Author: Re-Farmer

This and that

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A whole bunch of little things happening today.

The kitties were happy to see me this morning! :-D

I did find the missing food container that had been in the entry to the cat house. It is, indeed, still in the cat house, but somehow got dragged well into the main space, in an area where I could only see if when the sun was shining through the window in the entry! LOL

I got one side of the bird feeder support painted.

Then it started to rain and I tucked it into the sun room. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to do the other side today.

While that was drying, I started to work on trimming the pieces from the sun room door frame so we can finally hand the replacement door straight. I measured how much space I had, taking into account space needed around the door itself. The piece across the top would be an easy one, but the side piece needs to have a half inch difference between the top and bottom.

I quickly discovered some problems.

I was looking forward to using the table saw for this, only to discover the blade isn’t large enough to cut through. It would only reach half the thickness of the wood. I went hunting in the basement and the garage and did find more blades, but none larger.

I figured I would use the circular saw, instead. I started with the short, top piece, but it’s only 2 1/2 inches wide. I had my daughter try to help by holding it steady on the saw horses, but we discovered that the circular saw couldn’t cut all the way through, either. ??? Well, there’s the reciprocating saw. The blade on that was more than long enough. Except we don’t have clamps large enough to hold the piece in place, and it vibrates so much, there was no way it could be held steady by hand.

Which left using a hand saw.

At which point I could really feel how hard the hardwood is! It took forever to saw the half-inch I needed to remove.

There is no way the side piece can be cut by hand. It’s just too awkward, it’s several times longer than the top piece, and the cut that needs to be made is a very gradual angle. I was able to use the chalk line to mark a guideline to follow, but it would be difficult enough using power tools, never mind by hand!

I might just have to go and pick up some larger clamps, so I can use the reciprocating saw. I was looking at circular saw blades while at the hardware store yesterday, and they had almost no inventory, so I can’t even just buy a larger blade for the table saw.

I’ll make that decision, tomorrow.

So we moved on to other things. Like deciding to use up all the carrots we harvested to make one giant pot of carrot soup.

With the beets, too, since there are so few of them.

As I write this, they are all being roasted in the oven, and the girls are working on the other preparations. We got about 6 pounds of carrots (and maybe half a pound of that is beets! LOL), so it’ll be a triple recipe. We’ve never made carrot soup before. It should be very interesting in appearance, with all the colours in there. The carrots includes purple, white, yellow, and orange, while the beets include red and white, deep red and gold. I figure we’ll get … purplish grey. LOL

The vegetables were all still on the metal mesh “door” in the old kitchen, which is about as cold as a refrigerator these days. Once they were trimmed and removed, I took the time to reinforce the metal mesh. Some of the staples were already popped out. :-(

I’d found some washers in the garage a while back, large enough to reinforce the mesh, but the holes in the washers were too large for wood screws. So I got some smaller washers that would hold the screws.

This is on the support bar across the middle, which had lost the most staples.

Doing the sides was a bit different. The mesh is slightly off center, so on one side, I had plenty of mesh to work with, while on the other…

… there was about half the amount to work with. It worked, though. The mesh feels very secure. Even if the staples somehow end up coming out, the mesh will stay in place. It is now strong enough to use as a soil or compost sifter, if we want.

For now, though, it’s tucked away until we need it next year. :-)

Now to go see how things are going with that carrot and beet soup…

:-)

The Re-Farmer

Did it work?

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This afternoon, the girls and I did a bit of winterizing around the house by laying sheets of foam insulation around the base of the house and covering the septic tank, and the pipes to the house, with straw. The only part that is left to do is around the tap at the back of the house. There is still a hose attached, and we’ll likely be using both front and back hoses for a while longer. Once those are put away and we shut the water off from the inside, we’ll cover it with more pieces of foam insulation. We’re doing this quite a bit earlier than last year. There was already snow on the ground then!

Once that was done, one of my daughters and I decided it was time to take down a branch of the tree in front of the kitchen window. This is the branch the tech from our internet provider singled out as the last possible thing that might be preventing our secondary internet account from having any signal at all to its satellite dish. I can’t say that I was hopeful. There are far fewer leaves left on the branch, yet the signal to our primary account has been worse than ever.

Still, the wasps are gone, so it was time to give it a go.

