I was a bit later heading out this morning, so there were plenty of yard cats to greet me. I didn’t bother trying to do a head count, though. I spotted Broccoli, so as soon as the kibble was doled out, I went around the house to the old garden shed with some food to leave for her, and to check on her babies.
I was able to pick them up and cuddle them for a bit, then set them safe in the kibble bin while I straightened out their “nest”. Then it was another cuddle before putting them back and leaving food for their mama.
I did have a pleasant surprise while putting the food out earlier, too.
I saw Judgement! He hasn’t been around for weeks and, my goodness, he was a hungry boy! Wherever it is he wanders, he isn’t finding much food, and was looking quite skinny. Poor thing.
After I came back from tending Broccoli’s babies, I startled a skunk that was in the kibble house. The direction he wanted to run off was filled by a cat, so he ran in circles for a bit before squeezing under the cat house. It gave me a chance to see that one of his ears was just loaded with wood ticks! Poor thing.
Today has been nice and sunny, with just a few clouds. The rain has stopped, so I put the tray of transplants out. In general, the cats leave the transplants alone. The only time there is an issue is when they sometimes try to go through a tray to get to a window or something.
Usually, that just results in a knocked over pot, but the trays with cardboard and peat pots had been watered. When the pots are damp, they damage easily. It looks like a cat tried to step into one, and it broke. The seedling inside – one of the melons that was not part of the Summer of Melons mix – was undamaged, though. I found a small pot in the sun room and was able to transfer it over. The drainage holes in these pots are quite large, so I put the remains of the cardboard pot on the bottom to keep the soil from washing out. What I could no longer do, however, was read the label for which type of melon it was! Probably Sarah’s Choice, but it might have been a watermelon. Well, we’ll have another mystery melon is all. If it survives being moved to its new home. I had one Pixie melon on this tray and, for some reason, it just withered away. We have two more in the house, though. This morning, I transferred the last seedlings out of the aquarium greenhouse and into the mini greenhouse frame at the window. They’ll be moved to the sun room soon.
Things are still really wet out there, of course. It’ll probably be a few days before the lowest areas drain, but it does make weeding easier! Aside from that, though, we’re not going to try and get more progress on the big stuff. Tomorrow, I’m taking my mother to a medical appointment for long term care assessment, which will take up most of the day, so I won’t be doing any big stuff then, either. My daughter might be able to get some progress with the dead trees she’s processing for the raised beds, but the spruce grove has quite a few low spots that would be filled with water, too, so we’ll see.
This is usually when I say, “little by little, it’ll get done”, but right now, we’re not even getting a little done on these jobs! However, we are warming up and staying dry for the next while, so we’ll get there.
So the rain started early this morning, and has been pretty constant, so far. The rainfall warnings include possible flooding in places, including our region. Our region is huge, though, and contains quite a few rural municipalities. Where we are is unlikely to have much, if any, where we are. The newly graded roads, however, are probably going to be a real mess!
With the rain, I did short rounds this morning and skipped switching out the trail cams, since I won’t want water getting into the cameras. Short rounds was good, though, because…
… a lovely surprise!!!!
My husband actually came out with me!!!! He caned it rather than drag his walker into the rain, but he did it! I could see he was really struggling near the end, but he did it. I honestly can’t remember the last time he went outside and walked around. It’s probably been at least a year.
As we went around, I checked the beds and we had a lovely surprise in the bed of Purple Caribe potatoes.
The first plants have emerged! Just two, so far that we can see, but this rain is going to be so good for them.
When I was mowing yesterday, I’d put one of the raised bed covers over the German Butterball potatoes, then forgot to take it off, so my husband helped me lift it off to the side, so they could get some rain, too. I had also forgotten to put the extensions on the eavestrough downspouts back after mowing. I’ll have to check the new basement later, and see if that caused any problems. The one corner was already damp and has a fan on it. That was the corner a rain barrel had been left to overflow during a wet summer, and is why we now have weeping tile problems. This basement used to always stay dry, even when the old basement was wet, but not anymore. My brother had found that corner so wet, for so long, there was mold. He cleaned it up with bleach, and when we clear the basement, we also bleached that entire corner, but it still gets wet at times.
