Okay, this is a first. Planting something in April!
We had a bed prepared and covered with plastic over hoops for the soil to warm up more, so that is where I started. All of the carrot seed tape we made fit into the bed, with even a bit of room to spare. After that, another bed was finally prepared and covered with more plastic, and in a couple of days, it will get spinach planted in it.
I tried an experiment this time, setting up an old phone to take a time lapse video of both jobs.
Plus some random cat appearances.
The time lapse made for a short video. I hope you enjoy it!
We are definitely seeing fewer cats at feeding time, as the weather improves. Sometimes, I’ll see a few of the more feral ones sneaking across the yards, waiting until I’m gone, before they come for food.
Then there are the ones like this little guy. They come as much for the pets as for the foods!
Last night, I was chasing that big racoon and a pair of skunks out of the sun room again. Overnight temperatures in the long range forecast look to be staying above freezing, so I think it’s going to be time to start closing the doors for the night. They’ll just have to put up with the beds in their cat shelter instead of the swing bench to sleep on. 😉
As I haven’t been able to do a burn during the day because of wind, the girls were kind enough to get it going last night, when things were calmer. They got hoses hooked up and I turned the water on from the basement for them, but there were issues! One hose just would not properly attach to the tap. Now that it’s daylight, I’ll take a look to see if there was any damage, because even when we hooked up a different hose, it wouldn’t attach to the end of that one, either. Thankfully, there was a third hose that worked well. Not that I would mind doing a controlled burn out there. Just not in the middle of the night! Now that the burn is finally done, I can clean out the ashes.
We’ve got some lovely weather predicted over the next while. Time to get outside and get to work! Woo Hoo!!
It’s mostly dry enough now that this evening, I decided to check out the gravel pit and our seasonal “creek”.
The gravel pit is very full! I’m standing at the westernmost end of the marshy area that is still sort of part of the gravel pit.
Gooby followed me around until I finally picked him up, tucked him into my jacket, and walked around with him tucked in like a baby. Which would have been a lot more pleasant, if he didn’t keep trying to eat my chin!
I went over to where the road had washed out last year. There is a sort of lane over a culvert on our side of the fence that is in pretty bad shape still, from last year’s flooding, plus deep divots from cows walking through it while it was still wet. The water wasn’t quite high enough to overflow the lane, but higher than the culvert, creating a whirlpool of foamy water. Still muddier than I was willing to cross over, so I headed back around to check another pond, which is also very full, and the drainage into the field. We have a rather fast flowing little creek going under the fence there right now.
I wonder if the renter will try growing corn there again this year? Last year, it was a complete write off.
I also went through the car graveyard and went looking for this.
This is the roughly 90 – 100 yr old wagon that I’m hoping to salvage. The wooden sides have broken and fallen more since I last checked it. The wheels are deep in the ground, which is still too frozen to try and pry out. It looks like I’ll have to remove the rotted wood here – after removing the sheet metal someone put in it – before we can try prying it out of the ground. I really hope the metal parts are still solid enough to use. It would be great to salvage it for the mobile chicken coop I want to build.
Once I was back in the yard and looking around for the garlic and crocuses my daughters spotted, I saw a rare visitor. This is one of Broccoli’s two calico babies (her third kitten is a grey tabby). The long haired one is Brussel, which would make this one Sprout.
I have not been able to get a good picture of her face, though, so when I saw that black “mask” over her eye, I thought maybe this was the cat the girls referred to as The Phantom.
However, there is also Rosencrantz’s tortie.
Who also has a “mask”. She is the one that has been hanging out in the sun room a lot, and I’m actually able to pet every now and then. In fact, earlier this evening, I came into the sun room and saw her sleeping on the swing bench alone. Her back was to me as I went over and began to pet her. She started moving around and pushing against my hand and accepting ear skritches… right up until she turned, saw me, freaked out and jumped away! Clearly, she liked being pet, but didn’t realize who the pets were coming from.
I sent these pictures to the girls, asking them which is which. They confirmed that the tortie is The Phantom – but they didn’t recognize the other one! They described Sprout as being similar in colouration, but with a clearer face, and hangs around more often.
I have no idea what cat they are talking about. The only other calico, besides Broccoli, is Brussel, and Brussel is a long haired cat.
Maybe Broccoli is who they are talking about? I do see her more often.
With so many yard cats, it gets hard to keep track!
Well, I’m going to make the executive decision. The calico with the black over her eye, and the black spot under one side of her nose, is now officially Sprout.
