I managed to get a picture of a new baby.
I believe this is one of two? of Caramel’s litter. Mostly a guess on m part. I’ve only caught glimpses of them, and there was no adult cat around when I got this picture.
I’m just happy the youngest kittens are starting to come to the kibble house for food. Hopefully, they will soon discover the inside of the cats’ house (they already go under it!) as a safe and warm place to be.
The Re-Farmer
Most of the yard kittens don’t have names.
The girls have come up with a name for one of them.
Judgement.
Because he always looks like he’s judging things!
😂
The Re-Farmer
Here are some of my morning smiles!
I love that some of the youngest litters are now regularly showing up at the kibble house – but it sure does get crowded in there!
I think I counted 20 yard cats in total this morning, but they move around so much, it’s hard to keep track.
Broccoli’s babies tend to stay away – as does Broccoli.
Looks like one of them is going to have some pretty long fur!
I had to zoom in quite a bit to get a shot of this domestic scene without disturbing them! Rosencrantz was putting up with four of her babies nursing, while number five was deterred by the chain link fence. They can no longer fit through the holes, and aren’t used to that, yet!
As far away as I was, Rosencratnz didn’t like that I’d stopped to take pictures, so she got up and left. Her kittens were not impressed. 😄
It looks like we’re going to have a lovely day today, so I’m wanting to do as much as possible outside! I plan to be working in the old kitchen garden, which means I’ll likely be surrounded by kittens. 😁 But first, I’ve got the floor boards on the water bowl shelter secured, so the base can finally get a scrubbing. It should be warm and sunny enough for it to dry relatively quickly. I want to get that painted as soon as possible. I’m not sure how we’re going to keep the kittens off the wet paint, though. They really like playing in that thing! 😂
The Re-Farmer
I must say, it’s been flippin’ hard to get a picture of this guy!
He (she?) is from the oldest litter, and very much a feline teenager! 😁
Last night, I was able to spent some time sitting outside, playing with the kittens with the rope toy I’d made, while sitting in the water bowl house. Normally, he stays well away from me, but he couldn’t resist. He actually played right at my feet, and would sometimes dash under the water bowl house, while I was sitting in it. I tried about a dozen photos before I finally got him!
His siblings include the super fluffy cat we’re trying to socialize for a family that wants him. My daughters have been trying to spend time outside to socialize kittens, too, and my younger daughter actually got to touch him! That’s the most progress any of us have managed so far. It’s really hard to socialize kittens, when their own mothers won’t let us near them. 😕
The Re-Farmer
One more thing off the to-do list!
This afternoon, I got the fermentation bucket from our wine making kit sanitized and set up to make more crab apple cider vinegar. I brought two of the three bins of crab apples in from the old kitchen. The apples got cut in half, de-stemmed and any damage I found was cut off. Since I picked the apples by shaking the tree, then picking them up off the ground, there was bound to be bruising to get rid of. All the pieces went into the giant enameled bowl that was ready with water and lemon juice, to keep them from browning.
Each bin held the equivalent of a 5 gallon bucket, full to overflowing. Once the apples were cut and trimmed, however, they took a lot less space. The line that you can see in the bucket is the 5 gallon mark, which is what I was shooting for. The basic instructions for making ACV in jars was to fill them 3/4 full with apple pieces, so that’s what I what I did with the bucket. After finishing off a bin and transfering the pieces from the water to the bucket, so I could see how much more I needed to cut up, I added sugar and commercial ACV with “mother” as a starter, using the same ratios that were used when we did them in 1 gallon jars. Then I cut more apples from the second bin until I reached about 3/4 full.
We buy filtered drinking water in refillable 5 gallon jugs, as our well water has developed a taste to it. I used one of those to fill the bucket to the 5 gallon line, which used up about 3 gallons from the water jug. It all got a gentle stir to dissolve the sugar and mix in the ACV mother.
The apple pieces now needed to be weighted down.
I just happen to have a large serving dish I found in a Goodwill store, years before we moved out here. It was the perfect size, and heavy enough that no other weight was need once the air pocket under the (sanitized) dish was removed.
