Critters

Bitty Baby

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While going to the pump shack to leave some kibble at the tray by the door, I heard a plaintive little meowing. It was one of Rosencrantz’s white and grey babies, out by the junk pile.

This one.

Not only did it let me pet it, but allowed me to carry it to the kibble house!

Unlike the fuzzy beauty behind it. The girls have been able to lure it close enough to touch, but so far, I haven’t had any luck at all.

What a difference between them. The tabby is from the oldest litter of the year, and the white and grey is from one of the youngest litters. I’d estimate there’s about 4 months between them.

The Re-Farmer

Exploring

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I laid the tarp I found in the barn out, to get a better look at it.

It turns out, it’s not a tarp. It’s the roof of the carport I found most of the frame pieces for, in the hayloft of the barn.

The kittens could not get enough of it!

You can see where there are channels that the curved roof supports would run through. All along the left, there is a series of matching, rectangular tears, one of which got duct taped.

I don’t think we can use this to cover that hole in the roof of the shed by the barn. I think we’re going to have to actually buy a large tarp.

For now, however, the kittens can enjoy it.

😊

The Re-Farmer

Check up

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Would you look at this handsome boy?

He’s in the V shaped bed they had him in to do an ultrasound at the vet. It took two of us to hold him while the vet did the ultrasound! Once it was done and he rolled himself over, he happily stayed in it, apparently quite comfortable!

Also, Leyendecker has an almost completely clean bill of health!

The vet actually brought over a little printout of the results from his blood tests. All but one result was back to normal, and the one was not a concern and likely due to stress. Even his kidneys show no sign of damage. It was his potassium levels that were the real surprise. They were perfectly normal. Last time, it was off the charts. The vet once again called him a miracle cat. Those potassium levels should have killed him.

During the ultrasound, she said that she could still see there was junk in his bladder, but just a little. The urinary cat food should help with that. He was also weighed, and is down half a kilogram (about a pound).

The medical exam and tests were well within my daughter’s budget, so I was able to get more wet and dry cat food for him. We’re trying a different brand this time, as he didn’t really like the other one. At least not compared to regular kibble and wet cat food. A 6 pound/2.72kg bag of kibble is almost $45, while one 156g/5.5oz tin of wet cat food is $2.47 each.

Ouch.

The vet did remember to ask about Keith; the last time I spoke to her on the phone, I had mentioned we had another sick cat. I told her that he passed away peacefully in his sleep soon after our call.

So this is about as good the news can get about Leyendecker! Her recommendation to help reduce his stress is the same: try and adopt him out to a home with less cats! Mind you, being able to adopt out more cats in general would have much the same affect.

I remember when we brought in our first outdoor cat, Fenrir. At the time, I swore we would not bring in any more cats. Three was enough.

Then we brought in cats that were sick or injured.

Then we brought females in so they wouldn’t get pregnant before we could get them fixed.

Always with the plan to socialize and adopt out cats, which hasn’t worked out all that well.

But it’s not like there’s much of an alternative. We’ve had people tell us we should just shoot them, but we’re not going to do that. We will just keep taking care of them, and hopefully adopt them out.

The Re-Farmer

Cold morning, and a bit of an update

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When I checked the weather this morning, at about 6:30am, we were at -6C/21F – colder than was predicted. It’s going to warm up again, but this was definitely a precursor of what’s to come, about a week from now.

The kitties seemed to be okay with it, though.

It had warmed up to about 0C/32F by the time I was taking this picture. It’ll be time to hook up electricity to the cat house soon. There was frost on the inside of the windows!

There was also no water left in their bowls at all this morning. Even the big plastic heated bowl that stopped working last winter had nothing but shards of ice stuck to the sides. It makes me wonder if we’ve got something large, like a deer, coming around and drinking the water.

The kitties were very happy when I refilled the bowls with warm water. 😊

When I first open the sun room door, it’s not unusual for cats to explode out of the shelf shelter next to the door. I’ve had to reinforce the rigid insulation, even at the very bottom, because they hit the sides on the way out and break it.

This morning, I saw a whole bunch of very small white and grey kittens bursting out of the shelf shelter. These would be the pump shack kittens! They’ve found a warm and cozy place to spend the night, near the house, which makes me feel much better. There are still a couple of other little kittens – I think they are Caramel’s hidden litter – that go shooting across the yard when I come out. Hopefully, as things get colder, they will learn that beside the house is a warmer, safer place to be, and the giant food givers mean them no harm.

