You’d think a city shopping trip would be more tiring than running errands with my mother, but nooooo…
We are having another beautiful sunny day, though the wind has certainly picked up. I counted 23 yard cats while doing their kibble and warm water this morning.
I was just coming back to the house would I saw these two, finishing off the kibble on the cat house roof. I tried to get a good picture of Brussel, but she moved around and sat with her back to me.
I swear, that fuzzy butt of hers is bigger than the little guy beside her!
She won’t let me anywhere near her – I had to zoom in quite a bit to get this shot – but she’s less shy than her sister, Sprout, who runs off as soon as she sees me and doesn’t come back to eat until I’m back inside.
Sadness.
When planning today’s outing with my mother, I brought up getting Chinese food for lunch again. She said no, made a big deal of the cost, and that she could make lunch for us, etc. Well, I didn’t listen to her. I left early enough to pick up some parcels at the post office before they closed for 2 hours over the lunch period, so when I got to her town, I picked up lunch anyhow and showed up early. She laughed and nattered a bit about my not listening to her, so I told her that I wanted a treat. Only later, while we were eating, did she say that I must have heard her thoughts. She had been poking around her fridge for something to make for lunch, didn’t find anything she wanted, and wasn’t up to cooking, anyhow. She’d been regretting telling me not to bring food! The next thing she knew, there I was with lunch for both of us! So that worked out.
After lunch and a bit of a visit, we headed out to do her errands, getting groceries last of all. I stayed long enough to put everything away, then started getting ready to head home. My mother was all ready to make tea, but I told her I had to go. As usual, she started going on about how, if we visit her, we should plan on staying for a long time. I told her I do – that’s why I come over so early! So we can get a visit in, first. I must say, I was pretty tired by then, anyhow. My mother is 91 yrs old, has a bum knee and uses a walker, but that hardly slows her down at all! It takes quite a bit to keep up with her, that’s for sure. She didn’t push for me to stay, though. I know she was tired, too, and would probably go for a nap as soon as I was gone!
Once at home, I found one of our backordered seeds from Veseys was in the mail.
I’m looking forward to these. I keep hearing about how great Delicata squash is, but it’s not a good storage variety. This new Honeyboat variety is described as good for storage, so I figured it was worth trying. At 100 days to maturity, it’s going to be one of the earlier ones to start indoors.
This leaves one more packet of seeds on back order to come in from Veseys.
While at the grocery store with my mother, I noticed they had a couple of seed displays up. I was so tempted to get more, but we already have so much, and in varieties better suited to our needs.
We had another lovely day today! Nice and sunny, with a high of -9C/16F, and almost no wind chill at all. The cats are quite loving it, romping around in the sun and the snow.
I had the hardest time getting this picture of Pointy Baby! He kept trying to reach out to me, or my phone. I managed to catch a shot during one split second he gave me a pretty pose! I counted 24 cats outside this morning.
With my last trip to the city, where were very few things on my list that I didn’t get, and I wasn’t intending to make another trip so soon. However, I’m going to be helping my mother with errands tomorrow, and I don’t want to shop on the weekend, so I figured I’d better head out today, before some things start running too low. I went to the closer Walmart, with the possible extra trip to Canadian Tire to get more stove pellet litter. I ended up not needing the extra trip.
This is $171.11
They had hardwood pellets in stock this time, and the price has actually gone down! They were $5 each. At Canadian Tire, the hardwood pellets have gone up in price from $6.99 to almost $8, while their softwood pellets stayed the same price. The Walmart price had been comparable to the Canadian Tire price, but I’d only ever seen softwood pellets. These hardwood pellets are the same brand that Canadian Tire carries. So I got two, and I would have gotten two more, if I weren’t also getting kibble.
Their inventory of large kibble bags was low again, except for the super cheap no-name brand, which come in 7kg/15lb bags. There were no 11kg/24lb bags, so I picked up a couple of 9kg/20lb bags, plus their largest size case of canned cat food. They all cost just under $30 each.
