Little bitty sprooooots actually showed up a couple of days ago, but they were so tiny, I didn’t bother trying to take a picture through the glass of the tank.
So far, only the Spoon tomatoes have started to show, not the Mosaic mix, though some of the bunching onions emerged even earlier.
I unpacked the second light for the tank – this was the one that originally came with the tank kit – and set it over the red solo cups. It’s sitting partly on the wood of the mesh frames, to better light up the inside of the cups. That wood is way too wide, really, but it’s what I had available.
Sometimes, I will also put another light fixture on the tank covers, too. While it does have a full spectrum bulb in it, it’s more because it’s an incandescent bulb, which provides a bit of heat. The onions don’t need it as much, but from everything I’ve been reading, tomato seedlings need more warmth.
I look forward to when things warm up and we can start moving seedlings to the sun room (after Ginger has completed his convalescence in there!). By then, the tomatoes and, later, squash seedlings will get all the heat they need in there!
I’m really glad we were able to plug power back into the cat’s house, when we couldn’t do it through the sun room any more. Temperatures have dropped, and while we are reaching above freezing during the day, it’s getting quite a bit colder overnight.
Since it’s too cold to continue with the clean up, when I was finishing my morning rounds, I decided to move the poles closer to the house and the garden area, so they will be handy when it’s time to start building the trellises and supports.
This gave me the opportunity to somewhat sort them by size. While I deliberately chose our winter squash to be smaller, shorter season, varieties, they will still need very sturdy supports, as will the gourds. While all of these will be temporary, they still need to be strong enough to hold a fair bit of way, and sturdy enough to not blow over in high winds.
We haven’t even decided on what form these supports will take, yet! But at least we’ll have ample materials, and can figure things out as we go.
Yesterday evening, I decided to try and introduce one of the inside cats to Ginger. I chose our mama cat, who moved out here with us, as she has been so incredibly maternal with all the new additions.
Well… that didn’t quite work out. She’s never been in the sun room before. At least not for more than a couple of moments, a year or two ago. So she was pretty nervous and more interested in exploring the room.
Ginger, however, was missing.
I couldn’t find him anywhere!
Eventually, I heard a little mew and he emerged from behind a storage bin.
Without his surgical shirt.
I’m not happy that he squeezed back there. We very deliberately put stuff in front of the window, because the inner pane had cracked last winter. This winter, it cracked even more, and pieces of glass have started to fall off. We can’t do anything about it until things are warm and dry enough that we can empty the sun room.
(Also, I now think that the large windows in the barn are more of what was used to build the sun room.)
I suspect he squeezed into there in his efforts to get the surgical shirt off. We still haven’t found it, so it’s likely somewhere in the corner, behind all the stuff we shoved in to keep cats out of there. :-/
As for the new cat in the room, Ginger was utterly indifferent to her.
When I picked him up, he at first tried to burrow his face into my elbow, but then realized I wasn’t going to try and give him any medication, so he settled right in and started purring. Loudly!
I sat with him in my arms like this for way too long! My husband even came by to rescue the mama cat, who wanted back into the house, and bring me my phone. It was 10C/50F in the sun room, which is fine for a bit, but gets pretty chilly after a while! When I finally had to go back in, I put him under the heat bulb, and he settled right back down again. :-)
I’m glad we had that extra heat bulb. This morning, it was -8C/18F outside, with a wind chill of -18C/0F. It was much warmer in the sun room, of course, but that heat bulb over his little nest is making a big difference.
He was quite happy to see me in the morning – though not so happy when my daughter and I gave him his medications! Once we were done, though, he settled into her arms, and she was the one stuck on the bench, being cuddled, this time! :-D
Ginger was one of the friendlier of the outside cats. He let us pet him more often than his brother, Nutmeg, who would let us pet him one in a while. (His brother, Creamsicle Jr. won’t come near us.) We could sometimes pick up Ginger, but that was pretty rare, and he wouldn’t stay up for long. So for him to actively burrow into our arms for cuddles is a HUGE difference from before his injury!
I think he will adapt to the indoor life pretty well.
Adapting to all the other cats… that might take a bit more time!
Every now and then, when I’m checking the files from the trail cameras, I see some interesting things. Like this.
I actually recognize both the truck and the trap, having seen them at the dump a while ago. That’s a bear trap.