I just wish she would stay close to the house more, so we could have a better chance of socializing her! But even Broccoli and Brussel, who do hang out closer, won’t let us near them.
When doing my evening rounds today, I decided to do a walkabout, which I will post about separately. I was just finishing up when I got a message from one of my daughters, who had gone out while I was going in, with a picture of purple snow crocuses! She said there was garlic up, too.
They were not there when I did my morning rounds!
So I went back outside and checked it out.
While trying to find the purple crocuses she took a picture of, I found a couple of white ones. They’re so small, it was hard to get a good photo while zooming in, so this is the only one good enough to post.
I’m so thrilled to see them!
As for the garlic, I had been thinking about whether it was time to move the winter mulch aside, or to wait a bit longer.
Well, now’s the time!
I found the one garlic that had pushed its way through the mulch and began clearing.
Marking each end of the rows with sticks when we planted helped a lot!
In the process, I found quite a few more garlic sprouting. They will do much better, now that they will be getting more light and air circulation.
I was able to pick up more potting soil after helping my mother with errands yesterday, which means that today I got to finish potting up our tomato seedlings.
I actually was able to “pot up” the Black Beauty and Indigo Blue Chocolate tomatoes by topping the cups up with soil, first. Then I potted up the last 18 Roma VF tomatoes, which used up my last two plastic bins. I had to move things around, and move the onions right out, to fit everything. The taller seedlings hat to go either to the top of the mini greenhouse frame, or to the shelf, where the onions were. The rest are still short enough to fit in the mini greenhouse frame, though I’ve run out of space in there.
Next was the Spoon tomatoes.
I planted two seeds per pellet, and I made sure to do the ones that had pairs of seedlings first – though one of them had three! For each one, I removed the outer covering on the Jiffy pellets, then separated the seedlings. They’re still quite small, so the cups got filled only about half way.
I noticed the outer covering on the Jiffy Pellets is different this year. It’s more paper like. I remember it being more net-like, before. Those didn’t really break down, and I would find them in the garden while cleaning up at the end of the year. I’m guessing that has sometime to do with the change. With one pair of seedlings, a tomato had actually grown through the outer covering. As I was trying to gently remove it, I ended up breaking the tomato stem clean through! It’s a tomato, though, so I went ahead and planted the tomato top, anyhow. Changes are pretty good it’ll send out new roots and survive.
These are all 35 Spoon tomatoes (I’d mistakenly counted 36, before). I was able to fit 19 onto an oven liner tray, which will allow for bottom watering. The tray the Roma tomatoes had been in, which now had only the spearmint and oregano in it, could fit another dozen. That left only 4 that needed to be double cupped. I’ve run out of both trays and bins.
Those done, I did some more rearranging and removed off the watering can and extra cups, which allowed me to bring the onions back closer to the light. With all those, plus the bin with the Zucca melon and African Drum gourds in it, this surface is now completely full. I don’t even have my work space anymore! The light isn’t as good during the day on here but, early in the morning, it does actually get direct sunlight for a few hours.
The peppers in the large aquarium greenhouse still have new seeds germinating, so I won’t be potting those up for a while. Not that I have the space for it anymore!
I will need to monitor the overnight temperatures in the sun room over the next while. We’re supposed to warm up, but the overnight temperatures are still dipping below freezing. If the sun room can manage to stay at 6C/43F or warmer during the night, I should be able to at least move the onions over. They are about the only thing we’ve started indoors that can handle cooler temperatures. I’d love to be able to move the biggest plants out, which is mostly the gourds and Zucca melon, but they are the most cold sensitive plants we’ve got right now. Daytime temperatures in the sun room have been reaching as high as 20C/68F, which would be great as long as it didn’t drop too far. The times I’ve checked it through the bathroom window at night, I’ve seen the thermometer at around 10C/50F, which would be acceptable, I think. Plus, we’d be closing the doors overnight to keep the yard cats out of the plants, which means it would stay warmer overnight, too.
The cats are not going to be happy, losing their favourite bed on the swing bench, and private dining areas! I’ll be happy to not have skunks and racoons going in there anymore!
All in good time, though. It’s still only April, and a lot of these can’t get transplanted until the middle of June!
While at my mother’s, we went over the shopping list a bit before running her errands. One of the things she wanted to get was some basic, transparent tape. The kind you find in the office or school supply sections.
My mother being my mother, she started hemming and hawing, saying, Oh, I’ve got this other tape. Maybe I should use that first (bringing out a roll of heavy duty packing tape), or maybe I should use this tape up, but I’ve never been able to use it.
