When heading out this morning, I made extra effort to take a closer look at Tuxedo Mask’s red eye.
He even let me pet him, while he was in the kibble house!
The eye is still really gross and leaky, but looking a lot better than yesterday.
Then I saw Broccoli.
Who also has a red, leaking eye.
*sigh*
I was able to get some decent photos, though. Once back inside, I called up the vet, then later emailed them a couple of photos.
I got a response, and they have an opening for us this afternoon, if we could bring them in. My younger daughter and I went out and we were able to bring Tuxedo Mask into the sun room. He remains there now, with the cat carrier, food, water and litter.
No luck with Broccoli, though.
She was in the cats’ house, watching me through the window, but would NOT come out. Not even for treats. She was bundled up with two other cats.
One of which also had a leaky eye.
*sigh*
It turned out to be Caramel. Her eye wasn’t red, though, so at least there’s that. We have more chance of catching Broccoli than Caramel. We’re going to keep trying, but I really don’t expect we’ll be able to get her.
I have, however, let the vet know we can bring in at least one cat, though.
I suppose this is a good time to promote the donation button! If you would like to donate towards the care and feeding of the kitties, you can buy us a Kofi. All donations are for the cats only, and any amount is greatly appreciated.
I will update on how the vet visit went as soon as I can!
This is a picture of part of the lettering on our new sign that I noticed when I was switching the memory card on the trail cam. The paint on several letters is peeling away!
My guess is that the reflective paint on top of the white affected the ability for the blue paint to adhere properly.
I’ll find a way to tack it back on until we can spray the whole thing with a clear coat. Unfortunately, that won’t happen until spring, since it’s too cold for paint to cure.
When I got back to the house, I spotted something rather concerning. One of Tuxedo Mask’s eyes is blood red!
No, I did not get a picture, and if I did, I would not post it!
It looks really gross. It doesn’t seem to be bothering him a lot, but that doesn’t mean much. Ginger had a shattered joint and it barely slowed him down, even as he had to wait for the surgery. The main thing is that he does still seem to be able to see out of it.
My younger daughter and I did our city shopping trip, and when we got back, it didn’t look any better. We need to get him to a vet, but we just finished paying for our StarLink system, so the larder is bare. At least I thought it was until I read my email. I got word from the ranch we’d ordered our quarter beef from. The finished weight turned out to be less than expected (considering how terrible the drought was on cattle, that does not surprise me), so they actually owe me money. The cuts will be ready around the 20th or 21st.
That frees up part of our budget.
We should be able to take Tuxedo Mask to a vet.
If we can catch him! He does let us pet him once in a while, but that’s very different from trying to get him into a cat carrier!
We’ll figure it out. We can call the vet tomorrow morning and see if we can bring him in right away.
Poor little Tuxedo Mask! His eye looks just awful. :-(
I was really excited to find Heritage Harvest Seed. First because it is a company from Fisher Branch, Manitoba. They are even further north than we are. Which means we can be confident that anything we order from them will grow here!
Also, they specialize in rare and endangered seeds. I love going through the site and reading the descriptions, which include things like the history of a particular plant, or the efforts made to find seeds, and so on. Quite a few things ended up on my wish list the moment I saw “extremely rare” added to the description!
There’s no way we could possibly order everything on my wishlist! However, when I placed my order, I did include things we will not be able to plant this year, but which I hope to plant in the future.
It was so hard not to order more than I did!
Here is what I settled on. All photos belong to Heritage Harvest Seeds.
Here we have a very different corn than I’m used to; Tom Thumb Popcorn. It is a small variety, growing to about 2 feet high, that produces many cobs that are only 2 or 3 inches long. They make an excellent popcorn, and are a short season corn. Popcorn is one of our few regular snack foods, and we’re always running out, so if we can grow our own, that would be awesome. :-)
This is the one variety of tomato that we are growing, not as a snack food for my husband and older daughter, but as something to preserve in the larder. I’ve been looking for a paste tomato to try, and settled on Cup of Moldova. It is listed as extremely rare. It is an indeterminate variety that is good for making sauce, which means it should also be good for making tomato paste. That is what I am growing them for. As it is a rare variety, we will definitely be keeping seeds, too.
Here is another red onion I decided to try. Tropeana Lunga. The Baker Creek onion I ordered is similar to this, and this one is also an Italian variety.