I tried to do a head count this morning. It’s hard, because they move so much. Especially with all the mostly white ones. I think I counted 25, though. Almost all kittens and cattens. Among the adults, I see Rosencrantz and Caramel regularly. I think I see Junk Pile, but one of the cattens looks so much like her, and is about the same size as her, I’m not sure. Rolando Moon, at least, is very easy to spot, and she comes and goes frequently. She is the last of the orange cats! I did not see her this morning. I’m not sure about all the ‘iccuses, all of which are grey tabbies. The adult males – all of them – have pretty much disappeared. The mamas were never particularly large, so I’m not sure if I’m seeing almost grown grey tabby cattens or adult cats!

Even Sad Face (aka Shop Towel), father to all those white and grey kittens, is rarely seen these days. I haven’t seen The Distinguished Guest in quite a while, and even then, only briefly. Potato Beetle hasn’t been seen in quite some time. One of the cattens looks a LOT like Potato Beetle.

We’ll need to take advantage of the few days of warm weather we’ll be having and get work done outside. This morning, I took the wheel barrow to the barn and went searching. There are two last pieces of high density mats that will go into the cat’s house to help insulate the floor – and can survive being scratched at. I also found one last large tarp of some kind. It needs to be cleaned up and patched up, but it should be big enough to put over the hole in the roof of the shed by the barn. My brother was able to put salvaged pieces of metal roofing on the other side, but we don’t have a safe way to do that on this side.

Too bad the scaffolding that used to be here disappeared before we moved in. That would have allowed us to patch up a few shed roofs. 😕

On top of that, I’ve got more to work on in the old kitchen garden to make it more functional, and there’s more clean up and weeding to prepare the beds for next year. Of course, we need to finish painting the water bowl shelter, but it’s been too cold for that, the last couple of days. We should be able to get it finished before things start getting – and staying – cold again.

In other things, my daughter and I did a dump run yesterday, then ran some errands. One of them was to visit my MILs grave to see if it needs to be cleaned up and add some silk flowers I got for it.

We never found it.

My daughter was so sick the day of the funeral, she could not remember where it was, other than vaguely in the middle somewhere. Maybe. The cemetery is quite large, but we went through the whole thing. We were starting to go through it a second time when my daughter spotted a notice on a storage shed. It turns out that some of the monuments had been damaged during this spring’s flooding, and were being slowly removed and repaired.

That explains what looked like unmarked graves I was finding! I guess my MIL’s grave stone was among those that had to be removed for repair.

We had another errand to run, but since we were still in town, I added one more. I kept forgetting to book an appointment for follow up bloodwork for Leyendecker. The vet clinic has just reopened in a new location, so we went there and I went in to book it. They are still most definitely still in move-in mode! It’s a much larger location, though, which I think was much needed. It took a while for the receptionist to find Leyendecker in the system (she ended up having to do a refresh and reload, and suddenly it all popped up!), but she was able to get us in.

For today!

I did not expect it to be that quick!

So I will be heading into town again this afternoon with Leyendecker. It’s just for blood work, and he didn’t need to fast or anything like that.

Hard to believe that, only a week or so ago, we seriously thought we might have to have him put down. He now seems completely back to normal! The only thing that’s changed is that now Nosencrantz and Butterscotch are okay with him being in my office/bedroom with them, though Nosencrantz will still growl at him sometimes. Hopefully, the blood work will reflect his improved condition.

The one last errand needed was to pick up some cash to pay the septic guy. We’ll get that done as soon as we can, and then we can cover the tank for the winter. We’ll have to use the insulated tarp again. I don’t think we’ll be getting another round straw bale before winter. We shall see. I would rather have straw, as it’s easier to move than a tarp frozen to the ground, if we need access to the tank again!

It’s always such a push to get things done before winter!

The Re-Farmer

I got to touch!

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Check out the attitude on this guy!

He looks so chill!

Also, he has a stuffy nose.

Or he could be a she. We still don’t know.

BUT!!!

He’s a playful one. While he was on the kibble house roof, I was able to get him to try and catch my wiggling fingers. He was willing to come right up to me and, if I was sneaky about it, I was able rest my other hand on his back. Not quite petting him, but getting him used to being touched by a human. He’d back off at soon as he realized I was touching him, but would come right back to trying to catch my fingers.

Much progress made!

The Re-Farmer

Caught a new one

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I managed to get a picture of a new baby.