So forgetting the extension on the downspout above that corner is not a good thing!
When feeding the outside cats, I didn’t see Broccoli, but we still went around to the garden shed. If I think she might be in there with her babies, I knock on the door, first. Opening the door still startles her, but she doesn’t always run out completely. She gets in and out through the hole in the back wall, and there’s an old chair in that corner. Sometimes, I can just see her butt under the chair, as she waits while I put food out for her. Today, she did actually leave the shed, so I took advantage of that to pick up her kittens and straighten out the self warming mat for them. My husband got to see them, too. If it hadn’t been raining, I would have passed them to him to hold while I straightened out the bedding. More human interaction would be a good thing, but not if they get too chilled in the process!
Speaking of chilled, as I write this, we are at 5C/41F – with a wind chill of -4C/25F! Our expected high for today is supposed to be 8C/46F According to the weather radar, we are under the light rainfall area, with the moderate rainfall passing by to the west of us, with a few places in the south and west of us, getting occasional heavy rainfall. In total, we’re expected to get 50-60mm of rain, which is roughly 2 – 2.5 inches. The rain, with another high of 8C/46F, is expected to continue until about noon tomorrow. Starting Sunday, things are supposed to warm up and we’ll have dry weather for at least a couple of weeks. Hopefully, that will be enough time for us to get those beds reworked and ready for planting! We should probably lay plastic down to help warm the soil up faster, too. Looking at the long range forecast, there are still going to be cooler nights in the second week of June. Not cool enough for frost, but cool enough that I’d want to find ways to protect our more heat loving transplants.
Which won’t even be in the ground for more than a week.
Pretty much everything we do, revolves around the weather.
If the really long range forecasts can be trusted (they can’t), we’ll have only one day of rain in June, and none in July. June is supposed to have a few highs reaching or surpassing 30C/86F, but right now, July is supposed to have highs of 25C/77F, every day. Literally, every day except the first four, which are supposed to have highs of 24C/75F. So you know that’s going to change a lot by the time we get there!
Well, that should be good for all the squash and melons we’re planting this year! Plus the eggplant and peppers. As long as we can keep up with the watering. One of our best gardening years was a drought year with heat waves. I’m still amazed by how many melons we got that year. It was so hard to get them properly watered on the squash tunnel, and the plants were so spindly, and they they produced so well! This year, they will be closer to the house for easier watering, and have better soil conditions. I am hopeful that we will have a much better gardening year, this year, and actually harvest enough to do some canning and preserving of things other than tomatoes and onions!
The cherries at the edge of the spruce grove are blooming like crazy right now. We might actually have berries from them this year. The one by the house – the one we plan to keep – is just starting to bloom. Usually, it blooms before the ones in the bushes.
The different types of lilacs are showing flower buds, but only the double lilac in the old kitchen garden is starting to show a few open blossoms. Most of the crab apple trees have buds, but the one big one that has tasty apples just sort of exploded in flowers this morning.
The grape hyacinths have their flower cones up. Little spots of purple, all over the area they’re in. Unfortunately, they are almost completely hidden by the purple bellflower that has taken over every open space among the trees. The area is too large to weed by hand, but I don’t want to use tools or the weed trimmer, and risk accidentally taking out the grape hyacinths.
I’m really looking forward to when the lilacs start opening. We’ve got five different kinds that my mother planted, and they all bloom at different types. Everything smells amazing for weeks!
I also made sure to check our little strawberry patch. Something – likely the cats – keeps digging into the mulch, but not the strawberries. I just need to put the mulch back in the morning, and everything else is okay.
