Month: September 2023

Our 2023 – and 2024! garden: planting and transplanting

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This morning, before I intended to continue working on the trellis bed, I wanted to transplant those volunteer tomatoes into the old kitchen garden.

Yes, it’s September, and our average first frost date is the day after tomorrow, but if the frost holds off long enough, they just might have a chance!

It was also a good time to amend the bed the Irish Cobbler potatoes were in. After removing the remaining mulch and loosening the soil (and finding a few tiny potatoes that got missed!), I worked in a bag of cow manure. I also noticed a couple of spaces in the walls where the grass clippings used as chinking was gone, so I found some scrap pieces of wood to put over the gaps on the inside.

Once the bed was prepared, I went and dug up the volunteer tomatoes. I don’t even water that bed anymore, so the soil was very dry. None of it stuck to the roots at all! I laid them out gently on one of the baking sheets we use to transfer seedlings in and out while hardening them off. Those are so handy! We need more of them, but Costco no longer carries them. They are SO much more expensive, elsewhere!

Anyhow.

I had seen one volunteer tomato had died; all it’s leaves just shriveled up for some reason. I left that one, but I still ended up digging out 9 tomato plants! All but one of them are where we’d had Spoon tomatoes planted, 2 years ago. I kept track of the one that came up where cherry and grape tomatoes were planted last year, and the year before.

I’d already given the bed a fairly decent watering, but once I knew how many transplants I had, I dug a hole for each of them, then gave each hole a deep watering. As for the transplants themselves, I trimmed off the lowest leaves and buried the bare stems all the way to the first set of leaves.

I happened to have exactly the right number of plastic rings that had been used to protect the peppers, etc. in the wattle weave bed, so those got put around each tomato plant. These will not only protect them from overnight chills, but from rambunctious kittens, too!

At this point, my alarm went off, reminding me that the post office was open again after lunch. I have a subscription on lysine for the outside cats, and it was in. When I got there, however, I had a pleasant surprise.

My saffron crocus bulbs were in! When I checked the tracking, it was telling me the package would arrive on Monday, so this was a pleasant surprise.

It also changed my plans for after I finished with the tomatoes.

Since we had to pull up all the Roma tomatoes, I had a lot of bamboo stakes available. I pushed in a pair of them inside each plastic ring. These will keep the wind from blowing them away – and the cats from knocking them about – and if the weather holds long enough for them to survive, they will be supports for the tomato plants, too.

I also had the soaker hose that had been used on the Roma tomato bed. It’s pretty long, though, so I was able to run it back and forth and around every plastic ring, using tent pegs to hold it in place on the curves.

Last of all, the mulch got returned.

It’s ridiculously late to be transplanting tomatoes in our area, but I wanted to give them a chance!

That done, I could move on to the saffron crocuses, which needed to be planted right away.

These are actually a zone 4 plant, and we’re zone 3, so they went into the same protected area we have our zone 4 apple tree, and where the girls planted tulips. This area has a mishmash of wire surrounding it, to protect them from the deer.

There are 20 bulbs in the package, and the need to be planted 4 to 8 inches deep, and 3 inches apart. I was originally intending to plant them in a 4 x 5 bulb block, in an area I was pretty sure there were no tulips growing, but after poking around with a garden fork, that went out the window pretty fast. The area is so full of large roots!

I ended up being able to start a longer trench, so I went with 2 rows of 10 bulbs, instead.

The instructions specifically said to NOT amend the soil with manure of fertilizer, to water them when planted, but to not water them again unless it was drought conditions.

In clearing out the soil, so many weed roots were removed that there was hardly any soil left. I would have to get soil from the remains of the truck load of garden soil in the outer yard we bought a couple of years ago.

After removing the top 4 inches of weed roots and dirt, I loosened the bottom with a cultivator tool, then gave the trench a very deep watering. Then I loosened the soil some more, tried to level it off a bit, and watered it some more!

