Yes, I just place our first order of seeds for next year’s garden. We might not need to order many seeds this year, considering how many we have left, but one thing we were out of completely was onions. Onions seeds only last one year, anyhow. Plus, today is the last day I can use the promo code from Maritime Gardening to get free shipping. 😁
This is what I ordered today.
I’m trying a new variety of yellow onion this year. Frontier. From the Veseys website:
Incredibly strong necks and consistent size! Frontier is a standout variety with our trial staff. Bulbs are golden, large and uniform with small necks that cure quickly. Ideal for fresh and storage markets, Frontier is long day hybrid onion with superb disease resistance. Matures in 100 days from transplant. Approx. 200 seeds/pkg.
I’m also trying a new type of shallot this year. Creme Brulee. From the website:
First Shallot AAS winner! An elongated shallot, Creme Brule has a citrusy flavour when eaten raw but when cooked, sugars are enhanced and do not leave an overpowering aftertaste. Bulbs are 4-5″ with a coppery pink skin. An attractive, easy to peel echalion, perfect for the home gardener or market grower! Matures in 95-100 days from transplant. Approx. 150 seeds/pkg.
I do still plan to try the Red Whethersfield onions again, and will probably get Red of Florence again, but those are from a different source.
Of course, I didn’t get just onions! I also got:
Yes, we will be trying to grow melons again (I’ll have a garden analysis post about this year’s melons coming up soon). We still have seeds, but I decided to get the Summer of Melons Blend. From the website:
Veseys exclusive! Best for the home gardener. This blend is the ideal solution to stretch out these beautiful summer flavours. It begins with sweet, early maturing hybrid varieties then keeps going through summer and into early fall. Maturity ranges from 75-85 days from transplant. Approx. 20 seeds/pkg.
I like having a variety, and having melons that mature at different rates – while still within our short growing season! – is bonus. It’ll also be a surprise, since the varieties included aren’t mentioned!
Veseys exclusive! Great range of colours and sizes. This exclusive Veseys blend contains a riot of shapes, sizes and colours that will bring your fall display to the next level. Some of the weirdest and wildest looking squash that we have seen in our trials. Ideal for both home and market gardeners looking for a great display without having to buy separate varieties. All are edible, and are strong vining types so they grow well together. Approx. 20-25 seeds/pkg.
I’ll have a garden analysis about our winter and summer squash, too, which was a real hit and miss situation. We do still have lots seeds from what we grew (or tried to grow) this past year. I have zero interest in having a “fall display” (who would we be displaying it for, anyhow? 😄). I like to try new varieties, but am hesitant to buy an entire package of seeds for something I’m not sure of. This way, we get just a few seeds of different varieties to try and – if they make it! – see if we like them enough to order more in the future. At some point, we’ll settle on one or two favourites and save our own seeds. Until we get to that point, we would be dealing with cross pollination, so any seeds we save as we’re experimenting would give us different results that may not be as good.
Just a small order for now. Soon, I’ll place another order for the red onions, so that we’ll have all the seeds ready to start them in January. Because, where we live, gardening starts in winter!
The cats just love this busted up bin with the garden netting in it.
When we first put the netting in it, we had a hard time stuffing it in enough to close the lid. The cats kept knocking it off the shelf, with both lid and bin, then used the netting as a bed. Now the netting is packed down so much, you’d never know it once filled the bin!
Also, I counted 37 cats outside this morning. Three times.
Which means that not only did the “missing” cats come back, but we seem to have gained another one. !!!
After the morning rounds were done, I was off to the city to do our second stock up shopping trip. This trip had three stops, all in the same general area, which is part of why we don’t do it at the same time as our Costco stock up trip. Another reason is because the Costco is in a different part of the city, and I just don’t want to drive around that much. I dislike shopping, and find it very draining, and one Costco trip on its own is as draining as the three stops I made today. Four, if you count getting gas.
My first stop was at Canadian Tire to get more hardwood pellets for the litters. That was just under $16, after taxes. We now have enough pellets to last us at least a couple of months.
My next stop was the international grocery store, where I finally had breakfast, at lunch time. I quite enjoy their dim sum. That, plus a drink, cost pennies over $20.
I completely forgot to get a picture of what I got there. I also can’t find the receipt; I think it’s still in the truck. 😄
It was a small trip. I hoped to get more fresh produce, but ended up just getting some bananas that will need to be eaten quickly, and mandarins. I did get an applewood maple smoked slab of bacon, which is one of the things we go to this store for. They also had a good sale on pork loin, but that was all I got for meat. Their sugar shelves in the baking aisle were empty, as they carry the Rogers brand of granulated sugar. There was cane sugar available in the international section, but it’s not granulated, and I’m not sure how it will do for baking. As I was still planning to hit the Walmart, I didn’t get any sugar here. I found some drinks, including the Beaver Buzz energy drinks we can no longer get locally – and they only had one flavour in stock. I got two boxes of Earl Grey Bergamot tea that was on sale, plus a spray bottle of cleaning vinegar of a type my daughters prefer. I even found a large block of Old Cheddar cheese for almost $25.
I can’t remember what else I got there right now, other than grabbing one of their food bank bags for the hamper. One bag includes pasta and pasta sauce, canned fruit, and a few other shelf stable items to make a complete meal for at least 2 people, with extras. The bag was only $9, which brought my total bill up to $108 and change.
My next stop was Walmart, and I did remember to put that receipt into my pocket.
I made a donation to the Children’s Hospital as well, so minus that, the final bill after taxes was $181.21
Yeah. This cost almost $200.
The food items: It’s cheap turkey season, so I got a medium turkey for $24 The creamers were on sale at 2 for $9 The crackers were on sale at 3 for $7 Large jar of olives: $8.97 pecan halves: $7.00 walnut pieces: $5.00 Dark sugar: $1.97 They were, of course, out of the Rogers brand of sugar. With that shortage, they were also sold out of the Redpath white granulated sugar, but there was still some Redpath brown sugar left. We still have enough granulated sugar at home to last us, as long as we don’t do any serious baking, but we were almost out of brown sugar. house brand popcorn, 2 bags at $2.47 each. I normally buy popcorn at Costco, but I never found it. Also, the popcorn we grew won’t pop, and I don’t know what we’ve done wrong! vegetable bouillon cubes, 4 packs at $1.47 each sour cream: $5.98 coffee: $9.97
The non-food items: I got toilet paper for the pantry, as we currently don’t have extra. That was on sale for $13,97 Paper towel: $16.97 Facial tissues: $8.97 All purpose cleaner: $9.97 One “extra” item I got was a new cutting board, to replace one of our plastic ones that needs to be tossed. Because of how our counter is, I got one with a grippy bottom. It cost $11.47 Another “extra” item I got was examination gloves. We’ve finally worked our way through the boxes we brought with us in the move, plus the ones that were here that the homecare aids used before my dad went into the nursing home. My daughters like to use them when doing deep cleaning. Especially in the basement. One box of 100 gloves: $15.97
Then, for the road, I got an energy drink for $3.27, plus a water bottle for $1.47
Before heading for home, I remembered to fill the tank again. On the way out, I normally stop in the town my mother lives in for gas, but I skipped it this time. The price for regular was 150.9¢/L When I got to the city, I saw 143.9¢/L all over the place. Domo, however, has 5¢ off per L on Mondays and Thursdays. Today is Thursday, so I filled up at 138.9¢/L About a quarter tank still cost me $43.45.