This is what she brought out.
Yeah. That’s a fabric tape. With a bright blue backing. She’s never used it, because she has never been able to take the backing off. When she moved off the farm, she took it for some reason, and had no idea where it came from or what it was for. Best guess was that my late brother, who worked in demolitions, might have brought it home as salvage from somewhere.
Curious, I look it over and found this on the inside.
It expired 19 years ago.
I’ve never seen a tape with an expiry date before.
I told her I’d take it home so I could look it up. I could have looked it up on my phone right there, but this way I could get it off her hands, so she wouldn’t have to think about it anymore. She has way too many things taking up space that she refuses to get rid of, and it seemed to distress her. I can’t even begin to think what she thought she would us it for when she took it.
So I brought it home (along with 2 ice cream buckets of vegetable peels for the compost pile, a stack of magazines we’ll never read that are only good for the burn pile, and a bunch of onions. At least the onions make sense. They are on the list of foods she’s not supposed to eat).
I think I figured out why it has an expiry date. It’s fire retardant! Or at least it used to be. This is one listing I found:
Polyken 294FR is a printed, linered, flame retardant glass cloth tape for aircraft cargo compartment seam sealing. Very lightweight. White fiberglass cloth printed with F.A.R. specifications. Highly conformable and easy to install. Very flexible accommodating angles and turns. Aggressive adhesive system. Removes easily without leaving residue. High tensile strength. Repositionable.
Applications: Cargo pit applications. Seam sealing (taping) and repair of cargo compartment liners for use on covering pins/rivets where high adhesion and flame resistance is critical. Aerospace industry.
Which means it’s likely something my brother who worked in aircraft maintenance brought home. He’s been retired from the industry for about 20 years, so even the dates make sense.
What blows my mind is that most of the links I followed said things like “ask for a quote” rather than listing a price. I found one with the blue backing like this roll, and the 3″ x 36 yards size was priced at over US$85. Another supplier’s same size roll was over Cdn$100. From the looks of the images I found, I’d say this is a little less than half a roll.
I wonder if the age has something to do with why the plastic backing won’t come off, too.
I planted chamomile and the second variety of thyme just a few days ago.
Two mornings later, when turning the aquarium lights, I spotted sprouting chamomile! By the afternoon, some thyme was coming up, too!
They were so tiny, though, I didn’t even try to get a picture until this morning.
They are still quite miniscule, but I can see more thyme coming up, while every single peat pellet has chamomile coming up.
I’ve never seen anything germinate this quickly! Meanwhile, I still have just a single oregano (I’m thinking of reseeding those) and just a few spearmint, that were started near the beginning of the month, and they are still barely any bigger than the chamomile sprouts are now! It seems the peat pellet trays are doing much better than using seed starter mix in toilet paper tube pots.
This afternoon, I will be heading out to help my mother with grocery shopping. Depending on the timing of things, I hope to pick up some more potting soil before coming home, so I can finish potting up the tomatoes.
I’m still just blown away by how quickly these germinated!
I noticed a huge racoon in the sun room, so I dashed outside without grabbing a coat. The racoon was gone, but I looked around with my phone as a flashlight, trying to see where it went. I never saw it again, but the moon and a planet near it was looking gorgeous, so I stayed outside for a while. It was just beautiful out there! Apparently, it’s -2C/28F with a wind chill of -5C/25F, but it felt much warmer.
Of course, by this time next month, these same temperatures will probably feel a lot colder! 😄
I ended up walking past the fence by the fire pit to get a clear view of the moon and tried to take some photos. I just used the night setting on my phone and tried a couple of hand held shot before setting the phone up on the hood of a nearby car.
Of course, the hood is curved, so the phone wasn’t level. It was also angled to the south further than I intended, which is why you can see the yard light in the photo. In reality, the yard light is barely a glow on this side, but the long exposure really picked it up! You can’t tell that the moon is a crescent at all. We’re supposed to still be able to see Mars and Jupiter right now, I think, but I’m pretty sure the planet visible in the photo is Venus.
I tried to take a couple of shots of just the stars, holding the phone myself.
This is what happens when you try to take a long exposure shot, and a Gooby decides to climb you. I didn’t intend to take a picture of the moon and planet again, but I was rather distracted with trying to extricate claws from my flesh!
Gooby really, really loves human attention, and he will get it, whether we are ready to give it or not!
