Author: Re-Farmer

An unplanned outing on a gorgeous day

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First, the cuteness!

I caught Peanut Butter Cup being adorable in her sleep.

She has quite settled in, and I’ve even woken up to find her curled up on me! The only down side of that is, she’s got… digestive issues. Little Miss Leaky Butt has inadvertently created much laundry. She’s gotten better, but not as much as the others. For a while, we had a whole lot of cats having… liquidity issues. We had been using the Kirkland brand of cat food before changing up to other brands, including the donated kibble. I try to have different brands and flavours as much as is affordable (plus wet cat food, which we’ve been giving them more of, for other reasons), but when it comes to price per kilogram, the Kirkland brand is still the best deal, so that’s the dominant brand of kibble they all get. I wouldn’t have made any sort of connection until I read a blog post about the Kirkland dog formula changing, and the effect it had on their dog. I haven’t been able to confirm, but found that others have wondered if the cat kibble formula has also changed. Since our own cat problems reduced when they started eating mostly other kibble brands (when the bins are topped up, they can get mixed together), I am now suspicious as to the cause. PBC, however, is still a messy girl at times, even on the other brands.

I’d hoped we wouldn’t have to make another trip before our stock up shopping, but we ran out of kibble. For the prices, it was worth the cost of gas to go to the nearest Walmart to pick some up, and still have budget left over for other necessities. My younger daughter came along with me to do some of her own shopping.

Our first stop was at Canadian Tire, where we were able to sanitize and refill two of our 18.9L water jugs. Since we were there anyhow, I picked up 4 more of the deep cell planting trays, plus a couple more base trays to replace some cracked ones. I need to pot up some tomatoes. My daughter found a couple of replacement spatulas that we hope won’t melt like some of the others we have! We went through most of the store just looking at things and talking about what we need to pick up over the next few weeks/months. In the process I was very happy to find a campfire coffee percolator on clearance! I’ve been on the lookout for one, to include with our other firepit cooking supplies, but they’ve always been so insanely expensive. Now we have a very basic 9 cup coffee percolator that includes an extra handle for hanging over the fire, for just under $18.

Once done there, we headed to the Walmart, split up and got our necessities. I got the cat food we needed, plus some items for the pantry. Canned, flaked tuna, packed in water, dropped in price to 97¢ per can, down from $1.97 per can. Canned meats and seafood of all kinds seem to have almost tripled in price over the past few years (depending on where you shop, of course), so to see a price actually go down to something close to pre-illegal-lockdown was a nice surprise. Mind you, only the girls like canned tuna, so it’s just for them, but anything extra for the pantry is always a good thing.

My daughter and I caught up again at the Walmart McDonalds, where I’d ordered lunch (my daughter hadn’t had breakfast before we left!), so she took the cart and loaded the truck while I waited for the food. While heading back to the truck, I remembered that I wanted to go to the Dollarama that shares the parking lot. My daughter had just finished bagging our stuff and loading it into the truck, so we left the food for later and she went into the store with me. While there, I found a few more things I wanted for starting seeds indoors. My daughter found some stuff, too – and got a present for me. A new hat for my collection!

It’s the absolute blingy-est adult sized hat I could find! Not only does it sparkle, it’s fluffy. 😂 It was actually the only blingy adult sized hat they had, but I’m absolutely giddy over it.

It doesn’t take much to make me happy.

We need to make something for our entry wall just for hanging up our hats. We have so many of them! 😁

Today we reached our high of 10C/49F, with some lovely sunshine. The only unpleasant thing was the winds were high enough to buffet us on the drive home. We’re supposed to continue being nice and warm – even reaching as high as 18C/65F next week, which is going to feel down right tropical.

Since potting the pre-germinated winter squash seeds I’d made a video of, 2 days ago, I potted up 2 more yesterday, and this morning I found more had germinated, so I’ll be potting those tonight. I will also be thinning by transplanting the San Marzano tomatoes, now that I have more of the large celled trays. The seedlings are a bit beat up from their fall, but almost all survived. I also need to pot up the other tomatoes and peppers in the small trays. That can be done over the next few days. With the pleasant upcoming weather, though, I want to set my snap pea seeds to soak, then tomorrow I want to plant them, along with some of the Uzbek Golden Carrots I made seed tape out of, plus spinach, in the bed that’s ready for them. I’ve decided to plant the snap peas in this bed, instead of the shelling peas, since we have fewer snap pea seeds, and it’s a relatively small bed.