It looks like 8 out of 9 are doing quite well right now. The 9th one does have leaf buds on it, so it will hopefully recover soon. Considering we ordered a package of 8, that one’s a bonus, anyhow!
Hopefully, these will do quite well where they are – as long as the bed doesn’t get invaded by those Chinese elm roots again!
The rhubarb in the south corner of the old kitchen garden is doing very well. I harvested a bunch, which should open things up and give the other stalks more room to grow. I have no idea what we will do with it. Maybe we have the ingredients for the rhubarb cake my daughter likes to make.
Today is turned out to be an off day. Since I did a dump run and a Walmart trip, it should have been a recovery day. Instead, I woke up stiff and sore in every joint. This, on top of a mostly sleepless night. I couldn’t get myself to bed until well past 1am; I knew trying to go to bed earlier would just be an exercise in frustration. Then, once I did finally get to bed, several cats suddenly got the zoomies, and were chasing each other around the house. That, of course, included running right over me in bed, as well as getting into placed they are not allowed.
Still, I should not have been waking up in so much pain, and just sooooo sleepy.
Then I checked the weather and realized why.
The rain we weren’t supposed to get until Friday arrived early. Just scattered showers, but still cloudy and dreary out there. Depending on which weather app I check, we’ll either get a bit of rain today, none tomorrow, then rain on Friday – or we will be getting scattered showers tomorrow as well.
This sort of weather has always made me feel sleepy. Even when I was a kid, it had that affect on me. Then I developed osteo-arthritis, and this sort of weather triggers it, badly. Everything hurts. Not severely, but enough to make moving around rather unpleasant, to say the least!
Things are supposed to clear up and warm up a bit, later, so I think I’ll take some painkillers and try lying down for a couple of hours – if I can squeeze in amongst the cats, that seem to be worn out from all their running around last night, and are now sprawled across my bed!
I can’t afford too many days like this. There is too much work to do outside!
Finding and fighting the bigger tree roots was bad enough. Once I was finally clear of those and working my way through new ground to the other end, I had another issue. At about the middle, I started hitting mats of Creeping Charlie. At that point, I didn’t even try to weed them, and was just digging out and tossing aside sod. Plus, I kept hitting rocks. Not particularly large rocks, but lots of them.
So now the new edges of the bed are clear, and the soil piled in the middle … mostly. The hole where I dug out the most roots got filled, but that’s it.
The next bed is probably going to be done differently. One side of it is so infested with Creeping Charlie, it’s not worth weeding or shifting the soil I’ll probably remove the infested soil completely. Which sucks, because we worked really hard to amend that soil for our vegetables, not for the Creeping Charlie!
I won’t be starting it today, though. Time to pain killer up again, and take a break.
I keep forgetting that I’m getting too old and broken for this.
I decided not to continue with prepping the garden bed I started working on yesterday. That area was in full sun, it was hot, and the mosquitoes were out in full force. So, other than helping my daughter drag out the first of the 18′ logs she prepped (she also cut two 4′ pieces for the ends, and they are now waiting to be debarked and have any branch bits cut flat), I stayed inside.
Instead, I went to be unusually early for me – at about 8pm – and actually fell asleep and everything! I was awake by 5am. Usually, I do my morning rounds, have breakfast, then head back out to do the more laborious stuff. This time, I made sure to eat first, then just stayed out after doing my rounds, so work on the garden bed.
I got distracted.
The first distraction was remembering to put netting over the chimney block planters at the chain link fence.
I had a roll of netting just long enough to cover the length of these blocks. It was actually longer than needed, but this piece has a tear near one end that was “sewn” together with twine. I made sure that end was the excess netting wrapped around the far end of the blocks
So that area is now protected from getting smothered by the elm seeds.
Of course, I checked the other beds, then gathered my tools to continue working on the low raised bed.
I had the loppers with me, to cut away the roots I knew I would find.
