Author: Re-Farmer

Morning harvest, and tiny unit

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We’re getting high winds again today. Last night, I saw there was an expected high of 29C/84F by this evening, but now they’re saying a high of 26C/79F. At the moment, it’s a much more pleasant 18C/64F

Which made doing the morning rounds quite pleasant. Especially since the smoke is gone.

Here is what I picked this morning.

There are green and yellow beans on the bottom. Those seem to be winding down. There’s also an accidental onion that got pulled up while I was weeding!

The Romas are steadily ripening, and I got a few Indigo Blues this morning, too. I did pick some Black Beauties, too. The small one with the green was found on the ground. The others, I picked because they were starting to split.

I ended up picking a couple of Montana Morado corn, but the rest did not seem ready. From how the cobs feel when I check them, we had some pollination issues. We need some serious soil improvements before we can grow good corn in the main garden area again. I should probably pick a Tom Thumb popcorn cob, just to see how they look. They are being left to get completely dry on the stalks, but I’m still curious.

As for yesterday’s harvest that I picked for my mother, the reaction I got was pretty much exactly what I expected. The only thing she seemed happy to see was the garlic. Also, tomatoes should be red. Only red. When I reminded her she had actually asked for some of the others, she told me, “just to see!” Never mind that she told me to give some to her when they were ripe, while she was getting a tour of the garden and looking right at them. Of course, she waxed poetic about all the wonderful produce my sister gives her. When she saw the zucchini, she told me she thought she would be giving me zucchini, because someone had left some in the common area for people to take. While putting things away, I saw the zucchini she was talking about. They were huge, and looked like the hybrid zucchini we were gifted with last year. As for the brown pepper, she just laughed derisively. At least she didn’t have anything bad to say about the potatoes.

Ah, well. I tried.

I guess we’ll just have to keep our harvests to ourselves. 😉

Anyhow.

Where was I? Ah, yes. Morning rounds!

Kittens are, of course, running around all over the place. I got a picture of this teeny tiny unit.

For perspective, that’s a piece of paracord on the ground, next to it. This is one of the two kittens that were in the junk pile. It’s sibling is black with a tiny white patch on its chest.

It’s sibling is also easily twice the size.

This one does not appear to be sick in any way. Not even a little bit of leaky eyes. It’s just really, really tiny.

I’ve been trying to get close to it to touch it, but it won’t let me. All in good time. We’ll be keeping an eye on it.

For now, it’s time to bring the car over to the house and load it up for a trip to the dump. After that, we’ll be grabbing our empty water bottles for refilling.

Oh! I almost forgot! We had our first successful loaf of bread in the new bread machine yesterday. This morning, the girls got it going again. There should be fresh bread, ready to eat, by the time we’ve done our running around. It seems I guessed right; that first time, a cat much have climbed on it and accidentally shut it off. The machine is working just fine. 😊

The Re-Farmer

Our 2023 garden: a harvest gift, and taste test

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I’m heading to my mother’s this afternoon, then taking her to a medical appointment, so I thought I would bring some things from our garden to her.

I picked the potatoes from under just one Irish Cobbler plant, which had a pretty decent amount of larger potatoes. There were also small ones, so I just buried them and the plant roots again. There’s a few orange carrots, a zucchini we harvested earlier, some Roma and Indigo Blue tomatoes and a Sweet Chocolate bell pepper. While cutting some thyme, I noticed a shallot that got missed, so I grabbed that, then added a couple more we’d harvested earlier. I also cut some spearmint for her. I decided to add one of the Black Beauty tomatoes we harvested earlier, too. The softest one I could find among the lot. After bagging it up, I remembered to grab a head of garlic for her, too.

My mother being my mother, I expect to get a lot of snarky comments and backhanded insults. 😄 She’ll have issues with the brown pepper and different coloured tomatoes. She did ask me to give her some of the tomatoes to try, but then launched into a long speech about how bad it is to have not-red coloured tomatoes. And, of course, she’ll tell me how my sister brought her soooooo much from her garden, and it’s so much better, and she’s just one person, so it’s all too much, and how bad it was for me to bring more.

My mother is very predictable. 😁

But I’m giving them to her anyways. Who knows. She might actually show appreciation for a change. 😄

We did have one really nice, ripe Indigo Blue Chocolate tomato for my daughter to taste test. I’d picked three and put them in my pocket so I could use both hands. One was so ripe, it split when I bent over, so it needed to be eaten right away.