After that, I went and sifted some garden soil into the wheel barrow to fill the trench, before getting the bulbs.

I did not expect them to be so…

…hairy.

The bulbs got laid out in two rows, 3 inches apart, then buried. I ended up needing to get a second small load of soil to cover them well. They got about 6 inches of soil, maybe a bit more, on top. It will, however settle over time. Compaction is another concern. I wanted to give them a final watering, but not with out a mulch, first!

Thankfully, we still have lots of grass clippings handy for mulch!

Once a thick layer was in place, I gave it another deep watering. I wanted that new soil, which was quite dry, to be moistened. The mulch is great for keeping the soil below moist, but if the clippings are very dry, they actually prevent moisture from getting through. The top will get wet, but the bottom – and the soil below – says dry. Kinda like how thatch works. So I made sure the mulch itself was very wet, all the way through, so that the water could moisten the soil, too.

Given the temperatures we can hit over the winter, these will need more protection before the ground freezes, as well the apple tree. It’s already sheltered and protected from the north and, now that the dead and dying trees are cut away, it gets full sunlight and warmth. Still, extra protection will be good! When the leaves fall, we can use that to mulch the entire area. In the spring, though, the mulch of the crocuses will need to be pushed aside, leaving only a light layer to protect the soil. The alternative would have been to plant them in pots and bring them in every winter, and frankly, I have no interest in doing that. It’s hard enough to protect our house plants from the cats! They’d just love some big pots of soil to dig in. 😄

Once the mulch was in place, I spread out the soil that had been removed as evenly as I could, and that was it.

We now have tomatoes transplanted that, if they survive, will be for this year, and bulbs planted for next year! These crocuses boom in the fall, so it will be quite some time before we know we will have any saffron to harvest.

I’m pretty excited to find out.

From the Vesey’s website:

Bulbs typically triple their flower output year over year. A package of 20 bulbs should produce enough saffron in the first season for the average family to enjoy sparingly.

Triple their output every year? That would be amazing!

But first, they have to survive our winters!

The Re-Farmer

Ready for the freezer

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I let the tomato sauce we made yesterday cool over night – with the current overnight temperatures we are getting right now, the kitchen gets really cold, so there were no concerns there!

This morning, I ladled it into some size medium Ziploc bags.

We did use some of it last night, while it was still hot. I still ended up with 6 bags for the freezer.

I left them on the baking sheet in the freezer, so they’d stay nice and flat while freezing.

Once this was done, I prepped more pans, then washed and sliced some Black Beauty tomatoes to dehydrate. Only 2 pans fit in the oven. I should look into getting extra oven racks. With enough oven racks, we could use all our 9×13 baking pans at the same time, and have room to spare for air circulation.

Something to keep in mind over the next while.

Anyhow, those went into the oven on the lowest “warm” setting, which on our new oven is 145F. I left the oven door propped open slightly with a wooden spoon to let the moisture out. It’ll still take a long time, though. Some of the slices ended up a bit on the thick side.

I also completely forgot to take any photos!

I’ll be sure to take some when it’s time to flip them.

The main thing is, these could stay in the oven to dry out, and I could go do other things. I was intending to get to the trellis bed again, but that didn’t happen. You’ll see why in my next post! I’m pretty excited about it. 😊

The Re-Farmer

Count the kitties!

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Well, the little Soot Sprite is definitely settling in!

Can you find it?

There are seven kittens in the photo. 😊

I’m happy to say that I’ve not had a single mess on my bed in quite a while, though I did just catch TTT about to take a dump on it. I got her off in time, but she couldn’t stop herself from making a mess on the floor. She just happened to be over plastic take out lid that I’ve been using as a kibble container, so at least it was an easy clean up.

However.

For some reason, there are kittens that insist on using the puppy pads. They use the litter boxes. All of them. However, for some reason, they’ve started to use two spots under my desk, too. Right next to the litter box!

