We had such a gorgeous day today! I finally got to the winter sown beds to remove the mulch, and even got to work on some beds that were not pre sown. I got enough done that I went ahead and recorded some video, instead. I hope you like it!
Temperatures are going to drop over the next few days before getting back into the double digits (Celsius, of course), but only for a short time. We’re supposed to be fluctuating quite a bit over the next couple of weeks. We’re still supposed to stay above freezing for the highs, at least, but a few nights are dipping below freezing. I’ll continue to monitor the temperatures in the portable greenhouse. It might still be a while before we can safely put trays in there and leave them overnight. Once we bring the trays out of the basement, they’re not going back!
I was really happy with the covered bed in the old kitchen garden. I had to be SO careful removing that mulch. There were a lot of seedlings visible. It’s too early to tell what they were. I’m hoping they survived the disturbance! The cover should protect them enough, now that the mulch is off. Especially considering there were still patches of frozen soil in there! I was especially happy when I uncovered the garlic bed. There were so many garlic tips visible! All blanched because of the mulch, but they will soon turn properly green, now that they’re exposed to sunlight. I’ll be watching all the winter sown beds closely for the next while, as a light mulch will need to be added, once the seedlings are large enough.
If felt so good to finally do some real work in the garden!
I had a rough night last night and my balance wasn’t very good, so I asked one of my daughters to accompany me while I was doing my morning rounds. My daughter popped out ahead with the warm water for the cats while I was getting the kibble ready when I heard her saying something about Brussel and the kittens.
When I first looked over, I was quite alarmed. I had not been able to straighten up the cat cave, so it was still on its side – but now it was half crushed and Brussel was sitting on top of it, looking at me! My first thought was that the kittens were still inside, being smothered.
I was wrong, of course. They were on top of the flattened side of the cave with Brussel.
All three of them.
That’s what my daughter was trying to point out to me. Caramel’s first kitten was still with Brussel and nursing!
I tried to get a picture, but this was the best I could get.
That little calico is resting her chin on her new sibling while she’s nursing. I think this kitten is a tortie; if so, it’s a female.
So it seems that when Caramel jumped into the cat cave with Brussel and my daughter moved her baby in with them, Caramel just left her baby to Brussel’s mothering. When I saw Caramel the next morning, she still looked pregnant, but not when I got home, which is when I spotted the two in the sun room.
I’ve heard that cats can do that sort of thing, but for there to be such a long time between births is pretty amazing. It’s unlikely she had them somewhere else then brought them over, or she would have brought her first kitten over, too. It would have been much closer and easier to bring to the cat house.
Caramel is also much more comfortable leaving her babies while she goes outside – unlike Brussel who barely leaves them to get some kibble, water and do her business.
Here, you can see Caramel milling around with the boys. It took a bit, but I was able to pet her – until one of the males pushed his way in between, demanding I pet him, instead!
When we peeked through the window, we could see the kittens curled up around each other, sleeping.
The down side of Caramel being in the cat house is, there’s no way I can give her wet cat food or squeeze treats like I can with Brussel. Caramel, at least, already allows us to sometimes pet her. Unlike Brussel, who actually seems to be getting more aggressive, not less, even as she accepts the food and treats.
We had another surprise this morning that was a bit more perplexing.
This is the side of the water bowl shelter. Somehow, one of the boards got loose! It may not even had been doing by a cat, but a racoon or skunk. Well. Maybe not a skunk. Nothing was knocked about inside, so I don’t think it got pushed out during a cat fight. It was just nailed in, so we’ll dig out the drill and use screws to secure it, later on.
My daughter and I checked out a few areas while we were out and about. The garden beds in the main garden area are almost completely uncovered now. With today’s high expected to be 17C/63F, the rest of the ice and snow should soon be gone. We can start doing some clean up and remove the mulch on the winter sown beds. I remembered to tuck one of the thermometers under the plastic covered bed. It should be interesting to see what it’s at, when we remove the cover to remove the mulch this afternoon. With the cover on, it’s entirely possible the soil below is already thawed out.
But not yet. I got another Charlie horse during the night, and my leg still feels unstable, though it was the mildest Charlie horse I’ve ever had. I’m going to try and get a bit more recovery time. Today is Saturday, which means the dump is open longer hours, so a dump run is also on my to-do list today. We’ll also need to get the isolation shelter prepared to hold three adult females for 2 weeks. We’ll be moving one of the box nests back into the bottom, after it’s cleaned out as best we can, and the litter box prepared.