My daughter found them absolutely delicious. Nice and sweet. Juicy, but not too juicy, with a rich tomato flavour. We have others harvested that will need to be eaten quickly, and I don’t think that’s going to be a problem at all! 😄

The Indigo Blues are an indeterminate tomato, so I can expect to be able to harvest small amounts of them more often, from now one. The Romas are starting to ripen in mass quantities, so I might just wait on processing the ones we’ve picked, so we can do larger quantities all at once.

On another note completely, we did try to use the new bread machine yesterday.

Something went wrong, but I don’t know what.

I came into the kitchen to check on it, and it was off. There was still power to it – the display was showing the exact settings I started with for a basic 1.5lb loaf. It should have been showing a count down on the time. It just wasn’t running. The bread dough had been completely kneaded and was just sitting and rising the pan, so I left it. Later on, my older daughter took the dough out and baked it in the oven, so we now have one, perfect little loaf in bread jail to try.

Hmmm… I wonder. We keep our bread in a bin – bread jail – to protect it from the cats. I wonder if maybe a cat stepped on the controls while we were not around, and shut it off? We’ve set the bread machine up on the counter near the microwave, where it could be plugged into an outlet on a different breaker, and plenty of space around it for when it’s hot and baking. It’s the one counter the cats are allowed on, as they like to sit and look out the window.

That’s about the only thing I can think of, other than mechanical failure.

My daughter plans to try again, later, so we’ll see!

Who knows. I might come home to some fresh bread to try. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Our 2023 garden: unexpected harvest

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I headed outside to check on things just a little while ago. The winds are quite severe right now, and I was eyeballing some of the trees, wondering which one was going to come down, next! At least the wind is blowing in a direction where they would fall away from the house, not towards it.

After picking up a few fallen branches – not many – I checked on the garden.

The trellised tomatoes definitely needed some help! Even a few of the Romas needed to get extra support. The big surprise with them is how many of the almost ripe tomatoes I’d left behind were now ready to pick! I hadn’t planned on that and ended up using the bottom of my shirt to hold them all.

I had to add more support to a number of Indigo Blues and Black Beauties, plus adding structural support to the Black Beauty trellis. With the wind direction going through the garden, the plant laden trellises were acting like sails!

These are all the tomatoes that were picked today, including from this morning. On the left are the Black Beauties, including a broken branch I found, with a couple of tomatoes on it. I just looked up how to tell when Black Beauties are ripe, and I can’t say it helped much. From the photos and video I saw, the are supposed to get more red on the bottom. Other articles said they get completely dark. As you can see, one is completely purple on the bottom. The colour is photo sensitive, so the parts that get the most sunlight are the darkest. The ones with bright green on the bottom are at least clearly not-ripe. The information I found also said they should start to be soft and slightly squishy. They are all rock hard! Which means even the all purple one is not ripe.

I think.

They are now laid out on a screen in the cat free zone and will hopefully continue to ripen. The Roma VF tomatoes don’t need more time, but they will be fine like this until we find a sauce recipe we want to try. The Indigo Blues, for the most part, should be ready for fresh eating now.

I think.

On a completely different note, our new bread machine has been cleaned and set up, and we just need to wait for a couple of ingredient to reach room temperature before we start our first basic loaf. I’m quite looking forward to it!

Meanwhile, I’m going to start looking up some basic, refrigerator tomato sauce recipes now!

The Re-Farmer

Biggest morning harvest, and choices

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This morning, I had the largest harvest out of the garden for this year, and it was almost all tomatoes!

There are a couple of handfuls of green and yellow beans under all that.

I wasn’t sure about the Indigo Blue tomatoes, and how to tell if they were ready. Last night, I was reading about an almost identical Indigo type tomato (honestly, I think it was the same tomato with a slightly different name, because it was from a different company than where I got these), and it mentioned the bottoms getting very red when they ripened. We had some that have been red on the bottoms for a while now, so I decided to pick them. I’m glad I did, because they were starting to split!

As for the Romas, I picked the ripest looking ones, including the one I found had fallen off on its own. Some might have been good with a bit more time on the vine, but I wanted to get the weight off the vines. These are very prolific! According to my daughters, they’re not very good for fresh eating, though. There are enough to make some tomato sauce or something along those lines. Probably not enough to make it worth breaking out the canner, so likely just for the fridge and immediate use.

