Views and follows of this blog have been slowly growing over the years. A bit thank you and welcome to those who most recently joined the family! I really appreciate that there are people out there who are enjoying what they find here enough to hit that follow button! I hope you find things interesting and useful. 😊
One of the things WordPress does in their “insights” section is show how many shares the blog gets, and where they are shared to. It’s no surprise that Facebook and Pinterest shares are pretty high on the list – they’re pretty much equal for second and third place among platforms shared to the most. I was rather surprised to see that shares to Telegram pretty much blow away everything else. There are almost twice as many shares to Telegram than all other platforms put together!
Which has me curious.
If you share my posts, where do you share them to, and why do you share to that particular platform? Also, what kinds of posts inspire you to hit that share button?
One of the things we had to do because the cats were so determined to dig up the soil in our house plants – especially Cabbages! – was cobble together barricades around each individual plant or pot. For smaller plants, we used the plastic containers from cheese balls and pork rinds we found at Costco. Containers I meant to save to use to protect plants in the garden. I’d cut them into strips to put around the inside edge of the pots and, when that wasn’t enough, to loop over the plants. That worked for things like the aloe vera, but one pot with a jade tree in it was just too big. I ended up using some 1/4 hardware cloth I had – again, something I bought to use for something else entirely – to make a wall around the entire pot. It took 2 pieces to go all the way around. This pot is a square with an inner pot that can be removed. The outer pot has a reservoir for bottom watering, and we had to jam the hardware cloth between the two. It was the only way to keep the cats from simply pulling it out. That still wasn’t enough, and we had to make a “roof” over it, too. I only had 1 inch hardware cloth left, but it was enough. Sometimes, we’d find Cabbages sitting on top of it, looking out the window!
Now that the living room is barricaded and can be used as a plant room, most of our house plants have been moved over. The one hanging in the kitchen can stay, since the cats have been leaving it alone up there. A couple of larger pots, however, needed a second person to open and close the door in the barrier and keep the cats out.
Yesterday, that finally got done.
One large aloe vera handled the transfer well. After removing the plastic strips around it, it was a bit floppy, because some of its leaves were forced to grow into curves by its protective force field.
The jade tree in the big pot had outgrown its cage a while ago. Branches were starting to grow through the larger holes of the “roof”, so that had already been removed. My daughter was a sweetheart and was able to manhandle the pot into the living room for me – the thing barely fits on the largest shelf of the plant stand we’ve been using for them! Once it was in place, I wrestled with the hardware cloth to get it off.
As soon as it came off, everything fell over!
There were three main stems in the pot and, with the cage around the pot holding them up, they didn’t have the strength to hold their own weight! On top of that, the branches were twisted around, some around each other, in various directions.
It took some doing, but…
I got it supported.
I had some thick doweling left from my outdoor kitchen model. They’re short, but strong enough that I could put them around the thickest stem and use super long twist ties to support it at the base. I was even able to support a smaller stem to those as well. The third stem got its own support.
That still left floppy tops, though. After scrounging around, I found a couple long cherry wood stems in the basement we’d saved with the intention of eventually carving something out of them. One of those is now shoved into the middle of the pot, and I was able to weave some paracord around various branches and stems and get them lifted up and supported.
The top broke off one of the smaller stems, along with a whole lot of leaves. After cleaning up all the broken leaves, I planted the broken top. Jade trees are remarkable in their ability to propagate. If I wanted to, I could have started up a new plant out every single one of those fallen leaves. I think the broken stem has a good chance of survival.
It will take a while, but eventually the stems will gain strength and be able to support themselves. Still, it’s interesting to see how the cage that was there to protect the plant also weakened it so much.
There’s a life lesson in there.
Meanwhile, now that these last two big plants are moved away from the dining room window, it suddenly seems to much bigger and brighter in there! 😄
I few days ago, I spotted our first Spoon tomatoes, but they are so fine and spindly, I waited until today to try and get a photo.
Still no sign of peppers, but there’s about 8 or so tomatoes sprouting, and signs of more seedling elbowing their way to the surface. They are so bitty!
Speaking of bitty, we also have our first strawberries sprouting!
Growing strawberries from seed is totally new to me, so I’m pretty happy to see these. Over time, I want to have lots of strawberries, so if growing them from seeds works, that would make it much more affordable compared to buying transplants or bare roots. We’ll probably still do both. I want to use them as a living ground cover around the silver buffalo berry bushes. Those are nitrogen fixers, so it would be a good combination, and when the bushes start getting too big and start shading out the strawberries, we can just transplant them somewhere else.
I am so looking forward to having our own berries. We all love them, but they are so expensive to buy! My younger daughter was asking about growing blueberries, but they need acidic soil. Ours is very alkaline. We will need to find a spot and focus on lowering the pH so we can plant some. Once we clear more of the dead trees out of the spruce grove, we might be able to get some good spaces in there. I’ve read the spruces increase soil acidity, so I will want to do some soil tests and see how it is now.
