May today be a day of great joy and blessings for you and yours!
Our basket this year included a multi-grain bread, figs and port sausage, ham, olives stuffed with blue cheese, a wheel of brie, salt, mustard with horseradish, parsley butter, olive oil, balsamic vinegar and hard boiled eggs, all of which received the traditional blessing.
He is risen, indeed!
The Re-Farmer
I didn’t have time to post this before heading into the city. We had an excellent visit, and ended up leaving an hour or so later than we should have. It was dark by the time we left, and with all the reflections on the damp roads, it was extremely difficult to see where the lanes were. We also very quickly realized we needed to stop as soon as possible and clean our headlights! Thankfully, there is a gas station just outside the city on our route – and the prices were 5 cents cheaper than when we filled on the way out. Gas prices were really weird. In the town my mother lives in, where we usually stop for gas, the prices had gone up from 154.9 cents/liter to 160.9. Usually, the prices are cheaper in the city, but we were passing gas stations at 169.9! This one station outside the city is usually a penny or two higher than inside the city, so it was very strange to see it lower than everywhere else. My daughter was a sweetheart and cleaned all the headlights and windows while I got the gas, and my goodness, did it make a difference! It was still very cautious driving, though. Not because of road conditions – those were great. It was being on constant lookout for deer! Thankfully, we only saw one, running away from the road, but there are so many of the around this time of year, I consider that very lucky.
So what did I find that I would have posted about before leaving?
This lovely surprise!
When I turn the lights on in the morning, I would always lift the dome on this tray to check the pots while getting the condensation to drip into the tray a bit. There wasn’t a single sprout this morning. After making our second basket and putting it in the living room for safe keeping, I took the time to look at the tray that had been moved off the neat mat, to see if any more peppers had sprouts. None had, but I realized I was seeing green through the condensation of the dome on the new tray. I couldn’t believe how many tomatoes has sprouted in such a short time! I’m also surprised they sprouted earlier than the herbs. Those seeds are so tiny, they are practically surface sown, so I figured they would be visible first, for sure. Nope. Not a single herb seed has germinated yet.
With the tomatoes sprouting, though, the dome now stays off.
Now, if only more of those peppers – and any of the Classic eggplant – would start sprouting!
The Re-Farmer
The outside cats are quite enjoying the warmer temperatures.
I snagged this picture through our bathroom window. The cats have knocked everything off that shelf, except for an organizer box in the corner that’s too heavy for them to casually push around.
They love this shelf!
They are also loving the paths to the electric meter and burn ring, now clear of snow.
Now that our angel of a neighbour cleared the driveway for us, that’s going to melt clear quickly, too. I just finished going through the trail cam files and took note of the time stamps. He showed up almost exactly an hour after I started clearing the end of the driveway.
This is how far I got in that hour. About 6 feet or so. Maybe 7. Granted, a lot of that time included having to use the ice scraper to break up the plow ridge before I could shovel it away, so it would have gone faster clearing ordinary snow. Still, it would probably have taken almost 2 more hours, just to clear up to the gate, where it was slightly deeper due to drifting. My daughter working at the other end with the little electric snow blower would not have been able to go much faster. It definitely would have taken us all day to get a path just wide enough to drive through, clear.
Which means we both would have been in a world of hurt, today – and we are set to drive to the city this afternoon!
Today is Holy Saturday, After I finish this, we’ll start assembling and blessing our baskets. We’re making a second one as a gift to bring with us this afternoon.
Time to get at it!
The Re-Farmer
So… the road got plowed last night.
They did a great job on the road, but that plow ridge. Oy! I knew it needed to be cleared before things warmed up, then froze again into a solid mass. This morning, at least, it was still relatively soft. Just really deep!
I came back with the snow shovel and the ice scraper. I used the ice scraper to break up the packed snow and large chunks in the plow ridge, then shoveled it away, little by little. My goal was to make a space wide enough to drive through, but first I did about half that width, just to dig my way to the road. Then I started digging my way back clearing the other half.
Part way through, I realized I was being watched from the road!
Two deer were very perplexed by my activities!
While I was out there, my daughter also came out and got little Spewie going. She started clearing the space in front of the garage. The snow is no longer sticky, but a lot harder than it was yesterday, so it was tough going on that poor little snow blower. I saw her having to go back into the garage quite a few time to flick the switch on the power bar back on.
Then, and angel swooped in.
While I was still shoveling away, our neighbour with the plow attachment on his truck drove up. Once I realized he was dropping his plow and turning into our driveway, I grabbed the shovel and ice scraper and moved out of the way.
In just a few minutes, he did what would have taken us all day, just to get a path wide enough to drive through!