After finishing my morning rounds, I headed out to do some errands. My first stop was the post office; my husband had ordered a new exercise ball, now that we have a cat free zone to store it in, in between uses. Then I gassed up before heading to the nearest Canadian Tire and Walmart stores. It started to rain while I was heading to the gas station, but while driving to the next city, it cleared up – though it was still hazy from all the smoke! I was amazed all that rain wasn’t enough to get rid of the smoke. In the time it took me to get home, though, the winds have picked up and are now blowing from the south, so the smoke is being blown away from us, instead of towards us. I can finally flip the fan in my window to blow air in, instead of out!

[Update: Well, I’m confused. We’ve got 3 weather warnings right now. Two for wind, one for smoke. According to the weather maps, the winds are coming from the north/northwest. But as I drove home, the car was being buffeted from the south side of the road. As I look at the security camera live feed, I’m seeing trees being blown around, and it looks like it’s from the south. I look out my window, and it looks like they’re being blown from the west. So I guess things are swirling around a lot! I’ll be looking for downed trees and branches, when this is over.]

At the Canadian Tire, I was after pellets for the litter boxes. They keep them in the vestibule by the exit, and I saw the hardwood pellets, but when I was ready to pay for a couple of bags, I was asked if I wanted hard or soft wood. The hardwood pellets had gone up in price awhile ago, so I got the softwood pellets.

Then I picked up the bags on the way out and realized the price on those had gone up, and they now cost more than the hardwood pellets. It’s only a difference of 50¢ a bag, but I’ll have to remember that. I do wish Walmart had them in stock more regularly, because they’re almost $3 per bag cheaper.

While at the Cdn Tire, I went looking for puppy pads, but the ones they had were far more expensive. I did, however, find some carpet powder designed for cat or dog mess cleanup. I’d run out of that awhile ago, but couldn’t find any the last time I was in the city. I also found the fire bricks I’ve been slowly stocking up on. The last time I was at a Canadian Tire, it was a different location, and I couldn’t find them, nor even the section they would have been in. The lady I asked didn’t even understand what I was asking about, and assumed they were a seasonal item. I’ve been buying the bricks in groups of four. By the time we will need them when building our outdoor kitchen, I hope to have enough to spare for other projects.

I found the puppy pads I needed at Walmart. Things seem to have improved in that respect. I’m no longer finding giant turds under my desk. Just giant pee spots. It seems Two Toes has figured out the litter boxes for at least one job! I came home to no mess at all, so maybe she’s figured it out for the other job. Thankfully, the kittens seem to have all figured out the litter boxes. Finally! Still, I was almost out of puppy pads already. I need at least 4 of them to protect the space. Two folded in half, and partway up the wall, and two fully open, layered on top and covering extra carpet. I’m also using pet odour eliminators and, now that I have it again, the carpet powder to dissuade cats from the area.

After talking it over with the family, we decided it was worth it to dip into savings a bit and pick up a new “toy” for the kitchen.

I got a bread making machine.

These were our choices.

The box on the right, with the white background, is a larger machine and has two different size Express settings, while the other, with the blue, has one Express setting, but also a yogurt setting. We’re more likely to be making yogurt than Express bread, which needs both bread flour and fast acting yeast. I did get fast acting yeast, but we never buy bread flour.

I believe the one on the right was a Hamilton Beach brand. It was $10 cheaper. I went with the blue boxed Oster brand for one simple reason: the other brand had only one box on the shelf, and it was bashed up. The outer packaging of the Oster brand didn’t list what its 12 functions were, so I couldn’t use those to decide. I didn’t see the list until I opened the box at home and read the instruction manual.

We’ve considered getting a bread machine for some time. With the summer heat, it’s really unpleasant to be kneading dough during the day, then the baking heats up the house even more, so my daughter would stay up all night, baking bread. All of us are also broken, one way or another, and it’s been getting increasingly painful to knead dough. So we’ve been buying most of our bread. With this, we can put everything in the machine and have fresh baked bread by morning, without wrecking anyone’s back or knees, and without heating the house up. Plus, if we want, we can set it to just make the dough during the night, then take it out and bake it in the oven in the morning. A friend of mine does that and says it really improves the taste and texture that way.

The only thing we’ll have to be careful of is, where to set it up and plug it in. As it is now, we can’t run the AC and the kettle at the same time, without tripping a breaker! The kettle is on a power bar, but the AC has to be plugged directly into the outlet.