… I went into the edge of the spruce grove and started clearing things away from the Saskatoon bushes. There’s a lot of chokecherries crowding them – one bunch was so entwined, I accidentally cut away some Saskatoon branches along with the chokecherry! There were quite a lot of dead, broken branches to clear away. Those were broken by the deer standing up on their hind legs to reach the berries, and pulling the branches down. There was an elm growing right from the based of some Saskatoons. I cut most of it away, but will have to come back with a saw to get the rest of it.
That was just the big stuff. The next thing to do will be to clear away the false spirea.
Again.
I had this whole area cleared of the spirea, a few years ago! It’s all completely filled in again. That stuff is so hard to get rid of, and so invasive!
That will be for another time. Getting those chokecherries out was the main thing. The Saskatoons will no longer be competing with them for water and nutrients, and they will get more sunlight, too. These Saskatoons are the healthiest ones we’ve found. There are others, out by the garage, but every year, as the berries start to form, they start to get what looks like some sort of fungus. So we want to be keeping these ones by the house well cared for and healthy.
That done, it was time to finally get back to that bed!
The first part of the job went well enough. I cleared the weeds out of the second half of the bed, and started piling the soil up onto the half I cleared yesterday, shifting the edge of the bed in the process.
Trouble started at the end nearest the trees, where I was breaking new ground to the 18′ mark. I already knew there were roots under there, but I kept finding more! The finer roots are one thing, but those larger ones – even the smallest of them – are much more difficult to get out. After shoveling the soil away as best I could, I took a hose to them. Partly to make them easier to see, partly to wash the grit off the roots so I could more easily cut them with the loppers and not damage the cutting edge.
I didn’t get all of them out, but I did make sure to cut them at the tree side of the roots, pull them up and dig them out as far as was reasonable, then cut them out. Anything left should die off.
I hope.
Once those were out, I started putting some of the soil back into the hole and leveling off the side where a log will be placed. Then I started digging out past the existing bed, along the 18′ line to corner marking the new 4′ width of the bed, breaking new ground.
Where I found more roots, besides the one that I was hitting when putting the marker back up.
These ones continued through to what will be the path between beds, so I cut them away to that point.
At which point, it was time for a hydration break!
One of the things I remembered to do once inside was to turn the aquarium greenhouse lights back on. Since I was there anyhow, I decided to check on the pumpkin seeds I’d scarified and set to pre-germinate.
I’ve stopped for a hydration break and to get out of the sun and heat. As I write this, we’ve reached our predicted high of 19C/66F. The winds are still pretty high, which does help, but it was time to go in! I’m not sure if I’ll be heading back out again today, or not. It depends on how my pain levels are. I did remember to take painkillers before I started, at least!
I got a couple of “before” pictures before I started. The marker for what will be the path between the bed that got done yesterday is almost exactly at the middle of the next bed to work on. Which means half the bed will need to be shifted on top of the other half.
The first thing that needed to be done was to loosen the soil in the entire bed with the garden fork. Years of amending these beds has really made a difference! When we started growing here, we could barely get a spade or garden fork into the soil more than a couple of inches. Now, I can push the tines on the garden fork all the way into the ground! The rains have certainly helped to soften the soil, too. It is already just moist, though, and not at all soggy.
The drainage here is a bit too good!
Next was to start weeding along the side that will be the middle of the bed, once everything is shifted over. This bed had a lot more dandelion tap roots to get rid of, compared to the crab grass rhizomes. The rhizomes are more of an issue along the edges.
As expected, once I started getting closer to the trees, I was catching more and more elm roots. Plus more larger rocks. One of the marking posts kept falling down because it couldn’t go deep enough into the soil. I ended up getting a trowel and digging out the rock it was hitting, right at the 4′ measurement that needed to be marked.
Then I started hitting larger roots.