With the tinies in the room, I’ve got the small, low pan that fit in Baby Jail when the kittens were all in there. I ended up putting it on top of one spot by the litter box. There is no space around it for them to use instead, so that is working. The other spot, however, is one I can’t put something on top of, because it’s right next to where I put my feet. If I put something there, I’d be constantly kicking it or dropping a foot in it.

I could understand it if was the tinies, as they haven’t been using a litter for long, but it’s not. I’ve actually caught one of the bigger kittens as it just finished making a mess on the puppy pad next to the litter box – then go into the litter box to pee! It doesn’t matter if the litter has just been changed, either.

I’m at a loss for ideas on what to use to convince the kittens to go into the litter boxes, not make a mess t next to them. The only thing I haven’t tried yet is cayenne pepper, and I don’t want to actually hurt them.

At least it’s an easy clean up.

The Re-Farmer

Warming up, and a morning harvest

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While doing my morning rounds, I make a point of looking at the squash blossoms to see if any need to be hand pollinated. With the chilly nights we’ve been having – we dropped to 6C/43F last night – I’ve been finding bees in the flowers, curled up and covered in pollen.

Not this morning!

These bees had made their way out to warm up in the sun!

You can even see how wet their “fur” is. That’s not from rain. That’s from the morning dew!

I am so happy to see so many bees this year. They got hit really hard the last two springs, and it’s good to see them recovering.

I also got a small harvest this morning.

We’ve got so many tomatoes inside already, waiting to be processed, and I still have the unripe Romas sitting on screens under the market tent, until we have room to move them indoors, but when they’re ripe, they’re ripe. They need to be picked!

Then there was just one, lonely zucchini. 😁 Which I’m quite happy with, since we almost had no surviving zucchini at all, this year!

With the overnight temperatures dropping lower than forecast, I find myself wondering if we should gather all the tomatoes and bring them in to ripen. We’ve got a couple of nights coming up that are now predicted to drop to 6C/43F overnight. Considering that we’ve been hitting that on nights we were supposed to drop to only 10C, it has me concerned. Sunday is the 10th – our first average frost date. We’re supposed to have a high of 18C/64F that day, and an overnight low of 6C/43F. The next day is supposed to have a high of 17C/63F, with no change in the low. After that, things are supposed to warm up again. Depending on how the forecasts change, we might be trying to cover the tomatoes, peppers and melons. There’s no way we can cover the squash bed. It’s just too spread out.

So many things depend on the weather right now. For things like the winter squash, peppers – only the Sweet Chocolates are far enough along to have ripe ones to pick – and our one eggplant that’s trying to grow fruit right now, a frost would mean no harvest at all. The carrots, onions and purple potatoes would be fine, at least.

Well, we shall see when the time comes. Just praying for the frost to hold off long enough for things to finish ripening, though even chilly nights will slow things down.

I know the bees would sure enjoy the warmth hanging around longer!

The Re-Farmer

Tomato sauce is done!

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It took a while, and I had to pause part way through to do other things, but it’s finally done!

Here are photos of the process. I didn’t really follow a recipe, but rather used a number of different recipes I found online to use as a guide.

After selecting the ripest Roma VF tomatoes, I gave them a wash and left them in the water while working on the onions and garlic. I wanted those on the bottom of the roasting pans to make sure they would get completely immersed in any liquid released by the tomatoes. I wanted them to cook until they were so soft, they’d disappear into the sauce.

When it came time to process the tomatoes, things went a lot faster than fighting with those little onions and garlic! I was going to leave the skins on, so I only needed to cut the stem ends off (and any damaged bits), then give them a squeeze. With the shape of the Roma, it was easy to do it sort of assembly line style, cutting the ends off and lining them up on the cutting board, cut side down, until the board was mostly full, then squeezing the seeds out into a bucket for the compost.

A handy tip to make things easier: place a cutting board inside a baking pan with low sides. I have a whole bunch of 9×13 baking pans that are perfect for this. They are large enough to fit a cutting board with room to spare to catch liquids or keep items handy, and the sides are low enough to not get in the way of my hand or the knife as I cut.