He even drove out and reversed all the way back down the driveway, so he could clear the area in front of where we store the lawn mowers and snow blower, which he couldn’t access from the other direction. Then, last of all, he widened the space at the end of the driveway!
He didn’t even stop to let me thank him. I shouted my thanks, anyway, and he just waved and kept going.
What an absolute sweetheart!
Also… I want a truck with a plow attachment like his! What a beast, and he could make that thing dance. 🤍🤍
The Re-Farmer
Well, that was a mistake.
After doing some shoveling this morning, I headed in and took a break with breakfast and a pot of tea before heading out again in the afternoon.
I waited too long.
I started by doing the upstairs litters, then getting the burn going, getting rid of our burnable garbage along with the sawdust litter. While tending that, I cleared the paths to the electric meter. With how warm it was getting and how the snow was changing, even in that time, I put a cover on the burn ring sooner than I normally would have, then went to get little Spewie out and clear the driveway.
It was too late.
It’s -4C/25F right now, bright and sunny. All the paths I dug earlier, where it’s darker, have melted away, but the snow is just getting wetter, stickier and heavier. Too sticky for the snow blower. I had to give up after only a couple of passes across the front of the garage.
While it’s not much of a problem for shoveling paths, with the snow just getting wetter and heavier, there’s no way we can shovel the entire driveway.
Which means we’re stuck. Our vehicles can’t get through that, either.
On top of that, the roads aren’t plowed, and I suspect they won’t be.
Hopefully, the warmer temperatures will take care of it for us by the weekend, when we are supposed to reach above freezing temperatures for highs from then on. I know the highways will be clear by then, but it’s rather different on gravel roads.
Crud.
The Re-Farmer
Well, the storm has passed, and everyone is starting to dig their way out.
This is me, on my way to switch out the memory card in the gate cam.
No, I’m not standing in a drift. The snow reaches almost to me knees. Taking into account what was already on the ground, we definitely got at least 10 inches/25 cm in total.
I didn’t walk all the way to the road, as the end of the driveway is drifted over, so not only is it deeper, but harder packed. The road has not been plowed yet. I’d already seen people posting in local Facebook groups asking about the plows. Apparently, our new council members have not sent them out yet. Whether that’s for budgetary reasons or because they decided to simply let it melt was the question.
Of course, we couldn’t get out of our driveway right now, anyways, even with the van.
I found a whole train of cats waiting for me when I got back to the inner yard!
This path is now shovelled clear again. I also cleared the path to the garage, wide enough for walker or wagon, and enough space in front of the garage to open the side doors.
We can now open the doors on the storage side, and there’s room enough to maneuver little Spewie out. That little snow blower is going to get a work out, today!
I cleared the path to the burn ring, too. We need to do another burn. I’d like to get more paths dug out, so that they will melt clear faster as things warm up. I’m not going to bother digging a path to the sign cam, though. There’s lots of space on the memory card, and the batteries were still good the last I checked, so it should be fine until I can get to it again. At least I can be confident our vandal isn’t going to fight his way through the snow to wreck the sign or something.
For now, I’m going to have myself another cup of tea before heading back out again.
The Re-Farmer
It’s feeling a bit surreal right now. The snow is still falling and it’s bright, if overcast, outside, so I keep thinking we’re in the middle of the afternoon in winter. But it’s spring right now, the days are longer, and it’s actually past 7:30 in the evening as I write this.
I headed outside to top up the kibble for the cats and had to push the sun room door open, because of the snow drifted against it. I ended up shoveling it clear, along with the space between the cat shelters, and just kept on going.
I didn’t do all that much. I cleared the path from the sun room door to the main entry, which was also partially blocked with snow. I cleared the steps, but only part of the patio blocks. There is a pile of snow at the “corner” beside the elm tree and I kept having to push the top of it further into the yard, because the snow I was shoveling was falling back onto the path I was clearing.
From there, I just cleared the path to the gate. The rest can wait until tomorrow.
The cats clearly liked what I was doing . Every time I cleared a new spot, I’d turn around and find a cat in it!
Except Gooby.
Gooby actually climbed my back while I was shoveling, then clung to my shoulder like a monkey! When I stopped to take the other picture, he crawled around between my phone and my face. That boy does love humans!!
The snow on that path to the house is not drifted. Plus, with how much the older snow had melted away from the path, it is also not accumulated snow. That’s all fresh along the edges of the blocks. It looks like we got more snow than was predicted for our area – that’s looking like 8 or 10 inches (20-25cm). I’ve heard that one area got as much as 35cm (almost 14 inches) today!
Thankfully, we are well stocked and don’t have to go anywhere for a few days!
