For the most part, the other cats have been ignoring the kittens. Sometimes, they’ll come over and peer into the nest, but that’s about it.
Then Beep Beep started taking Nicco out to a new spot under my crafting table, repeatedly. I thought I’d gotten her to stop, but one of my daughters found Nicco under my table – with David! The two of them were looking very confused at each other.
David is now very curious about the babies.
This morning, that curiosity got the better of him!
The kittens immediately went over to check out this furry new visitor! The tuxedo, now known as Leyendecker (I remembered it! LOL), was especially interested in burrowing into that luxuriant fur.
David was a little freaked out by that and left. He ended up on top of the nest, looking down at them. :-D
The babies, meanwhile, are now very active, if still very clumsy, running around, wrestling, climbing and generally being very playful.
And now I have to get some things finished early today. I am taking the van in after dropping my daughter off at work, for an oil change and getting the summer tires put on, so I may as well stay in town and have lunch with my daughter. :-) We’re supposed to hit 18C (64F) today, and while it will likely be cooler so close to the lake, we might actually be able to eat outside. Of course, if she ended up with a really early lunch again, and the van isn’t ready yet, we might not have much choice! :-D
Yes! Finally! The weather is cooperating, and I was able to get our potatoes in!
From a previous post, this is what I was starting with.
The frames are just there to mark out where the beds will be. As you can see, there’s a fair bit of grass and weeds. It has been a while since this area had any sort of gardening done in it.
While the no-till, no-dig method we’re using is something that can be done directly on the grass, I wanted to add at least some amendments, first.
I used a wheelbarrow to mix 1 bag of manure with a slightly larger volume of peat.
After spreading it out on one of the beds with a rake, I used another bag of manure mixed with peat on the second bed. I then topped them with a thin layer of straw, making sure to use the damp straw from the bottom of the bale, where it was starting to decompose already.
I had hoped to use some material from our own compost pile, but as I dug around, I did not find any usable material. I had tried to clean out some of the older compost, from before we moved here, but as I dug around, I found more stuff I missed. Twigs and branches are one thing. It looks like people had stared to use it for garbage, and I found pieces of wood that were probably used as support stakes, plastic trays from transplants, and even a piece of fabric. There was some well composted material, but it was so full of sticks, it was unusable.
I’m thinking we will need to start a completely new compost pile somewhere else. This one is looking like a write off. :-(
So, no compost of our own for the potato beds.
Once both beds were spread with the manure and peat mixture, I gave them a very thorough watering. Even though we’ve had rain for the past couple of days, the soil was still pretty dry.
After soaking the beds, I added the potatoes. Each box was 3 pounds of seed potatoes. That worked out to 3 rows of 6 potatoes (plus 1 extra, so I put 2 small ones together) in one bed, and 3 rows of 5 potatoes in the other.
After spreading the potatoes out, I went back to evenly space them and push them gently down to have contact with the ground. With one potato, I went to pick it up, but it wouldn’t move.
???
I tried again, but it was stuck to the ground.
Amazingly, in the space of a couple of minutes, this one potato that had direct contact with the ground and shot out a 3 or 4 inch root, with capillaries! I wish I’d made the effort to take off my muddy gloves to take a photo, but instead, I dug a quick hole in the ground where I wanted it to be and “transplanted” it. I still can’t believe a potato could grow a root so deep, so fast, even after seeing it with my own eyes!
The next step was to cover the potatoes with a deep layer of straw. Again, I used straw from the bottom of the bale, where more of it was already damp and some was starting to decompose already. I made a layer roughly a foot deep.
I then scattered more peat across the top, then tamped it all down with the back of the spade. This peat is as much to add some weight to prevent flyaway straw as it is to amend the soil.
After the above photo was taken, I spent the next while thoroughly soaking the straw.
