I’d say it’s a good thing I changed my mind about going into town! I was keeping up with the chatter on a local highways conditions group, and things were getting really dangerous out there!
It’s still warm enough that the pools of water collected under our gate aren’t completely frozen. Those sections of ice on the main gravel road near us would be much like this, still. Thankfully, we don’t need to go anywhere for a couple of days.
While our current temperatures are still mild – we are at -5C/25F right now – the winds were absolutely brutal while I was doing my rounds. From what I can see in the trees outside my window, they haven’t died down, either. The wind chill is currently at -18C/1F
The outside cats were not enjoying it!
I counted 33 this morning, and 18 of them were in the sun room. Some pretty much never go into the sun room, no matter how cold it gets. As I was finishing up my rounds, the some of the ones outside were taking shelter under the kibble house.
We tried to arrange the shelters in such a way that they, and the house, would cut the wind, but somehow the wind always gets into there, blowing snow into the kibble house and their food trays. It doesn’t seem to get under the kibble house as much, and with that sheet of insulation on the ground, and more insulation under the floor of the kibble house, forming a ceiling under there, it is a favourite spot for them to hang out.
The water bowl shelter’s floor is quite a bit higher off the ground, and we’ve got another kibble tray under it, as well as pieces of insulation on the ground. At some point, I want to use some scrap carpet – we might have some usable pieces in the barn – and make a sort of wind break. I want to cut a piece long enough to go around three sides of the water bowl house, then cut it into strips, except for a solid band that will be attached to the base of the water bowl house. The cats would be able to easily push their way through the strips of carpet, and the carpet would shelter from the bulk of the wind and snow. My brother put something like that over the door of the dog house they gave us, except he added two layers of carpet, and the strips were cut so that they overlapped, cutting the wind even more. Unfortunately, the cats have been scratching at it, so it needs to be replaced.
Today is going to be a good day to stay inside and catch up on things!
I had some excellent responses to my earlier post, trying to figure out what’s going on with the vehicles. For the tire problem to be happening with one vehicle is strange enough, but our truck, as well as my mother’s car? Then there’s the oil thing, in the truck.
First, to address the tires.
Yes, cold most definitely can be a factor when it come to air loss in our area… but not this year! Temperatures have been much warmer than average in our area this year, because of the strong El Niño. We might even have a brown Christmas this year! Yesterday, as I was coming home from a dump run (my last trip of the day), it was even starting to rain. We’ve had winters where both the van and my mother’s car basically froze, saved only by the block heaters, and did not have this sort of air loss.
My mother’s car had all 4 tires replaced not long after we took over keeping and caring for the vehicle from my brother. I had managed to miss hitting some deer, but ended up in the ditch. Much to our shock, I was able to drive straight out without any stop and keep driving, but one tire went flat before we got home. After it was taken to the garage, we discovered other damage and all the tires got replaced. That was about 4 or 5 years ago and, for the amount of driving we do in general, they are still in excellent shape. It’s not like we’re commuting every day on them or anything like that. One tire is newer than the others, after our gravel road conditions caused a blowout about 3 years ago.
The tires on her car becoming unexplainedly flat has mostly been in just the past 6 months or so. I found the right rear tire flat one time, with no cause found. Once pumped up, it held it’s air fine. Then there was the left front tire. When that happened a second time, we got it checked, along with the other front tire by mistake. No signs of any leak. Then, most recently, I checked all 4 tires before going to my mother’s. The left rear tire was almost flat, the left front tire was really low and both right tires were also low, but not as much. The right rear tire was lower than the right front tire.
With my mother’s car, it’s parked in an addition to the garage and, as small as it is, it still barely fits. If I have a passenger, they have to get out of the car before I drive into the garage. In order to get in and out of the driver’s side without the door hitting a counter shelf against the wall and having to squeeze my way out, it is parked closer to the other wall, and diagonally. Which means the driver’s side tires can be reached fairly easily, the rear passenger side tire could be reached if someone really wanted to make the effort, but the front passenger side tire is virtually inaccessible. To check the tires, I have to drive the car out of the garage completely.
Thanks, Silk, for your info about the Schrader valve. I was wondering what it was called! I’ve looked at the tool you linked to. The more I look at it, the more I wonder; have I seen one of these before? With all our digging around what’s left at the farm, trying to find what’s still useful. I may have seen something like that and wondered what it was for. Or, my brain it trying to fill memory gaps. I can definitely see my late bother having a tool like that around. What I don’t know is if our vandal would have one. I tend to find that idea highly unlikely; at least not as something he would have acquired to work on his own vehicles – though he’s taken so many tools from here before we moved in, he may have one among them. Whether he would know what it is, I’m not sure.
Also… I hope that jerk you mentioned got caught and faced the consequences for his actions! Vandalizing people’s tires can cost lives!