All the recipes I found had the amount of tomatoes by weight – usually 4 lbs. I had no idea how many pounds of tomatoes I had, so I just winged the quantities for the other ingredients, and split everything between the three pans.

After all the tomatoes were cut and seeded, I added more olive oil and carefully turned the tomatoes to coat them, while trying not to move the onions and garlic on the bottom too much.

The recipes I found had oven temperatures ranging from 300F to 425F, and while some had cooking times, most were “until the skins start to blister”.

I decided to go lower and slower. I put the three roasting pans into a 325F oven. I checked them at about 40 minutes, then added another half an hour.

While they were roasting, I went and got some fresh oregano and thyme. I didn’t get a lot of oregano, because the plant is mostly blooming right now, and the bees were loving the flowers. So I just found a few smaller stems. I picked about the same amount of the thyme sharing a pot with the oregano. We have German Winter Thyme in the old kitchen garden, but the seed pack for these ones didn’t include a variety name.

This gave me a chance to try out the herb chopper I picked up at a Dollarama not long ago. It came with a cutting board with a recess matching the curve of the blades. It did a pretty good job, though with the slightly larger oregano leaves, they sort of got caught between the blades while just rocking it, so it needed to be lifted and shifted with each cut. That was not as much of an issue with the thyme leaves.

I like it.

When the timer went off on the oven, the kitchen needed to be used for other cooking, so I just shut it off and left the pans in the oven. Then, before I started on the final cooking, I made sure to do all my outside stuff and other little things, so they were in the oven for probably 2 or 3 hours. They were still quite warm when I took them out!

When transferring them into my big stock pot, I was very happy to see how softened the onions and garlic were! Exactly what I was after. All three roasting pans really filled that pot!

At this point, I added the chopped herbs and salt. Sea salt, because we happen to have some at the moment. After stirring that in, I turned on the heat, then used the immersion blender on it. Not for long, but that things is very efficient, so there were just a few larger pieces that got missed.

After that, I kept it at a simmer for about another couple of hours, stirring frequently. I tasted it a few times and ended up adding more salt (twice), some pepper, some dried sage, a bay leaf and a splash of lemon juice.

Towards the end, I removed the bay leaf and took the immersion blender to it again. This time I kept it going for longer, so make sure there weren’t any big pieces of tomato skins anywhere.

I like that this pot has a measurement scale inside it. After the first blending, the sauce reached just under the 7L mark. When it was done, it was at the 6L mark. I could have cooked it down further, but I think it’ll be good enough.

For now, the sauce is cooling down. I plan to put it into freezer bags and freeze them, though we will probably use some of it with a meal, first.

I think the next processing I will do is to dehydrate slices of the Black Beauty and Indigo Blue tomatoes. Those can be left in a warm oven, unattended, while I get other work done.

A dehydrator would be a useful gadget, but we really don’t have the space for one. At least not where we also have access to an outlet.

For now, the oven will do just fine, and tomorrow, I hope to get some work done outside at the same time!

The Re-Farmer

Taking a break

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Finally, I am home for the day and can start the tomato sauce. We have tomatoes all over the place, and I gathered all the ripest Roma VF, leaving the Black Beauty and Indigo Blue, for now.

It was enough to fill a kitchen sink.

After going over numerous recipes for roasted tomato sauce, I decided on how I would make these.

I have 3 roasting pans and can fit them all in the oven together.

To start, the bottoms got a generous splash of olive oil. I then took advantage of this and used the smaller onions and garlic. I finished off an entire small braid of onions, which gave me the equivalent of maybe 2 large onions. 😁 I also smashed and peeled cloves from about a dozen small garlic bulbs. That gave me the equivalent of about 2 large bulbs.

I wasn’t too concerned about the proportions in each roasting pan. They will all go into one pot, later. That’s when I will be adding fresh herbs and seasonings.

