It is turning out to be a lovely day today! We’re at 19C/66F right now, which is our predicted high of the day, with almost no wind at all. Which means I’ve been able to get some stuff done in the garden! Finally!
The first thing to get done was take down the last of the nets and support stakes on the future trellis bed and around the strawberries. I was surprised to find more strawberry plants have been eaten, though! As near as I can figure, a deer managed to get its heat under the netting on one side.
*sigh*
I had some chicken wire around the side where a hole had been made in the netting. Once everything was cleared, I put the chicken wire over the bed for now. The strawberries – what’s left of them – will be heavily mulched for the winter, but at this point I’m thinking we may need to transplant them closer to the house, where we can more easily keep the deer away. I’ll decide that later.
With all the hardware collected and set aside, I started cleaning up the high raised bed – mostly because it’s easier on the body!
I was expecting to find shallots that I missed harvesting, once I started cleaning up the dead pepper plants, and I was right. I found quite a few, actually, considering how small the bed is.
I’ve decided I will find a place to transplant these and mulch them over the winter, so that next year, we will have shallot seeds.
I removed the grass clipping mulch on the high raised bed and got about half way through digging out weeds and their roots, when I got a message from my brother. He’s on his way over with another load. He plans to cut away some tree branches while he is here, as they have a storage trailer they will be bringing out tomorrow, and they are in the way.
I’m more than happy to get those branches cleared away!
So I paused in the garden to come in and have lunch before he gets here, as I plan to help my brother as much as possible once he gets here.
While I was waiting for my food to heat up, I tended to the dehydrated peppers.
This is three trays of peppers, combined into one. They’re back in the oven for now, while it cools down (we used the “warm” setting at 150F to dehydrate the peppers). Later on, we might pop them into a jar for storage, or perhaps powder them. I’m not the pepper eater, so I will let the family decide which they would prefer.
Time to head back into the main garden area until my brother gets here. Now that all the stakes and netting are down, it should go faster. My goal right now is to prepare as many beds as I can to direct sow into, then cover with leaves for the winter. Hopefully, we will get a head start on the garden next year by doing this, but if it doesn’t work, the beds will still be ready for planting in, in the spring.
Well, we may not have had many yellow peppers in the garden, but now that they are ripening in the living room, we have a LOT of yellow peppers!
I neglected to take any photos, though, so here is a WordPress AI generated version…
I specifically told the AI generator “long slices”, but it gave me rounds, instead. 😄
There are two types of yellow peppers in the short season collection we got. Yellow and orangey-yellow. Once I had them under the kitchen like while washing them, I could finally tell the difference!
I prepped and sliced enough yellow peppers, plus I think one or two orangey-yellow ones, to fill a gallon size freezer bag.
The remaining orangey-yellow ones were starting to dehydrate all on their own, so I sliced those ones super thin and set them to dehydrate in the oven. That got me three 9×13 baking pans, which required a bit of creativity to fit on the two oven racks. I’ve got a tray meant to cook vegetables on the BBQ, so the bottom is perforated, to use as a spacer between two pans on top of each other.
There were other purple and Sweet Chocolate peppers that could have been processed, but I left those for later and got almost all the tomatoes that are in the living room. A few ended up in the compost, as they were over ripe. The rest got washed, then topped and tailed. I was able to fill one gallon size freezer bag with San Marzano, plus some Roma VF (I assume) compost pile tomatoes. Another gallon bag got a mix of the Forme de Coure and what are probably all Black Cherry tomatoes. There might be some Chocolate Cherry tomatoes mixed in there. Once off the vines, I can’t tell them apart.
The bags all went into the small freezer for now. The chest freezer has bins and boxes of ripening tomatoes covering it right now. I go through them regularly and pull out the ones that are ripening the fastest, and move them into my harvesting colander. Once that’s full, they get transferred to the living room to continue ripening.
Eventually, we will be able to combine the contents of bins so that there’s fewer of them, and have easier access to the chest freezer. Moving a bin or two is not an issue. Moving five bins, a box and a colander to get into the freezer it something else entirely!
All in all, that’s a pretty good haul to quickly process, considering these are all things that were harvested early, before they got hit with frost. There are many more tomatoes ripening, including the ones from the compost pile that look like Indigo Blue Chocolate, though I suppose some might be Black Beauties, from last year’s garden. The basin of unripe hot peppers in the living room is looking more and more red. There are still a lot of green sweet peppers, some of which I can tell are the purple Dragonfly peppers, with a very few Purple Beauty left, and others are the brown Sweet Chocolate peppers. The remaining ones, I expect to turn yellow or orangey-yellow.
So we will have plenty more vegetables to process for the winter over the next while.
Tomorrow we are supposed to reach a high of 19C/66F and, more importantly, we are NOT expected to have high winds again. Since there is nothing more we can do in the bathroom until the sealant has finished curing, that means I should be able to finally get outside and clean up in the garden, and prepare beds for fall planting. It’s time to get garlic planted – we will be using our own garlic from this year’s harvest – and I want to try fall sowing seeds that will hopefully survive our winter and give us an early start in next year’s garden. At this point, looking at the monthly forecast, it seems we will be in for a relatively mild winter. I certainly hope so. We’re supposed to have a La Nińa winter this year which, for our region, usually results in bitterly cold temperatures.
I could really do without that.
While I can no longer tolerate heat like I used to, I find I am absolutely dreading the cold of winter more and more, every year. Especially this year, as we have not been able to slowly stock up quite as much as we have in the past, on the assumption that we will get snowed in or whatever, for weeks or even months again. Everything is so much more expensive now, it’s getting harder and harder to get any extras at all.
So the more we can process from our garden and put up for the winter, the better!
Today is the first of a short spell of warmer days we are expecting. As I write this, at almost 7pm, we are at a lovely 12C/54F. The weather app says it feels like 5C/41F, but it doesn’t seem that chill around our home.
This afternoon, I took advantage of the warmer temperatures and finally got to work, cleaning up in the main garden area. What I’m shooting for is to get some beds ready to try some fall planting – because garlic, that is. I’ve been inspired once again by Gardening in Canada.