I extended the weeding up to the 18′ mark, beyond the existing bed, which is about 17′ long, counting the width of the logs that had framed it. In the last picture of the above Instagram slide show, you can see one of the tree roots partially pulled up and draped over the handle of the garden fork. There’s another, larger root that runs across and into what is currently the path. I’ll have to bring the loppers over cut that, and any other roots I find along the way.
I just had to get a picture of the tree branches against the sky. The maple trees are leafing out nicely, with all the rain we’ve been having, but the Chinese elms… They’re not getting their leaves yet. They get their seeds, first. All that green on those branches is seeds, seeds and more seeds.
Seeds that will mature, dry up, turn brown, and fall.
A whole storm of them, blowing and drifting and getting into everything.
So. Many. Seeds.
I’ve started to really, really dislike these trees! Not only do their roots invade up into our garden beds and grow bags, but they suffocate everything around them with their seeds – and once those little buggers start germinating, they have ridiculously long and strong tap roots that makes weeding them far more difficult than one would think, when pulling on a tiny little seedling to weed them out!
I wonder if I have enough plastic to cover these beds and solarize them before their log walls get added? I definitely have enough for at least a couple of beds. It might be worth sacrificing more of our clear garbage bags, if it’ll keep those god-awful seeds off the bare soil!
While working, I was thinking about what to do with the paths, since they are basically all crab grass, not lawn grass. It might be worth investing in some landscape cloth, weed whacking them as close to the ground as possible, covering them with the landscape cloth, then covering them with wood chips.
Something to think about, after these beds are done!
It was really windy out there this morning – too windy to take the transplants outside for hardening off. All the pots would get blown over!
That wind also means the Chinese Elm seeds are being blown off, even though they are still green. They tend to drop en masse after they’ve dried out and turned brown.
When I saw how many seeds were on the bed along the chain link fence, though, I had to do something about it. Thankfully, I dug out several rolls of netting from the garden shed, before we returned Broccoli’s kittens to her nest, so I didn’t have to disturb her and her babies to get anything!
Last year, we used decorative wire garden fencing we found over the years, in sections and in different places! Some of it was so damaged, it had to be tossed, but there’s enough left to set up along the length of this bed, just inside the bricks. That would hold the netting up from the soil.
I was happy to find the first of three rolls of mosquito netting I grabbed was long enough to cover the entire bed, with some to spare. It would have been such a pain to have to cobble together two shorter lengths!
Once it was unrolled to the length of the bed, I used garden staples to fix one edge to the ground, outside the brick border.
Syndol “helped”.
At the end by the car gate, right at the start, I fixed the top corner of the netting to the chain link fence with a ground staple. Then, after the bottom edge was fixed all the way across, I went back along the outside of the fence and used more ground staples to fasten the netting to the top of the chain links.
Syndol “helped”.
At the people gate end, I wrapped the excess around the post as well. Now that I think about it, that means we can’t close the gate right now, but that should be okay. The netting needs to stay just long enough to protect the beds until after the seeds have dropped. We only ever close the gates when the renter’s cows get into the outer yard, when the electric fence fails for some reason, and the cows aren’t rotated onto this quarter, yet.
We’ll have to add netting over the chimney block planters, too. The raised beds in the west yard need to be protected, too. One already has netting around it, but it’s a wider mesh. Hopefully, it’ll still stop the seeds from covering the bed. The other two beds could get the other covers on them, since they don’t have any trellis posts and netting inside them. Two of the covers have plastic on them. They got removed, so the rain would water the potatoes in one bed, and saturate the soil in the empty bed. I’m considering removing the plastic and covering them with netting, which would let the rain in. The forecasts have changed. We were supposed to get more rain tomorrow, then off and on throughout the week, but now it’s saying we won’t get rain again until Friday (today is Sunday).
That means we might actually be able to mow the lawn! Right now, we have standing water in the low spot behind the garage, as well as in the vehicle gate. Hopefully, it’ll be absorbed over the next couple of days. We need to do a dump run, which means backing the truck up to the house. The lawn is so wet, driving on it right now would actually damage it.