This makes a total of five different varieties of onions we have seeds for, but I don’t mind. We use onions a LOT. The hard part will be finding the space needed to start them indoors.
We’ll figure something out!
Last time, I ordered these seeds from Baker Creek. They failed completely, and we don’t know why. Perhaps ordering Strawberry Spinach from a Canadian, zone 3, source might make a difference? I don’t know. We will do what we can to improve the bed we’ll be planting them in as well. I do hope they work out this time. I was really looking forward to them!
Though we’ve ordered pole beans, I wanted to have at least one variety for dry beans, rather than fresh eating. These are Blue Grey Speckled Tepary, and were once a staple food in parts of the US and in Mexico. They are also drought resistant and heat tolerant – which, after this past summer, is a big deal!
This is the third variety of hulless pumpkin seeds that I ordered; Styrian hulless. This variety was used to press for oil, and the fruit can reach up to 20 pounds in size! The description noted it as being very productive and dependable.
This is another one I picked when I saw it listed as extremely rare: Boston Marrow Squash. There is an interesting history behind it, but the real selling point was the description including “…makes the best pumpkin pie I have ever tasted!” It’s also a good storage squash. Even if we only grow a couple of plants, I want to make sure to save seeds from it, to keep the variety going.
Yes, I picked a wheat. The historical Marquis wheat, which is supposed to have excellent baking qualities.
We don’t have anywhere to grow wheat right now, but it is something we do want to do, so we can grind our own flour. Wheat seeds can last for a very long time, so I don’t mind getting some now, while we can, for future use.
This one is my wild and crazy purchase. The Zucca Melon; a variety that was saved from near extinction. I highly recommend clicking on the link and reading the story behind it.
These can get massive – anywhere from 60 – 120 pounds, and is described as …“a cross between a vegetable marrow and a hippopotamus”.
How can anyone resist that?
I’ll probably grow only one or two plants, and hopefully will be able to save seeds.
This makes the last of my seed orders for this month’s budget. I may still order things that won’t get shipped – or billed – until spring, but we shall see. For now, I’m done.
The garden will be expanding quite a bit again, and this time we should have more fruit trees and berry bushes. Hopefully, we will have a good growing season, too, and not have to deal with drought and heat waves again!
Last year, we grew the Montana Morado corn, from Baker Creek, which I thought was maize morado, or Kulli, from Peru. They turned out to be a US hybrid.
There was certainly nothing to object to about the corn itself, but once I learned about maize morado, I just got it in me that I really, really want to grow Kulli corn, here in the middle of Canada.
After much searching, I found a source that I could order from: Mary’s Heirloom Seeds.
This image belongs to Mary’s Heirloom seeds.
While the company is based in Texas, the corn itself is from the Andes Highlands. From what I’ve been able to find out, the Highlands have two seasons; summer (dry) and winter (wet). The temperature swings are more moderate than what we have. It’s a mountainous region, filled with microclimates, so it’s hard to know how to compare to the zone system we use in Canada and the US. With how hot and dry our summers can get, it may actually do all right here. It requires 120 days to maturity, so I will be starting them indoors, as we did with the Montana Morado.
The seed packets have only 25 seeds in them, so I ordered four, since I wasn’t ordering anything else. Even so, the cost of shipping wasn’t much less than the cost of the seeds!
As with so many other things, the main issue will be protecting the corn from critters. If we can manage that, I feel we will be able to grow this successfully, here. This is a corn that can be eaten fresh while young as a sweet corn, dried for a flour corn, used as a dye, and of course, used to make chicha morado.
I may not have made my shopping trip to the city today, but that didn’t stop me from shopping!
I have already placed my first seed order for next year’s garden from Vesey’s. That order is in, including a correction. We’ve got a monthly seed budget right now, so we will continue to place orders throughout the winter, for seeds, seedlings, roots and tubers.
For this past year’s garden, we ordered seeds from two places; Vesey’s, which is where we had ordered seeds for the previous year’s garden from, and Baker Creek; Rare Seeds. We were quite happy with both places. This year, I plan to order from other Canadian sources I found, but we still have items we wanted to get from Baker Creek.
This is the order I placed with them last night. All photos belong to Baker Creek.