The down side of using the smallest bulbs is that it took a really long time standing at the counter, prepping them.

My back is killing me, and I took painkillers before I started.

So I am taking a break now.

Next step is to trim and deseed the tomatoes. That’s going to be another long time, standing at the counter!

I plan on leaving the skins, though, as I will be using the immersion blender as a final step.

As for the black tomatoes, once the sauce is done in the oven, I think I will slice the ripest ones and dehydrate them. As much as I can fit on baking pans, at least. There are more Romas ripening, so there will likely be more sauce or paste to make, later.

The Re-Farmer

Trellis bed progress, and we have a soot sprite

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Since I ended up driving around again today, once I was home to stay, I took advantage of the cooler temperatures and calmer winds to work on the trellis bed.

One larger base log was ready. The next step was to use a garden fork to loosen the soil from one marker to the other. Aside from pulling out as many weeds and roots as I could, I was also able to use a hoe to try and adjust the soil height. The log is, of course, wider at the base, plus the ground has a slight dip at one end, so I brought loosened soil from one end to the other, to try and make it to the log would be more or less level once on the ground. Plus, with the loosened soil, it wasn’t going to roll around out of position on me. Once that was on place, I could start debarking the log that would be set on top of it.

Debarking is pretty fast. It’s all those branch bits and lumps that slow things down!

After doing the top half, it started to get pretty painful on the back, so I used one of the poplar logs that will be vertical posts to raise the end. It worked for helping the back, but the saw horse kept rocking, and the poplar log kept wanting to roll! 😂

Once the smaller log was debarked, I use the baby chainsaw (electric pruner) to sort of flatten the base log from end to end. Mostly to get rid of some lumps where branches used to be. The smaller log was naturally flat next to a couple of branch stumps, so I took advantage of that and flattened the rest of the lot a tiny bit, to match the naturally flat part. It’s not a perfect fit, but I wasn’t really trying for one. I might level things off a bit more, but if I do, it’ll be when I have the chain saw set up, so I’m not killing the batteries on my mini chainsaw so quickly.

Next, it was time to work on the large log that will be the base log for the other wall of the raised bed. It had more branch bits to cut off than the other two, but once those were trimmed, debarking went quickly.

At that point, it was time to stop for the day – and for the draw knife to get a good cleaning and sharpening!

I expect to actually be home all day tomorrow, so I’ll be able to finally make more tomato sauce. When I get back to working on the bed, I plan to make use of the pieces of rebar I’d picked up for the shelter we could never get set up. I’ve got auger drill bits in that size. Once I’m satisfied with out the side logs are resting on each other, I will drill a pair of holes, then hammer in the rebar, so hold the logs together. When the time comes, the ends will be joined with 4′ logs, but first the ends of the side logs will have to be trimmed even. That will be much easier if I can do that while they are already secured into position.

As for the vertical supports, I am changing my mind on how to do those, again. I’d been planning to set the posts inside the raised bed, before they were filled. Setting them in the middle of the beds would result in a trellis tunnel that is 6′ apart across the top, and would give access to both sides of the bed for planting and weeding.

The more I think about it, though, the more potential problems I can see with doing it that way. Primarily, I’d have to treat the bottoms of the posts to prevent rotting. I was planning to debark and char them. With the winds we’ve been having, though, the chances of being able to get a fire going to do that don’t seem pretty good. Also, finding straight horizontal pieces that are 6′ long is going to be harder. I have enough vertical supports to have 4 posts for each of what will be 4 beds like this. I could try to harvest more poplar to have more verticals, but finding nice straight ones in the right size has not been as easy as I thought it would be, and I don’t want to be wasting trees. So if we have 4 verticals per bed, they would need to be 6′ apart, and I would need three 6′ pieces per bed – or 12 in total, for the 4 beds we plan to build here. If the trellis tunnel sides are also 6′ apart, that adds another four 6′ pieces needed per tunnel, making 20 horizontals in total.