With all three stops together, including donations, I spent almost $300 today. I had intended to check out the Fresh Co that’s along the same strip, but just didn’t have the spoons for it. I was okay for most of it, but after driving for over an hour, my feet, knees and hips stiffen up, so I’m limping for the first while until my joints are “greased”. By the end of it, it’s my lower back and hips that’s starting to go. Then it’s another hour + drive, leaving me with stiffened joints again when it’s time to unload the truck. At least then, I’ve got the girls to help me!
That’s basically it for our stock up shopping. We will do one more city shopping trip for my daughters, probably next week. They have their own list and budget. That can be a time for me to check out the Fresh Co, finally. Other than that, anything else we need, mostly fresh produce, will be purchased locally.
With December having so many stat holidays around weekends at the end of the month, my husband’s disability payments are always on different dates. Normally, he gets his main payment on the last business day of the month, and the CPP Disability on the third last business day of the month. In December, the CPP Disability comes in several days before Christmas, so that will likely be when I will do our first January stock up shopping trip, as well as anything we want to get special for Christmas dinner. The last few years, we relied on our stocking up supplies for January, as we often didn’t manage to get to the city at all until February or even March, either because of the weather and being snowed in, or both vehicles being too frozen. This year, between the mild winter we’re expecting and having the truck instead of the van, we should actually be able to do another stock up trip in January. I sure as heck don’t plan to go to the city to shop between Christmas and New Year’s, if I can avoid it!!
I would like to crawl into my cave and hibernate, now.
Our root vegetables this year were a mix of successes and failures!
First up, the successes.
Potatoes
We had three varieties of potatoes this year. We chose the varieties based on things like their storability, and their resistance to disease, as well as their flavour profiles. One time, the Purple Peruvian Fingerlings, were a potato we’d grown a couple of years ago and quite enjoyed. The other two were new to us: Irish Cobbler, a white potato, and Red Thumb Fingerling, a potato with both red skin and red flesh.
The original plan had been to plant them all in grow bags this year. We’d tried the Ruth Stout method last year, and both beds got flooded out, and there was very little left to harvest. We were going to repurpose old bird seed and deer feed bags for this. We have stopped buying both – we just can’t afford it anymore, with how much cat kibble we’re buying now – so it turned out we didn’t have enough for all three varieties.
This required a change in plans and, that early in the season, there were only a few places we could plant potatoes directly into the soil. So, the red and white potatoes went into low raised beds in the Old Kitchen garden.
The red potatoes went into the long, thin bed next to the retaining wall block, which got redone this spring, and when I ran out of room, into the short end of the L shaped wattle weave bed.
You can see how the Old Kitchen Garden beds the potatoes were planted into progressed over the years in this video.
The Purple Peruvians went into the grow bags.
So, how did the potatoes do this year?
Pretty darn good.
We harvested baby potatoes from the Old Kitchen Garden only a couple of times, since we didn’t really have a lot of any variety. The Irish Cobbler were the first to be ready to harvest, then the Red Thumb.
The Purple Peruvians, on the other hand, took an incredibly long time to mature, and did not get harvested until mid October. I’ve been going through my files to find photos of them – they were our biggest harvest – but it turns seems that by the time I was done harvesting them, it was too dark for photos!
As I write this, we have finished off our Irish Cobbler potatoes, but still have Red Thumb and Purple Peruvian Fingerling potatoes in storage.
Final thoughts on potatoes
I would consider all three varieties a success, this year. Especially the Purple Peruvians.
The smallest harvest we got was the Irish Cobblers. They were also the earliest maturing variety. They did seem to have issues with scab, however. They tasted good, however, and were a good potato for a variety of preparation methods.
The Red Thumb did quite well, and were also tasty. When cooked, they practically mashed themselves, so not a good variety if we wanted to do a hash or in a soup or stew. Having pink mashed potatoes as a side for Thanksgiving dinner was rather fun!
The Purple Peruvians seemed to take a lot longer to mature compared to the first year we grew them, with robust plants right up until the frost hit them. They are nicely prolific. The only “down” side is one of aesthetics. They do bleed their colour quite a bit, leaving fingers purple can changing the colour of any soups or stews they are cooked in!
When it comes to growing potatoes for our general needs and use, we will need to grow a lot more, but we are still figuring out what varieties we want to grow. As much as we like the Purple Peruvians and Red Thumb potatoes, I think we might want to move away from fingerling potatoes in general, other than perhaps as a side crop. Their smaller sizes and, in the case of the Purple Peruvians, uneven shapes, make them harder to handle, clean and peel. In the future, I think we will try varieties that have more even shapes and larger sizes, as well as being good for long term storage.
One last surprise
As I mentioned, we grew potatoes last year using the Ruth Stout, deep mulch method. Not only did the potato patches get flooded out, but they also got hit with slugs quite badly.
It seems, however, that we missed a few potatoes when we harvested them, and they showed up this year!
One of them, from the All Blue patch, got quite large and began producing seeds!
I didn’t try digging up the potatoes in the fall, but I did collect the seed balls. I haven’t tried opening any yet. From what I’ve read, these can be opened and the seeds inside processed much like tomato seeds. Seeds from potatoes will not be clones, as they are when the tubers are planted. I believe there are some rare exceptions, but the seeds each typically produce a new variety, like apple seeds do. I think that if we planted them, we’d still get something similar to the All Blue potato they came from, but the only way to find that out is to plant them and find out! I’ve read that, in the first year, potatoes planted from seed will only produce a single potato that can then be planted like any other potato and produce clones of itself. I don’t know if we’ll be able to experiment with this next year. It will depend on how much space we have. Still, I’d like to try it!
Carrots
We has several varieties of carrot seeds this year, and I’d intended to plant more. In the end, we only had space to plant two.
One variety was new to us; the orange Naval carrot. With those ones, we tried something else new: making seed tape.
The other variety was the Uzbek Golden carrot. We’d grown them last year and, while they did not get a chance to reach their full potential, it being such a bad growing year overall, we did enjoy them. This year, they did even better!
With these ones, we harvested them throughout the summer, as needed, then harvested the last of them after we had our first frosts.
Uzbek Golden Carrots, Gold Ball turnips, a couple of radishes and some onions that got missed.
There was some slug damage, and a few of them split, but overall they did very well.
These carrots are lightly sweet, crispy and delicious. They were a great carrot to eat raw, and also held up to cooking very well. This is definitely a variety we would enjoy growing again. I would like to find a Canadian supplier of seeds, though. It’s getting too expensive to order seeds in from the US.
As for the Naval carrots, we planted devoted an entire bed to them.
I definitely liked how the seed tape worked out. We planted an entire package of seeds, didn’t need to thin any of them, and got a very high germination rate.
We didn’t harvest many of them through the summer, though. Instead, we left them in the ground to try out a different method of storing them for the winter: in ground and under a heavy mulch. The idea is to be able to harvest fresh carrots during the winter.
This is our first “winter” harvest.
The carrots were noticeably smaller at one end of the bed, likely because that end gets less light, so that’s the end I harvested these from. Under the thick mulch, the ground was cold and did have ice shards in some places, but the ground was workable and the carrots could be dug out fairly easily. They were wonderfully crisp and fresh and very tasty! The ultimate test for this method of storage is yet to come, as winter isn’t even officially here yet, and things have still been pretty mild, compared to how our winters usually tend to be.