I wasn’t able to find the usual shampoo and conditioner we use, in the big bottles with pumps. I haven’t seen those in quite a while, so I got smaller bottles of the same brand – two types with different oils in them – to try. They were on sale, at under $5 each.
The only thing on my list that was groceries was the icing sugar, but I also grabbed some red rooibos tea. My husband requested nacho fixings, so I got the giant jar of olives (which was cheaper than at the wholesale place!) and no-name brand tortilla chips. I got a couple of loaves of rye bread. I saw some bakery cookies for sale and got some salted caramel chip cookies as a treat, plus a variety pack of gum to keep in the van. One last extra was a couple of packages of biodegradable pots. All of these were between $3 and $5.
They didn’t have the larger size pots that I would prefer to use for certain seeds, but these ones will do for others. Eventually, when we’re planting seeds that aren’t as much of an issue for size or potting up, we’ll just use the red solo cups we have so much of. I expect we’ll need at least a couple more bags of seed starting mix, but not for quite a while.
Everything except the big bags and the canned cat food fit into just one of my hard sided grocery bags.
With this done, anything else we need for the month can be picked up locally, as needed. We will be making one more trip to the city, though, to get the materials we need to build a cat barrier to the living room. This is a project the girls are planning out and paying for, so they get to tell me when that’s going to happen! 😄
After the shopping was unloaded, we loaded the van up again for a trip to the dump and I headed out again. That’s a quick trip, at least.
Then, more running around tomorrow, this time with my mother’s car. After that, I should be able to play hermit again for a little while! 😄
Okay, so I made this video a while ago, but had all sorts of problems exporting the finished video into a file format that I could upload to YouTube that worked. After trying for days and having it fail, suddenly it worked. Nothing had changed on my computer, and there was no software update. Just, one day no-worky, another day, yes-worky.
Frustrating!
No matter!
Normally, I would have done a long, photo heavy post on making this, but I don’t have the media storage space, so I’m trying to make more videos. I’d found a video on how to make a Tuscan beef stew that looked really good, but I didn’t have the exact ingredients.
So I made it with what I had on hand.
Here is not-quite Tuscan style beef stew, made with mead.
Let me know what you think, and if you have any suggestions to improve things!
Of the 25 cats I counted this morning, that did not include any visiting toms. I usually see Sad Face wandering around later, or in the sun room, eating.
I just got back from doing the evening feeding of the outside cats. With how warm it’s been, I’m actually seeing the sun room completely empty when I check it through the bathroom window. Just before I headed out, I did see two cats on the swing bench. One of them turned out to be The Distinguished Guest. I’ve not seen him much at all lately, and even then, it’s been in passing.
The poor thing was looking in rough shape before, but he’s looking even worse now. When I came into the sun room, he jumped down and squeezed out the doors, so it was the best look I’ve been able to get of him in ages. He’s a long haired cat, but his tail has been looking very thin, and now I’m thinking there’s either fur missing, or grey muck is stuck to it. I tried not to spook him as I went out, but he still moved away towards the storage house. Slowly. His movements are stiff, and he’s got a limp. His fur is looking quite scraggly.
I don’t know where he spent the cold snap we had; I did see glimpses of him, but I don’t think he was using any of the other shelters around the yard. I’m afraid Sad Face has been attacking him and chasing him off. I suspect right now he’s dealing with both the effects of the recent cold we’ve had, and getting beat up by Sad Face.
I did see both of them in the sun room not that long ago, though. It took me a while to be sure it was The Distinguished Guest on the swing bench, as we now have a long haired tuxedo that I’m sure is his son, and they’re about the same size now. Sad Face was ignoring him in favour of food. If that was how the two would behave all the time, I would be much happier!
As for tonight, after I topped up the food bowls, TDG sat and waited by the storage house, then started to limp his way back. Hopefully, he’ll make his way back into the sun room and settle in for the night, without trouble, and spend time time resting and recovering, with food and water nearby.
