I managed to get a picture of Ginger this morning.
This was just a moment before he leapt up and tackled my phone! :-D
He was very fierce-some this morning!
I got this picture of David the Magnificent, yesterday, and just had to share.
He is such a pretzel!
Meanwhile, I had a whole crowd, outside!
The Ghost Baby was peeking between the shelters to see if it was safe to go eat!
She finally dared!
My daughter told me that she sometimes shows up at their second floor window, describing her as a ghost baby. I figure that’ll do just fine as a name. Better than “that sort-of calico cat…”.
My daughters have also been telling me about another grey and white tabby. I honestly can’t remember (I’m losing track!), but they say it’s Junk Pile’s baby from last summer, and it looks like here, except thicker. So they call it Thickilous.
:-D
I may well have seen it and thought it was Junk Pile, but until I see them both at the same time, I have no way of knowing.
So we have these 7, possibly Thickilous, and Nicky the Nose, hanging around. We have more cats inside than outside right now!
Well. At least until the kittens are born. Only Butterscotch looks pregnant, but that doesn’t mean the others aren’t!
He’s been running around all over the house, but I managed to catch him and lure him with some cephalopods.
It’s not the squidlies he’s hunting.
It’s my phone!
:-D
As a side note, my spell check dictionary does not recognize the word “cephalopod”. Which is weird enough on it’s own, but the alternative spelling it suggests for the plural is “hydrocephalus”, while the suggestion for the singular is “cephalic”.
Excuse me while I “add to dictionary.” :-D
I dug up the patterns to make more of these. I am in error. Neither of these are squids. The pink one is a cuttlefish. :-D
The cats love them!
But not as much as Ginger loves to attack my phone while I try to take his picture. ;-)
My daughter’s orchids are looking beautiful this morning!
They have been doing very well since she starting using kokedama, though finding a place to hang them where the cats couldn’t get at them was more of a challenge!
Unfortunately, one of them seems to be struggling. You can see some of the dead leaves behind the flowers in the above photo. My daughter has figured out that, when we had the polar vortex hit us in February, it simply got too cold for them at the window, and one in particular is having a much harder time recovering.
Now that we have the aquariums converted to cat proof greenhouses, next winter we will be able to move them into one of those to keep them warmer.
I also saw some fluffy, furry flowers this morning. ;-)
I was able to bring them some meaty treats from the kitchen this morning, and they were very happy!
I love how Creamsicle Jr. is licking his chops! :-D
We’re supposed to have a nice, warm day today, and I’m looking forward to getting some garden preparations done outside. The cats have already discovered the soil my daughter moved to the old kitchen garden. They LOVE rolling around in dirt. We have several trees with bald patches at their bases, because the cats roll under them so much. One of them is an ornamental apple tree in the old kitchen garden, and now they have bonus dirt to roll in.
I don’t mind them rolling at the bottom of the tree. We can’t plant anything under them, anyhow – but it’s going to be a problem if they decide to roll in the new soil after we’ve planted!
Then he promptly tried to catch and eat my phone. :-D
I’m happy to say that, for a past couple of night, we have not been closing the other cats out, and have found Ginger curled up and snoozing with other cats. He’s always been more laid back about accepting other cats, and now it looks like the other cats have gotten used to their new family member. :-)
Unfortunately, other critters are getting used to things.
When the girls went outside to drop the bags of litter into a bin we have for them, they found THREE skunks in the kibble house! If things were warm enough to have a hose out, we would spray them with water from a distance, but that is not yet an option. My daughter tried to shoo them away with a stick, but they just ignored her. They didn’t even threaten to spray. The little one even ignored her when she actually poked at him with the stick!
We’re going to have to leave less kibble out for the outside cats, since they’re not finishing it all during the day, and the skunks are starting to rely on it as a source of food.
Oh, my goodness!!! I just got interrupted while writing this, and I am so excited!!!
I called about the garden soil this morning. I was expecting a call back, to arrange for one of the guys to come by and figure out where to drop the soil off. Before then, I’d called to have our septic tank emptied, and the drive wanted to do that right away, while the ground it still hard, so I had gone ahead to open the gate for him. Instead of the septic guy, we had someone else come knocking on the door about the garden soil.
We walked around and I showed him the easy one, first; in the outer yard, near where we will be building the permanent raised beds in the future. For this year’s garden, however, I was right. They won’t be able to get their truck under the tree branches to where I had hoped the soil could go. I showed him an alternate area I was thinking of, and that one works out perfectly. There is a gate to the garden in the fence there, and they can use our secondary driveway to come right in to it.
Then he said they could deliver it today.
!!!
The ground is still frozen, which makes it better for the trucks.
When I mentioned I didn’t have cash on hand to pay for it, he brushed it off and told me I could swing by and pay for it later.
!!!
So we now have both gates open and waiting for very large trucks to come through! :-)
I am just thrilled!
Okay, back to topic. Where was I?
Ah, the skunks. LOL
When I headed out to do my rounds this morning, I saw the skunks had been after more than kibble.
This is near the kibble house and cat shelter. I’m not sure what they were digging for, this early in the spring, but I guess they found something!