The more we can get done in the fall, the easier it will make things in the spring!
I’m surprised by just how much can be planted in the fall, with our zone 3 winters. Her list includes wildflowers; particularly poppies, hollyhocks, sunflowers, coneflowers and columbine. Now that I think about it, all of those make sense; we’ve had all but coneflowers sow themselves here, and the only reason we haven’t had coneflowers overwinter here is because we don’t have them anywhere to begin with. I do still have a native wildflower mix that needs to be sown, but those will have their own space to be seeded in.
For vegetables, she listed them in groups. One is the alliums; onions, leeks and shallots. We’ve got our own onion seed this year, so that is an option for us. We should also be able to use our own garlic for planting this year, too.
She mentions root crops like turnips, carrots, radishes and beets, all of which benefit from winter sowing by becoming sweeter and more flavourful, the following year.
Peas is something she plants all over, as she uses them as an indicator plant. You can tell how warm the soil is becoming by when they germinate.
The next group she mentions are brussels sprouts, kale, spinach, kohlrabi and possibly cabbage.
Last of all, she mentions squash and pumpkins. Considering the squash we had in our compost pile last year, we’ve already had those by accident!
They are normally a hot weather plant, but our compost tomatoes shows that, in the right conditions, tomatoes could be added to the list, too. Hmm… so can beans, for that matter.
Looking at her list and remembering what I have for seeds right now, we could plant onions, turnips, carrots, radishes, beets, peas, spinach, kohlrabi and both summer and winter squash.
What I might end up doing is just mixing up the seeds for onions, turnips, carrots and beets and planting them randomly in one bed – mostly because the onions could protect the things it’s planted with from deer. I could probably interplant onions with kohlrabi, peas and spinach, too, though I’d have to watch the spacing more. Squash… well, they take up so much space, they would be on their own, for the most part!
In order to do this, there are two things I need to get ready. First, is prepare the soil by increasing organic material. Compaction is a huge problem with our soil. I can do trench composting again, which really seems to make a big difference in production, but the soil itself needs to be amended as best we can.
Then, once seeds are planted, the other thing they will need is a light and fine mulch. Grass clippings and leaves would be what we have on hand to use. She recommends piling snow over the seeds in the winter for added insulation, but for the main garden area, I don’t see us needing to do that. That whole space gets well covered with snow over the winter!
Right away, I can see that we would have a very different garden next year, if we do this fall sowing.
We shall see if we can get to that point over the next week or so!
With that in mind, I focused on the main garden area. Here is a slideshow of today’s progress.
I started off using the weed trimmer. I hadn’t been able to do much clearing of the paths, once the winter squash, pumpkins, drum gourds and melon bed vines really took off. In some paths, I could barely walk through them without stepping on a vine.
I started to use the weed trimmer in where the next raised bed that will be part of a squash tunnel will be built, but not too much, just yet. I’ll clear into there more when I have to access the stack of what will be vertical support poles attached to the existing bed.
After trimming one side of the high raised bed, I stopped to pull up the winter squash vines. All the squash got powdery mildew towards the end of the season, so all of these were for the burn pile, not the compost. In fact, the only squash that did not get powdery mildew was the Crespo squash, in a completely different area.
I ended up spending most of my time on the pole bean trellis. There were only 5 surviving plants but, my goodness, they sure took over that trellis netting!
Also, folding up that netting for storage is a lot easier when you lay it out, then weave a bamboo stake through one short end.
After the first squash bed was cleared, I moved the corn stalks over from the other squash bed, so I could get at the vines under them. Later, I plan to trench compost the corn stalks.
Pulling up the squash vines was truly interesting, at times. I couldn’t believe how long some of them had gotten! These would have been so awesome on a trellis tunnel!
The only two beds I did not clear this time were the high raised bed, and the first trellis bed. I did finish weed trimming the paths, though. Right now, the bed that needs the least amount of work is the westernmost one, where I’d already prepped half of it after harvesting the onions and covered it with plastic.
The solarization doesn’t seem to be working, though. I’m seeing a lot of green growing under one end. The problem is, that end of the bed gets a lot more shade, this time of year, so it doesn’t get a chance to get hot enough to solarize. At least not at the south end. There may be greater success towards the middle of the bed.
Around the time I finished the weed trimming, I found some messages from the family. My daughter had spent some time going through all the fittings I picked up, working out which would be needed, which wouldn’t, etc. In the end, we were going to need more of two fittings – and will likely have quite a few to return to the store, once the job is done.
It was past 3:30 by then. The store we needed to go to was the second one I’d gone to, yesterday. Thankfully, they weren’t going to close until 5:30 – the local one closes at 4. My daughter came along with me.
While she was looking at the fittings, I looked around for the hot water tank element tool I needed, then asked for help, because I couldn’t even find the section. It turned out to be tucked away in a corner. 😄 I also asked about a socket large enough to remove the anode rod but, in the end, I think the same heat element tool will fit the anode rod. I’ll test that out, later.
Then my daughter needed help, because one of the fittings she was looking for was behind locked doors! Quite a few displays in this store were behind glass. I would not have expected theft to be more of a problem in this location, that the store I usually go to!
After we got what we needed and were heading home, I missed my turn to cross over to the other highway – the streets look no different than driveways in this town! That meant we ended up driving to the town closer to home.
My daughter hadn’t eaten anything since early in the morning. Since we ended up in town anyhow she, being the sweetheart that she is, sprung for some Dairy Queen for all of us.
It now looks like we have everything we need to replace the pipes and faucet set for the tub. The hard part is going to be cutting the copper pipe to get the old pieces out. There is very little room to work in. Especially since the cutter needs to spin around the pipe.
While I might be able to assist, this is a job mostly for my younger daughter. She’s the most able bodied among us – and considering she has PCOS and all the joint pain that can come with, that’s not saying much!
Hopefully, I will be able go get more progress in the garden instead, and if all goes really well, be able to plant things for next year in a few days!
If all goes well for my daughter, we might even be able to use the tub and shower again, soon, too!
