Author: Re-Farmer

First shot!

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Today, my husband was finally up to heading outside to help me sight the crossbow. I found an excellent spot for a shooting range and got us set up.

The instructions said to sight at 10 yards, then micro adjust at 20 yards. I pre-measured the distance on some paracord, then used flags to mark where the target was placed, at 10 yards, then 20 yards. In the photo, we are set up at at 10 yards.

I did try to use the cocking cable myself, first, but even after my husband shortened the cable, I’m just too short! He had to do it for me.

Unfortunately, cocking the bow turned out to be very hard on him. To cock the bow, you lean over the bow, hook the cord up in the appropriate spots, grab the handles, pull and straighten up at the same time.

Which is really, really painful for someone with a lower back injury.

He did it a few times, took a few shots and adjusted the sight. When it comes time to micro adjust, we’ll have to take into account that he shoots left handed, and I shoot right handed. I quickly called it a day, though. I did not want him to injure his back even more.

I did, however, get one shot in, myself, before we packed up. Here is my first ever shot with the crossbow!

I was aiming for that centre target. The holes above, right, were my husband’s shots while adjusting the sight. The other holes were from when my brother in law was adjusting the sight at 20 yards.

The crossbow has an adjustable stock, and I didn’t noticed my husband had shortened it while cocking the bow, because it was digging into his abdomen uncomfortably, then didn’t return it to where it was. So when I fired, I was a bit too close to the sight. There’s just enough recoil that the sight smacked me in the glasses. Oops.

We definitely need to get a crank. Unfortunately, Cabelas, where I bought it, doesn’t seem to carry them anymore, and Killer Instinct, the manufacturer, doesn’t seem to make them anymore. The only one my husband has been able to find has been on eBay, and it’s pretty expensive.

I may have to just shorten the cord even more and try again. Even if I do get it to a length that works for me, I still want a crank. The crank is silent. The pulleys on the cocking cord squeak. If I’m going to be hunting, I need to be able to cock it silently!

We’ll figure it out.

The Re-Farmer

Growing

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Things are really enjoying the rain we’ve had recently. Including the Ozark Nest Egg gourds.

I noticed that there were both male and female flowers blooming at the same time, so I decided to try hand pollinating them. The previous newly formed gourds have all withered away, so I hope these will take.

The problem is that by the time there are more male flowers blooming, the female flowers have already closed up. I opened the larger ones to pollinate, just to see if they will take. I had to do the same thing with the luffa gourds. We shall see if it works!

The gourds were not the only things to appreciate the rain.

These weren’t there when I walked past this branch pile, yesterday!

It’s amazing how quickly mushrooms can develop quite large, pretty much overnight!

The Re-Farmer

(ps: this was supposed to be posted yesterday, but my computer stopped responding and I had to shut it down. :-/)

Babcia’s Bread Experiment: a re-awakening

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With how hot it’s been all summer, we’ve done no baking at all. It was simply too hot in the house to do baking and heat it up even more! Only recently did my daughter finally start baking some bread again.

Which means that our dough baby has been sitting in its flour, unused, for several months. That’s one beauty of using this type of dough starter; it doesn’t need to be regularly used and fed, the way a wet sourdough starter needs to be, and will just go dormant.

Last night, I woke it up! :-D

It really doesn’t look any different, once it was dug out of the flour.

The flour it was in, however, did look a bit different.

The dough baby has its own canister of flour, which had started to form a sort of shell around the dough. When I opened it, I could really get that sourdough smell, and it was as much in the flour as from the dough baby. I will be using this flour when doing the bread baking, as it is probably infused with yeast, too.

As dry as it was, the dough baby had lots of air pockets in it, making it easy to crumble apart.

I stirred in 2 cups of very warm water, then set it in a warm oven overnight, lightly covered. After a few hours, I checked it and decided to go ahead and cheat by sprinkling a bit of traditional yeast (not the fast acting type) and a bit of sugar into it as well, then swirling it about.

This is how it looked in the morning, after being stirred again.

That orange bowl really messed with the colour!