I look forward to when we can roll that isolation shelter out, open it all up and give it a good cleaning! I’m glad the cats are enjoying it, but they do make a mess of things. 😄
Things are going to be busy for the next while. Lots of driving around to do, on top of the usual spring clean up.
I’m looking forward to it, but I really need to remember that I’m a lot more broken now, than when we first moved out here!
I’m also falling asleep at my keyboard.
*sigh*
Time to try lying down and hopefully get some real sleep for an hour or two.
The first (rather crappy) image above is of our very first sweet pepper seedling! I was starting to wonder if they were going to make it or not.
The pre-germinated Spoon tomatoes (in the next image), however, are growing like gangbusters! Almost every cell has at least one seedling emerging. Of the four varieties, these ones have been growing the fastest, and I’m quite impressed with them.
While I was out today, I picked up a new dial type thermometer for the portable greenhouse. With the old one showing temperatures like 50C/122F, and I thought for sure there was something wrong with it, since it didn’t feel anywhere near that got while I was in the greenhouse.
It looks like I was wrong!
In the next photo, you can see old and new thermometers, next to each other. The new one is on the right, and had been in there for maybe 10 or 15 minutes.
This time, however, it did actually feel very hot in there. Not sure why it didn’t, last time!
The last image is of our chitting potatoes. When I’ve done this in the past, I’ve laid them out on cardboard egg trays, cut side down to dry off. Recently, I watched and MI Gardener video on chitting potatoes, and he was laying them down on wood shavings to absorb the moisture. With I think would work better than the egg cartons. So this time, I used some older drain trays from seed starting kits – they have cracks in them and can’t hold water anymore, so they won’t be used for seed starting anymore. I put a layer of the stove pellets we use for litter on the bottom. As they absorb moisture, the pellets will swell up and start breaking apart into sawdust. I am thinking that will do a very good job of absorbing moisture so the cut surfaces will try off and “heal” better.
In the past, I set the trays of chitting potatoes up on our chest freezer in the old kitchen, which gets in the way of actually using the freezer. They are supposed to be set in warmth and light, so I moved things around and set them under the light next to the seedling tray with the warming mat. I had to lay them crosswise to fit, so half the potatoes weren’t getting as much light. That was solved by shifting the winter squash tray on the shelf above, so now the shop like that shine through the openings in the shelf. That should work fine, and the trays can be rotated, if necessary.
I checked on the pre-germinating seeds while I was at it. Still no sign of radicals.
As for the potatoes, I honestly don’t know where I’ll be planting them this year. They can be planted before the last frost date, though. I am expecting to plant these in one of the main garden area beds, and it will just depend on which one I can get ready yet. We hit 15C/59F today, and tomorrow we’re supposed to reach 17C/63F. I’m rather hoping that the snow covering the beds in the main garden area will finally melt away! Maybe then, I can lay some plastic down over some beds to help them thaw out faster.
I’m itching to get started on a lot of clean up out there, but some areas are just too muddy, while others are still covered in snow! At the very least, though, I should be able to start removing mulch from the winter sown beds that no longer have snow on them. Somewhere along the lines, I’ll figure out where the potatoes will go!
Or, more accurately, the sound of ice crackling under their weight as they walked across it!
They were very curious about it, too.
While giving the yard cats their morning feeding, I kept and eye out for Caramel – and saw her. Quite a bit, in fact. She was dashing from kibble tray to kibble tray, both in the sun room and out. I looked all over, including with Brussel, through the cat house windows, and even the two old dog houses by the outhouse, with straw bedding inside. No sign of her kitten, yet there was mom, hanging around the house!
Still looking pregnant, too.
I wasn’t sure what to make of that.
I headed out early enough to do the Walmart part of my shopping before I was supposed to meet with the Cat Lady. I got a couple of big bags of cat food, which were the most expensive items of the day. I also picked up a couple of 2kg (about 4 1/2 pounds) bags of Yukon Gold seed potatoes. Maybe I’m jumping the gun, but I didn’t want to wait too long with those. We’re already almost half way through April! I got a few other little things, but didn’t want to stay in the store for long. Once the truck was loaded, I moved it to where the Cat Lady and I were to meet, next to the Dollarama, and waited.