Tomorrow is Canadian Thanksgiving, but our turkey needs to be cooked, so we will be having our dinner today.
But first, I had to make a trip to the nearer city for a few things. Only about half of today’s shopping came out of our regular budget, though, as my daughter sent me funds for the other half.
Not pictured was my first stop at Canadian Tire. There, I was able to sanitize two of our 18.9L/5 gallon water jugs and refill them – the price at Canadian Tire is much lower than locally, so if I’m making the trip anyhow, it’s worth getting our refills done at the same time.
The main thing we needed to get at Canadian Tire was some mold and mildew resistant primer. We will use that on the exposed bathroom walls, before putting on the tub surround.
I was also able to get a few other things as well. One was a tube of transparent Kwik Seal, which is both an adhesive and a caulk that is waterproof. We’ll be using it on the overlap of the catio and isolation shelter roof panels. I also picked up some 6×3/4 inch wood screws, as we ran out, and a latch that I think should work on the ramp-door on the isolation shelter.
Before doing to the till, I checked out the display of vehicle organizers and accessories for the truck. What I found, though, was an emergency hand crank flashlight and FM radio that was on sale, so I grabbed that for our emergency kit. I think it has a port for charging a cell phone, too, but the packaging didn’t have a detailed list on it. We’ll need to test it out, later, anyhow, and will be able to see, then. Eventually, I want to get a version that can also be charged with a solar panel. I’ve got a couple on my wish list that have different charging ports, different lighting options, etc. that I want for the house.
The Canadian Tire purchase totaled $81.91 after taxes, with the most expensive item being the quart of primer.
After that, it was across the street to the Walmart. This is what $232.58 looks like.
The kibble is for the inside cats, with an extra for the outside cats – I put our last 40 pound bag into the bin today, and that will last about a week. The shelf is the other thing I needed to make the trip for. With the wardrobe out of my husband’s room, he still needs a shelf. I’d have preferred to get a better shelf, but when it came to the smaller higher quality shelves, I was looking at twice the price for half the shelf! So this will do for now.
There are also some supplements; some Vitamin D and some Magnesium. On my daughter’s list was the coffee, creamer and energy drinks, plus some sort of heat and eat. Until we can get the hot water tank fixed, we’re trying to avoid dirtying dishes as much as possible!
Then, because it’s cheap turkey season, I got a frozen turkey; the medium turkeys are $22. I also got a couple of packages of bacon, one of which is for the turkey.
Oh! I almost forgot. I also got a collar with breakaway buckle for the cats. Syndol still has his collar, but I want to get collars on the other cats that got neutered, so it’s easy to tell them apart. Unfortunately, the first collars I got for them have disappeared. They were likely on too loose. I’ll start with getting one on Stinky, since he is one of the crowd of white cats with grey that can be so hard to tell apart at times.
Once I was home and everything was put away, I headed outside to do a bit of harvesting for our Thanksgiving dinner.
I started off with getting some German Butterball potatoes, and the last Uzbek Golden carrots (not counting the ones that went to seed).
I also harvested a few sunchokes, and the last Purple Caribe potatoes. There were two plants I’d left to grow longer, and between the two of them, I found a whole 6 potatoes, and one of them was really small.
If you click through to the next picture, you’ll see the squash I selected for Thanksgiving. Being part of the Wild Bunch Mix, I don’t know what kind it is. We only had the one survive to be harvested. It looks like it could be an immature Long Island Cheese.
We shall see how it tastes!
Since we’re trying to use as few dishes, pots and pans as possible, I was shooting to make our Thanksgiving dinner a one roaster meal.
I almost made it.
I started by oiling the bottom of our big roaster, then lined the bottom with slices of onions and shallots. Then all the carrots, potatoes and most of the sunchokes were laid out over the onions as flat and even as I could make them.
I say “most of the sunchokes” because, as I was cleaning and preparing them, I found several of the largest ones had some sort of worm in them!
Ugh.
The turkey itself was kept plain. After getting a thorough washing and the wings tucked under, it went on top of the vegetables. Then I took a package of bacon and wove the strips over the top of the turkey.
With all that in the roaster, there really wasn’t room for the squash. My husband doesn’t like winter squash, anyhow. So that got cut into chunks and peeled, and put into its own smaller roasting pan.
The good thing about winter squash getting harvested too early, because of frost, is that the shell is soft enough to use a vegetable peeler on!
I kept the squash simple, too. The chunks got pieces of butter spread out over them, then they all got sprinkled with brown sugar.
The turkey went into the over at 450° for 15 minutes, uncovered. Then the heat was reduced to 350°, and the roaster covered with foil (the turkey is too high to use the lid). The squash was put into the oven at this time, too.
As I was writing this, the oven timer went off. The squash is now ready and out of the oven, but it will be a while before the turkey and vegetables are ready.
Along with all this, I also picked up a pumpkin pie at the local grocery store/post office. We’ll just need to whip some cream to go with it.
When the time comes, we’ll be eating off of paper plates, so there’s less to wash.
It’s not going to be fancy, but it doesn’t need to be. We have much to be thankful for!
Speaking of which…
I got a voice mail on my phone from home care, letting me know that no one was available to do my mother’s evening medication assist. So I called my mother to let her know – not something I was looking forward to, after her mind games, yesterday. I made the call just before I started on cleaning the vegetables, so I told her I was going to be quick, because I needed to go to the kitchen, and passed on the message.
Before she let me go, though, she said she had something she needed to tell me. She said she didn’t want me to worry. She would pay for the septic repairs.
She then said she forgot that she had promised to pay it, earlier.
I did tell her, I never asked her to pay for it. She offered, and I was very grateful, because we would have have been able to cover it ourselves. She kind of waffled a bit, and just repeated that she would take care of it, and stopped just short of actually apologizing for her behaviour. Which is fine by me. I don’t expect her to.
Then she mentioned that she spoke to my brother last night. I asked how that was and again, she waffled. She finally just said, it was a short call, and that they talked about him coming out to put away her air conditioner, and that it would be good to do it before winter arrives.