We considered our options and decided to use the extended pole pruning saw to take the branch down, rather than climb up a step ladder and use something else. We figured that, this way, we could more easily jump out of the way if the branch went in an odd direction as it fell.

We also chose to cut it further out, so that the cats will still have their perching branch. They like to sit on it and watch us through the kitchen window! :-)

It was a pretty large branch, so rather than try and manhandle the whole thing, I used the reciprocating saw to break it down to smaller pieces. The thin, leafy branches went to the chipping pile in the outer yard. The lengths of the “trunk” were big enough, we lay them out around one side of the bed the white lilacs are in. We only needed to grab one more piece from another large branch we had taken down from the tree near the gate to completely line one side, and curve around the end.

Then, because I was able to find some this summer, my daughter sprayed the cut end with pruning paint.

At some point, we are going to take this tree out completely but, until then, I’d really like to get the branch hanging over the roof removed. There’s no way for us to take it down without it falling on the roof. We just don’t have the equipment to take it down safely in pieces.

So it will wait. It seems to be quite strong and unlikely to come down in a storm, but then, so did the branches on this tree that have come down in storms!

Once we were done and everything was cleaned up, we went inside to see if we could notice a difference in our signal with the primary account.

We had no internet.

Nothing.

Zero.

Zilch!!!

After doing the usual troubleshooting, there was still nothing.

So my husband started phoning our internet provider. After several calls that went straight to a busy signal, rather than their usual recorded messages to direct calls, we figured we were not the only ones having issues! My husband tried again about an hour or two later, and this time it went straight to a recording saying they were getting an unusually high volume of calls and were not able to answer.

Eventually, though, we did get our internet back!

Once we did, one of my daughters tested it out by trying to log into a particular game where our intermittent signal was giving all sorts of problems. She was actually able to log in first try – and was even able to switch servers in the game! Now, this could just mean we are having a particularly good night. It could mean taking down the branch made a difference. Or it could mean that, in fixing whatever shut down our IPs service completely, they also fixed whatever problem was causing our intermittent service.

One thing I’ve noticed in preparing to write this post, though; WordPress seems to be loading better now! I have been having endless problems embedding images into posts, and this time, they worked just fine. I still had tabs that didn’t want to load, but even those were able to finally load, much faster than usual.

Tomorrow, my husband will call our IP to get the suspension on the secondary account removed, and we will see if we finally get a signal. If there is still no signal to that dish, there’s nothing else here that would be causing the problem. For all we tried to ration our internet usage, we still went over last month, and the overage fees per gig are so high, the final bill was higher on one account, than the cost of both accounts together!

Until then, I’m just happy to have any internet at all, again!

The Re-Farmer

It wasn’t supposed to rain today

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All the forecasts showed the rains would be passed by this morning. Instead, we’ve got three large systems heading over us.

Which meant the cat food containers I put by the cat house were full of water.

At least all the food that was in them was gone, first.

I dragged over the saw horses and made them a quick shelter.

I reached into the cat house to grab the container in there to fill, but it was gone. Not just pushed back, almost out of reach, as I’ve found it before. Nope. Completely gone!

There was another container that I’d had that disappeared. I figured it got pushed under the cat house, but with this one completely gone, now I wonder!

The girls heard skunks fighting last night. I wonder if they could have dragged them off? Is that a thing skunks do?

Hopefully, the rain will be done by this afternoon, when we’re supposed to have quite pleasant temperatures. We were going to put the sheets of insulation around the bottom of the house today, as well as cover the septic tank for the winter, but we’ll see how wet it still is.

Well, now… The phone rang while I was writing this. My mother called to let me know she found a note slipped under her door, saying “your daughter has to wear a mask.” When I brought up medical exemptions, and that she shouldn’t be wearing one, either, she told me that they don’t understand that. She doesn’t want trouble, so she wears one and just pulls it away from her face, or under her neck, when she can’t breathe.

*sigh*

That is a problem to deal with another time! For now, I need to head to town to pick up a prescription refill for my husband, at the pharmacy where they are more sane about things like this!

The Re-Farmer

Getting a little closer, and… another one

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I have been using the food and water bowls outside to slowly get the little kittens used to coming to the cat house, where they will hopefully get curious enough to go inside and discover how nice and dry and warm it is in there.

There had been quite a crowd at the food bowls earlier, but they ran off as I walked around. There had been a couple of Butterscotch’s kittens there, though the others were hanging around near the door to the house, where one of the containers had been for the past week or so.