The Re-Farmer
For a while outside, the wind picked up and I could see the snow coming down horizontally out the window! From what I’m hearing the roads are in terrible condition, and quite a few people posted online that they started to go somewhere, only to turn around immediately. Everyone is being told to stay home. A number of roads have been closed, particularly in the South. For our area, it looks like the worst of it has passed by, and things should be getting better from now on, though there is a second system on the radar that might make it as far as us later. Maybe.
A good day to be inside and doing garden stuff!
The first thing I needed to do was start some new seeds.
There were only three things that need to be started in the 6-8 week range; spearmint, oregano and the Roma tomatoes.
The oregano and spearmint seeds are so miniscule! We don’t need a lot of either, so there was more than enough for our needs. There weren’t a lot of seed in the tomato packet, so I actually counted them to work out how to use the tray. There turned out to be 67 seeds in the packet. Usually, for “pots” the size of these toilet paper rolls, I would plant two seeds per pot, but with so few seeds, only one got two seeds and the other 65 got a single seed each. Romas are a tomato I want to have a lot of, so we can do tomato paste and sauces again at the end of the year.
The herbs each gone one row in the tray. Here, the tray is on the heat mat, and it now has a dome over it, too.
This is the tray that had been on the heat mat. There are some cayenne, Dragonfly and Early Sensation peppers sprouting. And look at all those spoon tomatoes!
The strawberries and Classic eggplant got moved out entirely, and are now in the small aquarium greenhouse, still on the little bin to lift them closer to the light. The hardware cloth cover for the tank is no longer needed to keep the cats out, but it is still needed to hold the light fixture. We couple put the light back under the tank’s lid and use that, but this way, there is still plenty of air flow.
This done, I decided to do some potting up. First, I thinned by dividing the Crespo squash…
They are on the aluminum sheet in the photo. Of the two pots, one had all three seeds in it germinate, and they all have their own pot now. The second pot, I left for now. You can see a second seed did start to germinate, but it seems to have just stopped growing.
In the baking tray, you can see the Zucca melon, at the bottom right of the picture, are doing well! Those tendrils are reaching out to climb, and I’ve already had to unwrap the biggest one from the mini greenhouse frame. The drum gourds in the back are doing okay, but I think it’s just too cold for them to grow much right now.
I’d reseeded more Zuccz melon and drum gourd, but none have germinated yet. There was a drum gourd seedling that died after I’d put more seed in the empty pots, and I was considering adding more drum gourd seeds to it. Not anymore! That pot has now been “potted up” into the stronger, lighter coloured pot, and contains an experiment.
Last year, we had purchased seeds for Tulip trees and pawpaws. We had a single Tulip tree germinate, only to die soon after. Nothing else germinated. Their containers had been moved between the sun room and the shelf just outside the sun room. No surprise that cats would eventually knock them around, and that was it for any chance of germination. They were planted in a seed starting mix, which I ended up adding in to the big bowl I use to moisten the starting mix before putting it into pots to start new seeds. I ended up finding one of the pawpaw seeds that actually looked robust, so I stuck it into the available pot. Who knows? Maybe it’ll sprout!
Today, I had dumped our last bag of seed starting mix into the big bowl with what was left from before and was mixing water in with my hands when I found another pawpaw seed that looked like it was fresh out of the package we got them in. So I stuck that into the pot I’d put the first one in. The pot is damp, though, so it broke. I grabbed one of the new biodegradable pots I bought and the whole thing fit perfectly inside it. Cool! Now we have two pawpaw seeds to potentially sprout!
As I went back to mixing water into the seed starter mix, I found three more pawpaw seeds! None of them showed even the slighted bit of rot or damage!
They all went into the experiment pot.
I have no idea if they will germinate, but it would be awesome if they did!
Once the herbs and tomato seeds were planted and things were shifted around, I decided it was time to pot up the Black Beauty tomato seedlings. The germination rate for those was really high, and they were starting to get too big for the square potting cells they were in. I had a bag of potting soil ready for potting up, and went with Red Solo cups to transplant them up into.
I filled them about half way with soil, and buried the stems of the seedlings about half way when transplanting. As they get bigger, we can keep filling the cups with soil, allowing for more roots to develop along the stems. The baking tray holds 12 cups, while the bin can only hold 9, which left 5 more to go back into the tray they had been in before. The smaller Indigo Blue tomatoes don’t need potting up yet. Sadly, there are still only three Little Finger eggplants; the pots I reseeded show no signs of germination yet. Again, I think it might just be too cold by the window, even though the whole thing is over a heat vent.
Lower down, you can see the tray that has the first peppers we planted, in the red cups they were potted up into, next to the German thyme and lemon grass. The yellow plant pot below has one of the pots of German thyme transplanted into it, which we will be keeping indoors. In the blue mushroom tray is the luffa. We still have just one plant. The other 3 pots were reseeded, but still nothing.