Anyhow, it was lightly bubbly by morning. After stirring it down, I added some of the flour from the dough baby canister.

I tried to get some natural light on there, so you can see the proper colour!

I broke up the flour as much as I could, but I’m not too worried about the lumps at this point. I added maybe a cup and a half of flour to get it to the consistency of a thick batter. It then went back into the warm oven for the sponge to develop.

It will take a long time for the sponge to develop without adding more commercial yeast, so bread baking with it is going to be an all day process, today! It’ll be checked regularly, but for this sponge stage, I figure it will take a few hours before I continue with the bread baking. :-)

The Re-Farmer

So many kitties, inside and out!

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The outside cats were out in full force, eager for breakfast, but first I wanted to share some indoor adorableness!

Cabbages and Cheddar, all snuggled together for a nap!

The size difference just blows me away. Cabbages is more than a year old now, so she is pretty much her full adult size. Cheddar… he’s just huge.

Yesterday evening, I decided to use our Roku device and watch some TV. We’ve got the Great Courses on Amazon Prime, and I’m watching Cooking Through the Ages right now. Cheddar decided to join me and trap my hand under his head as a pillow!

He eventually got driven out, though, when Tissue came over and started bugging him. After he left…

… she took his spot!

She would not stop squirming, though, and when I brought my phone over to take pictures…

… she went for it, and tried to eat it!

Gosh, she has the strangest facial structure! Like a little alien.

Meanwhile, her younger siblings outside were joining the breakfast buffet.

While I was pouring the kibble out, Broccoli jumped into the kibble house, and I actually got to pet her! She was torn between startled and wanting to go at the food. The confused expression she gave me as I pet her back was hilarious. She seemed to like the pets, though, and tolerated them for a little while.

There are nine kittens in the above photo. Potato Beetle is one of the adults, and he’s at the tray on the ground. Butterscotch is inside the kibble house. Nutmeg was around, too, but on the other side of the kibble house, out of view.

Rosencrantz, Nosencrantz and Toesencrantz, enjoying breakfast together!

More progress; while walking back from pouring kibble onto the tray under the shrine, Nosencrantz came running right up to me, and let me pet her, before continuing on to the food!

I really, really like Nosencrantz.

I guess this is a good time to promote our Ko-fi page. If you are interested in helping with the feeding and care for the kitties, you can click here, or on the donation button on the side bar. All donations go towards the cats, either for their food, to get them fixed, or for any needed vet care, and are gratefully appreciated.

The Re-Farmer

In the pink!

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Well, this is one way to tell the temperature are getting chilly at night.

And that I need to change the batteries in the newer trail cam.

Until the camera warms up enough, it starts recording things in pink!

Also, during night shots, the infrared flash stops working and the files have a red law battery warning across the bottom. I’ve taken down the white string lights that had been along the top barbed wire on the fence, as they were getting pretty damaged and burnt out. There is now a solar powered string of lights long enough to reach from the gate to the corner fence post. When the infrared flash doesn’t turn on, they are quite nice and bright! :-)

I’ll have to head back out later with some fresh batteries. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Morning kitties

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We had a good crowd, this morning!

I got to pet Nosencrantz this morning, but had to move away before Toesencrantz would come to eat.

I am NOT happy with Potato Beetle. He attacked Rosencrantz this morning. Again. Drove her off. She did get a chance to come by and eat with her babies, later, but he is really nasty towards her!

We had nine kittens in the kibble house again (the two orange cats are the adults). I was looking at the photos with my daughter and talking about the five grey tabbies. There’s Bradicous, Chadicous, Sadicous and Tadicous. What would number five be called? Why not Gaticous? (a play on the movie title, Gattaca)

Gaticous, it is! :-D

Ghost Baby made an appearance, too, dashing by in the background. :-)

You know what else made an appearance?

Toe pints. Itty, bitty kittie toe prints!

Dirty little toe prints!

At least the paint was dry before it got walked on. :-D

Odd that the camera in my phone turned the mint green paint into white!

The Re-Farmer

Clean up: our “second bathroom”, first coat inside, done!

