Author: Re-Farmer

Planned and unplanned outings, and sooo many kittens!

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The morning started out as usual, with the feeding of the yard cats and my morning rounds.

Oddly, I seem to be seeing fewer kittens? I think? Meaning the littles that have been showing up in the past couple of weeks. They tend to hide so quickly, I’m not sure, but it just feels like there are fewer of them. The older kittens are still around, but I just can’t get a handle on how many littles there are.

Even though I’d picked up another 9kg back of kibble for the outside cats recently, we were already running out. I was already scheduled to pick up my mother’s bubble packs and do her grocery shopping today, so I decided I would keep going from her place and hit the Walmart. Plus, my husband is having issues with his cracked tooth that won’t be worked on until the middle of next month. So I wanted to pick up foods that were safer for him to eat.

My younger daughter was able to come along with me, which was nice.

My brother, SIL and their older grandson were staying in their trailer this weekend and were going to be heading back to the city soon after I needed to head out, so we made a quick hello and goodbye visit. My great-nephew will be heading home next weekend, before school starts, so I wanted to make sure we got our hugs in!

My daughter and I got to my mother’s town early enough that the pharmacy wasn’t open yet – but the gas station with the best fried chicken and wedges in town had their chicken ready – so we picked up a meal for my mother boxed up separately, then got some for ourselves to eat in the truck. The truck’s seats are more comfortable than the chairs and tables they have in the station. 😄

We still got to the pharmacy just minutes after it opened. My mother’s bubble packs were ready, and most of it was covered this time, so I had very little to pay for it this time. I’m glad I made sure to pick them up today. When I put them in my mother’s lock box, I checked what was there. She had only enough for this evening, plus tomorrow morning. The pharmacy’s records show she should have had enough to last until Wednesday. However, with so many messed up times with her meds, and her abusive behaviour towards the home care aids for not using the partial packs of meds because they were the wrong days, etc., I have taken a few old partial packs back to the pharmacy. They were required to dispose of the meds, which I haven’t mentioned to my mother, or she’d blow a gasket, but it was that or have her constantly harassing the care aids about them. I’ll have to call the pharmacy tomorrow and talk to them about that. They do the bubble packs on the weekends, and that’s cutting it really close for my mother at this point. Better to have her meds prepared earlier. Normally, she would have had them delivered, but that leaves her medications outside the lock box, and she’s already tried hiding a week’s worth of meds away because she doesn’t trust the home care aids.

When we got to my mother’s, it was still not much past noon. Mass was still going on in the church across the street, but I was able to find parking. I wasn’t sure if my mother would have had the energy to make it to church or not, but thought it was unlikely.

I was right. My mother was home and praying the rosary, with her table all set up in preparation for when someone from the church would come by with communion for her. The interruption of us coming when we did messed her up a bit. Which I totally get. When I’m right into something and get interrupted, the mental shift can actually be physically painful.

My brother had given me a new drip pan specifically for my mother’s model of stove, to replace one she has that is completely rusted out for some reason, so I popped that in for her while she got out her shopping list. It was really short this time! We went over it and I asked a few questions, but she said she was well supplied with everything I remembered to ask about.

She was happy to see my daughter, though, and didn’t make any of her usual rude comments, which was nice.

She told us to take our time because she didn’t want to be interrupted when the guy came with communion, but her list was so short, we were back just as church was letting out. My mother was once again thrown by us coming in when we did. I told her that people were just starting to leave church, so we were quick about putting everything away, and making sure her mild carton was opened for her (the local grocery store no longer has 2L milk in plastic jugs, just cartons, and with my mother’s hands, it’s a real struggle to open a carton). My mother was a bit upset about the rush. She had been expecting me to come later, and had been looking forward to being able to “talk for hours and hours”… ??? Especially since my daughter was with me. So she said, no more Sundays for grocery shopping! Which is fine, but I was there today, on a Sunday, so that she could get her medications before running out!

We were in and out quickly, though, and soon on the road to the Walmart. I didn’t take a photo, but it totaled almost $200. Ouch! We got two 9kg bags of kibble, and a package of XXL (30″x30″) puppy pads, plus some on sale TP. Peanut butter, bananas and bread for my husband at times when no one is available to cook for him, and hot dog wieners/hoagies for times when there is someone to cook for him. He can’t chew “real” meat right now, no matter how tender! We got some water flavour packages for him as well. We remembered to grab a couple of containers of popcorn seasoning, and found a charging cable for my daughter’s older phone with a micro-USB port. After that, it was some cheese mini-croissants to snack on for the ride home, and some $1 chocolate bars for each of us as a treat.

I keep thinking I’m forgetting something, but nope. That list is all it took, to cost almost $200.

Once we got home, it was late enough that, while my daughter put away everything else, I refilled the kibble bin and did the evening cat feeding.

Which brings me to the cuteness!

I’ll actually start with a couple of pictures I got, yesterday.

First, there was this cuddle puddle!

Can you spot the Little in there? One of them has figured out how to climb up to the platform and discovered the cat beds up there. Here, it’s being snuggled by Eyelet on the left, and The Grink on the right.