With this method, I saw recommendations of putting a layer of hay (which I don’t have, so I’m using straw) 2 feet deep. This is definitely not 2 feet deep. Over the next day or two, I plan to soak the straw some more, add another layer, then soak it again. After that, I should not need to water it much, if at all, for the rest of the growing season. I’ve heard people using this method say that no watering is needed at all, because the mulch maintains moisture as it breaks down, but I expect to need to water it at some point. It all depends on whether we have another drought this summer.
After the straw has started to settle and pack itself down, I will remove the frames to be used elsewhere.
Once this was done, I checked out the area we are planning to transplant our squash seedlings. We had covered this area last year with straw, then covered with tarps, to amend the soil and try to kill off the grass and weeds. We still ended up having to use Round Up. Even covered with tarps, weeds where pushing their way through the straw and lifting the pegged down tarps off the ground!
This is how the area looks now.
The black tarps in the back are there to warm up the mulched soil on that side a bit faster.
I could not do this here, last year. In fact, the soil was so hard, we were bending tent pegs while fastening down the tarps. While working on the potato beds next to this area, I would sometimes shove the fork or the spade into the ground to set it aside while I did the next thing, and ended up leaning them on the bale or wagon most of the time, because the ground is just so hard. Yet here, I could sink the fork’s tines their entire length down!
I pushed aside some of the mulch and dug around a bit. There are still a LOT of quack grass roots in there. I pulled some up, and you can see the bundle of roots in the above photo. The soil is quite “sticky”. The exciting thing was uncovering a worm. A very good sign!
Which means our efforts last year are paying off. The soil is already improving. When it’s time to transplant into the area, we will still be dealing with rocks and root systems, but the ground is now workable.
It’s amazing, what a mulch can do to improve soil conditions!
The orange ones now have names. The bigger one is Turmeric. The tiny one is Saffron. :-D
As I write this, Beep Beep is curled up with them, but things were not so peaceful, a little while ago. I heard some strange squealing and looked over in time to see her jump out of the nest, with Nicco in her mouth, then dash over to a corner under my crafting table. There is shelf under there that’s empty, since it’s unreachable, and she was starting to move him into it. I had to move some storage bins to be able to reach Nicco and bring him out, but she tried again, later. I’m hoping I’ve dissuaded her from moving the kittens into there. Aside from this being a hard, colder, smaller space, they would eventually damage the wood of the shelf, and the carpet in front of it, as they get bigger and start pooping and peeing all over.
I now have storage bins all over my bed. With the area uncovered, it’s less tempting of a potential nest!
Meanwhile…
While doing my rounds this morning, I paused to take another look at one of the chokecherry trees among the lilacs, and consider some possibilities. Here is how the tree is growing.
It’s hard to see among the lilacs, so I put in the lines to show how the main trunk is leaning.
Here is a closer look of the base.
While I was not planning to work on the lilac hedge for some time, I am debating with myself on whether I should just go ahead and clear out around this tree. It is pretty choked out by the lilacs, so on the one hand, it would make for a healthier tree and higher yields of berries as quickly as this summer. Now would be a good time to clear it out, before the leaves are in. On the other hand, this tree is leaning so far over, I think the lilacs may be the only thing holding it upright. Whenever I do clear it, I would add a support of some kind, and start training it to grow straight again.
What do you think? Should I do it now, or stick to my original plan of doing it when we work on the lilacs a year or two from now?
First, I wish to share with you this image of domestic bliss I get to enjoy from my office chair of late.
Just look at those blue, blue eyes! And the little guy, splayed on his back. We had been calling him Nicky Pants, but it looks like we’ve settled on Nicco for a name. Mini-BeepBeep, has earned a different name. She is growing much bigger than the other kittens, and is now known as Big Rig. :-D
One of the things I had scheduled for today was a quick stop at my mother’s. Originally, it was to hang up the beautiful flowers on the beautiful plant hanger my brother (who lives an hour and a half’s drive away) had bought her for Mother’s Day. Something lovely for her to see outside her window. I’d picked up some solar powered rope lights to wrap around it, so she could have something to see at night, too.
