Critters

Our 2021 garden: NOOOOoooo!!!!!

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I am so very, very unhappy right now.

I went out to do the evening watering, and also add some shredded Irish Spring soap to the decimated beet bed, in hopes the deer will leave it alone and it can recover.

While weeding in the carrot bed in the main garden area, I noticed some greens had been nibbled on. It was only at one corner, so I figured it might have been a deer, though I didn’t think deer liked carrot greens. With discovering the groundhog had made a den in the nearby pruned branch pile, I looked it up, and it turns out they will eat carrot greens. So I figured I would add some of the soap shavings to the carrot bed, too.

I was too late.

The entire bed was decimated this afternoon!

All of it.

The bed was split between two types of carrots. They were pelleted seeds, so we were able to space them as we planted them, and they were doing really well. No thinning needed. Now, they’re all gone.

I am pretty sure that, if we can deep the deer away, the beets will be able to at least somewhat recover, but will carrots? I have no idea. We do have left over seed for both types, and I considered using one of the empty spinach beds to plant more, but we’re at the end of June. We don’t have enough of a growing season left to start over.

We do have two other types of carrots in the old kitchen garden, but these were specialty carrots, and had a lot less seed in the packets. They were also planted later, so they were not as far along as these ones.

I added the soap shavings to the bed anyhow, and the girls have covered it with one of the covers we used on the spinach beds. Not that these can stop a ground hog, but still.

Meanwhile, we’ve been trying to encourage the groundhog to move on. We don’t have a live trap, and even if we did, where would we release it? We are surrounded by farms. I don’t want to pass the problem on to someone else!

Anyhow.

One of my daughters came out while I was watering and went to the branch pile to see the den, only to see the groundhog looking back at her! She started to tear apart the pile, and then I passed the hose to her so she could start spraying water into the den. The groundhog came out and hid the branches. They never saw it go away, though.

While they were doing that, I continued watering from the water barrel by the peas and corn. I was afraid of what I would find when I got there, but these far flung beds were unharmed.

Moving that branch pile is going to be a priority, and we’ll continue to convince the groundhog to move on, on its own. Depending on how things go, and if we can figure out where we can release it, I might be able to borrow a live trap from my brother. When I told him about the groundhogs I saw in the outer yard, he told me about catching and releasing one from their own property, so I know he’s gone one large enough. The groundhog in the garden is bigger than the two in the outer yard.

*sigh*

I am not a happy camper right now!

The Re-Farmer

Morning critters, and… this could be a problem!

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I had a pleasant surprise when I first went outside to do my morning rounds. Rosencrantz and her kittens were playing at the bottom of the little shrine, on the INSIDE of the chain link fence!

So I found a couple of containers and put food and water out for them. Not longer after, I saw this.

The grey and white kitten ran off when it saw me, but the orange one stayed. This would be their first time eating kibble and the orange baby seems to really like it!

It was also brave enough – or hungry enough! – to stay eating after Mom left.

After finishing my rounds outside, I was just about to settle at the computer to go over the trail cam files when I saw movement out in the garden.

It was a groundhog, making its way towards the beds.

When I saw it stop and start going after some onions, I dashed out to chase it away. (Checking later, it did not eat any of the onions, but when I was weeding the carrots in the next bed earlier, I’d noticed some of the greens had been nibbled on. Deer, I thought, but maybe not? What do groundhogs eat, anyway?)

As I was making noise to chase the groundhog away from the beds, I saw it go under the pile of branched I’d pruned from the nearby trees. A pile we should have moved long ago. :-/

So I went over to the pile and shook the branches to chase it out.

Nothing.

Moved around to get at some other branches.

Nothing.

Mover around and…

What on earth is that?

Well, that explains why it wasn’t running out from under the branch pile. It has a den under there!

Those larger branches on the left? I’d put those there not very long ago. They had been set aside for potential use, but when I needed to mow around the pile, I moved them on top. That hole was not there when I did it, which means it was dug some time within the last week or so.

I was able to stick my phone through the branches to try and get a better picture.

That is a pretty big hole! But then, so was the groundhog.

I knew there had to be dens around somewhere, and suspect there is at least one under the big branch pile in the outer yard, but this is the first one we’ve actually seen.

I find myself looking at all that sand and gravel piled up outside the opening. I know the top soil isn’t very deep, but this really shows what our ground is like under it.

Well, I guess this is a good incentive to finally move that branch pile! Then to see what we can do to persuade the groundhog to find somewhere else to live. Preferably not in the yard at all!