At the dump, I can understand, but I do wonder why one would be needed here! Yes, I’ve seen black bears around (not this year, yet), but it’s unusual for them to become a problem outside of places like landfills.
I like this image better.
It’s uncommon to actually catch the deer in the trail cams, where they are now. They usually jump the fences on the other side of the cameras. They don’t like to jump the gate at all. This deer went through the fence, slipping through the two bottom stands of barbed wire on the left, where it gets dark. There’s a low area there to drain run off to the ditch.
In the next few files, I could see another deer, crossing the driveway on the far side of the gate, to join this one. It was barely visible in the infrared flash, though.
Our plans include putting a little person gate where the wheel is, and replacing the barbed wire with boards or poles. I’ve unplugged the lights, because so many of the bulbs are out, and entire strings are dead. When we have the barbed wire replaced, I want to mount new strings of lights underneath, where they will be better protected from the elements, and last longer. Yes, they are outdoor lights, but I can see rust on them, next to burnt out bulbs. :-/
If the deer won’t jump the gate and prefer to slip through the barbed wire, I wonder how they will handle it when we get around to replacing the barbed wire?
It started to snow lightly last night, and is still snowing now!
Nutmeg, Creamsicle Jr. and their mom, Butterscotch
From what I can see on the weather radar, the heavier snow passed just south of us, and we will continue to have snow for at least a few more hours.
Which makes me extra happy to have gotten the clean up in the trees done, yesterday. It looked so good, as I walked by while doing my morning rounds! It’s going to look so much better, when it’s finally done. :-)
A nice, light snowfall and a slow melt is just what we need right now. The temperatures are hovering around freezing, and we’ll be getting just a touch warmer. That moisture should stay in the ground, where we need it.
In other things, we had a cat disaster this morning.
A crashing noise in my husband’s room had us running. (Well… hobbling. None of us can run anymore. LOL) He has an extra comforter on the top of his wardrobe, near a window, that the cats love to hang out on. Somehow, that had gotten knocked off.
That was not the disaster.
The disaster was it hitting my husband’s incense bowl on the way down, knocking it over his computer, filling it with fine sand and ashes. And everything else in the area, of course, but the computer was the only thing at risk.
My husband spent the last couple of hours, carefully dismantling the computer, blowing out all the sand and dust, then putting it back together again.
Just moments ago, he let me know that it is working again.
*phew*
Disaster averted, I guess!
He’s not too happy with the cats right now. It’s not the first time they knocked the bowl down. At least last time, it was just a mess to clean up, though the handle on the lid did break. It’s a small, hand thrown pottery bowl I got from a very skilled and talented potter in the city we moved away from, so it’s not something that can be easily replaced. :-(
I visited Ginger this morning, while starting my morning rounds and before my daughter came over with his medications and the new surgical shirt.
He enjoyed the visiting part, at least! I even managed to get several usable pictures.
Doesn’t he look completely malevolent? :-D He’s actually really enjoying the scritches.
Then he started rolling around, and managed to give me a good view of both surgical sites.
I really wasn’t that interested in the one at his nethers, to be honest, but hey; it needs to be checked, too!
Is it time to groom, or time to eat? He tried to do both at the same time. :-D
When my daughter came in with the meds, I picked him up to hold him. He knew exactly what was coming, and tried hiding his face in my arm! He’s actually really good about taking them, even if he fights us off and sometimes projectile spits a pill halfway across the room. We managed to get him medicated. He seemed very offended by the whole process when we put him down.
He was even more offended when we got the surgical shirt on him.
After we finished tying it off, he scuttled over to this spot and flumped down like a sausage. Then stayed there. He was not at all happy with us!!
My daughter stayed with him while I finished my rounds, and when she left, he’d found a different spot to flump down like a sausage.
The shirt came with what looks like a feminine hygiene product to stick to the inside over the surgical site. We used it, though about half of the incision is actually higher than the neck line on the shirt. That’s not the part we’re concerned about, since it’s the lower part that gets the brunt of it when he starts rolling. The very end of the incision has a bit of a space after the sutures end, and it looked like there was the tiniest bit of blood near the wound. It was dry, but I’m more comfortable with having it covered now. Even if he isn’t!
He would probably be just fine without it, but I hope we can leave it on him for at least a few days.
Poor baby is torn between excited to see us and craving attention, and ticked off at us for making him take medications and wear clothing! :-D
I was very happy to see the battery charged up fast enough that I could use it again tonight. I quickly trimmed the poles I’d left earlier and moved them out, then got started. Both my daughters were able to join me this time, so I got to focus on cutting and trimming, while they cleared away the trimmed branches and hauled away the poles.