Well… to say that my mother was less than gracious about the gifts would be an understatement. Rude, angry, even cruel, would be better words to use. Now, I’ve reached a point where my mother’s behaviour can’t hurt me anymore. At least not in any tangible way. My brother, however is a better person than I am, and he still bleeds. When I spoke to her on the phone after the visit, and about my coming back to hang the flowers when it was supposed to warm up and stay warm, she continued with her ungrateful and hurtful comments.
So my brother drove the distance and took back the gift she made very clear she did not want. Keep in mind that my mother has always been an avid gardener, has two green thumbs, and was just complaining about how the caretakers had dug up all the annual flowers, including hers, and thrown them out. This gift was so that she could have flowers that the caretakers wouldn’t dig up.
The solar powered lights, she had told me, never turned on. It turned out there was a yard light outside her apartment, and it was simply too bright for the light string to turn itself on. When they were wrapped up on her couch, waiting for me, they did turn on, and she said they looked lovely – but she didn’t want them.
So my trip to hang up flowers became a trip to retrieve my unwanted gift.
I did, however, have a chance to talk to my mother on the phone about her behaviour and how hurtful she was. Her words may not have hurt me directly – I was not at all surprised by the behaviour – but to see how much she hurt my brother does make my heart ache for him. I tried to explain this to her. She is really big on people behaving “properly” (which typically means, they should act the way she thinks they should, dress the way she thinks they should, be interested in things she thinks they should, and not act, dress or think in any way she doesn’t like). So I told her that the proper way to respond when someone gives you a gift is to say thank you, and to be kind and gracious.
Well, she had all sorts of excuses to justify her behaviour, but I kept coming back to, “you can still be kind.”
Then we talked about when I could come over, and for her to meet me at a particular exit, since her building will remain locked down to the general public and most visitors for a while, yet. She was in need of some groceries, so I drove her over and she took advantage of having access to a vehicle and stocked up on more than her usual week’s worth of supplies. I helped bring all the bags to her apartment, and then left right away, but before I did, my mother seemed to make a real effort.
She thanked me. Then she talked about how grateful she was that I, and my siblings, help her out so much, and how thankful she was that we do.
Now, if only she would do this with my oldest brother! Of all of us, he is the one she has been the most unkind to. She had certainly tried it with me, since we moved out here, but it doesn’t work, so she has largely stopped.
*sigh*
So the whole thing went longer than planned, which would not have been much of an issue for what I wanted to get done today, had something else not changed. Today was supposed to be the day things started to warm up.
It hasn’t.
The forecast is still saying we’re supposed to reach of high of 11C (51F) with a “real feel” of 10C (50F) today.
They lie.
It’s been cold and damp and very unpleasant out there.
So instead of working outside and prepping the potato beds, I decided to focus on warm things. Like slow roasted ribs in BBQ sauce, and a massive batch of scalloped potatoes in a cheese sauce in the slow cooker. Both of which are being cooked low and slow.
The house smells amazing.
Oh, my timer just went off! Time to check on supper! :-D
They are quite liking the new set up. The kittens will wobble their way all over, then go back to their little bed for cuddles with Mom.
So far, it looks like all the kittens are male. There is only one, mini-BeepBeep, we haven’t been able to see.
While doing my rounds, I noticed these other babies.
This is a chokecherry. As the leaf buds unfurl, they reveal baby future berries! Those little clusters will eventually bloom and, if we have a good year, we will have lots of berries. This little tree is just sort of by itself in the middle of a grassy area on the North side of the garden. There are two more, among the lilac hedge. In the last couple of years, those ones produced berries, but this little one, not really. It looks like this year, it has reached production maturity!
So it looks like my plans to plant the potatoes today is not going to happen. We were expecting rain, but it has turned out to be colder than forecast. While the rain has been light, it has been pretty constant. Which is fine. It just means we have to spend less time soaking the area we’ll be planting the potatoes in, tomorrow.