My goal for today day is to get a second bed in the main garden area weeded and shifted over to its new, permanent location – or at least get started on it! It’s really windy out there, and it’s supposed to get quite hot, while the next few days are supposed to be cooler. We’ll see how far we can get before the heat becomes a problem. I don’t mind waiting for cooler days to work on it. I can get more done, faster, on a cooler day.
Looking at the long range forecasts, the overnight temperatures we are now expecting are well away from the “danger of frost” zone. At least for the last week of May. We might even be able to get some things transplanted early, in the beds that are currently ready. We can protect the transplants with the plastic rings we make from my husband’s distilled water bottles. We did that last year, and it worked out really well. Especially for the chocolate peppers and that one surviving Classic eggplant. We need to focus on getting the transplants in, then do the direct sowing in whatever space we have left.
Oh! That reminds me…
Last night, as I was getting ready to start pre-germinating those pumpkin seeds I picked up, I took out the two containers of Zucca and Pixie melon seeds that were still in the aquarium greenhouse. I was expecting to toss them into the compost. Much to my surprise, two of the three Pixie melon seeds left in there had roots. Even more of a surprise, so did one of the two remaining Zucca melon seeds! So I potted those up and they are now on the warming mat. The pumpkin seeds are now set up with them, in a container between damp paper towels to pre-germinate. I also moved out pots with one Pixie and one Zucca melon that had broken the soil surface. For now, they’re in the mini greenhouse frame at the window, but they will join the other transplants in the sunroom later today. I just need to have someone open and close the door we made for the living room, so no cats sneak in. Fenrir is the worst for that. I swear, that cat can teleport. She’ll be in a completely different part of the house, but as soon as she hears that door open, suddenly she’s through the door and dashing under the couch! She does the same thing when we open the door to the old kitchen. So if any of us needs to get into either room while carrying something, we need a second person to open and close the doors for us, and chase the cats away.
While we do have quite a few transplants going, we started way less than we did last year. I went kinda crazy with starting seeds last year. Many never germinated, which was probably a good thing; we had way more transplants than we had space for, since we ended up with about half the growing space than we had, the previous year. This year, I’m hoping to avoid both problems; pre-germinated seeds for the first one, and starting less for the second. Hopefully, we’ll be able to get back to expanding the garden every year again. Once we get everything in the current beds planted, we should be able to start building more beds for next year.
We haven’t even tried uncovering what’s left of the pile of purchased garden soil yet. I think we’ll have enough for this year, but we’ll need to consider getting another dump truck load for next year.
The ultimate goal is to be able to grow enough food to feed ourselves with fresh produce, and preserve enough of certain things to last from harvest to harvest. As we also intend to get small livestock, growing their food is part of the plan, too. Chickens will be relatively easy to provide for, but if we’re going to get the sheep my daughter wants for their fleece, and the milk goats I want, we’ll need to plan accordingly. Some things, of course, we will have to buy. Especially for winter feed. As we progress with the garden beds, we intend to expand into the outer yard as well. Over time, we’ll have the beds closest to the house to be for things like kitchen herbs and greens, the beds further away for things that would need to be harvested every couple of days, like summer squash, peas and green beans, then the beds furthers from the house for things that get harvested at the end of the season, like winter squash, root vegetables and tubers or dry beans. Even further out, we’ll start to plant crops specifically to supplement animal feed.
It’ll take a few years, but the plan is there, even if it does have to get changed up or delayed by circumstances fairly regularly.
Who knew a video about how to reuse potting soil could be so funny?
I just had to share it! However, when I try to embed it, I get a message saying playback has been disabled, so you’ll just have to click this link and watch it on YouTube.
The Saskatoons growing nearer the house are blooming now. As soon as we’re able, I want to get into that area and cut away the chokecherry, false spirea and other things that are crowding them.
