Spring snow, TDG status, and comparing power

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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

Kitty parade, and a few last things before the storm

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There was quite the crowd when I came out to do my rounds this morning!

I counted 23 altogether this morning. I did not see The Distinguished Guest this morning, but he was hanging around inside the sun room when I went to feed them last night. He was so hungry, I was actually able to pet him a bit. Then he ran outside, but when I put food in the kibble house trays, I was able to pet him briefly, again.

He has a very distinctive, low pitched meow, I’ve noticed!

This handsome boy followed me up the driveway and, as I was walking back, he kept flinging himself to the ground in front of me, every few steps. I’d pet him a bit, then he’d run ahead again and the process would be repeated!

He still has pieces of burr stuck on his back. I’d been able to get the worst of them out, but he won’t let me take out any more. His tail is still chock full of burrs, but as soon as I check his tail with my hands (his fur is so long, the burrs are mostly hidden from view), he runs off.

Then, as I was coming back from the sign cam, I found this!

There was actually five of them, but when I stopped to get out my phone and zoom in for a picture, Judgement, who was at the front, ran ahead and under my feet! I had to stop and pet each one of them before they would let me past on the path. 😄

Plans for today had changed again. I got a call from my mother last night, telling me I didn’t need to come over to help her with errands today. After I rescheduled from yesterday because of highway conditions, she decided to try doing her errands herself, using her walker. She got it all done, including a large grocery shopping trip that they delivered to her place later. That’s a lot of walking for someone in their 90’s with wrecked knees!! She sounded quite pleased with herself.

In the end, I still needed to go to town to get a few last things for our Easter baskets – we will be making an extra one this year, as a gift – before the predicted storm hits some time today. I also had some stuff I was going to give to my mother when I helped her with errands today. So I decided I would drop stuff off at her place first, then head to town for my errands.

I called and left a message telling her I was going to drop things off on my way to the other town, but when I got there, she was fully expecting me to stay for a long visit. She had a dessert ready for me – it had bananas in it, which I already told her is among the things I won’t eat because I gave up sugar and starchy foods for Lent – and water boiled for tea. Of course, she mocked me for not eating the banana dessert, telling me I should go to church, instead. As if there is any sort of equivalence. Not that it matters. When we lived in the city, we were going to church every Sunday, but that still wasn’t good enough for her. It wasn’t the “right” church. Whatever that means to her at any given moment! 😄

I did stay for a few minutes as she went through the things I brought for her. One of them was a photo I found (I honestly don’t know where it came from) of me, my mother and my sister. I gave it to her to replace the one she has on her wall of me and her, that has a big X scratched across my face that had to have been done by our vandal, though my mother never noticed it until I spotted it.

It should be interesting to see if she actually replaces the picture. When she saw the one I brought for her, she told me she thought she already had a copy.

Then she started listing things off that she wanted me to take, from the carboard box her groceries were delivered in, to the bucket of peelings for our compost she had in her fridge. I just told her, not today! For someone who complained for years about how their friends from the city kept bringing their unwanted junk (and sometimes pets!) to the farm, because “there’s so much room at the farm!”, it amazes me that she now does that to me. I’ve even pointed that out to her, but she just laughs, and keeps going it!

When I was finally on my way, I took a different route to town. The highway to my mother’s town was nice and clear, but this East/West road turned out to have quite a lot of ice and snow, which was melting, just to make it that much more slippery, along the way. Especially as I got closer to the next highway. That one, at least, was almost clear until I got to the turnoff to where I needed to go. That road had sheer ice on it, including the exit lane. Yikes!!

Once in town, everything was pretty clear. I ran my errands, including picking up the prescription refills that were scheduled to be delivered tomorrow. Since I was in town anyhow, I picked them up – along with some antihistamines. While walking around this morning, I was having a hard time breathing because my sinuses were completely blocked. It took me a while to clue in that, duh, it’s spring. I don’t know what I’m allergic to out there – it’s too early for pollen in our area – but something out there is causing me to react. It’s not as much of a problem when I’m indoors, but once I’m outside, it doesn’t take long for problems to start!

On my way home after finishing my errands, I was happy to see the provincial trunk road was mostly clear. After the other East/West roads I took, I was not sure what to expect.

Now that this trip is done, we should hopefully not need to go anywhere again until the weekend, and by then, any snow from the predicted storm we get should be cleared from the roads, even in the city. At least I hope so. The last few times we’ve been invited to their place, we ended up turning around and going home because of storms!

I need to start my next batch of seeds this week. I’m not quite sure how I’ll be managing that. We just have the one warming mat in the big aquarium greenhouse, and while the Spoon tomatoes are coming up, there isn’t a single pepper germinating yet. There’s the space beside the warming mat, but the eggplant there won’t germinate for a little while yet. The strawberries could handle being moved to the small aquarium, but we’ll also have to move out my daughter’s orchids. They are there not just to protect from cats, which is not needed anymore, but for the extra warmth. Being by the window in winter is too cold for them.

We’ll figure something out.

Until then, I’ll be getting the toilet paper tubes we’ve been saving and make them into little plant pots to start seeds in. We’ll be working on the seeds that need to be started 6-8 weeks before last frost this time.

I’m so glad we were able to block the living room off from that cats! It’s making all this a lot more stress free!

The Re-Farmer

So this is a thing that happened

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*sigh*

Today, I tried to have the door open in my room while I was doing stuff on my computer. I don’t expect Nosencrantz or even Marlee to leave the room, but I’m getting really tired of the constant interruptions of the “safe” cats scratching at the door to be let in or out. In fact, most of the cats are okay coming in, even if Marlee snarls at them. Nosencrantz even stayed on her window shelf rather than hiding somewhere. Marlee parked her butt under my printer table and snarled at any cat that went at the food bowls, and they basically ignored her. Butterscotch was settled under a foot stool I have near the heat vent under the window; a favourite spot for many of the cats.