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After a quick run out to hit the farmer’s market, and then town, I decided to finish painting the inside of the outhouse while there was still enough light.

I’m glad I did. :-)

Here are the “before” pictures.

I had a few drips, while working on the top and ceiling. :-D

It was a bit tight to get photos of the inside, front!

There are a LOT of nooks and crannies around that door frame.

I actually started with the door. I figured I should get that done first, just in case it needed to get closed at the end of the day, so it would have more time to dry.

Then I worked on the most difficult areas around the door. For such a small amount of square footage, it took quite a while to get that done! Painting the inside of the door frame turned out to take quite a while, too, as there are a lot of gaps that I needed to squeeze the brush into.

Once the front was done, I methodically worked my way to the back. Of course, I found more staples and tacks that I missed! :-D

Since I wasn’t planning on taking off the toilet seat, once the sides were done, I painted the seat box under the toilet seat first. The lid leans against the back wall when it’s open, so I wanted to give the paint at least a little while to dry before having to close the lid again. On the plus side, there are only 2 points of contact under the seat, so even if still wet, closing the lid wouldn’t mess the paint up too badly.

Here are the “after” shots.

This time, I remembered my phone has a “panorama” setting. LOL

Yeah, I painted the toilet lid. Sort of. It had so many drips on it, I just went ahead and used the lid to get excess paint off the brush. :-D

And here it is, with the painted door.

While doing a second coat will take a lot less paint, I suspect we will need to buy another can. Those nooks and crannies took a lot more paint to cover than expected. Especially when I came across wood that had pieces fall out, or had a very rough finish. One of the beams supporting the corner still had bark on it, and winding gouges on the surface from insects. All of this ended up needing extra paint to get into the various holes and surfaces

What a difference!

One of the things we’ll have to do is put some sort of non-slip… something… on the metal sheet in front of the outhouse. It can get slippery when it’s wet.

After a second coat of paint, we’ll put the mirror cabinet back in – my daughter suggested just putting the old one back, rather than digging out the one in the basement, because then we’d just have to find somewhere to store the old one, anyhow! :-D Also, she noticed we had a chain latch, still in its package, that we can use on the inside, so we don’t have to buy a new latch. It will be mounted on the top cross piece of the door, so I won’t be trying to mount a latch where old screw holes have already damaged the wood. I’ve decided that, for a light, I will pick up another one of those LED, battery operated light switches. We have two of them in the house that come in very handy; one is set up in the bathroom to use at night instead of turning on the very bright main lights, and another is set up in a very dark corner where one of the upstairs litter boxes is kept. When we get one for the outhouse, I want to mount it across from the mirror, to take full advantage of reflected light. We’ll need some sort of dust, critter and insect proof container to keep toilet paper in, and maybe some wet wipes or something. The girls plan to put art on the walls. :-D

The next time something happens and we can’t use our indoor bathroom again, we will at least have someplace pleasant to go! :-D The only other thing is, we now have to empty the pit of all that gravel the groundhog dug up. It will be important to get that done before winter, because if we get any normal amount of snow, when it melts in the spring, we’ll have a big puddle in front of the outhouse, and the back of the garage, and water will drain into the pit again. The gravel is high enough in there, that there is no longer room for it, which would force the water above the floor boards. Mind you, it would probably end up draining into the groundhog’s den, but there is nothing we can do about that.

The main thing was getting at least this first coat of paint done, then digging out the pit. If we don’t have a chance to fix the roof before winter, I want to at least put a tarp or something over it. The rest can be done slowly, as we find the time.

The Re-Farmer

Clean up: our “second bathroom”, painting started

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Okay, time for a break!

Hopefully, I’ll be able to continue later today, but if not, there is at least some progress in painting the inside of the outhouse.

This is the colour my daughter chose. Personally, I would have gone for a pale blue instead of a pale mint, but honestly, I don’t really care that much. We just needed a light colour to brighten things up on the inside, that wasn’t institutional white. :-D

I almost forgot to take the before photos!