I reminded her that my brother had been saying he needs to come out and take care of that for her; he just has no idea when he’ll be able to. I also reassured her that, even if we got snow (it’s not unusual to get a blizzard in October where we are), he did such a good job sealing the window around the AC vent, it wouldn’t matter. No weather is getting in through there! She agreed that he did an excellent job.
Ah, my timer is going off again. Time to check on the turkey!
Today is October 10, and yes, we have garden progress!
Last month, the 10 was our average first frost date, so I took garden tour video. I might do that again, later today, depending on how other things go. I might also leave it for the middle of the month. We shall see!
While doing my rounds this morning, I finally pulled the red onions in the high raised bed and set them to cure.
The strong fence wire on this cover was perfect to hang them on! Only a few didn’t have enough greens to hang them, so they got set out on the frame to cure.
After I took this photo, I also gathered the whole three shallots that were left by the summer squash, and hung them on the frame wire, too.
I am perplexed by these onions. As far as I can remember, these were supposed to be the Red Wethersfield onions, which have a round, flattish shape. These look more like the Tropeana Lunga or Red of Florence onions we grew before, but we didn’t have seeds for those this year.
So I decided to look at my old post about planting in this bed.
Well, that explains it.
These aren’t onions.
They are the Creme Brulé shallots.
I completely forgot that I planted shallots in this bed. I was sure I’d planted Red Wethersfield in here!
It’s a good thing I use this blog as a gardening journal!
So… those shallots are HUGE! Their size was another reason I didn’t think they could be shallots. Particularly since the ones planted in the bed with the yellow onions and summer squash were so much smaller.
Which had me wondering…
Where are all my Red Wethersfield?
Well… I did know where some of them were, but did they survive?
I had planted some of them among the Forme De Couer tomatoes, but we weren’t able to keep the cats off of them. This was all I could find. A few got planted in the wattle weave bed, but I could see no sign of those.
I was sure I had more transplants than this, though!
Ah, well.
I will be keeping these. As we clean up and prepare the beds for the winter, I will find a place to transplant them, then mulch them over the winter. Hopefully, they will survive the winter and go to seed next year, and we can try again.
As for the bean pods with the onions, those are the Carminat purple pole beans I’d left to go to seed. There had been at least a couple more pods, but I couldn’t find them. With one, I did find the torn remains of the pod, so I’d say the racoons were at it again.
These are all the seeds that were in the bods. It looks like only one is damaged.
They will sit in the cat free zone to dry a bit more, now that they are out of their pods, then I’ll package them up for next year. These do grow very well here, so when we plant them again, I want to mark off one or two plants to specifically leave for growing more seed.
Meanwhile, it’s getting close to the time to plant garlic for next year. I will select our largest heads of garlic in the root cellar, rather than buying more.
Which means we will have onion seeds (with still more to collect from the garden), pole bean seeds, and garlic from our own garden for next year. I’ve also saved seed from that blue squash we had to harvest when it broke off its own stem, and we plan to save seed from that one big Crespo squash. There is the possibility of cross pollination with the Wild Bunch Mix winter squash we grew, though, so any seed we save there may not be true to the parent, even if I was able to hand pollinate from the same plant.
It doesn’t look like those Uzbek Golden carrots that bloomed are producing any seed. The flowers are died off, but there’s no seed. Perhaps because these are first year blooms? I don’t know.
We are slowly getting to the point where we will be able to save more and more of our own seed. I don’t expect to be 100% using our own seed, if only because I like to try new things, and we are still working out what varieties we like best in some things, but I do expect to be able to grow at least 90% of our garden from our own seed within a few years.
Just a little big closer to our goal of being as self sufficient as possible!
The red onions have been left, since they can handle the cold nights, and still aren’t quite ready for picking. With various distractions related to our plumbing issues, the potatoes still need to be harvested. The sunchokes are still green and growing, so they won’t be harvested for a while. Mostly, the beds are ready for winter clean up – once we can get to them!
When my daughter harvested this bed, she left behind the really tiny tomatoes, or the damaged ones. However, as more of the foliage died back, I could see some green tomatoes that looked fine, and seemed to have gotten missed. The foliage in this bed was so dense, that’s no surprise. I basically ignored them, though, figuring they were frost damaged by then.
This morning I could see they had continued to ripen! Hidden in the middle like that, it seems they got protected from our first frost and following cold nights, too.
So I picked them and added them to the bins and boxes of green tomatoes in the old kitchen to ripen.
We have quite a few things slowly ripening. Yesterday, my older daughter grabbed all the ripe hot peppers, cleaned and prepped them, then set them in the oven to dehydrate. Eventually, they will be made into a powder.
Now… my older daughter is pretty much the only one that can eat these. My husband used to love spicy food, but the medications he’s on have really messed with his ability to taste or tolerate foods. My younger daughter can handle a bit of heat, but not as much. My, I can’t tolerate spicy food at all.
So she has taken over preparing the hot peppers as they ripen and, once dehydrated and powdered, she will have enough to last a very long time! We won’t need to grow hot peppers for some years. 😁
Now, these are hot peppers, but not exceptionally hot peppers. They’re not the kind where you need to wear gloves or anything.
Normally.
It turns out that, after processing about a dozen remarkably large hot peppers, that becomes a problem.
Not right away, though. My daughter had no issues at all while working on them. She was careful about washing her hands before touching things, too.
Then she made herself a sandwich.
The pepper oils from her hands – even after being washed – got onto her sandwich, and it was so spicy, it started to burn her mouth. She ended up having to drink straight cream to reduce the pain!
Then her fingers started to burn.
It happened slowly, over several hours, but eventually she could barely even use one hand.
She sprung for take out for supper, so I went into town to pick up the food. By the time I got back and she regaled me on what had happened, I could see the tips of all her fingers were bright red!
Lesson learned. Even mildly hot peppers can become a problem, if you’re processing enough of them at once!
Gloves needed!
Meanwhile, even her lungs were starting to burn!
