I am very happy to say, I got another bed in the main garden area done today!
I decided to work on the trellis bed, as I figured it would take the least time. I was going to loose light fast, and it was getting cold and damp!
This bed had the sunflowers, pumpkins, red noodle beans, onions – mostly self seeded – and self seeded Spoon tomatoes in it.
My first order of business was to loosen the soil enough to pull up the remains of the sunflowers and set them aside in the wheelbarrow, for later use.
You can see how the bed looked, once the sunflowers were out.
From there, I wanted to work the opposite side, where there are still onions. Some grew well and went to seed. Others just sort of disappeared. Still others were tiny self seeded onions that I transplanted along the one side, in hopes they would have enough season to grow.
Most of those disappeared, too.
Some, however, had started to show new growth!
I wanted to dig up what onions survived and replant them as seed onions again.
For the first pass, I just loosened the soil with the garden fork enough to find and remove what onions I could see. A couple of the ones that went to seed were completely spent and went into the wheelbarrow, but all the onions I found were set aside for later.
In the second picture of the above slide show, you can see what I pulled up, plus four tiny onions I’d found while cleaning up elsewhere and set aside for today.
I knew I would find more, once I started doing a thorough weeding, which I certainly did. Quite a few were hiding in the soil. There were a surprising number of larger ones that should have grown and gone to seed this year. Some of them were showing growth only now! In the third picture, you can see the final number of onions I’d found. Most were red onions, but a few little ones were yellow onions. There’s one big yellow onion that had gone to seed.
Cleaning up the bed did go a lot faster than the other beds. What a difference one more log in height makes! I did find tree roots, but nowhere near as many, and not as close to the surface. There were also almost no rocks at all. I was hitting rocks with the garden fork as I loosened soil, but they were further down than what I was clearing of weeds. What few rocks I uncovered could be tossed into the trees. No bucket needed!
Towards the end of the clean up, I was really pushing to get done. I could hear thunder in the distance, and the wind was picking up. I thought I might have to stop before finishing when it started to rain, but then the rain moved on, and I got it done!
Once the weeding was done, I used the landscape rack to pull the soil to the sides to make a trench in the middle. That’s where the sunflower stalks and pumpkin vines got trench composted. I even included the frost killed sunflower heads. They were killed off before any seeds could reach viability, so they should be okay to bury.
Once the stalks and vines were laid out in the trench, I stomped on them a few times. Then I paused to take the next picture in the slide show above, before burying it.
When everything was buried, I raked up the weeds and roots I’d pulled out. In the next picture of the slide show, you can see what was the smallest pile of weeds I’d pulled up yet!
Then, I started planting onions. In the next picture of the slide show, there’s the finished bed and the onions visible. They were planted all along one side, plus the ends.
The last picture is of the row along the side of the bed.
For this bed, I am considering winter sowing one of our shelling pea varieties along the trellis side of the bed, then something planted in the spring, in between.
While these onions are meant to be left to grow seeds, I do intend to start onions indoors for spring transplanting. They would need to be started in January or February.
I’m so glad I got that bed done, and got rained on only a little bit!
There are a couple more beds there to work on that I expect will have a lot more elm roots in them. I am hoping to be able to get at least one bed done tomorrow. Two, if the weather holds!
I’m actually kind of dreading it, though, as I expect the roots to be bad in them.
Meanwhile, as I was putting things away and tidying up, I noticed a lot of dead walking onion stalks and a WHOLE lot more new growth. I cleaned up the dead bits, being careful not to damage any of the new growth. Any bulbils on the stalks I cut away got broken off and returned to the soil for more growth.
There are so many weeds in there, but that doesn’t seem to bother the onions any!
You can also see almost all the herbs in the tiny raised bed are doing well. Just the basil got killed by the cold. The chives are also doing well, and some are even blooming!
By the time all that was done, I was more than happy to get inside to warm up with a hot cup of tea and supper…
… plus my daughters’ fresh baked cookies, for dessert.
All in all, it was a productive day, even in the garden, after being gone for so long!
Today turned out to be too damp to work on more garden beds outside. Another day lost when there are very few days left to get the beds ready for winter sowing. Hopefully, I’ll get more progress done over the next couple of days. After that, we’re supposed to have another day of rain, and then it’s actually supposed to slowly warm up a fair bit, so I should still have time to get beds ready and winter sowing done.
While I’m focusing on the main garden beds right now – they are the largest and most difficult, thanks to the tree roots I’m battling – we do actually still have things growing! The greens mix I sowed in the old kitchen garden still has a few things that have done quite well with the frosts we’ve had.
The most visible are the Swiss Chard. We’ve just been harvesting leaves from the larger plants as we want some, and they soon fill out with more.
The first photo in the slide show above show the two largest of them – the ones we’ve harvested from the most! There are other, smaller ones in the bed. These had germinated in areas where the kohlrabi was growing, so they got shaded out. Interestingly, I harvested a few kohl rabi but cutting the stems at the bases, rather than pulling the whole plant, and the stumps are growing new leaves!
All of the winter sown seed mixes had onions seeds, which didn’t make it, for the most part. This bed has a few poking up, including a few clusters of greens. As those greens have gotten bigger, however, their leaves turned out to be flat! They look like garlic! Now, we did have a couple of garlic show up in this bed. In a previous year, we planted garlic in it, and it seems a couple of cloves that hadn’t germinated then, survived to germinate this year. The thing is, this bed was completely reworked to make the soil as fluffy as possible before the winter sown seed mix was added. I never saw garlic cloves. Looking at the clusters, if those are garlic, they look like they are growing out of a whole bulb of cloves, not individual ones!
I’ll be digging them up as I clean the bed and, if they are indeed garlic, they will be replanted and mulched for the winter.
One of the garden related things I did today was start going through the seeds I’d collected and set out to dry in the cat free zone, aka: the living room. Today, I started jarring some of them up.
In the first photo, I’ve got some of them in spice jars that were gifted to us. There are the mixed Jewel nasturtiums, radish seeds from whatever plants had pods ready (we had 4 or 5 different types of radish in the root vegetable seed mix), Super sugar snap peas, and the Hedou Tiny bok choy. I had to look up the name for those. I keep wanting to call them Hinou instead of Hedou, and I don’t know why!
In the next picture, I’ve separated carrot seeds out from their clusters. Same with the onion seeds, after that. The last picture is the Jebousek lettuce seeds I’d collected by trimming off the stalks. They are now separated out from their stalks and will be left to dry out some more. Some of them are still surprisingly green.
I’ve also started planning on where I want to do the winter sowing, and choosing what will go where. There are a number of things I need to consider. Some faster growing/maturing things will be planted closer to the house, while stuff that will take much longer before they can be harvested will be further from the house. Some will need extra protection from deer and/or insect damage. Others will be interplanted with things that will be sown or transplanted in the spring. I’m even considering things like which things will get harvested the most often, for the high raised bed.
Which means none of what I’ll be winter sowing. That bed is going to get bush beans again. Must easier on the back to harvest from there! I had bush beans in there a few years ago, and it was SO much easier to find and pick the beans.
I picked up so many seeds, taking advantage of MI Gardener’s sales on their already low priced (even taking into account the dollar difference) seeds, that we have lots of extras, and that doesn’t even take into account the seeds I already have in stock. We can pick and choose what we want to try growing this year. I’ll be going through them with my daughter’s, too, to see what interests them.
In other things…
We’ve heard from the company that’s replacing our door and frame. Today was out, because of rain, and the installers don’t do Saturdays, so Monday is the earliest it will be installed. Monday, however, has a 70% chance of rain, so it will likely be done on Tuesday. I have my eye appointment on Tuesday, and my daughter will have to drive me home, but it’s not until the afternoon, so that’s not an issue.
I’ve also been in touch with the woman who is taking 6 yard cats tomorrow, with a time and place to meet arranged. She says she has a kibble donation for us, too, which is greatly appreciated! The three littles are so small, they can go into the same carrier together. Being together will probably help keep them calmer, too. Four carriers in the truck will be much easier to arrange than six! Especially since I want to refill a couple of water jugs while I’m in town.