That’s one way to find out that particular outlet is on the same breaker as the dining room outlets – plus the living room ceiling light and the kitchen’s range hood!

Hopefully, we’ll be able to get it set up and bake our first loaf of bread tonight. 😊

The Re-Farmer

A little green friend, and painting progress

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We’re supposed to get rain tomorrow morning, but I’m not counting on the forecast. The garden needed watering. So, while I had a sprinkler going in the main garden, I took off the diverter on the full rain barrel in preparation to water the south garden beds.

Look what I found hiding under the down spout!

I just love these tree frogs! They’re so adorable!

Between the smoke and the heat, I decided to work on a semi-indoor job today. The inner sun room door is not meant to be exposed to the elements the way it is, when we have both doors wide open as we do for most of the summer. Since we’ve got outdoor paint left over from doing the stump bench and table, I decided to use it on the door.

Here is the progress so far.

I’ve got inside and outside shots starting after I’d scrubbed the door down and removed the loose bits of veneer, then after using masking tape on it. I made sure to cover the hinge plated, door knob roses and the latch.

One of the things I noticed as we cleaned and cleared stuff shortly after we moved here is that any doors that got painted, no one taped off anything. Which is almost painful to see, when the antique door knob/skeleton key plates, and even the knobs themselves, were painted over. Unlike the door I’m painting now, which is a modern, hollow core door, these are solid wood doors, too. I’d love to strip the paint off and maybe stain or varnish them, but that’s a project for well into the future!

I got the first coat of paint on, and I figure this is going to need at least three coats. We might end up finishing off the gallon of paint on this! It would have been nice to use the same blue as the outer door, but we use what we’ve got. That outer door isn’t going to last too much longer, anyhow. Like the one it replaced, it’s already starting to come apart in places.

Depending on the weather, I hope to get another coat done tomorrow. I’ll be heading out tomorrow morning on some errands, then the next day I’ll be taking my mother to her medical appointment. My younger daughter is feeling better now – she was actually able to eat! – so maybe she’ll be up to doing a coat or two while I’m gone, and if it doesn’t rain. We shall see. With the first coat on, at least the door won’t be getting any worse while waiting for more coats!

The Re-Farmer

Tiny harvest, and a bit o’ nip

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I didn’t head outside to do my morning rounds until after TTT got her morning medications. Somehow, I managed to not look out a window until then, so it was quite a surprise to see how hazy everything was. There’s smoke everywhere. I’ve just checked the live fire maps, and all the fires are well to the north of us. Air quality warnings say the smoke is coming from the territories and northern areas of the prairie provinces. Looking at the live feed on the security camera as I write this, I can see the smoke in the trees of the old hay yard, and my younger brother’s field across the road just sort of disappears.

I didn’t do much of of harvest this morning. I didn’t have a container, so I didn’t try to pick beans. I might come back this afternoon, but will likely leave it to tomorrow.

While pruning the Roma tomatoes, I knocked three off their vines, and found a fourth one already on the ground. I’d put them in my pocket as I found them and kept working and, unfortunately, squished one while bending over! So that went into the old compost pile. There was only one zucchini ready to harvest, and I grabbed the last two of the Sweet Chocolate peppers that had matured the earliest. My daughters had picked the third one a couple of days ago. I can certainly see why they are called “chocolate” peppers!

It feels strange to be half way through August and be harvesting so little. The peas are still having their second production, but there’s only enough that I pick a few pods and eat them while doing my morning rounds. We have yet to have a good year for peas. I think it’s time to harvest the potatoes in the old kitchen garden. They’ve almost completely died back. The purple potatoes in the grow bags are still lush and green, though.

The Roma tomatoes are ripening steadily. I could have picked more, but I want to leave them to ripen on the vines longer. The Indigo Blue and Black Beauties are still rock hard. I suppose I could be harvesting carrots and turnips, but I want to leave most of them to harvest for the winter, not for casual summer eating. With our garden turning out to be so much smaller than planned, there just isn’t much to harvest on a regular basis.

Wow. In the time it took me to write that, I can see on the security camera that the smoke has gotten even denser!

In other things, TTT is doing incredibly well after her surgery. The vet clinic called yesterday to follow up on her, and we made an appointment for her to get her staples removed. This will be just with a tech, not a vet, unless we see some sort of problem that needs to be checked.