Finally, the whole thing was covered with cheese cloth that was snuggly tied in place. Then, because we have cats, the lid was put loosely on top. It now sits next to the carboy of fermenting hard apple cider.
This now needs to ferment for 3 weeks before it gets strained off, then left to ferment another 3 weeks.
The down side of fermenting crab apples is, it attracts fruit flies. It turns out they love apple cider vinegar! So I made a couple of fruit fly traps using some of the commercial ACV in small jars topped with plastic wrap with holes pokes in them. One went into the big aquarium, where the three 1 gallon jars of ACV are fermenting. The other is now in between the fermentation bucket and the carboy.
Even after removing a small bucket of apples for my mother, we still have about a bin and a half of apples! We need to do something with them quickly, before they really start bruising.
I’m considering cooking them up and straining them for their juice. I think we’ll get a lot more juice of them that way, compared to using the juicing machine! Or maybe make some jelly? We’ve made apple jelly before, but the jars had to be kept in the fridge because we didn’t have everything we needed to water bath can them.
There are SO many apples, though, we couple probably make a few different things!
The Re-Farmer
I am just amazed at how the pink rose bush is doing this year!
There are dozens of flowers, and dozens more buds developing. This is the first year we’ve had more than just a couple of flowers!
The leaves are looking awfully yellow. I don’t know much about roses. I’m not sure if that’s from the type of rose, if there’s a nutritional deficiency, or if there has just been too much water this spring. It could also be lack of sunlight, still. We’ve pruned back the ornamental apple above it, but unless we take it out completely, it’s still going to have shade for at least half the day.
And to think, when we first moved here, it was in such poor shape, it could barely be seen against the stick that was supporting it. The same stick you can see in the photo above! I’m so glad we were able to save it. :-)
The Re-Farmer
This big bugger is why we don’t have hanging bird feeders anymore.
After this picture was taken, a skunk joined it for a while. As I write this, the skunk it still there.
This looks like the big racoon I saw a few nights ago, when I came out to see what critters were snarling out the window. A big racoon made like it was going at me, then backed off, a couple of times, while a much smaller one was at the seeds.
With the storms and winds we’ve been having, we’re not seeing a lot of birds at the feeding station right now. Even the open ground where the seeds are gets filled with water enough to wash the seeds up against the grass.
I’m not seeing the groundhogs very often anymore, either. I think their dens are flooded out, and they’ve moved on. There was the one that dug a den under the mock orange against the house I was seeing more often. I’ve been pushing the dirt back into the hole regularly, and I think I’ve finally won the battle. It hasn’t been re-dug for a few days. Hopefully, that means our garden is safer from them this year!
The Re-Farmer
A single white rose decided to bloom early.
All the white rose bushes are loaded with buds. It’s looking like we’re going to have quite a show, soon!
The Re-Farmer
Since planting trees and bushes are more long term than our usual gardening, I decided to start a food forest category.
Including for things that were already here before we moved in, like these Saskatoons. It’s so nice to see them blooming again – though you can very clearly see how high the deer ate the twigs and branches! Hopefully, we’ll have berries this year. Thankfully, these are very flexible, so we should be able to bend them down to harvest them.
We are, however getting a frost advisory tonight. !!! Well, our June 2 last frost date is just an average, after all. It’s supposed to dip to just barely freezing, so most things should be all right.
Including…
The 20 out of 30 silver buffalo berry my daughter was able to transplant today!
She does not take progress pictures, though, so I just got a picture at the end of the day.
Even with the holes already dug, it was a huge job. The soil that was removed was so full of roots, rocks, weeds and gravel, she was using garden soil from the remains of the pile we got last year – which is clear across the garden area. After sitting there for a year, it’s full of roots, too, which she picked out as best she could.
She started at the north end of the double rows, next to the highbush cranberry, as the ground is slightly higher there, and the holes were mud rather than filled with pools of water. It didn’t take long before she was having to deal with standing water, though.