The angle is bad because I was already standing on the seat box when I took these, and I wasn’t about to clamber down, just to take pictures. ;-)

My main goal for today was to do everything that needed me to be standing on the seat box to reach. The only exception was one side of a roof joist, right in the middle. For that, I made use of the thick boards we’d found stored in here when we cleaned it out. The three of them together gave me 6 inches in height, and that was enough.

This is probably the most difficult part to do, with all the corners and tight areas. After this, things should go a lot faster.

The opening at the top is covered with wire mesh window screen, stapled in place. It did not occur to me that the mesh was not flush with the surface when I started trying to paint over it. I didn’t want to take it off, though. I think we will pick up some more wire mesh window screen in the future for other projects, and when we do, I’ll look at replacing this screen. Then the frame can be painted properly. No hurry, though. Depending on how long before we can do that, we could paint the frame in the same colour as the outside. We haven’t decided what that colour will be.

For now, though, I’m off to the Farmer’s Market. I’ve discovered that organic humans are being allowed in, and I want to pick up some pork from our neighbour. :-) We’ve emailed briefly and I might be able to check their homestead out over the weekend, too. :-) I’m looking forward to it!

The Re-Farmer

At the gate, and after the rain

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While doing my rounds this morning, I found a strange thing at the gate.

The twine was caught around the lock and the caribiner, which usually hangs over one side of the gate, was hooked onto the chain link.

Right off the bat, I knew this was NOT our vandal. If it were, there would have been actual damage, like the locks being glued again, or something like that.

Needless to say, I was quite curious when I sat down to look at the trail cam files. I had a pretty good idea who did it.

I was right.

When my daughter’s package was delivered, the driver tried to shove it into the gate, then used the chain to try and hold it in place. The problem is, the gate moves in the wind. When the cameras were triggered again, less than 15 minutes later, I could see the package was already half-falling. My the time my daughter came over to get the package, about half an hour after it was dropped off, it was on the ground.

It’s a good thing it wasn’t fragile!!

Going through the trail cam files was interesting for another reason: several files caught huge flashes of lighting from last night’s storm! I even saw a deer and her little one, hurrying up the driveway, while the sky light them up repeatedly.

Yesterday blew past our expected high of the day, reaching at least 30C/86F, possibly 32C/90F. That was followed by a wicked thunderstorm that passed over us around 11pm. It was awesome! Of course, we lost internet well before that. It rained enough that I found our rain barrel by the sun room, which had only a few inches of water on the bottom, full to overflowing.

We *really* need an overflow hose on that thing.

The garden loved the rain, too!

I was seeing huge new blossoms on the summer squash. Even the Ozark Nest Egg and the luffa gourds had new flowers opening. So did the Tennessee Dancing gourds, but they never really stopped blooming, so that wasn’t a lot of change.

The Crespo squash is seeing more flowers opening, too, and some of the developing fruit is noticeably bigger! These two are the ones closest to the barriers than I can get clear photos of, but there are quite a few more getting bigger like this.

The sunflowers are loving the deep watering, too. And just look at this Hopi Black Dye seed head! It is getting so very dark!

I even had a baby harvest this morning.

The larger melon is a Pixie melon. There are still lots of those. The little one is a Halona melon. The remaining melons on those vines are not getting any bigger, as the vines are pretty much completely died back now. Most of the melons are all very securely attached to their vines, though. This little one was feeling a bit softer, so I had it with breakfast. :-)

I even was able to pick some peas! With our first green peas, I did find a pod or two, but between the drought and the critters, that was about it. This is the most I’ve picked at once, this year.

That longest pod is the size they would all be reaching, if growing conditions were better.

I suppose I really should have left them for another day, as these were a bit on the small size, but I couldn’t resist.

I had them with my breakfast, too. :-)

The melon wasn’t as sweet as larger ones we’d picked, but it was definitely ripe. The peas were also probably not as sweet as they would have been under better growing conditions. They were both still quite tasty, though!

Last night’s storm had blown the door to the outhouse closed. I opened it again and things were still a bit damp. It’s been a few hours now, so I am going to head out and see if I can start painting!

The Re-Farmer