Month: April 2022

Our 2022 garden: potting up

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Today, I went through the mini-greenhouse to see what might need to be potted up.

It turned out that there wasn’t anything that wasn’t already potted up. However, almost all the Cup of Moldova tomatoes are getting too big for the shelves! They are certainly doing well, after the thinning and addition of more soil along their stems. Over the next day or two, these need to be moved into the sun room, just for the space.

At the furthest end of the large aquarium greenhouse, you can see the two, out of three, Crespo squash that got potted up. The third smaller one in between the bigger ones had actually been thinned out of another pot, and is going quite well. In the foreground are a pair of Canteen gourds that had shared a small pot. For some reason, when I moved these out of the mini-greenhouse, because a tendril had started to wrap itself around the shelf above, I thought they were luffa. The writing on the labels had started to fade, so I fixed that.

It took some juggling to get the bigger pots to fit into the space. They definitely need to go into the sun room soon, too!

Meanwhile, on the heat mat…

The Red Baron bunching onions are coming up nicely. I’m looking forward to these. Still nothing among the ground cherry, though.

As I write this, we are at -2C/28F, which is warmer than forecast. Warm enough that any expose ground or concrete is thawing out and melting the snow around it in the sun. We’re still supposed to reach a low of -13C/9F overnight tonight, and tomorrow we’re supposed to warm up to -2C/28F, but get more snow. Depending on what app I look at, we’re either going to get isolated flurries, or snow all day for a total of 2-4cm, or about 1/2 – 1 1/2 inches. Either way, it won’t be enough to cause problems with driving my mother to my brother’s, to meet her new great grandson. :-)

After that, we’re supposed to had daytime highs hovering a few degrees above freezing for the next while. One of my apps has a 28 day long range forecast and, according to that, we won’t start hitting 10C/50F until May. Our last frost date is June 2, so that fits. Last year, May was an incredibly warm month. May long weekend is when a lot of people put their gardens in, only for many of them to lose almost everything to one cold night, just days later. Hopefully, we will not have anything like that again!

I am really looking forward to getting to work on the garden!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2022 Easter basket

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Today, we assembled our traditional Polish Easter basked and blessed it. If you wish to learn more about the symbolism of its contents, you may wish to visit this site. (link will open a new tab)

Over the years, we modified, dropped or added items with complementary symbolism. In the tiny jars, we have salt (traditional) red wine vinegar, mustard and olive oil (non-traditional). Normally, we’d have horseradish root, but ours is buried under snow, and we don’t use it enough to warrant a jar, however the mustard we chose this year has horseradish in it. The olives are non-traditional, and while eggs are traditional, this year we have pickled eggs, which is not. The bright yellow and white ones are the turmeric eggs we tried this year; the white spots are from being a tight fit in the jar! :-D The cheese, ham, sausage and bread are all traditional, as is the butter in a small glass. Usually, I put that in a small bowl with a cross made of cloves pressed into it, but it gets hard to fit the containers, so I melted some butter and poured it into a glass, instead. The one concession to a typical North American basket are the little chocolate eggs. The whole thing gets covered with a pretty cloth. I’ve got several hand embroidered, some antique, clothes I like to use. The one chosen for this year is actually under the basket as I took the picture. We skipped the sprigs of greenery because we usually just don’t have any fresh greenery around Easter.

Over the years, we’ve included prosciutto roses (in place of the traditional bacon), marzipan shaped into a lamb and flowers, a bottle of wine, a white candle, and fruit. An apple, grapes or figs would all by symbolically appropriate.

Normally, after the basket has been blessed, we’d put things away in the fridge until tomorrow, when it will be the basis of our Easter brunch. This year, however, it’s cold enough that we can put it all into the old kitchen, which is easily as cold as a fridge!

As I will be out for much of the day, I don’t know when I will have a chance to write a post. So I will take this moment to wish you all a happy and blessed Easter, from the Re-Farmer family to yours!

More digging, an injured cat and Easter preparations

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There weren’t a lot of cats out and about when I did my morning rounds, which was a bit of a surprise.