We did have a surprise last night.

She actually nursed Tin Whistle for a while! Until now, she’s shown no interest in nursing, nor have the kittens shown an interest in her. Considering that one time, when we let Cheddar in, the kittens tried to find nip on him, I am slightly surprised. They are very close to weaning, though. In fact, Decimus has taken to batting them away when she’s done with them. She comes in just long enough to nurse for a minute or two, and that’s it. She wants out again, and spends almost no time with them at all now!

TTT, on the other hand, it quite okay with them. I’ve seen them grooming each other and now, she actually got nurse. I don’t know that she’s producing milk anymore. While she was rolling around, we could see only two active nips – possibly three. I know I saw her nursing 6 kittens one time. Did she have losses that we never saw? I know her kittens are hanging around the house now, but we’ve got other little ones from other litters, and all the moms nurse all the kittens, so we just can’t tell which kittens belong to which mother!

As for TTT and the inside kittens, so far, there have been no other attempts to nurse, but we’ll see.

There is one major downside with TTT being in my bedroom/office isolation ward.

She hasn’t figured out the litter boxes yet.

With the kittens, I had to put puppy pads under my desk, but it does seem we’ve been able to train them to stop going there. I’m not finding little puddles or tiny turds anymore.

No. Now I’m finding big, adult sized puddles and turds.

At least the puppy pads make it easier to clean up. It’s obviously TTT. Last night, I even caught her peeing on my pillow, and we had to strip the bed and do laundry. I had grabbed her and dropped her into a litter box, but she was so startled, she just ran off. With so many litter boxes to choose from, you’d think she’d figure it out, but nope. She wants the puppy pads! She waits until I’m out of the room, since it means I’m no longer at my desk, so I come back to find the results, and she’s back to napping somewhere. Frustrating!

Another, different sort of frustrating, is in sympathy with my younger daughter. She got sick yesterday evening, and is still stick now. So far, she doesn’t feel bad enough to go to a hospital. She’s trying to think what she might have eaten that could have done it to her, but she didn’t eat anything different than the rest of us, and no one else is sick. During the night, she tried to eat a piece of bread, and that didn’t stay down. She’s so hungry, but doesn’t dare eat. At least she’s feeling a bit better, but that’s not saying much right now.

Hopefully, whatever it is, will pass quickly and completely!

As for me, I’m going to see if I can escape my room, without any kittens escaping, and try and get something useful done today!

The Re-Farmer

This and that

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I seem to still be in recovery mode today, even after taking yesterday as a day of rest. I tend to forget just how draining it can be after spending time with my mother, even when she’s having one of her better days!

It’s also working out to be a hotter day. We’ve got a high of 26C/79F for today and tomorrow and, depending on what app I’m looking at, we’ll be hitting either 29C/84 or 31C/88F by the end of the week.

I did get at least one thing accomplished – finally! I cut away the web of roots and got the water pipe out from where I’d tried patching it, to the tap.

It took more digging and cutting to find the bottom of the tap and cut it free!

The only thing holding it upright was the web of roots, and that length of conduit pipe.

The short sections of rigid pipe were filled with dirt and roots. A couple of them had to be blasted with water before I could get them off the water pipe.

I did find where water can been coming out, when I did the patches and tested the tap. Quite a split in the pipe!

How the ground pipe was joined to the tap pipe was not what I expected. I thought there might be some sort of threaded connector. The metal pipe is jammed into the water pipe – and it is still very water tight, and very secure! I’ll probably have to cut it off, if I bother to at all.

I would like to use the original tap again. Even parts of the original metal pipe, too, if I can. However, my intended replacement for all this is to use an ordinary, heavy duty garden hose that can be easily removed, as needed. The dirt and roots in the short sections of pipe reinforce my plan to have a long pipe, from house to tap, to protect the hose.

For now, however, I will not remove the rest of the pipe, to the house. There are going to be much larger roots to cut through, plus it runs through a higher traffic area that gets regularly mowed, so I don’t want to dig a trench until I’m ready to put in the new system. I’m very interested in seeing how that hose end that comes out of the ground is attached to the water pipe!

