Author: Re-Farmer

A rough start to the day, and the groundhog battle begins

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I am not a morning person.

I never have been.

It is not unusual for me to be up at 2 or 3 am. If it were feasible, I would sleep all day and be up all night. When I had a job working the night shift at a gas station convenience store, it was fantastic. I was awake and alert all night, and had some of the best sleep during the day, ever. At least I did when I wasn’t getting phone calls from people who knew I was working nights, but figured that since I was home during the day, that was a great time for them to call and chat. :-D

My daughters are much the same as I am. Usually, that works out. Our general routine is just shifted over. When others are having lunch, we’re having breakfast. That sort of thing.

Since I do the morning routine and the girls do the evening routine, I do try to get up earlier to make sure the outside cats have food, etc., but it’s still later than average, shall we say.

Then there are mornings like this.

I was awakened by the distinctive sounds of a cat in the basement, climbing the screen barrier between the basements. I’d found and blocked where they had been getting through, so I tried to ignore it.

Until I could hear Beep Beep in the old basement, making her distinctive beeping meow, and starting to claw at the screen at the top of the old basement steps. The screen we use to keep the cats out of the basement, while we have the door open to keep the house cool.

It was just before 6am when I dragged myself out of bed. When I got into the old basement (navigating those stairs is never a good thing!), I discovered Turmeric was in there, too! I managed to get them both out of the old basement without killing myself on the stairs, without either of them scratching the heck out of me, and without letting any of the other cats, waiting at the basement door, down, so that was a win. :-/

The next while was spent fussing about in both the old and new basements, to figure out where they were getting through. They’d managed to create an opening through my last blocking attempt, so I scrounged up something else to put across the gap.

Then, after going to the bathroom, I was going to go back to bed when I started hearing a noise. Flushing the toilet had triggered one of the pumps in the basement, which is not unusual, but this sound was something else entirely. It was a strange, high pitched, pulsing, vibrating noise.

So I unlatched the screen and hobbled back into the old basement.

It was the septic pump that had turned on, but as I walked towards it, I passed the noise.

It wasn’t coming from the pump.

It was coming from a space above the basement wall.

The old basement is very low, and even short little me can see the top of the basement walls, where the floor beams rest. On the other side of the wood is the crawl space under the old kitchen. The old kitchen is where the breaker box is. When my brother set up the laundry in the entry, he had to run new wires through this spot, and he even ran an extra set of wires, in case we ever need to install something else. It was such a pain to run the wires through, he wanted to save future hassles.

So all I’m seeing in this spot is the new wire, neatly bundled up on one side of a floor beam, and another older wire running through holes in the floor beams, and is one of the wires that powers the pumps and tanks. It doesn’t even enter the basement at this location.

Which means there is nothing in this spot that is mechanical that might be making the vibrational noise. At least, not in the basement side. But what could possibly be in the crawl space, on the other side of the wall, that could make that noise?

Whatever it was, it stopped when the septic pump turned itself off.

This is a mystery on its own, but it’s not the only one. A while back, the well pump would make grinding noises as it lost pressure. It is old and needs to be replaced, but no plumber dares work on it, because we might have a leaky foot valve, which is in the well. Replacing the pump might cause the valve to fail, and we’d lose water. The well itself is so old, if something like that did happen, we would have difficulty finding replacement parts the right size, or might have to get a new well dug. So we’re on pins and needles when it comes to this pump. Oddly, since we’ve made the effort to never open the taps in the bath tub to full pressure, which was emptying the pressure tank faster than the pump could refill it, the grinding noise has stopped. Even with using the hoses so much to water the garden beds, and the pump running so much more than usual, it’s been fine.

However, when we were still figuring out what was going on with the pump, one of the distinctive things was that, before the well pump turned on and started making the grinding noise, I would first hear a sproinging noise. It was loud enough I could hear it from my office/bedroom, but by the time I got into the basement, the pump would be running and the noise was gone. Then, I happened to be in the basement before the well pump turned on one time. I heard the sproinging noise, and it was not coming from the pump. It was coming from the same place I heard the vibrational noise, this morning.