Here is the before and after.
I was also able to take out some of the smaller dead trees, though one had to be cut pretty high up, where the 4 inch bar could get through. Another didn’t even need cutting; once I’d cleared around it, I could just push it over!
After about half an hour of almost continual cutting, the battery started to die. I probably could have gotten a few more cuts out of it, but I helped the girls finish cleaning up, instead.
This is a very good start in materials to build with!
We then spent some time talking about what sort of trellises and arches to build (though I suppose “pergola” would be the word to use) and walking through the garden area to think about how we want to work things out. The strongest, heaviest poles will be used to support the winter squash, and for those, we were thinking of some sort of A frame tall enough for us to walk under.
Which, I admit, doesn’t have to be that tall. ;-)
Then we wandered around, looking at where we planted the bulbs and corms last fall. We have no idea if they survived the deep freeze we had last month. My bigger concern is how dry everything is. You’re not supposed to have to water these. Especially the tulips. But we’ve had so little snow this past winter! We’re supposed to get a little big of snow on Friday or Saturday, but even if it reaches us here, the amount of precipitation expected would be pretty negligible. It’s not unusual to have one last blizzard in April, which would actually be very beneficial, as far as precipitation goes. I’d rather have snow right now, instead of rain, as the ground it still so frozen, rain would wash away to the ditches, rather than watering the soil.
But I digress.
It was so great to finally get outside and start doing yard work! I was really missing it. :-) And our new baby chainsaw is turning out to be an awesome tool!
It was a lovely day today, with the temperature at a glorious 3C/37F. With things still on track for our garden plans, I figured this was a good day to start some clean up and gather the materials that will be used to build trellises, etc.
This meant giving our new baby chainsaw (otherwise known as a cordless pruner, but that’s boring) its first workout, as I took down some of the little poplars along the south fence line of the spruce grove.
I’m just really excited to be able to do this work in March! I think the earliest I’ve ever been able to start this sort of work since we’ve moved here, has been in May.
Before starting, I took the time to clear out a number of branches that fell over the winter. In the process, I found this old bird’s nest on the ground. I left it there. :-)
Here are the before and after pictures. I’m afraid I didn’t match up my positioning very well! (click on the pictures to see them better)
The larger tree lying on the ground on the left came down last fall, and there’s another hung up in the brush behind it that has been there since before we moved in. The further into the grove we go, the more downed trees and branches there are. Clearing those, and other fire hazards, out is a major goal.
When we had a trail cam on a tree instead of a post, I used to trudge down that foot path, every morning, to switch out the memory card. This area has already seen a fair bit of clean up since we first moved here. The space to the left of the foot path has self-seeding flowers. I figure it would be good to get this done before they start growing again. Once they’re in full bloom, it’s a gorgeous mix of purple and green, almost all the way down.
In the distance of the after picture, you can see several poplars lying on the ground. I was trimming branches off of them when the battery died. I’ve left them there until I can come back to finish the trimming.
Because I goofed on my positioning, the elm tree in the foreground of the second picture is hiding where I cleared out some things between the two big poplars.
From the time it took me to take the before pictures, to the time it took for the battery to run out (which includes the time taken to clear out dead branches first, was only about 50 minutes. In that short time, I did as much as would have taken me at least twice that amount of time, with hand tools. Even using the reciprocating saw took longer.
These are the trimmed poles that will be used for building supports in our various garden beds. There will be quite a bit more, by the time I’m done clearing this area.
That baby chain saw made the job SO much faster and easier! And it was surprisingly quiet, and downright fun to use! I can certainly see why these things are selling out so quickly. The only down side is that the little bitty battery doesn’t last very long. I’d estimate about half an hour of cutting time in total. So having a second battery is going to be a necessity, and with the work I am expecting to do over the next few months, a third certainly won’t be overkill!
I still have to leave some of the larger stumplings to go back and cut to ground level later, with a larger cutting tool. Not as many as I’d expected to, though.
I’m now eagerly awaiting the battery charge, in hopes that I’ll be able to take it out again this evening! :-D Mind you, I could go out with manual tools, if I really wanted to, but they’re stored in the sun room with Ginger, so I’ll wait for the charger.