Now I’m thinking I should attach the vertical supports to the outside of the beds, along each side of the tunnel space. I can see a few advantages to this.

First, I won’t have to dig any post holes.

Second, if they are attached to the outside of the beds, they won’t be buried in soil and I won’t need to treat them to keep them from rotting.

It will also be easier to find shorter, straight pieces for the horizontals, plus it will be easier to reach and work on the tops to attach them. Right now, I’m just aiming to do one low raised bed with a trellis wall. Even if we manage to get the second half done, the horizontals at the top don’t need to be until later. Plus, it will be much easier to attach 4′ lengths onto the verticals later on, than 6′ lengths with half a garden bed to work around.

By not having the verticals in the middle of the beds, they won’t take up growing space. Also, these beds are 18′ long, and 4′ wide on the outside. Our raised bed covers are intended to be interchangeable, at 9’x3′. Without the verticals inside the bed, we’ll be able to fit a pair of them over one 18′ bed, if needed. The logs are wide enough that the actual growing space will be closer to 3′, so the covers will have frame support.

The main reason I wanted to put them down the middle of the bed was to be able to reach the growing space from both sides. It had been my intention to reuse the hardware cloth and chicken wire from the old squash tunnel for this. However, as long as we use something with large enough openings, we’d still be able to tend the bed, through the trellis, just like we’ve been able to do with the cover currently on the high raised bed, made with the stronger fence wire and larger openings.

The one real drawback is now to secure the verticals to the walls. I might still have to dig post holes.

I’ll figure that out, when the time comes.

In other things…

I did the running around I had to do; since I had to go to Staples to get the printer ink we needed, and it shares a parking lot with a Walmart, I took advantage of that and picked up a few things, including more of the shredded cat food the cats in the isolation ward prefer. Or maybe it’s me that really prefers it. It’s much easier to divide into bowls than paté.

Once we had the printer ink, we could print off the label we needed (frustrating to have to buy colour ink to print something that is black and white text!), then pack up the RAM that didn’t work with my husband’s computer and drive to a Purolator depot.

There is one thing that’s new right now.

When feeding the cats outside for the evening, I was able to catch a little black kitten.

I brought it inside.

It’s just the tiniest little soot sprite!

My younger daughter has always wanted an all black cat. Now, she will have one.

So far, it is not too keen on this whole “indoors” thing, and being surrounded by strange kittens. It doesn’t even seem to recognizes its brother. However, it quite enjoyed its first taste of wet cat food! I can hear it wandering around behind me, sometimes giving out a strange, hoarse little meow.

It will take time, but Pom Pom is starting to warm up to attention now, and hopefully that will encourage Sprite to accept attention from humans, too. If things go well, I hope to have it well socialized by the time my daughter gets back from house sitting. 😊

The Re-Farmer

Swinging

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While checking on the garden yesterday evening, I noticed some of the melons were getting pretty heavy, so I dug out something I’d made the first year we tried to grow melons, and succeeded. This morning, I got some photos.

Melon hammocks!

I might have to make more. There are quite a lot of melons getting nice and big in the makeshift trellis!

I look forward to when we have permanent and portable trellises. I am really happy with how some of our climbing vines have been doing. Especially the melons in their kiddie pool raised bed! There are three varieties in there, but they are all climbing so vigorously, the vines are all twisted around each other. We’ll figure out which is which, when it’s time to harvest them.

The Re-Farmer

Evening harvest and a change in plans

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Well, I’m going to be running around tomorrow, after all.

But first, while doing my evening rounds, I found myself bringing in a small harvest.

At first, I thought I’d just grab the few ripe Indigo Blues I spotted, but then I noticed the Red Swan beans, among the purple corn. The plants are small and sparse, but once I started looking around the leaves, I kept finding more and more larger bean pods! The yellow zucchini was one I looked at this morning and thought would wait until tomorrow or the day after, but it was noticeably bigger by the evening.

