When heading out earlier, I carefully checked on the babies, and they seemed very comfortable in their new nest!

I’ve seen the mama around, but not in the sun room. While she was willing to put up with me when I put the evening kibble out, once she’d eaten, she kept her distance. I was concerned when I started hearing the kittens from the sun room, but she was going in the other direction, so I made a wide circle around her to use the main doors, in hopes she would go towards the sun room to get away from me but, instead, she went up the sidewalk to the gate. So I went inside to not disturb her, and hope that she hears her kittens and tends to them. Earlier, I even made sure to leave little piles of kibble around where the nest is, to treat her when she does.

This is what I started working on while outside.

What a flippin’ pain to attach the fence wire to the frame! I was using U nails (aka: staples) to attach them, but they were the biggest problem. They were poorly cut, and the ends were often jagged instead of pointed. There was really nothing we could do about that, either. I also had to hammer most of them to be more closed, so that they wouldn’t splay while being hammered into the wood.

I tacked a section of fence wire to the ends first, the added the third section to the middle, so that it overlapped the end pieces evenly. Once that was tacked in place, I went back and added a U nail over every joint in the wire, with my daughter holding the frame steady and passing me the best U nails out of the bag that she could find. I would not be at all surprised if the U nails simply popped right out.

I was very frustrated with them.

Ideally, I would strength the whole thing by sandwiching the fence wire between another piece of wood, but the horizontal and vertical pieces of fence wire are joined by one being wrapped several times over the other, making each join triple the thickness of the wire on its own. It would still work, but there would be a larger gap between the boards than I would want. It would certainly make the corners more stable, though. Hmm… We do still have a couple of 12′ pieces that were cut wonky. Maybe I could experiment and try it with just one frame.

By the time I was hammering the last of the U nails in, it was starting to rain again, so we left the other half for another time.

Once inside, I was going to start supper, but the girls took that over and are working on it as I write this. We did decide that there really wasn’t enough of the potatoes I picked earlier for the four of us – we do like our potatoes! – so I went out and harvested some of the Red Thumb potatoes, too.

That colour is amazing! These are red all the way through, too.

After passing them on to my daughters to prepare, I went back out and harvested some fresh dill leaves from the self seeded dill we have along the edge of the old kitchen garden, to go with the new potatoes. When the old kitchen garden is set up to be more of an herb garden, we plan to include a variety of dill that is grown more for its leaves than for the seed heads, since that’s how we use it the most. We have another variety that is more for pickling, and we plan to sow those somewhere further away, where we don’t mind them self seeding and can treat them as a perennial.

I’m really looking forward to trying these potato varieties!

The Re-Farmer