Tomorrow, I also want to check on the bed that is solarizing right now and see how it’s doing, after today’s warmth and sunshine. We ended up ordering some sulphur pellets online, to increase the acidity of our very alkaline soil. I will wait until those arrive and add some to the bed that’s solarizing, before I plant the purple caribe potatoes in it. Potatoes like a pH of 5-6, and ours is 8; probably higher. Our test trips and pH meter don’t go any higher. I’ll probably be adding it to all our beds – or as many as possible, before we run out. From what I’ve been reading, our high pH may be more responsible for some of our troubles than anything else, including the relatively low NPK in all our soil tests. The two dump truck loads of garden soil we purchased years ago had adequate amounts of NPK when tested, and that’s been used in all our garden beds, but even the purchased soil tested as alkaline.

We are supposed to be heading into another drought this summer, so anything we can do to improve things is going to help. The first year we tried to grow melons was a drought year with heat waves, and we had a surprisingly good harvest from them. This year, I plan to grow several types of melons, so I hope it works out for them again.

Tomorrow is 6 weeks before our last frost date and, if I can manage to make space in the aquarium greenhouse, I plan to start pre-germinating another batch of seeds. I’ll be looking closely at days to maturity to decide which ones I will be starting, but I expect we’ll start more seeds pretty much weekly, if not more often, at this point.

I really need to figure out how to make space for all the pots, though. We may have to kick the yard cats out of the sun room a bit early! We won’t be able to leave the sun room door open overnight anymore once we start putting plants in there. I’m not worried so much about the cats; they tended to ignore the bins and trays of seedlings last year. It’s the skunks and racoons that we need to keep out!

We’ll figure it out.

All in good time!

The Re-Farmer

Still there, and thinking warm thoughts

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Well, it stayed cold enough that the snow we got is still there – with a bit more. We might get more flurries later today, and then the wind is supposed to pick up.

It’ll all be gone by tomorrow.

I counted 33 yard cats this morning – but I didn’t see Sad Face anywhere! Which means there’s another new one in the bunch.

I plugged the heat lamp in the sun room back in. They had really enjoyed the warmer temperatures and only a few continued to hang out in the sun room, but now that the temperatures have dropped again and the snow is back, every time I look out the bathroom window, there’s a crowd. Several crowds, actually, on and under the platform.

They will not be happy when they loose their platform so I can set up for my plants. 😁

Breakfast in the snow!

I got a good shot of the cat with the damaged eye. The hematoma doesn’t seem to be getting any smaller, that I can tell, but he seems to have no vision issues. He’s certainly more lively and active now, after having spent several days being quite lethargic and shivering in the sun room. I’m glad he sought out the warmth and shelter when he was feeling sick. Now that he’s improving, the down side is, he’s no longer letting me touch him. I managed to sneak pet his back while I was petting Driver (on the far right of the photo), but he quickly moved away. He is less skittish then he used to be, at least. The cats were all very hungry this morning, so I let him be rather than interrupt his breakfast.

With the chill and snow out there, I wanted to share something more spring like, so here is a video from MI Gardener to enjoy.

Some of these “hacks” are things I’ve already been doing, or trying to do. The first one is to have hose guards on his raised bed corners. That’s something I’ve appreciated about the higher raised beds, as the beds themselves are the hose guards. The only problem is that I typically have several hoses joined together, and the couplings tend to get caught on things. I’ve seen people use curtain rods they picked up at thrift stores; the round kind, where one half slides over the other to adjust the width. Setting them so the outside half is on the top allows it to rotate as the hose is pulled around it, which keeps things from getting stuck.

In the comments under the video, someone described how they’ve put permanent hose guards in their beds, made from small fence posts – then topped them with tennis balls for safety, so their grand kids are less likely to hurt themselves on them. What a great idea!