I only spotted seven at first! Then Potato Beetle showed up, wanting into the sun room, so I let him.

With a bit of concern. He seemed to be limping a bit.

With the new snow on the ground, I can’t get to some of the areas that I normally check as part of my rounds, so the necessities were finished quickly. I decided to take the time to dig out the burn barrel, since we’ll need to fire it up before things start melting away.

This area had been almost completely clear of snow before the storm. This is all new snow.

After digging out enough space to move around the barrel without getting too close while it’s lit, I also dug a path to the spare fire ring, and took the snow off the dry wood and kindling we have on the grate we use as a spark shield in the summer.

After a quick check of the roof, I dug out (almost literally) the roof snow shovel and used that to take as much snow off the sun room roof as I could. Hopefully, there won’t be too many leaks into the sun room when the rest of it melts.

While in the sun room, Potato Beetle came out of his warm spot on the bottom shelf, which is when I could see that yes, he was limping. A lot. He was avoiding putting weight on his front left leg at much as he could.

Damn.

I’ve called the vet and we now have an appointment for him for Wednesday at 7pm. They are now open 7 days a week, for extended hours. They are even open over Easter weekend, but are so booked, that was the earliest she could fit us in. She did put us on the cancellation list, just in case.

*sigh*

Hopefully, the funds set aside for my new glasses (which apparently won’t happen, since I’m not allowed to get an eye exam) will be enough cover it.

So that is set for Wednesday evening, then on Thursday, I have to go to court to deal with our vandal’s vexatious litigation against me that he filed, after I applied for the restraining order against him.

Hopefully, the judge will throw it out for the ridiculousness it is.

*sigh*

Well, until then, we will continue our Easter traditions. Today, we are assembling our basket. We’ve decided not to take it to the church for blessing, and will just bless it ourselves again. When my mother told me her church was doing it and what time, I talked about possibly bringing our basket in. She then launched into a long diatribe about how she hoped I wouldn’t bring that big, big basket I had the last time we were able to get our basket blessed. Apparently, in her mind, only small baskets are acceptable. No one has big baskets, so bringing a big basket is somehow uncivilized. Clearly, she forgets some of the big baskets people would bring to the church we used to go to when I was a kid. Ours could be considered small in comparison. Not to mention the ones with all the decorations hanging off the handles, and the bottles of win, etc. What she’s completely forgetting is why we do basket blessings in the first place. Instead, it’s become yet another thing to show off to other people, and judge other people for if they do it “wrong”. I don’t want her attitude to ruin one of our most symbolic and deeply meaningful traditions. When I called her last night and updated her on things (my nephew and his family were on the road at the time; they have since arrived safely!), she brought up getting her own basket ready, then asked if I’d be bringing ours. Phrased in such a way that she clearly thought I would not, and that the restrictions (there are none) were the reason.

Since I am driving my mother to my brother’s on Easter, the girls are staying home to celebrate it with my husband, with our traditional brunch, using foods from the basket.

I hope they remember to take pictures for me! :-D

The Re-Farmer

It’s a Wonder

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Before coming back inside, I remembered to check out the flower I spotted on the Wonderberry.

Such a pretty, tiny little thing!

Then I killed it. :-(

I pinched off all the flower buds that I could find, so the plant will put more energy into growing foliage. With no insects to pollinate them this early anyhow, blooming is just wasted energy for the plant. Hopefully, it will continue to do just fine until we can plant it outside.

The sunroom was about 16C/61F at the time I did this! That’s over 20 degrees Celsius warmer than outside! If the temperatures didn’t drop down to about 3C/37F overnight in there, all our seedlings would be set up in the sun room right now. I’m hoping, as things warm up over the next few days, we’ll finally be able to start doing that. After Easter, we’ll be starting the seeds that need to be started at 6 weeks before last frost. That will be the Kulli corn and the remaining tomato varieties; yellow pear and Chocolate Cherry. We have a very few Spoon tomato seeds left. Maybe we’ll finish those off, too.