It might be cold and dreary outside, but Sarlac, the aloe, is enjoying things just fine. That flower spike is just inches from the ceiling!
Of course, one of the first things in my morning routine is to check on the kitties. We’ve been talking about how we wanted to change things up for them, as they get bigger and more active.
In the top right corner of the photo, you can see the crate we’ve been using to put their little nesting box in.
You can also see the dampness, under it.
With the rain today, and more forecast here and there over the next week, this will only get worse. While the crate keeps the kitten’s box from being directly on it, the increased humidity is making the basement feel noticeably colder. We do have a heater down there, but it’s not something that should be left on, unattended, for long.
We had already considered using one of the large boxes my husband’s new computer came in, to make a sort of “play pen” for the kittens. On seeing how much larger and wetter the damp spot is, I started thinking of alternatives. We had intended to place the box itself over a sheet of rigid insulation, which would have prevented any sort of damp puddle from forming at all, in the first place. However, the larger space would be harder to stay warm. The current little nest is well wrapped and small enough that Beep Beep’s, and their body heat alone could keep it nice and snug. Not so, in a larger space.
So…
They are now upstairs. Just a couple of feet from me, as I type this!
We’ve got two boxes set up, one inside the other, so half the space has a “roof” over it. There’s lots of padding on the bottom to keep them soft and warm. Beep Beep wasn’t sure what to make of things when we walked off with all her babies, but once we showed her the new set up, she settled right in.
The babies were very quick to explore their new space, which is about triple the size of what they had before. Then they went right back into a pile on their familiar little bedding. :-D
So far, the other cats have been curious about the new set up, but easily discouraged away, so they won’t jump in. With the box set up between my desk and my crafting table, I can keep a close eye on them.
This means we can start leaving the new part basement door open all the time, and slowly start moving all the litter boxes, food and water bowls, downstairs. There’s plenty of space to store the cat food and litter, too.
I’m looking forward to not having cat litter and kibble tracking all over the house… :-D
Since working in the garden was out, I went into town to run some errands. Since I was in the area, I stopped at the garage to see if they’d been able to look at my mother’s car.
Yes, they had.
Yes, it does need a new differential.
*sigh*
The owner was in the process of trying to track down a second hand one for me. Until then, though, I booked an oil change for Saturday, then asked about tires for our van. Being May, we should be able to safely rotate out of our winter tires by now. ;-) I have our summer tires bagged and waiting, but I would kinda like to get new ones, so I asked for a price on that.
It turned out to be quite out of budget, so when I bring the van in for the oil change, I’ll also bring our summer tires, and get those switched over as well.
One of my other stops was at the hardware store. I was hoping to find replacement hinge kits for the gates in the chain link fence. I was showing a photo to one of the staff when the guy who’d helped me get what I needed to fix our sump pump hose walked by with another customer, and paused to ask how the fix went, and I was happy to tell him what a success it was. He then took a quick look at the photo I was showing the other staff member, who was new enough to not know they don’t carry anything for fences and gate, and was able to recommend other places in town I should be able to find them, then continued on with the customer he had been helping.
With that question answered, I went into the paint section. We have decided to go ahead and paint or stain the old picnic table. It’s not in the best shape, but we could probably get quite a few more years out of it, if we treat the wood. After talking to the lady in the paint department, I decided to go with paint, rather than a stain. My daughter and I had been talking colours, so with that conversation in mind, I chose a bright teal blue. While a quart would probably have been enough, I figure we’ll be painting other things, too, so I got a gallon. It was funny to see how excited the lady who was helping me got when she saw which colour I chose. Apparently, bright colours are not typical choices people make, but it’s something she prefers herself. She asked to see pictures of the table when it’s done! :-D
I got a business card for one of the managers, and have already emailed her to tell her how great the staff has been. I know stores get complaints all the time so, if I can, I try to make sure to give credit and commendations, whenever I can!
