While doing my evening rounds this morning, I spotted the first tassels on the kulli corn!
I got this picture by standing with my arms up as high as I could reach. I did not zoom in at all. I think at least a couple of the kulli corn have reached their 8′ potential height!
Still no signs of silks, though.
Going through the garden beds with one of my daughters later on, we were looking at the sweet corn, which has lots of tassels, and the popcorn. The little bitty Tom Thumb popcorn plants are not only showing lots of tassels, but I actually spotted some silks in one of them! The doubt the plant it was on was even a foot high. They only need 60 days to maturity, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, except for how drowned out they got this spring.
When checking the tomatoes in the main garden area, I was noticing some were looking like they were about to crack, and I think some were even missing. So we decided to harvest the most ripe ones. Yes, we’ve picked a few tomatoes here and there already, but this is our first real harvest of them!
The Cup of Moldova are on the right, Sophie’s Choice on the left. There are still plenty more on the vines that are completely green, or just starting to blush.
My daughter found a couple really ripe ones that were so small, they would have fallen through the holes in the containers we were using. Pocket tomatoes! 😄
Once inside, they got nestled into shredded paper. With so much less of the Sophie’s Choice tomatoes, they got transferred to a smaller bin.
They can now sit in the relative cool and indirect light of the old kitchen to finish ripening, safe from cats!
The girls will be prepping the kitchen and dining table for when we’re ready to start canning the tomatoes. Hopefully, they’ll find my small batch canning recipe book in the process. It’s bugging me, now that I can’t find it! I know where it should be, but it isn’t there!
We talked about pickling the beans I picked this morning, with the recipe from another book I found for that, but they might just blanch and freeze them, instead. It depends on how things go for them tonight. My older daughter has commissions to work on, of course, so most of that job will be falling on my younger daughter.
Today has been a very fruitful day out of the garden, and with so many setbacks this year, I am incredibly grateful.
Yesterday, I fixed up the mesh covered beds with the fall spinach, making sure to peg down the sides of the netting so the kittens couldn’t get under.
This morning…
Well… they didn’t get under it.
*sigh*
When I came out, there were kittens sitting on the mesh, looking at me.
I took this photo after I’d taken out all the pegs. The mesh needed more support, but I don’t have any more of the metal stakes I used to slide the hoops over.
What I did still have were some pieces from the canopy tent a piece of tree had fallen on last year. Most of the pieces from the dismantled frame are being used around various garden beds, but there were two longer pieces that had snapped near their middles that were still around, leaving me with four lengths with one rough end.
So I stuck them in the spaces between the hoops, broken ends into the soil, thinking maybe I could lash or zip tie hoops to them. Which wouldn’t be very stable, but as I pushed the pieces into the soil, I remembered that they all have screw holes at the ends. I’ve been using those holes to threat twine through.
So that’s what I did. After lashing the bamboo poles back across the hoops, I began stringing twine through and across the metal pieces, the hoops and the poles.
With kittens rolling around, playing in the netting, rolling across the bed, and generally getting underfoot.
I could see that some spinach from the first sowing had started to germinate, and the seedlings are all flattened.
*sigh*
Well, at least the netting has enough support to keep it from collapsing.
For now.
As I was cleaning up and about to put things away, something odd in the path caught my eye.
This was just sitting in the dirt in the path.
It wasn’t there yesterday.
It is not ours. The girls and I don’t have anything like this. Which means it is probably something that was left among my parents’ stuff, though I don’t recall ever seeing it before. Where it came from and how it got into the path of the old kitchen garden is a mystery!
I was able to do some harvesting this morning, while checking on the garden.
This is a beautiful Ozark Nest Egg gourd! From what I can see so far, we’ll have about 4 of them, plus there was a female flower I found that I hand pollinated.
I was able to hand pollinate quite a few summer squash, too. I did see bees out and about, but while the male flowers were open, the female flowers had already closed.
This tiny Baby Pam pumpkin is the most ripe of them all – plus there was another female flower that I could hand pollinate, too.
The smaller of the two giant pumpkins had a growth spurt. It also has developed a wonky shape!
I was very happy with this morning’s harvest
We are still getting yellow bush beans. The purple beans are getting very prolific, and the green pole beans are kicking in, too. (The green bush beans under the sweet corn are starting to show tiny pods, too.) We actually have enough beans that we could probably can some pin sized jars. I’d love to do some pickled beans!