Using a board across the beds is something else I do, though I don’t have the knees to get right on one and squat to reach the soil! Mostly, I use them to lean against and support myself with one hand, while using the other to do what I need to do. Handily, we’ve got quite a bit of scrap boards that can be used for that, though they tend to be pretty rotten and damaged, and I’ve had more than a few of them crack and break up!

I’ll have to remember the “using the pot to make a transplant hole the right size”, tip.

With the carrots, I’ve used scrap boards to cover the seeds until they germinate. Only because I tend to have plenty of those, but not cardboard! What’s fun is to move them aside to check for germination – and finding frogs sheltering under them! Slug eating frogs must always be encouraged. 😁

I like his pretty dibbler tool. Since mobility is an issue for me, I tend to use something longer. Some days, I’ve used 4′ long support stakes as dibblers. Those are handy to mark out shallow trenches for smaller seeds, too. If I need larger holes to plant in, we’ve got lots of sticks or tree branches that will do!

Another commenter mentioned a tip I’ve heard of before that I definitely want to try, for the low raised beds. Get a piece of PVC pipe and use it to drop seeds in place. That would solve both mobility/pain issues, and short-people-like-me reach issues!

Just a side note, when it comes to reach; the lower the bed, the harder the reach. So for a low raised bed, accessible from both sides, like what he has, I’d recommend going no more than 3′ wide, but with a high raised bed, 4′ wide works just fine.

I’m really looking forward to winter finally being done with us!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 Garden: potting seeds already! (video)

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It’s only been 2 – maybe 2 1/2 – days!

This morning, when checking on the Wild Bunch winter squash seeds, I spotted one seed with a root showing.

By this afternoon, there were several more.

So I potted them up.

So far, it’s 6 out of 25 seeds, but I can see that the rest will start germinating very quickly.

Outside, the rain finally settled into snow, and we’ve got a light dusting of it out there right now. We’re just getting the tail end of a system that dropped a foot of snow, elsewhere in the country! The only thing I’m really concerned about outside is the saffron crocuses. I took their mulch off and the ground they were growing through was still frozen, but I’m not sure how the newly exposed leaves will handle these temperatures.

They are now saying tomorrow will have a high of -1C/30F, but the day after is supposed to reach a high of 10C/50F!

Until then, it’s a good time for inside stuff – like getting the germinated seeds planted in pots!

The Re-Farmer

Various things

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It’s another chilly and wet day, so no progress outside.

The rain continued through the night, and this area where I’d scattered all those seeds is now full of water again. That will either benefit the seeds, or drown them!

Speaking of seeds, the first Wild Bunch Mix winter squash seed has a root emerging already! At least, it was 1 this morning, though when I check it again later today, I’m sure there will be more. I could just see them, starting to show through the snips in the outer shells I’d made.

I had some errands to run, so I headed out early enough to get to the post office before it closed until the afternoon. Then it was off to town, where I made a quick stop at the grocery store for a few things, then went to one of the hardware stores. I will be running out of seed starting mix soon, with all the seeds in the Wild Bunch Mix I have pre-germinating, so I wanted to get more of that. Then, after looking around, then finally asking someone, I found it!

I found vermiculite!

I couldn’t find it when I checked while in the city, yet there it was, locally. Quite a few bags in stock, too. I missed them at first, because the packaging is almost identical to one of the brand’s potting soils. I’m hoping this will help keep the moss and mold in some of our pots at bay.

My daughter had finally fixed some problems with her bank’s updated app, and was able to treat us today, so the last stop before heading home was for some take out from a Greek restaurant in town. A “Greek” restaurant, but with the most massive menu I’ve seen anywhere!

While I was out, I got a message from my husband telling me a package I was expecting tomorrow was in. I’d already been to the post office and it wasn’t there – or so I thought – so I stopped in again on the way. I figured it had to have been a non-post office delivery, but nope. As I was going in and out of the store, the rain turned to snow, then back to rain, then back to snow, then back to rain…

We’ll be getting that until at least midnight. Tomorrow is expected to be chillier than today, then things should finally start warming up again, the day after. Winter just doesn’t want to let go! This freeze/thaw cycle, though, is just tearing apart the gravel roads.

