I did our first stock up shop tonight, but will do my regular price post later.

I didn’t get much sleep last night, and got up early to do the morning routine and watering while it was still relatively cool. Then I headed into the city, doing Canadian Tire, Walmart, and Dollarama and a Fresh Co (the last two shared a building). I also got gas at $1.599 in the city. One outside the city limits, the prices were $1.799

By the time I was done and heading home, my lower back was killing me, my left hip was giving out and my left shoulder kept trying to dislocate. I was heavily using shopping cards as walkers.

When I got home, I basically hit the heads, then crashed on the couch in the cat free zone, while my daughters unloaded the truck, parked it in the garage and put everything away. My older daughter was a sweetheart and brought me my water bottle and pain killers, because I forgot to do it before I lay down. I didn’t sleep, but I did give my body a chance to recover.

Then I had stuff to do outside. I’ll post photos later, but all our snail rolls and the seed tray are now outside, in the portable greenhouse frame in the shade. The snail rolls are in bins I picked up at the Dollarama for better stability, and they’re all further secured with wire to the frame, the the frame itself is now secured to the fence. Even the seed tray has the cover weighted down and is secured with wire – it seems we had an excellent germination rate overnight, but something, likely a mouse, destroyed it, even digging into individual cells to get at the seeds. I had to replant everything! Two items only had 4 seeds left in the packets, so I couldn’t replant all 6 cells in each row.

I did the watering in the front yard, then went to the back yard with some 3′ plant stakes I picked up. The mosquito netting over the potatoes was pulled up on the sides; the cats keep jumping on it! My daughter and I laid the stakes across, securing them on top of the 6′ bamboo stakes along the sides. The new stakes were a bit too long and had to be placed at angles so they wouldn’t stick out too far. Then we put the mosquito netting back on. Before I could even finish securing the edges with ground staples, a cat was already on top of the netting! After doing the edges, I put garden clips all round the sides and on the new supports across the tops. I don’t know if it’ll hold if the cats keep jumping on it, though. They are really determinded!

Also, for some reason, while working in the main garden area, we were absolutely attacked by clouds of mosquitoes! There weren’t any while I was doing the front yard watering.

Anyhow.

I finished the evening by watering the main garden area and the trees – the apple tree is recovering and has more new leaf bugs on branches I feared were dead, due to critter damage.

Now, I need to go to bed. Tomorrow, we will try to get the two littles in the isolation shelter into carriers. The goal is to bring in 3 cats. If that ends up being three fully grown males because that’s all we can catch, so be it. The rescue worker that arranged to have 3 slots available for me is aware of the problem. Since the raccoons and skunks clean up every crumb of kibble, the outside cats are essentially fasting, too, unless the go hunting somewhere. The vet will be aware of this, too.

I really hope we at least get the black and white female in the isolation shelter.

So I will be gone most of tomorrow with whatever cats we’re able to get.

For now, I’m going to try and go to bed early and get actual sleep.

I’m seriously considering sleeping on the couch in the cat free zone.

The Re-Farmer