There is something behind the basement all at this spot, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what it is. When the old kitchen was added on to the house, it had neither electricity nor running water. The only thing that should be there is electrical wires, and there is no reason for wires to make sproinging or pulsating vibrational noises!

I have emailed my brother to ask him. He’s the only living person who would have any idea what’s under there.

By the time all that was done, there was no point in my trying to go back to bed, so I went out to do my morning rounds early.

I am somewhat encouraged.

The beet bed that was decimated yesterday actually looks better. A few beets still have their leaves and, after the evening watering, they have perked up again. There was no new damage.

I also have some hope for the carrots, too. The tallest fronds may have all been eaten, but they still had a lot of growing to do, so there are still new fronds coming up. We may end up with more spindly carrots, but I think we might still have a chance with them. The next few days will tell us, one way or the other.

We are still left with the groundhog to deal with.

This is how things got left, last night. About half the pile was pulled to one side, and once water started running into the den, the groundhog came out and hid in the remaining branches. I never saw it this morning, but as I approached the den, I heard it scramble away from the opening.

Those branches had to go!

I’ll have go come back with the weed trimmer to clean this up more.

Some of the dirt from digging the den had partially buried some branches, so moving them knocked some dirt and rocks into the opening.

I don’t know if the groundhog ran off while I was hauling branches away. I saw and heard nothing, though.

Once the branches were cleared away, I brought the hose over and started to spray into the opening, pausing every now and then to give the groundhog a chance to run out. It never did, so perhaps it had already left.

In looking up how to get rid of a groundhog, flooding the den was one of the recommended methods. It was also suggested to do it in July or August, in case the groundhog was pregnant or had a litter. That was something that had occurred to me. We’re only seeing the one groundhog at this den, but it’s entirely possible it’s a mama with some babies down there.

With that in mind, we will be taking our time in driving it away from this den, so that it can find another location for a den and, if there are any, move its babies out.

Once we are sure it’s been driven out, we will block the opening and level out the pile of soil it made.

Hopefully, the critter will move on, and we will not have to take more drastic measure. :_/

As for me, this broken and battered body of mine is giving out. Time to lie down and, hopefully, get some sleep!

The Re-Farmer

Chive Blossom Vinegar is done

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Well, we had at least one good thing happen today.

I was able to finish the chive blossom vinegar.

The bottle has had two weeks in the cupboard to infuse. Any time we went into the cupboard for something, we’d turn the bottle upside down a few times, to get the blossoms out of the bottle neck and mix with the vinegar.

I was curious how the colour would turn out. The site I’d found instructions on had a final product that was bright pink. I used white wine vinegar, though, which is pale yellow.

The final colour is quite dramatic, isn’t it?

After straining the vinegar, the bottle got cleaned and scaled, the vinegar added back, and we replaced the little plastic thing in the top, that controls the flow of vinegar when pouring.

We haven’t tried it in anything yet, but the smell of it is absolutely fabulous!! I can’t wait to try it!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: NOOOOoooo!!!!!

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I am so very, very unhappy right now.

I went out to do the evening watering, and also add some shredded Irish Spring soap to the decimated beet bed, in hopes the deer will leave it alone and it can recover.

While weeding in the carrot bed in the main garden area, I noticed some greens had been nibbled on. It was only at one corner, so I figured it might have been a deer, though I didn’t think deer liked carrot greens. With discovering the groundhog had made a den in the nearby pruned branch pile, I looked it up, and it turns out they will eat carrot greens. So I figured I would add some of the soap shavings to the carrot bed, too.

I was too late.

The entire bed was decimated this afternoon!

All of it.

The bed was split between two types of carrots. They were pelleted seeds, so we were able to space them as we planted them, and they were doing really well. No thinning needed. Now, they’re all gone.

I am pretty sure that, if we can deep the deer away, the beets will be able to at least somewhat recover, but will carrots? I have no idea. We do have left over seed for both types, and I considered using one of the empty spinach beds to plant more, but we’re at the end of June. We don’t have enough of a growing season left to start over.