I really should know better than to move the peppers to see how ripe they are. Where the sun hits turns brown rather quickly, while the parts in shade stay green longer. They are completely ripe when they are all brown. The problem is, their stems are fragile, so when I move a pepper to see the other side of it, it just snaps right off!

Which is fine. My daughter is using it for her meal right now.

Meanwhile…

While still at my mother’s, I got a message from my husband letting me know there was something to pick up at the post office. One of the packages was RAM for his computer. He was very excited about it.

Some time later, I came out and noticed he wasn’t in his room. Eventually, I found him in the living room, reading on his tablet.

Not a good sign.

He had installed the RAM, which was absolutely the right hardware for his computer, but when he turned it on, it wouldn’t work. He just had a black screen with a spinning circle on it.

Turns out, this is a known problem with his brand of computer. It doesn’t like being upgraded.

After fighting with it for a while, he reinstalled the original RAM.

And it still didn’t work.

His computer was dead.

At which point, he pain killered up and lay down for a while, because installing the hardware really did a number on his back. When he couldn’t handle being prone anymore, he moved to the living room.

At least he was still able to research his issue, then try something else.

Ultimately, he was able to get the original RAM working again, and he has a working computer again.

He’s also going to return the RAM.

That requires printing out a return label.

The printer is in my room. We don’t need to print a lot of stuff, but the self cleaning uses a lot of ink, anyhow. I’m out of cyan and magenta. You’d think we’d still be able to print out a black and white label, but nope. Even when it’s set to black and white, if more than one colour of ink is out, the printer simply won’t print.

Which means that tomorrow, I have to go to the nearest place that sells this brand of ink.

Which is a Staples, in the smaller city.

Then, after the ink is installed the the labels printed, I’m going to have to go to a Purolator to send the return out.

Which is driving to either the town we usually go to, or the town my mother lives in. Considering were the Purolator depot moved to in town, there isn’t really any difference in time or distance between them.

So I’ll have a couple of hours, more or less, of driving to get the ink and bring it home, then another 45 minutes to an hour of driving to get to a Purolator.

A significant portion of the refund is going to have to go back to paying for the gas and ink!

Well, so much for starting on that tomato sauce tomorrow.

The Re-Farmer

Another outing

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My big shopping trips to the city may be done, but that doesn’t mean I get to stay home!

I was going to start roasting tomatoes today, but got a call from my mother last night.

She said she called because we (my sister and I) hadn’t called her, and she was bored.

Gee. Thanks, Mom.

Well, it turned out to be not just that. She has a birthday coming up soon and I asked about taking her out to dinner for that, which got her to talking about needing groceries. After much waffling back and forth, it was arranged that I would come over today. We’d do lunch, then run errands.

I will say, it was a “good” outing with my mother, as far as such things go. There were a few things she tried, ranging from assuming my SIL, who is absolute gold and someone who has always been so incredibly kind and patient with my mother, was just a terrible person that would make my brother do things my mother doesn’t want him to do. Which is crazy enough in the first place (starting with the fact that my mother is still trying to control my brother, who is in his 60’s), but it also was about her trying to control us, after her death.

She’s most definitely worried about the wrong people, to begin with.

Part of the problem is that my mother thinks she understands thing she can’t even begin to grasp, they are so outside of her experience. But, because she’s turning 92 and lived through so much, that means she knows everything. Including people’s thoughts and motivations.

It was very difficult to reign in the conversation. I even tried to show photos of my brother and his wife that they sent me, but she didn’t even care to look at them. Even just ordering food was an ordeal. She was going to order nothing but a bowl of soup, because she has to “watch what she eats”. She wasn’t even going to order something to drink with it. Well, I certainly wasn’t going to eat a meal while she watched me, hungry, so I was just going to have my pop. She started telling me to order whatever I wanted, then suddenly remembered this restaurant has pizza and said that if I ordered a pizza, she’d share with me, got all excited, then told me to order a medium pizza.