Final thoughts on carrots
I do wish we’d had the space to plant more varieties, but I’m happy with what we did plant. Both varieties are tasty. If I have anything to complain about, I’d say it’s that they are a bit harder to pull, as their greens come off easily. These need to be dug loose, first. I’d be doing that anyhow, so that’s not really an issue. These are definite winners.
Now for the losers. Mostly.
Turnips and Beets
This year, we planted varieties of turnips and beets we have tried before.
Last year, we got Gold Ball turnips as a freebie with a seed order. We tried growing them, but something ate the seed leaves as fast as they came up. So, we bought more seeds to try them again.
For the beets, we planted a variety called Merlin.
There were planted in the same bed, next to the Indigo Blue tomatoes, and bordered with yellow onions. I hoped that the onions would help deter any critters or insects that would want to eat the turnip and beet greens.
The turnips did seem to do rather well. They got quite leafy, enough though something was most definitely eating them. The leaves were filled with holes.
While we did harvest a few larger turnips, ultimately, they never reached their full potential. You can see in the photo with the Uzbek carrots above, how few there were, that were worth harvesting, by the end of the season. All bug eaten greens, almost no turnips. I think they tasted okay, but they probably didn’t taste the same as they would have, if they’d reached their full potential.
In the photo above, you can see where we planted the Uzbek Golden carrots, sharing a bed with the Black Beauty Tomato transplants in the foreground. The carrot seeds are covered by boards to protect them until they sprouted. In the bed on the left of the photo, the half on the lower left got the turnips, while the half on the upper left got the beets. You can see the labels marking where they are in there. (The white boards on either side of the tomatoes are there to protect the new transplants from high winds.)
The beets barely came up at all.
The first year we grew beets, they did rather well, but pretty much every time we’ve planted them since, they’ve been doing worse and worse. This year was, to be honest, pathetic.
In the case of this bed, however, I think there was something odd about the soil. Even the turnips grew stronger and healthier on the south end of the bed, but by the middle of the bed, they were smaller and sicklier. Then there were a few little beet seedlings that started to emerge, but by the north end of the bed, there was nothing. No germination at all. Even the tomato plants at that end seemed to be smaller and less healthy looking.
The entire bed got the same amount of sunlight and water. This was one of the beds that had a sprinkler hose wound throughout. The problem could be in the soil itself, but after harvesting the grow bags at the end of the season, I think the problem may actually be that row of self seeded trees my mother allowed to stay. She’d had a row of raspberries there and, after transplanting the raspberries, she left the saplings to grow to be a wind break. In trying to clean up around there, I can see that attempts have been made to remove these trees in the past, and they’ve just grown back. It’s a mix of maple and Chinese elm, which means they are not only taking up space that used to be productive garden space, but are spreading seeds. Those Chinese elm seeds are the worst, and have been causing all sorts of problems. However, when working on the soil in these beds, pulling up roots and amending it, we find a lot of roots at the north ends of them. The bottoms of many of the grow bags the peppers were in were absolutely crowded out by tree roots that had grown in from below. Because of how these trees growing, I suspect that it’s the Chinese elm roots that are depleting spreading the most and winning the competition for nutrients.
Final thoughts on turnips and beets
We’ve had such poor results growing turnips and beets, I don’t know that we will try to grow them again, until we can plant them in higher raised beds. The one area we’ve grown beets in semi successfully, was in the East yard, near the spruce grove. When we cleared out where the old wood pile used to be, we found the best and softest soil of all under there. While my daughters have enjoyed what beets we’ve managed to grow in the past, with the Merlin variety being a favourite of theirs, I honestly don’t know if we like any of the turnips. I’ve selected turnips to grow as a good storage crop for food security, but it’s not much good for that, if we don’t actually like eating them. With the small turnips we’ve managed to harvest so far, we’re not getting their full flavour.
Which means we will likely skip trying to grow turnips and beets again for at least a couple of years. Once we have more, and more established, raised beds, we can try again.
Extras: more beets, plus radishes
After we harvested the garlic, we had an empty bed suitable for a fall crop. In it, we decided to plant spinach, beet and radishes.
We planted the Cherry Belle radishes, Lakeside spinach and Bresko beets.
I’ll cover spinach in another post, but in this bed, they started to germinate, then promptly disappeared. A couple of seedlings did survive, but didn’t grow much at all. The beets barely germinated, and what did germinate, soon disappeared. Only the radishes grew, and while we got decent looking plants, and a couple that shot up and started to bloom, there were almost no radishes worth harvesting. While I think insects or slugs got the beets and spinach, I suspect it was the nearby trees that did in the radishes.
Only one of us in our household actually likes radishes, however I’ve been curious to try radish pods. So far, we’ve never had radishes get to the point of producing any! Even though these ones were planted so late (my daughter that likes them ended up house sitting for a month, so she wasn’t here to eat what few we got!), the ones that started blooming are the furthest along we’ve had them grow.
As with the beets and turnips, I think radishes are something that we won’t grow again for a while. They do produce very quickly, if eating the roots is what we’re after, so we might tuck them in between other things as a sort of ground cover, but that’s about it. I do still want to grow some for their pods to try. Perhaps we’ll have an empty corner in a higher raised bed to tuck a few seeds in, and just let them be until the end of the season. That will be a last minute decision, depending on what space we have to work with, next year.
Which means that, for root vegetables, we’re basically down to potatoes and carrots!
Well. I guess that’ll make things easier to plan out next year! 😄
It was absolutely surreal. I left my room to have supper. He was in the little cat bed, snuggling with other kittens. When I came back, I found him passed away.
While I was in the city, my younger daughter spent a lot of time cuddling with him. Nothing seemed out of place. After I got home and came into my room, he was being butt cuddled by one of the tabbies. I pet him, and he responded normally.
Then he was gone.
Yes, he was a sick kitty. That’s why we brought him inside. But he seemed to be getting better! He certainly wasn’t getting worse.
We’ve lost so many to that horrible strain of herpes this year.
First, the garlic, which was planted in the fall of 2022.
We planted garlic in one low raised bed, starting with cloves we’d saved from the one successful bed of garlic planted the previous year.
First, we had to reclaim and prepare the bed from the summer’s crop. Of our saved garlic, we got only 24 big cloves out of the six bulbs we kept! We then bought more garlic locally, rather than ordering it in, this time trying a soft neck garlic for the first time.
So how did they turn out in the summer?
Apparently, not good enough to warrant getting pictures of the bed as it grew. At least not any I uploaded into my dwindling WordPress media storage.
We seemed to have lost quite a few to the winter cold. I’d say we had almost a 40% loss on our saved garlic, which was hit the hardest. Interestingly, it was the soft neck garlic that did the best, as far as survival. We harvested all the scapes from both the hard neck varieties well before soft neck variety produced scapes. All produced decent, if not particularly large, bulbs at harvest time. As I write this, we still have some left to use for cooking. We did not save any for replanting. We just didn’t have enough to make it worthwhile.
Final thoughts on garlic.
We seem to have a problem with losing our garlic to the cold over the winter. For this fall’s planting, we got just one variety. They were all planted in the Old Kitchen garden, closer to the house. We made efforts to plant them more in the middle of the beds, as the outer edges of raised beds will freeze faster. That resulted in the 3 pounds of garlic we ordered being spread out over 4 raised beds. They also got a deep mulch. This winter should be a mild one, though, so the risk of loss due to cold will be reduced, too.