We do have two other types of carrots in the old kitchen garden, but these were specialty carrots, and had a lot less seed in the packets. They were also planted later, so they were not as far along as these ones.

I added the soap shavings to the bed anyhow, and the girls have covered it with one of the covers we used on the spinach beds. Not that these can stop a ground hog, but still.

Meanwhile, we’ve been trying to encourage the groundhog to move on. We don’t have a live trap, and even if we did, where would we release it? We are surrounded by farms. I don’t want to pass the problem on to someone else!

Anyhow.

One of my daughters came out while I was watering and went to the branch pile to see the den, only to see the groundhog looking back at her! She started to tear apart the pile, and then I passed the hose to her so she could start spraying water into the den. The groundhog came out and hid the branches. They never saw it go away, though.

While they were doing that, I continued watering from the water barrel by the peas and corn. I was afraid of what I would find when I got there, but these far flung beds were unharmed.

Moving that branch pile is going to be a priority, and we’ll continue to convince the groundhog to move on, on its own. Depending on how things go, and if we can figure out where we can release it, I might be able to borrow a live trap from my brother. When I told him about the groundhogs I saw in the outer yard, he told me about catching and releasing one from their own property, so I know he’s gone one large enough. The groundhog in the garden is bigger than the two in the outer yard.

*sigh*

I am not a happy camper right now!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: decimated!

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When doing my rounds this morning, I gathered more garlic scapes and did some weeding in the beet bed next to the garlic. They were doing very well, and I was planning on gathering some beet greens later in the day, to include in a salad or something.

This afternoon, I made a quick trip into town, then drove into the yard to unload the van. As I was unloading, something about the beet bed across the yard looked… off. So I made a point of checking it after putting the van away.

No wonder it looked off, even from a distance!

It’s been decimated.

And yes, those are deep hoof prints in the soil.

Planting the onions around the beets wasn’t enough to keep a deer out.

The crazy thing is that this happened during the day. We were indoors, but we were still moving about and near windows. The girls can see this bed from their windows upstairs, and they saw nothing. In the summer months, we never see deer in the yard. At most we see them on the trail cam going through the gate, and I haven’t even been seeing them on the garden cam at all, and even then, we only see them at night, or very early in the morning.

The beets might recover, though I’ll have to find a way to cover it again. The mosquito netting on the hoops kept blowing off. I’ll see if I can make a cover for it using the chicken wire we got for the squash tunnel. It’s a 50′ roll, so there will be more than enough to spare.

I’m not sure when I’ll be able to do it. We’ve been hearing thunder for a while now, and my desktop weather app just popped up with a severe thunderstorm warning. Because of the thunder I was hearing, I had checked it before starting this post, and it was still saying only 60% chance of rain, so something changed in just the past few minutes! From the looks of the trees outside, I might be shutting down my computer soon!

Well, at least the weather will keep animals sheltering themselves, instead of eating our garden! It’s a good thing we planted so many beets in the old kitchen garden, too. Even if this bed doesn’t recover, we will still have lots of beets.

The Re-Farmer

Morning critters, and… this could be a problem!

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I had a pleasant surprise when I first went outside to do my morning rounds. Rosencrantz and her kittens were playing at the bottom of the little shrine, on the INSIDE of the chain link fence!

So I found a couple of containers and put food and water out for them. Not longer after, I saw this.

The grey and white kitten ran off when it saw me, but the orange one stayed. This would be their first time eating kibble and the orange baby seems to really like it!

It was also brave enough – or hungry enough! – to stay eating after Mom left.

After finishing my rounds outside, I was just about to settle at the computer to go over the trail cam files when I saw movement out in the garden.

It was a groundhog, making its way towards the beds.

When I saw it stop and start going after some onions, I dashed out to chase it away. (Checking later, it did not eat any of the onions, but when I was weeding the carrots in the next bed earlier, I’d noticed some of the greens had been nibbled on. Deer, I thought, but maybe not? What do groundhogs eat, anyway?)

As I was making noise to chase the groundhog away from the beds, I saw it go under the pile of branched I’d pruned from the nearby trees. A pile we should have moved long ago. :-/

So I went over to the pile and shook the branches to chase it out.