Can you believe The Grink is about 2 years old? He’s barely bigger than Eyelet!

Then there were this two.

That black kitten was absolutely snuzzling its face into the tabby. This cat bed is in the back of the water bowl shelter.

When opening the door into the sun room to do this morning’s feeding, I found a while pile of kittens – large and small! – waiting right under the threshold, making it very difficult to step through! I need to be careful, as Sir Robin in particular REALLY wants to be inside. He managed to sneak into the house while my older daughter and I were bringing the cured garlic in, after covering the eggplant for the night, and my daughter found him in the kitchen!

Most of the kittens scatter as I step through, but one kitten didn’t. It stayed loafed and moved its head around, as if confused.

It turned out its eyes were stuck shut, so it had no idea what was going on around it!

I finished putting the food out but, when I got back to the sun room, I couldn’t see the stuck eyed kitten. I finished my rounds and tried looking again before heading inside. That’s when I spotted a little white kitten bum through the opening of the new cat cave.

It’s a bit difficult to get close, since it’s in a shelf, and I need to step around food trays and the little plant stand that’s there for the cats to use to get to the platform. I was able to reach in and felt a couple of kittens in there, but managed to get the white butted kitten. Once I got it out, I could confirm it was the one with the stuck eyes. It wasn’t happy, but I was able to get it to the bathroom and into the bathtub to chill a bit, while I ran the hot water in the sink while getting something to wipe its eyes with.

The kitten wasn’t happy about being picked up again, but stopped fighting me once I started washing its eyes. Once both eyes were cleared, it just started up at me for a while. This kitten is mostly white with grey “eyebrows”, like Button, Eyelet and Grommet – but where Button and Eyelet have blue eyes, and Grommet has yellowish eyes, this one has really dark eyes!

Once done, I took it back to the sun room and tucked it back into the cat cave. Then I used my phone’s camera to take a picture and see who else was in there.

Wow!

There were AT LEAST six kittens in there! Including another one that could have used an eye wash. It’s amazing I was able to grab the right kitten right from the start!

That little tabby with white in the foreground… he always looks so furious! 😄

As we were getting ready to head out, I went to open the gate first and spotted this adorableness, under the truck.

This is the garage kitten that will sometimes let me pet him and pick him up.

Still no such progress with his sibling (I’m about 98% sure the smokey one is a female).

Yes, we ALWAYS check the truck before starting it and driving.

After we got back from errands and the evening feeding was done, I did my evening rounds. As I was heading in, I spotted Lady Hypotenose on top of the cat cage… and what was that not far from her?

Oh! Hello!

My goodness, these two have such thick, thick black eyeliner!

Then there was the platform kitten, no longer in a cuddle puddle. I just had to get a picture.

It has claimed that bed for its own!

Last of all, I’ve got two pictures of this adorableness. The second one was taken yesterday.

We already have a cat we call Ink, because she looks like she got into a pot of ink with her mouth and paws. This one also looks like it got into some ink.

We’re debating whether to call it Spot or Blot.

What do you think?

I did try to do a head count of the littles this morning, and I think I counted twelve but, as I mentioned earlier, I’m pretty sure some are “missing”. Especially the ones that showed up in the junk pile by the chain link fence, instead of the sun room or cat shelters by the house. It could be that they’ve been moved on by their mothers, or they simply didn’t happen to be out while I was putting the food out.

The next few weeks will be ones to keep an eye on them. This is the stage where, if they are going to get hit with the local variant of herpes, now will be it. That’s the ones with the leaky eyes, and that’s what did in Kale and, I’m sure, Zipper. This year, though, not all the kittens got it. Poirot’s babies have had zero issues, nor have the outer yard kittens that started out coming to the shrine feeding station (they are now willing to go right into the sun room!). The garage kittens have shown no sign if it, either. It looks like some of the littles are resistant.

From what the Cat Lady told me, that would be because of the lysine we’ve been adding to their food for the past year or two. For the cats that are already struggling with the virus, I’m told it’s “lysine for life”, and if they stop getting the lysine, they can get really sick again. BUT, it benefits the next generation, and they can not need it at all. That’s what I seem to be seeing now, with the littles. In fact, at this point, it seems like more of them are resistant than not.

Still, if it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen over the next few weeks. Which means we might start finding losses.

Well, it is what it is, and there’s not much we can do about it, that we aren’t already doing.

The Re-Farmer

[addendum: I was curious as to what WP’s AI image generator would come up with based on the contents of this post.

This is what I got.

What’s with the two headed kittens????]

Our 2025 Garden: Morning harvest, and first zucchini!

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Another tiny harvest this morning, and we finally have a zucchini!

This is not actually our first zucchini, but it is the first one that made it to a size that could be harvested. The first zucchini I spotted withered away immediately, which means it wasn’t pollinated. I hand pollinated the one beside it and thought it was going to make it. When I saw the blossom end starting to turn yellow when it was just a couple of inches long, I knew it wasn’t going to last much longer. So I picked it, bit off the ends, and ate the middle, right in the garden. It was a two bite zucchini! 😄 This one was on a completely different plant; the only other one that’s been producing female flowers.