We’ve got a lovely day outside, and I was hoping to be able to do a burn. While setting up the burn ring, I noticed The Distinguished Guest was lurking about in the outer yard. He wouldn’t come near me, but I could still see that something was wrong.
I had to zoom in quite a bit to get this shot. That is a new wound on his leg. I sent the picture to the cat rescue lady, but since we can’t actually catch him, there’s nothing we can do but monitor from a distance. At least he’s still coming around for food. My guess is, the damage was done by Sad Face (AKA; Shop Towel). Sad Face has been quite aggressive towards TDG and some other cats, and he’s got the size and bulk to be the winner pretty much every time. I still see Sad Face around, but he runs off pretty quickly.
About the only positive thing I could make out is that TDG wasn’t actively limping as he walked around. He’s is such rough shape, though. He was a lot more social when he first showed up at our place, which is why we think he was dumped, but with Shop Towel beating on him, and likely getting chased away from other farms around us, he is a lot more feral now. I’ve only been able to get close to him when he’s been too hungry to be willing to leave the kibble.
He is not the only critter I saw today. When I first went outside to bring burnables out, I spotted a groundhog running away, first to the raised beds near the spruce grove, then skirting along the edge of the spruce grove towards the garage, then around the other side of the garage. Where he went after that, I couldn’t see. From the looks of the hole in the ground we found by the house when the snow first melted away, it’s possible it’s being actively used, and if it is, this might be the grog that’s using it.
I was really hoping to not have to deal with grogs in the garden this year.
Ah, well. It is what it is.
I’m more concerned about TDG.
As for the burn, it’s all set up, but we’ve got too many wind gusts to do a burn today, so it’ll have to wait. The burn ring is getting so full of ashes, we won’t be able to cover and let it smolder this time, but need to burn it down as much as possible, then clean out the ashes. Since we are slowly burning away the rotten pallets cleared out of where the wood pile used to be, before an electric furnace was installed, there’s a lot of nails in there, so we’ll be using the soil sifter over the wheel barrow to catch things like nails, as well as larger pieces of unburned wood. Since this is all from litter pellet sawdust and garbage, we can’t use the ashes in the garden, but we can dump it in some of the low spots in the outer yard.
This post has been oddly difficult to type. For some reason, Fenrir has decided she really, really wants to sniff and lick my keyboard, directly under my left hand. Earlier, she was trying to do the same thing with my mouse and mouse hand, and when I tried to stop her, she actually got angry enough to attack my hand and try to bight me! I can’t imagine what she could possibly be smelling on there all of a sudden.
But I digress.
Hopefully, tomorrow will be a calmer day and we’ll be able to get that burn done. If possible, I’d like to do a controlled burn of the outer yard around there, but for that, I’d want to make sure to have enough hoses joined together to reach, and the water tap’s shut off valve in the basement turned on. It’s still freezing overnight, so we’d have to make sure to turn the valve off again.
It may be dipping below freezing during the night, but not by much, so I unplugged the extension cord to the cats’ house and put that away, then unplugged the outside heated water bowl. I haven’t bothered to unplug the heated water bowl in the sun room, yet, simply because I like for that cats to have access to at least some warm water during the night.
Okay, this is weird. Fenrir is back. It’s not my keyboard she’s trying to get at. It’s my left hand. I don’t know what I touched that she might be smelling, and I did wash my hands when I came back inside, so I have no idea what’s going on! Time to give up trying to type, though. Every time I remove her, she comes right back and tried to eat my hand!
My daughter took care of feeding the outside cats early this morning, so I headed out a few hours later to do the rest of my rounds, including checking to see if any fallen branches needed to be cleaned up, etc.
You would never know that, just a few days ago, we looked like this.
The day after the snow stopped, not only was all this new snow gone, but so was a lot of the remaining older snow! Right now, the only snow left on the ground is either from the deepest piles, or in the deepest shade. Which actually goes a long way to helping me identify where to prioritize new growing zones and high raised beds.
With so little snow and not a whole lot of accumulated water, either, I checked out a few areas in the outer yard I now have access to.
Removing the maple that was allow to grow at the back of this old cabin means there are no longer branches causing damage to the roof, but we have lost a few more pieces of that corrugated tin. There are pieces from a shed that collapsed long before we moved here that can be salvaged to replace the missing and damaged ones, but we have no way to safely get up there to put them on. I really want to cover these patches of roof. This is the last of the log buildings that hasn’t collapsed, and I want to salvage it, if at all possible, but that’s not going to happen if we don’t at least patch up the roof. Ideally, of course, we’d replace it entirely, but that’s not going to happen until we are in a position to repair the building, and that’s not going to happen for a few years, yet. We’ll need to continue cleaning up around it, and cutting away the trees that have been allowed to grow against the walls.