To answer some other points brought up:
The truck is a 2011 and, since we’ve bought it, the mileage is over 240,000km/149,130m. I’ve got the vehicle’s history, and a record of the work done on it to get it safetied. It has all new tires and, while they are not the highest end tires, they are certainly not cheap. These are very good tires. We got the vehicle from the mechanic owner of the garage we’ve been going to for years, rather than a dealership. We’ve been burned by dealerships and dealership garages way too many times. I’d rather buy a vehicle from a garage that sells cars on the side, than a dealership that also has a garage, if you get what I mean.
Along with the tires, I know it got an oil change, so basically both the oil and the tires have been driven only by us since we bought it.
A few things did get missed when the vehicle was being prepped for sale. They (both our mechanic and the garage that did the safety inspection) did not see a problem with the battery; that showed up after we started driving it. The tire sensor module’s battery is not something they would have checked, either. No one bothered checking the cord for the block heater, the end of which was neatly tucked away, so no one noticed the plug had been torn off at some point. With this winter being so mild, there is no rush to get that fixed. Of course, being an older vehicle with so many miles on it, I would expect to find things that will only show up by actually driving it regularly – like the driver’s side seat belt being difficult to get latched in place.
The truck is parked in the original part of the garage (where my mother’s car is now, and where the lawn mowers, etc. are stored, were added to each side, much later on). The tires can be easily reached from all sides. However, it’s a longer vehicle, and just barely fits. In order for us to be able to close the garage door (which is broken right now, so it’s open all the time), the truck has to be pulled so far forward, it’s almost kissing the counter against the back wall. The space under the counter is open, so the front bumper can actually go under the counter, just a tiny bit. If we pop the hood from inside, we can’t access the lever under the hood to open it all the way, because it’s right at counter level. If we need to access the engine while in the garage, the truck has to be backed up. However, if someone could manage to get the hood up, they would be able to access the engine compartment from the sides. Even with the truck not pulled all the way in, from the side was the only way I could reach the dipstick.
Speaking of which…
While I was poking around in there, with a utility light hanging from under the hood so I could see, I cleaned off the top of the oil cap, then reached with my phone to take a picture. That was the only way I could see and read what was written on it!
I can just reach that dip stick from the side, enough to pull it out. If I really stretch, I can touch the cap, but not enough to open it, or add oil, without basically climbing the truck. Hence the need for a foot stool!
It never occurred to me that someone might remove the oil through the dipstick. In theory, if they could get the hood up, it could be done but, if nothing else, I would have seen some sign of that in all the gravel dust all over the engine compartment. The top of the cap was covered with gravel dust and clearly hadn’t been touched since the engine was worked on before we bought it. It was thick enough that I could barely see there was writing under the oil symbol.
While there is no sign of a leak under the truck, in the photo above, you can see there is a small section that does look oily. Again, this is something that was visible when I took the picture. Even with the work light above, it didn’t look damp like that while I was checking the oil level.
The gauge layout is completely different from any other vehicle we’ve had, and the oil gauge itself is different from any other vehicle we’ve had. My daughter actually looked it up while I was driving, shortly after we brought the truck home, so we could figure out what it was telling us, and what range for the needle to be in was good or not. That very difference, as well as the different location of the gauge, has had me checking it frequently. It’s where I’m used to the fuel gauge being, in other vehicles we’ve had, so my eyes still automatically go there first. Which is why I can be so sure the oil loss was sudden. There was also no change in driveability.
Well, I still need to head out and pick up oil for the truck – and pick up another parcel at the post office, which is closed right now, so I have to wait another 1 1/2 hours. Unless I take my mother’s car and go to town and talk to our mechanic directly, then hit the post office on the way home. I think I’ll do that.
Assuming, of course, the tires on my mother’s car aren’t low again!
The Re-Farmer
Update:
I didn’t make it into town to talk to our mechanic. Since I was going to use my mother’s car, I made a point of checking the tires, first. Sure enough, the tires on the driver’s side had lost about 10-15psi, with the front tire having lost more. It was raining/snowing at the time, so I fired up the compressor to pump the tires, rather than using the hand pump. The hose is long, but not long enough to reach both sides of the vehicle, though it turned out the passenger side tires didn’t need it.
As I was just getting onto the main gravel road, I realized going to town was not a good idea. That area that’s shaded by the trees and covered in ice had plenty of water on top of the ice. In the time it would take me to drive to town, talk to our mechanic, then drive back, it would probably be starting to freeze, and I use as heck didn’t want to be driving on that with my mother’s car!
So I stopped at the post office, which is inside a general store. They did have the type of oil I needed in stock, so I picked up a couple of litres – and a package that had been delivered yesterday, but not though the mail, so I never saw it! My husband got a delivery notification for it and was wondering. He thought it had been sent by post. 😁
Anyhow.