While there, I was also able to pick up some peat and composted manure. I want to put some of that down first, then put the potatoes on it, add a thick layer of straw, then add some peat on top, more to keep the straw weighted down, but also help retain moisture. None of the videos I’ve seen about this way of growing potatoes has suggest this, but we have definitely noticed that wind can be an issue and figured, it at least couldn’t hurt!
Hopefully, I will be able to get this done tomorrow. We now have rain forecast for tomorrow afternoon, but it’s also expected to be much warmer – and staying warm – than today, so the potatoes should be fine.
Over the next day or two, I hope to get those carrots and parsley seeds in, too.
Welcome to my “Recommended” series of posts. These will be weekly – for now – posts about resources and sites I have found over the past while that I found so excellent, I want to share them with you, my dear readers. 🙂 Whether or not I continue to post these, and how often they are posted, will depend on feedback. Please feel free to comment below, and if you have a favorite resource of your own, do share, and I will review them for possible future posts.
I hope you find these recommendations as useful and enjoyable as I have!
My very first Recommended post was for the YouTube channel Liziqi. I love the video format that makes it accessible to all, including those who don’t understand any Chinese language. Since discovering this channel, I’ve found a couple others that I now follow that are similar, yet very different. This is one of them. XiaoXi’s Culinary Idyll, which focuses on both cooking and hand crafts.
I didn’t know that, when I stumbled on the first video I saw: How to make delicious braised chicken out of stone.
Out of stone? That certainly piqued my curiosity when it showed up in my feed, recommended by YouTube.
As I started watching the video, I was perplexed. Where is the chicken? What is he going to do with that rock he dragged out of a riverbed?
By the time I got to the cooking part of the video, I was completely hooked.
How do you braise a chicken out of stone?
First, find a rock and carve it into an exquisite cooking pot.
This is a very new channel, less than a year old at the time of this writing. So it didn’t take long for me to go through all of the videos.
The first videos started off with a very different feel. At first, it was straight up cooking videos.
Other videos featured a lot more people and activities.
Then the crafting portion came into the picture – with a sense of humor!
Are you having trouble making traditional noodles by hand? That’s okay – use a machine!
First, cut down a tree…
As I worked my way through the videos, from oldest to newest, I got the sense that the makers of these were kind of feeling their way around on the focus. Where the Liziqi videos started out with just her, filming herself until she could finally hire a couple of people to do the recording for her, these videos appear to have been made with a professional film team from the start.
I’m okay with that.
The format they seem to be settling on is basically just the one guy who first makes a thing, then somehow uses that thing to prepare a food. Both of which are gorgeous.
Then you get to watch him eat. :-D
I readily admit, every time I see the guy working in his shop, I suffer from an extreme bout of tool envy.
You’ll see him doing everything from forging a frying pan (one of the few videos where he cooks food, but you don’t see it being eaten at the end), to weaving various useful objects (I will never look at a bamboo steamer the same way again!), to making things with wood and resin and…
…succulents?
While there is a lot of focus on traditional crafts, there is definitely a modern, even high tech, side to some of these videos.
While these are hardly “how to” videos, they are still quite inspiring – whether you’re looking for ideas on things to make, or ideas for cooking traditional Chinese food!
Or going fishing with a woven, waterproof hat you just made.
Even if you have no interest making the things or cooking the food, the videos themselves are beautiful to watch, and seeing his exquisite attention to detail is a pleasure in itself.
Today I took my husband into the city for a medical appointment, but of course I had to check the kitties, first!
They are getting more and more active! We’re going to have to put them in something deeper, soon, so they don’t start crawling around the basement. At their size, there are too many things they can get into, that we couldn’t be able to get them out again! :-D
My husband and I left early enough to hit the post office, first, and ended up swinging by home again to drop things off. My husband had finally got his retroactive disability tax credit, and he used some of it to get a much needed new computer. Not something we wanted sitting in the van while we were in the city!