The Re-Farmer

Growing things

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When we got that one really cold night in late May, most things survived (the new mulberry sapling, sadly, did not) just fine. However, anything that was budding lost their flowers. Including almost all of the lilacs.

This Korean lilac usually blooms after the common lilac, but with the warmth we’d had earlier in May, it was starting to bud, too. This morning, I found this single spray of flowers blooming on it. It does look like it may be putting out more buds, though. We won’t get the mass of tiny flowers that is usual for this lilac this year, but there will be some, at least.

Then there’s this poor mock orange, by the laundry platform. February’s deep freeze had already decimated it. More of it has died off since the May frost. Yet this thing is amazingly resilient, and it now blooming!

I want to transplant this to a more protected location, once we figure out where that is. There is another on the East side of the house that didn’t get as damaged by the May frost, however it isn’t thriving there, either. Too dry against the house, and sunlight only in the morning. It is also starting to bloom, but like its leaves, the flowers are much smaller. We can water it regularly, but there isn’t much we can do about the lack of sunlight, so I figure that one will get transplanted, too, at some point.

The little furry flowers are growing, too! (The fourth one was playing the the bushes, so I couldn’t get a photo of it.)

When I put food out in the mornings, Butterscotch is at the kibble house along with the other yard cats, but these guys are learning to come out to their own food and water in the mornings now, too.

At the squash tunnel, I found our first Pixie melon flower!

We definitively need to get more mesh soon for that last section of the tunnel. The Halona melons are getting tall enough that we’ll need to start training them up the tunnel walls, in a very short while.

These are in the carrot bed in the old kitchen garden. They are growing where the white kohlrabi was planted. I’m hoping that’s what they are, and not just some similar looking plant of my mother’s, pushing its way through! :-D This little garden always had a variety of things growing in it, but mostly flowers. Very determined flowers! When we first cleaned out this garden, then laid down cardboard and layers of straw, leaf litter and grass clippings, many still managed to push their way through. In digging out by the house to make the path, then building the beds we planted in this year, during which I removed many, many roots, you’d think that would have set them back, but no. They’re pushing their way through soil paths, the straw paths, and even the deeper soil of the new beds. It would be rather impressive, if they were not so invasive, and crowding out our vegetables!

Still, it’s nice to see all the growing things. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden bed prep, and dealing with the heat

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The weather forecast said that we would be cooler today.

They lied.

When I did my morning rounds, it was already above 20C/68F, and we easily hit 28C/82F this afternoon, with a humidex above 30C/86F. Which meant that we spent as much of the day indoors, out of the heat, as we could. Thankfully, the way things are oriented, we can keep certain windows open to allow a cross breeze without heating the house up.

The cats appreciate that.

Yes, we leave the little step ladder at the door, just so they can look out the window! It was so funny to watch these to, with their matching positions, heads turning and tail tips twitching, in unison! Hard to believe that little Layendecker is now just as big as Cheddar! With the smaller cats, three of them can fit up there, but these big boys fill up the whole stop step! :-D

I did have to make a run into town, as we ran out of kibble for the outside cats. While I was there, I picked up some ingredients for my daughters. Yesterday, they finished off one of the giant bowls of spinach to make a spinach soup.

We’d already finished off one giant bowl, mostly through dehydrating (using the screens in the sun room didn’t work, so we did batches in the oven). When making the soup, that huge bowl cooked down to a remarkable small amount in the stock pot! :-D With my trip into town, the girls have enough to make a huge batch of baked spinach dip, which we plan to enjoy while watching watching Sherlock Holmes, with Jeremy Brett and David Burke.

It’s going to be a late one, though. We didn’t get back from working on the garden until past 10pm. I had tried going out a bit earlier to start prepping the spinach beds to plant in again, but those beds are in full sun. I wasn’t interested in getting heat stroke! It didn’t get cool enough to head out again until past 8:30pm.

The girls did the evening watering while I worked on the beds.

The logs were added after we’d started making the beds, so once I’d cleared away the remains of the spinach plants and the weeds, I took advantage of the situation to level the beds out, and create a bit of a ridge around the edges, to help keep the water from draining down the sides – and taking the soil with it. I used a garden fork to loosen the soil, to more easily pull the roots out. I was most pleased with how keep the tines could go, without any sort of resistance. This bed would handle root vegetables very well!

I had “help” while I was working.

Nutmeg could not get enough attention! :-) While I was pulling out roots and weeds, he kept getting under me, demanding pets, and rolling around in the freshly turned soil, sometimes rolling right off the edge of the garden bed – just like his brother does on our beds, indoors! Unfortunately, when I was using the garden fork, he had a terrible habit of suddenly lunging at the fork to “catch” it, even as I was stabbing it into the soil.