Once I got home, I just left the oil with the truck and headed inside. We’ve got nicer weather coming up. One of us will grab a stool, move the truck, and get some oil in there when it’s not so unpleasant out.
I was able to send the photo I took yesterday, along with a message asking our mechanic to call me when he had some, saying I had a tires and oil mystery. He didn’t see me until he was closed up for the day, but called me anyhow.
I told him about the tires on my mother’s car, first, since I’d already taken it in for him to check it earlier, and it’s an ongoing thing. Then I told him about the tires on the truck also being low, which surprised him. We’d had the warnings due to the faulty sensor before, so they’d topped the tires up for me, just in case, before, plus I’d checked the pressure before, because of the warnings I was getting.
Then I told him about the oil suddenly being low.
With that, we talked for a bit about how GM is somewhat different from other vehicles (we’ve never owned a GM before), and while it may appear really low on the dipstick, it’s probably just down one liter, not almost dry. The oily moisture visible in the photo I sent it normal.
As for the tires, while it’s possible that our fluctuating temperatures and humidity levels could be affecting the tires, it is still really strange. At one point I told him, if it weren’t for the lack of physical evidence, I’d think someone were coming in and letting the air out of the tires! His response was, knowing where I live, he wouldn’t be surprised if it was. The thing is, if someone had – even some random vandal – there would have been some sort of evidence visible. With my mother’s car, just getting the doors open to access it would have made it obvious. The doors are sagging slightly and don’t latch properly anymore, so I’ve got an old tire, with a rim still on it, in front of one door, and a metal object of some kind I found in the garage in front of the other, to keep the wind from blowing it open. In theory, they could go through the main part of the garage, as there is a doorway into where my mother’s car is, but I’ve got 6 years of collected aluminum stored in that corner, and there isn’t a lot of room to get around the front of the car. The light switch is by the double doors, too, so if someone went that way – even someone who knows the layout of the garage – they’d be knocking over bags of aluminum in the dark. Plus, there’s that dirt flour that would have shown scuff marks and tracks.
He’s asked me to bring the vehicles in, starting with the truck. He’ll take all the tires off and check them. I’ll bring my mother’s car in, another time. I don’t even need to make an appointment. He just asked me to text him, first. Today is Friday, so I’ll do that on Monday.
He’s as perplexed about the tires as I am. Particularly since it’s now happening on both vehicles!
While feeding the outside cats this morning, I spotted the kitten with the cloudy eye.
At least, I thought I did.
It ended up under the kibble house, but I managed to get a picture.
Which is when I discovered there was another cat already under there! The kitten had been right at the edge and backed up as I tried to take the photo, which is the only reason I saw the other one, hidden under there!
You can see the cloudiness in the kitten’s left eye in this photo.
However…
This is a photo I posted recently.
I thought we had two almost identical kittens from this litter – yet now that I can compare photos, I can see they are the same kitten.
There is no cloudy eye in this photo from a few days ago!
There is another tabby from that litter that’s seen even less frequently than I thought, now that I know I’ve been mistaking this one for it!
Yes, that left eye looks a bit darker in the photo, but that’s because of how the daylight is hitting it.
Very strange! I’ve never heard of cloudiness in the eyes coming and going like that!
What I’m finding amusing is that angry looking face. More so because, these are its siblings.
They all have matching angry faces!
While the black and white kitten is getting quite used to pets, and the tortie is… more tolerant, shall we say, of being pet and picked up, that little tabby just won’t allow it, even though I’ve managed to sneak a touch now and then, while it’s eating.
Which suggests to me that the tabby is female, given how the socialization of yard cats has been for us over the years! 😄😄
My regular readers might remember a strange situation we had with my mother’s car.
The first was discovering the left from tire almost completely flat. It was pumped up and seemed fine, until it was suddenly flat again. I took it to the garage to have it checked. They accidentally checked the right front tire, which was fine, but they found nothing wrong with the left front tire, either.
Then, not very long ago, before going to my mother’s, I checked the tires and found all four of them low. This time, it was the rear left tire that was almost flat. I pumped them all up and they were still fine when I checked them again before taking my mother to the hospital for her follow up, just a few days ago.
Now that we’ve got the truck, we’ve got a vehicle with brand new tires. The onboard computer, however, started giving us low tire warnings, right from the start – even though a pressure check showed they were fine. We’re also getting a “service tire monitoring system” warning. After talking to the mechanic, he thinks it’s just a low battery in the monitor. That’s a repair by replacement. The part is not expensive, but replacing the battery was the priority for our budget this month.
The problem with having these warning lights on all the time, though, is not knowing if they’re actually legitimate or not. So when my daughter and I headed to the city today, we paused at a gas station to check the tires.
Three out of four tires were low. One, very low!
???
Then, on the trip home, I saw the oil pressure gauge was low. I am not sure if it was low as we were driving out, but I know for sure it was where it was supposed to be, the last time I drove it. I do normally keep an eye on all the gauges when I drive.