Nostrildamus is comfortable enough with me to not run off. Normally, Little Braveheart would be there, too, but…

I’ll get to that in a bit.

Yesterday, I was going to take a break from digging garden beds. Partly because I still haven’t decided if I want to make a third one, and partly because it feels like I’ve pulled all the muscles in the backs of my legs. Nothing major, but I figured a couple of days rest would be a good idea.

Which was good timing, because I got a call from my mother, asking if I could drive her for groceries. It was a bit chilly to walk.

So I headed out in the afternoon and did that. I’d forgotten that her municipality is under a mask mandate now. Even in the lobby of where my mother lives, they are supposed to wear masks. Which is so bizarre and arbitrary. Especially considering how low the numbers are right now. But, the goal posts have been moved again, and masks are now the thing.

The problem is, my mother shouldn’t be wearing a mask. She has long been complaining about breathing problems, and we haven’t been able to track down why. I tried to talk to her about it, when she asked if I had one and I told her I can’t wear masks, but it was not a conversation she could handle. She put it on before we left, leaving it under her nose, but as we were driving, I could really hear her struggling to breath. Meanwhile, no one batted an eye at my not wearing one. *sigh*

Unfortunately, my mother was in “fine form” this time. While chatting before we left, I tried showing her some pictures of the garlic beds I was working on, and she became incredibly angry. I shouldn’t be doing any of this, because it should be plowed or tilled. She saw the straw layer and, even as I tried to say I’d added compost first and what I was doing, she kept cutting me off and asking why there was straw under there. Then she got mad about the wood walkways, and said I need to take those out and plant things there, because it was a waste of space. Because apparently, there shouldn’t be room to walk in a garden. ??

That was just the start of things. After shopping, she wanted to go to a restaurant for a quick bite, and that got cut off short when my not living the way she wanted turned into a racist rant (my husband is Metis).

It was not a good time.

When I got home, the girls had the van ready and filled with stuff for the dump, so I basically switched vehicles and did that. When I was finally able to come inside to stay, I noticed the door to the new part basement was closed. Since all the cat food and most of the litter boxes are down there, I commented on it. I was informed that my younger daughter was down there.

With Little Braveheart.

While they were loading the van, she was able to pet and pick up Braveheart and Nostrildamus. She was also able to confirm that Nostrildamus is male, and Braveheart is female.

In the interest of reducing the number of future litters, Braveheart was brought inside.

We now have 15 cats in the house.

Braveheart is semi-feral – and still more feral than semi – so she’s been spending most of the time hiding somewhere. While in the basement, my other daughter would slowly introduce other cats downstairs. Braveheart had been meowing plaintively when Two Face first came down. They instantly got along, and meows became purrs as they ate together. Over the next while, she met the other cats and seemed to get along much better with the dudes than the dudettes! Fenrir does not like her, but she isn’t particularly friendly with any of the cats, so that’s not unusual. Beep Beep batted at her, but Beep Beep is in heat and has been randomly batting at all of the cats.

I’ve been putting the word out on local Facebook groups to try and adopt cats out, but have had zero responses. No one wants cats right now, apparently. Our next step is to print out posters and drive around to different towns in the area and put them up.

Today I hope to finally get my day of rest. I did start soaking down the garlic beds last night; I plan to do that again today, and will continue wetting them down over the next while until the garlic comes in. I want them to be soaked through the compost layer before planting. I’m leaning towards not doing a third bed and, if the two beds we have now are not enough, we can plant garlic in the retaining wall blocks in the old kitchen garden. Of course, that assumes our back order comes in in time!

I have also been keeping an eye on the various materials I’ve been finding lying about, and I think I have what I need to make a quick little shelter for the outside food and water bowls. I want to keep those by the cat house, but don’t want them to be buried in snow. We’ll have the heated water bowl plugged into the second outlet in the cat house. The cord should be just long enough to reach outside the entry, so I’ll want to set something up there to keep it from getting snowed under, too. Last year, it was set up inside the sun room, so that wasn’t an issue. I will be working on plans for that, today, and hopefully will start building something tomorrow, when it’s expected to be warmer, and not raining.

We’ve been very fortunate this fall, so far. Last year, we already had a snowfall by this time, and a blizzard on Thanksgiving weekend. The long range forecasts have us warmer, with rain every now and then. I’ve heard predictions for both another bitterly long and cold winter, and for a long, mild fall followed by a milder winter. So far, the longer, mild fall seems to be the one that’s coming true.

