With the cooler nights, I finally closed my bedroom window yesterday.
This was more complex than normal.
The cats like to sit on the window ledge, but with the window open, they could attack anything that blew or flew by. Nosencrantz in particular was getting very destructive. Even when I got the window fan and set it up, she kept trying to get at the window, knocking the fan down. I had cord running through the handle, and more across the window, to keep the fan from being pushed off the ledge, but she would jam herself in behind. I finally had to grab some of the old window screens we used for drying mind leaves, needing 2 of them to cover the window and the fan, along with a cut-to-size piece of 2 inch Styrofoam between the top of the fan and the top of the window sill. She still kept clawing at the screens (which, thankfully, we metal mesh and stronger than the window’s screen). I had to come up with a rather elaborate barricade to block access to the window, and still allow air flow and use of the fan. That included creating a barricade around the shelf near the window she likes to curl up in, because she would actually pull one of the screens out of position.
I was able to take the fan down a while ago, but still had to keep the barricades. Nosencrantz was very, very determined!
To finally close the window, I had to remove cords, that piece of Styrofoam and the extra screens. Then, once the window could finally be closed, I had to remove its screen and tuck it behind the other ones to further protect it. Then I could finally move away the barricade around the shelf.
Which meant that Nosencrantz could now access the top of the shelf again.
This is what I get to see, now.
She has such and expression. Like she’s analyzing, and trying to figure things out.
Since we did not get the expected rain today, I headed out with our yard wagon and started raking up the grass clippings from the outer yard. The never mowed areas where I’d been able to expand into had a deep layer of clippings to gather, before it started killing off the grass below.
The three most socialized kittens just loved what I was doing. Especially the one you can see inside the wagon!
I’d originally planned to just make a pile of clippings near the main garden area, but instead decided to actually do some mulching. It won’t make much of a difference for the plants, this late in the season, but it will help with amending the soil for next year.
The Chocolate cherry tomatoes and carrots got done. There was just no weeding happening in this bed. Whatever the weeds were, they were pretty delicate. I found myself just tearing leaves instead of pulling up roots, and often accidentally catching carrot greens in the process, so I just gave up. You can see what few carrots made it in this bed, but there are so few onions that made it, the’re not visible in the photo.
As expected, the layers in these blocks settled a fair bit. After lifting the protective netting, I was able to do some weeding, first, then mulched with clippings. I’ve left the netting up. When they were transplanted, there was a good chance the cats would roll on them or dig them up, but that’s not really a concern right now. We also no longer have ground hogs that might try to eat the squash. They’ve all disappeared for some time now.
The current bush my mother gave me last year to transplant got a new layer of mulch around it as well.
In the main garden area, the tomato bed got done, making sure it went under the soaker hose. It would have been great if we could have done this much earlier in the season; the stove pellet sawdust mulch we added after transplanting them had broken down quite a bit, long ago. It was the same situation with these other beds…
With the onions harvested, there was just the Purple Beauty peppers, and two tomato plants, that got mulched. Plus the sunflowers. Because, why not?
The Little Finger eggplant got done as well.
There is a single eggplant developing on one of the plants!
After all that, I was still left with a big pile of clippings. They will be quite handy as we prepare beds for next year, and for when we plant our hard neck garlic this fall.
As I write this, my daughters are outside, giving everything a good watering. The forecasts are still saying we’re supposed to be getting rain today, but they’re also saying we’re raining right now. Looking at the weather radar, there is an actual horseshoe shape of rain around us, but not over us! Still, there’s a large system of rain heading our way. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll actually get some rain. But if not, things are being watered, just in case. If we do get rain, the extra certainly won’t hurt.
Strange to thing that we need the rain – in areas, I can see the ground cracking from last of moisture – area all the flooding we had this spring!
I checked my weather app last night, and read that we were to get rain and thunderstorms this morning.
This morning, I checked the app and it told me “rain will end in 45 minutes”.
There was no rain.
We’re going to have to water the garden today.
Which is not a complaint. We have a garden to water, still! Though the evenings have been chillier than forecast, we’re still frost free.
While checking all the garden beds, I spotted some deer damage in the sweet corn.
The silks were nibbled off!
It looks like a deer ducked under the rope fence (so much for the bells and whirligigs to startle them!), walked along one side of the corn, nibbling the silks all along the way.