It’s the four week seed starts that are going to need the most space. These include:
– the remaining gourds we’ll be doing this year (Yakteen and Apple)
– all the summer squash (Endeavor green zucchini, Goldy yellow zucchini, Madga, Sunburst yellow pattypan and G Star green pattypan)
– and pumpkin, including three types of hulless seed pumpkins (Styrian, Kakai and Lady Godiva), the Baby Pam from last year that didn’t germinate at all, but I hope will work if we scarify the seeds first, plus some giant pumpkin seeds that were given away for free that I’d like to try.
– all the winter squash (Little Gem/Kuri and Teddy from last year, Georgia Candy Roaster, Winter Sweet and Boston Marrow)
– all the melons (Halona and Pixie, from saved seeds, Kaho watermelon and Zucca, plus some seeds saved from grocery store melons we liked)
– cucumber (Eureka)

These are all things we do want to plant quite a bit of each type, since they are being grown more for preserving than for fresh eating. Except the melon. We might freeze or pickle some, but mostly, we’ll be eating those fresh, and I can hardly wait!

We’re also going to be using many of the squash in particular to reclaim portions of the old garden area. Anything that is doesn’t need to be trellised, or their fruit is too big to trellis, we’ll take advantage of their spreading habits and large leaves to shade out the weeds beyond the hills and mulch we’ll be planting them in.

After that, we’ve got the stuff we’ll be direct sowing, some of which can be started before last frost. We’ve got 4 types of turnip (I ordered 2, but got 2 more as freebies), 2 types of bread poppies, strawberry spinach, I think 2 types of beets this year, 3 types of pole beans, including 1 shelling type, 2 types of bush beans left over from last year, 2 types of peas, 4 types of carrots, 2 more types of corn, including a popcorn, 3 types of radishes, which I still want to grow for their pods, not their roots, 3 types of spinach from last year, 4 types of lettuce from last year, and 2 types of chard from last year. Then there’s the stuff that will be shipped when it’s time to plant, including 3 types of potatoes, sunchokes and sweet potato slips.

I don’t know where we’re going to plant a lot of this. We do have a general sort of map set out. Quite a few things will be planted in temporary beds to help prepare the soil for future plans, and some things will be interplanted with others, so they’ll be sharing beds. We will likely need to build more temporary trellises, too. In the end, though, we’re still figuring things out, so we have no fixed plans. Almost everything is going to have to be flexible.

Getting this all in is going to be a wonder in itself!

The Re-Farmer

We’re clear!!

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I am just so thrilled right now!

I was literally about to get my boots on to go outside and see if I could do some snow blowing, when I glanced at the live feed for the garage cam, and saw a lane down our driveway.

Our driveway was being cleared!

The renters, God Bless them, had sent someone over to do our driveway for us.

I came out and watched for awhile, as he piled more and more snow over the big branch pile that needs to be chipped. I knew it would be a lot of work to clear the driveway with our little electric snowblower, and we would have been able to clear just enough to drive through. Seeing how much snow he was pushing made me realize we probably could not have done it. Little Spewie could not have handled that much snow. Oh, we probably could have made a few passes, but would probably have been tripping the power bar the extension cord is plugged into, repeatedly. It’s something that happens when the snow it too much for it. Chances are, we would have burned the little thing out, if we pushed to get the job done.

After clearing the snow, he pushed a lane over to where I was standing by the gate, and we chatted a bit. Of course, I thanked him profusely.

That was just so incredibly thoughtful of them. And they would have had no idea how much it meant for us. It means that, for sure, I will be able to drive my mother out to meet her new great-grandson, on Easter.

That is a LOT of snow!

And yet, it’s warm enough that there’s still water in that low spot along the fence line.

He even turned around and cleared as close as he could to the garage doors. All I needed to do was get that last bit out.

Which I did right away.

What didn’t get done was clearing a path to the burn barrel. My daughters did the cat litter and dumped the sawdust litter into the burn barrel while I was clearing snow. They had a hard time getting to the barrel!