These were being dehydrated in the oven. We had the kitchen window open and the fan running. The house smelled amazing, but we still had to stay out of the kitchen as much as possible, so as not to breathe too many of the hot pepper fumes. Even the cats were staying out of the kitchen!
Speaking of cats, they added another distraction. My younger daughter tried to go to bed early, only to discover a cat with a messy butt made a mess on her bed. She had to wash all her bedding.
We had been working to clear my husband’s bedroom, and started doing his laundry, too, so that was already set up (yes, we are still running the hose out the window for the washing machine to drain into the yard). The girls were going to start the laundry and my younger daughter was going to use her sister’s bed for the night.
Which is when they discovered more mess in the middled of her sheets, from a cat or cats that squirmed its way under her covers.
So they were both up all night, doing load after load of laundry. Some things needed to be washed twice, just because of their size. They didn’t get to bed until past 6am.
We’ll be more laundry today, too. My husband has set up his CPAP in my bedroom so he could sleep with me.
Sleeping in the same bed as my husband! Imagine that. 😄
That will give us a chance to strip his hospital bed and wash things like his pillows and body pillows, along with the extra blankets he puts under his sheets. The mattress for the hospital bed has a sort of thick vinyl instead of fabric, so it’s easier to clean. Unfortunately, it doesn’t breath, and causes my husband to sweat. The extra layers under the sheets help prevent that.
I did finally find an XL twin fitted sheet on Amazon for his mattress, which is several inches longer than a standard twin mattress. We’ve confirmed the new sheet fits properly, so we’ll need to get a few more. For now, though, he has only one fitted sheet that actually fits the mattress on his hospital bed.
We’ve been working most of yesterday on clearing his room so we can access the corner behind the plumbing for the tub. This is where we will be cutting an access panel, but it’s still covered by the wardrobe. My husband doesn’t really use the wardrobe, and the girls have said they’ll take it upstairs – but they will need to move out their little bar fridge for the space. They don’t use that much anymore, so we were already talking about moving it to my room. I’ll have to find space for that, though.
Once we get that figured out, we can start moving things around but, for now, we still have one more corner of husband’s room to clear and clean, where has his own tiny fridge to store his injections. This will give us the opportunity to defrost and clean it, too, then move it to where it will be more easily accessible.
The bonus of moving the girls’ fridge out from upstairs, to make room for the wardrobe, is that it frees up a grounded outlet.
That means they can get an air conditioner and actually be able to plug it in! The upstairs gets so insanely hot in the summer, they really need one up there.
That will not happen for a while, though, since my daughter will be paying for what we end up needing to get the bathroom walls repaired.
So all of this rearranging and cleaning and figuring things out is happening at the same time – all because the hot water tap in the tub broke.
There is nothing we can do in the bathroom itself right now. The fan it still running to dry the rotted aspenite. My brother will be looking at it when he comes out on Friday evening (today is Wednesday).
We will have to pull out the tub to be able to find and cut away all the rot, and I’m not even sure how that will be done. It does seem like the tub is in two parts; the tub itself, resting on top of a flat panel that hides the underside of the tub.
Well, we’ll find out when the time comes.
Until then, we’ll just take advantage of the disaster and do the clearing, cleaning and rearranging we need to do, anyways.
On the one hand, I’m glad this has happened now, and not in the middle of winter.
On the other, this keeps me from getting outside stuff done, and from finishing the cat isolation shelter!
Hopefully, I’ll be able to get some of that done today, since there’s only so much I can do in my husband’s bedroom before I need my daughters to help out. It’s so close to being finished, too!
Yes, the tiny strawberries are still growing, still blooming and still producing berries! Only a couple were ripe. Whatever variety of strawberries they are, they are certainly appropriate for our climate! It should be interesting to see how they do, when they are transplanted somewhere they can grow wild.
My trip to my mother’s was productive, though she was physically not up to climbing in and out of the truck to go to the bank. Hopefully, my sister will visit on one of her days off and can take her with her car. It’s much easier for our mother to get in and out of her vehicle.
At her request, I picked up a large pizza for our lunch. Today was her first day on the Meals on Wheels program, though. We were done eating before it arrived, and my mother still has half a pizza. That will be two or three meals for her, right there, and the Meals on Wheels will be her supper.
The place that cooks the meals usually sends out invoices at the end of the month, but my mother wanted to pay in advance. She doesn’t trust the post office, though, so she asked the volunteer delivery person – who happened to be one of the social workers that hosts all sorts of activities in the building – to hand deliver it. My mother has been making use of their services on an as-needed basis and always paid cash per meal directly to the delivery person, so we knew this was acceptable.
Lack of volunteers means they only deliver meals three days a week. As we were talking about the delivery days, the social worker told my mother that, if she wanted, she could request more than one meal. She could, for example, order two meals each on Monday and Wednesday, then order three meals on Friday. This way, she could have a meal for every day of the week. My mother was happy to hear that, and said that she would think about it. For now, we’ll just see how the three days a week works out for her.
The meal comes with a container of soup, which my mother wanted to eat right away, leaving the rest of the meal for later in the day. So I headed out with her list and did her shopping for her. It didn’t take long, even with going to both the pharmacy and the grocery store. My mother is set for a good while now.
By the time all was done and I was heading home, I noticed that I would reach our area in time for the post office to reopen for the afternoon. I knew one package was expected today. Another was due in a couple of days, but sometimes they come in early.
There turned out to be three packages waiting for me!
One was the pair of clamp lamps, the other was the ceramic bulbs. I tested both lamps and bulbs, then set them aside for now. We won’t need to set them up for a while, yet, and one of them is meant to go into the cat isolation shelter. We have a larger clamp lamp that we used last year, but the bulb didn’t make it through the entire winter. When the budget allows, I should pick up another two pack.
The other package was a chainsaw sharpening kit. My husband, sweetheart that he is, sharpened the chain on the mini-chainsaw (battery powered pruning saw) for me. I’ll have to find the spare and get him to do that one, too, plus the chain for our larger electric chainsaw.
