Funny how I do my rounds every morning and evening, and I still sometimes find new things!
Though the first thing to share with you is what I found last night!
My daughters heard a ruckus outside, so I went out to check and found this.
There was at least one more racoon that ran off before I could shine a light into the kibble house.
The one trying to claw its way under the roof looks very unhappy!
Speaking of unhappy, while walking around in the outer yard last night, my older daughter twisted her ankle in a dip on the ground, hidden by grass. I keep dropping a lawn mower tire in it, or tripping over it myself, so I went and got a wheelbarrow of soil. While I was doing that, my daughters kicked around in the grass and found three more sunken areas. Once we saw the spacing, we realized what they were from. When we first moved here, there was a truck that was parked there. It belonged to my brother that lives in the quarter section across the road, so he moved it away our first summer here. The low spots are from the tires sinking during the years it sat there! The one tire made a deeper hole, because it was sitting where more spring meltwater would accumulate.
My daughter twisted her ankle bad enough that she’s still limping today. 😢
This morning, as I was checking the garden beds along the chain link fence, I started hearing kitten noises. I knew one of the mamas likely had a litter there, but had yet to hear or see anything until today. It took going all the way around to the back of the pile before I saw two kittens in the grass.
Yes, there are two kittens in the picture! There is a tuxedo hiding under a big burdock leaf. The mama was not happy to see me there!
Of course, I had to take a quick peek and check on the newest babies we found.
In this photo, I could count 7 faces.
The mama was near by and watching me closely, so I just quickly stuck my phone over the opening, snapped a couple of pictures and left.
Yesterday evening, I finally dragged away the broken tree top that fell near where the low raised beds and compost pile are. One of the branches snagged on a squash vine hanging out of the compost ring, so I make sure to check if it was okay this morning. Looks like the damage was very minor, because our mystery squash are doing very well!
There are even female flowers developing! The one vine is quite large, but there are at least 3 more smaller ones in there. It should be interesting to see what they turn out to be!
Though we had rain off and on all day yesterday, it was never more than enough to dampen the grass, so I got the sprinkler going over the squash patch this morning. It also waters the purple corn, so I could probably move that new soaker hose to another bed. While that was running, I took my time checking other things, and ended up pulling crab grass in the bed we grew potatoes and melons in last year – or should I say, tried to! – that still has the old straw mulch over it. After clearing away a bunch of crab grass, I found…
… a remarkably large potato plant was hidden in the grass! This would be an All Blue potato. In the other bed, where the straw was cleared in preparation for building the trellis beds, I uncovered a single potato plant (also pictured above), but it is much, much smaller. The smaller one would be the Briget variety.
Next I checked the high raised bed, where I noticed one of the clips holding the netting at the top was broken and floating in the netting above the beans.
I found some of the ground staples pulled up, too.
Something actually managed to eat more of our bush bean leaves!!!
It couldn’t possibly be a deer that did it. From what I saw while putting the netting and ground staples back, I got the impression that something got in, then panicked a bit while tearing itself out. But what? It’s not like a rabbit could climb up there. We haven’t seen any ground hogs, and I don’t know that they are climbers – plus, I think a ground hog would have done a lot more damage!
Whatever it was, it ate some leaves and left. The plants are still showing flower buds, so it looks like they will survive just fine, and we should be getting at least a few beans this year.
In other things, I finally got a call about my mother’s glasses, so tomorrow I will be picking her up and taking her to pick them up. I hope she’s happy with them. Since I’m going to her town anyhow, that will give me a chance to stop at different hardware store and see if they have the right size coupling in stock. It will be great to repair that pipe and be able to hook the hose up to the garden tap, instead of the house! If it works out and no new cracks appear, I want to see if I can drag a double laundry sink we found in of one of the sheds, and make a vegetable washing station under the garden tap, too. That would be very handy!
But first, we fix the water pipe!
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 