I’ll take all that I can get!

The Re-Farmer

Ceramic heating soaks…?

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This morning, my daughter asked me if I’d read the packaging for the terrarium heater we got for the cat house.

I had not, so she read it to me, and I just have to share!

In case you can’t see or read the image for some reason, this is what is says, in “Engrish“.

Reptile Products
Heat Emitter

. The ceramic heating soaks is one kind of infrared source,has one kind of similar natural sunlight heat radiation.

. The radiator produces the long wave infrared heat radiation can effectively the warm reptilia animal.

. Has promoted in the rearing tray temperature.

. Infrared hot may penetrate the skin organization,expands the blood vessel,thepromotion blood circulation,the enhancement health and accelerates to be restored to health

. Can provide the quantity of heat for reptile,provides the heat source is nonluminous,the service is 10000 hours.

Surface temperature is too high.
do not directly touch during use

It sounds like it was put through Google translate or something! :-D I love it!

In thinking about putting this heater into the cathouse, I remembered we have something that will be useful.

We have a spare smoke detector.

I found it in the kitchen junk drawer, still in its package. We’ll test it to see if it works (it should, but I have no idea how long it’s been sitting in that drawer). We can then install it (or a new one, if it doesn’t work) in the cathouse. That will add some piece of mind for us, in the unlikely event something goes wrong with the heater.

Since we’re taking out the light source to do this, I’m thinking of getting an LED night light for in there, with a red or blue bulb that won’t affect their night vision. The light would be for us to see inside through the windows at night, and make sure it’s cats in there, and not a skunk! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Working on the cat house

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Today, the ceramic terrarium heaters we ordered came in, so when we had the chance, my daughter and I opened up the cat house to put it in.

For some reason, I thought the light was mounted on the frame, not the roof! This is a waterproof light fixture of the sort that’s meant to be around pools. My brother had large dogs, and these made sure they couldn’t bang into the fixture and cause problems.

When we opened it up, I found it had an LED light in it. I was sure my brother had said it was a 100W incandescent bulb, that could add some warmth to the interior. There would be no warmth from this! But that’s okay, because we now have this!

It is ever so slightly wider than a light bulb. We can put the cage of the fixture back on it, but would have to add a spacer for about a quarter inch, so the metal cage won’t touch the heater.

While my daughter was fussing with the cover and putting in the heater, I did some clean up inside. The straw is covered with a large, heavy crocheted blanket – and the cats pooped on it. After getting that out, I decided there was just too much of flax straw in there for my comfort, so I took most of it out, pausing only to help my daughter set up the extension cord to test the heater.

After removing most of the straw, we also cleaned the windows, inside and out. They were looking pretty cloudy! :-D

Then my daughter spotted smoke.

!!!

Just a little puff.

She saw it again, several times, but as hard as I looked, I just couldn’t see it.

However, we also noticed that this thing was a lot hotter than expected! This is designed for reptile terrariums. I know reptiles like their heat, but not this much! With the heater being so close to the wood of the roof, this was definitely a concern.

So, we took it off – once it was cool enough for me to touch it with my gloved hands. That thing retains heat a long time, too!

For now, there is nothing there, and the cords are put away. My daughter lent me a lamp that I could use to test the heater and keep an eye on it while I worked on the computer.

Oddly, it doesn’t seem to get as hot inside, as it did outside. There is much less heat from the sides, while I could hold my hand a couple of inches from the flat surface for about 10 seconds before it got too uncomfortable. The base of the lamp is metal, and after it had been going for a while, I touched the base, and it was just a bit warm. I don’t know why it was so much hotter when we first tested it out.

Also, no sign of smoke.

With the way the fixture is oriented, the heat would be directed at the back wall of the cat house. I am thinking it might be better to orient it so the heat would be directed downwards, instead. There is a LOT more space under there, than between the heater and the back wall. Especially after having removed most of the straw, which is once again covered and weighed down by the blanket.

This is something that is intended to be left on overnight, so we really want to make sure it is safe.

Meanwhile there is something that I notice whenever we open up the cat house roof. With two people lifting, I can hear and feel how it is stressing the roof, as it twists and flexes. If I try to lift it by myself, I can fell that flexing so much, I stopped trying. I’m afraid of breaking something!