The tiny plums we’ve got left in the yard are in full bloom right now. There’s two trees left and I’m hoping we can manage to keep at least one of them. We’ve had to cut away others that were spreading or dying. We plan to buy plum trees in the future, and some varieties need a wild plum nearby for cross pollination, so if we get one of those, it would be planted near these ones.
Our very first tulip has bloomed. There are quite a few other buds. I’m happy to say that the fence wire we’ve put around the tulip patch has been sufficient to keep the deer out! They really seem to love tulip flower buds.
In other areas, the garlic is coming up nicely. The strawberries we started from seed that are in the wattle weave bed are getting nice and big – bigger than the ones in the asparagus bed. Those ones, however, have started to show flower buds! No sign of the purple asparagus, though. I suspect we’ve lost those.
In the bed with the peas, carrots and spinach, I’ve now spotted a whole three pea shoots from the first planting of sugar snap peas.
The newly planted strawberries are mostly looking good. Seven of the nice transplants are showing definite growth. The other two either didn’t make it, or are further behind.
I did have a sad find this morning. When feeding the outside cats and seeing Broccoli out front, I went to the garden shed to check on her babies and leave some food for her while she was away.
I knew something was wrong as soon as I saw two of the babies had squirmed off the side of the self warming mat nest. It was a bit bunched up on one side, but where the fluffy top was exposed, I found the third kitten, dead. It was the smaller of the calicos. There was no sign of what caused its death.
As soon as I removed it, the black and white kitten squirmed its way back onto the fluffy part of the mat. I straightened it out a bit, so there was more of the top available for them, and left some kibble for their mother nearby.
Then I buried the little one in front of the stone cross on the edge of the spruce grove. I know this is a to be expected with semiferal cats, but it’s always sad to see. At least we don’t seem to be getting a repeat of last year. If I remember correctly, by this time, we’d already found the remains of at least two or three entire litters.
By about 10:30 or so, I was on my way to my mother’s. She wanted me to pick up lunch first. She was hoping that the grocery store would have their hot dinners available, but if not, she asked me to pick up some fried chicken at the gas station. It turned out they did have two dinners left – each with a piece of BBQ chicken, potato wedges and green beans. As I was getting them, I picked up a cold drink for myself. My mother always has tea, but I don’t want to use up my mother’s supplies. Normally, I’d have gotten a Monster energy drink, but I knew that would just get me lectured. So I got a coffee based energy drink. I figured that would be a safe thing to drink around her. I don’t normally drink coffee, but I do like coffee as a flavour, and that’s pretty much what these are.
When I got to my mother’s, she was very happy with the dinners, though she had made her own “salad”, brought that out and tried to make me eat it. I told her I was more than happy with the vegetables in the dinner.
Then she started complaining that the beans were undercooked. So I ate one.
They were prefectly al dente.
To my mother, they should be mushy.
I couldn’t even think that she preferred softer food because of her dentures, with the holes from missing teeth she refuses to fix, since the salad she made, and was eating instead of the beans, was made with celery and apples, and even crunchier than the beans.
Then, as we were eating, she got “that look”.
Oh, how I know that look. The nasty smirk and open condensation, just before she’s about to launch into some verbal abuse.
“You know that drinks are unhealthy, right?” she says to me.
And by “drinks”, she meant the can I was drinking from. She had no idea what I was actually drinking, but it was in a can, so it must be bad. This isn’t a new thing; shortly after we moved here, she came to visit and saw our recycling bag for aluminum. It had mostly V8 cans in it, but she started lecturing us about how we shouldn’t be drinking pop. We explained to her what V8 was, but I guess she didn’t believe us? She then brought up, for the next few years, how we drink too much pop, and that’s why I’m fat, based on her once seeing a recycling bag full of V8 cans.
At this point, I don’t think I’d been there for more than 15 minutes. So I just put my fork down and asked, is it time for me to leave? I pointed out that she didn’t even know what I was drinking (if she’d bothered to look, she would have seen that it was coffee based, and that it contained vitamins and herbs), that I was there for such a short time, and she was already attacking me.