This bed was surprisingly different from the first one. When pushing the fork into the soil, I would quickly go through the raised part of the bed – about 8 inches – then hit solid. I wasn’t hitting rocks. Just rock hard soil! The last bed was much the same, though not as bad as this one. There is a difference between them. The first bed I worked on had been a squash bed, mulched with straw, last year. These two beds were a last minute change. When I’d prepped the area last fall, I’d made three smaller beds oriented East-West, where three pumpkin hills had been. This spring, I decided to make these two larger beds, oriented North-South. The soil beneath would be a mix of soil that had been turned in the fall, and walking paths. It’s remarkable what a difference that one season of use the previous year has made in the soil of that first bed.

All three beds are now prepared and ready for planting! We will be planting lettuces in succession along one side of each bed.

Since the radishes we interplanted with the corn all disappeared, and I ended up picking up more. Three different varieties to try, though I couldn’t find a daikon type that my daughter likes. They are fast maturing, so we should be able to grow some radishes, and still be able to grow more spinach in these beds for a fall crop.

We’re not actually fans of radishes in general, so we won’t be planting many. I do want to leave some to fully mature. I’ve read that radish pods are very tasty, but it’s not something available in stores, and I’d like to try them. From what I’ve read in the past, radishes used to be grown for their pods, not their roots, and the pods can be canned as well. It should be an interesting experiment. I’m still disappointed that none of the ones we planted earlier survived, even though they did germinate so quickly. I had specially ordered those varieties for my daughter. :-(

We’ll just have to try them again, next year!

Well my other daughter had just swung by to inform me that the baked spinach dip is ready! I am really looking forward to it! :-)

The Re-Farmer

New babies!

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While heading out to start the evening watering, I spotted Butterscotch’s babies coming out to play.

Or should I say, my daughter spotted them. I’d gone out to help my mother with errands, then did a few of my own, so I pulled up to the house to unload the car. My daughter later parked it for me, and spotted them while returning to the house. She plunked herself down on the ground with a long stick to wiggle at them, and they were very interested! :-D Not enough to come close, though, but she’s working on it!

While we were finishing up the evening watering, I happened to see movement in the junk pile by the chain link fence.

Rosencrantz had brought her babies!

I didn’t dare get too close, so zooming in with my phone was the best I could do.

It looks like she only has the two of them. They are so adorable! I don’t know where she has her “nest”, other than it was not in the junk pile, so I am glad that she is starting to bring them closer to the house.

So this is now two litters accounted for. I know Junk Pile cat has had a litter, and from the looks of her teats, I’d say she has a litter of six. Until she starts bringing them to the yard, we won’t know if she has six surviving kittens. There’s also Ghost Baby, who is too feral for us to even know if she’s female. We’re just assuming she is, and that there is another litter somewhere for us to discover.

I suspect we will be finding out fairly soon!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden: first harvest!

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Today, we harvested all three spinach beds!

Looking at them this morning, I thought we could just harvest the plants that had started to go to seed and leave the smaller ones, but when we were ready to start, we realized that the smaller ones were going to seed, too!

We ended up using our three biggest baskets to hold it all.

Yes, these are our Easter baskets, and one of them still has its decorations. The flower garland is woven through the basket, so it doesn’t come off. :-D

Each of those baskets is filled with a different variety of spinach, though to be honest, I can’t tell any difference. They were even supposed to mature at different rates, but between the deer, the heat and the lack of rain, they all matured at the same time.

Nutmeg was hanging around while we were working, and my daughter noticed he was playing “cat and mouse” with something. It turned out to be a frog!

She rescued it.

We see frogs fairly regularly in the garden beds. That makes me happy. More frogs means less bugs eating our produce! :-)

We used shears to cut the spinach, so all the roots, along with the plants that weren’t suitable to harvest (like the teeny ones the deer got to), are still there. The beds will get a thorough clean up, probably tomorrow, so we can plant lettuces, next.

We dragged out the screen “door” that fits at the top of the old basement stairs, and covered it with the mosquito netting we’d been using to protect one of the beds. We also brought out a couple of our largest bowls. The spinach got washed in the bowls in batches, which also gave us a chance to start taking out any weeds that came along for a ride, and removing some of the yellowing or damaged leaves. After being washed, they got dumped on the mesh and got another rinse with the hose.

Then it was time to start picking over the spinach and destemming them. I set up the wagon to hold the screens I’d washed earlier, to dry spinach on.

