Author: Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: doing things different this year

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It’s cold AF out there, which means I’m thinking of the garden!

We are doing things very different this year, though.

The first major change is that I winter sowed a number of garden beds in the fall. You can see what and where, in this last garden tour video of 2024.

In previous years, I would have already at least started onions and shallots by now, and possibly some peppers. With the winter sowing, however, I have – hopefully – a head start on all these. I combined old and new seeds in various combinations into shakers before scattering them onto prepared beds and deep mulching them.

This is what I’ve got already sown.

Garlic – saved cloves

Seed combo 1: root vegetables
Carrots: Uzbek Golden and Napoli
Beets: Bresko, Merlin, Cylindra and Albino
Turnip: Purple Prince
Radishes: French Breakfast, Champion, Cherry Belle and Zlata
Onions: saved seed (mix of red and yellow bulb unions)
Note: left over seeds from this mix were planted in a final bed with saved Jebousek lettuce seeds added in

Seed combo 2: Summer squash mix
Sunburst pattypan
White Scallop pattypan
Magda
Green zucchini: Endeavor
Yellow zucchini: Goldy

Seed combo 3: Kitchen Garden mix
Swiss Chard: Bright Lights and Fordhook Giant
Spinach: Space, Lakeside, Bloomsdale and Hybrid Olympia
Kohlrabi: Early White Vienna and Early Purple Vienna
Bok Choi: Hinou Tiny (saved seed)
Shallots: saved seed
Onions: saved seed

Seed Combo 4: tall and climbing (mostly)
Sunflowers: Mongolian Giant and Hopi Black Dye
Peas: Dalvay shelling peas (not saved seed) and King Tut purple peas (saved seed)
Bush beans: Royal Burgundy
Corn: Montana Morado (saved seed)
Onions: saved seed

Flower Combo 1
Nasturtium: Dwarf Jewel Mix
Butterfly flower: Orange Shades (milkweed)
Forget Me Not

Flower Combo 2
Western Wildflower Mix

Perennials:
Strawberries: Albion Everbearing and an unknown variety of small strawberries, plus whatever survives in the asparagus bed
Purple Asparagus
Sunchokes
Onions for seed

So that is quite a lot of stuff that’s already been sown!

In theory, because they were heavily mulched, plus have an added layer of snow to insulated them, these seeds should start germinated as soon as the soil warms up enough.

In theory.

There are two things that I expect will reduce the germination rates.

First, I used this as an opportunity to use up some older seeds. Most of the summer squash, for example, is seed that’s 3 or 4 years old. The white scallop squash were new for last summer, so those should have a higher germination rate. Considering how many seeds were scattered in one bed, having a lower germination rate is not a bad thing. It would have me from having to thin them.

Second, these polar vortexes we’ve been hit with. While all the beds were mulched, the temperatures got so cold, it’s entirely possible a lot of these seeds have been killed off. I still expect some to come up – the onion and shallots, beans and peas are, I think, most likely to survive the cold. At this point, however, I will be amazed if we get anything. In fact, I’ll even be surprised if our Liberty apple tree survived, for all that we made sure it was planted in a well sheltered microclimate.

In the spring, once the snow starts melting away, I will need to remove the mulch so that the soil can warm up faster. With some beds, like the one in the old kitchen garden, I am hoping to be able to put one of the covers over them with plastic to warm them up faster. With the summer squash bed in particular, I’m hoping to arrange enough hoops or something so that it can be covered for its entire 18′ length. That bed will also need extra protection from slugs.

Aside from these winter sown beds, this is the space we still have available.

In the main garden area.

There is the low raised bed that will eventually be paired with another bed, yet to be built, to form a trellis tunnel. Right now, one half of that bed was cleaned up and replanted with onions that we gathered seed from, last year. I was able to do all red onions along one half, and all yellow onions along the other. The other side of the bed is where we had melons last year, and that half is still open for planting.

That leaves three other 18′ beds that are available. One has the logs to frame it, and those will be permanently joined once things thaw out in the spring. The other two have no log frames, yet. We have some dead spruces that are either cut down or have fallen down that we can use for that, but that will be worked on throughout the summer, or until whatever we plant in the beds are too big to work around.

There is also the bed with the Albion Everbearing strawberries in it. Those should survive the winter. Given the trouble we had with deer eating them, what I will probably do, once the ground is thawed out enough, is transplant them into the old kitchen garden – more on that later. Once that’s done, the bed will be available for something else.

As we are able, we intend to add many more beds to this area, focusing first on the trellis beds to the East, then reclaiming what has been a squash bed for the past few years to the West. This will require harvesting more dead spruces for materials, so it may be slow going. Last year, we got very little progress done, largely because of the weather!

In the Old Kitchen Garden

There is just one rectangular bed in the old kitchen garden that is winter sown. That leaves the tiny raised bed, the retaining wall blocks and the long, narrow bed against it, and the L shaped wattle weave bed.

For the long bed at the retaining wall, I will be doing some changes. Along the inside of the bed, it is bordered with a couple of logs to make it a lower raised bed. The top log is too crooked, so we can’t raise the soil level any higher, as it ends up falling through the gaps. I’ve decided I will remove that crooked long, but keep the straight bottom log, and then harvest willow branched and coppiced maple to wattle weave on top of it. This bed also has some short logs on the ends of the retaining wall blocks. The vertical sticks we used to hold those in place have started to break up, so I will probably replace those with a wattle woven wall, as well. Once this is done, we can add more soil to make it a slightly higher raised bed and not have soil falling into the path anymore.

The short side of the L shaped bed is where I am thinking of transplanting the Albion Everbearing strawberries. Considering how well the strawberries we grew from seed are doing there, I think that will work out.

As for the strawberries that we grew from seed, in the long side of the L shaped bed, while they are doing very well and are very prolific, they aren’t that good of a strawberry. Those will be transplanted out, but I haven’t decided where, yet. It will be somewhere that they can be left to grow wild and spread naturally.

That bed also had thyme we transplanted in, and chamomile that self seeded, in it. It’s unlikely the thyme survived the winter, but it’s possible the chamomile self seeded again. We shall see in the spring.

The tiny raised bed needs no work on it. Just the cover needs some maintenance from the cats using it as a hammock.

Then there are the retaining wall blocks. A lot of them have mint in them that we expect will come back. The ones with chives in them will come back, for sure. As for the remaining empty ones, they don’t get a lot of light and the growing space gets overtaken by an invasive flower that comes in from below, very quickly, so we will need to give a lot of consideration over what can be planted in there.

Chain link fence

We have a similar issue with the chimney block planters at the chain link fence, except it’s elm tree roots, not flowers, that have invaded those blocks! These need to be treated as a container garden, when it comes to what gets planted in them. Nothing really seems to do well there. Partly because of the invading roots, but also the blocks themselves would also be making the relatively small amount of soil they hold more alkaline. We will need to make sure to continue to amend the soil with sulfur granules or other acidifiers, more than other areas (our soil is already quite alkaline).

The other chain link fence bed is winter sown, but in the fall, I’m hoping we can finally redo the bed with permanent walls. Right now, we have scrap boards against the chain link fence to hold the soil in, and bricks around the other side and the end that are simply resting on the soil. I want to make this bed higher – to make it easier on my back, if nothing else! I need to come up with something better to go along the chain link fence; the old boards I found were already starting to rot, so they won’t last much longer. For the rest of it, I wouldn’t mind doing more wattle weaving, but that needs a LOT of long, straight, narrow, flexible branches, and we just don’t have that. What we do have will probably be used up this spring when I add wattle weaving to the narrow bed in the old kitchen garden.