At which point, she started crossing herself and told me, it was up to me if I wanted to go.
Uh huh.
She did, at least, stop finding things to attack me about.
Instead, she switched tactics. Since the dinners were chicken, she started talking about how my brother would come to the farm every week after work, and he would bring chicken dinners, but he doesn’t do that anymore. This would have been before she moved off the farm to where she is now, so more than 10 years ago. I told her, it’s good that now we’re at the farm, so he doesn’t have to make that long drive anymore. Oh, but he doesn’t even phone anymore! I just laughed and said, yes, he does. Just because you don’t remember it, that doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened. Then I suggested that what she really meant was, he doesn’t call her every day, like she wants him to. Which seems to have hit the mark with her, because she actually seemed to think about it and dropped the subject. Meanwhile, I know my brother has even told her outright, that it hurts him to call her, because she quickly starts attacking him for whatever is on her mind at the time. Her response is to start going on about “freedom of speech” and how she just says what’s on her mind, we need to forgive each other, and generally try to make herself to be the victim, and him into the mean one.
She doesn’t try that with me very much anymore. I call her out when she gets abusive now, so she’s cut it back quite a bit.
It did make for a much quieter than usual meal, though!
My mother has been having a harder time with her mobility, so we went over her list. Her writing is a mix of English and Polish, with the English spelled… creatively, so sometimes, I need to clarify. For example, I knew from an earlier conversation that she wanted corn meal, but on her list, she wrote in polish, corn flour. I clarified, and it turns out she didn’t know that there was such a thing as corn flour that is different from corn meal. She’ll also just say things like “fruit”, and I know it means to get what looks good or is on sale, and I know what kinds of fruit she likes. As we talked, though, she specifically asked for NO blueberries.
They get caught in the holes in her dentures! 😄
Fair enough!
Once I understood what she was looking for, I headed out and did her shopping for her. There is usually at least one thing I have to change up, for various reasons, and I make sure to explain the changes as I put things away.
Oh, there was one thing I couldn’t resist for myself while at the grocery store.
Every year, in the spring, there is a box of free pumpkin seeds at this grocery store. Each envelope has two seeds in it, and they limit it to one packet per person. This year, they came with a little pamphlet. The town has a pumpkin fest every year, and this year is their 100th. It included information about the variety of seeds (Rocket), growing instructions (can be direct sown or started indoors, with a pH around 6), and what to expect (pumpkins from 15-20 pounds in size). Mostly, though, they were encouraging students to grow pumpkins and enter them in the pumpkin fest contest, in various categories, for prize money. These aren’t for giant pumpkins, so the prizes are very small, but if it’s enough to get kids excited about growing things, that’s just bonus!
So I grabbed a packet. Once I’m done writing this, I’ll scarify them and start pre-germinating them. I have no intention of entering any contests, but some 20 pound pumpkins would be nice!
As I was leaving the grocery store, I was immediately blasted by high winds. A storm was moving in, so as soon as my mother’s groceries were put away, I said my goodbyes. I ended up driving into the storm, but the worst of it was past by the time I got home. We’ll definitely need to check for fallen branches – or fallen trees! – tomorrow.
Our gravel roads, however, are getting worse and worse. The municipality can’t even do anything about it, since they are too wet right now.
We’re going to need a break in the rain to cut the grass, too. It’s getting way too tall. Plus, we can always use more grass clippings for mulch!
We should be getting a one day break in the rain tomorrow, but more rain again, the day after. The grass will be too wet to cut, but we have to focus on getting the garden ready, anyhow.
Oh? Is that more thunder I hear?
According to the weather radar, we’re right in line for some heavy rain in a little bit.
I’m not complaining. This is supposed to be a drought year, and with how little snow we got this past winter, any rain we get now is a good thing!
The Re-Farmer 