I’m a bit disheartened by how dry the soil is, though, even with most of yesterday’s snow melted away.
Heading into the outer yard, I was watching the large numbers of birds in the pile of branches when I noticed a patch of ground that looked different.
Here, at least, the ground is a bit moister. There used to be a large pile of snow, pushed up by a tractor when our driveway was kindly cleared for us. That snow finally melted away only recently.
Well, that area now has a pile of soil beside it! The first load was just delivered!
The next load should be here in about 20 minutes, so I’d better get my butt off the computer. :-)
The girls had gone out for a walk and excitedly told me I needed to go outside – with a camera!
You know those garlic in the snow I got a picture of this morning?
There’s more of them now!
The two on the left where not there this morning!
We also have a first appearance.
One of our muscari (grape hyacinth) has emerged! The first of (hopefully!) 200. :-D
Though today has stayed just below freezing, it was enough that a lot of areas warmed up and the snow melted. Including roofs.
Long before we moved out here, the storage house got a new roof, but the eaves troughs were never reattached. In fact, the other side has none at all. So most of the snow melting off the roof just drips straight down.
(Also, that wasp nest is a couple of years old and empty)
Which made for an interesting double layer of icicles on one of the step below. :-D
Unfortunately, ice has also formed directly on the grape vines at ground level.
If these have survived the winter, we really need to find a better spot to transplant them!
The nearby spirea can handle the ice just fine!
It’s like the cross bar on the grape vine support is exactly under the drip line! :-D
The cats, meanwhile, are wisely staying out of the wind! I was surprised and pleased to see Butterscotch in there, with her boy Nutmeg. :-)
It’s so awesome to be seeing anything growing in the weather we’ve been having! Talk about resilient! :-)
We were supposed to get rain, first, but if we did, it wasn’t much. Not a lot of snow, either, but we’re supposed to get more, later in the week. These are our “April showers” that will hopefully lead to May flowers. :-)
I managed to snag a photo of Ginger this morning!
He has been very active, so it’s been hard to get photos! :-D
As squirmy as he was while I tried to get that photo, it was no comparison to Beep Beep.
I hadn’t even tried to pet her. As soon as she saw me taking pictures of Ginger, she started rolling around like mad, beeping for attention!
When I came outside, I saw Ginger’s brothers and Junk Pile coming out of the cat’s house, while his mom emerged from the shelf shelter by the sun room door. I’m not sure where Rosencrantz emerged from! :-D
You can see the chickadee on the bird feeder platform, and if you look carefully, you’ll see another one in the lilac bush, just under the thicker branches.
The snow almost made even the ugly fence look pretty!
I so look forward to when we can take that fence out!
The little garlics peeking through the mulch are visibly bigger than when we first spotted them! Thankfully, they should be able to handle this weather just fine. Likewise, the onion starts in the sun room are doing quite well. The temperatures in there don’t go below freezing (and the trays also have heat from below), but it gets chilly enough that if we had the tomatoes or squash in there, we’d have to bring them into the house for the night. The sun room still manages to stay warmer overnight than the old kitchen!
I spotted the shy calico disappearing under the fence on the far end of my mother’s “living fence” of hawthorn, carigana and oaks.
One of these months, I’ll get to cleaning up around the collapsing log cabin, and that corner of the fence. The chain link just sort of got dropped to the ground after the last fence post, so the junk there, and on the other side of the cabin, act as a sort of fence on their own. Once it’s cleaned out, if the renter’s cows get into the outer yard again, there will be nothing that can stop them from getting into the inner yard. Another reason to fill in any gaps, should the electric fence fail again.
I do love seeing the cows, and the few times they have gotten through, they did a great job of eating the overgrown areas in the outer yard, which in turn reduces the fire hazard in those areas. :-)
By the time I was done my rounds, the cats were making their way back into their shelter. I think it’s even dark enough for the light sensor on the timer to turn on the ceramic heater bulb.
Those things have been so handy, I think we will pick up more!
As I write this, we are at -3C/27F with a wind chill of -11C/12F. It’s the wind that’s more of an issue than the snow or the temperatures. Meanwhile, short range forecasts have us at 1C/34F over the next couple of days, with a sudden leap to 15C/59F on Thursday – only to drop to -3C over night, with more snow into Friday. Which is supposed to reach a high of 2C/35F, so it’s all going to melt away very quickly. Long range forecasts show rain and snow in the first days of May.
Somewhere in there, we have to get our septic tank emptied, and get those loads of garden soil delivered. There are things we need to be able to direct sow two weeks before last frost, and everything we are planting this year depends on having that soil available.
It feels like we’re starting to cut it close. Even with the snow, though, we’ve had enough warm temperatures that they should be able to load the soil into their trucks by now. I need to remember to make some calls tomorrow and find out.
It seems the more we get these little snowfalls, the more antsy I am to get gardening! :-D
The outside cats were, as usual, very excited about that whole “food” thing. ;-)
The super shy one was even down to “shy” instead of “super shy”. :-D
Usually, she’ll peek in between the shelters, see me and run off. Not this morning!
She actually joined the buffet while I was still there!
Then she ran off as soon as I moved.