I had already ordered onions, but did not have a red onion, yet. This is the Red of Florence onion; a long day onion (important when growing onions as far north as we are) that is a rare Italian variety, noted for its “balanced” flavour – whatever that means!
I like its shape, and think it would be a lot easier to cut!
The description says it can be planted in the fall or spring, but I doubt that applies to our zone!
This is the Black Nebula carrot, described as the darkest carrot they’ve ever seen, and it’s supposed to be exceptionally healthy. We already have a couple of other varieties of carrot we can plant, but I enjoy trying new types, and purple things did well for us in our 2021 garden. Plus, I consider carrots a staple food, so the more, the better!
As long as we can keep those groundhogs out!
Here we’re into something rather different – hulless seed pumpkins! I’ve ordered three different varieties, including two from Baker Creek. I really like pumpkin seeds, but hulled pumpkin seeds at the store is pretty expensive, so when I discovered there are hulless varieties, some of which can be eaten straight out of the fruit, I just had to give them a try!
I plan to try growing only a couple of each variety, so we can see which one we like best.
This past year, we got the Giant Rattle bread seed poppy, which we will be growing again from seed we’ve saved. Next year, we will find a spot for these Hungarian Blue, where they can self sow and be treated as a perennial.
Well, I couldn’t resist! Though we still have seeds, when I saw the Crespo squash was back in stock, I ordered a fresh packet. I was really impressed with how vigorously these grew, and how well they recovered after being repeatedly damaged by deer and groundhogs. If there had been enough growing season left after that, I’ve no doubt we would have had quite a few squash. We will try these again, and take precautions from the start, to ensure the critters don’t get to them!
That is it for our Baker Creek order this time. While I have loads of others in my wish list. Since we are ordering from several other places this year, and I am trying to focus on Canadian sources as much as possible, I don’t expect to be making another order from here.
We have a new visitor to the feeding station, today!
I haven’t seen grouse in the yard in quite a while, and whenever we did, they tended to be under some bushes or trees. This is the first time we’ve seen one at the feeding station!
Such a pretty bird, all puffed up to stay warm.
I think there was too much movement in the window, as it started to move away, but it did come back, and actually stayed at the feeding station for quite a long time.
I haven’t done my Critter of the Day pictures in ages. Usually, once we’re spending more time indoors, I start them up again, but they take quite a bit of time. I do very little post processing – maybe some cropping, or fixing the lighting, but that’s it. The main thing is to resize them so they don’t take up so much storage space on my WordPress account. Even after upgrading our account, I post so many photos, it adds up.
So I don’t think I’ll be doing daily critters, but I will post some every now and then. I recently uploaded the files from the DSLR in the living room, and this one made me smile. I just had to share!
I can’t help it. I just love it when we catch tongue blehps!!! They always make me smile. :-)
In the last little while, the deer have started to show up at the feeding station during daylight hours almost every day, and the yards a crisscrossed with their tracks. Though we’re just seeing a few at a time, there are definitely a LOT more that we’re not seeing!
So pretty. :-)
At least they are, now, when there is no garden for them to get into! :-D
It’s been difficult to get a really good picture of the new addition to our outside cats, but my daughter managed to get one with the DSLR outside our living room window a while back.
The Distinguished Guest is such a beauty! Here, just looks like she’s all black, but she has a white blaze on her chest, making her more like a tuxedo.
She is still with us, though I haven’t seen her yet, today. In fact, I haven’t seen any of the outside cats. I had a rough night last night, so my husband was sweet enough to take care of the critter feeding this morning. I’m even postponing the city shopping trip to tomorrow. Hopefully, I’ll actually get some sleep tonight. We’ve brought the storage bins of Christmas decorations up, and the inside cats are having a blast exploring the new smalls and knocking things over.
One thing about feeding so many yard cats. Especially in the winter.
Sometimes, they make you feel really, really loved and appreciated!
In between trying to chomp my fingers. :-D
Butterscotch in particular likes to strrreeetttcchhh out for pets. Or stand in her back legs.
She’s so sweet, when she’s not vicious and mean! :-D
I had a small addition to my morning rounds, and that was to check on the van. I have a habit of leaving really, really early for things, and yesterday was one of those days that got me into that habit. I was just about to leave for my course, and the van wouldn’t start.
The battery was dead.