So, for this project I need to get a long enough heavy duty hose, enough pipe, with drainage holes, to fit together and reach from house to tap, angled fittings for the ends that will get a removeable seal around the hose to prevent water, dirt or critters from getting in, and appropriate pipes and fittings to attach the hose to the tap assembly. For the tap itself, I want to build a box for the vertical pipe with the tap mounted on the garden side. I liked the original post’s little roof over the tap and will probably expand on that, to double as a shelf or something. The box will have a door at the back to access the hose and pipes, with room enough to store a few things, like the cord that will be used to pull the hose through the underground pipes, should it ever need to be removed, repaired or replaced.

Once this is installed and complete, I plan to make a vegetable washing station under the tap, using salvaged materials I’ve found around the property.

Hopefully, by the time it’s done, it’ll be good enough to last another 50 years or so.

After I finished up with the tap and hose set up, I headed towards the house and checked out the old kitchen garden. I was finally able to get a photo of one of the developing luffa.

I’ve been able to spot three of these. Hopefully, they have been pollinated and will develop into mature luffa gourds before we get frost. These are so high up, there’s no possibility of hand pollinating!

Before heading back to the house, I had an adorable surprise.

Tiny, familiar kittens.

Octomom had brought them to the house!

I only saw 4 of them, including this one.

They still can’t move very fast, so I was able to catch this one and hold it for a little while. This one is completely black. I saw the other black one, and it appears to have a white patch on its chest. I also saw the brown and the grey tabbies. Where the other 4 are, I could not see. Eventually, Octomom came around for them, but only two followed her across the yard. The rest were still hiding under the storage house.

While I was outside, I started to get some messages from the Cat Lady. She was at the vet with the kittens, and the prognosis is not good. They would have died within the week, she was told. As it is, they have a cat virus (calci), herpes, low glucose, low oxygen, pneumonia, infected ears and sores in their throats. The kittens have been at the vet all day, and the bill is getting high. I feel so bad about this. We were only going to pass on the one kitten, so now it’s double the expense for her, and we have no way to help out.

Priority is going to be spaying and neutering, because a lot of this is exacerbated by the sheer number of kittens.

Oh, wow!! Something just happened while I was writing this!

Two Toes is letting Tin Whistle nurse!

I had been expecting the kittens to at least try to nurse on her, since Decimus leaves the room once she’s done with nursing, and batting them away when they want to nurse more. They had not been trying, though, nor did Two Toes, until just moments ago!

Two Toes is doing really well. She seems quite happy, loves head pets, and gave me kisses today!

Whatever fight she was in that left her with a broken leg, the fur on her face and head is full of scabs that are healing well.

The only down side is poor Snarly Marlee! She does NOT like the kittens. The girls try to bring her into the living room for a while, so she can get a break, while they are there.

Hopefully, it won’t be for much longer. It would be fantastic if we could adopt them all out!

The Re-Farmer

A survivor!

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One of the things I did in the garden last night was go through the squash patch and cut away any dead or dying leaves, dropping them for mulch.

Which is when I found a survivor!

The slugs were especially bad around the yellow zucchini. There were two plants in the mount, and one of them was completely destroyed.

Or so I thought!

Not only did it survive, but this morning, it was blooming!

It’s so spindly and has barely any leaves, but look at all those flower buds!

There is even at least one female flower in there.

Talk about resilient!

The Re-Farmer

Morning harvest

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I’ve been doing so much running around in the last while, I am so glad to finally have a day when I can stay home! I’m going to be doing more running around throughout the rest of the month (our gas budget for the car is already blown away!), so I’m going to take full advantage of this day of rest. In fact, I’ll probably go for a nap right after I publish this!

After medicating our tripod Houdini, I headed out to do my morning rounds and see what was ready to harvest.

There was a surprising amount of bush beans to pick, considering they got harvested yesterday, too. That zucchini grew quite a lot, overnight! I grabbed a couple of larger turnips, and a few Spoon tomatoes. I had to resist picking just-ripe Romas this morning. We will be harvesting substantial amounts of them, soon!

I also picked all the shallots that were at the end of the wattle weave bed, next to the Sweet Chocolate peppers. The kittens have been rolling around on them, so the stems were broken. They won’t get any bigger after that. The stems were so badly damaged, they weren’t even salvageable for the greens!

I’m quite happy with what I’m seeing in the grape vines.

All the clusters are getting very red, and a few are an almost-ripe deep purple.

I think we’ll be making jelly with these when they’re done. 😊

For now, it’s time to peel some kittens off my knees, back and shoulders, and see if I can get a nap in.

😄

The Re-Farmer