Towards the end, I was able to help her out, adding the mulch and watering it just enough to keep it from blowing away. By the end of it, my poor daughter was so knackered, she could barely lift the shovel on its own, never mind with soil in it!
So the remaining 10 silver buffalo berry (I just realized, I’ve been calling them bison berry, because we don’t have buffalo; we have bison. The label says buffalo) will be planted tomorrow. Holes still need to be dug for the sea buckthorn, but there’s just 5 of those. Then there’s the Korean pine, which is going to be planted in the outer yard.
While she did that, I worked on the main garden area and got some decent progress done, too – but that will be my next post.
The Re-Farmer
With Nosencrantz insisting in spending her days tucked into an empty shelf behind my nightstand, I decided she should at least have a bed. So last night, I quickly crocheted one for her.
Before I was done, Turmeric was isolated in my room with me, Butterscotch and Nosencrantz for her fast. B & N were not impressed with the company. Turmeric is one of the cats that has been the most aggressive towards them. Particularly towards Nosencrantz. So they were both hiding in their nests, while Turmeric roamed the rest of the room.
Which is why Turmeric got to test out the new bed, first!
It looks so tiny compared to her from this angle. Trust me; it’s large enough for a cat to curl up in! :-D
When the girls did the evening cat stuff (which is when they get wet cat food), Turmeric was tucked into the bathroom until B & N were finished eating.
It was not a good night.
Normally, once the other cats are closed out, so that B & N can at least get some wet cat food, uninterrupted, that’s when they come out and eat, drink, use the litter, and play.
I don’t get a lot of sleep these days.
They couldn’t do that as much, last night. Of course, there was no other food once the bowls with the wet cat food were cleared away. Just water. At least three times during the night, I had actual cat fights happen as Turmeric went after Nosencrantz! Poor thing. Then, when I wasn’t breaking up cat fights, I was fending of Turmeric attention, as she decided the best way to get at Nosencrantz’s cubby hole was by first snuggling my face and licking my nose (because noses are delicious, apparently), then making a dash for the opening behind my night stand.
So adorable and nasty, at the same time!
I finally got some sleep, just in time for my alarm to go off. I had given myself extra time, so I figured I could set my timer for half an hour and still have time to get ready to go.
I think I forgot to hit the start button.
An hour later, I woke up and had to start scrambling! I didn’t have time to do the morning cat stuff, though once I had Turmeric in the carrier, I had enough time to put food out for the outside cats – startling away several deer in the yard – before we left.
Turmeric wasn’t too impressed with being carried, but once in the van, she settled down very quickly.
She even took a bit of a nap.
What a face.
Drop off time was for when the vet clinic opened, and I got there early – though when I checked my phone, the appointment was for a half hour later. I hadn’t needed to rush so much! No matter. They had no problem taking her when they opened.
My daughter usually has been doing this part, since the mask thing because an issue. The restriction is lifted, but there were still signs all over, stating that they were a “health care facility” and required masks.
They had zero issue with my maskless face.
The paperwork was done. The Cat Lady and her new rescue are covering the cost of the spay, while the tattoo is a clinic freebie. The pain meds for afterwards is not covered, but we might still have enough left over from when Beep Beep and Fenrir were done. I checked the bottle when I got home, and I think we’ll pick up more, just in case. The doses are low – especially for such light cats (Turmeric weighed in at just over 5 pounds) – but I’d rather have extra than not enough.
As I write this, she should be out of surgery and recovering. We’re set to pick her up at 3:30, though they’ll call us when she is ready.
Today also happens to be my and my husband’s 34th wedding anniversary. He’s not up to going out for dinner, so I’ll be picking up some pizza on the way home, courtesy of my daughter. We’ll be trying a different place this time. I’ll have enough time to drop off Turmeric and the food, then head out again to pick up our meat order. I just got the invoice this morning, and will be picking up the order this evening.
Now that’s my kind of anniversary gift! :-D
We do get a giggle out of the fact that we’re meeting up in a parking lot to get meat, like it’s some sort of drug deal. :-D
It’s going to be quite a day for running around from town to town! Worth it, though.
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 