Once we were done driving around and the truck was in the garage, I popped the hood and checked the oil. Which was rather amusing, since I can barely reach the dip stick.
The oil was very low, too!
Yet, there was no evidence of a leak anywhere.
Also, I know the oil had been changed as the truck was prepped for sale, so we are the only ones to have been driving it since then. Same with the tires.
I was going to add oil to the truck, but it uses 5W30, and what we have on hand is 5W40, so I’ll use my mother’s car, tomorrow, and pick up some 5W30 and top up the truck.
And maybe find a stool of some kind that we can keep with the truck, so I can reach further into the engine compartment. I might be able to just reach the dip stick, but I can’t reach the cap to add more oil!
If it weren’t for the fact that there is zero evidence for it, I would think that “someone” has been letting the air out of our tires, but… the oil, too? No. If that was what happened, there have been tracks in the snow (for when it happened with my mother’s car), or scuffs in the dirt floor of the garage around the truck. Plus, the only person I can think of that would do something like this is our vandal, and he’s got too many mobility issues for him to have been able to reach all the tires on my mother’s car (it barely fits into the side of the garage it’s parked in, and can only be accessed from one side). Or slither under the truck to drain the oil into a pan, which is what would have had to have been done for there to be no oil on the ground under the truck.
I am perplexed!!
Aside from that, the day went well.
My daughter and I went to several places. One was a liquidation place I wanted to check out, as I’d heard they got a huge shipment of name brand pet food. It turned out to be mostly dog food, but what cat food we found… well, it may have been a deal from the regular prices for these brands, but they cost more, for less kibble, than what we have been getting at Walmart and Costco. We didn’t get any kibble, but we did get a few other things that were a good price, including a little Christmas tree. Since we will be limiting our Christmas decorating and celebrating to the cat free zone in the living room, I’d been wondering how we would find space for any of our trees. Certainly not the 6′ one, but even the one we’ve been using against the door in the dining room, well above the floor, would have been too big. My daughters have a smaller one they would set up, upstairs, but not with the kittens this year. I think it’s a 4′ tree, which would still be a bit large for what we want to do with the space.
What I got was a red sparkly cone shaped tree with baubles already on it that’s only about 2′ tall. It’ll fit on top of the piano. I later found some plain white string lights for it at Dollarama, and we already have small tree toppers that would work.
An almost instant Christmas tree!
Before we went to the Dollarama, we swung by the international grocery store for some dim sum for “breakfast” – neither of us had eaten yet! Along with the string lights we found at Dollarama, we remembered to get a small garbage can for the truck – my daughter chose one with flowers all over it. 😊 They also had more of the little puppy beds in stock, so we got another one of those, since the cats love the first one I got so much. They are thrilled with the new one, too!
One of the places I wanted to try for our shopping was Fresh Co. I keep hearing how they have such good prices. My daughter had their shopping list, so I just needed some basics. I didn’t find their prices to be all that much better, except for a couple of sales. They had bags of 4 avocados selling for under $2 a bag! These days, you can’t even get a single avocado for under $2! So I got two bags. They also had a brand of butter for under $5 a pound. They had a limit of 4 pounds, but I only got 2, since we still have plenty from the last Costco shopping trip in the freezer. Costco’s price is over $5, but in most places, a pound of butter costs almost $7 a pound – and that’s the cheap house brand or no-name ones. The other brand name butters are much more expensive.
My daughter had a longer list than me, and she wasn’t able to find everything at the Fresh Co, so we went back to the international grocery store, after I filled the gas tank. Today is Thursday, and Domo has 5¢ off per litre on Mondays and Thursdays. The gas prices had also dropped and were 138.9¢/L, so we were paying 133.9¢/L. While my daughter was at the international grocery store, I popped over to a Dollar Tree I hadn’t been to in years, just to check it out.
That done, we were going to head home, when I remembered I needed memory cards for the older trail cam, so we swung by a Staples. I only needed 8gig cards, and two of them, so I can switch cards when I do my morning rounds. The lowest they had in stock was 16gig – and they were almost $20 each! The 32gig cards were cheaper than the 16gig cards, and the sales person that tried to help me said 8gig cards would be even more expensive. I guess nobody buys such low memory cards anymore. I could have gotten even better prices if I were getting micro disks, instead, but those don’t work on the camera. If they did, I could have used the ones I already have on hand.
So now I have a pair of 32gig cards to replace the old 8gig cards for the older trail cam. Here’s hoping they’ll work! I know the cameras generally can’t handle the large memory cards, but that usually starts at 128gigs, if I remember correctly.