The next area at the chain link fence is the asparagus bed and the sunchokes. The sunchokes should be fine, and need almost no maintenance. The purple asparagus is likely a lost cause. We should have been harvesting asparagus for the past two years and, while some are coming up, spring flooding has really set them back. The strawberries interplanted with them try to do well, only to get eaten by deer, in spite of protective measures. There is nothing we can do about the spring flooding, even though it doesn’t flood there every years. We could try making a higher raised bed but I really don’t think it’s worth the effort to dig up the asparagus, build a higher bed, and replant them, in this location. Especially with elm trees so close, as their roots are so invasive. I still want to grow asparagus. We’ll just have to find a better place to do it.

The East garden beds

We currently have one winter sown bed in the East yard. That leaves two more 9’x3′ beds, plus a new 4′ square bed, available.

The compost ring is in this area, and I fully expect lots of things to start growing out of there this year! One year, we had lots of mystery hybrid squash show up. Last year, it was almost all tomatoes, though some potatoes (which never got harvested) also showed up. With what we’ve been tossing in there after preserving the harvest, I wouldn’t be surprised if more tomatoes, squash, melons and even bell peppers started to grow in there.

Those are the areas we will have available to plant in this year, right from the start.

There are a few things that I will want to start indoors for spring transplanting. Others, I will probably buy transplants, instead. Here are some things I’m considering.

Tomatoes: We ended up growing a lot more tomatoes than intended, and way more than we use. For this year, I’m thinking we will just grow a cherry or grape tomato for the family to snack on. We don’t need to do paste or sauce tomatoes again this year. If we do grow a slicing tomato, it will be just a couple of plants. We do have tomato seeds we can start, but are severely limited in space for starts this year, so I might just buy transplants. We shall see.

Peppers: we’ve been experimenting with short season varieties to figure out what the family likes, which had us growing away more than needed. We’ve saved some seed but, again, we don’t have a lot of space to do starts. If we grow peppers again this year, I will probably buy two, maybe three, transplants and that’s it.

Corn: last year, I tried a super short season variety. This year, I have seeds for another short season variety to try. Just enough to see if we like them. This year, I will see what I can to do set up supports around the corn before they get big, as we have a real problem with the stalks being blown over by high winds. We also need to find a way to keep the raccoons from eating them!

As for the Montana Morado corn that was winter sown, there were very few seeds. I’d collected the kernels from what plants survived when we grew them a couple of years ago, and we were intending to test them out as a corn flour. Before we could do that, the cats knocked the container over during the night, spilling it all over the floor. I’d swept them up and threw them away, not thinking that they could still be used as seed. Over time, I would find a few kernels here and there that got missed and saved those. If any of these winter sown seeds survive, I am hoping to use them to collect more seed. We shall see.

Peas: we have the shelling peas winter sown, but I would like to grow some edible pod peas, too. The family likes those better.

Beans: we have bush beans that are winter sown. I would like to grow at least one variety of pole bean, and one variety of shelling bean. We have lots of bean seeds to choose from.

Melons: we do love our melons, but this year, I think we will plant only one variety of melons, and one variety of watermelons. These would need to be started indoors, in late April.

Winter squash: last year, we tried the Wild Bunch mix and had such a high germination rate, we didn’t have the space to grow any others! Two 18′ beds were filled with winter squash. Last year, we also bought two varieties of winter squash my daughters wanted to try, so I want to try those this year. They will need to be started indoors around the end of March or mid-April. I’ll have to check the seed packets again to be sure.

Potatoes: normally, I would have ordered my potatoes by now, for spring delivery, but just haven’t done it. We do want to grow potatoes – and a lot more of them. I’m just not yet sure where we could plant them right now. If worse comes to worse, we can buy our potatoes from stores in the spring, instead of ordering them online.

Salsify: we got seeds for these a few years ago, but never got around to actually growing them. This year, I’d like to finally do that! I’ll have to double check the packages to see about starting them indoors or not.

Herbs: I have quite a few varieties of herbs. I need to check which ones need to be started indoors. The long term plan is for things like herbs, greens and other things we use in the kitchen frequently, to be grown in the old kitchen garden, since it is closest to the house. The problem is, we keep forgetting to actually use them!

Flowers: my daughter particularly want to grow flowers but, in my seed cache, I have a packet of Crego Mixed Colour Aster seeds. These were given out in the memorial cards of an old friend that passed away suddenly, last year. I would like to find someplace to plant them in her memory, this year.

Wheat: a few years back, I got a rare, heritage variety of Marquis wheat seeds. If we have a free bed, I would like to finally plant them. I only have a couple of packages, so we won’t have enough to use them for anything. I will be growing them solely to save more seed for future planting. At some point, we hope to reclaim enough growing area to plant a small field of wheat and have enough to actually use to make flour, and still save seed. Mostly, though, I want to keep a heritage variety alive.

So that’s the general plan for now. Very little is going to be started indoors this spring.

If the winter sowing doesn’t pan out, we’re going to have a much smaller garden!

It will be a few months before we will know of they survived these cold snaps. Hopefully, we’ll be able to tell early enough to know what seeds or transplants we’d need to buy to replace them, before it’s too late in the season.

For now, we have reached our high of the day; -20C/-4F, with no wind chill.

Time to warm up the truck and go to the post office!

The Re-Farmer

One more day?

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Another day, where I wish I had the life of our cats.

Well, maybe not Butterscotch. She is frequently a ball of stress and anxiety. Before getting the above photo, I had lured the cats out of my room by loudly topping up kibble bowls in the dining room. Once I got all the cats, except our elderly Freya, out of my room, I could close the door. This gives time for Butterscotch to emerge from her corner to eat, drink and use the litter box. Last night, Butterscotch was looking distressed while various cats were at her food and water bowls on my craft table (which I can’t use as a craft table anymore), so I got the girls to be noisy about topping up the kibble bowls. As soon as the other cats started making their way for the door, poor Butterscotch RAN for the one litter box, hidden under my computer table, that she will use.

This morning, after luring the other cats out of the room and closing the door, I tried getting a bit more sleep. I had a very rough night last night, with many interruptions of various kinds. Usually, Butterscotch sleeps on my pillow next to my head. Lately, she’s taken to sleeping on my waist and hip. When I woke up, she wasn’t in any of her usual spots. It was a while before I noticed a cat in The Box. Without the other cats around, she finally discovered it! There is something about this box – it’s just the right size and dimensions, I guess – that the cats love, so I just keep it on my bed, next to the super fluffy, sparkly cat bed that was donated to us.

I had to go feed the outside cats, so I opened the door to let the other cats in when I left. When I came back, a different cat was in the box. Butterscotch was nowhere to be seen. As I write this, I got confirmation that she was hiding under the armchair again. One of the other cats was peeking at her, and I could hear her hissing and snarling. That is her usual response towards the other cats, even if they are completely ignoring her. Unfortunately, some of them are aggressive towards her, even to the point of attacking her when she tries to use the litter box. I have no idea why these cats started to do this. It wasn’t like this when we first brought her in. Sure, she has always refused to leave my room, but she was at least using all the room and even sleeping in cuddle piles on my bed, or coming to me while I’m on my computer, asking for pets.

Still, the indoor life is loads better than what it used to be for this old grandma!

I delayed going outside until past 9 but, like yesterday, it still wasn’t warming up. We were at -31C/-24F, and the wind chill was at -41C/-42F Another morning where I just gave the outside cats their food and warm water, and that was it!

We are supposed to get daytime highs that are slightly warmer than yesterday and, as I write this shortly past 10:30am, we have reached -24C/-11F, with a wind chill of -34C/-29F At least, that’s what my phone app tells me. My desktop weather app tells me we are at -26C/-15F, with a “feels like” of -25C/-13F Our expected high of the day is -20C/-4F. We are still under an ongoing extreme cold warning. Looking at the weather map, the polar vortex is currently extending through the Canadian prairie provinces, all the way down to Texas.

