Oh, my goodness. This took way more time and effort to make than usual! Starting with going back later in the day to record new video because I made too many goofs, the first time around. I mean, how did I accidentally say “corn” when I meant to say “peas”? Repeatedly!! 😂
It also took all day to upload the file. Yes, it’s more than half an hour long, but it still shouldn’t have taken more than 8 hours to upload.
But, here it is. A tour of our garden, including fruit trees this time. It’s been a very rough year for the garden, with some complete losses, but we do still have something to show for it, at least!
I hope you enjoy it, and please feel free to let me know what you think!
There was a new and different flower among the dancing gourds, and it turned out to be a luffa!
Which means there may actually be two surviving luffa gourds that got transplanted.
Along with this open flower, I found some teeny, tiny female flowers developing as well. Unfortunately, there isn’t a single male flower or bud to be seen, so this luffa likely won’t get pollinated.
It’s way too late in the season for something like luffa. We started them indoors early enough to have given them the time, even after the Great Cat Crush, but everything got set back by the weather so much after transplanting, any advantage we had was lost. Still, it was a nice surprise to find they did survive!
Feeding the kitties has developed an unexpected challenge. The one kitten that has decided he really likes people after all, has also decided he likes to get underfoot.
Literally.
I tried to be careful, but still ended up bopping him once.
I got to see Broccoli and Broccoli Baby sharing a food tray. That kitten is looking like it may end up with much longer fur than its mama.
I think this is the first good picture I’ve managed to get of this guy! He’s one of Junk Pile’s kittens. He, the black and white and the tuxedo, have been hanging out around the house and old kitchen garden a lot more lately. As you can see, they don’t run off quite so much anymore, either.
What a handsome boye.
If he’s a boy. No chance to see, one way or the other!
Then I saw someone different…
I guess this one would be considered a tortie?
I’ve actually seen glimpses of this one before. Just flashes of “is that a new kitten?” running by. This is the first real sighting.
I’m pretty sure this is another Broccoli baby, but there is just no way to know.
Then there was this sighting.
My first thought had been, “Oh, look – Junk Pile has joined Broccoli Baby for breakfast.”
Then I realized, this is a kitten, about the same size as Junk Pile’s “teenagers”.
This picture was taken on May 6. These are Junk Pile’s kittens. You can see the tuxedo in the back, the tabby and the black and white in the foreground. Those three are here often.
There are two other kittens in here that are just “dark”.
No Junk Pile Mini Me.
The above picture may actually be two litters, being co-parented, as we did see one one of the ‘iccuses in with here, too, before they moved their babies away from the commotion of human activity.
Either way, though this new kitten looks old enough to have been born at the start of May, like these ones, it isn’t from one of the litters we knew about. The only other cat that I can think might have had a litter around the same time is Ghost Baby, and she’s such a ghost, it would take her kittens to be big enough to be on their own before we’d see them show up by the house. So that’s a possibility.
So this would put the number of sighted kittens at about 14. Plus I know Rosencrantz had a second litter after loosing her first one (she rolled on the ground earlier today and, from the looks of her belly, she is nursing at least 4 kittens), and now Junk Pile no longer looks pregnant.
Which means we can expect to see more new faces over the next few months, still.
We were out of potatoes and I wanted some for supper, so I decided to see what I could get out of the garden.
*sigh*
I chose to dig under plants that I remember had come up the earliest, and were the farthest from the most flooding.
First, the good: the soil under the mulch and cardboard is SO much softer, instead of the usual rock hard. It was cool in the 27C/81F heat, and moist. There were lots of worms, though there were also lots of crab grass rhizomes. A single season under an “instant garden” made a HUGE difference in the soil.
Now, the not so good:
There were almost no potatoes. I dug up three of each type of potato, and that’s all there was.
I didn’t pull out the plants completely, leaving the remains of the seed potato and the soil around the base, digging them down a bit deeper than they started, returned the mulch and watered them well. Who knows. They might survive and still produce more potatoes. Unlikely, but it’s worth a try.
With the condition of the plants, I didn’t really expect much, but I still thought I’d find more than one or two potatoes per plant!
I then thinned out some of the Uzbek golden carrots, checked out the Black Nebula (there’s one in there, hidden by the yellow carrots), and they’re still really skinny but getting bigger. I also picked some of the smaller onions. Over the next while, if we want fresh onions, we’ll dig up the little ones, leaving the bigger ones to get even bigger for winter storage.
For supper, I used these, plus some of the beans I picked this morning, and the turnips I’d picked before, along with some thinly sliced pork to make a sort of Hodge Podge.
I love being able to cook with food almost entirely out of the garden.
I didn’t get a photo of the finished squash patch last night, so I got one this morning.
All the paths are now mulched, too. There’s no carboard under the paths, so I expect things to start growing through, but at least it will be more sparse.
The plants themselves are seeing new growth and lots of flowers. It’s a race against time and the weather to see if we’ll have anything to pick this year.
I love that you can see the giant pumpkin from so far away!