Also, we need to plant a lot more garlic. That one bed, even if we hadn’t lost as many as we did, was not enough to meet our usage needs. We could easily plant two or three times as many garlic. This fall, we planted 3 pounds of seed garlic, and while it’s more than what we planted last year, more would never be a bad thing!
We do have raspberries here that my mother has been growing for decades, descended from plants I used to pick from as a child. They are almost a wild variety. For our food forest, we want to include different varieties that mature at different times of the year. We’d purchased a red variety of raspberries a couple of years ago, but the deer kept eating them. They are protected now, but are not recovering well. So when these purple raspberries were planted, in an area we’d planted peas and beans in previous years, we made sure they were protected from deer.
They did rather well, too. These were supposed to be first year canes, so it was a surprise when we saw them starting to bloom. Yes, they actually produced fruit!
No new canes that would produce fruit next year emerged, though. Which means that when they died back after fruiting… well, it looks like they’ve just died.
I keep forgetting to contact Veseys about them.
[Edit: I have since remembered to contact them, and have been told this is normal, and they should start growing in the spring.]
Final thoughts of raspberries
We all love raspberries. This was actually a pretty good year for them, and the old raspberry bushes produced quite well. Especially since we cut away the crab apple tree that suddenly died of a fungal disease last year. It had been shading the patch quite a lot. This year, that end of the patch got a lot more sun, and they clearly thrived.
As for the purple Royalty raspberries, we did get enough to taste, and do like them. We will look to replacing the dead ones, while also planning to get a gold variety, plus another red variety. The long term goal is to have lots of raspberries from June through to August.
Our first apple tree
We have plenty of crab apple trees, most of which are dying of a fungal disease, so we have to be really careful about getting new apples. This spring, we got our first eating apple tree; a Liberty apple. It’s actually a zone 4 variety, so we needed to also give thought on where to plant it. It needed to get the full warmth of the sun, while also being sheltered from the cold winds. In winter, it will need extra protection to keep it from freezing.
For this, we chose an area in the west yard, closer to the house. There are ornamental crab apples nearby for cross pollination. We’ve got tulips planted here, which need protecting from the deer, with dead and dying trees that needed clearing away. So that all got taken care of, and the apple tree was planted closer to a hedge of lilacs for extra protection from the elements, while still getting that full sun.
We also got a pair of mulberry trees that are rated to zone 3. When we ordered one tree from Veseys, they did not have the size available for 2023, so we got two smaller ones, instead. They were so tiny, we ended up not transplanting them. Instead, they got potted up and kept indoors. As I write this, they are much, much larger, and their leaves have turned yellow and are dropping for the winter. If all goes well, they will come out of dormancy in the spring, we’ll harden them off and plant them in our food forest area when we are past our last frost date, in June, next year.
Final thoughts on apples (and mulberries)
Finding apples that are good for fresh eating, that are also hardy to our zone, is a challenge, but they are out there. So why did we get a variety that’s zone 4?
I’m a sucker for punishment?
The variety had qualities we were looking for, from flavour to storability. Hopefully, it will work out, and acclimate to our winters over time.
When it comes to apples, one tree should produce enough for a family, but they also often need another variety for cross pollination. So we might pick up one more variety of apple in the near future. What we really need to watch out for, though, is that fungal disease that’s killing off our crab apples. I’ve been researching about it, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Once it’s in the soil, it doesn’t go away. So if an area is badly infected, like where the row of crab apples are now, we would not be able to plant apples there again and expect healthy trees. Yes, there are ways to treat the tree, but it’s not really an option for us right now.
As for the mulberry trees, I’m pretty excited about those. I’ve never had mulberry before, but my mother remembers they had a huge mulberry tree behind their barn, when she was a child in Poland. As a food tree, they are known to be productive to the point of nuisance, so they will be planted well away from the house. There’s a gap in the lilac hedge on the north side of the property that needs to be filled in. That would be a good place to transplant these. Eventually, they should grow into towering shade trees, so we need to make sure they’re not going to cause problems for other things we want to plant around there.
Last minute addition: saffron crocus!
This year, I was really excited to find out Veseys got a Canadian supplier for saffron crocuses, acclimated to zone 4! So we took a chance and ordered some.
These were planted in a trench in the fenced off area about the tulips and the Liberty apple tree this fall. For the winter, they got a deep mulch to protect them. If they survive, they can be expected to produce flowers with harvestable stamens in the fall of 2024, and each year, they can potentially triple as they expand.
Of course, every year, they will acclimate more to our climate zone, too.
Final thoughts on saffron crocuses
We don’t really use a lot of saffron, so if even a few survive to produce next year, that will be enough for our needs. Long term, if they do well, who knows. We might eventually have enough saffron to be worth selling at the local markets or something. If not… well, it was worth a try!
Recovering Strawberries and Asparagus
Last year, our purple asparagus bed was flooded out. It didn’t really affect the strawberries that were interplanted with them, but the asparagus crowns were buried 2 ft deep. I wasn’t sure any survived. In the end, we did get some asparagus plants growing, but they have been set back, at least a year. This should have been the first year we could harvest any, but that just wasn’t going to happen.
As for the strawberries, they recovered quite nicely after the winter and were soon producing.
We ended up rigging up protection around the bed, and the strawberries did recover. In fact, they began producing again, quite late in the season, because of the deer damage, and were still trying to produce, right up until the first frost hit them!
Final thoughts on strawberries and asparagus
We planted a purple variety of asparagus, and the plan had been to plant a green variety the next year, and to keep adding more every year until we had enough for our family to enjoy regularly. Well, that didn’t happen. The challenge is, asparagus is a 20 year commitment. We have to find places to plant them that will not be used for anything else for 20 years, because I sure don’t want to be transplanting them in the future. Since we’re still struggling to clear up certain areas, we just don’t have the space that can be used that way.
After last year’s flooding, we now have an idea of where the more susceptible areas are that we either have to avoid, or where we’d have to make a bed raised high enough that flooding won’t be an issue.
So, yes, we do still intend to increase our asparagus beds, with both green and purple varieties. It’s just been delayed. As for the asparagus we have right now, I’m hoping they recovered enough that they will do better next year. I don’t expect we’ll have enough to harvest next year, though. Maybe in 2025.
Asparagus is definitely a long term planning sort of thing!
As for the strawberries, these were purchased transplants that were interplanted with the asparagus because I’d read they do well together. Over time, however, I am now thinking to get more strawberries to interplant around the food forest area, as a sort of ground cover, rather than having dedicated beds to just strawberries.
Strawberries from seed
Now we move on to an impulse purchase that did surprisingly well. I got a kit to grow strawberries from seed. It was marketed for kids, but strawberries are strawberries, and we just can’t get enough strawberries in this household!
What started out as this…
… became this.
Yes, we actually got a few mature strawberries!
These got transplanted in the wattle weave bed along with some herbs, peppers, eggplant and luffa. Eventually, the Old Kitchen garden will be mostly an herb garden. I honestly didn’t know if they’d make it, or if they’d produce this year at all, they were so tiny.
The kit did not say what variety the strawberries were and, from the looks of the berries, they seem to be a type of wild strawberry. We only got maybe 4 or 5 ripe berries to try, and they were tasty, but not as tasty as the variety that were bought as transplants.