After I cleaned the doors and made sure I could open the swing doors all the way, I checked on the van, because I could see garbage under the door. We never made it to the dump, and I had to take the bags out of the van to run errands, leaving them on top of things to keep them up off the ground.

Unfortunately, critters still got to them. Pretty much ever single garbage bag was pulled down and torn to shreds, with garbage strewn all on the one side of the garage, and under the van.

*sigh*

In the time it took me to clean up the mess, using a garden hoe to pull as much as I could see/reach out from under the van – then moving the van to get what I missed – the ground I’d cleared in front of the garage had started to thaw! It’s -7C/19F with a wind chill of -16C/3F out there, but the winds are from the north right now, and the south facing garage was quite warm. In fact, when my daughters came outside with the litter, or to bring things I needed, they didn’t even bother putting on coats.

The next couple of days are supposed to be just below freezing, then for the rest of the week it’s supposed to be just above freezing, with even possible light rain at the end of the week, before things start o warm up again. It’s going to be that slow melt that we need, in order to keep all this wonderful moisture right here, instead of flooding and washing out all the way to the lake.

I’m just so happy right now! We have such wonderful neighbours.

The Re-Farmer

That’s just deep, Man!

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Well, relatively speaking.

Still, the snow is deep enough that the deer were struggling to get through. They were very happy to find the paths we’ve dug!

I spotted about 11 outside cats this morning. Potato Beetle came out of the sun room when I went out to make sure the deer coming into the yard weren’t going for the kibble. He happily went back in when I finished my morning rounds.

After feeding the critters, I started to do a bit of shoveling on the main paths. While clearing in front of the sun room, I accidentally caught the shovel on something, making a loud noise, startling the cats in the kibble house. There was an explosion of cats as they all ran off.

Except Ghost Baby, who took advantage of the situation, planted herself in a kibble tray and kept on eating!

That is so completely the opposite of how she has been in the past. Before, if you so much as looked directly at her, she’d ghost away. I think she’s finally learning that it’s safe to eat while we’re around.

One of the potential plans for the day was to take little Spewie out and start clearing the driveway. I’m not so sure if that’s happen, though. It’s going to be another chilly day, but it’s more an issue of wind. Things are supposed to be calmer tomorrow, but also warmer, which means the snow blower is more likely to struggle with the snow. *sigh* Still, it needs to get done.

I’ve heard from my brother that my nephew and his family are still making the drive out. The highways are open all along their route, so they’re going for it. I do wish they’d just cancelled. He is confident in making the drive, though. They should arrive late tonight. I figure, if they are willing to make the trip, the least we can do is clear our driveway so that I can drive my mother out to meet her newest great-grandbaby!

Whether the snow blowing happens today or tomorrow, when that’s not being worked on, we’ll be going through the seedlings. Some of them, like the Crespo squash and the second planting of Wonderberry, are outgrowing their starter pots. I picked up larger versions of the pots that can be just buried in the ground when it’s time to transplant, so we’ll be able to pot them up with little to no root disturbance. We might have some space issues, not just for the bigger pots, but their heights. Looking at the long and short range forecasts, though, we should be able to start putting more pots in the sun room. How well the one Wonderberry plant is doing is quite encouraging. It makes me wonder if the thermometer on the wall is reading on the cold side. It’s right against the wall, and one of the window’s it is above lost its inner pane before we ever moved here, so it might be reading temperatures that don’t reflect other parts of the room.

Oh, I totally forgot to take a picture! I’ll have to go back later. The Wonderberry in the sun room has actually started to bloom! With the sun room being so much cooler than inside the mini-greenhouse, I’d thought it would slow down in growth, but it seems to be quite enjoying the condition in the sun room, and thriving!

I’m not sure if it’s a good thing or not, for a Wonderberry to be blooming already. We won’t be able to transplant it outside for at least another month! There are no pollinators for it. Which means I should probably prune the flower buds off, so its growth can focus on foliage.