I did find one cob that had been pulled off and left on the ground.
I’d been able to check the other nibbled ones, but with this one I could peel it entirely. They are still not ripe. I think the cool evenings are slowing things down.
We’re supposed to have highs between 17C/63F (today) and 14C/57F (in a couple days) over the next while, before temperatures rise above 20C/68F again. We’re supposed to stay above 20C for several days before dropping to the mid teens again. One of my apps has a 28 day long range forecast, and according to that, we won’t hit overnight temperatures low enough for a frost risk until almost a week into October.
Every mild day is bonus right now, and allowing our garden to continue to produce.
I love those G Star patty pans!
The onions are from the curing table for today’s cooking, but the rest is fresh picked. The Yellow Pear are filled with ripening tomatoes – much more than the Chocolate cherry. We have to figure out what to do with them all.
A couple of Sophie’s Choice tomatoes were ripe enough to pick. I will use those to save seeds. The paste tomatoes went into the freezer for later processing.
As I write this, my older daughter is in the kitchen, trying to use up a whole lot of vegetables for lunch, to go with the short ribs that were in the slow cooker all night. I look forward to seeing what she comes up with! 😊
I spent most of yesterday helping my mother run errands, so I didn’t get a lot done at home. It was a lovely evening, however, so I took advantage of it to do a burn.
I had company.
It took a few sprays of the hose for him to learn to stay away from the fire ring and burn barrel, but he quickly learned that if he was in my chair, I would let him stay.
It was just too funny to turn around and find him in the cup holder!
I just love these tiny little gourds! They look like adorable little ornaments.
The dew is so heavy in the mornings, they were dripping water.
As the leaves slowly die back, more and more of the gourds are becoming visible. I am hoping we’ll be able to save seeds from them this year, because we definitely want to plant them again next year. They are totally “useless” things to grow in the garden, but they bring a smile to my face, every time I see them.
I did recordings for a garden tour video on Sept. 10 – the date for our average first frost – and meant to post the finished video yesterday. I ended up leaving my computer on all night while the video uploaded to YouTube, only for it to not process. Which meant I had to close it and start over.
It really irritates me that YouTube will let you upload something for hours, but if the processing fails, there’s nothing there. All that time, lost!
But it’s done, and here it is! Our September garden tour video – and it’s much shorter than my last one!
This morning, I got a small harvest.
It seemed strange to pick those tiny, misshapen Purple Beauty peppers, but they are ripe, so leaving them isn’t going to help anything.
I picked the largest G-star patty pan and could have picked more, but decided to let them get bigger. I’m so glad those are finally producing.
There was just one cucumber to pick and I didn’t even try to pick any pole beans. What little is left can be left to dry on the vine. I was able to pick a decent number of Cup of Moldova tomatoes, but the Sophie’s Choice tomatoes seem to have just stagnated. They’re not really ripening. I suppose when the time come, and we pick the remaining green ones to finish ripening indoors, they will still be fine.
The onions that had been left on the netting overnight are now set out to cure out of direct sunlight. We are supposed to get rain in a few days, so if they still need time to cure, they will be protected under the canopy tent. We’ll be able to braid the Red of Florence onions, but will have to use a mesh bag to store the yellow onions, and even the ones that still have greens on them, the greens aren’t strong enough to handle being braided.
The next big job in the garden is to harvest the Brigit potatoes. I’m not looking forward to it, after how difficult it was to harvest the small bed of Caribe potatoes, and how few potatoes there were. It’s going to be a lot of work for little return.
Not today, though. I’m rather sore from digging this morning. I seem to have pulled something in my neck while wresting with that rock, and it’s starting to hurt pretty bad. 😕
Time to pain killer up and work on something more sedentary for now.
Keith passed away peacefully during the night. When I found him this morning, he looked like he was having a lovely little snooze.
My older daughter and I buried him this morning. At first, we were going to bury him under a willow, where there used to be a flower bed, but there were too many roots under the first few inches of soil. Knowing we could not be able to dig very deep, and not wanting critters to do damage, my daughter went looking for something to use as a cover while I decided to dig among the white lilacs.
We have horrible, rock hard, rock filled soil on top of hard clay and rocks. But we traded off and made progress, until we hit some much bigger roots. We took a hatchet to those, only to find a large rock under them. After much digging around it, we realized it was just too big and was not going to move.