When TDG first showed up here, he actually allowed us to pet him. I’m still sure he was dumped. Unfortunately, over time, he has become more feral, not less, and there is very little we can do to help him, beyond what we are already doing. Poor thing. 😥
What a beautiful day it is today! As I write this, we are at -1C/30F, and have yet to reach our predicted high of 0C/32F.
It’s a good thing it’s getting nice and warm. Yesterday evening, I went to set up the one of the new ceramic heat bulbs in the sun room. Before I did, I screwed it into the fixture and plugged it in, in the old kitchen, to test it.
It didn’t work.
So I took the heat bulb and removed one of the bathroom light bulbs to test it there.
It works.
Looks like the old light fixture is toast. This was something my brother had attached to a board so that he could use the heat of a light bulb to keep pipes from freezing in the kitchen, when this place was empty. We might have some other portable light somewhere that I could safely set up in the sun room, but if we do, it would be in one of the sheds or the barn, where we won’t have access until spring.
The sun room is above freezing, however, so the kitties will be fine. This morning, I counted 25!
Today I went through the packets of seeds to start indoors and selected these as needing to be started very early.
I was finding contradictory information about the Sweet Chocolate bell peppers. The package says to start the seeds indoors 8-12 weeks before last frost – but the days to maturity I found maxed out at 86 days! We could potentially start though by direct seeding by that, if the soil were warm enough right after our last frost date. I am considering planting more of them, when I do the other peppers, but we have so many varieties to try, I don’t want to take up the space, if we don’t have to.
The lemongrass will eventually end up in a large pot, while the thyme will be going into a raised bed in the old kitchen garden. They, and the peppers, will eventually need to be potted up at least once before going outside, so I decided to put them in the degradable square pots, so that can be done without disturbing the roots.
Because of the size the Zucca melon and drum gourds will get before transplanting, those went straight into the largest degradable pots I have for now.
But first, I needed to make space in the aquarium greenhouses.
I could fit only two trays of the onions in the small aquarium. The problem is, there’s nothing we have that fits in there that can be used as a drain tray for bottom watering.
We have a large jade tree that we had to cage with hardware cloth because the cats wouldn’t stop digging in it. I had to remove the top of it because the jade tree was starting to grow through the openings, so I used that to rig a cover for the tank. Last year, we used salvaged screen windows, but they were larger than the top of the tank and, even with weights, the cats kept knocking it about. I’m hoping this works. On the one hand, the openings are large enough that the cats could reach through and dig at the trays – the first year we used this tank as a greenhouse, the cats destroyed our onion starts by reaching through the filter opening in the tank’s lid. They were incredibly determined to get at those trays! However, the larger size mesh also means it’ll be harder for the cats to walk on it, so maybe they’ll just stay off?
We’ll see!
The luffa seedlings have joined the remaining tow trays of onions. I wanted to keep them in this aquarium greenhouse, since it’s warmer than the little one, thanks to the two lights above. One of the seedlings seems to have stalled and isn’t getting any bigger. The second seed in the pot hasn’t germinated at all, and probably won’t by now. I thinned out the extra seedlings that were in two of the pots. So we are probably down to three luffa. Hopefully, they will survive long enough for transplanting!
We now have four cells each of lemongrass, thyme and Sweet Chocolate peppers – those thyme seeds are so incredibly tiny! While I was sowing the seeds for those, I had six each of scarified zucca and drum gourd seeds soaking in water, and now each round pot has two seeds. The seed starting mix was premoistened and the surface got spritzed with water after the seeds were planted, but I also made sure to add a lot of water to the tray, once it was on the warming mat. I want those pots to absorb water from the tray, not the soil.
It should be interesting to see how these do, with being started this early! We won’t need to start more seeds until probably March, though I’ll have to double check on some of them. I think things like the Crespo squash and Boston Marrow could use an earlier start. We’ll have time to move things around in the living room to make space for trays as they get rotated out of the aquarium greenhouses while need seed trays go in.