Speaking of pickles, we even have enough cucumbers altogether to do some pickles, too – also in pint sized jars.
There are just a few peas ripe enough to pick, but more are growing. I thinned out more of the carrots, and grabbed a couple of small onions for today’s use. I found a whole three ground cherries that were ripe enough, they fell off their plants.
We also have our first picking of sunburst pattypan squash. I normally would not have picked them this small, but they don’t seem to be getting any bigger, before they start withering away. Hopefully, picking these will encourage more growth, and the hand pollinating I was able to do will help, too.
My daughters have been doing the processing at night, when things are cooler. They should be able to do the pickling, if we have all the ingredients we need. My recipe book for small batch canning seems to have disappeared, though, so I can’t double check to see if we are missing ingredients. I have other recipes, though, and of course we can look online.
I’m just excited to finally have quantities sufficient to even think of canning instead of freezing.
I had just put kibble out this morning, and was continuing my rounds when I saw something very unexpected.
New kittens had emerged from the junk pile!
There are actually 4 of them. I saw a dark shadow of a kitten behind the chain link fence.
This was the first one I saw, as I startled it and it ran away from the kibble tray under the shrine.
These two were eating voraciously. One ran off as I came closer, but the other – the one on the left – did not. I was able to reach out and pick it up! It took about half a minute before it realized something was weird and it started to hiss and wriggle. I managed to give it a few pets before gently putting it back with the food.
I think it’s safe to say that these two are Sad Face’s babies.
In the wee hours of the morning, I went in the bathroom and must have made a startling noise. Outside the window, I heard some scrambling, and the sound of a bin hitting the floor.
I found these guys.
There are three of them. They stayed frozen like this while I did some clean up. The bin did not spill, thankfully, and is now stored in the old kitchen.
I picked up just enough to make a clear path to the door. While I was working, one squeezed its way up to the next shelf and hid behind some stuff. The other two eventually pushed behind the bird seed bin to the corner by the window, and froze there.
I left the doors wide open and the lights on after I cleaned up as much as I needed to – with kittens under foot the whole time! The kittens and raccoons don’t seem to have any issues with each other. Hopefully, it will stay that way, and raccoons sometimes kill cats.
Considering how we have the doors rigged, I’m amazed that these big buggers managed to squeeze through. They’re set up so that, while a critter is pushing through the gap in one door, the other door gets pulled more closed. The gap is just big enough for a kitten. An adult cat would have to squeeze through.
A big, roly poly trash panda would have more problems getting in, to be sure, but get in they did!
They made no effort to get at the sunflower seeds in the other bin, though we do see them eating them where we put them for the birds. Hopefully, with the kibble bin no longer in the sun room, they will have no reason to come back.
With all the rain we’ve been having lately, the garden is loving it. Who would think, after all that flooding in the spring, that would even be an issue?
The Red Kuri winter squash is doing so well, and starting to turn colour. We have a little more than 3 weeks before our average first frost. We may just have enough time for these to fully ripen.
The other squash are blooming and growing like they should have, in the spring. I’m still holding out for a long, mild fall so we can at least get summer squash, if not more winter squash!
The variety of sweet corn we have is not particularly tall, but these are still quite a bit shorter than they should be – but they are putting out tassels, which means we should be seeing silks, soon too. Even the Tom Thumb popcorn is perking up. Those only grow to about 2 ft high, and some of them are almost there. They are sending out tassels, too. Their cobs only grow a few inches long.
We might actually have corn this year!
This is my big surprise. The tiny, barely making it, eggplants are blooming, too! Well. One of them is. I thought these ones were a complete loss. They probably still are, but one can hope!
The paste tomatoes are really starting to turn nice and red. We’re at the point where I’m wondering if I should start harvesting most of them and letting them finish ripening inside. Less chance of critters getting to them before we do, but then we’d have to find ways to keep the inside cats out of them.
I’ll be harvesting more tomorrow. It’s still mostly beans, but I should be able to pick a fair number of cucumbers, too. We don’t have enough to warrant trying to pickle them, but enough to make some cucumber salads! It’s the same with the beans. There’s more than we can eat in a day or two, but not enough to make it worthwhile to break out the canner. One of my daughters has just been blanching and freezing the excess for now. It’ll be when we do the tomatoes that we’ll finally get into some serious processing. 😊
What a mix of things doing well, things failing, and things struggling in the garden this year.