Because the roof is so heavy, my brother designed it so he could add a counter weight to make it easier to lift. He never added one, though.

Today, I did.

I dug up a cinder block and, with the crate to support its weight, tied it to the support, which runs the entire length of the roof.

Of course, I had to remove the crate and test it out!

It works quite well. I was able to lift the roof easily myself, and only when I first started to lift, did I feel that twisting that concerned me.

It could actually use a bit more weight, though, but it would be a simple matter to stick a couple of bricks into the openings or something.

The crate will stay under the block to support its weight, and we can just pop it out when we need to lift the roof.

Oh, that reminds me. Our plans to replace the skid under the cat house will not come to fruition. I found a steel pipe and tried to see if it would work as a lever by trying to shift the cat house on the skid.

Not only did it not move, but the pipe bent! The wood at the bottom edge, which is starting to rot a bit, was also crushed where the pipe was. The old skid is just going to have to stay.

The extension cord we have now is juuuuuussstt long enough to reach the cord on the cat house. I will be getting hold of a longer one, so that there is some slack, as soon as possible. We have also ordered a cord protector case – they aren’t available locally – to protect them when they get buried in snow!

Once we are set up to leave it plugged in all the time, I will be plugging in the heated water bowl in the second outlet inside the cat house. It has a long enough cord for the bowl to be just outside the opening. We’re expected to warm up again over the next week, but it won’t be much longer before the water will start freezing – and staying frozen!

I had really hoped we could use the ceramic heater in the cat house tonight. Ah, well. It’ll get done, soon enough! :-)

The Re-Farmer

Fall clean up: surprises in the junk pile

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Little by little, I had been working my way towards the junk pile. With a litter of kittens living in it, it was not as high on the priority list. Still, I’d been clearing access to it, and had even gone digging into it to find scrap pieces of wood.

The junk pile is actually a wood pile, with lots of junk around it, too. The wood had been neatly stacked and covered with tarps, which have long since torn up and degraded, which means the wood at the top has a lot of rot happening, but the further down it goes, the better the shape of the wood.

Unfortunately, in sorting through the pieces to find the least rotten ones, I also discovered that many were also full of nails, screws or staples. I’d set those aside to deal with another time. With having to go through it so much more today, and having to set aside so many pieces, “another time” was today!

While trying to get at the wood to find better pieces, I ended up having to move the remains of old tarps to access it, and finally had to move the grey tarp that was draped across the end of the pile.

That was my first surprise.

It turned out to be huge!

I then had to remove the even more torn up orange tarp, though I found another, smaller orange one (it actually looks more like the remains of a larger tarp). There are also the remains of a blue tarp on the pile of wood, but it’s so disintegrated, I didn’t even try to dig it out, yet.

I also finally dug out the yellow tarp I was seeing just bits and pieces of. This one was so brittle, I could hear it cracking as I moved it.

When it came time to do something with the wood I’d set aside, I was a bit at a loss. I didn’t want to just make a pile on the ground. I also wanted to stack it in suck a way that no critters would hurt themselves on all the nails and such.

After thinking about it for a bit, I went over to the garden shed and hunted through the stuff we’d piled around it while cleaning out the maple grove.

I ended up bringing over an old metal bed frame – one of three I found in the maple grove. It has metal slats held in place with springs, so I put the longest boards I placed the first few boards in such a way that none of the weight was on the slats. After that, I layered the pieces in such a way that all the pointy bits were facing down or tucked away somehow. Critters can still get under it, without the risk of scratching themselves on rusty nails.

Once the rotted and dangerous pieces were stacked, I started to pull up the disintegrating orange tarp that was mostly on the side, tangled in the things that had been leaned against it to keep it from blowing away in the wind.

That’s when I started to see wheels.

By the time I was done, I’d pulled out all of these.

That’s a metal dump truck in there! Too bad it is so rusted out. The paint is coming off in chunks, too.

I think these might have belonged to one of my nephews.

All of my nephews are adults now.

I ended up tucking them part way under the pile of rotted wood, to partially cover them. I’ll figure out what to do with them, another time.

As I was pulling those out, I also found this…

A rather large white tail deer antler! The discolouring shows the parts that were in contact with debris that would have gotten wet, regularly.

While I was working, I was eventually able to get closer to a tree stump than before. Which is when I noticed something odd.