This evening, before the light was gone, I got my mother’s angel statue set up by the trail cam, facing the gate. I hope I’ve secured it to the block it’s on well enough. It’s rather top heavy. Ideally, it would be secured to a post hidden behind it. Maybe with something pretty, or at least a neutral colour to match the neutral colour of the statue, around her waist so it looks like it’s supposed to be there. When I’m able to, I’ll drag out some larger rocks to set around the bottom to hide the block it’s on for now. Eventually, the rocks will form the walls of a slightly raised flower bed around the base of the angel.
I’m even thinking of moving my mother’s Mary statue to be part of the display. It’s currently mostly hidden by the mock orange beside the laundry platform. Unlike the angel, though, this statue is concrete. It weighs anywhere from 80-100 pounds. No chance of that one blowing away in the wind!
This will be a longer term work in progress. It’s going to involve a lot of digging and the hauling of a lot of heavy rocks! For now, the main priority is to make sure the angel doesn’t get blown over. Especially now that we know how easily it breaks!
I haven’t told my brother that I’ve set it up, yet. I am pretty sure he’ll be coming out this weekend again. He still has plenty to do with his own stuff, but our motion sensor light over the door has stopped working. We thought it just needed a new bulb and tested it by turning it on manually, but it still didn’t work. I think he intends to replace it completely, since he asked me to send him pictures of it in daylight, after I sent him a video of the light occasionally flashing like a strobe light.
In the end, even though I didn’t get stuff done outside because it was so wet, I did manage to have a productive garden related day!
I’m really chafing about not getting those beds ready faster, though! 😄😄
Well, no surprise that the forecast changed overnight. Instead of rain all day on Friday, the rain started here last night, and continued off and on throughout the day.
Thankfully, it was a light rain.
As usual, I started out the day with feeding the outside cats. Before starting on softening the bowl of kibble, I quickly tossed a scoop full through the screenless storm door window to tide them over and distract them, first. I still have gelled turkey stock and meaty bits to mix into to their morning kibble with hot water and some canned cat food, too. Once I got it all mixed up, I left it to soak for a few minutes.
I’d seen on the critter cam that they’d somehow knocked the big cat carrier off its shelf, and it was in the middle of the floor, so I knew it would be in the way as I stepped out of the old kitchen. I snagged a daughter for cat herding duty, then tried to get through the doors as quickly as possible.
There were cats and kittens trying to get in, while others were milling around and eating the kibble I’d tossed in earlier.
Including a strange new ca….
Not a cat.
There, in the crowd of cats and kittens munching away, was a skunk! It and the cats were completely indifferent to each other!
As I got through and added softened kibble to several trays, I paused to pick up the carrier while my daughter dealt with the cats that managed to get through the doors before she could close the storm door. The skunk did leave while I was doing that, as did some of the more feral cats. It seemed unbothered by me as well as the cats!
Not a good thing, but there isn’t much we can do about it.
Once the feeding and watering was done (I’m bringing warm water to top up their bowls now, instead of using the hose, which will soon be put away for the winter), I did my morning rounds. My weather app said it was raining, but it seems our climate bubble was doing its thing again.
With the trellis netting and other stakes and supports done, the deer could access the sunflowers. I’d already grabbed the seed heads that looked like they might have viable seeds in them, so the remaining ones had immature seed heads on them. A couple of the tallest ones were untouched, but the shorter ones were either broken with the seed heads eaten, or the entire stalks were munched down to just a couple of feet in height.
Cheeky buggers!
After the morning rounds were done, I popped inside long enough to have breakfast, then headed out to work on the next garden bed.
I decided to work on the log framed low raised bed. I hoped it would not be as bad as the last two beds I worked on. This one had the failed melons, the successful, if stunted, Spoon tomatoes and the failed purple beans and Swiss chard.
The first picture is how it looked after the grass clipping mulch was removed. There were very few weeds and most of those were crab grass.
The question was, how bad were the tree roots?
Since I would be dealing with rhizomes, I started by loosening the soil of the entire bed before I started clean up at the south end of the bed. This is the end furthest from those trees we need to get rid of, being the source of so many of our problems.
I started finding roots right away. The bed is 18 feet long, plus it’s another dozen feet or so to the nearest trees on the north side.
This bed turned out to not only have fewer normal weeds than the other beds, but fewer rocks, too. As for the roots, the closer to the middle of the bed that I got, the harder it was to get the tree roots out. With some of them, it was because the roots were running under the log wall. I could also feel that there was a large root, somewhere deeper below the bed, because I was finding roots that were basically growing vertically from something deeper than I was going with my garden fork, not horizontal, as usual. By the time I got to the middle, though, even with the pre-loosened soil, there were too many roots I couldn’t pull out of the soil, so I went to the north end to work my way back to the middle.
I promptly hit a larger root.
After fighting around it with my garden fork, I went and got a spade to dig around it, plus the loppers. I was able to cut away one larger root that I found in the process, but it was not the one causing me the most problems.
That’s the one you can see in the second picture of the slide show above.
This was not the root that was causing an issue further down the bed, though. This one ran diagonally across the bed, so I was able to use the loppers to cut it close to where it went under the log frame.
In the next picture, you can see where I’d made my way closer to the middle, and some of the other roots I was having issues with. Some would have to be dealt with when working the other side of the bed.
In the last picture of the above slide show, I had finished clearing one side. At the middle, I’d pretty much dug a pit to try and get the roots out.
In the end, though, there weren’t as many roots to fight with as in previous beds. There wasn’t even as many rocks to remove. The amount I had in the bucket after getting the first half done was about what I’d picked from a third of one side on the other two beds I cleared!
It had started to rain while I was working on this. A light and gentle rain, so I kept working, but I was getting pretty damp by the time I finished the one side. It was well past noon by then, so I headed in for sustenance and hydration.
I took my time with my late lunch, which turned out to be a good thing.
I got a phone call from home care, just as I was wrapping up and getting ready to head out again.
They were unable to find someone to do my mother’s evening med assist for Friday evening. They were still working on finding someone, but it was possible I might have to cover for Saturday and Sunday evenings, too.
!!!
Then they told me, they did actually have someone available, but this home care worker was male, and my mother had said she didn’t want men doing her med assist, so they were stuck.
?????
I hadn’t heard about this at all. My mother hadn’t had anything negative to say about the male home care workers, either, other than to mention that they were “from other places” (meaning, recent immigrants that weren’t white). But for her to say no men at all?
We talked about it for a bit, and I told them I could call my mother to find out what was going on. They told me that, if anything changed, to call the number for the home care coordinator (it was the scheduler and a new trainee that had called me) to talk about it.
After the call, I quickly updated my family, as well as my siblings in our group chat, then called my mother. There was no answer so I left a message. I puttered around on my computer while waiting, staying close to the phone, but I didn’t have a lot of time before the home care office would close for the day, plus I was going to start losing daylight to work outside. After a few minutes, I tried again.
This time, my mom answered just as the answering machine picked up. She’d been in the common room and was just coming back when the phone started ringing, so she’d never heard my earlier message.
I told her about the call from home care, that they didn’t have anyone to cover for Friday night’s med assists, and possibly Saturday and Sunday, too. Before she could start going on about how terrible they were, I told her that they actually did have someone available, but it was a male, and they told me she’d said told them, no male.
My mother confirmed this. She had called the home care office and told the home care coordinator, she didn’t want any med doing her med assists.
I asked more questions, and she said she didn’t want a man rubbing the Voltaren onto her bad and seeing her partially naked body. Which, as far as I knew, was something only done in the mornings, as they have extra time booked for stuff like that. She admitted, she had never asked one of the guys (it turns out there are three different male home care workers that have been visiting her) to do it, but eventually said that, if they had been women, she would have asked them to. She also admitted that they have never been unkind to her, and had never caused problems – unlike for example, one of the female home care workers recently not bothering to count my mother’s meds from the bubble pack, and one was missing. It turned out to have fallen to the floor. Or another that always leaves without making sure my mother took her meds, first.