I think we can safely assume this tortie is a Broccoli baby. I’m starting to see it slightly more often, though still not as much as Broccoli Baby! 😁
It’s hard to say, but it’s possible that Broccoli’s kittens are actually the oldest ones. I seem to recall seeing her showing up at the kibble house looking not-pregnant, before I discovered Junk Pile’s kittens in the cat’s house. The difference in ages would be less than a week, I think.
My morning started out pretty sh***y. Literally. While sitting on my bedside, I spotted something that looked wrong in an empty shelf. I have a wall that’s almost completely covered with salvaged shelfing. Parts of it has blocked by my craft table, so they shelves there are empty. The cats like to use them to sleep in, but this one shelf at floor level, we’ve had problems with Nosencrantz using it to poop in, instead of the litter box. It’s hard to see under there. When I discovered this had happened, one of my daughters had to crawl under the table to clean it up for me – I physically cannot get at it.
Well, it had happened again.
That shelf is now cleaned up and blocked off with a box. The cats have lost one of their napping places.
While my daughter worked on that, I went to head outside to do my morning rounds.
I found this.
The sun room was completely torn apart. I took this picture after picking up the kibble bin, which had been pulled right out of its shelf. Thankfully, the lid mostly stayed on and very little had spilled out. Stuff had been knocked off the shelf above the kibble bin, and it looks like something tried to get in behind the rest, as it was knocked askew. I was using kibble bags to hold garbage; one paper bag with burnable garbed in it, one plastic bag with non-burnables for the dump. Both were torn up. Buckets knocked over, and the litter box completely covered in stuff. It’s actually in the photo, on the left, but you can’t see it. Even the water bowl somehow got messed up, my mini-chainsaw, its case and charger, knocked off the archery target it was resting on, etc.
What a disaster.
With kittens running through it.
They were very excited by my cleaning up the mess!
The sun room still needs a thorough cleaning, but that will require taking most of the things in it out completely, so we can wash the concrete floor, but the weather has not been good for that.
My guess is, skunks. Either that or racoons. The down side of having the doors propped open for the kittens. Other critters can get it, too! I try to tie off the doors so that when a kitten squeezed in through one door, the line pulls the other door more closed. Then, when a kitten pushed through the second door, the door behind them gets pulled closed.
The problem is, even larger critters can often squeeze through some very small spaces. And some of the skunks are already pretty small, so it won’t take that much squeezing. The only reason I think racoons are a possibility is because of the kibble bin being knocked down, and signs that critters tried to get behind things on the shelf above. Skunks aren’t good climbers, but I think a racoon would have done more damage. Hard to know for sure. They left nothing behind for us to find and identify either way.
The fuzzy little grey tabby was okay with my working around it. Not only did it not run away, but it let me pick it up and cuddle it – and even started to purr!
Socialization progress increased!
Once I finished with the sun room, I could finally get out and do my morning rounds, before having to head out to my mother’s.
Which is when I found this.
My guess is, kittens jumped on top of one of them. With the other, they got under at one end, then perhaps panicked, and ran through the end where the mesh is rolled around a board to hold it down.
Which means we’re going to have to peg down the edges. Which makes it such a pain to get at the space to weed or harvest. Better than having the seedlings eaten by grasshoppers when they germinate. Now if I can just keep the kittens from crushing them, too!
I found that as I was finished my rounds and was almost ready to head inside, when I found this.
The kittens discovered the toy I left for Potato Beetle while he was isolated in here.
This group of kittens has pretty much moved into the sun room; the four little ones from one litter, and the two out of four older ones, that have been hanging out together for quite some time, now.
We’ve had some pretty heavy rain, off and on, for the past couple of days. There was more last night. As I was unlocking the gate to go to my mother’s, I saw evidence of just how much there had to have been, at some point.
When I mowed the sides of the driveway, grass clippings were blown over and mostly covering the gravel. Here, you can see that there was actually enough “wave” action to create ripples of dried grass clippings, all the way from under the gate (which the water tends to pool), to where the culvert runs under. The driveway starts to incline after that line.
What a way to start the day.
Beyond that, the phone appointment for my mother ended up being late. My mom and I have the same doctor, and I’ve had phone appointments with him where he called as much as an hour early, so I made sure to be there well before then. It ended up being late enough that I called the clinic to see if there was a problem. I was told he was running later and it might be a while.