My husband likes sharpening things. 😁
After having the supper my older daughter prepared, I headed outside to take care of the eggplant and pepper bed. I removed the plastic that was surrounding it and rolled it up around a couple of narrow boards for storage. We might use one section to put around the catio for the winter, so for now, they’re being stored on the catio roof.
The eggplant leaves were definitely killed off by the cold, but I was surprised by how well the eggplants held out.
Even some really tiny Little Finger eggplant seemed salvageable. Only a few were too frost damaged to bother picking. There were only three Classic eggplant left to harvest, and all three had minimal frost damage on them.
That plastic did the job, even if it couldn’t completely protect the plants!
The Cheyenne hot peppers in the middle of the bed fared better. There were SO many peppers, and none of them were too frost damaged to pick!
I should have used the bigger colander! It’s being used for something else, though. When I brought them inside, they almost filled the basin I’d dug out of the old kitchen recently.
We don’t have the space to spread them out, so I guess we’ll have to string them and hang them. They should continue to ripen.
We most definitely don’t have the space for all the things that need to ripen indoors, though!
Which is a good problem to have, I suppose!
I’m just happy to have a harvest in October.
After this, the potatoes need to be harvested. Oh, and the red onions are still hanging in there!
The sunchokes should also be harvested, but they are still quite green and growing. The frost hasn’t really bothered them at all. I’m curious as to how well they did, after not harvesting them at all last year.
In a few days, we’ll be bringing the rest of the winter squash from the garage to the root cellar.
The root cellar is going to be pretty full this winter!
Not too bad, considering what a rough start the garden had this year. I’m quite pleased!
When I uncovered the high raised bed this morning, it was clear the covers were not enough to keep the peppers from being damaged by the frost a couple of nights ago.
The eggplant and hot pepper bed also saw damage, though the eggplants and each end faired worse than the hot peppers in the middle.
I had grabbed just the ripest of the hot peppers for now, though a couple of green ones broke off in the process. We’ll go back to tend to that bed, later.
With the bell peppers, I gathered almost off of them. I did leave behind the tiny ones that were too small to bother with, though I think some of the ones I did grab probably could have been left, too. It just seems a shame to leave them behind.
You can tell which ones are the Sweet Chocolate peppers, even when they’re green. They have a more elongated shape.
So these will be set out to ripen more before getting cut up and either frozen or dehydrated. Most likely the bell peppers will all be frozen, but the hot peppers will be dried and then powdered. We have quite a few ripe and ready to start on now. We’ll be using the oven to dehydrate them, so that will be an overnight thing.
The red onions in the high raised bed with the bell peppers were left for now. They can handle the colder temperatures, and most aren’t really ready for harvesting, yet.
Today is working out to be a very windy day, and we’re supposed to get rain, of and on, so we won’t be getting a lot of outside stuff done today.
Well, it finally happened. We had our first frost this year, on the night of October 3 – well past our average first frost date of September 10.
It’s still earlier than last year. A year ago today, which was our Thanksgiving day (this year, it’s next week), we had just had a lot of rain the day before, and were still harvesting from the garden, and not needing to cover anything.
We have nothing to complain about. We still have a couple of beds in the garden we could cover that, if the forecasts are at all accurate, can continue to be covered at night and kept going for a few more weeks, if we want.
Also, no snow. We might get rain tomorrow, but the earliest we’re currently expecting snow is a little bit overnight, more than two weeks from how.
Last night, we did go below freezing, and had our first morning of using warm water from the house to give to the cats, instead of filling their water bowls from the hose.
The cold was enough to finally do in the mighty, mighty Crespo squash!
I’m still amazed by how huge those plants got!
This morning, the septic guy came to empty the tank for the winter. After he did that, he adjusted the weight next to the float/pill switch he replaced for us this summer. He tried adjusting the line from the basement first, but had to do it from inside the tank.
What a guy. He was actually on the ground, his upper body leaning right into the tank to reach.
As if that weren’t enough, he showed up with an eye patch and sunglasses over his regular glasses! He somehow detached a retina and, while it is healing well, without the eye patch, he was seeing double. I can barely even lean over the open tank to see inside without feeling like my glasses will fall off, and there he was, hanging head first right into the tank. He did take off the sunglasses for that, but yikes!
He got it done, though, and now the weight will no longer get hung up on the inside of the grey water side of the tank.
I’m really glad he was able to do it. It had gotten caught again this morning. I’d brought the hose from the garden to the house. The tap is in the wall next to the septic tank. I’d shut off the tap and left the nozzle open, so water could drain out rather than freeze. Not much drained out, though! When I turned the tap on so I could use the hose on the weight inside the tank, it was barely a trickle. There was too much ice in the hose. Still, it was enough to get the weight free hanging again, and I could hear the pump shutting itself off in the basement, as soon as it did. The hoses will be put away, soon, so we wouldn’t have been able to keep this up for long.
Now that the tank has been emptied, we can start preparing to cover it for the winter – but we still need to have the company come in and repair the expeller out by the barn. I’ve called and left another message, and still no call back!
After the septic guy was done, my daughter and I went into the root cellar. After wiping down the shelves and covering most with paper, we brought in the onions and garlic, then assembly lined it to bring the winter squash down. They had all been sitting on the washing machine, and we need to use that today!
While my daughter finished in the basement (there was no way my knees could handle going up and down those stairs!), I got the drainage hose for the washing machine set out the storm door window again. We’d been leaving it set up for at least the past month, but with temperatures dropping below freezing, we wanted to be able to close the inner door.
It won’t be long before we’re going to have to start using the drain to the septic tank again. Between the expeller needing to be fixed, and the state or our pipes, we’re hoping to delay that as long as we can.
Last night, I did the first treatment with the Free-Flow Drain and Line Maintenance stuff.
The instructions say to start at the drain closest to the tank, so that anything loosened in the pipes doesn’t end up clogging things further down. The closest is the access pipe in the floor of the basement. Based on the diameter of the pipe, that took 4 tablespoons of product in a cup of warm water. A cup of water isn’t enough to get the stuff to where things get hung up in the pipe, so I had to chase it down with more water.