This morning has probably the most Royal Burgundy beans I’ve picked at once. There were no yellow bush beans to pick at all. What a difference from the first year we grew bush beans! The Royal Burgundy had the fewest seeds in the packet, but they were the most prolific of the three varieties we got in the pack we bought. That year was actually the most prolific of all, and I was finding bags of frozen beans in the freezer, two years later!

Hopefully, next year will be a better growing year. Personally, I think we’re looking at a shorter fall and longer winter, but I hope I’m wrong. I’m looking at the Old Farmer’s Almanac forecast for the prairies, and this is what they had to say about the upcoming fall.

The Prairies

The Prairie provinces can expect a warmer and wetter-than-normal autumn. September: Temperatures will average 12°C (1°C above normal), with around 45mm of precipitation—right on average. The first part of the month will bring isolated showers and a cool dip, but mid to late September will trend warmer with thunderstorms and lots of sunny, very warm days to close out the month. October: Temperatures rise even more to 8°C (2°C above normal), with 30mm of rain (5mm above average). Expect a warm, sunny start with light drizzle mid-month. Later, the west may see early flurries while the east has drizzle, before things warm up again near the end of October.

That would be nice, but I don’t think so. I still keep thinking about the garter snakes, already heading for their winter dens about a month early!

They don’t have a long range forecast for winter in Canada, yet.

The Farmer’s Almanac (not to be confused with the Old Farmer’s Almanac) does have a Canadian winter forecast. For the prairies, we’re told to expect this winter to be very cold with above average snowfall, whiteouts and blizzards. As usual, January and February are expected to be the worst hit.

*sigh*

Well, at least the snow will be a good insulator for anything I plant in the fall!

For now, I’ll just enjoy what we have. Which, today, has brought more off and on rain that wasn’t in yesterday’s forecast, and quite a lot of wind.

Eventually, I’ll be able to finish mowing that last overgrown section of the old garden area!!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: August garden tour video

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I’ve been trying to take recordings on the same day every month – usually the 21st, as that’s usually the first day of spring. I did take recordings yesterday, but I waited too long and it was getting too dark, so some of the videos really sucked.

So I tried again this morning, and here we are! There has actually been a decent amount of growth since last month. Enjoy!

After doing my morning rounds, I made a small shopping trip to the nearer city – we were running lot on kibble again, so it was a good time to pick up a few other things we would run out of before our first stock up shopping trip next week. By the time I got home, we were getting hit with intermittent rain throughout the afternoon. Even a brief downpour that had me waiting things out in the garage until it was done!

In checking the basement, though, it really show how dry things have been. In the summer, the old basement, which has no weeping tile, can get very wet, and it’s not unusual to have pooling water that I sweep into the floor drain. Even the new basement has a corner that gets quite wet. The weeping tile drains past the floor drain into the septic tank, and we sometimes see flowing water in the floor drain from under the new basement. We keep blower fans and pedestal fans going to dry and keep things dry, and the sump pump gets quite a work out.

This summer, we have had some damp areas, but mostly it’s been in the corner where the well pump is, and that is from condensation. We haven’t been running the dehumidifier as, when I did get it going, it started making some rather unfortunate noises. It is very old, so we would be better off replacing it.

I checked the basements today, and even that corner is almost completely dry, with just one fan running. The floor drain is barely damp, so there’s pretty much nothing draining from the weeping tile under the new basement. This tells me that, while it’s been raining enough that I haven’t had to water the garden lately, the water table is still really low, and the ground is still really dry, in spite of the wonderful rain we’ve been having.

We’re not expecting rain here again for quite some time. What we are expecting, on Sunday night (two nights from now), is for the overnight temperatures to drop to 5C/41F. That wasn’t supposed to happen until the first week of September. Which means I want to at least cover the peppers and eggplant, and hopefully the summer squash, too. It’s supposed to warm up again, with very pleasant overnight temperatures, but all it takes is one cold night to kill the more tender plants.

Of course, the forecasts change so often, it might not be an issue – or it might get even colder than predicted.

We’ll just have to wait and see, I guess!

The Re-Farmer

Finally mulched the new food forest additions

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It was getting ridiculously hot and muggy, but I wanted to finally get a good mulch around the newest food forest additions. I had just gone around them with the weed trimmer and, with the rain we’ve been having, it would grow back fast if it didn’t get covered.

Of course, I forgot to take a “before” picture, before I started! 😄

In the first to photos above, I had just laid out the first wheelbarrow load of wood chips. Before that, I moved out the hose I had set up in the rain barrel, taken away pieces of wood from when we had our pea and bean trellises out there that were weighing down the cardboard, and removed the leaky rain barrel and my watering can. I left the cages and the metal spinner.

The plum tree already had the largest area mulched with grass clippings, so I added the wood chips only up to the wire mesh. With everything else, I mulched closer in, but still made sure to leave a “donut hole” around the plants themselves. There was also a pile of grass clippings set aside when the area was prepped for planting, so I went ahead and added that in, too. With that added in, it took 4 1/2 wheel barrow loads to mulch the area, nice and thick.