Not until I’ve taken a picture of the pretty white flowers. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Like Mother, Like Daughter

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Don’t let those sweet faces and adorable loaf shapes deceive you!

These two buggers can be real beeeyotches! Especially to each other! One moment, they’ll be all sweet and cuddly, the next, they’re picking fights.

We love them anyway.

The Re-Farmer

Recommended: RoseRed Homestead – That “Woman with a gadget”

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Welcome to my second “Recommended” series. Here, you’ll find various sites and channels that I’ve been enjoying and wanted to share with you. With so many people currently looking to find ways to be more self sufficient or prepared for emergencies, that will be the focus for most of these, but I’ll also be adding a few that are just plain fun. Please feel free to leave a comment or make your own recommendation. I hope you enjoy these!

Over the past few years, I’ve seen quite a rise in people interested in leading more self sufficient lives, and especially a rise in the “homesteading” area. Which kind of threw me when I first stumbled on the community, since that was how I grew up, and no one called it “homesteading” back then.

There are now many, many websites, video channels, Pinterest boards, social media groups and even streaming services, dedicated to the them. On many of these, you’ll see references to “going back to how Grandma used to live”. Many extol the virtues of living a “simpler” life, going “off grid” and low tech. They’re learning how to grow gardens, raise animals, and preserve the bounty, moving away from certain materials, whether it’s plastics or hydrocarbon based fuels, or away from certain types of companies, like big box stores or massive online shopping services, like Amazon. The goal is to be more “green”, “sustainable”, etc. Just like “Grandma” used to live.

Now, these are laudable goals. I share many of them. But here’s the thing.

That’s not how “Grandma” used to live.

I mean, yes, most of those things were true, but they are true only from today’s perspective. In reality, whenever possible, “Grandma” embraced new technology, new materials, and resources. Canning wasn’t possible until it became cheap and easy to get standard sized jars, lids and rings. Techniques such as fermenting, brining, drying, smoking – these all were continually improved as new equipment and materials came available. Anything that made life easier, made it faster and safer to preserve food, or acquire material goods, was embraced.

Grandma was as high tech as she could afford to be.

When I stumbled on the RoseRed Homestead YouTube channel, one of my first thoughts was, THIS is Grandma. Our previous generations would have absolutely embraced all of the gadgets, if they could, and if they couldn’t, they found workarounds.

I’ll quote this from their About page.

We focus on three simple themes: Emergency Preparedness, Food Security, and Self Reliance. If difficult times are coming, we want to help our channel community be as ready as possible to sustain themselves for an extended period of time and to assist others when possible. You will find videos on safe canning, dehydrating, freeze drying, gardening, and preparedness projects from safe water storage to cooking off grid. We have even done scientific testing of new electric canners with a special “gadget!”

This channel has only been around since the spring of 2019, but is well filled with some really amazing and useful videos – and now they have a new website, too.

It’s really, really hard to pick just a few videos as examples, there are so many fantastic ones.

One of the things I love about this channel is their thorough experiments and comparisons. So surprise that Rose works in Science Education! This is one excellent example.

Here she preserves potatoes by various methods, including freeze drying – yes, she has a freeze dryer! Those things are expensive! – then reconstituting, tasting and comparing the final product.

Interested in pressure canning? Confused with all the information out there? Check this out.

Great information, but I’m also blown away by the gadgets sitting on her counter. :-D

Want to learn about dehydrating? She’s got you covered.

As someone who is interesting in grinding our own flour, I found this one quite useful.

Gotta love that 40 yr old mill she’s got!

In this next one, she tests out a “survival soup” recipe.

There is some great information on that one. In the “emergency preparedness” and “survival” areas, there are a lot of claims made, so it’s great to see some of them being tested out in such a methodical way.

Like this other one.

Here, she shows her off-grid kitchen gadgets – and how her back ups have backups!

It’s not all high tech, though. Here, she makes and demonstrates a home made solar cooker.

Then, when people commented about her many, expensive gadgets and asked if she could talk about some low tech options, she responded with this.

I look forward to her follow up videos on this!