And finally, here are the onions and shallots! It’s been a while since I showed how they were doing. I suppose we could give them hair cuts, but that may not be beneficial. Gardening in Canada did a video about it, and I trust what she says.
My daughter’s orchids got moved to the shelf beside the onions. I hope they do okay, there. They’re pretty far from the heat vent.
That is it for now! The next seeds we will need to start are the 4-6 week seeds, and I think I have only 1 or 2 things that needs to be started in that range. After that, it’s all stuff that needs 3-4 weeks before last frost date. There are a few seeds in that range that I plan to experiment with, starting some indoors and direct seeding others, to compare how they do.
Being able to work on gardening stuff while it’s snowing outside feels really good!
The Re-Farmer
Well, that predicted snow started falling last night, and will continue to fall for most of today!
We’re going to have a lot of clearing to do when it’s over.
I wouldn’t call our current conditions a storm, but other areas of the province are getting hit with more snow and higher winds than we are. No complaints, really! Even closer to home, others are getting things worse. I’m glad I was able to pick up those prescriptions and antihistamines yesterday. This morning, I got a call from the pharmacy, letting me know there would be no deliveries today. She was glad to hear I’d already picked them up. Being right on the lake, town would be getting a lot more snow and wind than we are, even though they are only about a 15 minute drive away.
Also yesterday, I spotted The Distinguished Guest in the sun room and managed to get a picture before he disappeared.
When I first looked through the window, he was fully inside the box we use as a kibble tray, picking over the last little bits of kibble he could find. I was able to see his left paw a bit. That was the paw he was limping on so badly, not that long ago. It definitely looks misshapen, but then, so do the rest of his paws that I could see. It could be from an injury, or it could just be full of matted winter fur. I made sure to put food out soon after I got this picture, even though it was earlier than usual, just to make sure he got something to eat.
As for this morning…
Most of the cats were inside the sun room when I came out, but a few still prefer to be outside. I wasn’t going to put kibble on the roof, but when I saw some jumping up and looking for food there, even though the trays we filled (one of the trays under the water bowl house had been pulled right out and ended up buried in the snow!), I shoveled the snow off, then got another container of food, putting some on the roof. I doubled their food this morning, putting most of the extra in the sun room, and more than usual in the entry of the cat house, where there is another tray, to encourage them to stay inside as much as possible.
Three of these trays are the baking sheets I bought to carry our transplants around. I’m going to have to reclaim them soon, which means I’ll need to find something to replace them with!
One of the things I had to do this morning was get a meter reading. After submitting the reading, I decided to check our data.
This is our electricity usage over the past year, compared to the year before.
You can really tell that February is when we had our cold snap! Spring of last year was when we had a heavy blizzard followed by flooding, so not only did we use more electricity for heat in March but, once it all started melting, our sump pump and septic pumps (the septic tank is where the new basement weeping tile drains into) were running very frequently.
Here is our usage for the last year, with weather overlay.
With an electric furnace, it’s pretty clear how much the temperatures affect our electricity usage!
It should be interesting to see how things change, if at all, over the next year, now that we have the new roof. We picked the lightest of shingles available and, hopefully, that will help keep the upstairs from overheating over the summer, at least a bit. The girls have fans running all summer, and my older daughter had to switch to working nights because it became too hot to use her computer during the day. The previous shingles were a dark brown, and would have warmed things up quite a bit.
As for now, the weather system that’s over us is quite large. but it doesn’t look like the worst of it will come anywhere near us. It’s expected to clear late tonight. We’ve got a high of -6C/21F forecast for today. Starting tomorrow, things are supposed to warm up and keep warming up. In a couple of days, our highs are supposed to go above freezing and stay there. By next week, we’re supposed to have temperatures in the double digits! (10C/50F and up) For the areas that are supposed to be getting up to 25cm/10 inches of snow in this storm, that will bring on the spring flooding in the river valley regions. I can’t say I’ll be complaining about any spring flooding we get. For all the massive flooding we got last year, our water table still hasn’t completely recovered from years of drought conditions. This spring snow will be a boon to for farmers and gardeners.
Speaking of which, I made a tray full of toilet paper tube pots yesterday evening. One of my goals for the day is to make space in the big aquarium greenhouse for new seed starts. I’m happy to say that some of our peppers have finally started to sprout, so we’ll be able to move that tray off the heat mat. I just need to set up the space next to it, so they will still be close to the warmth of the lights.
Snow days are a great time to be working on our future garden!
The Re-Farmer
The weather app also tells me it’s snowing right now, and not a flake is showing up on the security camera live feed. Still, it’s a large system moving in. We might get the 5-10 cm (about 3-5 inches) over the course of the day.
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 