Final thoughts on strawberries from seed
Since this was a spur of the moment experiment, my expectations were not high, so it doesn’t mean much to say they exceeded expectations! Once transplanted, they did really well. I don’t think I’ll grow strawberries from seed again, though. The ones purchased as transplants were more productive (even after the deer got to them) and much tastier. We’ll see if these survive the winter. They are mulched, but they were planted along the edge of the bed, so are still susceptible to freezing. For all I know, they will produce larger berries once firmly established. We shall see.
Sunchokes
I kept forgetting about the Sunchokes, aka: Jerusalem Artichokes, this year! They are in a permanent bed next to the asparagus, and this is their second year. Last year, we’d planted 10 tubers in two rows. In the fall, I harvested half the bed, replanted 5 of the largest tubers, leaving the other half of the bed untouched. The sunchokes came up quite well from both halves. They grew nice and tall and…
That’s it.
Like last year, they never boomed. I never even saw any buds forming.
This was all we harvested last year.
I was going to harvest some this fall but, in the end, I just left them. We should have more to harvest, next fall. Instead, we cut the stalks and lay them down on the bed and covered them with a grass clipping mulch. As Sunchokes are native to Canada, they probably don’t need a mulch at all, but it won’t hurt.
There are people on some of the local gardening groups on Facebook I’m part of that also grow sunchokes. I saw several people talking about how they’ve been growing them for years, and they have never bloomed, wondering what they were doing wrong. Some old time gardeners have said theirs have never boomed, either, but they still get a good harvest every year. At least I know it’s not just here!
Final thought on Sunchokes
So, obviously, I don’t have much to say about the for this year, since we skipped harvesting them. When we did try them, we liked them, so I do want to let them grow and multiply, so that we can have larger harvests. After learning that other people in our zone that have grown them for years and never had them bloom, I guess that means we don’t have to transplant them somewhere else or something. We can just leave them were they are. Hopefully, next fall, we’ll be able to get a good harvest out of them.
Everything else
This is a follow up on the things we planted the year before.
We planted a bundle of 5 sea buckthorn. Two survived. They are still surviving and growing bigger. Eventually, we will get more to add to the privacy hedge. If all goes well, we’ll have at least one male sea buckthorn, and will eventually get berries.
We planted two highbush cranberry. Last year, the deer ate one of them, it recovered, and they at it again. I put an old saw horse of that one to protect it as it recovered again. This year, it was growing well, as was the other one, which is still unprotected. Amazingly, towards the end of the season, the one with the saw horse over it to protect it got eaten again! Given how late in the season this happened, I don’t know if it will recover.
Deer chewed Highbush Cranberry.
We planted 30 silver buffalo berry in two curving rows, to eventually act as a privacy screen. It looks like we’ve lost 2 of them, possibly 3. One, I expected, as I’d accidentally pulled it up last year while weeding, but one or two may have died before fall, too. Some of them are getting pretty big, while others are still quite small. With last spring’s flooding, one end of the rows was completely underwater, and they handled it just fine. It will be a few years, yet, before they get large enough to start producing berries.
We had planted 6 Korean pine in the outer yard. We have 4 survivors. This year, they were still quite tiny, and are still covered in their chicken wire cages for protection.
From what I’ve read, they grow very slowly for the first 5 years, then start to really shoot up, and eventually become very large trees. We got 3 yr old seedlings, which means this was year 5 for them. We shall see if they get their first growth spurt next year!
Final thoughts on our food forest.
Our long term goal is to have as many perennial food plants as we can manage. Fruits, nuts, berries, tubers, whatever. We’ve got a good start on it, and hope to add more to it every year. For some things, like the sea buckthorn and silver buffalo berry, these are multipurpose plantings. They should be prolific enough – eventually – to provide winter food for the birds, while the bushes themselves will be privacy screens and living fences. The far flung areas we’d planted corn, beans, squash, etc. last year were done to help prepare and amend the soil for permanent planting, and this year, only one small area was used to grow squash in. Next year, we hope to plant a fruit tree or something in that spot.
We are trying to be very selective on what we plant and where. We need to leave lanes open, wide enough to drive through, to be able to get at fences, etc. There is also the lane we will keep open because there is a telephone line buried under it. That means we need to consider root systems, as well, when locations are decided on.
The one thing we planted out there this year – the Royalty raspberries – appears to ultimately be a failure, since they produced this year, instead of next year, and died back. So very little progress was made in that area this year. We do have some black currant bushes that I am thinking of transplanting out there. They are closer to the house, but under trees. They bloom in the spring, but have almost no berries. They simply don’t get enough sunlight.
Over time, we will keep adding more to the area, as the budget allows. Pears, plums and gooseberries are on the list, and I’m seriously considering transplanting our haskap bushes. The “male” haskap, which is supposed to be the right variety to cross pollinate the two “female” varieties, is done blooming before the two other even start. I think they’re just planted in a bad spot. Too many tree roots, and too many of those perennial flowers that my mother planted there. Even though I’ve cleared them away from around the haskaps, they get so big, they still cover the bushes – and the haskaps are supposed to get big enough that it shouldn’t be an issue! We shall see.
The experiments.
Last year, there were two things we planted that, while annuals, could be treated as perennials, because they self seed so easily. Wonderberry and Aunt Molly Ground Cherries. With those, I let them drop fruit to see if they would come back this year.
They did not.
We might still get some ground cherries in the future, but they were much more fragile a plant than I expected. They broke easily, as I reached under to find and pick ripe berries, and the patch itself got flattened by wind and had to be supported. If I do plant them in the future, I’d want to have some sort of supports for them, and I don’t know if they’re worth the extra effort!
That is where we are at now, with our fall plantings and perennials. Not a lot of progress there, this year, unfortunately. When it comes to perennials – especially trees – it can take years before they start producing, so delays in progress add years, rather than months, to having food production! At least things like berries produce faster and fill the time gap a bit.
What a change a day makes! Yesterday, we had a high of -9C/16F, and an overnight low of -14C/7F (that I saw; it might have gone lower). That doesn’t count the windchill, and we had high winds yesterday. Today, we’ve reached a high of 2C/36F and our overnight low is expected to be only -3C/27F
[Edit: while I was still working on this post, we reached a high of 3C/37F, which is higher than was forecast for the day, by as much as 3°, depending on which app I got by.]
Which will make life much easier on the kitties.
I did a head count this morning, and again when I fed them after unloading the truck, so I could safely drive it out of the yard to park it. I counted 33, each time. Which means, taking into account the one I know we’ve lost, we’re “missing” three cats. Just as I couldn’t tell which ones were “new”, I can’t tell which ones are missing. There are some cats that are distinctive and we see regularly, but others look so much alike, and won’t let us near them, we just can’t keep track.
I did get a good action shot this morning, though!
I so want to be able to get Brussel and the other calicos socialized!!! They just won’t let it happen, though.
Today was my day for the Costco stock up shopping. This is what $956.06 looks like.
I did not get everything on my list. Some just wasn’t there. No sugar, for example, except for things like super expensive raw cane sugar or fake sugar. Rogers is on strike right now, so I wasn’t expecting to see that brand, but I was sure Costco also carried other brands. Ah, well. Our next stock up trip will include a Walmart, and they carry Redpath sugar, and they’re not on strike.