We can check on him, without disturbing him, through the bathroom window at any time. This morning, we forgot to unplug the heater bulb, and my husband found him basking under it! As the sun room warmed up during the day, however, he moved to follow the sun spots.
This morning, I went ahead of my daughter to visit with Ginger, so I could first give the outside cats some warm water.
There was a slight delay on that.
Since we took the extension cord that was providing power to the cat house, so it wouldn’t be in Ginger’s way, the heated water bowl is no longer heated. And it got chilly last night!
So I decided to quickly pop into the sun room to give Ginger some warm water first, and the little bugger actually managed to get outside!! Thankfully, he didn’t get too far, and I was able to get him back into the sun room. His food bowl was empty, so I topped that up to tempt him away from the door.
We can give him normal amounts of food and water now, too.
My daughter joined me with his medications and we took care of that, then she stayed with him to make sure he didn’t run outside while I fed the critters, returned the containers, and got her to pass me one of the 100ft extension cords, before she could finally close up the outside doors to the sun room and safely leave.
I then plugged the 100ft extension cord to the outlet on the side of the house, ran it across the entry, making sure it was tucked under the door, and plugged in the cat house.
We shouldn’t need to keep power into here for much longer!
That done, I quickly finished my rounds, then headed into town. We decided to go ahead and buy a surgical shirt for Ginger, rather than make one.
Which is when things got weird.
When I opened the door, I was immediately greeted by a dog in the doorway. His two humans were just finishing up and on their way out, so I held the door for them to come out.
The dog insisted on more pets, so that took a little while.
Which is when one of the staff came over. She had recognized me and was all “this is the person I was telling you about! The one with the poster…” They still have posters with the kittens we have for adoption on there. The woman held up a paper where I could see a hand drawn map, saying “we were just on our way over there!”
Now, the first thing that came to mind is, who at the clinic knew where we lived enough to draw a map?
The next thing to come to mind was, having people suddenly show up at our gate might not work out too well. So I quickly suggested they wait until I was done, then they could follow me, which they agreed to do. As soon as I was done getting the surgical shirt, I sent a quick message to the family, letting me know someone would be following me to look at cats to adopt. I didn’t have time to tell them any more than that!
So off we went, with them following me, until we reached the gravel road. It’s incredibly dusty, as well as lots of rocks showing through the gravel, so I drove slower than usual. Even so, I noticed after a while, that they didn’t seem to be following me anymore.
I stopped on the side of the road and waited for the dust to settle and, sure enough, they were well behind, and looked like they were in the process of turning around.
??
They seemed to see that I had stopped and starting heading my way. They caught up to me and we stopped alongside each other to talk.
Her first comment was, “I think I’m following the wrong person!” They thought they were going to somewhere in town, to the humane society. That’s where their hand drawn map was for.
What we eventually worked out is that, while at the clinic, the person at the counter had told them about us having cats to adopt, as well as the humane society. I mentioned we’d never been able to get through to the humane society, and she said they’d told her that at the clinic! So it looks like they thought the staff member was telling them I was with the humane society. After confirming that yes, we do have fixed female cats up for adoption, they continued to follow along.
The gentleman was older and not up to getting out of the vehicle, so I quickly went in to talk to whatever daughter was around. Susan was near the door, so I took her out while my daughter went looking for Two Face.
Susan hasn’t been outside since she’s been fixed, other than one very brief escape attempt in the winter.
She really wanted to be outside! I ended up having to put her down, hoping she would be too nervous to go far, but nope. She was ready to explore! I managed to catch her again, but had to bring her inside at that point.
My daughter had Two Face, so I grabbed her and headed for the door.
The woman saw us through the window and her immediately response was, “oh, I like her!!” One look at that beautiful face, and she was in love.
Two Face was also a lot calmer, and we were able to bring her to the car for the gentleman to see her.
The main problem was, they had their dog in the back. I have no doubt the dog would have been fine, but Two Face would probably be too nervous.
We spoke for a while, and figured things out. Two Face is due for her annual shots, and their dog has to go back to the clinic in three weeks. They’ll make an appointment for both of them, then call us to let us know when that will be. They have a cage they can put Two Face in, so they’ll come here first, with the cage, then take her to the vet for her shots. Since the clinic has Two Face on file, they can transfer her file to them at the same time, and they will take her home from there.
Unless something happens in the between now and then, Two Face will finally be adopted out!
It was really weird, but it worked out in the end!