The conversation got very intense as she tried to blame home care for not having enough people, etc. She was all over the place with it, and I kept having to bring it back to it just being about her getting her med assists. Eventually, though, we got to the heart of the issue.
My mother didn’t want brown people doing her med assists.
I had no patience with this and pointed out that, because of her not liking brown people, I might have to do her evening med assists, three nights in a row. She tried to make it their fault, saying “they” (the home care office) did this to me but I told her, no SHE is doing this to me.
In the end, I got her to agree to have a male med assist only to do her meds. No rubbing the Voltaren onto her back. If they were doing a morning assist, they could still do her commode, but no back rubs. If she’s uncomfortable with being touched like that, fair enough, but at least they could do her pills.
Once we got that decided on, I told her I had to call the home care office back quickly, as the office wasn’t going to be open for very much longer. She kept going on and on, keeping me on the phone, even after I told her I had to get the call done as quickly as possible. She did, however, finally talk about getting extra home care services, though in a way that had me rather confused, but I didn’t care at that point. We’ve been trying to get her to accept more home care services for quite some time now, and she’s been refusing, even though she really needs more help. I told her I would bring it up with the coordinator when I called her, and they would probably need to make an appointment with her to discuss it, but I needed to get off the phone to call the office. She STILL tried to keep me on the phone and I finally had to cut her off so I could hang up and make the call.
Thankfully, the home care coordinator was in her office at the time, so I was able to talk to her and not just leave a message. I told her about the situation and that I’d talked to my mother about it. I said that my mother had agreed that, as long as it didn’t involve rubbing the medication onto her back, she was willing to accept male home care aids. The coordinator filled me in on the call from my mother and, apparently, one of the men did offer to rub the medication onto her back for her, and she’d said no. I told her that, if the workers visiting her were women, she would be asking them to do her back, but not the men. Which would have been an understandable restriction, but the home care coordinator knows my mother by now, and she already figured out it was really about race.
So that was taken care of. They would be able to schedule men for my mother’s med assists, with the one restriction regarding applying the medication onto my mother’s back.
I then brought up about my mother bringing up her need for more care, and the first question she asked was, is my mother willing to accept more care? Which has been the biggest problem. My mother simply refusing it. I told her that yes, she is willing to do it.
My mother was due for her annual re-assessment anyhow, so we quickly made an appointment for next weed. Along with the care assessment, the coordinator wanted to go over the panel for a nursing home again, as that needed to be updated, too. I told her about how my mother can barely get around her apartment of later, needing to hang on to furniture or the walls to move around, and how I’d actually heard her crying out in pain at times, when I was last at her place to help out with things.
That done, I called my mother back with the appointment time and updated my family.
Grommet was very determined to “help”. Usually by being directly in front of me while I worked, trying to give my hands kisses, or even trying to climb up my legs for attention!
The second side was done a lot faster, thankfully. Here is the finished bed!
The bed actually seems fuller, now that the soil is all fluffy again, instead of compacted. I’m out of stuff to cover it to protect if from the cats, though. When it comes time to do winter sowing in there, I’ll have to watch out for “presents” from the cats!
While working on the bed, I did find three frogs! One had come out of the mulch on its own. I was able to catch it and release it in and area where it would be able to burrow down for the winter. While picking rocks and roots, I uncovered two more frogs! I’m so glad I didn’t accidentally stab them with the garden fork. I was able to catch and move them to a safe place, too.
It was still pretty light out when I was finished, but not for long enough to start another bed. Instead, I did my evening rounds. While I was at it, I cleared up the pile of regrown maples my brother had cut away from the back of the pump shack for me. I set aside the straightest pieces for use in the garden, and the rest went onto the burn pile. Later on, I’ll trim the trigs and side shoots off the straight pieces, then bring the useable pieces to the old kitchen garden. They will made good stakes for the bed that still needs the wall on the inside to be finished.
Now that I have written this, I realize I’ve not switched out the trial cam memory cards yet, and it’s full dark right now. That’s the down side of changing from switching them in the mornings! Ah, well. I’ll survive.
Time to shoe up, grab a flash light, and go take care of that!
One more bed is done. Three more in the main garden area to go!
I’d say I did have a productive day today, though not quite how I originally planned.
Being a warmer day, I was going to head outside to work in the garden earlier, but with my telephone appointment from the sports injury clinic in the afternoon, I decided I didn’t want to be working in the dirt before handling the phone.
So I worked with epoxy, instead.
My mother had an angel statue in her apartment for many years. It’s meant to be outdoors in a yard or garden, but she kept it in her living room. It’s about three and a half feet tall and, I’ve determined today, made of fiberglass.
My mother has been trying to get us to take things or claim things of hers for when she “goes up up”, and she decided the angel should go here to the farm. My brother and I decided that it will be set up by the gate, for our vandal to see the next time he gets all creepy for the cameras again. My mother loved that idea!
As we were taking it from her place, though, my brother discovered one of the wings was cracked. We didn’t want water to get in, so we wanted to use some epoxy on it to seal it up, first.
I decided I would do this today, so that we could get it outside by the weekend. We already have a spot for it, with a chunk of old side walk block for it to stand on. I just have to figure out how to secure it, or the angel will go flying in the wind!
I had picked up some clear epoxy for it. When my brother came out this past weekend, he brought me some clear epoxy for it, too – the exact same stuff that I’d picked up! So we have extra now. 😁
The type I got has a plunger that squeezes out both the resin and hardener in equal amounts at the same time, which made things easy. I mixed a bit up and applied it to the crack. There’s no way to clamp such an odd shape, though, so I had to try and press the edges of the crack together with my hands while the epoxy set.
So now I had to figure out how to set the angel so I could use gravity to help me hold the wing in place, so I could epoxy the whole thing together. At least we could see that no water would get into the body of the angel.
As I tried setting the angel flat on the floor, I heard another cracking noise.
The angel is holding a bird in its hands. I just broke a wing tip off.
*sigh*
I was able to lean the angel against a shelf, applied the epoxy to the wing and had to stand there and hold it in place for at least 5 minutes, which is what the packaging says is the set time. It was probably closer to 10 minutes before I felt I could let it be and could go do something else for awhile.
While I was standing there, holding the wing in place, I could see on the other wing why it broke off so easily. The wings were added onto the angel separately, and I could see a seam where the wing joined the body.
You can see on the second picture, how it looked before I finally dared straighten the angel back up again. Then I mixed up a bit more epoxy, and attached the broken wing tip onto the bird. I had to sit there and hold it in place, too. This time, I remembered to use the timer on my phone. After 5 minutes, I moved away to start putting away the epoxy syringe into its packaging when I heard a clunk. The wing tip fell off! So I held it for another 10 minutes. It seems to be holding fine, now.
When it gets set out, I’ll probably just find a way to tie it down to the concrete base to keep it from blowing away, for now. Eventually, I will make a little flower garden around it. Since that area is lower and tends to flood in the spring, I am thinking to dig out some of the sod in the lower area, where I can see someone started to make a ditch at some point, and use that as the base to build up soil around the agnel. I am thinking of bringing rocks to frame the flower bed. Digging up sod from nearby will create a deeper, mini-pond like area for the spring run off to collect in, and maybe I won’t be slogging through water when switching out the trail came for a change!
That is for the future, though. The important thing is so make sure the wind won’t carry the angel away!
Like it tried to do with this tree I noticed while doing my evening rounds today.
We never heard it go down, but it clearly came down during the recent high winds. You can see the difference in the wood from the freshly fallen tree and one that fell many years ago.
This tree is one of the ones I wanted to harvest for raised bed walls. It’s hung up on other trees, but pretty low to the ground, so I should be able to harvest it to use in the garden, still.
Anyhow…
After I got the angel done, I basically just stayed indoors until I got my call. The doctor was right on time, too! It was a very quick call. When the doctor asked how I was doing, I was able to give him a glowing report on what a huge difference the injection made for my hip. From the sound of his voice, I don’t think he gets such an enthusiastic response very often! 😄 In the end, all he had to do was tell me to get back to them should I have issues again in the future, and we were done.