This photo really highlights that mix of white and black fur he has! When the light doesn’t get these stark contrasts, he looks like a grey old man. 😄
Also, the poor bugger has SO many burrs hiding in the long fur. Every chance I got to pet him, I’d try to pull some more out, but I keep finding more. He’s got a big clump on his chest, and I found an even bigger one at the back of his belly. There’s another big one behind one of his ears, though I’m not sure if that’s a burr, or a matt of fur. We’re going to have to take scissors to this poor guy!
Speaking of poor guys. Or gals.
The girls can hear stuff outside from upstairs much better than on the ground floor, so when my younger daughter went flying out of the house, I figured it was to break up another cat fight. It was over by the time I joined her, but it was not what I expected. I figured The Distinguished Guest and Shop Towel were at it again, but nope. It was Rolando Moon…
And another orange cat.
A long haired orange cat.
Rolando Moon was in the tree in front of the kitchen window, with a tuft of long orange fur stuck in her teeth.
I got it out for her.
The cat had run away behind the storage house and, as we watched, I spotted it crossing the snow behind the pump shack. I realize I have seen this cat before. About a week or so ago, as I head up the driveway while doing my morning rounds, a cat exploded out from under the garage door and went running across the old hay yard, disappearing behind the shed and barn. With the sun rise behind it, I wasn’t sure if it was an orange cat, or a grey one, but I was leaning towards orange. All I knew for sure is that this was not a cat I’d seen before. Seeing the long haired orange walking across the snow in better light yesterday evening, I think it’s the same cat I saw before.
We’ve had long haired orange cats here before, and I have old pictures and video of one particularly mean bugger from the last time we visited the farm before my father passed away. It’s been a few years, though. Since moving here, we’ve gone from having almost all orange yard cats to only one – Rolando Moon, who is also among those photos I took so many years ago.
So it’s possible we might get a new addition to the yard cats (I counted 23 or 24 this morning). That’s assuming Rolando Moon doesn’t drive it away!
On another note, I was able to spend some more time cleaning up old blog posts to free up media storage space. I completely forgot just how many photo posts I made over the years! For a while, I was doing both Critter of the Day and Photo of the Day posts at the same time. While a lot of these posts are basically just a picture with maybe a line of text, some of them had four or five photos each.
No wonder I’ve been running out of storage space!
As I go further back, though, a lot more are full blog posts that also have a whole lot of critter photos added in. I’ve been leaving those. I also left the ones where the images are stored on Flickr. I still have more to go through, but I did manage to free up more storage space. As the seasons progress this year, the photo heavy gardening and progress posts I used to do will be a thing of the past, or I’m going to be facing the same problem in a very short time. I’ll be putting things together into videos, instead. As far as I can tell, YouTube and Rumble don’t have any storage limits.
It was a bit nostalgic going through those old photos before deleting them off of WordPress. There was one really good photo of Nicky the Nose’s face, looking directly at the camera. Gosh, Nosencrantz looks so much like him! No DNA test needed to confirm paternity! We haven’t seen Nicky the Nose for a couple of years, now. I found some old photos of Shop Towel, looking younger and less beat up, along with other toms that used to visit, but no longer do. Quite a few of our own yard cats that have disappeared in there, too. Seeing pictures of Keith as a kitten brought back memories. We sure miss him.
There are so many good photos. I can see why I posted them, and hate to have to remove them. I want to find some way to bring them back.
Hhmmm… What are your thoughts on this idea. If we were to use some of these photos on a site like Red Bubble, where they could be printed on demand on things like mugs, clothing, journals, clocks, stickers, etc., with all proceeds of sales going towards the care and feeding of the cats, how do you think that would go over? Would you buy, say, a cell phone case with beautiful bird picture on it? Or a notebook with a picture of a deer sticking its tongue out? Or a t-shirt with a cat photo?
Or maybe you have some other idea for these photos to suggest?
Today, my daughter and I headed out for what should be our last big stock up trip of the month.
Well. “Big” is a relative term.
Of course, the morning rounds were done first, and I had company!
The ice these cats are so curious about was melted and muddy by the time we got home.
Also, I counted 24 this morning. When we got back and finished unloading, I topped up their food and water, and The Distinguished Guest was there! I’ve been seeing him more often of late, though yesterday, Shop Towel also showed up and there was quite the cat fight. No new injuries on TDG that we can see. He still looks very rough, but he’s no longer limping. Poor thing. He was so hungry, he almost let me touch him while he was in the kibble house!
My daughter and I left a bit later than we usually would have, as we thought we might have company this morning. The timing didn’t quite work out, so while we were gone, my husband got a quick visit from his sister from another mother, who dropped off some gifts. Including this.
His sister had bought it recently, but then got a really good deal on a Ninja, so she passed the Magic Bullet on to us! That was very thoughtful of her. 😊
My daughter and I had only two places to go to. Our second stop was at Walmart. My daughter had her own shopping to do. I picked up two more 9kg bags of kibble. At $34.97 each, it was a better price than the Canadian Tire. I also picked up some more cheese, since I wasn’t able to get what we usually do at Costco. Some Havarti ($4.44), marble ($4.44) and mozzarella ($7.87). We also got a small ham for the Easter basket ($10.97).