This is just a sampling of videos covering a broad range, and I didn’t even touch all of the topics she covers.

This channel is an absolute gold mind, and I highly recommend checking out their videos, and learn how “Grandma” does things to live a self-sufficient, prepared lifestyle!

The Re-Farmer

Recommended Reboot

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It occurred to me that it’s been about 2 years since I added to my Recommended series of posts. I’ve found many more great resources to add to the list, so for the next while, I’ll be making a new series of posts to add to the list. Given the circumstances, most of them will be in some way related to self sufficiency, homesteading, etc., but I’ll also include a few that are just fun.

Last year, I posted these once a week, but even paring things down quite a bit, there’s still quite a few I’d like to share with you, so I’ll probably be making them twice a week, this time.

Feel free to recommend a few of your favourite resources in the comments, too.

I hope you enjoy them and look forward to hearing your thoughts about them.

The Re-Farmer

More digging, and I’m a suck

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We got a break in the snow, so I went outside to do some more digging. All the paths I dug this morning, plus what my daughter dug out, had to be redone, as they were already filling with snow and, in a couple of places, were drifted over.

The main goal was to be able to get to the garage.

Unfortunately, right in front of the garage is where it tends to build up with extra snow blown off the roof.

And I needed to dig out the far set of doors.

Which I did. Both doors can be fully opened, to access the equipment inside.

Which is basically little Spewie. My thoughts of trying to fire up the old gas power snow blower disappeared rather quickly. Since it wasn’t working, it got shifted to the back and never got shifted forward for the winter, so it is blocked by the push mowers, the broken riding mower, the chipper, and little Spewie.

Which I won’t break out until tomorrow. That little thing takes a long time to do the job, partly due to the small size and partly due to having to drag 200 ft of extension cord behind me, to be able to reach the road.

That thing was made to clear things like short sidewalks, not entire country driveways! :-D Still, it does the job quite well, and sure beats trying to manually dig out the driveway. Thank God our driveway isn’t very long!

I didn’t realize until I was inside, that I forgot to get a picture of the main sidewalk, so I took this photo from inside the house.

Yes, the snow was coming down again by then!

To get this photo, I opened the inner door of the main entry, reminding myself of why we don’t use that door anymore. I’d really hoped my fix would last longer (if you’re new to the blog, you can read about how that was done here, here and here), but I’m not bothering to take off the hinges to find out what happened. The entire door and frame needs to be replaced, so there’s no point in trying to fix it again.

Meanwhile…

I am a total suck when it comes to the cats.

When I first headed out this morning, Potato Beetle managed to dash into the sun room when I opened the door. I left the doors partly open so he could come out and have some food once I cleared the kibble house. He didn’t come out, so I left a bit of food for him in the sun room.

I came back later to check and didn’t see him, but I did startle Rolando Moon off of my husband’s walker seat. :-D

It’s a very comfortable seat.

Thinking Potato Beetle was out, I closed up the doors, since we’ve got plants in there and I didn’t want it to get too cold, then continued digging. Coming back in later, I found him tucked in a corner under the swing bench. So I left him be, and made sure he had food and water.

When my daughter went outside to dig some more, I checked the sun room again. I thought he went outside after her, only to catch a glimpse of him.

He was in the plant shelf.

On the tray under the small light fixture that we’re using as a minor heat source for the plants above. He was actually wrapped around the fixture!

Every now and then, I’d check on him to see if he was ready to go out. After a while, he moved away from the fixture, but still next to it. When I went out to dig again, I found him one shelf down.

He is absolutely content in there.

So I made sure his food and water was topped up, then dragged out the extra litter box and put some litter in it. And made sure the box bed with the pillow in it was handy. He can stay in there all night, if he wants to.

Because I am a total suck for the cats.

Oh, yeah… while digging out the snow that drifted around the kibble house again, I also dug out the cat path to the storage house, too, so it’ll be easier for the cats to get to and from the kibble house.

Did I mention I’m a suck for the cats?

Yeah. I totally am.

The Re-Farmer