We can do the next treatment tonight. That will be the bathroom sink, toilet and tub. The main drain pipe from under the bathroom is as large as the floor drain, but the product has to go through much smaller pipes, first, so we’ll do a smaller amount, but do all three at the same time.
Depending on how this works out, we might do these drains more than once, before moving on to the next furthest drain.
Once we’ve done the treatment with this stuff, we’ll start using the Septic Remedy stuff for regular tank maintenance.
None of which will make much difference at all, if that ejector pipe doesn’t get repaired!
In other things, I finally got a call back from the place that does Meals on Wheels in my mother’s town. After a bit of back and forth conversation, my mother is now set up to get meals delivered, instead of having homecare come in to do batch cooking. They only deliver three days a week, though. They no longer have enough volunteers to do five days a week. If I were living in the same town as my mother, I could have arranged to pick up meals on the other days myself and bring them to her, but it’s just not possible to do from where we are. The cost of gas would be higher than the cost of the meals!
One of my follow up calls to my mother, while arranging this, happened to be just after my sister left. She had come by for a visit, and to drop off some vegetables from her garden for my mother.
Including tomatoes.
My mother isn’t supposed to eat tomatoes.
*sigh*
It does mean I won’t be going over there to help her with her grocery shopping until after the weekend, though, which is helpful.
As for today, I’m going to have to make it a day of rest. It seems all the stuff my daughter and I were able to get done yesterday was pushing it for me. Last night, I rolled over in bed and got hit with a Charlie horse. Thankfully, I was able to message my older daughter and she was able to come help me. It was several hours before I could get back to sleep. My attempt at napping after my daughter and I finished with putting stuff in the root cellar, then setting up the laundry, was a failure. Being aggressively cuddled by cats was something I could get used to, but that’s when the Meals on Wheels lady called. By the time I was done all the phone calls, sleep was just not going to happen.
My every joint still and sore, though. The temperature fluctuations are not helping! Neither is the brain fog from lack of sleep.
Hopefully, we’ll get caught up over the weekend, but we do have warmer weather coming, so hopefully we’ll be able to get quite a bit more done.
I need to reign in my expectations, though. I keep forgetting how broken I am.
I think it’s time to make an appointment with the doctor and see about applying for disability. My last doctor said he felt I wasn’t at that point, yet, but that was a few years ago, and he’s moved on to another clinic. We’ll see what this other doctor has to say about it.
Something to do next week, though. The clinic doesn’t take calls on Fridays.
As for right now, it’s all I can do to stay awake, so if this post sounds disjointed and rambling, that is why!
My younger daughter and I were able to get so much done today, all before our expected first frost.
Depending on which weather app I look at, we’re supposed to drop to either -2C/28F, or 1C/34F tonight.
Either way, we’re looking at frost tonight.
Strangely, there are absolutely no frost warnings. Perhaps the humidity is too low. The temperature alone is enough to cause damage, though.
Last night, my older daughter helped me cover the two beds that actually can be covered, and I’m glad we did. We dropped to 3C/37F last night, and that was enough to kill off the last of the squash and melon leaves. Even the Crespo squash was droopy, and they were the only ones that were still lush, green and growing.
My daughter started off by checking on the biggest Crespo squash. As she rolled it aside, the stem broke right off its vine.
The two that were growing in the bean trellis didn’t get to full maturity, so they’ll need to be eaten sooner, too. Or we could cut make a puree to freeze or something like that.
My daughter started off harvesting the tomatoes in the old kitchen garden ahead of me. She’d collected all the Forme de Couer and had moved on to the Black Cherry tomatoes by the time I was able to start helping her. The Black Cherries were so tangled up in the lilac branches, we had to cut our way through to be able see, never mind reach, the tomatoes. After a while, I grabbed a pile of cut up tomato plants to take it to the compost pile when I realized, there were plenty of tomatoes in the compost pile to gather.
So I grabbed another bin and worked on those.
I found a surprise!
I knew there were two types of volunteer tomatoes in there. A few Indigo Blues, and a whole lot of Roma VF from last year’s harvests.
I found a third type, completely buried by the others!
They look like a slicing tomato of some kind, but I don’t remember growing a red variety of slicing tomato last year. It was also the only one that had an almost ripe tomato.
You’ll notice a lot of the Romas are very pale – almost white – in colour. These were essentially blanched from being under so many stems and leaves. I’m really surprised by how many we got in there!
It’s a shame they never got to ripen. A few of the Romas had started to show a blush. Who knows how many of these will actually ripen once indoors.
By the time I got the compost tomatoes done, my daughter was almost finished the old kitchen garden, so I moved on to the main garden area, bringing the wagon with the Crespo squash, to start harvesting the squash and melons. Then my daughter joined me and started harvesting the rest of the San Marzano tomatoes.
I found several melons were already “harvested”! One had a hole in it and was essentially hollowed out, so I’m guessing a mouse got that one. The others looked more like racoon damage.
Once the squash and melons were picked, plus a few patty pan squash, I cut down and went through all the corn stalks to find the cobs I’d left to go to seed.
This was all the racoons left me, and it’s not even dried out enough to have viable seeds.
Ah, well. Live and learn!
That done, I got another bin and helped my daughter with the last of the tomatoes. There were so many San Marzanos in the main garden area! Then we did the tomatoes that were at the chain link fence.
The bin with the cat next to it has the Chocolate Cherry tomatoes from the chain link fence in it, plus the tiny tomatoes from the volunteer tomato plant that I found among the potatoes. There were so many perfect little tomatoes! Not a single one had a chance to ripen. We have no idea what kind of tomatoes they were, either.
My daughter had already moved the previously harvested winter squash from the garage to the house, so now these squash are set up in the garage. It looks like some of the blue squash did get to fully mature, but most of them seem shy of full maturity, so they won’t be able to properly cure. They are still quite edible, though. They just won’t last as long in the root cellar than if they had fully matured and cured. Still, some time set up like this in the garage will help them last a bit longer.
Once we were done with the harvesting, my daughter uncovered the box of the truck, and we loaded up with as many bags of cans as we felt we could properly secure.