Along with some wet cat food and treat donations, she had three lovely cat beds to pass on. These were their own cat beds that none of their cats use anymore. !!! I was more than happy to accept their rejects. 😄
While going through a big bag of canned cat food to sort out the stuff for us, we got to talking about The Wolfman and his allergy to poultry. She scored canned cat food without any chicken in it, which is remarkably hard to find. She was telling me how, before they knew he was allergic to chicken, he was basically going bald. Which is so strange, because he showed no signs of an allergy until after he’d lived with them for some time. He even lost the fur on his magnificent flag of a tail. It’s all grown back now, but they have to be super careful about keeping him away from chicken. He’s a thief and would eat an entire roasted chicken before it had time to cool off!
As we were chatting about him, she told me about some vet visits they’d had with him, trying to figure out what was going on, and that at one point, she’d requested X-rays. The only reason we were able to catch The Wolfman and bring him indoors was because one of his front legs was wildly dislocated, flipped over backwards. She remembered when it happened, as we had asked her for advice. It was a long weekend and all the vet clinics were closed. She told us of two that she knew of that were open, in our entire province, and they were all hours away.
Then his leg popped back into place on its own. It happened some time during the night, so we have no idea how that happened.
Well, it turns out there is some permanent damage to that shoulder, including arthritis. The Cat Lady said they do see him sometimes favouring that shoulder. The vet, on looking at the X-rays, was apparently shocked, saying that leg had to have been flipped right around (it was), and couldn’t believe that it was able to pop back into place on its own. It never did completely return into its proper position, though. The vet, however, said that when a dislocation is this bad, the usual result is amputation! There’s a blood vessel that gets pinched, cutting off the blood supply to the leg completely and basically killing it. How that didn’t happen, they couldn’t figure out. As The Wolfman gets older, the shoulder will probably bother him more but, right now, his recovery from that injury a mystery to them.
They have a few cats from us that are like that. Button surviving is a mystery. The kitten we never named that turned out to be Down’s is another mystery survivor. Then there’s Cabbages, of course. The very first sick kitty they took from us and ended up keeping permanently!
Once we were done transferring stuff between vehicles, we headed into the Dollarama. I was specifically looking for a new dial-type thermometer to put into the portable greenhouse. The only one I could find was more of a decor item and not a dial type. I was also going to pick some some cat deterrent strips that are meant for garden beds. I was planning to use them in areas in the house that cats keep insisting in getting into, no matter how we try to stop them. There are none of those to be had at all.
I did pick up a few other small items, then headed back to the Walmart. It took some searching, but I did find the type of thermometer I was looking for. Next to the extension cords, of all things!
From there, it was time to head home. By the time everything was unloaded, it was pretty much time to feed the yard cats again; hopefully, it was early enough for the cats to finish eating before the skunks and racoons showed up!
I saw Caramel again, and even Brussel was outside, though she was quick to dash back into the cat cave with her babies. When Caramel jumped into it with them, it got knocked onto its side, and Brussel hasn’t been out of it long enough for me to fix it. She is still quite aggressive towards me, even as I give her her wet cat food, or her morning squeeze treat.
With Caramel hanging around, it seemed to me she wasn’t quite so … round, anymore. More saggy and floppy than round. She also kept going in and out of the cat house.
That first picture is the best I could get through the glare and dirt of the window, but there are two kittens in that cat bed! This is the cat bed that’s closer to the smaller window, not the one we found the dead kitten in, yesterday. There’s the dark kitten we saw before, now with an orange tabby, and they were very squirmy!
When I looked in again later, Caramel was there, and she was not happy to see me! She even hissed at me through the window.
The floor in the cat house currently has some high density foam mats on it that I found in the barn; with the heat bulb in there, I didn’t want to use straw. There were just a couple of cat beds at the windows, and a blanket, though the blanket was all bunched up by the wall opposite the windows.
I decided that two of the donated cat beds would go into the cat house. Later on, while Caramel out of the cat house, one of my daughters helped me lift the roof just long enough to lay down the two beds and close it again. Hopefully, some of the other mamas might decide to have their babies in there, too, which will make it easier to socialize, or at least trap them, later.