I was going to take my husband into town for some bloodwork he needs to get done. I’d suggested going in the afternoon, when we reach our high of the day, but he suggested we go another day!

I had no problem accepting that suggestion, though I will have to go to the post office. I’ll go when they reopen in the afternoon, which is when we should be at our high of the day.

Tomorrow, however, we are supposed to start getting highs above -20C/-4f, and lows above -30C/-22F and continue to warm up. Meaning today should be the last really cold day of the winter. We’re even supposed to hover just above and below the freezing mark for most of the last week of February.

I’ll believe that, when I see it!

This coming Friday (today is Tuesday), we should have a high of -6C/21F, which is great, since I’m now scheduled to go to my mother’s to do her grocery shopping and errands.

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting to hear back from the home care case coordinator. I’d left a message last night, after talking to my mother and being told she missed two of her medication times because the home care aid never showed up – and when she showed up the next day, claimed she didn’t know my mother was back from the hospital. My mother also claims the aids all have trouble opening the lock box.

The problem is, we can’t trust my mother to be telling the truth. I have no doubt that, at least some of the time, she believes what she is saying, but she also has a history of simply lying outright. Finding out that she thought she was taking “hospital medication”, which turned out to mean her barely used bubble pack that she had with her in the hospital, and that she “remembers” me packing it in her bag when we brought her home, when I had already taken it to the pharmacy the day before, was both confusing and concerning. Confusing, because of how she phrased things. Concerning because what she remembers happening, did not happen and could not have happened.

Not that long ago, my mother’s blood pressure dosage had been changed. On picking up her newly updated bubble packs, the pharmacist gave instructions to set aside the active bubble pack with the old dose until I could bring it back to them, and they would use the pills in there in the next bubble packs, since only the BP prescription had changed. I made sure to tell my mother this, but I never found that old bubble pack. I thought I’d seen it and went to get it to take to the pharmacist the day before she was discharged from the hospital, but that turned out to be one with just her eye supplements. They had to do those separately until they got an official prescription that would allow them to put it with her regular bubble packs. I suspected, but now am confirmed that my mother never set aside that older bubble pack, and just used it up. The home care aids would not have known of any changes to her prescription and just given her what was there.

Meanwhile, her BP just kept going up and now she is on a completely different BP medication.

When I get to her place on Friday, I’ll have to remember to dig out her BP monitor that she keeps hidden in a closet, and test her. I already dug out her pulse oximeter, which I hope she has kept on the table with the lock box. Knowing my mother, she probably hid it back in the closet.

My mother gets very angry about that lock box and not being able to access her medications, but the more I discover things that she’s been doing, the happier I am that we have it! I wish we’d thought of it, long ago, when we first discovered she was messing with her medications.

Well, we do what we can. As alarming as some of this is, I’m hoping that the stuff she is doing will flag her file as more urgent for getting her into supportive living, or even long term care, which is what I think she really needs. She may be physically “too healthy” for a nursing home, but with her cognitive changes, I think she may be more than supportive living can provide. Plus, she actually wants to be in a nursing home and, at 93 years old, I think she’s earned that!

Funny how her own doctor – the one she doesn’t like because she’s black, female and has a strong accent – is the only one that immediately accepted my mother saying she’s ready for a nursing home. Home care and other doctors she’s seen have all basically said she’s too healthy and too mobile for it. I understand that there is limited space and the nursing homes tend to be for the worse cases, but a person shouldn’t have to fall and break a hip, or be at death’s door, before they can get the care they need!

But I digress.

Once this current polar vortex finally breaks, things will be easier for my mother, too. She’s feeling so much better after her time in the hospital – and even sounds better on the phone – she might even be up to crossing the street to go to church, again!

This has not been a very severe winter. In fact, it has been pretty mild, overall. In a way, I think that has made these cold snaps even harder to deal with than if it was just a cold winter, overall.

That and I’m just getting too old for this s***!

😄😂😄

The Re-Farmer

Isn’t it supposed to get warmer?

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I checked the temperatures during the night, shortly after 2am, where we were at -29C/-20F, with a wind chill of -43C/-45F

I checked again shortly after 7am – when I would normally be getting ready to go outside to feed the cats and do my rounds.

It was -31C/-24F, with a wind chill of -42C/-44F

I checked again about half our later, and the temperature was the same, but the wind chill was back to -43C/-45F

Okay. I’ll just wait for things to warm up a bit before I feed the outside cats. They wouldn’t want to be running around in these temperatures, anyhow.

More than an hour later, and the temperatures hadn’t changed.

So I went and gave the outside cats their not-frozen kibble and warm water, and basically skipped my usual rounds entirely.

The thermometer in the sun room, at least, was reading around -15C/5F at the time. Still cold enough that the heated water bowl has frost around the top of the water level, with a layer of ice around one side, and cats had frost on their face fur. I don’t bother to put kibble in most of the trays anymore – the ones I can see they aren’t eating from. Instead, I scatter it in spots on the platform and shelves, under the heat bulb and the couple of trays they do eat from. Even outside, where their kibble trays are over full with frozen kibble, I leave very little fresh kibble, but have instead scooping some of it back into the bowl I used to carry their food. The bowl in the catio gets extra kibble, since it does warm up in there, but it looks like the birds are the ones eating the kibble under the shrine. The isolation shelter, however, gets the rest of the kibble in the bowl, including what I’ve scooped out from the frozen trays. The cats finish that bowl off completely!

Today was our day to do the litters which, with using the stove pellets, gets dumped into a separate compost pile behind the outhouse. This is one of those jobs where the girls do the inside part, and I do the outside part. We waited until past 3 to do it, though! By then, it was -23C/-9F, with a wind chill of -34C/-29F, but it was bright and sunny, which meant the sun room and the isolation shelter where much warmer – and filled with cats!

I got the above photos earlier in the afternoon, though. I was able to get a few shots from the bathroom window, which got their attention, but they didn’t run away. In the first photo, we have Fluffy, who is doing well enough to be on the very top shelf of the shelf against the old kitchen well. Most of the others were crowded in the opposite shelf, against the window, enjoying sun spots.

Instagram cropped the next photo for some reason, even though I set it to “full size”, so you’re not getting the full effect of having those three cats starting at me! It’s the little one in the middle that has me laughing, though. Those eyes!!!

The last photo of the thermometer shows it reading about -5C/23F. That thermometer is on a cold wall mounted about two west facing windows, so it would actually be reading colder than the ambient temperature – and certainly colder than the temperature in the sun spots filled with cats!

Slight interruption while writing this.

Well… not “slight”.

My mother called. As we were talking, it came out that she apparently did not get her second and third med assist visit from home care. It took a bit of questioning to find out this apparently happened on Saturday (today is Monday). According to my mother, then the home care aid that was supposed to show up on Saturday showed up on Sunday, she told my mother she didn’t know my mother was home from the hospital, so that’s why she didn’t show up. Which makes no sense.

There was also a very confusing thing my mother started taking about the medications she was taking in the hospital. After much questioning to figure out what she was talking about (it sounded like she had brought hospital medications home with her), it turns out she “remembers” me packing her medications from home, that she’s brought with her to the initial appointment that had her going to the ER, the day we brought her home. She said, don’t you remember, you put them in the bag, because they didn’t fit in my purse. W

Which did not happen. I’d already taken her partial bubble pack she had in the hospital, then took all her old bubble packs and pills from her place, to the pharmacy the day before she came home. Then, before we came to get her, we were able to pick up her new bubble packs from the pharmacy, with the updated prescriptions.

My mother has no memory of this. She thought her partial bubble pack was in the lock box, to be used so they wouldn’t “go to waste”.