After I got the two “after” pictures, I set the rain barrel back between the gooseberry and apple, making sure the cracked side was facing the middle. One of the sticks I’d removed earlier had been under the opposite side of the barrel to tilt it slightly towards the cracks, and that was returned as well.

By the time I was done, I was dripping with sweat, and we hadn’t even reached out high of the day, so headed back inside once this was done. I still want to head out to take garden tour video, but not quite yet!

I did get some video, though. I had gone back to the paths I’d worked on earlier today, and wow, those ants work fast!

This was just one small section in the video. You can even see one ant going by, carrying an egg. Already I can see openings to tunnels, all over the place! Those buggers work fast!

Crud. I’m going to need to get ant traps to get rid of them, since they’ll cause lots of damage here, and these ants are biters. I hate having to kill them, though.

While we currently have sunshine, heat and humidity where we are, I’m happy to say that there is a large system of rain passing over the north of our province, where most of the wildfires as still burning. There’s a possibility of up to about 100mm (just under four inches) of rain by tomorrow!

I think, over the next few days, I’m going to have to start setting up supports around some of our beds. Looking at the long range forecast into September, we might actually drop to potential frost temperatures in the first week. Even in the next week ahead, we have at least one night where we are expected to drop below 10C/50F. The eggplant seem the most intolerant of cold, but we’ve finally got some female flowers on the winter squash showing up! If we can just stay above 10C/59F for another month, we might actually have something to harvest.

Ah, well. Whatever happens, we’ll just have to deal with it!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: baby baked potatoes, and garden path progress

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While doing my rounds today, I noticed some really huge squash and pumpkin flowers were open. There was even one among the zucchini that I made sure to hand pollinate, since no male flowers were open.

In checking the winter squash, though, I had my first find of potential Baked Potato squash. Two little female flowers were finally forming.

Once those blossoms open, I will be sure to hand pollinate them, just to be on the safe side.

Not that it’s likely we’ll get anything from them. We’re well into the second half of August right now. These are shorter season varieties, but even if these female flowers get properly pollinated and start to grow, it’s unlikely we have enough season left for full maturity.

Once I was done my rounds, I grabbed the wheelbarrow and started bringing wood chips over to cover some garden paths. I forgot to get a “before” picture of the first one I started on, so I instead have a “half way done” picture.

That first picture is after three wheelbarrow loads. Some of the wood chips were also spread around the north ends of the two beds.

The second picture shows that path finished, including the ends of the two beds, with a total of five wheelbarrow loads. I especially wanted to make sure there was a thick, stamped down layer right up against the walls of the raised beds.

The only down side is that, while loading the wheelbarrow from the wood chip pile, I broke up an ant hill. Which means that, along with the wood chips, I also brought over a whole bunch of red ants and their eggs.

I’ll need to pick up some ant traps soon.

Once this was done, I headed inside for breakfast. By the time I came out again, it was just starting to almost, kinda, sorta rain. More of a misting than a rain. I was already soaked with sweat from the humidity, so I figured I may as well keep at it.

For the second path, I remembered to get a proper “before” picture.

For this one, I tried to load the wheelbarrow as much as I could, without losing woodchips along the way. It still took five loads, but I had enough to add to the ends, as well as more to put along the sides of the flower bed. That bed will get walls eventually, and the wood chips are where the walls would go, but that’s okay. As it is now, if I’m not careful while watering, the soil mound the flowers are planted in starts to erode, and the wood chips will reduce that.

The high raised bed already had its own ant colony in one corner, so I just added more ants… 🫤

Definitely need to get ant traps.

Here is how it looked from the north end.

Those bricks at the end of the flower bed were added because the cats were digging there to use the soil as a littler box.

The Cosmos are getting nice and tall, and looking really healthy! Hopefully, they aren’t shading out the memorial asters too much.

I did finally remove the hoops that were still over that section. I’d left them after removing the netting simply because they weren’t in the way of anything, and it was as good a place to store them as any.

Eventually, this end will have a more developed 4′ wide path, but that will happen after we get rid of those killer trees and build more beds to reclaim the space they’ve taken over. For now, I just need a narrower mulched path to keep the weeds down.

Once this was done, it had gone from misting to raining, so it was time to stop. This area won’t get more wood chips for a while, as I’m adding that after the raised beds on either side of a path are permanently framed with logs.

I did use up a decent chunk of the wood chip pile!

Not only was there a big ant nest in it, but poplar roots were working their way through it, too. It’s been there a few years, now. Where I’m standing to take the picture is how far it extended when the tree company we hired to get rid of the big branch pile for us dumped it there. This area is meant to be kept open, wide enough to drive through, if needed, so it’ll be good to use up that pile. We’ll need to go over with with the landscape rake when we’ve cleared as much as we can, just so we can mow over it without the lawnmower blades doing much crunching and munching, and potentially getting damaged.

The next areas I’ll be adding wood chips to are around the raised beds in the east yard, and around the newest food forest additions.

Which I might actually get some progress on, as it seems to have stopped raining. We’re getting into the hottest part of the day, though, so I might work on another project, instead.