We were able to bury Keith, though, and cover his grave.
It seems rather appropriate that as soon as everything was in place, a kitten decided to play on the spot.
The bench was returned and will add an extra level of protection. Once the ground is frozen, we won’t have to be concerned about it. In the spring, we will add soil and plant something over his grave.
Good bye, Keith.
How strange that we would suddenly lose Keith, when Leyendecker was the one who as so very ill. He has been active, has a good appetite and is overall looking so much better… but still doesn’t seem to be able to void properly. My daughter wants to have his blood tested again before making a final decision, to confirm one way or the other, whether his is recovering.
Right now, I just feel so tired.
And not because I just spent more than an hour fighting a losing battle with a big rock.
After the onions were harvested, and my daughter no longer needed help with her build, I headed over to the platform bed frame the girls have been slowly getting painted. The top, where the litter boxes will be sitting, got several coats of paint. They’ve been working on the under side. It’s the legs that need the extra coats of paint, now that we know the newer basement floor can get water seeping in, despite the weeping tile.
There was just one last coat of paint to add to the leg ends, plus around the edges. The platform is upside down on the picnic table, so I went to put a couple of bricks under it, to elevate it enough to paint the edges, and not the picnic table.
As I came around the back, I found this.
Well, so much for my trying not to get red paint on the blue picnic table when I was painting the bench I made!
The platform now has its final coat of paint, though. We’ll be able to bring it back into the house and into the basement any time after tonight.
Meanwhile, my daughter got some good progress on the water bowl shelter today.
As you can see, it’s already kitten approved!
She worked on this without any detailed plan; just a general idea of the build, adapted to what materials were available. I found the scrap piece of half inch plywood in the barn, so that became the size of the shelter.
The smaller cross pieces at the bottom, inside the uprights, will be the supports for the floor. Another cross piece will be added for extra support. We might have some scraps in the barn that will work. With the floor lower that the top of the cross piece in the front, there will be a lip to prevent the bowls from being casually knocked out. When we built the kibble house, one of the first problems we discovered was that the skunks would pull the kibble trays right off, scattering kibble all over the ground and making an awful lot of noise. Putting a board across the front solved that problem. My daughter made sure that would not be an issue this time!
Once a floor is figured out, it will need walls on three sides. We have more of the wider boards across the front and back. They are pretty rotten on the ends, but they are also longer than needed. Most likely, the shelter will be flipped onto its roof, then boards added across the back with the rotten ends sticking out. Once they are secured, we can simply saw the ends off along the vertical support, then do the same thing on the sides. It doesn’t need to be perfectly seals. It just need to keep the snow out.
This should fit rather well beside the kibble house. The cats’ house, the kibble house and this water shelter, will together form a sort of U shape. The heated water bowl is plugged into an outlet inside the cats’ house, which has its own extension cord that is more than long enough to reach. So even if the regular water bowls freeze, they will still have at least one bowl of liquid water available.
We painted the kibble house a bright yellow, but we no longer have any of that paint left. I’ll have to pick up some more, probably next month. The kibble house could use a touch up, too. Plus, if we dig up the shingles we found in some sheds, we could do both roofs, too.
Yeah. We’re sucks when it comes to the cats.
Speaking of shingles and roofs…
This is a section of roof on the house that caught my attention today.
You can see a loose shingle has started to slide down. This is a very steep roof, but at least it’s low enough that it can be patched from a ladder. This section of roof forms the angled walls of the second floor. Both sides used to be like this, but my dad had one side raised into a low slope roof to make more room in the second floor. Unfortunately, that low slope is why there is now water leaking in through one of the second floor windows.
That brick chimney is for the wood furnace we can no longer use. When the new roof is done, that chimney will be removed completely. It needed to be redone since my parents bought the place. That’s what the chimney blocks I’m now using as planters and retaining walls were for! It just never got done, and now it never will.
This is the only section of roof that is north facing. Ice and snow remains here the longest, and you can really tell. All of the shingles are lifting. It’s worse now than it was even in the spring! This is over the attic above the old kitchen – an attic no one goes into, as the entrance is difficult to get at, so the girls have simply blocked it off with furniture.