I don’t know why. It was working fine on Friday.
Well, my husband was a sweetheart and put it on the charger while I too my mother’s car to my course.
Having to pay expenses for two vehicles may be hard on the budget. Especially when one of those vehicles isn’t really mine, but out here, having a “spare” is pretty necessary. It’s not like we could just hop on a bus or take a taxi or something!
This morning, I made sure to start the van and check the battery level, and it was just fine.
Which is great, but it’s still a mystery that the battery would suddenly die like that.
Depending on how things go, I’ll be making our city shopping trip in the next day or two. We’re actually supposed go above freezing again, in a couple of days. It’ll be messy, but I prefer that to making these trips during a deep freeze.
Which, thankfully, is not on the horizon. The long range forecast are showing December will start to get colder at about the middle of the month, but even then, it’ll still be pretty mild for this time of year.
Still holding out hope that The Farmer’s Almanac will the the accurate one in predicting a mild wet winter for our area, and not the other long range forecasts I saw that predicted another severely cold winter. Either way, though, we plan to be prepared!
Including prepared to keep the outside cats warm and well fed. <3
Not even a glorious sunrise quite makes up for having to be heading out so early, on icy roads.
But it was worth it.
I just spent the day at one of the nearby towns, and am proud to say that I have officially passed my non-restricted firearms safety course; an early Christmas present from my husband!
I just have to mail in the form to get my license, which might take a few weeks, or a few months, to get processed and mailed to me.
Once I get that, I can legally buy any hunting-type long rifle or shotgun.
Now, I learned how to shoot as a child, and a lot of the rules we have now didn’t exist back then. There wasn’t much I had to “unlearn”, though. With the written test, I only got one answer wrong, and it was a silly one. It was a true/false shotgun question, and I am only slightly more familiar with them than I am with a muzzle loader! :-D I’ll be getting a prize in the mail, though!
The practical part of the test had me handling weapon types I’d only ever seen in movies until today. Thankfully, being unfamiliar with a weapon did not generally result in lost points.
One thing I found interesting, particularly as someone who lives in the boonies; as long as we meet some pretty basic, common sense safety precautions, we’re pretty much wild west out here. Especially if there is a concern about wild animals in the area. While the list of restricted weapons and ammunition is longer here in Canada, and pretty stupid (some are banned basically because they look scary, and there’s even an air rifle that reaches only 350fps that’s banned. My crossbow does over 400fps!), thanks to the gun registry being rightfully thrown out, as long as we’ve got our license and keep it up to date, there are not a lot of restrictions.
Granted, we don’t have the budget to actually buy a rifle any time soon, but once I get the license, at least it will be an option. We also want the girls to take the course, too, though for the cost, it would be just one at a time. Which is fine. As long as I’m not the only one in the household with the license.
I am quite happy. It was worth it, and allows us to eventually get one more type of tool needed for living out here.
On a completely different note, today is the first Sunday of Advent, and while I was gone, the girls were kind enough to bring the bins of Christmas stuff up from the basement. Time to start some cat-proof decorating! :-D
Oh, and on another completely different note, and one that I was actually kind of expecting.
I got an email from our vandal’s lawyer, rather late on Friday, wanting to talk to me on the phone. Sure enough, our vandal did NOT agree to the conditions, so we do not have our Peace Bond against him. His lawyer will call me on Monday (tomorrow) to tell me what happened, and to talk next steps. I expect he will suggest mediation, which is where our vandal and I sit down with a third party, who tries to get us to work something out. Which I would be willing to do, if we were dealing with someone rational, but we’re dealing with someone who can’t accept responsibility for his actions, things everything is everyone else’s fault, and believes he’s entitled not only to what’s on the farm, but to have complete access to everything here, any time he wishes, as if we weren’t living here – except that I’m supposed to invite him in for tea after he verbally abuses me and vandalizes stuff. So I don’t see that mediation would be of any use. Which would mean going to trial, and the earliest court dates that are being booked are a year from now.
Well, we’ll see what happens when I talk to the lawyer on Monday.
*sigh*
At least as long as this drags through the courts, our vandal is behaving and leaving us alone, even if he does sometimes still phone my mother and leave nasty messages about how horrible we are. Ah, well. It is what it is. We just go along the best we can, while this drags on!
The Re-Farmer 