I’m so enjoying finally getting some stuff done out there!

The Re-Farmer

Setting a “trap”, and itty bitty kitties

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While heading out to the garden again after breakfast, I noticed that the catio was unoccupied.

The perfect time to set my “trap”!

The plan is to set it up behind the garage to lure the garage kittens out. They run around the garage, but they won’t come to the house. Even if I catch the white and grey and take him to the sun room, he’s soon back in the garage.

What I’m hoping is that they will accept the catio as a place to eat and sleep. Then, over time, we’ll move it closer and closer to the house. If it really comes down to it, we could potentially close the door with them inside. That would be only once we get them socialized enough to get spayed/neutered.

Of course, it took more work than expected.

First up, I got the big food bowl off the ground inside and set it on one of the shelves to come along. It was still wrapped around with plastic that I put on for the winter and ended up leaving. I think later on, we’ll put clear plastic around the upper half of the catio to protect from the elements, but leave the bottom half open for air circulation. It’s very much a greenhouse as it is now!

Anyhow.

I had put rope handles at each corner to use to move the catio, and those were under the plastic, so I raised the plastic on one end so I could access them. There were a couple of bricks used to make sure the door didn’t accidentally close them in, and those got set on the roof to come for the ride (there are other bricks on the roof as weights against high winds). Last of all, I had a 2×2 piece of lumber under the frame at the door, so that water would drain off the roof to the other side. That got set in one of the cat shelves inside to come for a ride, too.

Then I started to try and drag it along.

The problem is, I put the rope handles too high. Because of how far apart they are, it can’t just be lifted and dragged. It would need to be “walked” across the yard. That risked breaking the frame. So I grabbed some twine and made new rope handles, lower down, threaded through short lengths cut from an old garden hose that can’t be used anymore. That would keep the twine from cutting into the hands.

That worked better, in that I could lift the end and drag it evenly, instead of “walking” it across. Unfortunately, they were still pretty far apart, making it difficult for short little me with my short little arms to pull it.

I was going to message my daughters to see if one of them could come and help me when I saw one of them had already messaged me. My mother’s pharmacy had called and wanted to talk to me about her bubble pack refills.

So I went in to take care of that and asked my daughters if they could finish moving the catio while I was on the phone. I didn’t realized that my older daughter had messaged me only because she had gotten up to use the washroom and happened to hear the phone ring. By the time I saw the message and came in, she was back in bed for the day.

Which meant my younger daughter moved it on her own!

That would not have been easy. She’s even shorter than I am! Not my much, but still…

Meanwhile, I made the call, then called my mother, then updated my siblings in our group chat. I’ll be going to pick up my mother’s bubble packs on Sunday, and will do her grocery shopping as well.

When I was done, I headed out to see where my daughter set up the catio – I’d only said it was going behind the garage.

It was already occupied.

Just by Pinky. I didn’t see any of her kittens until some time later, and even then, it was just the smokey one.

Pinky was so settled on that cat bed that when I lifted the front to put the 2×2 under it, she didn’t move! I dropped the plastic back down and set the bricks up in the door so make sure it wouldn’t close all the way, then tied it off so it wouldn’t blow around in the wind, either.

I also spent quite a bit of time petting Pinky on that cat bed. She was very, very content in there!

I set the food bowl – an old heated water bowl that burned out – just inside the doorway. Later on, I’ll find something to use as a water bowl for in there, too.

So, starting this evening, I will no longer be leaving food in the garage for the kittens. It will be in the catio, only.

I think it might be a good idea to add wheels to this. Not directly under, as that would leave a gap a cat could get out through. I’m thinking more like a pair of wheels on one side, and handles on the other, so it can be moved around like a wheelbarrow. Or a chicken tractor. We can certainly grag it around as it is now, but that puts a lot of strain on the frame and it’s more likely to break.

That done, I went back towards the house and noticed Slick under the canopy tent again. I had to use the zoom on my phone’s camera to see whether she was nursing or not. Once I was sure there were no kittens for me to scare away, I continued on my way.

Which is when I saw some ears in the window of the isolation shelter.

Look what I found!

I see other littles in the isolation shelter, but these ones have practically moved right in.

The inside of the front window really needs a cleaning. 😄

I didn’t get any pictures while doing the morning feeding, though I did try to get a head count of the adults. I think I counted 22. I didn’t even try to count the kittens. They move too fast!

Except one.

I’ve got a little bowl set under the ramp to the water bowl shelter, which is in front of the chimney flue they use to hide in. As soon as I come near, they start dashing into the flu to get under the cat house.

One of the, however, didn’t run away.

So I pet it.

It still didn’t run away.

So I picked it up.

Which is when I saw that its eyes were stuck shut!

Thankfully, it didn’t try to hiss or spit or bite, and I was able to wash its eyes until they could open again. Then it just looked up at me, seeming rather stunned!

Hopefully, this will be the start of socialization.

We’ve got our work cut out for us, to get these guys at least friendly enough to get them to a vet, once they’re big enough! The vet wants them to weigh at least two pounds for spays.