Since the fixture used for the heat bulb in the sun room is broken, I won’t need the frame of the mini greenhouse to support it anymore. The mini greenhouse can be brought in and gotten ready, too. Plus, we should be able to use some of the plant hooks in the ceiling to hang the shop lights we’re using for grow lights, and generally have a much better set up than last year.
Which means we’ll have to make building a cat barrier a priority over the next few weeks!
This is one of the grey and whites – though the lighting makes it look more brown than grey! – that lets us pet him. He is so tiny!!
And yes, I know. He’s got leaky eyes. There’s nothing we’re able to do about it at this time. They all get it, off and on, especially in the winter.
Today, the ceramic heat bulbs we ordered came in.
The brand we ordered before is no longer available, but these are the same thing. The dimensions seem a little different – a bit broader and narrower at the top – but that might be just me. The old one is still in the garbage can in the sun room. If I remember, I’ll compare when I set a bulb up tonight. It’s so much warmer these days, it almost seemed unnecessary, but I don’t think the babies will mind a bit of extra warmth!
Today has been a very quiet day. I’m currently working on a reflective crochet pony tail hat while watching videos on building outdoor kitchens. My poor younger daughter is not doing well today (my older daughter has gone back to working at night and sleeping during the day, as she finds herself more productive that way). She did so much in the basement yesterday, she’s hobbling around with a cane, today. It’s a huge job, and not quite done yet. The mess the cats have been making is bad enough, but she’s getting into the corner of the basement that was most affected by the failed weeping tile during the spring flooding, and that will involve moving around an old gutted radio, a gutted phonograph, and my mother’s old sewing machine (which should still work), all of which are pretty large pieces of furniture. She’s been working section by section, and once she’s cleaned up each section of mess, she’s been bleaching the heck out it, so we won’t end up with mold and mildew problems. It’s unlikely we’ll get the level of moisture we did last year, as it’s quite unlikely we’ll see that level of flooding again, but it’ll help for when we’re able to finally paint things down there. The down side is, there’s really no one in a position to help her much at all, so she’s doing this almost completely on her own. 😔 She’s paying for it today, so she’s pain killered up and using today to recover.
We’re one heck of a gimpy family!
Ah, well. We do what we can and, little by little, we’re getting it done.
Well, I’m back from the city, with a mostly successful shopping trip to the Wholesale Club. I didn’t quite get everything on my list, while also getting a few things not specifically on my list, but that I either keep an eye our for, or get only while at this store.
The grand total, after taxes, was $350.17
I like that their receipt organizes everything by category, rather than the order they were scanned in.
Under “grocery”, I got a package of heavy duty scouring pads, having taken out the last one from our supply recently. We were also low on parchment paper, so I got a cheap no-name brand, as well as a package of paper towels.
There’s a 10kg (22lb) bag of white sugar. Icing sugar was on my list, too, but I didn’t find any. A bottle of lemon juice, a big thing of iced tea mix, and giant bags of Fusillli and Farfalle pasta.
In dairy, there’s a tub of sour cream, a big block of Old cheddar (more expensive than Costco, except they didn’t have any in that size at all), and a couple of pounds of butter. The no-name butter was $5.99 each, but the whipping cream was $4.89 each, so I got two of those and will be making more butter myself.
I got 4 big bags of pierogi in two flavours; the no-name brand, at $4.99 each, was about a third the price of the name brand variety in comparable sized bags. There’s also a gallon of vanilla ice cream my husband requested.
There’s a 2L of soy milk for my daughters in the “natural foods” category. They are lactose intolerant, and the soy milk is cheaper than lactose free real milk. That’s the main reason I want a milk goat!
Under “produce” there’s a bag of “imperfect” avocados, and Medjool dates.
Those dates are quite addictive! Excellent stuffed with a bit of goat cheese. Better still stuffed with a mixture of goat cheese and crushed nuts, rolled in salt and pan fried with honey – something we did when the girls were younger and we were recreating recipes from ancient Rome. Sublime!