His appointment went well, though the drive was quite painful. It was for some tests in Nuclear Medicine, in the same hospital as the cardiac clinic. I was not allowed to come in with him, though. We arrived early, as is our habit, and I expected to have lots of time to walk around on a beautiful day, playing Pokemon Go. They must have taken him in early, because he was done much faster than I expected. Which is a nice change, even if the reasons for it are not to nice. :-/
His computer was not the only thing to arrive in the mail. I got a parcel I was expecting to come in tomorrow.
My Yukon Gem potatoes have arrived!
Which means I need to get them planted right away. Looking at the forecasts, tonight we’re supposed to reach 0C (32F), and that’s the coldest it’ll get overnight from now on.
I had been thinking about where and how we would plant the potatoes. With our rock hard soil in most places, I decided to go with a completely new and different method from what I’m used to. Here are some videos about what I am going to try.
The only thing is, I don’t have hay, nor was any available. I just have straw. I hope it will do as a substitute. I’ve seen other articles and videos that used straw, so I think it should.
With this in mind, I made use of the frames from the goat catching pen we’d made. The long sides are roughly 8 ft x 4 ft. A perfect garden bed size. So I am using them to mark out where I want to put the potatoes.
I will remove them, after I’ve finished covering the seed potatoes. For the 6 pounds of potatoes I have, this should be enough. I soaked the areas thoroughly, and will soak them again tomorrow before we start again. We are expecting some rain tomorrow (I hope!), but it won’t be much. By Sunday, we are supposed to hit 21C!! (70F) so I want to make sure it’s all thoroughly covered and watered before the heat hits.
We are also going to have to watch out for the Potato Beetle!
He kept us company while we started on the future potato beds.
I had considered setting them up where we’d covered with straw last year, as I am sure we won’t be having as many squash to transplant as I had hoped. There’s still a possibility that more seedlings will come up before the end of the month, so I figured I may as well just go off to one side, instead.
How well this works will help us decide what to do as we increase the amounts and varieties of potatoes we grow in the future. If we can get a good crop, without having to plow or till this hard, rocky ground, that would be really awesome!
Well, today ended up a bit going off plan, but we still got a couple of things off the to-do list for outside.
The main one being, the broken flexible hose for the sump pump has been replaced!
This is what the connection looked like, before I started.
After talking to my brother, I was confident there wouldn’t be any weird surprises when I took off the flexible hose.
The first order of business was to make sure the pump wouldn’t go off while I was working on it. The reservoir was pretty full, so I lifted the float to trigger the pump and let it drain before unplugging the pump.
My brother had suggested I might want to push the pipe from the inside, through the opening to maybe add a bit of length on the outside. The pipe is so snug in there, though, that it wouldn’t budge. Which told me I wouldn’t need to have one of my daughters in the basement to brace it while I was attaching things on the outside, at least!
Once I took the flexible hose off, I could see that the batting or whatever that is, and the rest of the hose, was wrapped in a thick later of electric tape.
I started taking that off and found…
… something that looked… almost like fabric? Canvas??
It turned out to be hockey tape. Several layers of it.
I got all the old tape and the batting-looking-stuff off and discovered…
… the end of the pipe had a big ole crack.
I guess that’s why it was taped so thoroughly, and why a larger hose was added over it.
I wonder. If the previous hose had indeed been wrecked by someone running over it with a lawn mower, it’s possible the hose was yanked hard enough to crack the pipe at this end, too.
I cut off the cracked part, which didn’t leave a whole lot of pipe sticking out the wall. I did try and push more through from the basement, but didn’t seem to accomplish anything.
The next thing to do was clean up the inside of the pipe, then use the connector piece the guy at the hardware store picked out for me, in case I needed to attach the two hose kits to each other.
Pushing the connector into the pipe did finally start moving the pipe through the opening – making it shorter, of course, but not enough that I couldn’t get it done. I brought out a hair drier to soften the plastic of the pipe, which made pushing the connector the rest of the way in much easier.