Which turned out to be maybe a third of the pile!
The whole thing got covered with a tarp and strapped down with ratchet straps. We set two up in an X across the pile, plus two more across the front and back. It was pretty windy, though, and once we got to highway speeds, the tarp was billowing under the straps more than I liked.
We stopped at a gas station to tuck the tarp back in place, then secured it more using Bungee cords. It still billowed, but nothing that was a potential problem.
This is the first time we’ve gone to this salvage place, but they were easy to find. I’d called for instructions yesterday, so we knew where to go to start. After talking to someone in the office, she directed me to where we should pull up, and staff could unload the truck.
My daughter and I started taking the straps and tarp off while they brought over a couple of bins with a forklift to bring them to the scale. All the cans are in transparent bags, so they could see that there were some tin cans in there, too.
That was okay for them, but good for us.
The tin cans go for 10 cents per weight.
The aluminum goes for 50 cents.
When they’re mixed up like this, they basically figure out something in between.
After everything was unloaded, we moved the truck again, and I went back to the office to wait. I had thought I stopped out of the way, but I turned out to be wrong, when a very large truck pulling a very long trailer came in! One of the office staff asked if we could park on the street. When I moved the truck, though, there wasn’t enough room to get by the trailer. I went back inside while my daughter waited until the truck could pull ahead, then she found a place to park.
As I was waiting in the office, I heard some staff going back and forth and saying something about “getting her a magnet”.
Then a guy came up to me and handed me a red keychain with their company name and number on it. It turns out, I was the “her”, and the keychain has a strong magnet on its end. This is for the next time we bring in a load; when we back stuff up, we can use the magnet to make sure there’s no cans with steel in them mixed in.
It means we’ll have to re-bag all the cans again, but the difference in price makes it worth is. With sooooo many cat food cans, plus the pop and energy drink cans, it is quite a loss to not get full price on the aluminum because there’s half a dozen tin cans scattered among them.
In the end, we brought 208 pounds, which got us just over $17. While they did give us an in between price, we still could have gotten quite a bit more, if we didn’t have those tin cans in there.
Live and learn!
It was very nice of them to give us the magnet, too. We have magnets, of course, but this one will be much more convenient!
That done, my daughter and I made a quick stop at a gas station, then headed home. We made a point of not covering the box again so that, once at home, we could give it a cleaning. The truck has screw holes in the bed from when it was a commercial vehicle hauling trailers. A remarkable amount of dust from the gravel roads gets in there!
I know it’s just going to get full of dust again, but it sure did feel better to finally wash that out with the hose!
Then we filled the truck again, this time with our garbage. We were overdue for a trip to the dump!
I had planned to go to a different landfill in our municipality, but I don’t know the area it’s in, so we went to our usual one.
I was really glad to have my daughter with me! The pit area is a real disaster. My daughter got out before we went into the pit area to make sure there wasn’t anything that might puncture a tire. While she kicked things out of the way, I slowly crawled along behind her with the truck until she could guide me in backing up to the pit. Not as close as we normally would have gone; too much broken glass!
And nails.
She was finding and kicking away nails, the whole distance!
This place has really gone downhill. The previous municipal council had fired the guy that used to take care of the landfill. I don’t know what the new council is doing, but the attendant that’s here now is not someone physically able to maintain the pit. Which is fine, if being an attendant is the only part of her job description, but whoever it is that’s been hired to use the heavy equipment to clean where we’re supposed to drive up to the pit is not doing a good job at all. Even the equipment being used is different, and the tracks on that front end loader is just destroying the gravel driveways.
But, we got the job done, and so far, it doesn’t look like I’ll be getting any flat tires, thanks to my daughter!
As we were leaving, my daughter wondered about being able to go to town and pick up something. It had been a long time since either of us had eaten, and she was thinking of perhaps treating us.
After talking about it, we decided that, between the two of us, we could pick up some fish and chips for all of us for supper.
Which was about when we got a message from my husband. The pharmacy called. When he had his prescription refills delivered, they didn’t have enough to fill one completely. They now had the amount they owed him.
Well, that was handy! We would have time to do that, before the pharmacy closed at 6pm.
A trip to town, it was!
As we were going along, we ended up stuck behind some slower moving traffic, so it took a bit longer to get to the pharmacy. I was going to just dash in, anyhow.
As I was walking in the door, behind two other people, a staff member let us know…
…they were closing in one minute – and she locked the entry doors behind us!
It turns out, they close at 5:30.
Thankfully, my husband’s prescription was quick to find, and it was already covered, so it just needed to be handed to me, and I could go!
From there, we went and got the fish and chips to bring home, plus a quick stop at the grocery store for something else my husband needed. We could finally go home!
We weren’t quite done yet, though!
One home, my daughter took care of bringing in the hot food, while I started bringing the bins of tomatoes into the old kitchen.
I have no idea what we’re going to do with them all.
In previous years, we kept a bin of green tomatoes out and my family just snacked on them as they ripened. They were all small grape, cherry or pear type tomatoes.
I know there are lots of things that can be done with green tomatoes; we’ve just never done them. I wouldn’t be able to eat them, so it’s a matter of finding things the family would like.
What we don’t have is the space to lay out so many green tomatoes in what should be a single layer, to ripen indoors. It would have to be in the living room – the cat free zone – but it’s a disaster right now.
Until we figure that out, all five bins are now laid out on the chest freezer in the old kitchen. That room is too dark and gets too cold to be able to leave them there to ripen.
Once we were finally able to have our supper, things still weren’t done!
It was back outside to recover the two beds for the night, so the peppers and eggplant will survive. The hoses had to be prepped so they wouldn’t have any water in them to freeze, and I even remembered to close the doors in the side of the garage the squash and melons were in, so they won’t get as cold.
And now I am FINALLY done for today.
I’m hoping to actually get to bed before midnight and get some real sleep for a change. My attempt to do so last night was a total failure! 😄
There is, of course, lots to do outside. This is one of the busiest times of the year, as we get ready for winter, while the weather holds!
The Re-Farmer 