When it was time to head outside, my daughter came out with me to help put away the things I organized last night. I fed the cats first, and she took advantage of that to try and pet as many kittens as possible. There are a few that are starting to allow touches, if not outright pets.
Smokey was purring and snuggling and enjoying every minute of it!
Oh, she is going to make someone very happy when she gets adopted out!
Just a few more days, and she’ll be off to the rescue with her brother, along with four others, for fostering as they get prepped for adoption. She and her brother, plus one other cat, are large enough for spays and neuters. The three littles we’ll be snagging will need to grow bigger before they are ready.
Once my daughter sadly put Smokey down, she went ahead of me to the old garden shed to make some space in it, and get the rolling seat in, first. From there, I started bring stuff over for her to put away in an organized fashion. She’s very good and Tetrising things!
Once everything was put away, I wanted to finally finish off the garden bed I’ve been working on for way too long now! Between being pulled away to other things, and the weather, it’s been very slow going even without the issues with roots.
I had so little left to do, but there were so many tree roots in there! I can’t believe how bad it was! No wonder the peas and carrots didn’t do as well as they could have. It wasn’t just drought conditions! I’m amazed they survived at all, with so many roots choking them out.
Once the bed was leveled out some more – the back of a fan rack is great for that – I brought out the plastic that was used to cover the winter squash, folded in half, so the big hole was not an issue, and set that over the bed, to protect it from cats until I can winter sow into it. Even while I was working on it, not only was I finding “presents” the cats had left, but when I stepped away to do things, like get the loppers to cut the larger roots, I came back to find fresh presents in the soil! Grommet (you can see him in the second photo) was particularly interested in what I was doing and, at one point, was about to use the spot I was working on, like I’d dug it out just for him to use as a litter box, while I was right there, picking out roots, weeds and rocks!
What a cheeky bugger!
That done, it was time to head inside for sustenance and hydration that my daughter prepared for me. I didn’t head out again as, by the time I was done, it was getting too dark.
Meanwhile, I’ve heard back from the company about our main entry door replacement. The door was delayed during the pre-painting process, but it will arrive tomorrow afternoon (Thursday). The guy was working on booking the installers, but it’s expected to rain on Friday, so he’s hoping they can come in on Saturday.
*sigh*
I’m looking at the forecast now. It has changed, of course. We are now expecting to get rain starting tomorrow afternoon, continuing off and on through Friday.
Which means that if I’m going to get more beds cleaned up and ready for winter sowing, I’d better be getting out there much earlier tomorrow!
Hopefully, the remaining beds won’t be as ridiculously full of roots like this one was, and they will go faster! There are four beds left to do in the main garden area – these are the 18′ long ones, so I want to get them done, first. There is a 9’x3′ bed, plus a 4′ square bed to do in the east garden area, and then the old kitchen garden needs to be done. Once the main garden beds are done, the others should go a lot faster. Aside from being smaller beds, they shouldn’t have as many tree roots growing up into them!
Looking at the long range forecast, it does look like we’ll have the weather to get this done. Amazingly, it has changed from the possibility of snow in the last week of October (I can’t believe the month is half gone already!), to warmer temperatures, and even a day that’s forecast to hit a high of 20C/68F! Then it’s supposed to rain during the last 5 days of October. That’s when we’ll be doing our city stock up trips, so that actually works out for me.
Of course, the forecast will change when I look at it again, tomorrow. I’ll take what I can get for pleasant weather, though. It’s not as pleasant as the one fall where we got our first frost in November, but still better than getting snow storms, like some have gotten up north already, but I’ll take what I can get!
Yes, there was frost on the cover but, if you look at the next photo in the slide show above, much of that frost was coating the inside of the cover!
I waited until things warmed up after I’d run my errands today before taking the cover off to see. In the third photo, you can see that all the plants were killed by frost. The next few photos are of the winter squash that seemed to have survived the cold. Two Baked Potato and three Mashed Potato squash made up the littler harvest you can see in the last photo of the slideshow above. The little ones should still be okay to eat. I am curious if the largest one has mature seeds inside. These are not varieties that produce large squash, so that one might actually be the full mature size.
That done, I then started working on gathering up all the hoops and stakes and netting and protective collars. The plastic cover that was over the winter squash got folded up length wise – it has a hole in it but, folded in half lengthwise, it should still be useable – a couple of times before getting rolled up.
Folding a very long, damp sheet of plastic took quite a while! Thankfully, there wasn’t much wind, but what little breeze there was sure didn’t help!
The trellis netting and the stakes holding them got taken down. Finding a way to store the netting, which has 4″ squares, without getting it all tangled took some doing.
For the past while, I’ve been putting the material together by the tree stump bench near the old garden shed. Aside from what is still covering the garlic, I think I’ve been able to gather everything from all the garden beds. I’d already partially sorted and bundled some of it. Today, I worked on finishing off the organizing, bundling and collecting it all.
The first photo above is how the garden looked, after I took all the stuff down. The garlic bed will be done after I’ve winter sown something with it, then give it a thick mulch of leaves. Until then, the cover is needed to protect the bed from cats wanting to use is as a litter box!
The next photo is all my bundles of stakes, hoops, the hoop nets I can still use, and even the twisted up wire hoops. I’ve got my soaker hoses all rolled up. The garden hoses will be done soon, too, but they are still being used. Ties, clips, short stakes to hold the Pexx hoops in place, and even the pieces of pool noodle used to go over the support posts that had twine threated through them, when used to hold netting over a bed to keep the cats out. I’m even hanging onto the water bottles that were set on the tops of stakes to rattle in the wind and hopefully startle deer away. I’ve got a bundle of 8 metal posts I found at the dollar store in there, too. Four of them had been used to support a trellis for the melons that they never grew big enough to grow up on. The other four were ones I found more recently and have not been used yet.
In the future, I intend to get more of the tallest, plain metal stakes, but I also really liked the taller tomato cage sets. The sets are three posts with connectors. The shorter ones came with two connectors per post, the taller ones with three connectors per post. The same connectors can fit both lengths of posts. I have two sets of the larger ones currently around the plum tree, supporting chicken wire, to keep the deer from eating it. I have shorter sets around the gooseberry bush and apple tree. I used several sets of the taller ones to make a deer barrier in front of the pea trellis. I can see being able to use them in a lot of other ways, too. They are surprisingly sturdy for a dollar store purchase, and I plan on getting more in the future.
The last picture has the collection of protective collars on t-posts, to keep them from blowing away. The round wire tomato cages that were used for the pepper and eggplant are all stacked up, with a large plastic bottle covering the sharp points. The water bottles used to help keep the frost at bay under covers are hanging off a smaller stake set into the wire cages to hold it up. The water bottles with their bottoms cut off that were used to deep water the summer squash are stored on there, too. There’s a couple or rolls of the black netting, plus a couple of roles of wire mesh, as well, plus the rest of the T-posts.
Now that I have all these sorted out, I need to figure out how to store them. Some can fit in the old garden shed, but the rolling garden seat needs to fit in there, too. I’ve got more stuff to store than last winter, plus there are the hoses and the garlic bed’s hoops and cover to add to the pile, and it won’t all fit in there. That shed is in serious need of replacing, too. Lots of rotten spots in the walls and roof that are slowly getting worse. In the last photo, you can see part of it. The door is a simple piece of plywood, and it’s comping apart in layers from weathering!
I’ll figure it out.
The next couple of days are supposed to be warmer. Friday is supposed to be the warmest day, but it’s also supposed to be raining off and on all day. If the long range forecast is at all accurate, aside from the one rainy day, we should have about a week and a half of decent, if chilly, weather to finish preparing garden beds and getting the winter sowing done. That’s the priority. After that, I can work on finishing the wall on that garden bed in the old kitchen garden that I’ve decided to do slightly differently. It would be nice to finally get that bed finished!! I can’t believe how long it’s been taking to get it done. That’s what happens when a job gets worked on piecemeal. 🫤
So while I didn’t get any progress on preparing beds for winter, I did actually get a lot done. By the time I was done with all the sorting and bundling for storage, it was getting pretty darn cold out there (we’d already passed our high of 8C/46F by the time I started). I’m hoping to get an earlier start tomorrow, partly because I have an afternoon telephone appointment with the sports injury clinic about my hip. Not only is it expected to be warmer tomorrow, but we’re supposed to stay at our high of 11C/51F for about 6 hours, rather than the eye blink of time we were at our high today! We’ll be dropping down to 8C/46F again by Saturday, then warming up a bit again. I will be delivering cats on Saturday, anyhow, so that works out!