I’ve already called and left a message with home care, explaining what my mother told me about the missed med assist visits. I should get a call back, tomorrow.

My mother, meanwhile, is upset that she can’t get at her own medications to take them herself, if home care doesn’t show up. Yet she clearly doesn’t know what is happening with her medications anymore, if she thinks she still has her old prescription bubble pack being used right now.

I made sure to message all this to my brother. One of his responses was, and they say Mom doesn’t need full time care?

*sigh*

There is a reason we have to have home care visiting my mother for her med assists. Many reasons, really, as well as reasons her medications are now in a lock box.

We really need to figure out what’s going on!

The Re-Farmer

Recipe (sortof): Green Soup

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Well, I should be going to bed right now, but I was peckish, so I decided to make myself a food. Which ended up being a soup.

It turned out so good, I just had to share!

This is really a “Use Watcha Got” soup. In this case, it turned into a Cream of Chicken and Avocado soup.

The ingredients:

1 large shallot, chopped (I would have used onion, but I didn’t feel like going to the root cellar to get one)
2 stalks of celery, sliced lengthwise and chopped into small pieces
2 medium sized potatoes, peeled and chopped into small cubes
1 ripe avocado, smashed into mush
cream cheese; roughly 2 oz (basically, I cut what was left of the piece in the fridge in half)
whipping cream; about half a cup
3 cups water and enough bouillon powder to make chicken stock (because that’s what I had available)
1 can chicken (a Costco can, so about a cup of chicken chunks)
enough ghee for sauteing (I normally would have used butter, but remembered we had ghee)

Preparation:

Melt the ghee in a saucepan until hot, then add the chopped shallots and celery pieces. Sauté until they start to be translucent. Add the potatoes and stir into the shallots and celery. Add the water and bring to a boil, adding the bouillon powder when it’s hot enough to dissolve quickly. Keep stirring occasionally.

After the water has boiled for about 5 minutes, stir in the smashed avocado. Return to boil and simmer for a few minutes, stirring occasionally.

Add the chunk of cream cheese. Return to boil and continue to simmer for a few more minutes, stirring continually until the cheese is completely melted.

Add cooked chicken chunks and return to a simmer for a few more minutes, or until the potato chunks are fully cooked, stirring frequently.

Stir in whipping cream and return to a simmer to heat it through.

Serve immediately and enjoy!

…

I think I’ll be having seconds!

The Re-Farmer

Recipe: S**t Balls

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Today, I decided to make something I haven’t made in many years. A no bake cookie.

I was first introduced to them by a friend in high school, while visiting her place. She called them S**t Balls, and that’s the name that has stuck for me!

KH, if you’re reading this, yes, it’s you’re fault! 😂

Since then, I’ve found them by many other names. It wasn’t until I got a community cookbook from the mid 90’s gifted to me that I actually saw a recipe for them. In fact, there were three almost identical recipes, all with different names! There is 5 Minute Boil cookies, using all brown sugar, Chocolate Drop Cookies, using all white sugar but skips the salt, and Fiddle Diddles, using margarine instead of butter, skipping the coconut, but including salt.

My version is a blend of all three.

Here is a slideshow of progress photos, for a double recipe.

Here is the basic, single recipe, and then I’ll go into more detail.

S**t Balls – No Bake Chocolate Cookies

2 cups sugar, white, brown or half and half
up to 1 cup cocoa
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup milk
1/2 tsp vanilla
3 cups rolled oats

Combine sugar, cocoa, butter and milk in a saucepan. Bring to a boil. Keep at a boil for 2 – 5 minutes (shorter time for white sugar only, longer time for brown sugar only), stirring constantly.

Remove from heat, stir in vanilla, then stir in rolled oats.

Drop spoonfulls onto trays lined with waxed or parchment paper. Cool until set. Can be chilled or frozen.

Optional ingredients:
1 cup shredded coconut (but why ruin your cookies??)
1/4 tsp salt

Easy Peasey!

First hint: use a bigger pot than you might think you need.

For my double recipe, I used our bigger stock pot. Once it starts boiling, it can bubble and expand quite a lot, and when the vanilla gets added at the end, it can sometimes foam right up.

Second hint: prepare your trays ahead of time. For my double recipe, I ended up using three 9×13 baking trays, lined with parchment paper.

In the first photo with the ingredients, I have doubled everything except the cocoa. Some recipes use only a 1/2 cup of cocoa, or even just 4 tsp, which is nothing. However, a cup of cocoa is a lot, so in doubling the recipe, I left the cocoa at 1 cup.

There is no salt in the photo, but as I was getting the mixture to a boil, I did add a few cranks from our salt grinder. Nowhere near the half teaspoon for a doubled recipe, but enough to make a difference. A touch of salt brings out the sweetness. Not that this recipe needs anything to bring out the sweetness!

The main ingredient is sugar, and what sugar you use can make a HUGE difference!

If you want a soft and chewy cookie, go with all brown sugar. You definitely have to boil it for a full 5 minutes, though. In the past, I’ve found ambient humidity can make a difference. Even after boiling at least 5 minutes, when it was humid out, the cookies just wouldn’t set and remained sticky and gooey. They still tasted good, but could only be eaten with a spoon!

If you like a dry cookie, use all granulated sugar, and you can get away with boiling it for only 2 minutes. With my double recipe, I boiled it for three minutes. The longer you boil it, the drier the cookie will be.

Of course, if you go with half and half (which is actually what I usually do), you’ll get a cookie that’s a bit moister, but not completely soft. For that, boil it for about 3 or 4 minutes.

The butter I used was still cold from the fridge, so I broke that up with my wooden spatula and stirred pretty constantly while bringing the mixture to a boil. It would be very easy for the sugar to start burning, so watch your temperature, too. Medium high is more than enough to get it to a boil and keep it there.

After the boiling time is done, take it off the heat and stir in the vanilla. Next, add the rolled oats and stir that in very thoroughly.

With the rolled oats, I used slow cooking oats, which have thicker flakes. You could use quick oats as well, but I find they lose their texture more. It’s just a matter of preference.

If you are using shredded coconut, it would be added with the rolled oats. Which we have never done, because none of us like shredded coconut. Ew.

Once the rolled oats are well mixed in, it’s time to drop the cookies.

I used a pair of soup spoons for this; one to scoop up the mixture, the other to scrape it off and onto the prepared pan.

Which can get very messy.

The two photos at the end with the cooling cookies, the first one is of the first tray of cookies, the second is of the third tray of cookies. You can see the first tray, there is more “spread” to the cookies, because it was still quite hot. It got easier to drop the cookies as the mixture cooled down. If you want to shape them a bit, you can use the spoons like you’re doing a quenelle, except round. I couldn’t do it with the first tray, as the mixture was still too hot and runny, but by the time I was doing the last of them, the mixture was starting to harden a bit too much!

With the size of spoons I used, I ended up with about 65 cookies in total, filling about 2 1/2 of my 9×13 trays. To chill them (and keep them safe from cats walking on them), the trays got moved onto the chest freezer in the old kitchen, where it is at or below freezing.

There you have it! A decidedly… questionable looking… no-bake drop cookie that takes very little time to make.

Enjoy!

The Re-Farmer

Well, at least the sun is out

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For now.

This is what it was like this morning.

You’d think things would be warming up by sunrise, but nooooo. This has been the coldest part of the day of late. -30C/-22F with a wind chill of -37C/-35F Normally, I would have been heading out at this time, but decided to wait. I knew the outside cats still had plenty of food, even if they don’t like eating frozen kibble, and they would still have water in at least some, if not all, of their heated water bowls.

It says the extreme cold warning is until Monday at 6am. My desktop’s weather app has the warning to 7:01 this evening. I would say my phone’s app is the more accurate one!