Once we have the spare funds, I’ve got my eyes on some solar powered trail cams. They don’t make the model we have now, but I’ve been able to find others where the solar panel powers the camera directly, rather than charging rechargeable batteries, and has regular batteries for when it’s too dark for the solar panel to do the job. There are other features I want, too, but I think that one is the deal breaker for me, when looking at the different models out there. That will mean needing more memory cards. I think I’ll buy them online, along with the camera, when the time comes!
But I digress!
We had ourselves a productive day in the city; my daughter found everything they had on their shopping list, and I got a few extra things as well.
We have quite a lot of fresh onions, on top of the ones we dehydrated (half of which I powdered) and froze. Mostly the Red of Florence onions.
Which have started to grow! Not all of them, but enough that we had to do something about it.
So I made a version of this historical onion soup using all red onions, to use up the ones that were sprouting.
I made a few other changes, too, of course.
This is how it turned out.
I sliced all the onions that were starting to sprout, saving the greens to use fresh, some of which I used to garnish my bowl. We’d done a pork roast yesterday, and there was just a bit left, along with the pot juices and rendered fat from the roast. I used the fat from the roast, as well as bacon drippings, to caramelize the onions, instead of butter. Part way through the caramelization process, I added the leftover bits of pork, finely chopped – there is no meat in the version in the video.
For the liquid, I use the juices from the pork roast, which had jelled quite nicely overnight, plus water. They used just water in the video. A vinegar I had on hand I chose to add to the beaten egg yolks was a fancy, barrel aged apple cider vinegar.
My daughters had made a loaf in the bread machine yesterday, and that was used for the bread portion. The video specifically stated to use the outside of a crusty loaf, not the soft insides (which would just turn to mush in the soup!), so I sliced off the crust on the bread machine bread. The bread machine makes a relatively dense bread, particularly around the edges, so I was able to cut quite thick slices off all sides for this, and cut them into fairly even cubes. They stood up well to being cooked in all that liquid!
The only other thing I did a differently was to add a splash of vinegar to the soup stock, even though there was vinegar in the beaten egg yolks. After tasting it, I just felt it needed that extra bit of bite.
The only down side to making this soup was the length of time it took to slice the onions, then caramelize them. By the time the soup was simmering and the cubed bread added, my back was giving out and I had to sit down in between doing the other stuff. Not an issue for people who aren’t broken, like me! 😁
As for the soup, it was quite tasty. Even my husband went for seconds, and he’s not a soup person! I think it would have tasted even better with yellow onions, but that’s just me. If all goes well, we’ll have a lot more of those in our garden next year!
This is definitely a soup I’d make again, with any type of onion.
I might be getting my daughters to do the chopping or caramelizing next time, though! 😄
I so want to pet this baby! I can’t get near it, though. Which makes me think it’s a female, since it’s almost always the females that have been making strange!
This kitten looks so much like the one with the cloudy eye. I can’t tell if I’ve seen that one recently. I counted “only” 34 this cats this morning.
Including this one.
I’ve been feeding the outside cats earlier in the afternoons, rather than the evenings, because sunset is now earlier than 4:30pm, and I want them to have a chance to eat before the racoons come after dark and eat all the kibble that’s left. As I was finishing up, this little fur ball was eating in the sun room. I stopped to pet some of the friendlier cats, and not only did he let me pet him, but he actually stopped eating and came over for me to pick him up and cuddle him!!!!
These two, plus the fuzzy tortie and the tabby with the cloudy eye, are all part of the same late litter of 8 as Pom Pom, The Beast (aka: Tiny), Soot Sprite, and the sadly missed Snorri. They’re among the few we can still remember are siblings, because they’re all so much smaller!
Weather wise, today has been gorgeous. We hit 7C/45F today! The original forecast was for 3C/37F. Even our overnight low is supposed to drop to only -1C/30F.
Unfortunately, I’ve basically wasted the day. Oh, I was productive this morning, but ended up having to lie down because my back was giving out and fell asleep.
Surrounded by cats.
Now that I keep my door open all the time again, my bed is consistently covered with a dozen cats.
We need to take more “glamour shots” of the kittens and send them to the Cat Lady for posting among her contacts. She and her family are still dealing with house sale issues. They haven’t been able to sell their current home, and were just resigning themselves to giving up the one they wanted to buy. They even brought the 25 cats that were being boarded back home. Then a last minute dream offer came in, pending a house inspection. Which should have happened a couple of days ago. If that goes through, they are going to be insanely busy over the next month, so I’m not expecting her to be able to get back to working the rescue until that’s done. I don’t want to be bugging her about it when she’s got all this to deal with – on top of her own health issues! She’s a dynamo! I don’t know how she does it, at times!
Anyhow.
I don’t know how much I’ll be able to get done on the next garden analysis post tonight, so I might not have one ready to be posted tomorrow. It’s just been one of those days, and my head space it not where I need it to be for that type of writing.
I did, however, try something this morning that I’ll cover in my next post. I just wish it wasn’t what caused issues with my back!