I am so glad my brother said he would take care of my mother’s morning meds today, after we got the call from home care saying they didn’t have anyone to do it!
After feeding the outside cats and doing my morning rounds, I grabbed breakfast, then backed the truck closer to the inner yard. I didn’t want to go too close to the house while loading the back, because of all the very curious cats and kittens!
Speaking of which, I did a head count of all the cats and kittens I could see this morning. I counted several times and got a different number each time, but the highest count was 42. Mostly kittens. I’ve been messaging with the rescue group and mentioned this, commenting on how I can now see why we’re going through kibble so fast. I told them I got four 40 pound bags when disability came in at the end of Septembers. Sixteen days, and we’ve gone through three of them. I had to start the fourth one, today. They asked if I could last a week. I think we might be able to. They also asked about the prices for 40 pounds bags, and I was later able to send them pictures of a couple of receipts from the two different feed stores I go to, and the two different brands I get from them. A rescue would certainly be on the look out for better prices on kibble!
Anyhow…
I am so happy we have that new cover installed on the truck!
We were finally able to take the garbage from cleaning out the sun room to the dump. After I loaded those much bigger bags from the sun room clean up, with my older daughter distracting kittens away from me and the truck as best she could, she helped me get the household garbage out of the old kitchen, where the bags go until we can do a dump run. With all the kittens running around, it’s easier to have one person pass these smaller bags through the screenless window in the storm door to a second person. That way, only one person has to dodge kittens! 😄
This is the first dump run we’ve been able to make since we took the truck in for repair and getting the new cover installed. With the extra garbage from the sun room clean up, it filled the entire space under the cover – and no worries that something would blow away on the highway!
Once the truck was loaded, I was off to the dump. I got there right at 10. There was already a truck parked on the road, waiting for the gate to be unlocked. It turned out that the car in front of me was the attendant! I had it in my head that they opened at nine, forgetting that winter hours starts at the end of October, not the beginning. Glad I didn’t leave for a 9am opening!
By the time I unloaded the truck, there was a whole crowd of vehicles that had come in behind me, including a dump truck with two huge crushed cubes of garbage. !!! I’m happy to say that the area in front of the pit was relatively clear of huge piles of garbage. I’m still nervous about getting a flat tire every time I got in there, though.
That done, it was off to the pharmacy in town. I wanted to get refills before I ran out. I’m glad I didn’t wait. I have my anti-inflammatories, and my stomach meds to protect from the anti-inflammatories. I take the stomach meds only once a day, but can take up one or two anti-inflammatories, up to three times a day. If I were to take the max dose of the anti-inflammatories, I would finish both at the same time. I only need to take a couple of anti-inflammatories once a day, though, so those last a lot longer. I’d actually picked up a refill a while back, but it has disappeared, and I never used any of it. I’m still finishing my first bottle. I suspect a cat knocked the second bottle of the shelf, but I haven’t been able to find it, anywhere! So I had to get another refill.
The stomach meds, though, have already been refilled twice before, and my prescription was done for refills. The pharmacy would have to fax my doctor to get an extension. Unfortunately, today is a Saturday on Thanksgiving weekend, which means the earliest the doctor will get the fax is on Tuesday.
Once again, glad I started this now, and not later! I’ll have enough to last until the updated prescription is in. If I’d waited, I would have run out, and I really don’t want to do that. These have saved me from so much pain and stiffness, it still amazes me.
Meanwhile, I was able to get the other refills. While the pharmacy was taking care of that, I headed over to the grocery store to pick up a few things before Thanksgiving.
I didn’t have much on my list, but I did spend time going through the store, looking for something I might want to add to our Thanksgiving dinner. I should have picked something up while in my mother’s town, yesterday! They had much better sales on pies. This store had sales, too, but they were not only more expensive even with the sale price, you had to buy two of them to get the sale price, Otherwise, they were regular price – and there was no way I was paying that much for a small pie!
Taking my time at the grocery store gave the pharmacy the time then needed to fill my prescriptions. They were just bagging it up when I got there. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get the missing one on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, my brother had surprised my mother by showing up to do her morning med assist instead of the home care worker. He also had a couple of Thanksgiving dinners my SIL had packed for her. She was very happy about that and said they would be her lunch and supper! 😊 He stayed long enough to take care of her portable air conditioner and the window set up for the winter. He was done and already here at the farm before I got back from my own errands, so I went over to see how things went. She can be particularly cruel to him.
She turned out to be having a good day today, and was actually mostly kind to him. As we were catching up, he remembered to tell me my mother brought up about me and the farm. I immediately became suspicious, but he told me it was good. She had brought up about how we are paying for the utilities here, and he said yes, plus things like the internet, and fixing things, and so on. She started to say how she wanted to help. I told him, she has teased about helping with the door replacement a couple of times, but I don’t expect her to. He assured me, she’ll help with the door replacement. As her PoA, he could even make it easier for her and do an etransfer, or she can write me a check, if she prefers, but he says she intends to help with the door. She wants this place to be in good shape.
I don’t trust her. She’s burned all of us, at one time or another, by making promised and then backing out at the last minute. She has cost my brother many thousands of dollars by doing that. Even the times she has helped, like with the new roof and replacing the septic ejector, it was because my brother made sure she followed through. She actually tried to back out of paying for the roof like she promised, after the work was done, because she refused to believe it should cost more than a thousand dollars (it was around $15,000, I think), even though we got estimates and showed them to her.
I trust my brother, but there’s only so much he can do, and I don’t trust her.
We shall see. Lord knows, we could use the help after this past very rough couple of years, and my brother knows it.
Meanwhile, as I got caught up with my brother, I came into the house to find my purchases had all magically put themselves away. 😄 That allowed me to go back outside and try and get some work done.
Painting the isolation shelter and a few other things, were priority. It was supposed to be a much warmer day today, but it has been insanely windy.
I did get the painting done, though. The new paint is very noticeably lighter! I don’t care, though. I made no effort to try and keep the new colour off the painted parts. When I find something better to bring in for colour matching, we’ll get another can of paint in the right shade, and give what I got painted today a second coat, after winter.
The sliding windows had to be removed, of course. I was careful when painting the tracks, as I didn’t want them to get filled with pools of paint by accident.
In the first picture, you can see the box to shelter the ramp opening. Later on, I want to flip it upside down to paint the inside, but that’s not a priority. I got the old plant stand painted, and it’s sitting on a couple of broken sidewalk block pieces to keep it above ground.
The second picture is the side where the sliding window can only side towards the front, not over the insulated side wall. There was a bit to do in the front, and a single piece on the back that needed to be done, but most of the painting needed was on the sides.
I did not do the wire mesh door. It was so windy, I was starting to get an ear ache and had to head inside for a while.
After a break, I headed out again. By then, the paint was no longer wet to the touch, so I put the sliding windows back, which you can see in the third picture. Everything was sliding just the way they should!
That cats could now use it, too. Without those windows, the wind was blowing through so much, it actually blew a corner of the hammock loose!
My next project was to continue that garden bed I’d done half of.
Just in time for it to start raining!
I stayed out as a light rain came and went, while thunder rumbled in the distance, until it finally started coming down too hard to stay outside.
The first picture is the “before” shot. The second is how far I got before it started raining too hard.
So. Many. Tree roots. I think I got about half way down that side. Maybe a bit less. The rock bucket is a little over half full.
Once the roots and rocks were cleared, the soil was wonderfully light and fluffy. Perfect to grow in – if we didn’t have to worry about those roots coming back!