As I write this, we are coming up on 11am, and have managed to warm up to -25C/-13F, with a wind chill of -28C/-18F Thankfully, the sky is clear and sunny, so we’ve got some passive solar heat happening in the sun room and the isolation shelter. We’re supposed to get a bit of snow early this evening, though.

The cats – especially the younger ones – have been absolutely thrilled they can go into the isolation shelter again. That top level is just crowded with kitties. I haven’t been able to do a head count, though. It seems to be mostly the more feral ones, and they panic and run away if I get too close. I don’t want them to leave their cuddle pile in the warm shelter, so I stay away, unless I’m actually putting in more food and water. That is the one place where the food bowl is completely empty when I get to it! I might start scooping frozen kibble from the outside bowls and trays to put into there, so it’ll thaw out enough for them to eat it.

Then there are cats like Patience.

Patience definitely looks like he is losing patience with this cold! Of all the cats, though, he probably has the biggest, thickest coat of winter fur of them all. Even more than Adam…

Adam is a physically larger cat than Patience but, with his winter fur, Patience looks bigger than she does!

Adam was sitting loafed like this when I first came out with the kibble. I’ve taken to scattering kibble in various spots on the platform and other raised areas, where I know they will actually eat it before it freezes. I put some right in front of her in the cat bed, and she barely even backed away from the scoop. She didn’t move from this spot until was about to go inside. I started petting Colin, right in front of her. I’d hoped I could sneak a pet while petting Colin, but as he kept pushing closer in front of her, it was just too much, and she finally got up and moved to the other cat bed.

Kohl, meanwhile, still seems to be holding a grudge against me! A trip to the vet and two weeks in isolation – is it a month ago now? – and she still rarely lets me touch her. She does like to eat kibble on this shelf, though, and that was enough for me to get at least a few pets in. Her fur is getting pretty matted. I am hoping we can get her comfortable enough with us again, that we can do something about that. Probably not until spring, though. We don’t want to be combing out her undercoat and cutting away mats, in this cold!

Magda peeking from behind her is so adorable!

When we got Kohl and Cat 1 fixed (yeah… I couldn’t come up with a name), we did not give them collars. They are not yet their adult sizes. Without knowing if we’d be able to handle them again, I didn’t want to take a chance of them growing bigger and the collars starting to bother them. I remember when our elderly Freya first showed up on our balcony in the city. She had a collar, so we assumed she was someone’s pet that was allowed outside. One day, she showed up with the collar gone – and a rather large spot on her neck where the fur was rubbed off, and a wound visible. Thank God it was a breakaway collar! She’d been on her own long enough to outgrow the collar, and it was harming her. I don’t want that to happen to these two.

Kohl might still let me pet her once in a while, but Cat 1 won’t come near us at all anymore. Getting collars on them when they are bigger, so show at a glance that they’ve been fixed, is not going to be easy!

Sadness. 😢

Today, our expected high is -22C/-8F, and our low is expected to be -30C/-22F, and tomorrow is expected to be the same. On Tuesday, we’re supposed to start warming up again. Thankfully, we don’t need to go anywhere. I might head to the post office tomorrow to pick up some parcels, but there is nothing essential in, so I will probably just wait until Tuesday afternoon!

I am definitely in the mood to hibernate as much as possible!

The Re-Farmer

Plugging away

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Today we got to stay home, with no errands to run. Technically, we should have done a dump run, but that can wait until things warm up a bit.

We actually reached a high of -19C/-2F, with a “real feel” of -15C/5F, which was nice for a change. Even when we did have wind chills of -25C/-13F, it was from a direction we were sheltered from. It was also bright and sunny, so we took advantage of it to run the house out the storm door window and do several loads of laundry. We didn’t get it all done before the hose had to be brought back in before it froze, even though we now do laundry using warm or hot water. We used to only do cold water washes, but this way, there’s less chance of the hose freezing. We are back under an extreme cold warning, and tomorrow the high will be lower than today, but it should be okay to run the hose out again for more laundry. We have extra bedding to do, after a cat threw up on my daughters bed. *sigh*

Speaking of cats…

I caught a photo of this bunch, all huddled together, this morning, when it was still pretty brutal out there. The sun room was significantly warmer, but from what I could see on the critter cam, they weren’t really using it. When I first came out this morning, though, I found a bunch of them cuddled together in the cat cage, under the platform. The platform hides most of the cat cage from the camera’s view, so I never saw them in there. I would be able to see if they jump in and out of the opening, though.

As I was going in and out today, to make sure the hose from the laundry was fully drained, I saw a crowd of cats mashed together in the top of the isolation shelter. I couldn’t get close for a photo, though, as the more feral ones would panic and run out of the shelter. I’m also seeing several faces peering at me through the cat house window, so at least a few of them are using that to keep warm, too.

In between such mundane household tasks, I have been working to free up storage space here on the blog. I really don’t want to move to another platform, if I can avoid it, but we simply can’t afford WordPress’ prices for extra storage. After trying a number of things, I ended up simply deleting old posts. For a very long time, I was doing Photo of the Day posts, every day, as well as Critter of the Day posts – sometimes both in one day. A lot of these were just a single photo with a brief comment on them. Others had several photos or slideshows, also with brief comments.

A few of them were also full blog posts. Those ones, I kept. The rest, I have been slowly going through. WordPress made changes in their system since I last did this, that has made it easier for me to find the posts in the first place (you’d be amazed how many unrelated posts would show up when I used the search term “photo of the day”, which was part of the titles), and work with them. It’s also been easier to find the related images in the media tab. So I’ve been going through the list of posts, opening to view the posts, one at a time, so I wouldn’t lose track. Once the post was open, I’d open the image (or images) in another tab, so I could copy and past the file name from the URL. I had the media storage in another tab, and I’d do a search for the image. Then it was, delete the image, delete the post, close the extra tabs, then do it again.

It was a real trip through memory lane, doing this. These were mostly photos of deer and birds, but also yard cats. Some of them were adopted out, some are now indoors, and a few have either passed away, or have disappeared. While I have all of these images stored on external hard drives, I did end up saving a few onto my computer and sharing the memories with the family. Seeing old photos of tiny Dave and little Cheddar, snuggling with Fenrir – who was still bigger than them at the time – was rather heartwarming. David was not fluffy yet, and both of them are at least double Fenrir’s size now!

The frustrating thing about this is, I’d gone through these posts before, back when we first realized that posting full size, high resolution photos on the blog was not a good idea! I’d gone through and resized those huge images, or got rid of them entirely, depending on what sort of post they were in.

When it came to our photo of the day posts, though, had I started cropping and resizing all of them, even adding borders and the blog’s URL onto them. These images do not have large file sizes. That’s why I left them, even as I’d deleted others with much larger file size images. There are just so many of them!

Which means that I’ve deleted dozens of photos and old posts, and have only managed to get my storage to 98.4% full, instead of 99.2%. That 99.2% was more of an “accident”. Thanks to 53old’s suggestion, I found that WP’s photo editor now allows images to be scaled down. I could use that to resize the images, and could even see how much smaller the file size was, as a result. Very hand, quick and easy!

Yet, the percentage of used up storage space went up, not down!

It seems that WP changed this function at some point, from a one and done sort of thing, to being able to revert the image back to original size later on. Which means that, while the scaled down image might be faster loading when the page is opened, the full size file was still stored within the system. So instead of just resizing a photo, I was essentially turning one file into two files, with the full size file “hidden” from view, but still in the system – and taking up storage space.

I went back to the ones I’d scaled down this morning and reverted them to their original sized, and got back the space.

So in order to reclaim more storage space on this blog, I’m going to have to keep plugging away at these old posts. They don’t get any views anymore; I’m currently working on 2019, so they’re all older. But gosh, I put a lot of work into those images, and I was posting them because I wanted to share some really nice photos!