I asked to have all the cat food on a separate bill. When they were doing the rest, the cashier motioned to the flat cart, which still had the other heavy stuff on it the other staff member was scanning. I couldn’t make out what he said, but was able to figure out that he was asking about the separate bill, so I repeated that I wanted all the cat food on a separate bill.
Apparently, canned cat food is not cat food, because he included that in the main bill with the groceries! 😄😄
I usually get the 9kg Kirkland brand of kibble, which is cheaper per kg, but there was none. Not even an empty space where they would have been. So instead of a dozen 9kg bags, I got ten 11.6kg bags of Whiskas. They were $37.99 each and, after taxes, came to $425.49
pork blade roast: regular $20.44, -$5 at the till pork chops: $24.05 chicken 3pk: $28.59 bacon, 5pk: $23.99 rotisserie chickens, two at $7.99 each double cream Brie: regular $10.99, -$2.50 at the till cream cheese, 4pk: $9.49 goat cheese, 2pk: $10.99 Old Cheddar: $14.99 mozzarella: $14.99 butter, 5 at $5.45 each: $27.25 whipping cream, two 1L at $4.79 each 10kg bag of flour: $9.99 pasta, 9pk: $13.99 flat of ramen noodles: $13.99 raspberry jam: $8.99 Kirkland brand mayo, 2 at $8.99 each (usually we get Hellman’s, but I couldn’t find any) avocado oil: $16.99 Kirkland brand EVOO: $23.99 lemon juice, 2pk: 4.99 5 dozen pack eggs: $16.49 rye bread, two 2 pks: $5.99 each tortilla wraps, 4 packs at $9.99 each for $39.96, – $8 at the till
Subtotal: $512.21 taxes: $18.39 Total: $530.57
Some of the things on my list were more paper products, like facial tissues and paper towels, but the packages are so big, I would have run out of room on my flat cart. As it is, the packages of bread and wraps kept vibrating off as I tried to maneuver the flat cart. 🤨
Also, it blows me away how many people don’t think twice about cutting off a loaded flat cart. Do they really think I can stop on a dime?? Then there are the people that stop to look at products, parking their carts right where there’s a pillar or something, leaving no room for anyone to get through. I get the need to park your cart. Heck, with my flat cart, I often have to park it and walk over to various displays to get something, simply because it’s not worth the effort to wrestle the flat cart through the aisles. Especially for cold rooms, like the dairy and eggs room, or where the soft fruits, salad kits and mushrooms are kept. However, I also make sure people can still get around the cart when I do!
Costco has changed brands of butter since I was last there, but the price is still under $6, making it the best price for butter I’ve seen, still. The whipping cream, at under $5 for 1L is also the best price I’ve seen. Since a 1L carton can make about a pound of butter, it’s the only place where it would be economical to make our own butter. Everywhere else I’ve seen, a 1L carton of whipping cream costs more than the house brand butters. Not that we’ll use the cream for that. If that were the plan, I’d buy a lot more than 2 cartons!
For this trip, adding the canned cat food to the kibble bill (about $43.66 after taxes), we spent about $469.15 on just cat food.
Taking the canned cat food off the rest of the bill, we spent $473.22 on stuff for us. Of that, we spent $375.17 on food. The rest was non-food items and taxes.
We are literally spending more money to feed the cats, than to feed ourselves.
Yes, we still have other stock up shopping trip to do, which will include more food items for ourselves, but those 10 bags of kibble won’t last the month. Last month, we bought 12 bags of Kirkland 9kg kibble, or 108kg. I’ve lost track, but we ended up buying another 7 or 8 bags, ranging in size from 7kg to 11kg, depending on what was in stock. If we use an average range of 9kg for 7 bags, that brings it up to 171kg. Right now, we have 116kg on hand, which means we might need to buy another 55kg in kibble before the end of the month.
And this is why we have to seriously consider starting to euthanize some of the yard cats. We just can’t keep this up. Not when we now have a car payment, even with the girls helping out when they can.
At least the inside kittens will go up for adoption again, once the Cat Lady’s housing situation settles, so the number of indoor cats will drop. We are also hoping to adopt out Toni and Ginger. We adore Ginger, but some of the other cats are starting to really bully him, and he deserves a better home situation than ours. But who would be willing to adopt three legged cats? Even if they don’t have other health issues?
I suppose this is a good time to point out the donation button at the top right, but I know things are tight for everyone right now.
*sigh*
Oh, I almost forgot. There was also the cost of gas and meals, spent today.
On the way out, I stopped to put $30 of regular gas into the truck, at 150.9¢/L I filled the tank once I reached Costco. The price for regular gas there was 135.9¢/L It cost me $66.41 to fill the tank. So, in total, it cost $96.41 to fill the tank from just below half. I also bought breakfast and lunch, for maybe another $20-$25 in total.
Also, the truck has a trip counter that I reset before heading home from Costco. With a short side trip to pick up the mail, it read just over 108km, so about double that for the entire trip.
I must say, I’m going to be very happy in January, when we get our quarter beef order in! With the hung weight being the highest we’ve had yet, I’ve doubled the last two monthly payments, which means in January, we’ll have only about $40 left to cover the balance. I don’t know that we’ll be able to do this again, though. It’s been great to be able to make monthly payments towards a quarter beef at the end of the year (or, in this case, beginning of the year), but with having truck payments now, we need to put some wiggle room back into our budget.
Well, it is what it is. We’ll deal. Somehow, we always manage to make it through.
Since moving out here, our gardening plans have changed a few times. Our original 5 year plan had us starting to garden around year 5, after focusing on cleaning and clearing first the inner yard in the first two years, then the outer yard over the next 2 or 3 years, before eventually moving beyond the outer yard, which is rented out.
It’s now been 6 years. The inner yard – specifically the spruce grove – is still not cleared and cleaned up. We had to start on parts of the outer yard earlier. Some things had to be dropped completely.
Gardening, however, started early, and I’m glad it did. We started off with a couple of reclaimed patches of ground. Each year, the garden beds were expanded and we grew more things.
Until this year.
All the best laid plans, indeed! We ended up with a garden perhaps half the size of the previous year.
Early in 2023, though, we still thought we’d be able to do a larger garden. Many seeds were purchased, and orders were placed for things that would be delivered in time for spring planting. Here is a video I did, going through our seeds – old and new – and starting our onions and luffa.
Even in April, I still thought we’d be able to meet most of our goals, and was able to get started preparing a couple of low raised beds.
I also did a spring garden tour in April, where I talked about our plans.
Among the things that changed was the shed we were supposed to get, that would have been fixed up to be a chicken coop. The person that had the shed to get rid of ended up throwing it away. It did not survive the winter.
Getting the dead trees to build more raised beds didn’t work out as planned. Slowly over the summer, we did get wood harvested, but felling dead spruces resulted in trees getting hung up and stuck on other trees.
That was just the beginning of plans that fell through.
All was not a loss, though. For what we did manage to get, there were some successes and failures, as there are every year, and that’s what I’ll be going through in this series of blog posts analyzing our 2023 garden. With what we’ve learned in the past few years, we should be able to make adjustments and do better next year.
So, I ended up having to make a trip into town this morning.
This bugger is part of the reason why.