We tried a whole bunch of new things in this category, this year! It was the peppers that we were particularly interested in getting going.
Peppers are something I’m growing for the rest of the family – I can’t eat peppers myself, much like I can’t eat fresh tomatoes. Which is unfortunate. I love the shape and smell of them, and when I’m prepping them for the family, they look so fresh, crisp and delicious! Yet every time I’ve tried to eat a pepper, it makes me gag. Even when they’re cooked, I still find myself wanting to gag, which is not a problem with cooked tomatoes. Oddly, though, I can eat jalapeno poppers, and quite love them. How does that make sense? My husband and daughters, meanwhile, love their fresh, raw peppers. So I wanted to try a variety of bell peppers this year, plus my daughter specifically requested hot peppers.
We did try to grow peppers last year – our terrible, no good, growing year! – and almost got some purple peppers. Just a few tiny, misshapen ones off of plants that did not thrive in a bed where nothing really grew well. They pretty much did the best of all the stuff we planted in that bed.
We did still have some of last year’s seeds left, but this year we went with new varieties.
One was the Sweet Chocolate bell pepper. I also ordered a collection of early sweet peppers, for their short growing season – Early Sunsation, Early Summer, and Dragonfly, all of which are different colours. For the hot pepper, we got a variety called Cheyenne.
With our short growing season, the Sweet Chocolates got started indoors quite early, along with some gourds and herbs.
The German Winter Thyme and the Lemon grass both needed an early start, too. Lemon grass is a zone 8, heat loving plant, so those were going to go into a pot in a sunny and sheltered location, when it was time to transplant.
With our short growing season, these were all started in early February. A lot of people on my local gardening groups started their peppers in January! The other varieties we had were specifically for our short season, and I must say, I had to really fight with myself to not start them until much later! Those got started in late March. In theory, I could have direct seeded them.
After filling 4 rows, I filled the last two rows with Spoon tomatoes.
We started a lot more seeds than we needed, on the assumption that they wouldn’t all germinate.
Well, we had pretty much a 100% germination rate!
As for other herbs, in early April we started oregano, spearmint and the Roma VF tomatoes.
We tried these in toilet paper tube pots, which we hoped would allow us to pot them up/transplant them still in the biodegradable tubes, without disturbing the roots.
Finally, we started chamomile seeds and a nameless variety of thyme, towards the end of April.
The first ones to be transplanted outside were the Sweet Chocolates, into the new wattle weave bed.
The peppers got protective plastic rings around them, as this was well before our last average frost date. I eventually needed to add sticks to keep the wind from blowing them askew, later adding supports for the peppers as well.
In front of the peppers, you can see where the German Winter Thyme was planted. At the end of the bed are the last spindly shallots. Beyond the thyme is an onion that came up on its own! Later, the chamomile would be transplanted near where the single onion is, as well as the strawberries from seed planted in between things all along the front of the bed.
As the days flew by and we weren’t getting other things ready as quickly as planned, I ended up planting more peppers in the wattle weave bed, just in case.
I chose one each of the early bell peppers, and one hot pepper. They got plastic rings to protect them, along with a couple other things I will cover in a different post.
We did eventually transplant more of the peppers in grow bags, together with Red of Florence onion, but we had so many seedlings, they were included in the Great Transplant Giveaway!
Some things, however, did not need to be transplanted at all, and could be direct sown. When it came to greens, we were actually going to skip trying to grow lettuce this year, and just grow spinach.
Spinach can be sown before last frost, so they went in, in late April.
After the seeds were sown, the bed got a floating row cover, to protect them from critters. This was just a dollar store row cover, and it tore astonishingly easy!
We did enjoy some nice harvests of the spinach, too. At least, with these first ones. After the garlic was harvested, spinach was one of the things we planted for a fall crop, and we got nothing. I think something ate the seedlings!
We found ourselves with some free seeds that we decided to try. One of them was a tiny variety of Bok Choy called Hedou. The other was a Czech variety or lettuce called Jebousek.
So how did it all work out?
It was a mixed bag!
The Peppers
The Sweet Chocolates, having been started indoors the earlier, had a head start, grew quite large and were the first to have mature peppers we could harvest.
The first ones we harvested were in August. They can be eaten while still green, but we waited until they turned the chocolate brown they were supposed to, when mature. They bloomed continuously, right up until the first frosts started to hit. We did try to cover the peppers on chillier nights, and that helped. Their location in the wattle weave bed was also much more protected than the grow bags in the garden.
As for the short season varieties, they did not do as well. The ones in the grow bags started off all right, but then sort of stagnated. We did get a few Dragonfly peppers to harvest, and there were other peppers developing when the first frosts hit.
The hot peppers had the most fruit developing, but all of the peppers planted later were slow in maturing. In the end, we harvested everything unripe and set them to finish maturing indoors.