It’s awfully tedious, but still preferable to moving the entire blog to a new platform. I will still have to store new photos somewhere else, like on Instagram, to embed them into posts. Thanks to a suggestion, I might be able to store them somewhere else and embed them into my posts so that people not on Instagram won’t have problems seeing them. I’ll look into doing that later on, though, after I’ve freed up a bit more space here. I need to have at least a bit more wiggle room in there!

I guess that’s my project for the weekend. The temperatures will be dropping; the extreme cold warning is back and continuing for a couple more days. We don’t have any appointments until the 20th, and it’s supposed to start warming up again around the 18th, so that should work out. About the only thing we’ll need to go out for between now and then is to get the mail and make a trip into town for little things, like refilling our water jugs. Possibly a grocery shopping trip for my mother as well. No big trips to the city or anything like that until the end of the month.

Next winter, I want to really work on finding ways to NOT have a lot of appointments in January and February. There isn’t anything we can do about stuff like my mother suddenly going to the ER and staying in the hospital for 2 weeks, but we can try to book medical appointments – for humans or felines! – outside of the two coldest, most miserable months of the year!

Of course, I’ve been saying that pretty much since our first two winters out here, where we found ourselves actually unable to go anywhere at all, either because the vehicles froze, or we were snowed in.

It hasn’t really worked out that way but, for all my whining, at least the winters have not been as bad since then! There is at least that, and replacing the van with our current truck, to be thankful for!

I’ll take what I can get!

The Re-Farmer

New Critter Cam unboxing and testing

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I finally got around to editing and uploading a short unboxing video for the camera we now have in the sun room.

A few extra bits of feedback, since I recorded these clips.

Near the end of the video, you can see the camera moving around with the motion detection tracking. One of the major benefits of this camera is that I can set my phone up on a stand beside my keyboard, have the app open and keep continuous eye on the sun room. The old camera would only do that for a few minutes before I’d get a “continue?” request and, if I didn’t tap fast enough, it would discontinue the life feed. To have continuous live feed running, we would have to buy a subscription. That one difference makes the purchase well worth while.

The problem is, with so many cats moving around, the tracking would be all over the place, sometimes even sending the camera to do a complete rotation. Since the camera is mounted against a wall like it is, that meant getting views of the ceiling! It would move around so much that, even just in my peripheral vision, I was feeling almost motion sickness. The movement was just non stop!

So… the motion tracking got shut off.

I can move it around manually on my phone, though, to look at different parts of the room. Syndol noticed it moving and climbed up onto the shelf under the old kitchen window, standing as tall as he could, trying to get closer to the moving camera! He can’t reach it, but it was quite funny to adjust the camera so I could look directly at him while he was looking direction at the camera!

It has the ability to auto record. If it detects motion, it can start recording video automatically, saving it to the micro SD card. What I didn’t realize at first was that it was set to continuous record, which meant there were a series of 20 minute long video files saved to the micro SD card! With files that large, it takes forever for it to load to do a playback. It can be set for shorter times, but I’m not bothering with that. There’s simply too much movement in the sun room to have all these automatic functions running. As for files on the memory card, if the card is full, it simply discards the oldest files, while storing the newest ones. So if I had anything I wanted to keep, I’d have to make sure to download it. With the motion sensor off, however, there is nothing being recorded onto the card.

If I did see something I wanted to record, though, there are icons I can tap while the app is running, to get stills or video. There’s also the microphone icon that I can tap and hold to talk into the sun room – which rather alarmed the cats when I used it to break up a fight! All in all, there is quite a bit of functionality on there, most of which I have no reason to use, with it being a critter cam.

As for the network connect, there has been a couple of times where the network lost contact with the camera. Normally, I would have hit the reset button, but it’s too high to reach without a stool or household step ladder, so I just unplugged it and plugged it back in. That seems to have done the trick and now I seem to no longer be having that problem.

The only real downside is the tilt limit. The camera can turn 360°, but there’s only so far it can tilt. Which means that I can tilt it “down”, and get a great view of the wall and door under the camera, but I can only tilt it “up” far enough to see the very bottom of the doorway to outside. If I rotate the camera while it is at max tilt, the platform the cats use, or the bathroom window, can be seen, but they appear sideways. It cannot tilt enough to see the south facing windows, which is where the cats like to hang out. This is all because the camera is mounted sideways on the wall. If it were flat on its base, or even at an angle, it would be able to capture more in its field of view.

Oh, that reminds me; I noticed in the settings that the view can be flipped, if the camera is mounted upside down.

The field of view issue in regards to the tilt is not a camera issue, but a mounting issue for our space. If we could mount it level, it would work fine, but we don’t have a space where we could mount it in the sun room that would be work – and be out of reach of the cats! They’d be all over it, as soon as it started moving! So the few issues we’re seeing are not camera issues.

Which means that this camera passes the test. I can see getting more of these to monitor other indoor areas, such as the pumps in the basement. If we were to set one up to monitor the well pump and sump pump corner, I could see an issue with being able to plug it in; that power cable is awfully short, and there are not a lot of outlets down there! For the septic pump, I would want a type that screws into the light socket, and has a built in LED light. Which is what the first one I tried buying was, but we could never get it to connect to our Wi-Fi.

I would also want to have some outdoor ones to monitor the isolation shelter, for example, or other key areas in the inner yard – as long as we can access power! – but there is very little hurry on that. Mostly for budget reasons. Plus, I know my brother will want to set up security cameras around the outer yard, so I will probably leave most of that for him to do. He has something in mind, and I’m content to let him do it as he sees fit. My priority right now is more about being able to monitor the pumps in the old basement.

Overall, I would be okay with recommending this indoor camera.

The Re-Farmer

Thinking of moving

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No, I don’t mean moving off the farm. For all the issues we’re having, I hope to live here for many more years!

No, I mean this blog.

This blog is a very photo heavy blog. Early on, we ran out of media storage with the free WP account, so we forked over the dollars to pay for an upgraded account, with our domain name, that gave us 13gigs of storage.

Which did tide us over for a while, but we are at 98.9% full right now.

Some things, I’ve been posting on Instagram and embedding here. Which doesn’t always works, and sometimes requires people to click through to Instagram to see the images, and I think you need to have an account to see anything there. There are some things, however, that I won’t post on The Re-Farmer Instagram account – like our stock up shopping photos. I also upload photos to Word Press using my phone only, because it automatically compresses the images into a smaller file. Something it does not seem to do when I upload using my computer. Even images I’ve resized significantly are larger files than ones I upload from my phone.

A while back, I started going through old posts to try and free up storage space. I got rid of a lot of “photos of the day” and “critter of the day” posts that basically had a photo and little else. With others where the photos were relevant to the post, I checked and, if the files were full size, I would remove the original image, resize it, and repost it.

It was enough to tide us over for a while longer but it is incredibly tedious and time heavy to do it, and I don’t even know if I managed to get all the posts I could. I’ve been making pretty much daily posts – sometimes several a day – for years, so there is a lot to go through. I have to first open a post and check the images separately. If it’s a full size image, I then have to find it in the media storage area. Which you’d think would be easy, since I could just copy and past the file name into the search field, but it turns out that WP changes the file names somehow, adding _ in spots within the file name, for example. So I would have to figure out how to find the image using parts of the file name, instead. Once I found an image that I wanted to keep, I would then resize it, upload the new file, input the new image file into the old post, then delete the original, large file. Or, if it was a photo only post, I would simply find and delete the old image file, and then the original post.

There’s only so much of that I can do, before there’s nothing left to change, and it’s not saving enough storage space to be worth it anymore. I hate making posts without at least some sort of image in it (like this one!). Most of my posts are about things we are doing that I want to share. The whole point of this blog is to document what we are doing here.