My daughter was shopping for clothes, which reminded me that I needed to get a new pair of jeans. Generally, I don’t like most of the clothes in the women’s department. Especially pants. I find the proportions are off, and they are often made with fabrics that feel really unfortunate. They do sometimes have one specific style of jeans in stock that I find comfortable. Today, there were just a few left in one colour, so there wasn’t a lot of choice, but I snagged them, for $22. That put our grand total at Walmart at $130.70 after taxes, most of which was cat food. We should be good for kibble for the rest of the month.
Our first stop was at Canadian Tire where, along with two bags of hardwood stove pellets (they were out of softwood, which is a bit cheaper) at $7.29 each, we got this.
You can see my new jeans in the corner. 😄
We were very happy to see they had the Iron Out tablets in stock, so we grabbed two, at $6.79 each. I also found nice large eco-pots that can be buried directly into the ground. I will test them out when I pot up some of our larger squash and gourds and see how they are. I got 8 of them for 79 cents each. They had even larger sizes, which might be useful, depending on how big the Zucca melon and gourds get, before we can transplant them outside. The other varieties will be started over the next few weeks, and should not get quite so large before it’s transplanting time.
We got an extra caulking gun because it was on sale for $8.97, and the one we have now has a lot of roofing tar stuck to it. It’s still useable. We would just prefer not to have to deal with that when we’re adhering and caulking the tub surround (the plumber never called back; I’ll have to contact him again and make sure he has my number!).
Then there are the bricks.
I got four fire bricks at $6.99 each. This put our grand total at $78.96 after taxes.
The fire bricks are something I plan to buy a few at a time, every month, which will be manageable on our budget. They are among the few things we will need to buy new for when we build our outdoor kitchen. The floor of the bread oven will be lined with these, and so will the fire area that will be under an open grill.
My daughter and I spent some time talking about our plans for the outdoor kitchen, including something we should be able to salvage. We still have that old wood cookstove in the old kitchen. It’s broken and we can’t use it. Even if it wasn’t broken, and we didn’t have the insurance issues, I wouldn’t dare use it. This thing is sitting directly on the floor, and there are no heat shields. No one had any of that stuff, back when this was installed. It would simply be too dangerous to use it.
However, we could incorporate the cook top into our building plans.
There are two main things broken on the stove. The hinges on the oven door are snapped. Which, I suppose, only matters if you want to use the oven. The thing that makes it unusable is the damage to the firebox.
You can read about how cleaning this old stove went, here, but this is the damage I discovered after emptying out the ashes. The oven hadn’t been used in many years, but no one bothered to clean out the fire box or ash bin.
That’s cast iron, and the space behind it was jammed solid with ashes, which you can see in the picture. It was really sad to see the results of how badly this old stove was treated.
Also, it’s a wonder we didn’t burn the house down, back when this thing was still being used!
So we’ve got this big cookstove in the old kitchen that can’t be used and is taking up space.
Which means that once we’ve got the shelter built, we can dismantle the cookstove and set it up again in the shelter. As long as it’s protected from the weather, and not sitting directly on the ground, it should be fine. Then we can look at incorporating pieces of it into the cooking area we will be building, and it would give my daughter the set up for a wok that she was thinking of, though the openings might be a bit small for what she has in mind. That’s okay. We will have plenty of time to modify our design ideas before we actually start building. The main thing is to get the shelter built, first.
Once we get that out of the old kitchen, we’ll have more space freed up. The chimney will still be there, though, so in the future, we can get a smaller cookstove and set it up with all the proper heat shields and floor protection in place.
After fixing that room up. The floor condition in particular is … fascinating.
All in good time.
Until then, we can do things like slowly accumulate the materials we will need, like the fire bricks I bought today.
On top of the expenditures listed there was, of course, the cost of gas. We were at half a tank on my mother’s car when we left. We stopped at the town my mother lives in to get gas, where we found the new carbon tax brought the price up another 4 cents per litre (we now pay 14 cents per litre in carbon taxes altogether), bringing it to 156.9 cents/L. Because of road dust getting into things, the gas pump nozzle keeps shutting itself off, as if the tank were full, so I never know how close to full I really am. I just put in a little over $20, which at least got me above 3/4 of a tank.
On the way home, we took a different route and stopped at the town we do most of our local shopping. My daughter had an errand to run, and I decided to try a particular gas station on the way home. This place had been closed for a while, but when the reopened, their prices were much lower. I figured, even with the price increase, they might still be the best price. Their sign read 151.9 cents/L, which was better than the old price in other stations – but when I put gas in, I noticed the pump was reading 145.9 cents/L! I put in $25 and actually filled the tank!
Okay, my mother’s car has a small tank and has terrible mileage, but I’ll take what good I can find!
I think I’ve found where I’m going to be buying gas regularly, as much as possible, now!
So that’s been our rather expensive day. Other than things like fresh produce we buy locally, we should be good for the rest of the month!
I forgot. I should have filled the tank again on my way home yesterday.
Quick Dick explains it well.
The cost of everything is going to go up again.
This is going to hurt so many people.
Folks, if you haven’t started to grow and raise as much of your own food as you can (and this is a worldwide problem), get starting doing what you can, as best you can.
The Re-Farmer 