My daughter and I then started going over the whole pile, picking out the best ones for dehydrating or into bowls, and dropping the rejects with the snipped stems for composting. We worked for about an hour, hour and a half, before my daughter went in with a filled bowl, to start supper while I kept working on the rest of the spinach.

The filled screens were left on the roof of the kibble house to drain for a while. They went into the sun room when it started to rain a bit, though we never got more than a smattering.

After about three hours, here are two of the three bowls that were filled. They are all really big bowls. Big enough to mix a 6 loaf batch of bread dough.

I’m hoping to be able to set up more batches to dehydrate out of this, but it depends on how well it works in the sun room. I’ve got the light I used to keep transplant trays warm on for the night, plus the ceiling fan. Tomorrow we’re supposed to get really hot, which means the sun room will be even hotter. I’m hoping that means they will dehydrate fairly quickly, and I can set up at least one more batch.

As for the rest, we might blanch some for freezing if we can’t use it up fast enough, but mostly, we plan to just eat it. :-D The girls have been looking of recipes for things like spinach soup to try, or maybe make another batch of their modified palak paneer sauce. We don’t have paneer, though.

I’m rather happy with our first garden harvest – and with being able to have one so early in the season!

While it may have taken a long time to clean it all, we were most entertained.

By skunks.

We had a whole parade of them, coming and going, including the mama and her babies.

All SIX of them!

I don’t know where she’s getting them all from! She started coming by with two. Then we saw her carrying a third. Today, she showed up with five – or so we thought. I took some video and, after I uploaded it and watched it, I realized there was six.

If you wish to see the video, click here. :-)

Gosh, they are so adorable! They came back several times, including just to run around an play.

As for the other skunks that showed up, I did end up stopping to take a hose to them. From where I was sitting, I couldn’t see them in the kibble house, but I could hear them, and they were not getting along. It turned out that only one of the containers had kibble left in it, and they were all trying to get at it. Then there was the one greedy guts that just wouldn’t stop eating.

Oh, and a question I had was answered. In the mornings, when I would go to refresh the cats’ water bowls, I would find one of them with kibble half dissolved in the water. It was always the bowl closest to the kibble house, but they’re far enough away that it couldn’t fall in by accident, as I had assumed was how it got into the heated water bowl, when we were still using that. The skunks, of course, use the water bowls, too. This evening, I saw one of the skunks come up to a water bowl, drink some water, then basically pick its teeth with its claws before drinking some more.

The reason it isn’t good for skunks to eat kibble is because of how their jaws are hinged. But they’ve got that figured out. The skunk was getting kibble stuck in its teeth, and was using water to get it out. The kibble would then fall into the bowl it was drinking from, for me to find in the morning.

They’re smart little buggers!

They also made what could have been a long and dreary job quite fun. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Criminal!

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Just look at this criminal beast!

I was just heading out to do my morning rounds, when I discovered crime had happened, and the criminal was watching me. Nicco, this time!

I let my daughters know, and when one of them came down to the old basement, she found FOUR cats had gotten through! Once the Spice Girls figured out how to unblock the top of the screen, all the other smaller, lighter cats are following their lead. :-(

I really wish we could find a way to stop this. There are just too many fragile and dangerous things in the old basement. So far, they have managed not to cause destruction, but I’ve found stuff on the floor showing that they are climbing the shelves. Shelves full of glass bottles, vintage canning jars and cleaners. And I’m always concerned that one of them will knock aside the cover to the sump pump reservoir. At least it’s dry in there right now, but still…

As I write this, I hear noises from the basement… The top is blocked off again, but I suspect we will find a cat in the old basement again.

*sigh*

The Re-Farmer

There was a strange man out my window!

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A strange, furry man.

I’ve seen a racoon twice on the trail cam. Once was just a tail tip when it was set over the tulips to see what was eating them. The second time, it went by after the camera was moved to face the sunflowers to see where the deer were coming from.

To be sitting on the couch and suddenly seeing this creature climbing up the pole to the bird feeder was almost surreal!

My daughters and I watched if for a while before I finally tapped on the window to make it stop eating the bird feed. I do wish I still had my phone out, because it went down the pole, head first!

What a remarkable experience!

I wonder if he’s been stealing bird seed before, when we haven’t been around to see it?

The Re-Farmer

Edit: I was able to upload some video I took onto Rumble. WordPress doesn’t seem to handle Rumble well, so please let me know if you have any problems viewing it. :-)

Protecting the jade tree, and critter capers

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So… we’ve had problems with the more recent additions to our cat colony indoors. They’ve decided our plants are for them to play with and dig in.