We had mild temperatures extending for quite a long time, though, and the final harvest was in October! In the photo, you can see a couple of purple Dragonfly peppers, and the rest that are visible are the Sweet Chocolate. There were hot peppers under there, too. Unfortunately, we covered grow bags too late one night, and the frost caused too much damage.
Once indoors, the green peppers that were not frost damaged did continue to mature. As I write this, we have a few hot peppers left that have turned red. The Sweet Chocolates are the only remaining bell peppers, they’ve all matured, and are currently strung up to dry. The rest were either already eaten, or had to be tossed due to frost damage causing them to start molding.
When cleaning up the garden beds for the winter, I discovered what I think may have been the reason the grow bag peppers and onions failed to thrive. I discovered the soil was filled with tiny tree roots that had grown in from below!
They were all like this grow bag, turned inside out.
No wonder they didn’t thrive!
As for the ones in the wattle weave bed, the hot pepper seemed to do fine, though late in developing, but the others seems to stagnate, too, and I’m not sure why!
Final thoughts on peppers
When it comes to the bell peppers, the family isn’t really finding enough difference in flavour to say they like one variety over another. They all just sort of taste the same, so they don’t really care what variety we grow next! I do have a request for hot peppers again. We still have seeds for all of these, so we don’t need to buy more, if we don’t want to. If we do grow the short season varieties again, I will most definitely start them indoors earlier. We’ll also have to be more thoughtful on where to plant them, to ensure they get shelter and a warmer microclimate. We might use grow bags again, but if we do, it won’t be anywhere near those trees again!
The Herbs
Our eventual goal is to turn the old kitchen garden into mostly an herb garden, along with other things that we might use in the kitchen frequently. This garden is right next to the house and sheltered, and gets lots of sun, except where the ornamental crab apple trees are an issue. Those will be pruned back more, over time. It also now has all low to mid height raised beds, with the possibility to add height to some of them, as needed.
The German Winter Thyme did quite well in the wattle weave bed, except for one transplanted group that suddenly died part way through the summer. The Chamomile also did well, and was blooming enthusiastically.
The spearmint got its own pot. We had only one oregano seedling survive – barely – so it was planted in the middle of a pot and surrounded by the other variety of thyme. The Lemon grass got its own pot, too. Everything in the pots seemed to do surprisingly well, though the Lemon grass didn’t get anywhere near as large as they should have.
Final thoughts on herbs
There’s really been just one problem with the herbs we grew.
We keep forgetting about them.
Which means, we weren’t using them.
Oh, we did use some thyme, oregano and a bit of spearmint, during the few times we remembered them. We didn’t use the chamomile or lemon grass at all. We weren’t sure when to best harvest the chamomile, which we wanted to dry for tea, and I never got around to looking it up, because I kept forgetting they existed. My daughter were wanting to try the lemon grass, but weren’t sure how to use it with the type of cooking we tend to do.
I don’t know about the chamomile, but with mulching the wattle weave bed like we did for this winter, it’s possible the German winter thyme will come back. The chamomile may have reseeded itself.
We never bothered doing anything to the pots. I suppose it’s possible the spearmint and thyme will come back in the spring; we’re having a very mild El Niño winter, so the pots shouldn’t freeze solid. I doubt the oregano will survive, though being in the middle of the pot, it’s more protected than the thyme around it.
These are all herbs I want to continue to grow, though, and as we further develop the old kitchen garden, I think we’ll get into the habit of using fresh herbs and not forget that they exist!
The Greens
With the spinach, they did better after we gave up on the floating row cover. Thankfully, no critters seemed interested in them! We’ve had spinach do both really well, and really poorly, and that happened again this year. The spring sowing was fine. The fall sowing was a complete fail.
We’ll definitely keep growing spinach, though. It’s just a matter of where, and making sure critters don’t get to it!
As for the lettuce and baby Bok Choi…
What a disaster!
Oh, they started sprouting just fine.
Then the Chinese elm started dropping their seeds.
There are four of them along the chain link fence, plus one by the house, plus more past the garage.
When those seeds start falling, everything is covered. The emerging seedlings were buried and choked out, and there was nothing we could do about it!
Those trees have got to go. They are causing all kinds of damage, with their billions of seeds and their sidewalk heaving, basement wall cracking roots.
Much to my surprise, however, a couple of baby Bok Choy actually survived and promptly bolted.
I left them be as they developed seed pods that managed to dry before the first frost hit. I was able to save some seeds!
There was a surprising number of Jabousek seedlings that survived! Enough that we even used some of the leaves in sandwiches. They didn’t seem to get bitter, even after bolting.
Once they started blooming, I left them be. Unfortunately, it took such a long time for their seeds to develop, they got hit with frost, first. I suppose it’s possible the earliest bloomers dropped seeds, but that bed is going to be reworked in the spring (I held off to let them finish producing seeds) to make it narrower, so it’s unlikely that any seeds dropped will germinate. We probably won’t grow any lettuces next year, but I certainly won’t complain if this variety shows up on its own!