Speaking of which…
The Cat Lady confirmed our getting three females done on Tuesday. The vet specifically asked us to bring in any pregnant ones. She then suggesting doing a group of males next month, then younger females. I told her we could do that – the males are the friendly ones, so getting several males will be easy – but said I was afraid that if we waited too long with the younger females, they’ll end up either pregnant, or they’re already pregnant and would have babies by then. In the end, the vet will do whatever we can catch and bring in.
Getting the cats spayed is one thing. This clinic is giving her amazing prices for that. The problem is, these being yard cats, they tend to have other problems. Ear mites are pretty much expected, but if the ear mites are really bad, the ears get infected. Then there’s infections for injuries, etc. The last batch of cats she helped get done, from the town my mother is in, had infections so bad, the clinic said they ethically couldn’t release one cat without treatment. These were yard cats, though, not pets. The person who has been feeding them said she wasn’t going to pay for extra treatment, since this was basically a trap, spay/neuter, release. They’re going to get ear mites again, get infections again, and are just as likely to simply disappear. So the Cat Lady was in a pickle and had to pay for the antibiotics – which, it turns out, costs more than a spay! – just to be able to get the cat released from the vet!
Dealing with stuff like this is why she was having a hard time booking our yard cats in, but with mamas starting to give birth, she talked to the vet and they were willing to fit some in.
Needless to say, we’re going to try extra hard to get the cats we’ve been asked to get, but when it comes to the females, we don’t have much control of the situation. As for the two mamas, they will be booked in 10 weeks, when their babies are weaned and their milk has dried up.
The first image is little Magda. She’s one of the ones that is so small, she hasn’t gone into heat yet, probably because she’s not healthy enough. But if she does get pregnant, I doubt she would survive. She is, however, very socialized and would be easy to get to a vet.
The next image is Rolando Moon, enjoying a nap. This Grand Old Lady was fixed by one of my brothers, as we were in the process of moving here. We were told she was the last of the females that needed to be fixed. Which turned out to be wrong, and here we are…
In the next photo is an incredibly scraggly cat that’s been showing up. I’m not sure if she’s one of ours (she’s not at all socialized, so I’m assuming it’s a she. 😄). I don’t know what’s going on with her neck fur, but it looks like it’s been worn right off!
Next is a very pregnant Slick, aka: Octomom. She had a litter of 8 kittens, two summers ago. She has been allowing me to pet her while eating on the cat house roof, which is a HUGE improvement – normally, we couldn’t get close to her, never mind pet her – so I’m really hoping we can catch her for the vet on Tuesday – and that she doesn’t have her kittens before then!! She is so very round.
The last photo is of a big boy that’s been hanging around off and on. I’m not sure if he’s one of ours returned, or if he’s from a neighbouring farm. I’m assuming it’s a male based on his size, more than anything else. We haven’t been able to get close enough to see.
I am so thankful for the Cat Lady and her rescue. They have been helping us with the cats, too much! It’s not easy for them at all, with so few people willing to adopt these days, full shelters everywhere, and donations trying up. We are certainly not the only ones trying to care for colonies this large, or even larger. Cats being dumped being a huge part of the problem, too.
This afternoon, I headed out to drop our tax stuff off at the preparers, late enough that when I got back, I immediately started feeding the outside cats.
When I feed them in the mornings, I try to see into the cat house, but at that time of day, there is a lot of reflection. Plus, they get pretty dirty on the inside. Yesterday, I could see there was… something… in the cat bed next to the larger window. So while feeding the cats this afternoon, I made a point of trying to see what it was.
It was a dead kitten.
*sigh*
The cat house roof needs two people to open it, so once the cats finished eating the kibble on the roof, my daughter came out to help me open it. The counterweight is supported by two milk crates. The bottom one is embedded in ice, so we couldn’t move it. My daughter, however, was able to hold up the roof for me while I got the kitten out (there was just the one) and wrapped it in paper towel.
As I was going back and forth, however, I noticed Caramel in the larger cat bed on the bottom of the shelf shelter. I don’t usually see her there.
And was that a squeak I heard?
After we finished with the cat house roof and I set the little body in the branch pile for later cremation (the ground it still too frozen to bury anything), I went past the shelf shelter and heard it again.