So I’ve been trying to figure out alternatives. The plan I have with WP right now isn’t available anymore, so if I upgrade, there’s no going back. Their plans go from 6gb of storage space to 50gb of storage space, and the plan I have now gives me 13gb.

Upgrading, however, is to a business plan I don’t want or need, just to get some extra storage space. There is an option to buy storage space as an add on, but it would need to be paid for annually (though the prices lists are monthly), and the cost for 50gb is more than twice as the cost of the next plan up, which comes with the same amount of storage space. They’re basically charging more than a dollar a gig (Canadian $), whether you’re buying an extra 50, 100, 150 or more gb.

Which is ridiculous.

Alternatives include starting another free WP account and using it just for storage space and embedding the images into posts here. Which becomes a logistical nightmare (I already have trouble keeping track of my personal accounts and this blog’s accounts). I had opened a Flickr account and use that to store images to embed here, but they limit by the number of files, not storage space, so that didn’t take long to fill up. I haven’t found another place to store files that can be embedded here that I like.

Another alternative is to move to another blogging platform. Since I use a gmail account for this blog’s email, I would have access to a Blogger account already. As far as I know, I haven’t seen any limit on how many images can be stores on a free account, but for all its problems, I like the editing functions on WP better than Blogger.

I tested out Medium, but that isn’t so much a platform for blogging as a space for far left extremist hive minds.

I considered doing YouTube videos, instead, but 1) it takes a lot more time to edit and upload a video and 2) there are only so many things I would want to take video of, and I’m not the sort that can just talk into a camera. I prefer writing. Plus, I also would avoid anything that shows our faces. There are reasons this blog remains anonymous.

I ended up getting a personal Substack account some time ago, mostly because I wanted to follow other Substacks. I haven’t tried writing anything there, but I noticed that you can transfer entire blogs over fairly easily to the platform.

So here’s the thing.

This blog now has just over 900 subscribers, including email subscribers, after 7 years of blogging. I really don’t make any effort to promote this blog. Again, our need to remain anonymous prevents us from trying to create the next, great viral blog. 😄 WP does make it easy to follow other WP blogs – or at least it does, when it’s actually working.

I turned ads on in 2020 and only recently got enough ad revenue for an actual payout, and that amount doesn’t even cover the cost of the plan we’re on. Not that this blog can be used as an income generator (I cannot have an income, as it would negatively effect my husband’s disability payments), but it can be used to raise donations for the cats.

From what I’ve seen, Substack might be a good place to move to. For anyone already using it, can you tell me what the limits are for storage space on a free account? I can’t find any information for that at all. Of course, I’d have to pay to keep our domain name, but that shouldn’t be an issue.

Substack also has other options that seem to make it easier to collect donations for the kitties. Substack would take a cut, but since the account is otherwise free, that beats how much we’re paying per year for our WP plan. With WP, I’d have to upgrade plans to be able to use a donation widget, and we just can’t afford that. I have a Ko-fi account, but have never been able to get anything more than a donation button to work here, and I keep forgetting to post updates there.

If I do move to Substack, and you subscribe to this blog, would you follow us over?

For those using Substack now, how to you find it? How would you compare the two platforms?

Any and all feedback would be greatly appreciated!

The Re-Farmer

Is this love?

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I lost track of things and forgot that today was Valentine’s Day!

This morning, I had a 8am telephone appointment with my mother’s doctor. Normally, I would be outside, giving the cats their food and warm water. We were still under an ongoing extreme cold warning (which is now finally over), so I would have basically just taken care of the cats and skipped most of my morning rounds!

With the phone appointment, however, I messaged my daughters, asking if they could take care of the outside cats. I was pretty sure my older daughter had gone to bed after a night’s work, but I wasn’t sure if my younger daughter was available.

She was, and she took care of the outside cats for me, while I waited for the call.

Which was about half an hour late, of course. My daughter was back inside, updating me, when the phone rang. With the cats’ food trays and bowls so full of frozen kibble, we’re figuring out ways to make it so they can actually eat it. With the isolation shelter open again, I’m thinking of taking some of kibble from the kibble shelter and putting it in the isolation shelter. When there was just two cats, there was excess kibble, but once the other cats started going in there again, the bowl was empty, and even the kibble scattered about was eaten up!

As for the phone call, it wasn’t my mother’s doctor that called, but another doctor working with her. I explained about my mother having been in the hospital for a couple of weeks, and how we were told she needs to see a doctor every month to monitor her kidney function, now that she’s back on the water pills. They didn’t actually have everything in my mother’s file yet, and the doctor had to ask me when she had been discharged!

They did have the results of her last bloodwork done while she was in the hospital, though, and he could tell me her kidneys are doing just fine.

The problem, of course, is making a 93 yr old who struggles to walk, climb into the truck and drive to the clinic, over and over, because there are no local doctors available.

The hospital in her town does have a lab, though.

My mother won’t need to physically go to the clinic every month.

They will mail bloodwork requisition forms to my mother every month. The local hospital will not accept these forms being faxed to them. It would have been better if I could physically pick it up, to eliminate any risk of the form being lost in the mail, but that’s just not an option.

I will, however, be in that town next week, and will be stopping at the clinic to get my own medical files to take to my new doctor, before my daughter and I have our appointments. So he got a form printed out and it will be waiting for me when I get there. As my mother had bloodwork done this month, already, she won’t need to get it done again until next month.

Aside from that, she can have telephone appointments to go over the results, though they do that only if there is a problem. She won’t need to physically come in for an appointment unless there is a need. We will have to continue to monitor her for swelling and breathing issues, which the doctor at the hospital already explained to us, and my mother is to go to the ER right away, if problems start up again.

That done, I updated my siblings in our group chat, as much to make sure I wrote down the details while it was still fresh in my mind as to share it with family. Then I phoned my mother to update her.

As I started talking to her about the monthly appointments the hospital doctor said she needed, and that I called the clinic about them, my mother got somewhat agitated. It took a bit to figure it out, but she was under the impression she had a physical appointment with her doctor. I had told her I had made a phone appointment to talk about her case, but since then, she got it in her mind that this was an appointment with her, not about her. I clarified and told her, I’d made a phone appointment with me, that I had just gotten off the phone, and I was calling to let her know how it went.

She stayed very quiet as I went through the call which, in itself, is unusual. Normally, she interrupts and starts taking the conversation in other directions. I’m not completely sure how much she understood, but when I got to the part about going to the local hospital for monthly blood work, she said that we would have to keep track of that for her.

Which, of course, was already the plan!

She then started talking about her medications and the lock box. To make is short, my mother was very angry about having the lock box, the home care aids cant get into it, she doesn’t need this big box and can manage her own medications.

I was alarmed when she said the home care aids can’t get into it. She said she didn’t get her medications this morning. At first, she made it sound like it was because the aide couldn’t open it, but if that were true, I would have gotten a phone call. Or my brother would have. This happened only once, with one person, though. My mother had 2 other visits the day before, after the new lock box was brought over, and got her medications. Now she was saying the aids can’t get into the box at all?

I asked if she got her morning medications, and she said no.

No one showed up.

????

Again, if they were short staffed, I would have got a phone call, because I would have had to drive to my mother’s to give her her medications.

Then I noticed the time.

It wasn’t even 9am yet.

They are supposed to give her her medications before 7 an 9am.

I mentioned the time and said, they probably just haven’t made it yet.

Well, my mother was still quite angry. She can manage her own medications. They don’t always come at the same time. She doesn’t need this big box.

We talked for awhile and I reminded her, this was doctor’s orders. It was for her own safety.

Oh, so my children don’t trust me?