Under meats, I splurged a bit. Oddly, the $10 bag of frozen vegetable samosas is listed under meats! I got a giant package of wieners (and buns) so we can have a cookout if we want. We still have meat in the freezer, but I wasn’t going to say no to the excellent price for pork butt. There was a lot of meat for just under $30. Unlike their chickens, where a three pack of small birds was almost $40! As a treat, I got one of their $20 boxes of chicken balls. I also got their $10 pack of sole filets for the girls, who like their seafood.
Under deli, we got a giant beating stick of summer sausage, Lyoner sausage and salami. I was planning to only get the big summer sausage, but these are handy for those days when we don’t have the energy for cooking. Plus, I want to experiment with something.
Last of all, I got a jug of windshield washer fluid, rated to -45C/-49F. With how warm it was today, I quickly ran out and pretty much emptied the jug I had in the van when I refilled the reservoir. I always try to keep a full jug in our van, and my mother’s car, just for times like this!
One thing I did not find was the bucket of Ghee. When I didn’t find it at Costco, I was sure I had to have found it here. I ended up asking an employee and as far as he knew, they never carried the bucket size! All they had were smallish tins. Maybe Costco was just out of stock? I do hope they get more, because buying it in that bucket size is SO much more affordable.
I went through the restaurant section and there were a few things that I’m eye balling for the future; especially for when we’re cooking outdoors more often. I also went through the pet food section, and there were none of the large bags of dry kibble I try to get. Not that I would have bought any. There’s no savings on kibble by buying it there.
I did decide to make one other stop before doing this shopping, checking out a liquidation store. We don’t go there often, but there’s something my daughter is wanting that I thought they might have. They didn’t, but while there, I did get a dozen packages of vegetable bouillon cubes at 4 for $1, or 29 cents each, restocking our supply from the last time I got a whole bunch of these! There wasn’t much else; mostly cheap Valentine’s day treats, though I did get a chisel tip paint brush that was on the list my daughters have for painting the basement. A long handled one would have been preferable, but no place I’ve looked seems to have them. Which is fine. We can always extend the handle ourselves, if necessary.
My younger daughter helped me bring everything to the house, and the poor thing really struggled with the heavier bags. She’s been working on the basement all day, so her back is killing her. I’ll have to make a point of hobbling down the stairs and see how it’s going, later on.
Speaking of hobbling…
The new medications my doctor is trying me on for my arthritis are… a thing. There is definite improvement in joint pain and reduced inflammation. The problem is, I seem to have just traded one pain for another. These medications are prescribed in tandem, with one of them pretty much there to protect the stomach from the other.
It’s not working very well.
Usually, it’s just a feeling of bloating, without the gas, but while driving and walking around today, it got really bad. At one point, as I was walking into the Wholesale Club, I suddenly wondered if I was going to throw up! I wasn’t feeling nauseous. It felt more like I really needed to burp, but was afraid to because it might be accompanied by something – and my stomach would have been pretty empty by then! According to the papers that came with the meds, side effects should subside within 2 weeks, and I only got 2 weeks of the medication. If this keeps up, I’m not going to request the prescription be continued, but will drop them completely. I’d rather deal with the pain from the OA than this abdominal pain and… insecurity, shall we say!
More motivation for me to try going carnivore, but if I do that now, we’ll go through the meat in our freezer way too quickly, and that’s supposed to be for all four of us, not just me! Very frustrating. But I can still work towards it.
Juggling what we can afford for the household can really conflict with what we’d like to do! Meanwhile, with the prices continuing to increase, we’re going to have to rely on food we grow ourselves a lot more, and that’s going to require more preparation if we’re going to start raising animals, too.
Ah, well. Self sufficiency was our goal from the beginning. I just hoped we’d have more time and resources to accomplish it!
The second seeds in two of the pots are actually germinating!
When it comes time to thin them out, I think I’ll try transplanting the smaller ones. I know squash and gourds don’t like being transplanted, but the more seedlings there are, the more survivors we’ll have once they finally go outside. We’ll see.