There was just one kitten, but she was clearly still in labour, so while my daughter went inside, I hung around. I did ask her to bring a cat bed from my room that the cats don’t like to use. I set it up in the cube of the cat cage next to Brussel – with her growling at me the whole time – but I wasn’t sure how that would work out. It is meant to be drawn closed at the top with a rope, but it always collapsed, so we folded the sides down to turn it into a big bowl. We used it with Decimus and her kittens that way, but that was when the cat cage was in my bedroom. In the sun room, it’s a lot more open. Plus, the sides tend to collapse. Still, I thought it was worth a try.
I kept checking on Caramel, and even tried to pet her. Much to my surprise, she not only let me pet her without trying to bite my hand, but when I moved away to switch hands or adjust my position, she actually reached out to grab my hand, trying to pull it back for more pets!
After a while, I figured it might be better to just try and take the entire bed, with mama and baby, into the cat cage. I took the other cat bed out and, with the help of a daughter tried to move the big cat bed with Caramel.
Caramel, of course, got off, but we put it with the baby into the cat cave. It started crying for Mom loudly, and it wasn’t long before Caramel started coming back into the sun room.
Then we heard a cat fight in the outer yard, so I went to check on that, while my daughter monitored things through the old kitchen door.
By the time I came back, Caramel was in the cat cage – and in the cat cave with Brussel! Caramel’s baby, however, was still in the other cube, on the cat bed.
So my daughter moved the baby over, and things became quiet again.
There’s no way this was going to work out, though. I was hoping Caramel would still use the other, larger cat bed. Especially since she was clearly still in labour. There just isn’t enough room in there for them.
Okay, as I was writing this, I had the live stream for the critter cam going and saw a couple of skunks. I went to chase them out, then checked on the mamas. I could only see Brussel and her babies. I could see no sign of Caramel and her baby.
Except…
I have the live stream up right now and Caramel is in the sun room. I see her milling about, eating a bit, milling around some more. Now I’m wondering if maybe her baby is still in there with Brussel, but I just couldn’t see?
Oh, Caramel just left the sun room. You’d think she’d be staying close to her own baby, and with how actively she was still milling around, I don’t think she’s still in labour.
I’m at a loss.
While all this was going on, I updated the Cat Lady. She was very apologetic. She’s been trying to get us in for spays and neuters for weeks. We’re not the only ones she’s helping, though, and donations only go so far. I told her about the dead kitten, too, which I’m pretty sure was a stillbirth. We have no way of knowing which cat that was from.
After much messaging back and forth with the Cat Lady, she now has us booked for next week. We’re shooting to bring in 3 pregnant females. It won’t be easy, but that’s the goal. She wants to get us for 2 more younger females and a male in May. I don’t know how she managed to get us in so quickly for 3 pregnant females!
She and I will also be meeting up tomorrow. She has some donations of canned cat food for us. That will be a big help!
In the middle of all this messaging back and forth, I finally was able to get to that drain pipe in the basement. I ran the big auger bit through and, while I did hit a spot where there was definitely something hard on the inside of the pipe, I was able to get past it easily. I was even able to get through the bend under the bathroom and push through quite a bit further. I did this several times. There wasn’t anywhere near as much gunk stuck to the auger parts as there was before.
I think it might actually be safe to hook up the washing machine drain again!
Once I got someone to run water to test for leaks and everything was cleaned up and put away, the only thing I wanted to do was take a shower!
I most definitely needed to use my husband’s bath chair, though. I even made sure to take pain killers before I started.
We can test the washing machine tomorrow.
I must say, nothing about today has been at all like I expected it to be! 😄
I couldn’t see any fresh growth on the sea buckthorn, mulberry or Liberty apple tree, but they all seem to have survived the winter. There’s still too much snow covering the ground to know if the snow crocuses or grape hyacinth are starting to come up. The saffron crocuses seem to be okay – something was digging around them and in the mulch around the Liberty apply tree, and some of the saffron crocuses got buried. Whatever did the digging – likely a skunk – clearly wasn’t after the bulbs, but probably found some insects or grubs to snack on. I haven’t seen any sign of tulips, yet. This section is now free of snow, so we should be seeing them pop through the mulch soon enough.
There were plenty of hungry kitties when I did the morning feeding, and some of them were still hanging around, looking for pets, as I was heading back to the house.