Once at home and looking at the packages I picked up, it turned out that what I thought was something else was the package my husband told me was in. Which is nice on the one hand, since it was something he ordered for me, but not so nice on the other, since it means his replacement CPAP hose and nose pieces aren’t in yet. He’s leaking air. He needs a new mask/headpiece (a hose arrangement the nose piece attaches to), too, but they were out of inventory.

On a completely different note, I got a call from my mother. She got another letter under her door from the public housing department that owns her building. It was a notice for beg bug spraying. She has been refusing to allow them in, as she believes one of the guys stole some stuff from her – stuff that she considered valuable, but are only valuable to her. She phoned the number on the letter and told the guy, she’s not afraid of bed bugs, but she is afraid of people coming in and stealing her stuff (the time she thinks this happened was more than a year ago). The guy said she must have misplaced them. This wouldn’t be the first time she’s believed someone has stolen from her. She had an envelope of money go missing and she all but directly accused one of her neighbours of going into her apartment while she was in the lounge. A couple of months later, she found the envelope.

So what my mother wants me to do is go through her stuff for her. The stuff in question, however, would be of interest to my sister for her genealogy records, so I suggested she call her. We could possibly do it together.

My daughter, however, pointed out something to me.

Personally, I don’t think my mother has bedbugs, so I haven’t been worried about it. However, if she *does* have bed bugs, and I start going through all the stuff in her bedroom, I’d be bringing them home – and with this house, we’d never be able to get rid of them. We’d have to move out and empty the house.

I’m going to have to call my mom back and tell her this. It’s one thing to go to her place and help her with her groceries. I’m basically just in her kitchen and little dining table, all near the door. It’s quite another to be in her bedroom, digging through her closest and shelves, going through stacks and stack of papers she’s got tucked in them.

*sigh*

She was going to call my sister then get back to me, but I’d better call her back now and get that over with.

She’s not going to be happy, but then, she’s been refusing to allow her place to be treated. Actions have consequences.

*sigh*

The Re-Farmer

It’s baaAAAAaaccckkk…. (and a WP frustration)

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Yup.

It’s white out there again.

Yesterday’s rain turned into snow overnight. At the time I was doing my rounds, it was more rain than snow, but still coming down.

It won’t last long. Areas such as the driveway are full of puddles but no snow, and we are expected to have a high of 8C/47F today, so it won’t last long. A couple more chilly days, then things are supposed to warm up again.

While giving the yard cats their food and water, I tried to do a head count. Every time I counted, the number got higher! I counted 33 at most.

A couple of the ladies are definitely looking round. With Adam and Brussel, it’s hard to tell, since they have such long fur, but I’m sure they’re getting big, too.

While checking the trial came files yesterday, I found that cats had triggered the gate cam a couple of times, with their baby making activities, as well as just rambling around the driveway.

Including one cat with distinctive patterns I’ve never seen before!

My guess is, he lives across the road from us. I know our own cats go across to two different properties on the regular, and I know other cats live there, too. One of them likely just followed ours back. The gate seems to be as far as he went, though, because we’ve never seen him in the yard.

On a completely different note, I’m not sure I solved any problems by using Google Photo to store images to post here. I tried it before but forgot what wasn’t working about it. Now I remember.

WP seems to still be storing the images in my own WP media files account. They’re still taking up space.

I think.

The image of the cats above, for example, was uploaded to my Google Photo account (which comes with my blog’s gmail address). After using the image block to select the image using Google Photo, it works fine in the post – but then shows up in my WP media files. If I look at the address for the image itself, it goes back to WP media. Which means I save nothing by saving the files externally. WP just automatically stores it locally. With some of the recent images, I hadn’t resized them first (I having worked the kinks out of using the software on my new computer yet), so that means full size files are being uploaded into my blog posts.

Except…

While adding the above photo, I notice it said “inserting” image, not “uploading” image, as it would if I were adding the image from, say, out of my phone.

It could be just a thumbnail showing up in my media files.

The main reason I have my doubts about it is because I’ve sometimes used the free images available through WP. They specifically say that if you use these images, they don’t take up storage space in your account. Yet those images also show up in my media files, and if I open the image in a new tab, I can see it tracks back to my media storage, not Pexels or Openverse. I don’t see anything in the source code that suggests the images are anywhere but in my own account’s storage.