I brought up that she herself has noticed she is not remembering things. Then I brought up the pill boxes full of loose pills I’d found when I got her old bubble packs to take the the pharmacy, and that the pharmacist had to dispose of them. She has a history of messing with her medications, and things like that were why she needed a lock box and med assist from home care. This is for her safety.

I didn’t bring it up with my mother, but in the group chat with my siblings later, I mentioned that all these pills she had in there were pills she did not take when she should have. Plus, she ignored the days and times on the bubble packs, just staring from the top, and taking them whenever she had her breakfast, because she is supposed to take them with food (except I don’t think any of them actually specify to take with food). And by “with food”, she means with a couple of crackers or cookies or a piece of toast and, before we got the home care med assist, she would take them at 5am and 5pm and before bed, instead of the times on the bubble pack. As a result, she often had a couple of active bubble packs going at once, and really made things harder for the home care aids.

But all of that would have been too much to talk to her about. We basically just have to bring it down to “doctor’s orders” and “it’s for your safety.”

Our call got interrupted, though, by a knock at the door.

The home care aid had arrived to give her her morning medications.

My mother has no understanding of how much she is messing herself up.

After I got off the phone with my mother, I updated my siblings again. My mother’s behavior is a strong demonstration of just why having that lock box, and home care visits for her med assist, is so important. We were able to chat for a bit, wondering about how my mother will handle having a Life Line, once that gets set up.

It can be really hard to help my mother when she keeps trying to sabotage our efforts. These group chats and updates are extra important, because my mother will say one thing to me, then something different to each of my siblings, then tries to play us against each other. This is something she has done for pretty much as long as I can remember though, of course, as a child, I had no understanding of what she was doing.

Aside from the group chat, I got a Valentine’s Day message from my SIL, which is when I was reminded that that’s what today it.

Which got me to thinking about the whole theme of Valentine’s Day being about love, and about what it means to love someone. Years ago, I read a point someone very wise said.

Love is a verb.

Most of us think of love as a feeling. Something you “fall into”. An emotion.

Which all can be part of love but, in the end, love is not how we feel, but what we do.

The English language rather fails when it comes to the word love. There are too many definitions for one word. The Ancient Greeks had different words for love that I think we could not go wrong, bringing back. They also viewed their words for love on a sort of scale. There are nine modern and ancient words for love. Here are four ancient ones.

The first type of love – the basest form – is eros. Eros is physical love, and the root of our word, erotica. Eros is about sex, really. In English, it would probably be better translated as “lust”. Eros was considered the lowest form of love.

The next type of love is philia. This is platonic love. Yes, there is a physical aspect to it – hugs and kisses between friends that have zero sexual connotations – but philia is brotherly love. The love of deep friendship. Philia is used in many ways in our language. Philadelphia is known as the “city of brotherly love” based on the Greek definition. It is also found in the suffix -phile. One example being bibliophile, a lover of books.

The next type of love, higher on the scale, is storgê. This is what might be called, family love. It is particularly used to described married couples raising their children together.

The highest form of love, however is ágape. This is unconditional love. Sacrificial love. Agape is independent of any external factors. It is given wholly, and expects nothing in return. Agape is the foundation of Christianity; that Jesus set aside His godhood to live fully human; a sinless life we could not hope to achieve, take on the punishment for our sins we all deserve – all of us, throughout humanity, throughout time. An execution so horrific, a new word was invented to describe the pain. Excruciating. Ex crucio. From the cross. To die in our place, so that He could conquer death, that we may live. All we have to do is fully accept this gift of His, yet we have no obligation to do so. That is the height of agape love.

So what is love, in our daily lives?

Love is what we do.

Love is to be friends with someone, be apart for years, yet when reunited, it’s as if those years apart never happened.

Love is seeing each other at our best and at our worst, and still being there for each other.

Love is a couple growing old together, facing the world together, long after the tingles have faded.

Love is a parent denying a child something they want, in favour of something they need, even when the child has a blowout and says they hate us for it.

In one of my recent devotions, these verses from Luke 11 were included.

5Then Jesus said to them, “Suppose you have a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; 6a friend of mine on a journey has come to me, and I have no food to offer him.’ 7And suppose the one inside answers, ‘Don’t bother me. The door is already locked, and my children and I are in bed. I can’t get up and give you anything.’ 8I tell you, even though he will not get up and give you the bread because of friendship, yet because of your shameless audacity e he will surely get up and give you as much as you need.

While the devotion was about persistence in prayer, as both a parent and someone with a lifelong interest in how people lived in the past, this line stands out to me.

‘Don’t bother me. The door is already locked, and my children and I are in bed. I can’t get up and give you anything.’ 

In context for the time period, most likely the family was sleeping together on a mat woven of reeds or grasses. Even overnight visitors would join the pile. Can you just picture it? Husband and wife, lying on the floor, their kids snuggled up around or even on them. Dad there with a toddler on his chest and another child on each side, while Mom lies next to them with a babe at her breast… and then there’s a knock at the door! No wonder the response is “don’t bother me… I can’t get up…” !!

For most of human history, that’s how we slept. That’s how we lived. We had almost constant physical contact with each other. It wasn’t until the Victorian era that houses started to have rooms set aside just for sleeping, and that children got separate rooms to sleep in. Even now, in many places around the world, separate bedrooms (and sometimes just having beds) are a luxury, and the idea of children sleeping apart from their parents would be unheard of.

Sadly, we live in a world hungry for love. Real love.

We even hunger for the platonic physical aspects of love that used to be just part of our everything living, before cradles and cribs and separate beds and bedrooms became the norm, among other changes. Our culture has become so hungry for philia and storge, many turn to eros to fill the emptiness. We have reached a point when many cannot view any sort of physical affection as being anything but eros. A parent can’t even kiss their own child on the lips, or a mother breastfeed her baby, without people viewing it as something sexual in nature.

Our current culture, at least in our Western nations, has redefined love in other ways. To far too many, love means to always go along with what a person wants. To validate and enable anything they do, even if they are self harming in the process. It means to agree with anything they say, no matter how wrong they are. If you do not do this, you get accused of hate – another word that has been redefined dramatically!

Which brings me back to today.

Today, my mother was very angry about her medications being in a lock box. When told the reason why, she tried to turn it around and accuse us of not trusting her.

For some people, the “loving” thing would be to do what she wants. To make her “happy” by giving in. Take away the lock box, and let her take her meds whenever she thinks she should, or only the ones she thinks she should, even though she can’t remember what all of them are anymore, and certainly doesn’t know what the new ones are.

That would, of course, be wrong and even harmful. So the loving thing to do is NOT what she wants, but what is good for her, even if she can’t understand it and has hairy fits about it.

When it comes to my mother, I don’t “feel” love for her. I don’t know if I ever have. Years of confusing and abusive behaviour made that impossible. But she is my mother, and I still “do” love for her. She can get mad at me and yell at me and say cruel things to me, but I will still “do” love. Or she can flip like a switch and suddenly become oddly generous or kind, and I don’t know if it’s real, or if she’s trying to mess with me. It doesn’t matter. I will still “do” love. That doesn’t mean I’ll put up with the behavior, and I will call her out on it – which is also a way to “do” love.

I can make similar parallels to our home life, where my husband has to sleep in a hospital bed in another room. We may not be able to share a bed, but we can still “do” love.

Or where our daughters gave up so much to move out with us, turned the poorly insulated upstairs into their own apartment, and put up with freezing winters and boiling summers up there.

Or my younger daughter crawling out of a warm bed this morning, to go outside in freezing temperatures, to feed and water the cats while I wait for a phone call.

There are so many ways to “do” love.

This Valentine’s Day, I wish you much philia. I wish you storge and agape and even, if appropriate, a little bit of eros!

Happy Valentine’s Day!

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The Re-Farmer