He called not long after. After some confusion, it turned out he had no idea why we had this appointment. He had already called my mother to talk to her about the sleep study results.
He called her on the very day I’d made this appointment for her. The clinic had called her, but she wanted me to be there, so I called them back. He must have called later that afternoon.
My mother didn’t tell me about it, and had forgotten about it until he brought it up. Of course, I was confused. Though my mother did finally remember he had called, she couldn’t remember what he’d told her. So he explained it all to me again.
Yikes!
So it turns out my mother does have a form of sleep apnea – one very different from my husband’s severe obstructive sleep apnea. She’s been referred to the sleep clinic. In 6 – 8 weeks, she’ll have an appointment with a specialist, and will do and overnight sleep study at the clinic, and they will start talking treatments with her.
If my mother ends up having to use a CPAP or BiPAP, I’m not sure she’ll be able to handle it. Not so much being able to use the machine, but being willing to put up with wearing hoses on her face, and nozzles up her nose, night after night.
We will deal with that when the time comes.
The main thing is, the referral is in, and the sleep clinic will take things over about it from here on.
That done, I was able to help her with a few errands before heading home. We’re still getting rain here and there, so I will have to catch up on things tomorrow. The next couple of days should be good weather for working outside.
The grey and white I spotted before has shown up again! It ran away as soon as it saw me, but I was able to get some shots through the storm door window, just a little while ago.
It does have tabby stripes in the grey, though they are much more muted than some of the others.
I wonder which cat is the mama? So far, I’ve only seen it on its own.
I’ve been training the cucumber up the trellis netting, but somehow missed one big cucumber that was lying right on the ground. I’m glad I spotted it this morning. Not much longer before it would have started to be over mature. Which would be okay if I were wanting to save seeds, but I won’t be for these.
With last night’s rain and an incredibly humid morning, things were still soaking wet outside, and my glasses were fogging up! The squash are loving it, though, and I’m seeing increased growth. Even the one Zucca melon that’s trying to survive had a noticeably growth spurt.
The sweet corn and the popcorn are both sending up tassels! The popcorn is still really small, but has had a growth spurt, too. They only reach about 2 ft high to begin with, so there is hope for a crop, yet!
There are squash blooming all over. Whenever possible, I am hand pollinating. There has not been a lot of opportunity to do that. Still, if we have a long, mild fall like last year, it will help ensure we have fruiting plants that can take advantage of it. We shall see!
There is also, most definitely, a second grey and white tabby. I spotted it running around in the sun room. Unlike this guy, who will now come up to me for attention, this one ran away. It seems to be a bit bigger, has more white, and the tabby colours are more defined and grey, without any of the brownish fur this one has on his face.
I had to make a run into town this morning to pick up more dry cat food. If I’d had more to pick up, I would have gone to the city for the much better prices, but it wasn’t worth the cost of gas. As it was, when I got to the grocery store, there was only one large bag – 8.5kg – left on the shelf. The guy stocking the shelf nearby saw me looking and told me they simply have not been getting dry cat food. They had been getting them weekly (finally, after more than a year of shortages), but now, nothing. He added that he didn’t know if the other grocery store had any. I’m glad he did, because I forgot that store existed. Where we usually go is on the edge of town, while the other is in the middle of “downtown”. I bought their last big bag of cat food, then went to the other store and was able to get another 7kg bag. We should be good for the rest of the month, I hope!
Yesterday, I tried making a video with the before and after pictures of the day’s wood chipping, using my new Movavi software. There was a new update when I opened it up, which I downloaded, so it was a while before I could start. I was able to record voice over within the software, though the only microphone I have is on my headset, so the sound quality was not the best, but it’s handy not having to open other software to do it.
Then I tried to save the finished video in a format that I could upload, and kept getting an error message.
The new update has a serious bug!
So I tried again, using the default photo/video viewer that came with my computer. It’s little more than a slide show, quickly put together, but this way it doesn’t take up more space in my WordPress media.
They got the job done just in time! Not long after, a thunderstorm rolled in and actually hit us (unlike all the other storms and rain that passed us by). Heavy rain continued through the night. The garden is just loving it!
We’re bright and sunny and hot right now, so I’ll be waiting for things to cool down before I start mulching the highbush cranberry and silver buffalo berry. It’ll be good to do that after such a heavy rainfall.
The Re-Farmer 