[obligatory addendum: if you wish to donate towards spays and neuters, there is a ko-fi donation button at the top right of the page. Every little bit helps, and is much appreciated.]

Enjoying kittens was just a bonus for the morning. I got lots done, and will be writing about that in other posts. This evening, I plan to take some footage for my monthly garden tour video, too. There will be quite a few changes on there, since last month!

The Re-Farmer

The other side, plus adorableness

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After my last post and how little seemed to have been done after all that mowing, when I headed out again this evening, I just had to get pictures from the other side.

In the first photo, you can actually see how little there is left to clear.

It’s also the densest section, so it’s going to take probably just as long to clear that section as it did to clear everything around it.

The fruit trees and bushes by the leaky rain barrel look so much better, now that it’s been weed trimmed and mowed around. Not that you can even see them in the photo! Over time, they will get a wood chip mulch around them, too.

The next picture is taken from the other end of the silver buffaloberry rows, and near the end of the crab apple tree row. That section by the crab apple trees was part of the super dense area, but it is also some of the roughest and uneven soil. When this section was plowed – badly – before we moved out here, there seemed to be some issue with turning the tractor in that corner. This was done by our vandal to “help” my parents. My sister is sure he was drunk when he did it. From the state of things, even after all these years, I think she’s right.

At this end, we will be planting more fruit trees on the north side, around where the newest ones are planted now. Along the east side we will probably be planting raspberry varieties that mature at different rates, so we can have raspberries for many months, along with other berry bushes and some varieties of nuts that grow on bushes, rather than trees. There are few nut trees that can grow where we are, and they can get very large, so those will get planted in the outer yard, as we acquire them.

Aside from feeling better about things after seeing just how little is left to clear in that corner, I got to enjoy some adorableness. My daughters took care feeding the yard cats while I was mowing, so they were all pretty calm.

While walking past the isolation shelter, I spotted a kitten looking back at me. Then another from the hammock.

Then more heads popped up!

Altogether, I saw three in the hammock, plus two by the water bowl.

I was considering moving the catio closer to the garage for the garage babies, but it was occupied, so I left it for now.

In the next image in the slideshow above, I managed to get a picture of the absolutely gorgeous little black and white kitten I’d been wondering about earlier, and whether it was a newcomer. I have concluded that is it not a new one; just one that I’m finally able to see well enough to identify it.

Must socialize the babies – and find them forever homes!!!

While I was outside, I could hear some thunder. Some areas of our province was getting tornado warnings, but where we are. Instead, the rain that was supposed to arrive in the wee hours of the morning was expected to hit this evening, instead. Then that changed again, and now we’re supposed to get rain closer to midnight, and it is supposed to keep raining for about four hours.

The garden will love that!

The Re-Farmer

Little by little…

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… it’s getting done.

I headed out this afternoon to continue working on cleaning up the main garden area. I started off by doing some weed trimming first, as I knew I wouldn’t have the energy to do it after mowing the overgrown area. I wanted to get around the log framed raised beds, as they will be getting wood chips added to their paths soon. I also trimmed around the newest food forest additions.

Our corded weed trimmer died on us earlier this year, so my brother dug his battery operated weed trimmer out of storage for me to use. Thankfully, he has many batteries! I drained two of them and was working on a third before I finished. Along with the main garden area, I made sure to trim around the east yard garden beds, as well as some stumps, rocks and roots, so that they where no longer hidden. Hitting those with a lawn mower is not fun!

The trimming done, my focus was the overgrown area, starting with opening up the higher traffic area towards the fruit trees, where I run a hose through to the old leaky rain barrel. This meant setting the mower as high as it could go for a first run.

Here is how it was yesterday afternoon, before any mowing started.

I took that one before starting to mow around where new trellis tunnel beds will be built, without trying for the overgrown area yet. I got an in progress photo last night, and then again today, when I had to stop.

In the first photo, you can see I cleared away the logs and solarization plastic. The cardboard was left for now. It will be laid over where the next trellis bed will be built and, if there is enough, over some of the paths before the wood chips are laid down.

The next photo is almost depressing. It really doesn’t look like much was done! That is partly because the remaining tall grass hides what was mowed around the sliver buffalo berry area. It really is a huge space, too.

The gas can is next to the stump that was under the pile of logs, where a diseased crab apple tree had died and was removed. There’s another off frame to the left, but it’s almost low enough to mow over.

I didn’t even need to refill the gas tank before I had to stop. It was simply too hot and humid, and I was starting to feel like I was about to pass out. Definitely time to get in out of the sun and hydrate!

Once that last section of tall grass, poplar saplings, alfalfa, clover, stink weed and various other things gets cleared with the push mower, it will need to be done again at a lower setting – but at that point, we could use the riding mower. Carefully. I don’t want to break my brother’s riding mower in there!

Over time, this area will get at least five more low raised beds that will be paired off with trellis tunnels, for a total of six, including the current one we’re already using. We might go with one more pair after that, but we may not need to. We won’t be going all the way in that direction with garden beds, though, as we will be planting more food forest items out there, and I want to have a wider lane between the two areas, in case we need to drive through with a vehicle.