Yet, these images are “inserted” not “uploaded”.

So…

Are the images I am storing externally taking up space in my account or not?

All I know is, my storage space just went from 98.2% full to 98.3% full.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 Garden: starting winter squash and chitting, on a chilly day (video)

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We got quite a bit of rain overnight! Enough to completely fill the rain barrel I’d returned to the corner of the sun room. When I came out this morning, I had to put the diverter back on!

It was still raining ever so slightly while I was out (I counted 31, maybe 32 cats this morning). The only garden related stuff I did was to take the mulch off the sunchokes and asparagus beds – the last beds that needed to be uncovered – so they can thaw out faster.

The rain looks like it has stopped, but it’s too muddy and chilly to do the work I had intended to do outside today. I did end up setting out the Purple Caribe potatoes to chit in the old kitchen.

A couple of them were large enough that I cut them in half, and those ones are perched on the carton in such a way that they will have air flow under them, so the cut areas will dry out.

Looking at how many 1kg give us, I’m rethinking where we will put the 2kg of German Butterball potatoes. My thought had been to put them where the squash were planted last year, but that’s a huge space. I’d basically just have one row of potatoes. So now I’m thinking we might use one of the low raised beds, instead, where the soil should be softer.

We really need to think about increasing the acidity of our soil. It is very alkaline, and pretty much everything we are growing needs soil that is at least a little acidic. We should pick up a bale or two of peat, but that has a very minor and slow effect on acidification. A lot of the usual soil amendments, like adding compost, actually increases the alkalinity, which is the last thing we need. I ended up running errands in the small city yesterday and was looking for Sulphur, but saw nothing. We do have a box of fertilizer we found when cleaning out the old kitchen years ago that is for acidifying the soil; it’s meant for azaleas, but should work for other things, too. If it’s still good. Does water soluble Miracle Gro have an expiry date? I have no idea how old this stuff is. The box was opened but, based on how full it looks, it may only have been used once!

Since today was an indoor kind of day, I started pre-germinated some winter squash.

We’re at just under 7 weeks before last frost, which I hope is enough time for these. Not knowing what varieties are in this mix means we will have different days to maturity among them. I’m still hoping to be able to start some other varieties of winter squash as well – ones we actually know what they are! I’m just not planning to grow entire rows of each. With pre-germinating the seeds, I can start just a few of each and not have to be as concerned about germination rates like when they’re sown into pots or pellets.

I’ll need more pots, though.

Among the last seeds I want to start indoors, by about 3 weeks before last frost, are several types of melons.

Last year, we started so many squash and melon seeds, then had entire trays where nothing germinated. A real waste. I think we’re going to have a much better success rate using the pre-germination method. It should be interesting to see how much of a difference it makes, as time goes by.

The next few days are supposed to continue to be colder and wet, with possible snow, with Friday having a high at, or just below, freezing (it’s Tuesday as I write this). By Sunday, we’re supposed to be back up to the double digits (Celsius), but our overnight lows will be staying close to freezing through most of May. We don’t expect to be direct seeding anything until June, but there are quite a few cold tolerant things we’ll be able to direct sow once the current cold snap is done.

May will be our month for building more raised beds, and harvesting more dead trees to build with.

There is so much that needs to be done!

Weather willing, we’ll have more prepared garden spaces than we had last year, but I’m not sure we’ll reclaim enough to match what we were growing in – well, trying to! – the year before.

Little by little, it’ll get done.

The Re-Farmer

Sowing wild, and a test

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With the current conditions, and the melted snow quickly disappearing, I decided to do some wild sowing.

I’m also going to do a test, since I’m almost out of storage space for files on my WP account. It now allows images to be uploaded from Google Photos, so that’s where these are from. Please let me know if you can also see them!

A friend sent me a whole bunch of old seeds. These are all the flower seeds from the stack. Not all the packages had years on them that I could find, but one of them was dated 2020.

I dumped all the seeds into an old spice shaker with very large holes in the lid. The old prescription bottles with Icelandic Poppy seeds from 2018 form the majority of these.

This is where they went.