That didn’t quite work with the flexible hose part. I could get it through the flat part easily enough, but once the end started to go into the flexible rings, it just wouldn’t go any further.
So I tightened the clamps as it was. It really should be closer together, but I know the important parts of the connector are through to the flexible rings of the hose and, together with the clamp, that should be enough. We’ll just have to keep an eye on it, to see if it leaks. If it does, I should just need to tighten the clamps a bit more. I put a container under the connections, so if it does leak, I’ll be able to see water in the container.
Next, I ran the hose down the side of the house.
There is adequate space along the house to tuck it under, so it won’t be in the way at all. It’s also being held in place by a shelf, garbage can and rain barrel along it’s length. The brick was just a little extra to hold it in place, closer to the pipe.
The hose reaches several feet into the old kitchen garden. I would have preferred an extra foot or two, but this should be fine. If we find it needs to be further from the sun room’s foundation, we can always get another connector and attach the hose from the spare kit onto it.
Once it was all done, the sump pump was plugged back in, but so far it hasn’t had to go off, yet. I’ll be sure to check on it, later today.
While I was working on this, the girls dragged the table saw out of the old shed we’d found the door in and brought it by the house. They plugged it in and turned it on and YES!!! It works!
It is currently sitting in the sun room. We won’t be able to work on the replacement door for the sun room today, as I’d planned. It likely won’t be worked on tomorrow, either.
Oh, I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here, yet. My husband got a call from the cardiac clinic in the city a couple of weeks ago. When they cancelled all appointments, they were looking to June for rescheduling. It seems they were no where near as busy with the Wuhan virus as they expected, and could start re-booking earlier. The appointment is early tomorrow afternoon, but he and I will be leaving in the late morning.
I have to figure out what to do after I drop him off, though, as I will not be allowed to go in with him, as normal. Which is frustrating, but whatever. Unfortunately, it’s not like I can find a coffee shop or something and hang out for more than an hour. My FIL actually lives nearby but, like where my mother lives, the building is locked down to visitors, since so many people living there are very high risk, including my FIL.
If I can find someplace free to park, maybe I’ll get some Pokemon Go in or something. :-/
Meanwhile, I have had to take it a bit easier today than I intended. It’s been a slightly worse pain day, and I don’t want to overdo it when I have what will likely be a long day, tomorrow.
For now, I think I’ll painkiller up and find something more sedentary to work on. :-/ Normally, I’d work on some crochet, but the pain is mostly in my arms and finger joints today, so that might not be possible.
The kittens have been noticeably more active, and I’ve been finding one orange one in particular, at the furthest end of their little nest box, looking out into the rest of the basement.
They are still very quick to bunch up again, though!
Lately, when I got downstairs, I have been leaving the basement door open. Beep Beep goes upstairs to explore, while other cats follow me downstairs. To explore.
Including Keith.
We’ve put the twin size bed frame against the wall for storage, and they quite enjoy climbing up to the top, to check things out from on high! :-D
While doing my rounds outside this morning, I spotted something new on one of the crab apple trees.
It looks like a fungal disease. It seems to be only on the one branch, so I hope that pruning it off will do the trick, but this tree has already had quite a few branches removed due to infection, and trees on either side of it have as well. It might be better to remove the entire tree, to prevent it from infecting the others. I will also be working on the areas we spotted a potentially deadly (to apple trees) fungus, so I might do it all at the same time.
Quite a few of these trees are just not doing well at all. I don’t know that the type of crab apples are particularly prone to fungal disease, or if it’s more a matter of their age making them more susceptible.
The important thing will be to prevent the spread of the fungus, and that means burning the wood. As some of the infections are in stumps already cut level with the ground, I plan to bring one of the metal rings we’ve got lying about to put over where these stumps are, and making a small fire on top of them. We are already under fire ban right now, but it’s not a complete ban, so contained fire pits and burn barrels are still okay.
Something else to add to the to-do list for outside!