I swear, this thing is visibly bigger, every day.
Of the two other pumpkins spotted, this one is making it and growing fast. The other did not get pollinated, and withered away. I see no other female flowers, so we’re probably just have the two.
In checking the Red Kuri squash and Apple gourds, I found both male and female flowers blooing at the same time, so I went ahead and hand pollinated. The Red Kuri is doing well, but with the Apple gourds, all the female flowers so far have withered. This morning, I found a female flower on one plant, and a male on another, si I made sure to hand pollinate
Thankfully, tomatoes are self pollinating.
The are so many of them changing colour right now! I have to check myself, to make sure I don’t pick some of them too early.
The one big Sophie’s Choice tomato I recently picked was enough for the girls to make a tomato salad out of it. I’m glad they’re enjoying the variety.
I finally picked the one bigger golden zucchini this morning. There were not a lot of yellow beans to pick, but there were more of the pole beans, with many more little ones on the vines. There will be more peas for a while, too. There may not be a lot of quantity from each of them, but altogether, it’s pretty decent.
The only down side this morning are my pain levels. I over did it yesterday, while pruning the trees. I was so distracted by the heat, I missed my other “time to back off” warning signs. Frustrating.
Ah, well. That’s what pain killers are for. Today is going to be a hotter one, with possible thunderstorms, so it’s not going to be a day for significant manual labour, anyhow.
The kittens were out in full force, this morning! I had a chance to sit on the scrap wood bench for a while, just watching them. And those I couldn’t see, I could hear!
The tuxedo from the oldest litter was doing the Spiderman thing. So were many of the kittens; I could hear scrambling all around and above me! Even the bitty babies were climbing all over. 😊
Broccoli Baby was the only other one I could get a picture of, though.
After doing some watering with the hose, I hooked up the soaker hose on the tomatoes, then let it run while I finished mulching the paths in the squash patch.
Our straw bale is now completely used up, and all the paths in the squash patch are now mulched. Yay!
Somehow, I didn’t think to take a picture, though. Too focused on getting the watering done!
The rain barrel at the trellises was half empty, so I set the hose to fill it and use the watering can, taking my time to give the barrel time to actually fill up in between my taking water out. That gave me the chance to train more of the cucumbers up their trellis net, as well as the mystery gourd.
Which is no longer a mystery.
The labels had worn off, but I figured they were either luffa or ozark nest egg gourds – and they didn’t look like luffa.
While training some of the vines up their trellis net, I found some baby gourds.
Which officially confirms it. They are Ozark nest egg gourds.
Which mean that none of the luffa transplants survived at all.
Hopefully, this year, we will actually have some mature gourds! Last year, once the heat waves and drought conditions eased off, the Ozark nest egg gourds absolutely exploded with new growth, and many baby gourds. Unfortunately, it was too late in the season by then, even with our unusually long and mild fall, and they were killed off by frost.
Hopefully, these will have more time! The gourds aren’t particularly large at their mature size, so there is a chance for them.
I would love to finally have some gourds to cure and use for crafting!
My original plan for this afternoon was to continue mowing, but I decided it was going to get too hot to be walking back and for for hours in the sun.
So I decided cutting back trees for hours was somehow better. 😁
Oh, to be fair, pruning the trees did allow me to spend more time in the shade than if I were mowing.
Except when I was hauling branches to the chipping pile.
Ah, well. The job needed to be done! It did eventually get too hot, though. We were supposed to reach our high of 25C/77F at 6pm. Instead we hit it by 2pm. As I write this, we’re at a humidex of 27C/81F. Definitely not good for me to be outside doing manual labour.
I didn’t even think to take “before” pictures, as I’ve taken so many pictures of the area for other reasons. This is what the area in front of the outhouse looks like now.
The arrows point to where two large branches were cut away. They were in the path of that big, dead spruce tree, when it gets cut down. There is now a clear gap for the spruce to fall. Removing them did take out some of the shade, but this is an elm. It’ll sent up new branches in no time, and they will grow in dense and bushy, so there will be share here again, soon enough.
These are the cut down pieces of the second branch I cut away from that tree. Both of them were about the same size, so there was about twice what you see in the photos that got broken down before they were manageable for hauling away. There were also quite a few dead branches that got cleared out, too.
There is another elm nearby that has many dead branches on it, but it won’t be cleaned up just yet. The way it’s leaning, the pieces might fall on the garlic and yellow pear tomato beds. It can wait until those beds have been harvested.
Once everything was hauled away and cleaned up, I was quite ready to go inside, but decided to clear some of the branches overhanging the sunchokes and asparagus beds. Then a few more… and a few more…
I did finally stop, though there are still more branches to take down. It was just getting too hot, and I can’t handle heat like I could in my younger days! I did move the gate and some old branches that were too big for our chipper to go around the other side of the chain link fence and clear the tall grass away, too.
When the tree guys come with their industrial chipper, they’ll have more than just rotting branches that have been sitting for years to chip. 😊
The Re-Farmer 