In the other direction, the existing beds will be framed with logs, plus the area that used to be our squash patch, which is also overgrown and needs to be mowed, will be worked on. Instead of more 18′ beds, though, sections of it will be made into perennial gardens, like the asparagus bed we started this year. We might also make wider blocks for planting things like corn, potatoes or even wheat, instead of the long and narrow beds we’ve got going right now. The area we first grew what we thought was kulli corn but was actually Montana Morado has some really good soil, compared to everywhere else in that area, so I would really like to reclaim it again.

In the longer term, after we get rid of that killer row of elms and maples along the north side of our garden beds, we will probably make more raised beds, right on top of where the trees are now. Partly to make sure there is no chance that they will grow back, partly to reclaim more garden space. When I was a kid, where those trees are now was part of my mother’s garden, and they are taking up a LOT of square footage that used to grow food!

A lot of clean up will be required before we can build anything there. For now, we’ve been tossing a lot of the rocks we’ve been picking out of the garden beds into where the trees are. Some of them are large enough that we’ll likely use them to weigh down row covers or the like. With how many rocks we grow every spring, we could probably collect enough to make some gabion structures. Along with the rocks, there’s also lots of Virginian Creeper and Creeping Charlie, among other things, that will need to be dealt with, too.

All in good time.

Little by little, it’s getting done.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: getting bigger, some firsts in the harvest, and peeking!

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First, the cuteness. I got this picture last night.

The littles are happily discovering the perks of being close to the house. They’ve been sleeping on various cat beds all over the place, enjoying reliable access to food and water, and the creche mothers are taking good care of them. Some are still super shy, but even they are getting brave enough to go into the sun room.

I was on the late side getting out this morning. I had a rough night. What little lawn mowing a managed with the push more did more than remind me I hadn’t fully recovered from suddenly getting sick.

It reinjured me.

My left arm, that I injured in a fall more than a month ago, had been feeling fine for awhile. Well enough that I wondered just what we’d be talking about when I see my doctor at the end of the month, to go over the X-rays.

Last night, all the joints were hurting enough that I got my older daughter to come over and rub them down with Voltaren. Only after that could I finally get some sleep. By then it was around 3am.

My left hip has also increasingly an issue. Not so much with pain, but stability. The lack of it! It’s gotten so that I have to sit down to put on my pants, because I can’t stand on my left leg. When taking the two steps from the original part of the house to the addition, I can only step up on my right leg. If I try to step up using my left leg, my hip just gives out.

Something else to talk about when I see my doctor!

With that in mind, I got one of my daughters to help me in the garden at the end of my morning rounds.

When I first got into the old kitchen to start preparing the wet and dry cat food mixture I feed them in the mornings, I spotted one of the white and grey littles, right at the window! This window used to be an exterior window, before the sun room was added on, so the sill on the outside is angled down for any moisture to drain away from the window. It makes it a challenge, but the smaller cats and kittens are still able to get onto it and not slide right off. To see the littles up there – I think the one I saw traded off with a second one while I was filling the kibble bowl – is good progress. They have figured out where the food comes from, and are comfortable with that.

Now if only the garage kittens would come out! They are SO hungry by the time I arrive to feed them, because they don’t come to the house where there is more food, after their bowl is empty. I’m seriously considering moving the isolation shelter closer to the garage, and use it to slowly get them closer to the house. The problem with that it, the littles and the outside yard kittens are already using it regularly.

Maybe the catio would work, instead.

After the cats were fed, I continued my rounds and checking on the garden.

I’m quite happy with what’s happening in the trellis bed. The noodle beans are still stunted, but the sunflowers and pumpkins are looking great!

One pumpkin plant – the one with the pumpkin in a sling – is the biggest of the five, and opened up a couple of massive flowers this morning. There’s just male flowers, though. I’ve been seeing tiny female flowers start to form but, so far, they’ve all shriveled up and fallen off, long before they opened up. So it looks like we’ll get a single pumpkin this year.

In the second image of the slideshow above, you can see the tallest of the Hopi Black Dye sunflowers. it has almost reached the height of the top horizontal support for the temporary trellis netting, which is at least 6 1/2 feet from the ground, so about 6 feet from the inside of the bed.

I’m surprised by all those little tomatoes I found when doing a major weeding, some time ago, and transplanted. I’ve since found three more that got missed, but I won’t bother moving those. Some of the transplants are getting surprisingly bed. The largest one is hidden under the leaves of the biggest pumpkin plant! One even has blossoms on it. I suspect that some of them, at least, might be Spoon tomatoes.

Speaking of Spoon tomatoes…

My younger daughter came out to help me pick them. With the instability of my hip, I can only pick from one side, where I can lean against the log wall. My daughter can actually get right into the bed, standing on the mulch in between the melons (which are not really growing, even if some are blooming) and pick the tomatoes on that side of the plants.

This is our morning’s harvest.

Yes, those are grapes! My daughter found the ripest looking clusters. There are lots more, but they are still more on the green side. If my guess is correct, these are Valiant grapes and they should get much bigger, not be the same size as the Spoon tomatoes. Once we figure out a place to transplant them, hopefully they will do better. The vines themselves are doing great where they are, but the fruit is not what it should be.