Nothing.

Moved around to get at some other branches.

Nothing.

Mover around and…

What on earth is that?

Well, that explains why it wasn’t running out from under the branch pile. It has a den under there!

Those larger branches on the left? I’d put those there not very long ago. They had been set aside for potential use, but when I needed to mow around the pile, I moved them on top. That hole was not there when I did it, which means it was dug some time within the last week or so.

I was able to stick my phone through the branches to try and get a better picture.

That is a pretty big hole! But then, so was the groundhog.

I knew there had to be dens around somewhere, and suspect there is at least one under the big branch pile in the outer yard, but this is the first one we’ve actually seen.

I find myself looking at all that sand and gravel piled up outside the opening. I know the top soil isn’t very deep, but this really shows what our ground is like under it.

Well, I guess this is a good incentive to finally move that branch pile! Then to see what we can do to persuade the groundhog to find somewhere else to live. Preferably not in the yard at all!

The Re-Farmer

Early birthday gifts, and working on the kibble house

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Today, we were able to make an unexpected trip to do some shopping, thanks to my husband’s disability payment coming in early. Top of the list was to replace our broken vacuum cleaner! :-D

Of course, with making a trip to the city, even if it’s the smaller, closer one, we were going to take advantage of it and get other things we need.

I’m happy to say that we not only found a new vacuum – marketed as being particularly good for pet hair – we happened to catch a sale and got it at half the price I’d budgeted for!

We were also able to pick up more mesh for the squash tunnel. They didn’t have the same type we’d used before in stock, so we got more chicken wire. I don’t think the squash and melons care what shape the mesh they’re climbing is. ;-)

Another one of the things I really needed to get was a new pair of work shoes. Not only have I worn my old ones out to the point they’re falling apart, but the cats have discovered how to take the insoles out and have been tearing them apart!

Considering the sorts of things I’ve been doing for the past while, I also wanted to get steel toed shoes.

Much to may amazement, the very first pair that I tried on was perfect! I’d actually looked at casual shoes first – in the men’s section, because women’s shoes don’t fit my feet – hoping to get a pair of slip ons. I normally get a men’s size 9, triple wide, but I couldn’t find any wide ones. I couldn’t even get my toes into a size 11! So I wasn’t holding out much hope with the work shoes. Particularly since none of the boxes were marked as wide. So getting it right on the very first pair, and for them to be so incredibly comfortable, was like Christmas!

Then when we went to pay for our stuff, my daughter stole the box and bought them for me for my birthday. :-D

No, it’s not my birthday. It’s not even my birth month, yet. But that’s how we do things. :-D

I also got myself an early birthday present.

A 10′ x 10′ canopy tent, to replace the one that broke last year. That one was so handy when we were painting the picnic table, and didn’t have to worry about it getting rained on or whatever, I really wanted to get another. It’s just a Walmart cheapie, but we’ve had a couple of them in the past, leaving them behind when we moved. According to the box, they’ve improved the design, and added a feature to make it easier to set up with just one person.

This evening, I set it up.

And promptly discovered a problem with one of the new features.

This handle in the middle is made so that, once you have the canopy on and the legs set to the height you want, all you need to do is push up on it and it will open fully and lock in place.

Have I mentioned that I’m short?

I’m not THAT short, but still…

I had the legs at the lowest level, yet when I pushed up on the handle, I couldn’t get it far enough to lock in place. Not only that, but the entire tent would start lifting, instead! :-D I did eventually get it, of course, but I had to jump to do it.

I suspect this was designed with the average height male in mind! :-D

But I got it, and that’s the important part!

Which means we can now paint the kibble house. :-)

There is plenty of space for it! :-)

Nutmeg seems distressed that the floor is gone! :-D

You can see part of the floor in the background.

The two sections of the floor boards got a thorough scrubbing to take off many months of muddy paw prints! :-D

The rest of the kibble house got scrubbed inside and out, including the muddy bottoms of the legs.

Once it’s dry, it’ll be ready for painting.

By the end of the day, my new shoes got a pretty decent workout!