I’m glad I got as much done as I did. I’m not sure when I’ll be able to get back at it. Tomorrow is supposed to be warmer, but rainy. We’ll be having our Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow, anyhow. I plan to pack up a care package for my mother and visit her on Thanksgiving day. She will be getting her Meals on Wheels, though, so it will be for later in the day. Monday and Tuesday are supposed to be quite chilly, with overnight lows reaching below freezing, but then it’s supposed to warm up again. That will be my time to get the beds finished, then start some winter sowing! I’ll have to go through my seed packs and work out where I want to plant things. Some things will be more appropriate for the old kitchen garden, right against the house. Others can be planted well away from the house, as they would get harvested in the fall. Some beds will get the winter sowing marked clearly, so that I can sow other things among them in the spring.
I’m really looking forward to having a better gardening year than this one was!
Last night, we apparently dropped to 2C/36F. There were no frost warnings. Yet, when I headed out to do the morning cat feeding and rounds, there was frost everywhere, not just in the shady areas.
Which meant we had to wait until it warmed up a bit before we could start on the garlic. I had limited time, as I needed to go to my mother’s today and would be there for a while, so my younger daughter came out to give me a hand.
The bed that was ready for the garlic has been covered in plastic for some time, so the first thing we had to do was unroll it. Then, while my daughter broke up garlic bulbs, selecting the biggest cloves and setting the smaller ones aside for the kitchen, I marked off three rows for the garlic.
The twine and stakes will stay in place until after I winter sow something in between the rows.
In the second photo, we laid out the cloves where they would be planted, more or less. We ran out before filling the bed, so I went in to get more of the biggest bulbs from our stock.
Sir Robin was helping.
Breaking the bulbs apart was surprising difficult. Hard neck garlic and be that way sometimes. We also found that there were very few small cloves! We were more selective than usual – in the past, I would plant every single clove unless they were super tiny. We are now at a point where we can be fussy about it, so the kitchen got quite a few decent sized cloves!
I forgot to take a photo of the all the cloves in place, so the next photo is after we started burying them.
Grommet and Havarti “helped”.
We were pushing off the cats so constantly, it was clear we would need to give the bed extra protection. Normally, I would mulch it heavily with leaves right away, but I will do that after the winter sowing is done, some time in the next week or so. Until then, that’s a lot of soft, fluffy soil that cats would just love to dig in!
Well, we did just take off that plastic cover, so we decided to use it again.
I got some hoops from the pile of stuff being set aside and organizes for winter storage while my daughter gave the bed a heavy watering. The soil was still damp, but more water is good at this point. We do want the garlic to actually start growing a bit, before the ground freezes.
Once the watering was done and the hoops were in place, pushed down far enough that the 5′ width of the plastic could cover it with enough slack on the sides to be secured, a length of twine was run across the tops and pinned snug at each end. The hoops and the pinned end of the twine was kept on the inside of the stakes marking the rows, so the plastic could be pulled down in front of them. Then we unrolled the plastic in the path next to the bed and simply lifted it over.
So glad my daughter was able to help with that!
The excess plastic at each end was twisted to close up the opening under the hoop at one end, then weighted down with bricks. Once one end was secured, I pulled the sheet as snug as I could, then did the same thing at the opposite end. Once that was done, I could send my daughter in. She was caning it again today, and her back was really killing her by the end of it. I used the boards that had kept the plastic from blowing way earlier to secure the sides and added bricks and rocks as weights to hold them in place, which you can see in the last photo of the above slide show.
There was quite a bit of soil and debris stuck to the damp plastic, so I hosed it off before calling it done. I got inside with a whole half hour left to clean up, change and head to my mother’s!
I hope the garlic will be protected enough, but also that it won’t get too warm under there. We’re dropping to 5C/41F tonight, but tomorrow is supposed to have a high of 17C/63F, with a low of 11C/52F, then Sunday is supposed to have a high of 19C/66F. It can get pretty hot in those plastic covered rows even at those temperatures! The temperatures are supposed to drop right down again after that, including overnight lows below freezing.
When the time comes to mulch the bed for the winter, I will be focusing on a thick mulch along the sides of the bed as well as the top. Even though the bed is raised only a few inches, the outer rows could potentially get hit with winter freezing quite a bit more than the middle. In one of our first few years growing garlic, I planted in the low raised beds in the east year. One bed didn’t survive the winter, except for a handful of cloves, because it froze through the side walls. The other had mostly bulbs in the inner rows, while the other garlic planted closest to the walls didn’t make it.
Live and learn!
I’m quite happy that we finally got the garlic for next year planted. There has been so many last minute delays!
I won’t be able to get much, if anything, done in the garden tomorrow, though. I’ll be doing a dump run, then I need to go to town to pick up some prescription refills and do a bit of shopping before Thanksgiving. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get back to cleaning up that bed so full of tree roots, then get started on the other beds that need to be prepped for winter sowing.
I wonder how full of tree roots the other beds will turn out to be!
I’m happy to day I did actually get some progress done outside.
Last night, however, I was up late doing some research on well pumps and pressure tanks.
I’ve been angsting about our well pump since we moved out here. I’ve never been able to ascertain what “normal” sounds like. Thanks go my brother, we do have a new pump ready and waiting to be installed, but no plumber has dared do it. I explain about it in this post from 2020. Basically, there was a possibility the foot valve was leaking, because the pump would start running, even when no one was using water, and they were concerned that if they switched out the pump, the foot valve could break apart. If that happened, we would have no water at all and could potentially need a new well dug.
Eventually, though, we figured out that we have phantom flush. I just happened to be on the toilet in the wee hours of the morning when I heard the water start going in the tank, to refill it. We replaced all the parts in pieces in the tank, but it was still happening. Finally, I just took the refill out of the overflow, so it filled directly into the tank instead, and the phantom flush stopped. Why it worked, I have no idea, but it did.
So with that problem “solved” (we actually want to replace the toilet, for a number of reasons), we figured it should be safe to replace the tank. We just don’t have a budget for it.
Well, in the last while, the pump sounding more and more grindy,. It runs for a normal length of time and the pressure is good. Most likely, it’s the bearings.
Which is bad enough on its own, but lately it’s been going off way too often. Every time the toilet is flushed, even if it’s been on person right after the other, using it. When someone is in the shower or the washing machine is going, it starts running so often, it may as well not have stopped in between (as I hear the pump starting up again, while my daughter is in the shower). We’re also losing pressure faster, which is always most noticeable in the kitchen, which is the farthest sink from the pump and tanks.
After looking things up, it looks like the pressure tank is starting to lose pressure. There can be a number of reasons for this, but the end result is the same. The tank can’t keep up the pressure, so the pump keeps having to turn on to refill it. Depending on the size, a new pressure tank can cost anywhere from about $200 to over $500. For the amount of water we use, we would need a somewhat larger tank (I think this one is a 7 gallon tank), I’d love to get a 20 gallon tank. That way, if we ever get those water fountains by the barn serviced, we could turn the tap on in the basement, and there would be continuous water available for any animals we might get, or even for the renter’s cows. These fountains are insulated and keep the water warm enough to never freeze, too.
But that’s not an option now, and to meet our needs, we’d want at least the same size as what we have no, no smaller.
This morning, I messaged my brother about it. The tanks I looked at all say “compatible with most deep well pumps”, but he’s the one that knows the system better than anyone living.
He doesn’t think it’s the pressure tank.
He thinks it’s the foot valve. He says it was last replaced 20 years ago.
Well, I don’t know how it can get replaced. The bottom of the well access is a concrete floor, with pipes running to the house through the side near the bottom. I don’t know how the well pipe itself can be accessed. The plumber seemed to think that the concrete on the bottom would have to be broken up. Which doesn’t make sense, if the foot valve was replaced 20 years ago. We should be able to pull it up somehow.
I’ll have to consult my brother about that.
Whether it’s the pressure tank or the foot valve that needs replacing, either way it would be a good time to install the new pump!
All these pumps and tanks are the greatest source of stress for me. Water related or septic related!
So that’s something I really would rather not have to worry about. There’s absolutely nothing we can do about it right now, either.
