the groundhog den. I didn’t think so, since it was so far away from the nearest den, and the grogs are bigger than the hole.
Today, while walking to the garage, I spotted a grog by the outhouse. Curious, I walked towards it and, sure enough, the big bugger actually managed to squeeze into that hole and disappeared! It really is a back door!
Thanks to my brother McGyvering a fix on the push mower, I was able to get all the mowing done in the inner and outer yards.
All of it.
I even managed to mow a lane to the back gate.
When my daughters got back from running some errands for me, one of them was a sweetheart and remembered to grab the can of orange spray paint and marked the yard hazards for me.
I kept forgetting! There’s several rocks, plus some roots and the remains of a tree stump that seem to be lifting higher every year. The rocks, I except, but I’m surprised by the roots and stump.
She even marked the grog hole! :-D
To give an idea of how far away from the den opening this is, I was standing roughly parallel to the grog back door when I took the previous photo of the yard. The main entry to the groundhog den is way in the background, on the right, where the orange tarp is covering the pile of wood they made their den under. I’d estimate the distance is about 80-90 feet between them.
Which means they’ve dug tunnels right under our garden beds.
While doing my rounds this morning, I decided it was time to do some pruning and clean up around the squash and melons.
With the summer squash, I cut away a lot of the bottom leaves, and anything dead or dying. The zucchini didn’t really need it, but the sunburst squash needed quite a bit.
Noting for next year: while I am happy with training the summer squash to grow vertically, and will probably do it again next year, I now know to make extra certain the support poles are more secure. I thought they were, but as you can see in about the middle of the squash bed, one of them has fallen right over under the weight of the squash attached to it – and I’d already added a second support pole with it! The zucchini on the far right of the photo is also tippy.
We are in a strange sort of state right now, where the squash and melons are continuing to bloom and produce, recovering for the extreme heat and dryness over the summer, but also dying off as they reach the end of their growing season. A couple of Halona melon plants were completely died off and got taken out. The single melon on the ground ground had come loose from one of those.
The three biggest Red Kuri squash are coming along nicely. The mottled green one is quite noticeably bigger. With the colours and slightly different shape, I find myself wondering if it got cross pollinated with one of the nearby Teddy squash.
Speaking of which…
There’s a new one! Of the two plants, one of them now has four squash developing on it. :-)
After I finished pruning the squash and melons, I went through the other beds, doing a bit of cleanup, and found this.
We’ve somehow lost a sunflower!
It doesn’t even look like it was bitten – there is no sign of critter damage anywhere. It looks almost as if it were cut! It’s also in the middle of a row, in the middle of a sunflower block.
Very strange.
I took the seed head inside and put it in a very small bowl, shallow enough for the barely-there stem to reach the water. :-)
As I was finishing up in the garden, the grader went by on the road, and the driver stopped to talk to me. He let me know that he’d seen a black bear – a big male – on our quarter section, and he thought it was heading for the newly dug out gravel pit for water. He’d actually seen 7 bears, just today! The most he’d ever seen in one day – and it wasn’t even 11:00 yet, at the time I talked to him. He suggested we might want to pick up an air horn to carry with us, so if we see a bear, we can use the noise to scare it off.
One of our neighbours, about a mile away, has been posting photos of a bear that’s been raiding – and destroying – his bird feeders. I would not be expecting any to come to our feeding station, though. With both bird feeders broken, I’ve just been tossing a scoop of seeds directly on the ground, so there’s not a lot to tempt them. Especially since we have zero saskatoons and chokecherries this year, and almost no crab apples, thanks to that one cold night in May. Even the ornamental apples in the old kitchen garden, which would normally be full of tiny bunches of apples, and birds eating them, have nothing. No hawthorn berries, either. Between the drought and the wildfires, this loss of berries would be quite widespread, and the bears are starving at a time they should be building up their fat reserves for the winter.
I really appreciated the grader driver stopping to let me know. I have never seen a bear in our yard, but this is not a normal year, so we will have to keep our eyes open!
The Re-Farmer 