This low area on the North side of our driveway still has a bit of standing water and the soil is still saturated in places. It gets full sun and. It’s an area that’s too rough to mow, so it’s as good a place as any to sow some random seeds! I simply broadcast the seeds as widely as I could over the area.

The chances that such old seeds would germinate at all is low to begin with. They will also have to contend with birds finding and eating them. How many will even have enough contact with the soil to take root is another factor.

Still, who knows? We might have ourselves quite a mix of flowers growing here this year.

Now, since this way of posting photos seems to be working (at least as far as I can tell on my own computer!), here’s a bonus.

I eventually counted 29 cats this morning, though not all together at the kibble bowls.

Hypotenose really, really wanted attention this morning!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 Garden: bed prep, and a comparison request

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Well, it finally got done! At about 1am, the video I meant to post yesterday was finally uploaded to YouTube, which then was going to take another hour to process it, in three different quality options. I waited until the lowest quality one was done, so I could select a thumbnail, then went to bed!

The question is, was it worth it?

I’ve watched the video myself, selecting the highest quality option, but I really can’t see much of a different.

Here is the video in question.

Could I ask a huge favour?

Could you please watch this video on YouTube, selecting the highest quality option, then compare it to this one…

… also on highest quality option?

Then let me know in the comments how you watched it, and if you could see any difference in quality or play.

I’m using my new desktop to watch these, and the YouTube settings for both allow me to watch them at 2160p/4K.

When exporting the older video in my software, I used the default “good” quality setting. There is little difference in file size with either “good” or “high” options, so it should not have taken so very long to upload. I don’t know if it was an issue with our internet, or with YouTube itself. Or both. I’ve had this happen before where the upload took so long. it was basically stopped. I gave up and started over again. The problem with doing that is, no matter how far along the upload was, trying again starts at the beginning, not from where you left off. In that case, when I tried it again, it uploaded much faster and without any problems the second time around. I seriously considered doing that again with this one, and probably should have.

Please feel free to let me know what you think!

The Re-Farmer

Sloooowwww….

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I was intending to write my daily post earlier, with a video that I edited together.

Well, that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen.

Photo by invisiblepower on Pexels.com

I save the video as high quality instead of merely “good” quality. Which makes a 12 minute video into a much larger file.

It’s 70% uploaded to YouTube, but will apparently take another 2 hours and 19 minutes to upload.

I thought it would finish uploading while I did the evening chores and made myself something to eat, but I think the upload paused when my computer went to sleep or something.

*sigh*

Ah, well. I guess I’ll post it tomorrow!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 Garden: solarizing

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First, thank you for the kind words I received after my last post yesterday. I’m happy to say I did actually get sleep, and am in much less pain today. I’m going to take it easy for a day or two, so I don’t have a relapse, but I did take the last step in preparing the bed I’ve been working on.

I got a couple of hoses set up to give it a soak and grabbed the first nozzle I found.

It promptly broke. The threaded portion cracked right off!

I couldn’t find the new nozzle we got last year, but I did find another older one (these were nozzles we found when we moved here, and they outlived others I’d bought new!) and that one got the job done.

I took all the plastic off again. There was condensation built up under it, as we had a touch of rain last night, but the soil beneath was still dry. I spent about 20 minutes going back and forth, giving it a deep watering. With the melting snow and water actually being absorbed by the soil instead of washing away, I know there is moisture close to the surface, so the amount of watering I did should be enough.

I ran out of ground staples while putting the plastic back, so I had to find weights for the last section.

The bricks being used to retain the soil is temporary. We will be gathering materials for something more permanent. I’m thinking something about 3 times the current height with the bricks. When that’s done, we’ll take the extra time to make sure everything is in a nice, straight line. In the process, we’ll replace the boards that are holding the soil from falling through the chain link fence with something better. The path itself will eventually have bricks or something, so it’s not to muddy.

A path we will make sure doesn’t get buried like those sidewalk block chunks I’ve been finding!

Looking at the forecast, I’m thinking the earliest we can plant the Purple Caribe potatoes in here will probably be next weekend. We’ve got a couple of warm days, then the temperatures are supposed to drop to freezing, then take a few more days to warm back up to double digits (Celsius).

I’m already feeling time slip away from me. Half of April is almost gone already!

The Re-Farmer