She really likes to lick my hands. The poor thing’s fur is so badly matted, and there are even burrs now stuck in her tail. At least she is socialized enough that, once things are warm enough, we should be able to use the new clippers to cut them off. Some of the other puffy cats, like Patience, are friendly, but getting any burrs or mats cut out might be too much for them.
Oh, dear. It just occurred to me.
I didn’t see Adam this morning. At all.
Which means she probably found some hiding place in the outer yard to have her litter. It would have been good if she’d used the sun room, but she doesn’t really go in there often at all. Even the cat house would have been good but, while there are cat beds at the windows in there, we had to take out the remains of boxes that had been in there, so there are no longer any more enclosed “nests” in that mamas have used in the past. Any time a cat has had a litter in there, though, they tended to disappear within days. I think it’s just too busy and active with other cats and they are quick to move their babies elsewhere.
If all goes well, I might be meeting up with the Cat Lady tomorrow. She has a whole bunch of wet cat food donations for us, and she said something about having more cat beds as well. We shall see. Tomorrow is looking to be a really nice day, too. Today’s high is supposed to be 8C/46F, but we’re supposed to reach highs of 16C/61F over the next two days! Even the overnight lows are supposed to stay above freezing for those two nights. We might be able to start removing the mulch from some of the winter sown beds, so the soil beneath can thaw out faster. If the long range forecast is to be trusted, we might even be able to sow cold tolerant things early. I’ll have to go through my bin of seeds for direct sowing and go through the most cold tolerant varieties to decide while ones can be planted first. At the very least, the peas will be able to go in, and we have two varieties of sugar snaps, and one variety of shelling peas we can plant as soon as the soil is workable. Those would be going into the main garden beds, though, and those are still covered in snow.
Okay, so working on that pipe is not going to happen today. Pain levels are on the upswing and I know if I try to work on it now, I’ll mess myself up for days.
So, instead, I worked on garden stuff!
The tomato seeds were all showing radicals, with some even starting to show seed leaves. It was time to get them into the seed starting mix.
The first image has the Black Beauty on the left, Spoon tomatoes on the right. Those Spoon tomatoes were really doing well! It’s hard to see, but all the Black Beauty seeds had radicals showing.
The next image has the Sub Arctic Plenty on the right. As a short season variety, it’s no surprise that they germinated so quickly. On the left are the Chocolate Cherry. I was a bit surprised that these were the slowest to germinate. I would have expected the Black Beauty to take the longest, considering they have the longest growing season needed.
I had to moisten more seed starter mix for this job, and I made sure to use hot water for that. By the time the cells were filled and the seeds were being transferred out of their trays, the damp mix was still warm. Warmer than the damp paper towels the seeds were on. Now they’re in the tray along with the Turkish Orange eggplant (there’s 6 visible seedlings there), the luffa (all three have finally emerged) and sweet bell pepper mix (no sign of any of those, yet). The bottom of the tray got warm water, too – I wanted to make sure those square peat pots had plenty of moisture to absorb, so they don’t try out the seed starting mix.
That done, I went through my next batch of seeds and decided to go for it with the melons. The White Scallop seeds were set aside for now, as they can wait until May to be done. I got the containers all prepped and labeled ahead of time, and even got some markers labeled for when it’s time to put them into seed starting mix.
For the watermelon, I used my older Cream of Saskatchewan and Kaho seeds. The Sarah’s Choice melon seeds are also older, but the Green Flesh Honeydew packet is new seeds.
Then there are the Zucca melons. Which are the giants. These seeds, which I made a point of scarifying by scraping their edges with a utility knife, are also older seeds, so I made a point of choosing the plumpest, most solid feeling seeds. Which could have been any of them, really. They were in quite good shape. I started 4 seeds. These are the ones that started out so well last year, only to be decimated by slugs, so any transplants we get out of these are going to require extra protection.
Four seeds each was what I was shooting for; we over did it with melons last year, and I want to cut back. With the Cream of Saskatchewan, there were only 5 seeds left in the pack, so I set them all out. With the Kaho watermelon, there were only 3 seeds left in the pack, so I guess that balances things out!
They all got covered with dampened paper towel, and are now set up on top of the aquarium light fixture. At this stage, they don’t really need light, but they do need warmth. I didn’t want to set up the other heat mat yet, and the light fixture is ever so slightly warm. Not as warm as a heat mat, but warm enough. Once they germinate and get transferred into trays, they’ll get a heat mat. It should be interesting to see how many germinate. Especially with the older seeds.
