I finally was able to get a photo of Ginger today.
Turmeric has been cuddling up with him fairly regularly, these days, which I am so happy to see!
It still throws me, how much bigger he is than Turmeric.
Then this happened.
Cheddar is about the size of both Ginger and Turmeric together, and definitely heavier than both together! :-D
He has been mostly ignoring Ginger, so this is awesome!
That is just so much orange. :-D
The Re-Farmer
Ginger let me take his picture this morning! :-)
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 Re-Farmer
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! :-)
The Re-Farmer
This morning, we woke to more snow on the ground.
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 Re-Farmer
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.
We shall see.
The Re-Farmer
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.
The Re-Farmer
Last night, I introduced Ginger to a new toy.
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
This morning, I walked into the living room and found seven deer outside our window!
That is the most we’ve seen, all at once, since our first spring here. :-)
Then I spotted them on the trail cams!
I never saw all seven on the trail cams at once. They kept streaming across the road from my brother’s place. :-)
I love the action shots! :-D
The Re-Farmer
I found quite a surprise at our gate when I checked the trail cam files!
Four deer, hanging out on the driveway and road! They stayed there long enough that I found about a dozen files (stills and video) of them!
Looking at the time stamps, they came to the driveway after visiting the house.
They weren’t very nice to each other!
One of them stayed in the trees and never came to the feeding station. What I found interesting as I watched it, is that it completely avoided the area closer to the feeding station and went around to the side.
The area I cleaned up recently.
They definitely prefer to go through the cleaned up areas in or under the trees, rather than out in the open.
This next image from the trail cam isn’t very good, but it is dramatic!
I almost didn’t see it at first!
In the next few files, I could see that there were actually two deer out there, just on the edge of the infrared flash.
Very cool!
Also very cool was having Rolando Moon show up yesterday, and still being here this morning when I went out to feed the outside kitties. It almost gives me hope that Nostrildamus and Potato Beetle might still show up again, though I realize the chances of that are very low.
Their food bowls were completely empty again – even the heated water bowl was completely dry – which suggests the skunks came to visit, too.
It gets pretty busy with critters out there! :-)
The Re-Farmer
Yesterday, Ginger discovered the joys of bedding being changed!
The cats tend to react two ways when the sheets get changed. About half the cats see what’s happening, and are all “YAY!!! IT’s party time!” and promptly make it very, very difficult to make the bed.
The others go into a panic and run away like the world is coming to an end.
Ginger, it turns out, is the party type.
There turned out to be three cats in this picture. :-D
Time to cover the freshly washed blanket in fur again!
Time to defend territory!
No worries about Beep Beep. Every now and then, she gets in a bad mood and goes after whatever cat happens to be nearby. Ginger handles himself just fine!
I should put the freshly washed blanket into the shelf, but I’ve discovered the cats love a folded up blanket on the corner of the bed, as a bed of their own. Ginger is no exception!
We’ve been closing the other cats out of this room at night, just so Ginger can get a break from the crowd and get some sleep on the good spots. ;-) The other cats are not happy with this. As I write this, there are currently 7 cats sprawled all over my bed! :-D As soon as I open the door in the morning, they all rush right in. Next thing I know, my bed is covered, they’re circling Ginger’s food and water bowls as if they didn’t have oodles of them elsewhere in the house, and take their turns using his litter box – also as if there weren’t several others on different floors available for them! LOL
As promised, here is a picture of David for Leenda. :-)
David is just as hefty as is brother, Keith, but looks like he should be all light and fluffy.
Well. He is fluffy… ;-)
Also, he has pants. Thick, fluffy pants. When he walks by, his tail is like a huge banner with wiggling pants below.
Which is a much better view than what all the short haired cats insist on giving us, every chance they get! :-D
Well now! I was hearing the sounds of a cat playing behind me as I wrote this, so I took a look. It’s Ginger, running around and batting a cat toy around! Yes, he’s found a way to run and bat at a toy with his one front leg, at the same time!
He has adapted so well, so quickly. :-)
The Re-Farmer