There were nails in the stump!

Looking closer, I could see the board on the ground. Assuming that was what the nails had been holding in the past, I’m wondering if maybe this had been a platform bird feeder at some point? It’s too high to be a seat, and too small to be much use as a table.

Once I’d done as much clearing as I was going to today, I put the partial tarp that was still useful over the wood pile, having thrown out the torn up one. Then I spread out the big grey tarp.

I’m not sure it’s actually a tarp. It might be a canopy cover of some sort. Whatever it was made for, it’s really big! It’s unfortunate it was left out the way it was, and got all torn up by the elements.

I ended up folding it up and setting it aside. It’s not much use at full size, but it’s big enough that, folded in quarters, I might actually find a use for it for one more winter, before tossing it.

At some point, I want to finish cleaning up the junk around the wood, then go through the wood itself to sort out the rotten pieces from the ones that are still useful.

Somewhere in there is a space big enough for Butterscotch to have a nest for her and her babies. I’m curious to see it!

The Re-Farmer

Fall clean up: preparing the second garlic bed

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Since I went and build up a bed and walkway yesterday, I kinda had to continue today! :-D

Here is where I left off, yesterday.

The goal was to create another bed with compostable material buried in it, and make a second walkway.

The first thing that had to be done was to break up all the soil inside the frame and pull out any weeds and roots I found. Then I loosened the areas the walkway was going to go. This area had been mulched with grass clippings, so there weren’t a lot of weeks that needed to be pulled out of there.

Then it was time to dig out the new bed, just keep enough to start hitting gravel. Of course, there were more roots – and rocks! – to take out.

There wasn’t much in the new compost pile I could use for this, so I also loaded up a wheel barrow full from the old compost pile. That got topped off with another wheel barrow full of old, damp straw.

The compostable material got buried, with extra soil added from digging out the walkway. I wanted this one to be slightly narrower than the other, to give me more room for a third bed, if I decide to do another one.

I had to make many trips to the junk pile to find enough wood to do the walkway 3 layers deep, like the first one.

Once this was done, I went to clean up the mess I’d made digging for pieces of wood in the junk pile. A lot of the pieces were either too rotten, or too full of nails, staples and screws!

Cleaning that up led to finding all sorts of things, so that will get it’s own post!

So we now have to beds ready and waiting for the garlic to come in. Tomorrow, I will get one of the girls to help me move the frame and see if we can fit a third one in. I don’t even know if we’ll have enough garlic to need three beds, but if it’s feasible, I’d rather have it and not need it, then need it and not have it!

The Re-Farmer

Frosty morning – and a rough start to the day!

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This morning, I was awakened by my husband, asking me if there was some trick to starting the washing machine.

I think it was a rhetorical question.

Our new washing machine, which we’ve had for only 2 1/2 months, simply stopped working. It won’t turn on.

Of course, my husband went through the usual check list. Breaker? It was fine. Outlet? Tested both plugins. Meter reads fine. While I went through the manual’s trouble shooting chart (which basically said, check the breaker, check the outlet), my husband went online and found that there’s a hard reset you can do, so we tried that. Still nothing. It simply will not turn on.

So I started looking at how to contact the LG to get it fixed, since we’re well within the 1 year limited warranty. I tried their website, first. Made an account, registered the item, started a request for getting warranty work done…

Got a note saying we were not under warranty, and we would be billed for the service call.

???

So I finally just phoned.

The good news is, the person I spoke to confirmed we are still under warranty; their website glitches sometimes. She was apologetic about that. Since I had just made an account on the website, she was able to find me in the system, so that made things faster.

They didn’t have any technicians available for where we are, but there is a local company that does warranty work for them, so they will contact this company on our behalf, and we will get a phone call from them.

Soon, I hope!

While I was working on this, I heard the well pump turn on and the noise it made really threw me. Since our plumber hasn’t gotten back to us, and I happened to catch the name of another plumber being recommended on a local Facebook group, I asked my husband to try contacting them.

It turns out that, this time of year, a lot of people are closing up their cottages for the winter, so he’s really busy with those jobs right now. So busy, he recommended we try someone else, because there was no way he could come in within the week. I don’t imagine other plumbers will be any different, so we might have to just wait until after Thanksgiving, which is next weekend.