Ah, well.
Mornings get very noisy this time of year. :-) While I was doing my rounds, I was hearing SO many Sandhill Cranes, as well as Canada Geese. Then a palliated woodpecker showed up, moving from tree to tree as I walked around, making sure I couldn’t possibly get a photo! :-D They have such a raucous call. I’d heard it before but this was the first time I saw one actively making it. I had no idea that noise was from a woodpecker until now! :-D
We’re supposed to have a warm one today, with a high of 11C/52F. Normally, I would be outside, doing more clean up and making use of our newly sharpened little electric chain saw. It’s got a 10″ bar, which is just enough to use on some of the downed trees nearer the house that have to be cleaned out.
Instead, I will be heading out this afternoon to help my mother with some grocery shopping. Which is probably a good thing, because I have been strangely hurting. I always have aches and pains, of course, but yesterday I started feeling the oddest chest pains. Mostly around the sternum, but also in the muscles in front of my shoulder joint. The “clavicular head”, according to the anatomy charts. It makes reaching for things much more limited. It’s the sort of pain I would normally associate with having overdone it with heavier physical labour, or pulling a muscle or something. I haven’t done anything that would explain it, though. The closest thing was to load the lawn mower in and out of the van, and there was nothing taxing about that.
Whatever caused it, I’m still feeling it today, and it seems unaffected by the pain killers I take daily for my osteoarthritis. It’s more annoying than anything else. I only really notice it when I stretch to reach for something and discover my range of motion suddenly limited.
Bah.
We have a few cooler days coming. Hopefully, it’ll pass by the time things warm up again, and I can get back to cleaning up in the spruce grove.
It was a very gorgeous 9C/48F outside, so I took advantage of it to check some things out, beyond the outer yard. More specifically, I wanted to check out the dugouts.
But first, I got accosted by a very affectionate – and still very round – Butterscotch. She really wanted attention, and even got me to pick her up. Which tells me she has a bit longer before she has her kittens, since she doesn’t want to be picked up when she’s closer to her due date.
For all the snow we got and what’s still on the ground, things are still on the dry side.
In this photo, I’m standing in the deepest part of the dugout in the old hay yard. There isn’t even any mud. This time of year, this should be a small pond. This is the area we hope to excavate deeper, a few years from now, in hopes to have water there all the time.
This dugout has even less water than the last time I came out here, a few weeks ago. This should be a large pond right now.
Finally, some water! This is the old gravel pit, and you can see by the lumpy ground from the renter’s cows, how high the water would usually be. This is deep enough, and there’s enough clay under it, that it is very rare for this spot to have no water at all. There is a low, marshy area that runs from this spot, towards the dugout in the previous photo, and there’s no water in there at all. Just mud in a few places. I could hear frogs, though, so that’s encouraging.
When I dropped of the lawn mower for servicing earlier today, the guy I was talking to mentioned predictions of up to 7 inches of snow on Sunday. I don’t know where he heard that, because when I look at Environment Canada and Accuweather, there are no such predictions. We might get some rain and snow tonight, but there’s very low chance of snow on Sunday, and no other rain predicted.
At least we got what we have so far. It will be a huge help.
I’d crocheted an amigurumi squid, years ago, trying out a new pattern. When I realized we’d closed the other cats out for the night and Ginger had no toys in the room, I decided to see if he would like it.
He did.
Squidly is now Ginger’s favourite toy! The other cats like it, too. :-D
Speaking of other cats…
His sister, Cabbages, and Keith were pretty adorable, cuddling together! :-)
This morning, as I put kibble out for the outside cats, most of them eventually made their way over.
I did not see Butterscotch.
I have my suspicions that she’s tucked away with somewhere, with new babies.
If my suspicions are correct, I hope her nest is nice and cozy, because they’re now predicting another 7 inches (almost 18cm!!) of snow on Sunday! We’ll have more snow in April than we’ve had the entire winter.
The slow melt we’re having now is perfect, except with the overnight temperatures going below zero, the freeze-thaw cycle is destroying the roads! I had to run some errands today, picking up our newly sharpened and tested electric chain saw while dropping off a lawn mower for servicing, then going to another town to drop some stuff off, and the gravel roads in particular are just awful. The paved roads and highways are going to be crumbling even worse than usual in the next while.
I don’t mind the snow while we’ve got these milder temperatures. I think most people on the farms out here will happily put up with rough roads, if it means they will have enough moisture when planting their crops.
I must admit, though, it’s rather disjointing to read other people’s blogs where they talk about all the stuff growing in their gardens, or their latest transplants. :-D
Speaking of which, we did decide to start one of the squashes we’ve got now, rather than later. The Crespo squash is the only one of them that grows large fruit. In trying to find the “days to maturity”, all I can find is “harvest the the skin is very hard”. Which doesn’t tell me much at all! I’ll just assume large fruit means longer time needed to grow them, and will give them a bigger head start. I set the seeds to soak last night, and will plant them later today.
I’m not finding a lot of information about this specific variety at all, so I’m really looking forward to seeing what happens with these.
And now I have to de-cat myself (hello, Susan) and get some work done! :-D
The Re-Farmer 