In the next few days, we’re going to have to shift things around again. The small aquarium greenhouse will get set up and the onions will get transferred over. The luffa will be moved off the warming mat and set where the onions are now. The warming mat will then get the next batch of seeds.
While peppers and eggplant are often started this early in our climate zone, the varieties we have can actually wait a bit longer. What needs to be started next are the zucca melon and drum gourds, since they need at least a month longer to mature than we have between average frost dates. I’ll have to go through all the varieties of seeds that need to be started indoors and sort them by days to maturity to see what else we need to start this early.
And we still need to pick up lumber to build a barrier to keep the cats out of the living room, so we can turn the whole thing into a greenhouse. I’ll have to talk to my daughter about that, since she’s the one paying for it.
Well… time for me to start heading to the city and do some stock up shopping!
As I was heading out to do my morning rounds, I was greeted by this adorableness.
I took this photo through the screen window of the old kitchen door, so it looks out of focus. This is the tortie the girls have named Phantom, because she has half her face covered with a black “mask”. Alas, I was unable to sneak a pet before she woke up, saw me setting out the kibble, and ran outside.
As I write this, we are at a wonderful -5C/23F, and are expected to go above freezing. Too warm for my down filled parka, so I was going to wear my hoodie.
Or not.
I’d left it hanging on the back of a spare dining room chair.
A chair the cats use as a bed.
I even made sure the hood wasn’t on the seat, so they couldn’t lie on it. This is just from them leaning against it!
Life with cats. Cat hair, everywhere!
I did have another light jacket I could use. I just don’t like it as much. I still had to take the lint brush to it, since I’ll be wearing it when I head to the city today. Hopefully, I won’t be trigging too many cat allergies when I’m around people, because there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it.
As lovely as the temperature is, though, walking out the sun room door was like hitting a wall. We’ve got 30 kmh/19mph winds right now, coming in from the south. It did make doing the rounds much less pleasant than it would have been, but the wind chill was still only -13C/9F, so it’s still not much to complain about! The only down side it that I’m going to be driving head on into it, the whole way to the city with the van, which is going to do a number on my mileage. At least it should make the trip home better!
I’m just loving what I’m seeing in the forecast over the next few days. We’re actually supposed to go above freezing for several days!
It’s almost 6pm as I start writing this, and not only have we reached our predicted high of -10C/14F (my app says there is a wind chill of -19C/-2F, but I just got back from topping up the outside kibble, with no jacket on, and there was no wind), but it’s supposed to keep getting warmer overnight!
The grey tabby that has suddenly become friendly – it’s the one between the black tabby and the white and grey at the top – managed to sneak into the old kitchen while I was coming out with kibble. He not only let me pet him, but I was able to confirm he is male.
Now why can’t any of the females suddenly become friendly? They still won’t let us anywhere near them! The calicos and torties are pretty much guaranteed to be female. Not sure about the rest of the tabby cattens, besides Judgement and the newly friendly one.
They are just loving the warmer temperatures, and so am I!
I’d made arrangements to get some farm fresh eggs this afternoon. Then I got a message saying they had to make a trip to the city to try and find a part, so that got postponed until they got back. With the warmer temperatures, I’ve been feeling so energetic and antsy, I ended up going into town to pick up a few things, even though we were planning a trip to the city soon. I was home long enough to get a chicken carcass in the slow cooker to make stock when I got the message that they were heading home, so I was back on the road soon after.
Aren’t they beautiful? I love the green ones!
I am always so inspired when I visit this place. This is the same person we’ve been getting our cardboard from, to use while making new garden beds. Today, I got to meet their new additions – a pair of fainting goats, and two emus!
Emus are flippin’ huge!
This is in addition to their alpaca, horses, donkeys, hens, Guinea hens, and probably other birds I don’t know about. Once we have our coop, I’m hoping to be able to buy chicks from them, too.