By the time we got all that done, I was still earlier than usual to get the outside rounds done. I figured the cats wouldn’t mind being fed early! :-D

It was -1C/30F at the time. The cats’ water bowls had ice on them, and the ground was covered with frost. It was quite beautiful.

  • Cat paths!
  • Frosted burdock

Rosencrantz was not impressed.

While going through the garden areas, I noticed the one sunflower with the seed head that was killed off by grubs looked… odd.

It looks like the grubs continued eating their way down the stalk – and then got killed by the frost!

Die, grubbins, die! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Fall clean up: I think I went overboard!

/ Re-Farmer / 4 Comments

When I cleared out the old wood pile from the yard last year, the soil I found below was a very pleasant surprise. Still, there was a whole lot of clean up that needed to be done this spring, before we could plant anything. We were still finding some pretty strange things in there! The biggest challenge was all the tree roots crisscrossing the area.

Now that we’ve had our first vegetables growing in there, it was interesting to see what was coming up along with them! After being buried by a wood pile for decades, there were still seeds and root systems that managed to survive and sprout. There was plantain (the weed, not the banana!), which is not surprising; that stuff can grow anywhere and is very hardy. Clover was more of a surprise, but there was also a lot of some long, delicate green plant that I didn’t recognize at all. I thought it might be a flower of some kind, but it never had any. There were flowers that came up, too, and since they came up where the khol rabi failed, to, I let them bed until today, when they were basically done blooming, anyhow.

All this meant that in digging over the beds, I was basically stopping with every fork full to break up the soil with my hands, so I could pull out as many weeds with their roots as I could.

I also found tree roots I’d missed in the spring!

While fighting with the roots, my feet sinking into the soft, soft soil, I kept thinking about where and how we would plant the garlic. The spaces to walk on, in between the beds of carrots and beets we’d planted, was packed down harder than the rest, of course, and it almost seemed like wasted soil!

Also, I discovered that, like the girls had discovered when planting deep bulbs, it seems even here, there is only about 8 inches of topsoil before I started hitting a lot of rocks.

We’ve got three kinds of garlic coming, which meant three beds. How and were did I want to arrange them?

Then I remembered I still had a 4’x8′ frame from the goat catcher we’d built.

Those are coming in very handy!

I dragged it over, and the area I’d worked on turned out to be almost exactly the size of the frame!

That’s when I started to go a bit crazy.

I started to dig out the soil inside the frame.

Hitting more roots, of course.

By this time, plan had started to form in my mind.

All the stuff I’d added to the compost a little while before?

It ended up in the space I’d shoveled out, along with some damp straw that I raked up from around the old dog houses, where they had been used as insulation around them.

When it came time to return the soil to the space, I kinda went overboard again…

I kept digging.

The vague plan in my mind took into account walking paths, and I didn’t want to be sinking in the soil. The pieces of wood I’d used to walk on weren’t very stabled, but what if…

What if they were laid down on an area that was dug down and leveled to just above the gravel?

So after I used a hoe and rake to even out the mound of soil, I used them to even out the pathway and started laying down boards.

This is how far I got before stopping for supper.

This is where I pause to say how much I appreciate the girls. While I’m outside doing stuff like this – which I consider fun – they’re inside taking care of the cooking and housework – which I loathe.

Then I went back to finish the job, and this is how it looked.

The wood I was using was salvaged from the junk pile in the spring, and some of if was slightly wider. I used the wider ones to make “walls” on either side of the path, then laid down three layers of boards in the middle. This made them a lot more stable to walk on, and also made the path the same thickness as the height of the “walls”. I had to cut a few to size to fill in gaps at the ends, which worked out all right.

This is old wood, some of which was already starting to rot. If I’d had the option, I would have put down gravel or something. These will do the job for now, and perhaps some day we’ll replaced them with flagstones or something.

When the girls came out to see how it looked, I snagged one of them to help me move the frame to the other side of the path.

This is where the second bed will be.

With 3 varieties of garlic, it looks like I’ll have to make three of these. It looks like there is just barely enough space to do that, before reaching the metal ring around the compost, though I could put the third one at a right angle to the others, instead.

I don’t know if I’ll be up to doing three of them! I don’t know how many cloves we’ll get out of a pound of seed garlic, each. If I do only two, I could split one variety between the two beds.

We shall see, after the second one is done.

I made a whole lot more work for myself by doing this, but… I think I like it better!

The Re-Farmer