If she would only let us near her, Brussel could be adopted out right away! She’s such a beauty, too, even if she does look ready to bite off my face. 😂
It’s interesting how the different cats have their preferred eating spaces. I try to spread things out, both inside the sun room and outside. I started putting kibble on the well cap, and the calicos – especially Brussel, here – prefer to eat there over the kibble house or the cat house roof. They almost never go into the sun room, or even the cat house. I don’t know where they hide out during the day, but I think it’s somewhere in the outer yard. Brussel will at least come to the well cap and closer to the house, regularly. Her sister, Sprout, barely even does that, and prefers to eat under the shrine – and even then, only after I am well away!
It’s chillier out, so the yard cats need more food than in the summer, which means we were running out of kibble again. Even with giving them lighter feedings, the bin would have been emptied this evening. I could have taken from the bin for the inside cats, but that one was getting low, and I didn’t want to empty it, too. The problem is, my husband’s CPP Disability payment doesn’t come in until tomorrow, which is when I will be doing our Costco shopping trip. His SunLife payment comes in on the last business day of the month, so that’s when I’ll go into the city again to do the other stock up shopping. I could have juggled some numbers; when I worked out the budget for the month, I always round up, so that there is wiggle room. Unfortunately. At least there would be, if there weren’t some odd purchases coming out. For example, for the second month in a row now, we got two Audible payments processed. One appears to be from a Canadian account, and one from a US account. My husband has an Audible subscription, but only one, so why are we being billed twice, with one clearly being converted from US dollars? I’ll have to call the bank about that and see what’s going on.
Anyhow.
My daughter was a sweetheart and was able to send an e-transfer that was enough to get some more kibble. We also just switched out one of our 18.9L/5 gallon drinking water jugs, so we had two empties that I refilled as well.
After I was done at the grocery store, I started the truck and the check engine line was on again. So I turned it off and set up the OBDII scanner. I didn’t do a full scan, though. The one we have now allows other options, including scanning just the check engine light. It took maybe a minute or two, and I got the same codes as before, that I already talked to our mechanic about. This is a “too rich fuel” reading that turns itself on and off. When it was on before and I got him to check it, he said it should clear itself. Which it did, after I filled the tank. Then it turned on again after another top up, only to be off the next time I used the truck. It’s been off ever since, until today. This time, when I cleared the codes, it turned off and it stayed off.
While doing a scan, the engine is off, but the key is in the half way position, where you can use the electrical system and see the displays on the console. Which is why I got a surprise warning on the onboard computer.
“Battery is low. Please start the engine.”
!!!???
Again????
Of course, this battery is brand new and was fully charged when it was installed. I started the engine, and the battery gauge showed me it was charging just fine. The alternator is not the problem.
Since it was just across the road, I drove over to the garage to talk to our mechanic – leaving the engine running while I went in!
He is perplexed. He’s gone over the truck a few times, now, and he can’t think of anything that would be draining the battery. I know we didn’t have any lights left on or anything like that. It’s not the first vehicle he’s encountered that would have these warnings come up, for no reason he could find. The last one he had it happen on was an Escalade. After talking to him for a while, it basically came down to, watch and see, and if it happens again, call him.
As we were talking, he remembered a gadget he now carries that he thinks we might want to pick up. A portable booster. We have booster cables, but they’re not much good if you don’t have another vehicle to connect with. Especially living in the boonies like we do. The one he showed me was a power pack with booster cables as well as other things, like the ability to charge devices with USB. Something like that would definitely be good to have in our vehicle emergency kit! I’ve since had a chance to look some of these up, and found a larger portable device that included an air compressor as well. The price was good, too, though it’s not something we can get any time soon with our current budget.
The truck seemed just fine in all other respects. For all I know, it could be a sensor issue.
While there, I remembered to ask about my seatbelt problem. He remembered I’d asked him about it in a text, but wasn’t sure what I was talking about. I described to him how the driver’s side seatbelt just doesn’t want to click into place. I keep having to push and wiggle and push again until the buckle finally latches – though I’ve had it come undone a couple of times, even then. Never while driving, though, but immediately after it latched and I was adjusting the seatbelt tension around my body.
This is not something he normally fixes at all. He did have a suggestion I didn’t even think of. Use a flashlight and see if something had fallen into where the latch is. Yeah, that could cause the problem! Then, if we didn’t find anything obvious, try a bit of WD40. Something to do tomorrow, before I head into the city.
Meanwhile, once I got home and things were brought inside, I was able to give the cats another light feeding, so I could safely drive the truck out of the yard and park it in the garage!
We need to do something about these cats. I counted 34 or 35 this morning. We’re spending more on cat food now than we are on truck payments. It may even be more than we are spending on actual food for ourselves. Our trips to the grocery store usually includes non-food items, like household products, persona hygiene products and the like. With how much food prices are going up, we haven’t been able to get the extra stock up items of the pantry the way we used to. I’ve even tried looking up Canadian wholesale pet food suppliers, and the few places I found that had online sales, the prices were no better than retail prices in the stores, so there’s no point. Even Amazon prices are higher than what I can get at Costco. I suppose I could go to that livestock feed store again and get the 16kg bags they carry that’s cheap, but the quality is so low, even the outside cats didn’t like to eat it. It’s much the same with the economy bags of kibble at Walmart. Sure, it’s cheaper per kg, but that doesn’t mean much if the quality sucks so much, the cats don’t want to eat it unless they’re practically starving. Which means it’s also likely to be quite unhealthy for them, too.
But what can we do? This year, we actually have people wanting to adopt some of our outdoor female cats as mousers on their own property, and they’ve have a better living situation than we can give them, but we have been unsuccessful in socializing them – and no one wants male yard cats, who are more likely to roam, no matter how friendly they are, it seems. It’s gotten to the point where we are going to have to seriously consider looking at how to humanely euthanize them. We could contact the municipality, and they’d send someone over with a rifle. Which can be humane, but only if they are a really good shot! Even then, no matter how good a shot they are, these are small, moving targets.
I can’t believe I’m even considering this, but the situation is getting untenable. It’s not just a matter of the cost of feeding them. It’s not healthy for them, either. The more there are, the more sick cats there will be – and we’ve lost so many more this year, than any year before! Without those losses – the ones we know of! – we’d probably have more like 50 yard cats right now.
*sigh*
I hope to be able to talk to the Cat Lady about it before any decisions are made. They’re moving to a new home seems to be falling through. They got financing for the new house, but have not been able to sell the old one. They’ve had many offers, and every one has fallen through. People just have not been able to get financing. They have until the end of the month. If they don’t get a buyer before then, they have to give up the new place and stay where they are. Meanwhile, they are still paying to board almost all their own cats, too!
Which reminds me. One of the sick kittens they took from us, got vet care for, then adopted out, came back. This is the white and grey one. While it was recovered, it was going to have a lifetime of relapses, which would have required antibiotics probably a couple of times a year. Which turned out to be too much for the woman who adopted him. So, the Cat Lady said she’d take him back. !!! Their dog is very happy about this, it seems. They had really bonded, and he was clearly missing him. This was a kitten that they fell in love with and really struggled to say good bye to. This does however, make the 5th cat from us, if I remember correctly, that they are keeping permanently! I’m afraid to tell her about any other cats or kittens we have to adopt out! By the time they get the cats fixed and get vet care, too many of them are turning out to have invisible health problems, and no one wants to adopt them. They also have pair of bonded kittens from us that they tried to adopt out together, but one of them turned out to have heart problems, so they’re keeping both.