I’m really glad to have gotten the steel toed shoes. Very handy, just in case I almost, *ahem* sort of, just about, *cough* maybe, could have dropped a kibble house on them.

Almost.

I caught it in time.

:-D

The Re-Farmer

Pretty in Purple and Pink

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I had been wondering about our variety of purple peas not blooming yet, while the green peas that were planted later now have quite a lot of flowers. Earlier today, someone on one of the local gardening groups I’m on had posted a photo of her purple peas that just started to bloom, so that was reassuring.

Then, while doing the evening watering, my daughters spotted our first purple pea flower!

Aren’t those colours amazing? Wow!

I am so looking forward to how these turn out!

The Re-Farmer

Growing things

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When we got that one really cold night in late May, most things survived (the new mulberry sapling, sadly, did not) just fine. However, anything that was budding lost their flowers. Including almost all of the lilacs.

This Korean lilac usually blooms after the common lilac, but with the warmth we’d had earlier in May, it was starting to bud, too. This morning, I found this single spray of flowers blooming on it. It does look like it may be putting out more buds, though. We won’t get the mass of tiny flowers that is usual for this lilac this year, but there will be some, at least.

Then there’s this poor mock orange, by the laundry platform. February’s deep freeze had already decimated it. More of it has died off since the May frost. Yet this thing is amazingly resilient, and it now blooming!

I want to transplant this to a more protected location, once we figure out where that is. There is another on the East side of the house that didn’t get as damaged by the May frost, however it isn’t thriving there, either. Too dry against the house, and sunlight only in the morning. It is also starting to bloom, but like its leaves, the flowers are much smaller. We can water it regularly, but there isn’t much we can do about the lack of sunlight, so I figure that one will get transplanted, too, at some point.

The little furry flowers are growing, too! (The fourth one was playing the the bushes, so I couldn’t get a photo of it.)

When I put food out in the mornings, Butterscotch is at the kibble house along with the other yard cats, but these guys are learning to come out to their own food and water in the mornings now, too.

At the squash tunnel, I found our first Pixie melon flower!

We definitively need to get more mesh soon for that last section of the tunnel. The Halona melons are getting tall enough that we’ll need to start training them up the tunnel walls, in a very short while.

These are in the carrot bed in the old kitchen garden. They are growing where the white kohlrabi was planted. I’m hoping that’s what they are, and not just some similar looking plant of my mother’s, pushing its way through! :-D This little garden always had a variety of things growing in it, but mostly flowers. Very determined flowers! When we first cleaned out this garden, then laid down cardboard and layers of straw, leaf litter and grass clippings, many still managed to push their way through. In digging out by the house to make the path, then building the beds we planted in this year, during which I removed many, many roots, you’d think that would have set them back, but no. They’re pushing their way through soil paths, the straw paths, and even the deeper soil of the new beds. It would be rather impressive, if they were not so invasive, and crowding out our vegetables!

Still, it’s nice to see all the growing things. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden bed prep, and dealing with the heat

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The weather forecast said that we would be cooler today.

They lied.

When I did my morning rounds, it was already above 20C/68F, and we easily hit 28C/82F this afternoon, with a humidex above 30C/86F. Which meant that we spent as much of the day indoors, out of the heat, as we could. Thankfully, the way things are oriented, we can keep certain windows open to allow a cross breeze without heating the house up.

The cats appreciate that.

Yes, we leave the little step ladder at the door, just so they can look out the window! It was so funny to watch these to, with their matching positions, heads turning and tail tips twitching, in unison! Hard to believe that little Layendecker is now just as big as Cheddar! With the smaller cats, three of them can fit up there, but these big boys fill up the whole stop step! :-D

I did have to make a run into town, as we ran out of kibble for the outside cats. While I was there, I picked up some ingredients for my daughters. Yesterday, they finished off one of the giant bowls of spinach to make a spinach soup.

We’d already finished off one giant bowl, mostly through dehydrating (using the screens in the sun room didn’t work, so we did batches in the oven). When making the soup, that huge bowl cooked down to a remarkable small amount in the stock pot! :-D With my trip into town, the girls have enough to make a huge batch of baked spinach dip, which we plan to enjoy while watching watching Sherlock Holmes, with Jeremy Brett and David Burke.