While I did a small trip today, I’ve decided to do a big city shopping trip tomorrow. We’re expected to have a high from 0C/32F to 2C/36F, depending on which app I look at. I figure I may as well take advantage of the warmth. This time, we’ll be going to a different wholesale place, where I know I can get things like the big buckets of ghee and restaurant size bags of pasta. It’s time to restock pantry supplies we’ve been using when we weren’t able to make our usual big trips. We didn’t have the extreme cold we usually do, other than the past week or so, but with the holidays, December and January are always the worst months for making these trips. I’m actually looking forward to the outing, even though I’m not at all looking forward to the shopping!
My younger daughter has different plans for tomorrow. Getting back to cleaning the basement! The cats have made a mess of the new basement, and she’s using that as an excuse to do a deep clean and organization of the space. That basement, however, isn’t much warmer than outside, even with the extra insulation added around the base of the house in the winter. During our recent deep freeze, it simply got too cold to work down there. It should get much better, and stay better, from now on. She wants to get it to the point that they can paint the basement. White paint on the ceiling (which is the exposed beams of the floor above) and special anti-mold and mildew paint for the walls. I don’t know if they want to do the walls white, too, but definitely a light colour. There are quite a few lights down there, but it’s still really dark.
We have a lot of big projects planned for when things warm up. Too many, really. The girls are focusing more on the inside, and are also talking about getting flooring for the kitchen and dining room, and refinishing the kitchen cupboards. Outside, I want to get that mobile coop built (and if that isn’t possible, we’re supposed to be getting a shed given to us that can be used until we can do the mobile one). Another project that will take probably quite a long time, as we acquire materials, is the outdoor kitchen. First priority is the timber frame roof. Once there’s a roof, we can be more leisurely about what we build inside. One side will have a smoker, clay oven, a “stove” opening to fit a large wok, and a grilling area. Two sides will have moveable work stations, and the fire pit will be added. The eaves of the roof will be longer past the wall of one side, where my daughter wants to have a forge.
Since we aren’t able to build the outdoor bathroom where we want to, until after a number of dead trees are removed, I want to do another, smaller, cordwood practise building. We need a new garden shed, so we can build a smaller shed – about 6’x8′ on the inside – in the maple grove, where a couple of trees had been removed while the power lines were being cleared. That is less of a priority, but since things will need to be built in stages, as we get materials, we might actually be able to get started on it this year.
Of course, there are also the high raised beds that need to be built. The outdoor kitchen actually solves something I was trying to figure out. The dead trees that we need to take down are quite large around. Too large to be practical for the high raised beds. I was considering cutting them in half, length wise, but now I’m thinking they’d be extremely strong upright supports for the outdoor kitchen frame. We can cut the lower, thickest, part of the trunks to the length we want, and then use the rest of the trunk for the high raised beds. It’ll mean more trees need to be cut down, but we need to do that, anyhow. With more than 20 dead trees that need to be removed, that’s more than enough to do both uprights for the outdoor kitchen, and the high raised beds.
Of course, there is the garden that needs to be worked on, including building new, permanent trellis tunnels, and other mobile trellises and supports. Plus trees and berry bushes to plant.
Oh, and on top of all these projects, we still need to dismantle that shed with the collapsed roof. We’ll be salvaging parts of it for building projects, such as the chicken coop I want to build. Plus, if we get that done first, I can use the space to build the outdoor kitchen, leaving more space available for the eventual garden beds we’ll be making nearby, where we get much better sunlight.
Feeling so energetic as the weather warms is kind of dangerous. I’m starting to plan way too many things! In the end, how much we actually end up accomplishing will depend on weather conditions. Last year, the flooding prevented a lot of the work I wanted to do, and the year before that it was the extreme heat. But if all we manage is to dismantle the shed, cut down some dead trees, and start setting aside the logs to use for the timber frame, that would be good.
I am so praying for good weather conditions this year, for the garden and for all the work we need to do outside! The last two years have been so brutal, we could really use the break!
The Re-Farmer 