*sigh*
Once their situation settles down, I’ll talk to the Cat Lady again about borrowing a trap and trying to get some of the female yard cats. This has been a mild enough winter, we could risk it. We could even rig up shelter around the trap somehow, but we really need to try and get them caught and spayed before they go into heat again.
It’s either that, or we start looking into more permanent actions, and I really don’t want to go that route.
Today is supposed to be a chillier day. We’ve already reached our expected high of -9C/16F Which wouldn’t be too bad – especially with how bright and sunny it is – but the wind chill brings it down to -19C/-2F The wind is just whipping around the house, too, so areas that would typically be more sheltered, aren’t.
We got a light snowfall overnight. Just enough to cover the ground. Tomorrow, we’re supposed to have a high of -10C/14F, then reach 0C/32F and 1C/34F over the next two days! So much of it will probably be gone before we dip below freezing again.
No surprise, that the cats were preferring the sun room to have breakfast in, rather than the cat house roof, or the kibble house!
This is 10 cats eating out of 2 bowls! There was another 5 eating behind me as I took this photo. All total, I counted 33 or 35 cats this morning.
When I was about to head in after finishing my rounds, I spotted a whole crowd of heads in the cat bed, watching me. A couple ran out as I stopped to get a picture, but I did manage to catch the runners in the shot.
I cropped out the second one that ran off. I don’t think anyone really wants to see that particular side of his anatomy. 😂 That calico in the back won’t let us come near her, but my goodness, she is not at all shy about telling us it’s feeding time! She is an unusually talkative cat. Especially for a yard cat.
We can sometimes pet that orange and white cat. There was a second orange and white kitten, but it disappeared a couple of months ago. The fluffy black kitten with the white blaze on its face is also getting better at letting us pet him, and even pick him up.
Barely visible behind the orange and white’s head is the little tortie. She won’t let us just pet her, but if we manage to pick her up, she will allow us to cuddle her. Being one of the only females we can actually touch, we have plans to bring her indoors as soon as we can. The calico is a priority, though, as she’s old enough to go into heat. Something that might actually happen earlier in the season, with our milder temperatures. That one, we just can’t get close to at all. Not even while they are all eating. With some of the other stand offish cats, I’ve managed to pet a few backs while they are eating before they run off. All seem to be males, of course. It’s hard to tell at times, because they move around to fast, but the older ones are a bit easier to spot.
You can see the little one with the cloudy eye. The pupil seems to be dilating the same as the good eye. There’s just that cloudy patch across it.
With the racoons being such an issue, I asked my daughter to give the cats their evening feeding earlier in the day, after we loaded the truck so I could make a garbage run. Sunset these days is around 4:30, so this not only got the cats away from the truck so I could leave, it meant they could finish eating while it was still light out. At night, I “arm” the motion sensor recording on the critter cam. When I checked the files this morning, I did see a couple of racoons go in, but there was no food left, so they didn’t stay long.
Meanwhile…
Yes!! I finally made it to the dump! It was even still open. I got so busy working on something else, I lost track of time. Thankfully, on Saturdays, they are open for 8 hours instead of 4.
After I tossed all the household garbage into the pit (they have bins for recycling, and various sheds and storage areas for electronic waste, paint, batteries, oil, etc., as well as separate areas for tires, large appliances, construction waste and other large stuff like that) and was closing things up, the woods on the other side of the pit suddenly started screaming. There had to be at least a dozen, probably more, coyotes back there! Coyotes have such a piercing howl, and some of them really did sound like they were screaming. Then there’s that yipping noise they make. Yikes! I’d hate to have a farm with livestock in this area. We do have coyotes here, of course, but I’ve never heard that many, all at once!
On a completely different note, yesterday evening I got to get some more progress on my garden analysis series of posts. I’ve got them planned out and organized into drafts, but each posts takes a lot of time to work on, as I go over my old posts and photos in the process. This year, I also have a number of videos to go over, as well. With my WordPress storage so close to maxing out, some things only got covered in video, or images are on my Instagram page, instead.
I think WordPress was having issues last night, Thankfully, it seems to not be happening today, as it hasn’t happened while I’m working on this post. As I was writing in my drafts last night, every now and then, it would simply disappear. Everything in my browser window would suddenly go white. The rest of the browser was still visible and uneffected; my tool bar was still there, the URL was unchanged, my tabs were still up. Just the contents of my WordPress editor would disappear. I’d have to reload the page to get it back.
Thankfully, WP automatically saves draft quite frequently, so I didn’t lose more than a sentence, but when it started happening more and more often, I had to stop for the night. I’m hoping to get more progress done on the drafts tonight. I’ve got the first completely post scheduled to post on Tuesday, and if all goes well, there will be a new one posted every morning for 10 days, altogether.
Which means I need to get my butt in gear. These analysis posts can take hours to write!
It does, however, help me get my thoughts together and make plans for next year, so it’s worth it.
As I was finishing up my morning rounds today, I spotted that kitten with the strange looking eye. I still can’t get close to it, but it was at some food, so it didn’t run away when I stopped to take a picture. I still had to zoom in on my desktop to see. This cropped image is the best I was able to get.
It’s still hard to see, but it looks almost like it has a cataract. Most likely, this eye got infected with the unusually bad strain of herpes that hit so many cats in our province this year. Whatever the cause, it was over with by the time this litter started showing up at the house.
I counted 36 cats this morning.
That critter cam we have set up in the sun room kept me busy last night. Those racoons are very persistent! They no longer really pay attention to my using the microphone to shoo them away.
Racoons make the strangest, snarling, piggy noises.
One of the first times I went into the old kitchen, I was surprised to find several cats in it! The outside door to the old kitchen from the sun room has a screen window. It’s old and torn and needs to be replaced. There is a window that slides down over it, but the slide locks have broken off, so the only way to move the window is to jam something like a screwdriver or a knife into the space, slide the latch and try and hold it in place while adjusting the window, so we just keep it all the way open.
Well, with the racoons making them rather nervous, the cats tore a hole in the corner of the screen in the door. The inner door was mostly closed, just to keep the cold out a bit, so they had no problem getting through.
Once the racoons were out, the cats left the old kitchen, but once they knew they could get through that screen, they kept at it! We tried closing the inner door completely, but that just meant cats got stuck between the doors. I opened it to chase racoons out again, and there were three cats between the doors! So we left the screen door open and closed the inner door. The last thing we needed was for the racoons to discover they could get through the screen and tear into the garbage bags stored in the old kitchen until we can finally get to the dump.
Which is open again today. With the battery replaced in the truck, we can finally get the garbage and recycling out!
We are going to have to do something about those racoons. Several times, it wasn’t enough to just chase them out of the sun room. I went outside and chased them out of the kibble house – then chased away the other three that were eating kibble under the shrine! From the noise, some were running under the storage house, so they weren’t going far. The time I chased away the ones by the shrine, I’d counted 8 of them altogether.
*sigh*
Ah, well.
One a completely different topic, my daughters are funny.
This is how they mark off the days on our calendar.
Every month, it’s something different. Sometimes, it’s geometric patterns. Sometimes, it will be a theme based on the month. Flowers in the spring, vegetables at the end of summer, that sort of thing. This was started off as marine life, then went with a food theme, and even some kelp!
I love the axolotl at the top. And the coelacanth! Two of my favourite sea creatures!
The Re-Farmer 