This is the first time in a couple of years we’ve been able to harvest some grapes before the raccoons ate them all.

Under the colander is a selection of fresh herbs; two types of oregano, two types of thyme, sage, basil, lemon balm and even some dill weed from the self seeded dill that came up among the herbs. I also gathers some walking onion bulbils; we don’t want them to spread beyond where they are now, so the bulbils are for eating, not growing! There’s a small amount of bush beans, some Sub Arctic Plenty tomatoes and some Chocolate Cherry tomatoes.

At the bottom are some nasturtium seeds. My daughter was admiring the flower bed (the Cosmos are getting so tall!) and asked about the nasturtiums, which are winding down right now. While checking them out, we noticed some of the seeds had started to dry up and fall off the plants. Rather than leave them there to likely rot, we gathered them up. They are now in the cat free zone (the living room) where we are keeping gathered seeds and seed pods to stay cool and dry before they get stored away.

As for the rest of today, I’m not sure what I’ll manage to get done outside. I’ll give myself a chance to rest, but I most likely will just pain killer up and head out later and do as much as I can. We shall see.

The Re-Farmer

Okay, not recovered after all, and more kitties

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I did get some done.

My first priority was to mow around the chat shelters. Get that over with and give them time to calm down before it was time for the evening feeding.

Eyelet is SO deaf. He was sitting with his back to me on the sidewalk as I was mowing alongside it. Other cats ran off, but it wasn’t until he turned his head and actually saw me, having just stopped because he wasn’t moving, that he finally ran away from the mower.

For all the rain we had, only parts of that section of yard needed to be mowed, so I was done quickly and could move on to where I really wanted to get into.

This area.

My ultimate goal is to get all that overgrown area mowed, but not quite yet. First I had to move those logs that are meant to be vertical supports for future trellis beds. Then I cleared away where the plastic has been solarizing where the next trellis bed will be. Most of that was plastic I found while cleaning up after we moved in, and I think it was meant to be used under shingles. It’s seen a few years use already, so it was disintegrating. As a result, the area isn’t very solarized, but it’s a start. That cardboard on the side will be laid over it, eventually.

The solarized area got cleared out, but I left the cardboard for now. I started off mowing in between the existing beds, as I plan to add wood chips in a couple of paths soon. I’ll be going over that with a weed trimmer next.

From the paths, I started mowing the open area I’d cleared before, but only got a little more than half of it done. It wasn’t just because I was still feeling weak from being sick, though. That area gets the full brunt of the sun for many hours. We were expected to reach a high of 24C/75F today, but we hit 25C/77F while I was out there. I don’t know what the humidex was but as I write this, a couple of hours later, it has dropped to 23C/73F and the humidex is at 28C/82F. Which means the humidex probably broke 30C/86F while I was out there.

Not the sort of temperatures to be moving logs, cleaning things up and using a push mower while in full sun at the best of times, never mind while still recovering from illness.

In the end, I had to stop, get inside, cool off and hydrate. Later on, I did go out to feed the outside cats while my daughter put away the lawn mower and gas can, and then made a quick… I was going to say supper, but I guess it was really lunch.

Yeah, I probably should have eaten before I went outside, too. I just wasn’t feeling hungry!

After putting the mower away, my daughter came over to help with the cat feeding, and I showed her what I found in the isolation shelter.

Most of the time, when I come by and there are kittens in there, they run off in a panic. This one hunkered down and tried to make itself small, instead. Which a prefer, since that meant it could get to the food I’d just put in faster, and was already next to a full water bowl, with a lovely, soft cat bed in between. Later on, I saw it in the lower level, peaking out from between the two box nests that are down there.

As we made our way back to the house, my daughter spotted Adam, covered in kittens. I snuck around and managed to get some pictures.

A couple of kittens had run off by then, so the first couple of pictures have “only” three kittens nursing. I wasn’t able to catch them all, but there were kittens going in and out of that chimney flu in front of the cat house entrance – they use that to get under the “porch” side of the cat house. There were so many of them under there! No way to count, though. For all we could tell, with how much they were moving around, we were seeing the same ones over and over again.

Oh, and that handsome boy in the middle of the second last photo of the slide show is “Cat #1”. I was able to spot the tattoo in his ear, which makes him the kitten that we had neutered at the same time Kohl was spayed, all grown up now! He stays nearby and I’ve managed to sneak a pet every now and then, but he is not socialized.

He is such a beauty, though!

Anyhow.

I’m not done for the day, as far as outside stuff goes. I’ll try to rest up some more, and will try mowing again tomorrow, BEFORE it gets hot out! Tomorrow’s high is supposed to be 26C/79F. Mind you, even our overnight low is supposed to be 20C/68F, so it’s not like we’re really cooling down much. We’re also supposed to get about an hour of rain in the wee hours of the night. I’m not complaining, but it will make mowing that overgrown area more challenging, as well as cutting away all the poplars that are trying to take over.

Little by little, it’ll get done.

The Re-Farmer