I believe this is one of two? of Caramel’s litter. Mostly a guess on m part. I’ve only caught glimpses of them, and there was no adult cat around when I got this picture.

I’m just happy the youngest kittens are starting to come to the kibble house for food. Hopefully, they will soon discover the inside of the cats’ house (they already go under it!) as a safe and warm place to be.

The Re-Farmer

Progress on the old kitchen garden bed and water bowl shelter

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To continue working on the low raised bed in the old kitchen garden, I couldn’t use the mini chainsaw any more – the batteries just don’t last long enough for a job like this.

It was time to break out the electric chain saw. It’s very handy. The only problem is that I was moving around so much to reach the corners, the extension cord was in the way.

It still made the job much easier and faster. There was one log that was so bumpy, I spent more time trying to smooth it out than all the rest of the work put together!

You can see in the background that the kittens had been playing in the soil on the tarp, spreading it out quite a bit!

The whole thing wasn’t very stable, though. Something needed to be done to stabilize it, so it wouldn’t fall apart when the soil was added.

I decided to sacrifice some of the plastic coated metal stakes that I’d used to hold hoops supporting netting over the spinach bed.

I used an auger bit to drill holes into each corner of the bed, then hammered in a length. A couple had to have excess length broken off, but I think the other two actually went all the way through and into the ground below.

This made the whole thing quite sturdy. Now I could start filling.

On top of the wood chips I’d added earlier, I added some of the contents of our compost pile. Vegetation, apple pieces from straining the apple cider vinegar, coffee grounds, and even a few eggshells went in.

Next was a layer of dry grass clippings. One of the logs at the end had a fair bit of space under it, so I stuffed it with some grass clippings, too. Then it all got a thorough soaking before the soil was returned.

Once the bed was full, soil was added around three side of it, to fill in the gaps left from digging out a larger hole than the bed itself.

Which, of course, a kitten promptly tried to use as a litter box!

Finally, some grass clippings were added to mulch the top, and it got another thorough watering. I was also able to clear off the stepping stones at each end.

This bed is now done, and ready for planting next year.

My next job will be to try and weed along the whole side of this garden, before we start figuring out the low wall we want to edge it with (my daughter wants to use rocks – we have lots of those!) and top it up with some of the leftover sifted soil. The next bed I want to work on, though, is the L shaped bed that goes around the double lilac. Even if it only gets a supporting wall on the inside of the L shape, that will help. Trying to work about that lilac bush is a pain, and there are so things trying to grow into the space from there. We’d already tried to remove so many roots over the past couple of years, but it’s just getting worse! As with this bed, the L shaped bed will be only 2 feet wide, except possibly the tip of the short part of the L shape, where it can be accessed from three sides and is already wider than the rest of the bed.

Little by little, this garden will eventually have all walled, low to middle height raised beds. I was wanting to make this our kitchen garden, with things like herbs and salad vegetables that get used the most often over the summer, in here. My younger daughter wants to make it into a flower garden. Considering most herbs have lovely flowers, I’m sure we can come up with a compromise. 😊

Speaking of my younger daughter, when I was done working here, I helped my daughter out with her project.

By stealing kittens.

You’ll notice one of them has yellow paws. My daughter was painting the water bowl shelter, and that kitten would NOT leave her alone! The only way to keep him out of the paint was to put him on her shoulders – which means her skin and the tank top she was wearing got paint, too!

The first coat is done. The underside won’t need another coat, except for the legs. She was able to crawl inside and paint there, too. Carefully, as the roof is resting on bricks to hold it off the ground, and it’s not particularly strong. I think she even got the floor done, as well as the underside of the roof. After the legs and walls get a couple of coats, we’ll flip it right side up again to do the roof and whatever else can be reached at that point.

I’m surprised more kittens didn’t end up with paint all over them. They really, really love playing in this thing! Once it’s done and set up with the water bowls, they’ll have three roofs they play on. 😁

When I picked the colour, I tried to get a yellow as close as I could to the colour used on the kibble house. I couldn’t remember where we’d bought the original paint from, so I figured it was a different brand’s colour and would be slightly different. My daughter remembered that we bought it at Canadian Tire, too. It turns out I really did pick the exact same colour! We used up an entire gallon on the kibble house, but the water shelter is smaller, so we should have enough left over to do the tree stump bench out by the main garden area, too.

It feels good to have visible, tangible progress done! A lot of the fall clean up work doesn’t look like a lot got accomplished, because things get taken away, rather than added.

Little by little, it’s getting done!

The Re-Farmer