What I did instead was my morning rounds, after feeding the outside cats. While coming back from checking the gate, I realized I was seeing an amazing full moon, and just had to try for some pictures. I even found someplace to steady my phone against, so I could zoom in.
Now that I see the picture on my desktop, it looks so detailed, I’m wondering if the camera automatically “fixed” the photo. That was a bit of a “scandal” some years ago, and that “feature” was supposed to have been dropped.
As I was going through the garden, I checked out the sunflowers. This past frost has killed them off, so any remaining seed heads will never reach maturity. I did, however, find this one…
It is possible that this one has viable seeds in it! I’ve tucked it into the portable greenhouse for now, to dry out some more. It would be nice to try again from our own seeds. Every generation of seeds collected will be better adapted to our local climate.
While the frost killed up most of the things that were exposed (I still haven’t tried peaking under the cover for the winter squash), one thing is doing just fine.
Once the morning rounds were done, I waited until things warmed up a bit in the afternoon before continuing with the stuff from the sun room that I had soaking over night. Most of it could be spread out, hung up or set up to dry. Except for the garden mesh. Today turned out to be ridiculously windy, so unraveling those will have to wait. For now, they’re set aside with their bin upside down over them, so they hopefully will not blow away.
That old sheet I found that was repurposed to cover garden beds sure had it’s moments when I tried to hang it on the line. Lots of clothes pins needed! Sure dried fast, though. 😄
I’m so glad I though to put that old roof panel onto the shelf shelter! This little feral kitten could enjoy a warm sun spot while completely protected from the wind.
Eventually, I got things done as much as I could until things dried. After my daughter and I get back from her appointment in the city, I’m hoping to finally put everything in bins with lids, and get them out of the yard again! I need that space to paint the isolation shelter.
The next thing to work on was that garden bed I’d started on a couple days ago.
*sigh*
With all the years of amending the soil, prepping these beds for the winter should only have taken about 15 minutes each. Half an hour, if the rocks and weeds were really bad.
Where I’d stopped, last time, had a bit root sticking up and I had to use the loppers to cut that. Then I just kept working my way down that side of the bed. In the first picture, you can see some of the roots I was exposing as I worked my way down. By this point, the soil was so dense with roots, I actually had a hard time pushing the garden fork through it!
The second picture was taken when I finally got that side done. I’d emptied the rocks bucket before I started, so these just rocks I’d picked today. When I stopped last time, I had worked past the half way point, so this was from about a third of one side of the bed. That pile I raked up at the end, near the bucket, is almost all tree roots. Very few normal weeds.
That last photo was taken from the unworked side of the bed. There were a could of bigger roots that I pulled up, but I won’t be able to get the rest out until I’ve worked the other side of the bed.
None of this was there when I planted the peas and carrots in it in the spring. All those roots are just one summer’s growth.
My mother keeps giving me a hard time for being such a bad gardener. Meanwhile, it’s the self seeded trees she deliberately left, after transplanting the raspberries they’d been growing through, that is causing me more problems that all the rocks! The roots are growing into where the soil is easiest to grow in – the soil I’ve been amending to grow vegetables in. So they’re filling the beds and taking up all the water and nutrients, and I’m not even finding it until the end of the season, after the damage is done. This, on top of dealing with drought conditions and smoke this year.
Trees are not always good thing.
One of these days, I’ve got to snag a daughter and our cutting equipment, and take down the entire row of elms and maples. Then we’ll have to find a way to make sure they don’t grow back! Otherwise, even as we build these up into high raised beds, the roots will still find their way up and into the growing zone.
It’s taking a lot longer than it should, but at least I did get some progress in today. Whether I manage to get any done tomorrow, after we get back from the city, will depend on how much daylight we have left.
It looks like we dropped to about -3C/27F last night. There was still frost on the ground when I headed out to do my morning rounds. I think the covered winter squash survived, but I didn’t want to uncover them to check, as it was still quite chilly at the time. Hopefully, they got a nice greenhouse effect during the day, as our high was only 9C/48F. We’re looking at a low of 2C/35F tonight, and they will need all the warmth trapped under the plastic that they can get!
There was obvious cold damage on other things as I checked in the morning, but it was when I did my evening rounds that the damage could really be seen. In the second picture of the slide show above, the Cosmos got hit quite hard. I don’t expect them to recover enough to continue blooming, and we certainly won’t have any seeds to collect.
The memorial asters, however, seemed to fair better. I suspect they were protected by the much taller Cosmos. Looking at the long range forecast, getting seeds from the asters might still happen.
I didn’t bother getting a picture, but the summer squash got hit the hardest.
I had picked the larger peppers (this mix is all smaller “snack size” peppers) before the frost hit, but once the leaves started to droop, I found one I missed. While the leaves obviously had cold damage, the pepper itself seemed okay.
In the herb bed, everything but the basil seemed to handle the frost just fine! I’m hoping that, if I mulch the bed deeply enough, the rest will survive the winter, as some of them are supposed to be perennials in warmer climates.
I had a few things I wanted to work on today but decided the sun room stuff was more of a priority. I had all sorts of buckets and bins to go thorough and sort.
The problem is, these were in a room full of cats, and no lids. Quite a lot of stuff had to be thrown out due to cat damage.
Other things were fine, but their containers had to be replaced. I found a few things I’d been looking for, including that last sheet repurposed as a cover for a garden bed! That’s now soaking in a bucket of water. I ended up setting a couple more bins with small plant pots and Red Solo cups to use for starting seeds or potting up, to soak overnight. One bin had some of the black garden netting on the bottom. Not only did it need to get a soaking, but I’m going to have to snag a daughter to help untangle it so it can be rolled up and stored properly.
Some of the stuff I was going through predated our moving here. I’m at a bit of a loss as to what to do with them. They’re not garbage, but some of the things, I don’t even know what they’re for, exactly. I also found a whole bunch of keys of all kinds, with no real clue as to what they belong with! The odds and sots are now in clear plastic jars with lids, so we can see exactly what’s in there.
I was able to sort some of the stuff out for storage in the garage, rather than the sun room. Other items are garden related in some way and I’m hoping to still store them in the sun room. The old garden shed doesn’t really have any space. Once the bins are no longer being used to soak things, and get a chance to dry out, I can finish organizing them. It turns out I have a whole lot of ground staples, still in their packaging, that simply got buried in other stuff!
Yesterday, I’d taken a bunch of garden gloves that had needed soaking and washing, and hung them up on the line to dry. Today, I found a whole bunch more that got soaked and washed, and hung on the line. There was at least six pairs, and maybe some strays as well. 😄 I’d been wondering where all my gloves were disappearing!
In the end, I was out there for several hours. It took a bit longer partly because I got cat pictures and started messaging with people from the new rescue.
Originally, she volunteered to take Smokey, but when I sent the above photo of Smokey with her brother, she decided not to separate them, and will take both. !!! I’m really happy with this, as Smokey is getting big enough and old enough that she could potentially go into heat. Not that I would expect that, this late in the year, but it’s possible.
They do know that Smokey isn’t socialized, but isn’t quite feral, either. Well, I have more good news about that.
She let me pet her today!
Several times!
Granted, I wasn’t able to pet her for long, but it’s better than I’ve been able to do before.
The current plan is to meet the foster in the nearer city’s Walmart parking lot to transfer them over on Sunday afternoon. So I am thinking to simply close the catio door while they are in there, earlier in the day. Then my daughters and I can more easily catch them to put them into carriers.
That gives us four days to try and get Smokey more used to human contact.
Once I had done as much as I was able to with the sun room stuff, it was time to do my evening rounds. I had a bit of a surprise when I got to the isolation shelter, which is right next to where I had been working all afternoon.
The stinky kitty sure moved in fast! He had been all curled up in the cat bed until he heard me coming closer and started getting nervous. I stayed well away until I was doing the evening cat feeding. There’s a food bowl next to the cat bed. When I got there, he was sprawled over the bed like you can see in the second picture, with his chin on the edge of the water bowl, like it was a pillow!
Cheeky bugger!