After this, the next things we might start indoors are some herbs and a few back-up White Scallop squash. Those can be started towards the end of April or beginning of May. I’m hoping we’ll be able to start using the portable greenhouse at around the same time. It really depends on those overnight temperatures inside the greenhouse, as we have no way to heat it. We won’t have the option to use the sun room this year, as the space is pretty much all set up for the cats now!
Ah, well. We’ll figure it out.
It felt good to be able to do some garden related stuff on such a dreary day.
I noticed as she went past me to return to her babies that there was a wad of fur hanging off her hip. It looks like a mat was coming off. After giving her some wet cat food, I tried petting her babies. They were okay with it, though Mama snarled. I then tried to touch her hip to feel what was going on. I couldn’t feel anything that could have been an injury, but she did NOT like being touched and all out attacked my hand. It makes me think that her undercoat is getting pretty matted, and she might be in pain from it. Unfortunately, she’s still too feral for us to be able to check her out or help her with it. I’d hoped, with her in the cat cave with her babies, and getting special food and treats, she would start to become more socialized but, in the last few days, she seems to be getting more snarly and agitated, not less.
Well, we do the best we can for her. It’s not like we have any other options right now!
This morning, I stayed in my pjs, popped on some rubber boots and did my short rounds. Which is just as well. It was snaining – snow-raining – at the time. You could even hear a continuous almost crackling noise as frozen rain hit. In fact, you can hear it in the video I took this morning.
It was -1C/30F, with a wind chill of -4C/25F at the time. The thermometer in the portable greenhouse was reading 1C/34F. Not a lot of difference.
The holes in the roof probably didn’t help.
Yup, I found a couple of tears in the plastic this morning. Best guess is, a cat tried to jump onto it from the kibble house roof.
Thankfully, there was no other damage. For now, I used clear duct tape to close them up from the inside. Once everything is warm and dry again, I’ll at more to the outside.
I had a lot of hungry cats this morning, including Brussel, but she was nursing her babies and wouldn’t leave the cat cave. She waited for me to deliver her wet cat food breakfast, instead. I’m glad of that, as it is more assurance that she and her kittens won’t simply disappear one morning, to some hidden location.
Last of all, I gave her a squeeze treat. It was harder than usual, as there were other cats around, and they can smell it. They want some, too, but we don’t have enough for all the cats. They’re just for the mama.
Once again, as I moved the tube away so I could squeeze the rest out, she got angry at me. She did wait, though, as I squeezed the last of it onto my finger and put my hand in. There was no hesitation as she licked the last of it off – but when I pulled my hand away, she attacked it, trying to pull it back!
Sorry, Mama. You ate it all up!
Once I was back inside, I headed to bed pretty much right away. This time, the cats let me sleep – as did the pain killers. Somewhat. I got at least a couple of hours of sleep out of it.
Meanwhile, my daughters got the drain from the washing machine set up out the storm door and started laundry day. Later on, I will be opening up the drain pipe in the basement and working to clear it out some more. We’ve done the hot water/detergent flush from the kitchen sink a few times, but I can still hear from the laundry drain, what sounds like water backing up the pipe a bit. Not a problem at all for the kitchen sink, but a potential problem for wash cycle draining, as it drains so much faster than the kitchen sink, and is at least 6 feet closer to that first bottleneck. As good as that drain auger tip is for clearing the pipe, what we really need is a heavy duty bottle brush type pipe cleaner that can really scrape off the inside of the pipe. I’ve been looking and the closest I can find is up to 30 feet long (you can add sections to it) and can be attached to a drill, but it’s designed to clean dryer vents, so the brush is a LOT larger than the inner diameter of the pipe I am trying to clean out. The bristles may be flexible enough to bend and fit, though. I’ve found another version that includes a narrower bottle brush end for the lint trap that looks like it would fit much better, but the rod is only a maximum of 2′ long, and costs almost a much as the 30′ version.
*sigh*
I hate having to shop for this stuff online. I’ve never even seen anything like these at the hardware stores. Perhaps, however, I was just not in the right sections. Something to keep an eye out for.
Meanwhile, we’ll try to clear the pipe out as best we can, with the tools we’ve got.
It’ll be so nice to not have to run a house out the storm door window to do laundry again.
The Re-Farmer 