One of the pots we’ve been trying to protect is has the parent jade trees that we brought with us when we moved. During the drive out, it got cold enough to kill some of the plants in the back of the van, and most of the jade tree died off, but it amazingly did recover and has been doing very well.

Now the cats are trying to kill it.

Mostly Cabbages, and her dirt digging, but the other cats have discovered that jade tree leaves make good toys. We’ve done a number of things to protect the plants but, with this particular pot, some cats – and we’re not sure which ones – have managed to knock aside the things we’ve used to protect it, and get right into the middle of the pot. Along with the soil being dug up, the stems of the plants were being bent outwards, with some getting snapped off.

Yesterday, I engaged in a bit of a rescue.

You can see cat toothmarks on a number of leaves!

I was able to get the pot outside – a job that required one daughter with a spray bottle to keep the cats at bay, while the other opened the doors for me.

The pipes that you see are the spare uprights from one of the shelves we put up in the old basement. The basement is too low for the full height of the shelves, so we never added on the top self. In trying to protect the several jade trees in this pot, I shoved 4 of the unused uprights from the shelf into the pot, and used them and some cotton yarn as supports.

I discovered they also work really well to water the pot. I can just pour water into a pipe to water from below. The pot is actually a self-watering pot, but the opening to the reservoir on the bottom is small and hard to get at.

In their efforts to get at the middle of the pot, the cats ended up pushing the yarn down the pipes, and they were no longer supporting the plant stems. All the stems were bent and spread outwards, like a massive spider. So I redid it, this time making sure to loop around some of the bigger stems. It should not slide down anymore.

I’m amazed by how resilient jade trees are!

After replacing the dug out soil in the middle, I had the thought that using some of the grass clippings and garden soil mix I had left over from “hilling” the potato bags might help keep the cats out of it. Then I gave the whole thing a nice shower with the hose, with water that had been warmed by the sun.

When it was brought back inside, one of the first things that happened was several cats going over to investigate.

Then start chewing on the grass clippings.

*sigh*

They were so determined to get at it, I ended up trying to put a leftover piece of wire mesh around the bottom. It wasn’t big enough, so I tried protecting the rest with a transparent recycling bag. We still had to make liberal use of the spray bottle to keep the cats away!

Of course, we couldn’t stay in the living room all evening, monitoring a plant pot. Coming back a couple of hours later, we found some determined cat had managed to get under the plastic and spread grass clippings all over the place.

And our vacuum cleaner is broken, with no budget to replace it until next month.

*sigh*

In the end, with the assistance of a daughter keeping the cats at bay while opening doors for me, we moved the pot into the sun room to keep it safe.

In the process, I discovered a piece of the jade tree had been broken off, so I stuck it into another jade tree pot; a smaller one with a plastic ring cut from the top of a Costco corn puff container to protect it.

That was yesterday.

This morning, I was awakened by the noise of cats trying to get through the screen between the basements again. There’s nothing I can do about that, so I tried to ignore it.

Then I heard the big thump.

Going into the living room, I found one of the pots with an aloe vera in it, on the floor.

Thankfully, between the dense plant and the plastic protector around it, it didn’t actually fall out of the pot and virtually no soil was lost.

As I put it back on the shelf, I saw the dirt.

The smaller jade tree, with its protective collar, had been dug into. Some small, determined cat managed to reach through the opening and get at the soil.

I moved the pot to the dining table, went back to clean up a bit, returned to the dining room, just in time to discover Susan – SUSAN!! – on the table, trying to get into the pot.

*sigh*

I ended up shoving some mesh fabric around the opening, but it looks like this pot is going to have to go into the sun room, too.

A while later, I went to do my rounds outside and found two cats on the platform under the basement window, looking at me. Possibly Turmeric and Susan. Or Saffron and Big Rig. It’s a bit hard to see through the two layers of mesh on the window.

*sigh*

I let the girls know they were there. The last time I tried to go into that basement to get cats out, I popped a kneecap on the stairs.

So… that was my start to the day. :-/

The Re-Farmer

Morning cuddles

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It’s been a while since I’ve posted a picture of Ginger!

Every morning and evening, at the sound of me getting my vitamins from my night stand, Ginger comes running for cuddles! This morning, I actually had a free hand to get a photo. :-)

I don’t know why he has decided “pill bottle rattling” equals “time to cuddle the human”, but since it’s pretty much the only time he is so cuddly, I don’t mind at all!

The Re-Farmer