I would not have ordered a pizza for myself, but if it meant she would actually eat, I went ahead and ordered one. I didn’t even try to ask her what kind she wanted.

She must’ve been famished, because she just inhaled that incredibly hot soup and was very happy to see the pizza when it arrived. Then suddenly she decided she needed coffee to go with it. She was all excited about having pizza to take home and not have to cook tomorrow, so I ended up having just a couple of pieces with her, and half the pizza was boxed up.

So… now that I’m home, I think I’ll have lunch. 😄

Oh, and as we were eating, she started commenting on how her small lunch was suddenly a big lunch, because of me. She said it like it was a joke, but she wasn’t actually joking, but trying to make it my “fault” that she *gasp* had an actual meal.

I’m not really complaining. This was supposed to be her birthday lunch, so I’m just happy that she actually ate something instead of starving herself for no reason. She doesn’t understand nutrition, either, but thinks she does, because she watched daytime talk shows in the past, and some guy somewhere said that if you eat soup, you’ll lose weight. Which is probably not what was actually said, but that’s what she remembers. She keeps cutting out the most nutritionally dense food and replacing it with empty carbs, then wonders why she’s hungry all the time.

Which reminds me. I didn’t see any meat left in her freezer, and she only bought some deli turkey that was on sale. I’ll have to grab some of the smaller packages of meat from our freezer and sneak them into hers.

Ultimately, though, I think I will just take her out to a birthday dinner, without her insisting she’s going to pay for it, and have a proper meal.

But then again, maybe not. If I do that, I’ll just get a constant barrage about what a terrible thing I’m doing, and constant complaining.

I was just thinking that she is having a harder time moving around, so maybe I could bring take out, instead, but that would just result in different insults and complaints.

*sigh*

I want to do nice things for my mother. I really do. It just gets so hard, sometimes. I’m not after any sort of grandiose thanks for it, but I’d at least like to not be treated like crap for it.

Ah, well. If she hasn’t figured it out by her 90’s, I don’t expect her to figure it out now.

In other things…

Today has been a really bad day for smoke from the fires up north. There are no fires near us at all, but we’ve got high winds blowing. Yesterday, we got such wonderful rain – real downpours! – but apparently none of it hit the areas with the fires. Most of them are just being monitored; they’re smaller and not threatening any populations, because no one lives where they are. A few others are listed as under control. That’s it. But there is one fire to the north of us, listed as under control, that is a bigger, and I guess that’s the one that we’re getting all the smoke from.

Kitty status: Pom Pom is getting more comfortable with us. I’ve been able to snag him and hold him for a while, and while he does try to run away if I get too close, once I’ve got him, he’s okay with sitting in my hands (he’s that small!) and getting pets. He hasn’t figured out the litter yet, but he did figure out the puppy pads, until just now. He actually went under my desk, while I was sitting here, writing this post, and started digging in the puppy pads. I put him in the litter box he was right next to and blocked him from coming out again, so he used it. It’s a start!

There is still no sign of Nosencrantz, Butterscotch or Marlee. Not even sightings in the distance. I’ve posted their photos on a local group online, asking people to keep an eye out for them. No responses.

I did get a message from someone interested in adopting Ghosty, asking if she were still available. I said yes, and asked if she would be an indoor cat. I was told no; they were looking for a mouser.

Ghosty is not going to be an outside cat again! I did mention we had some older outdoor kittens, but they wanted a female, and all the most socialized ones are male.

Oh, my goodness! Looking out my window, there was such a huge gust of wind blowing the big maple round!

Now that we have the small scaffolding, I wonder if we can use it to get that one huge branch down, piece by piece, before the tree finally breaks off at that weak spot on the trunk.

Well, there isn’t going to be much we can get done outside in this wind.

Mind you, after visiting with my mother, even on one of her good days, I am going to need a few hours to decompress, anyhow.

The Re-Farmer