Between the high winds and rain we’ve been having recently, it’s been a while since my rounds have included all the perimeter of the spruce grove.
The predicted storms have, once again, passed us by – this time to the south – but we have been getting rain almost constantly for the last while.
Which would have been wonderful in the spring. The farmers in the middle of harvesting their crops are now being hit with a triple whammy. A cold late spring followed by a hot dry summer, and now when hot and dry is what the crops need, it’s cold and wet.
That’s the reality of farming, though, and everyone just goes with it. What else can you do?
In the last while, the kittens have become more interested in following me around as I do my morning rounds. Especially when I go to switch the memory card in the trail cam. Usually, it’s just one or two kittens, though.
This morning, my daughter came along, and that really got their attention, so we had 4 of them from the start. :-D
The girls and I were able to get out for a wonderful visit with my older brother today. We had a fantastic time, and we got a tour of their yard, including the hundreds of new trees they planted!
Gotta love having a big enough yard to be able to do something like that. :-D
Blue Spruce tips
This picture is of one of their blue spruces that they planted years ago, looking nice and healthy, in spite of the dryness. What a difference it makes when something is planted with planning and care! At least some of the blue spruce I have found here would have been planted at about the same time, give or take a year or two, and should be looking more like this. Hopefully, with the clearing I’ve done, the surviving ones will recover.
Of course, the RCMP called me back after we left. I wasn’t expecting a follow up call so soon! The officer is going to call again this evening, so I’m staying near the phone now.
It’s been one heck of a day, outside. While there were high winds at my brother’s, the winds are even higher here at home. I’ve already done a check around the yard. There are lots of small branches on the ground but, so far at least, not a lot of larger ones. It’s getting winder even as I write this, though, so I’m not going to start picking them up until tomorrow, at the earliest. (Oh, wow, are the maple branches out my window ever being flung around as I write this!!!) The bird feeder was blown over when we got back and I put it back up again, only to have it blow over soon after. I’m leaving it for now, since there’s no point in putting it back up until things calm down.
Right now, we’re at 30C, with a “real feel” of 34C. We were supposed to get thunderstorms tonight, but now the predictions are for thunderstorms starting tomorrow afternoon. The weather system causing the winds right now has storms in it, too, but from the weather radar, they’re all going to pass to the north of us.
What a thing, to actually wish for storms to hit, just so we can get some rain!
We are actually a bit late on this. After 10 days in the fermentation bucket, when we should have started sanitizing things and transferring the must to the carboy, we were instead dealing with hot water tank problems.
While moving the chimney blocks from their stacks to where the retaining wall is going to be, we found an old aftershave bottle. My daughter did some research, and estimates that it’s from the 1980’s.
It turns out there are collectors for these out there! *L*
So she gave it a good washing, including trying to clean the inside.
After dropping one daughter off at work, my other daughter and I did a whole bunch of manual labour around the yard.
The first thing we did was haul away the stuff I’d clean up in the old wood pile area, including moving the pile of debris to the back of the outhouse, and sorting through the pile of found objects and garbage.
Yesterday, being Sunday, my daughter had a short shift and I was planning to stay in town again. I ended up meeting with my older brother and his wife, and we were able to spend a couple of wonderful hours together.
They are such great people!
At one point, we got to talking about how useful it would be for us to have a trailer, and how expensive new ones are. Apparently, there had been a small trailer by the garage, but it disappeared before we moved here.
Then they remembered.
We do still have a trailer.
Sort of.
They told me where it was, so when I did my evening rounds before it got dark, I went looking for it.