I most definitely want to try growing the Bok Choy seeds we kept. We never got to try them, and I’m very curious! We do like Bok Choy, but very rarely buy it.
So that’s it for peppers, herbs and greens and, I must say, getting this written was brutal! It took me all day, just to get started, as so many things kept popping up that needed to be done. Then, once I did finally get started… I swear, I’ve never been interrupted while writing so many times in my life! Most of which was because I saw on the critter cam that racoons were in the sun room. !!! I did try using the talk feature to yell at them, and they did leave at first, but after a while, they’d just look towards the camera, then ignore my voice!
If anything I’ve written here seems at all disjointed or not to my usual standard of writing or its full of typos that I’ve missed, that would be why! 😄😄😄
It wasn’t until I was cropping the picture that I saw it.
That face.
No, that one.
The other one.
The one in the back.
!!!
I was cropping the photo on my phone, right after taking it, so I looked again. From the same angle, I could just see a dark shadow behind the fuzzy kitten. The box has a side opening, but when I tried to see it through there, there was nothing visible. It was jammed way into the back corner.
Creepy stalker kitty! 🤣🤣
Also, I counted 34 this morning, then spotted number 35, hiding behind a tree trunk, as I did my rounds.
My daughter and I left really early for my eye exam, just to be on the safe side. The drive is normally about 45 minutes. Road conditions were good, but the farther south we drove, the denser the fog and the worse the visibility. The town my appointment was in was completely enveloped in fog. The city, another 15 minutes drive away, would have been even worse!
Since we got there so early, we had time for lunch, and to check out a couple of stores. I still got to my appointment almost an hour early. I’m glad I did, because they were able to take me in early. There was the pre-test stuff, which included a field of vision test, this time. I haven’t had one of those in well over 20 years. Then I got the eye drops and stayed in the waiting room to give them time to do their work. Even with all that, it was still earlier than my appointment when the doctor came to get me. I have some extremely mild hemorrhaging in my eyes that she wanted to check again. They seem pretty much unchanged. My field of vision test also seemed fine, though she didn’t have any previous tests to compare to, of course.
She wants me back again in 6 months, partly for a regular eye exam, but to do the field of vision and dilation tests again, and be able to compare.
Since I was taken in so early, it was still light out for our entire drive home. Being a passenger for a change, I tried to get some pictures out the window. In town, the visibility had actually gotten worse, but once we were on the highway and heading north, the visibility improved.
One good thing with everything being covered with hoarfrost. Deer are highly visible!
We even got back early enough to pick up a parcel at the post office, before they closed.
So now I sit here wondering if my eyes can handle working on another garden analysis post.
Considering how they feel, just from writing this, I think they’re still way too dilated!
Ah, it feels so good to be using a keyboard again! I really don’t like using my phone to tap out blog posts. 😄
Would you look at this bunch?
There’s always quite the rush of cats in the sun room when I first come out with my little bin and scoop to feed them. They’ve usually tossed things about over night (or the racoons have!), so I now put the bin down in the ground and let them have at it, while I pick things up and put them back where they belong. Then take scoops of kibble from around usually 3 or 4 cats eating out of the bin to fill the feeding areas in the sun room. Even after that’s done, I usually still have one or two I need to bodily remove from the bin so I can take it outside. There is a black cat that now lets me pet it and even move it around while it’s eating. I think it’s the one I posted a picture of recently. I’m not 100% sure, though.
This morning, every time I tried to do a head count, I got a different number. However, my first head count, done while they were all still voraciously eating, rather than running around all over the place, I got 38, and I’m almost positive I did not double count any of them. Once they’ve had at least some food, though, they start running around and then some start disappearing.
Then there are the ones that don’t disappear. They instead settle down in the sun room, with full little bellies, and settle in for a nap!
I’ve managed to touch the back of that fluffy grey tabby in the top right a few times while eating. He (she?) would run off, but not as quickly as usual. When not eating, I can’t get close enough to touch.
I think my daughter and I will need to head out earlier for my eye appointment today. I can see on the security camera live feed that the fog is getting thicker. We had fog alerts starting last night. After my mother was done at the hospital, we were hitting fog on the drive to her place. In one stretch, I turned off the main highway to cross over to her town and immediately drove into a wall of fog. We kept driving in and out of fog banks the whole way, but it did seem to clear up as we reached her town.
When I was driving home, I started driving through fog banks again. In some places, the ground was clear, but the fog hung like a ceiling, above.
When I came out to do my rounds this morning, there was a light fog. The trees are covered in light hoarfrost. I expected it to get lighter as the day went on, but nope. It’s getting denser!
So glad we’ll be taking the truck, and not my mother’s car!