The chimney here is to the old wood cookstove in the old kitchen. The stove can no longer be used. Not only is it unsafe, being so close to the wall with no heat shield (how did we never burn the house down when I was a kid???), but the fire box is badly damaged, and the door to the oven is broken off. Some day, however, we may be able to replace it with another cookstove, with a proper heat shield and protective flooring. If nothing else, it would be good to have something like that as an emergency back up if we lose electricity. We certainly have the option to cook outside, but if we lose power in the winter, not only would we want to be cooking indoors, such a set up would also be a heat source.
Not that we could do that any time soon. Right now, the only reason my brother was able to get property insurance was by providing photographic proof that all wood burning stoves – including the ones in the storage shed, installed back when it was a work shop – and the wood burning furnace were disabled. Without that, the cost of insurance would have been much, much higher, for things that can’t even be used. We’ll probably have our outdoor kitchen built long before we’re in a position to remove the old wood cookstove and replace it with something else.
The main thing for now it, getting a new roof.
I really hope my mother isn’t just yanking my brother’s chain again, and will actually follow through. I’m just praying that she’ll make good on her promise, and it can be done before winter. Not only because of how bad the roof is getting, but because it will probably save us money on our heating bills, too. Our equal payment plan has been reset to just over $330 per month. It used to be just under $300, but just this past month, our usage has been up 20% from last year. For January and February – our coldest months of the year – our actual usage in 2021 would have cost us almost $450 in January, and almost $600 in February. In 2022, our actual usage would have cost us almost $600 in January, and almost $450 in February – and March, too! Meanwhile, the upstairs gets freezing cold, even with their heaters. Then, in the summer, it gets so hot, their computers start to have problems. A few roof would help reduce those extremes and reduce the energy we use.
I’m afraid to hope my mother will follow through, though. I know once she sees how expensive it is now, she’s going to start backing off. I just hope my brother can persuade her how urgently it’s needed.
Well. We’ll see. The guy that came by today will send me his estimate tomorrow, and then we’ll see.
In between helping my daughter when she needed an extra pair of hands while building the cats’ water bowl shelter, I harvested most of our onions.
These are the yellow onions from sets – there was no variety name that came with them. The netting was very handy to hold the onions for me!
I also had a helper.
This little beast was traipsing through the Black Nebula carrots, like he was on a jungle safari. Every now and then, when I tossed an onion on the netting, he would leap up from below to try and catch it! Then just hang there until I unhooked his claws and set him aside, only for him to run back into the carrots and hunt down the next onion!
The little bugger even tried it from under the mosquito netting while I dug up the Red of Florence onions. Those were split between two beds, and both are on the netting now.
We aren’t expecting rain for several days, so I’m actually going to leave them on the netting to cure for a while. Quite a few of the yellow onions no longer had their greens, but of those that do, they’ll get braided and hung up to finish curing indoors.
The Red of Florence onions, with their long shape, were a lot easier to harvest.
There are still the Tropena Lunga onions in the high raised bed, but they haven’t started to fall over yet, so I’m leaving them to grow some more.
We don’t have as many onions as I would have liked. The ones planted in the bed by the chain link fence might have one or two worth harvesting, but that’s it, and the red onions from sets planted with the yellow pear tomatoes are really small. I’m not sure if there will be much out of those.
Note for future reference. Plant a LOT more onions. These will only last us a few months, and certainly not the whole winter.
The yellow onions from sets were not any bigger than the ones we started from seed, though we don’t have other yellow onions to compare to, since they didn’t survive after transplanting. Nor did the shallots, both from seeds and from sets, planted in the same bed. At this point, we’re not seeing any advantage between starting from sets or from seed in the final product. Which means that next year, we will likely do both, again. We seriously need a better set up for starting seeds indoors. One that keeps the cats away! We’re actually looking at making a removable hardware cloth door between the living and dining rooms, as well as similar barrier over a shelf that is open on both sides. If we can keep the cats out of the living room, we can dedicate the room to starting seeds and not have to be constantly protect them from the cats. Having to keep the seedlings in the aquarium greenhouses, and under the plastic cover in the mini greenhouse, didn’t allow adequate air circulation, even with fans, and made it more difficult to provide adequate lighting.
We will have the winter to figure that out how to do that, though. 😊
The Re-Farmer 