I find myself wondering if the best way to save this building would be to literally take it apart, log by log, and rebuild it on a better foundation (it’s sitting on giant logs that are rotting away and sinking into the ground), and put on a new roof in the process. We’d have to keep track of the individual logs so that they get put back together in the same order, since they are cut to fit just as they are.
When my parents bought this property, this building was used as a summer kitchen. My parents used it as a chicken coop, which never got cleaned up inside after they stopped having chickens, so there’s a lot of work that needs to be done inside. It is actually wired for electricity, though, with a couple of lights, light switches and outlets, so that heat lamps could be used for the chicks. I believe it was powered via the old pump shack, much like the current warehouse is now, except that my late brother buried the electrical cable between those two buildings. The pump shack and the old chicken coop are much closer together. I have no memory of it, but there was most likely a power line running from just under the eaves of each roof. I’ll have to take a closer look to see if there is any sign of where the line went into the cabin at some point.
Then there’s this old cabin.
I was able to get around to the far side of it, and it has collapsed even more. What a shame.
When I was a kid, this building used to be closer to the house, where we now have a parking area. It used to be a house. My parents bought this place from my dad’s uncle, but the family that owned it before had built the cabins. This one, and another before it, had been houses. When the family needed a bigger house, they just built another cabin. The original part of the house we live in now was the last cabin they built. I don’t know if they originally built it on a basement or if that was dug out later, but a second floor was included and what we now call the old kitchen was tacked on later, and is not built of logs. At some point, my dad had this old cabin moved here, and it was used as “storage”. Basically, filled with all the junk no one was willing to throw away, or that friends in the city gave to the farm, because there’s always room on the farm, right? I remember playing inside it as a child, before it was too filled up, then again after it was moved, and more filled with stuff. I even found the remains of the cradle I slept in as a child. I was quite startled by how small it was – way smaller than what is now considered safe for a baby crib – but I distinctly remember the little teddy bear design on the inside of what might be considered the footboard. Of course, in my memory, it was much, much bigger.
I have some very, very early memories.
I also remember playing and exploring in the other log building that had been a house. There had been a foot powered sharpening wheel in there, and I wonder if the one I found when cleaning up my dad’s old forge was from there. I doubt it, but I like to think that at least that one thing was saved. During the years I was away, I’m guessing it collapsed, too. All I know is that it was burned, and there is now no sign of it. Sadly, no one considered these buildings worth maintaining.
I’ve had it recommended that we just light a match to this, but I want to dismantle it to clean it up, and salvage what we can. There are bound to be sections of logs that aren’t rotted out, and they can be reused for things like the cordwood buildings we are wanting to build. Much of this wood is so rotted that yes, it will get burned, but there is so much stuff in there, we need to dig it out and see how they should be disposed of properly.
That oil drum in the foreground would make a good replacement burn barrel, if we had a way to cut the top off.
Because this is so close to the septic outlet, we might have to get rid of those trees that should never have been allowed to grow against the building in the first place.
What a shame.
Thankfully, the winds have died down, but to have an idea of just how windy it got…
The winds have been slowly destroying the tarp – or what was probably the roof of some kind of shelter – and I’d put the rocks and old tires to keep it from blowing around as much. The winds were high enough to actually blow that tire on the ground off the roof of the car! I pulled as much of the tarp back as I could – it needs to be replaced, of course, but a little bit of coverage is better than no coverage – and put the old tire back on top.
What’s really amazing is on the left of the photo. Do you see what looks like three sticks poking through the tarp?
Those look like maple. There’s a tree growing under there! It wasn’t there when I put the tarp on, several years ago. Somehow, it has managed to get enough light under there to grow and actually break through the tarp. Once things warm up a bit more (the tarp is still frozen to the ground on this side), I’ll have to uncover it and remove the tree.
Talk about resilient!
Usually, when extending my rounds this time of year, I’m making note of all the things that we’ll need to work on and hopefully complete over the summer months. What’s frustrating is looking at things like this, knowing what work needs to be done, but also knowing we can’t do it for various reasons. Like not being able to safely get up to patch the roof on the one cabin, so it doesn’t end up like the other one.
Well, we shall see what we manage to get done over the next few years.
The Re-Farmer 