He’s going to be most upset when I move the isolation shelter under the canopy tent for painting – and when it’s set up by the house for the winter! Once that heat lamp is set up, there will be a lot of cats using the isolation shelter. 😄
So that’s progress for today. Tomorrow is supposed to be a fair bit warmer so, once I’ve got the soaking things set to dry, I should finally get that garlic in, then get to preparing more beds for winter sowing.
Thankfully, it looks like the weather will hold for a little while longer. Lots of work to get done in the next few weeks!
The first picture was of a group of three very round mushrooms – I thought they were puffballs at first, until I saw the stems. The next three pictures are with my hand for perspective – then I found a fourth one, off to the side!
I have no idea if they are edible, and have no intention of finding out.
As I was heading inside, I found this adorable cuddle puddle.
Two of them! The smallest kittens really like to pile together.
Once the morning round were done, I was able to get a few things done before heading to my mother’s. My brother came out today, but he had to focus on replacing the radiator on one of his tractors that got damaged last fall, then try to get it going. Days are short, so I just popped over to say hello before I headed out.
When I got to my mother’s, she was all “prepared” for me. I barely got through the door! She had ice cream buckets of tomatoes she wanted me to take home. One of her neighbours in her building has had a great tomato year in their little garden plot and has been leaving boxes of them in the common room for people to help themselves. My mother keeps taking more than she needs for herself, because apparently no one else is taking any, and she doesn’t want them to go to waste.
So… she gives them to me.
While I was getting the two ice cream buckets of tomatoes out from under her table for her, I saw her collection of jugs for her drinking and cooking water, so I refilled those right away.
There were other errands she wanted me to do, but I told her I’d do them after I’ve put away her groceries.
She didn’t have a list, so I sat down to start that with her. It took a while, because she kept wanting to go on about other things. There’s one home care worker she has issues with in particular. For a basic med assist, they are supposed to be there for 5 minutes, making sure she takes her medication before they leave. The morning assist is for 10 minutes, as they are supposed to help with emptying the commode or helping apply her Voltaren to her back. This one rushes to put the meds in the little bowl she has for them, to make sure they’re all there (sometimes, they can get caught in the packaging), locked the box up and leaves without making sure my mother takes her meds. Apparently, she’s been so rough with the lock box, she ended up knocking my mom’s phone off its charger and just left it where it fell.
My mother was also angry about her new schedule. She has five evenings, which is two med assists done by the same person, plus four mornings, done by someone else (out of a 2 week schedule) listed as “unfilled”. I tried to explain to her that they have to have the schedules out by a certain time, so if they don’t have someone for a specific date or time, they have to list it as “unfilled”. That doesn’t mean they won’t find someone. Just that they hadn’t, before the deadline. My mother thinks it means people are going to show up because they’ve… called in sick, in advance? She doesn’t understand how scheduling works.
It did give me a chance to try and talk to my mother about things she can do to try and get herself into a nursing home faster. I tried to explain that, because she’s only getting med assists, they basically view her as being able to care for herself. But if she takes advantage of the other assists they have available – meal assists, bathing assists, dressing assisted, etc. – that would go a long way to helping her get in faster.
She just got angry at me. She doesn’t trust the home care workers (there’s one that she says is really good at her job, and that’s the one that helped care for my father, before he went into the nursing home) and doesn’t want them touching her or preparing her meals. I tried to explain why she needed to get it anyhow and, besides, if she were in a nursing home, she’d be having that all done for her, anyhow. To which she said, in a nursing home, she would have “professionals”. I told her, the home care workers are “professionals”. They may or may not be good at their jobs, but they get training, first.
At one point she told me she had been talking to a woman that used to live in our little hamlet, that I went to school with. Her mother lived in the same building as my mother, having moved in a few years ago. It turns out her mother is in a nursing home now! She was visiting a friend and stopped to chat with my mother. As my mother told her how much she wants to be in a nursing home, she was told to try falling down! Which is pretty much what I was thinking, but hadn’t mentioned. My mother is constantly afraid of falling down, so she is super careful not to. If, however, she did have a fall, she’d have to use her Lifeline to get help, because she certainly couldn’t get up again on her own. They could call her an ambulance (and would call me to inform me of any issues). Chances are if that happened, my mother would end up going straight to a nursing home or supportive living, somewhere.
She did mention about the last time she used her Lifeline to talk to someone about her she was feeling. At the end of it, she was asked if there was anything else they could do for her. She said, help me get into a nursing home! The person on the Lifeline said they would talk to someone higher up about it.
I don’t know what they can do, but if there’s something, it would help! Lord knows, my mother isn’t willing to do anything herself that would get her in faster. We keep telling her things that would help (like getting other home care assistance that they have available), but she just refuses. I can understand why, but she doesn’t understand that she is sabotaging herself. She much prefers to complain and expect other people to do things for her, not do them herself. This is not a new thing. She’s been like this for as long as I can remember.
After much circular conversation, I did manage to get a shopping list written down for her. Some of it was “see how it looks” or “depends on the price” type stuff. She needed more of her Voltaren, too, so a trip to the pharmacy was also in order.
I was able to find everything she wanted, and even got her a pumpkin pie as a treat I was pretty sure she would be happy with. Either she’d be happy, or she’d be angry. Thankfully, she was in a good mood, and was very happy to see the pie!
Once everything was put away, she insisted I sit with a cup of tea for a while before I finished doing things like sweeping her floor, taking care of her garbage, etc. Then she foisted a bag of aluminum foil she saved from her Meals on Wheels packaging onto me, together with the tomatoes! She’s been carefully washing and setting aside the foil each part of her meal is wrapped in. From the amount in the bag, it’s been probably a year’s worth of foil! She thought I might be able to use them in the garden (??) or something. I told her, I could add them to our aluminum recycling. We save up our aluminum until it’s worth the trip to the salvage yard. She was quite happy with that idea.
All in all, the visit with my mom was pretty good. Just one racist rant I had to distract away from, and during the times she did get angry because she didn’t like what she was being told, it wasn’t quite the personal attacks on me such things often become. It was actually a pretty good visit, as far as that goes with my mother!
That done, I had a request from my husband, so I went to the town we usually go to for our local shopping. The difference in prices between grocery stores was worth the extra driving.
Thankfully, fruit cake was not part of his shopping list.
I could not believe how expensive these fruitcakes have become! Not that long ago, seeing them at prices above $7 was considered expensive!
After I got the few things on my husband’s list and made a stop at the gas station, it was time for home.
My brother was still working on his tractor, so I headed over for a quick hello and to update him a bit about how it went with Mom. Then I went in to change into my grubbies to do some work in the garden, instead of in the sun room, while there was still light enough.
I made sure to water the winter squash and cover them for the night, first. We’re supposed to get rain, but it’s also supposed to get cold enough that I’m not sure the winter squash would survive it. They might be kept covered for several days, if the 7 day forecast is at all accurate. The next three nights in particular will probably put an end to the eggplant, peppers and summer squash, so if there’s anything to bring in an ripen indoors, tomorrow will be the day to do it.
I need to get more garden beds ready for winter sowing, though, and today I started working on the bed the carrots and peas were grown in.
I got a little more than a quarter of it done. As I was working my way down one side, I kept getting tangled up in tree roots. It was a while before I found root they were all coming from and got that pulled out. Then I found more from another root!
It was starting to get dark, so I didn’t want to start fighting with roots I couldn’t quite find yet, so I decided to call it a night. For all the work done in these beds, particularly when they got shifted to their permanent locations, getting them ready for the winter should be easy. All of these roots I’m hitting were not there in the spring. I’m blown away by how far they are extending from the trees, and how big they are.
According to the weather apps, we’re supposed to get rain all night and all through tomorrow, with heavy rain warning. So it might be a couple of days before I can continue. The overnight lows that had been forecast to drop below freezing have changed to just at freezing. Hopefully, the cover will be enough for the winter squash. After that one cold night, we’re actually supposed to get decent, if cool, weather again. That would be a good time to get the garlic in.
Well, we’ll see what actually happens! I’ll take the mild weather for as long as possible!
The Re-Farmer 