It’s going to be a late one, though. We didn’t get back from working on the garden until past 10pm. I had tried going out a bit earlier to start prepping the spinach beds to plant in again, but those beds are in full sun. I wasn’t interested in getting heat stroke! It didn’t get cool enough to head out again until past 8:30pm.

The girls did the evening watering while I worked on the beds.

The logs were added after we’d started making the beds, so once I’d cleared away the remains of the spinach plants and the weeds, I took advantage of the situation to level the beds out, and create a bit of a ridge around the edges, to help keep the water from draining down the sides – and taking the soil with it. I used a garden fork to loosen the soil, to more easily pull the roots out. I was most pleased with how keep the tines could go, without any sort of resistance. This bed would handle root vegetables very well!

I had “help” while I was working.

Nutmeg could not get enough attention! :-) While I was pulling out roots and weeds, he kept getting under me, demanding pets, and rolling around in the freshly turned soil, sometimes rolling right off the edge of the garden bed – just like his brother does on our beds, indoors! Unfortunately, when I was using the garden fork, he had a terrible habit of suddenly lunging at the fork to “catch” it, even as I was stabbing it into the soil.

This bed was surprisingly different from the first one. When pushing the fork into the soil, I would quickly go through the raised part of the bed – about 8 inches – then hit solid. I wasn’t hitting rocks. Just rock hard soil! The last bed was much the same, though not as bad as this one. There is a difference between them. The first bed I worked on had been a squash bed, mulched with straw, last year. These two beds were a last minute change. When I’d prepped the area last fall, I’d made three smaller beds oriented East-West, where three pumpkin hills had been. This spring, I decided to make these two larger beds, oriented North-South. The soil beneath would be a mix of soil that had been turned in the fall, and walking paths. It’s remarkable what a difference that one season of use the previous year has made in the soil of that first bed.

All three beds are now prepared and ready for planting! We will be planting lettuces in succession along one side of each bed.

Since the radishes we interplanted with the corn all disappeared, and I ended up picking up more. Three different varieties to try, though I couldn’t find a daikon type that my daughter likes. They are fast maturing, so we should be able to grow some radishes, and still be able to grow more spinach in these beds for a fall crop.

We’re not actually fans of radishes in general, so we won’t be planting many. I do want to leave some to fully mature. I’ve read that radish pods are very tasty, but it’s not something available in stores, and I’d like to try them. From what I’ve read in the past, radishes used to be grown for their pods, not their roots, and the pods can be canned as well. It should be an interesting experiment. I’m still disappointed that none of the ones we planted earlier survived, even though they did germinate so quickly. I had specially ordered those varieties for my daughter. :-(

We’ll just have to try them again, next year!

Well my other daughter had just swung by to inform me that the baked spinach dip is ready! I am really looking forward to it! :-)

The Re-Farmer

New babies!

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While heading out to start the evening watering, I spotted Butterscotch’s babies coming out to play.

Or should I say, my daughter spotted them. I’d gone out to help my mother with errands, then did a few of my own, so I pulled up to the house to unload the car. My daughter later parked it for me, and spotted them while returning to the house. She plunked herself down on the ground with a long stick to wiggle at them, and they were very interested! :-D Not enough to come close, though, but she’s working on it!

While we were finishing up the evening watering, I happened to see movement in the junk pile by the chain link fence.

Rosencrantz had brought her babies!

I didn’t dare get too close, so zooming in with my phone was the best I could do.

It looks like she only has the two of them. They are so adorable! I don’t know where she has her “nest”, other than it was not in the junk pile, so I am glad that she is starting to bring them closer to the house.

So this is now two litters accounted for. I know Junk Pile cat has had a litter, and from the looks of her teats, I’d say she has a litter of six. Until she starts bringing them to the yard, we won’t know if she has six surviving kittens. There’s also Ghost Baby, who is too feral for us to even know if she’s female. We’re just assuming she is, and that there is another litter somewhere for us to discover.

I suspect we will be finding out fairly soon!

The Re-Farmer