But then, there’s Turmeric.

She was creeping around and snarling beside the cat cage, which is how I found out Butterscotch was under the stool, enjoying the heat vent. I shooed her away and she wandered on and around the bed for a while. I even pet and cuddled her for a bit, to calm her down, before settling at my computer again.

Then the fight happened.

Turmeric attacked Butterscotch.

I got her away, but not without some damage.

I’m glad we picked up those large gauzes, not long ago! I ended up with two long scratches under my arm, and a few puncture wounds on the top. The gauze was large enough to cover all of them.

Tissue also tends to be snarly when she comes into my room – she really hated being isolated in here when she was healing. But not even she tends to actively attack one of the ladies.

Turmeric, on the other hand, will actively try to search out, stalk and attack Butterscotch, Nozencrantz and sometimes Marlee. I can’t understand why. I mean, we’ve brought Potato Beetle in, he’s never been kept away from the other cats, and she’s never gone after him like that. She especially gets along well with Grandma, who moved out here with us, and let Turmeric “nurse” after Beep Beep decided weaning was going to happen, whether her kittens wanted it or not.

Oh, for crying out loud!!!

I just got interrupted while I was writing the above. Nosencrantz was on her window shelf on my craft table, as she often is, when Leyendecker… LEYENDECKER!!! suddenly jumped onto the table and attacked her. WTF???

I just don’t get it.

Yes, we have too many cats in the house, but it’s a big house, and many of the cats don’t even bother coming in when my door is open. There is nothing to explain why we are having so many cats specifically targeting Butterscotch and Nosencrantz. Especially Nosencrantz. Not even Marlee is as much of a target, but maybe that’s because she is the snarly one and, having survived being abandoned and on her own for 2 years, is no soft target. They are not “new” cats anymore.

I just. Don’t. Get it.

Well, at least this time, I didn’t have to physically separate the cats and end up with more unintentional wounds!

The Re-Farmer

Change in plans

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With all the snowfall warnings we got, my mother called me up last night to talk about helping her with errands today. In the end, we decided I would check conditions on the morning, and we’d go from there.

Well, I’m not going to my mother’s today.

Not even the deer wanted to take my path to the sign cam. 😄

We didn’t get a lot of snow. I was keeping an eye on the highway conditions group I’m in, on Facebook, and people were talking about the icy road conditions. Which makes sense, considering how warm it was while the snow was falling. Nothing but ice on the road, under that snow! Still, the people posting had driven the highways several hours before I would need to, so it wouldn’t necessarily apply anymore.

There was some drifting at the end of the driveway, but the gravel road looked okay. No plowing needed. I shoveled out the sidewalks and a path to the garage, but that was about it. I was going to combine trips and head to town to our regular pharmacy first for a prescription refill, so I called them up just minutes after they opened, thinking to leave soon after.

The pharmacist that answered the phone happens to live half way between us and town. When I said that I was hoping to pick up today, but would require delivery if I didn’t make it, she told me the roads were still very icy. If I were using our van, with its good winter tires, I probably would have gone for it. However, we’re not using the van right now, nor would I use it to run errands with my mother. While my mother’s car has good all-weather tires, they’re still not winter tires, and can’t handle the ice as well.

So I decided to reschedule with my mother to tomorrow. We’re supposed to get more snow later in the week – hopefully not too much, because we’ve just accepted an Easter dinner invitation in the city on Saturday that a daughter and I will be going to! – but not early tomorrow.

I called my mother to reschedule, and she was all “but it’s so nice and sunny outside!” as if that somehow meant there shouldn’t be ice on the roads. If she can’t see it, it’s not real! 😄 Then I headed outside again to shovel the drifts out of the end of the driveway. It didn’t take long. The snow was still light and the drifts weren’t very hard packed. Yet. Which is why I wanted to get them cleared now. I didn’t want them to be there if we do get more snow later on.

Then, since I was out anyway, I cleared the snow in front of the garage so the side doors can be opened easily. Then I widened the path to to the garage. Then the paths to the electricity meter and the burn ring. Finally, I cleared the paths around the cat shelters and to the shrine, where we still keep a food bowl for the shiest of the cats. The snow was blown around enough that the food bowls inside the kibble house had snow in them, and even the trays under the water bowl shelter were full of snow! The cats were definitely happy to have access to food in the sun room. There were 16 of them, just in the sun room, when I put food out this morning. I counted 23 altogether.

Then I came in to a lovely breakfast my daughter prepared. What a sweetheart!

So today is going to be a quieter day than planned. I’m good with that. By rescheduling with my mother to tomorrow, and getting our prescription refills delivered the day after (I am so thankful for that service!!), it’ll mean much less driving around, too.

Meanwhile, the storm warnings are still happening. A Colorado Low is coming in, and the south end of our province is now expected to get another 15-25cm (6-10 inches) of snow, starting tomorrow afternoon and over the next couple of days. How much of that will reach us, or even as far as the city, is hard to say. After that, our highs are supposed to go above freezing, then keep getting warmer. It’s a good thing the municipalities have been clearing the ditches and culverts. That will go a long way to prevent flooding. Not that we’d have anything close to the flooding we had last spring!

I am really looking forward to the snow being gone, and things being dry enough to start working outside!

The Re-Farmer

Snow kidding!

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Every spring, around this time, there’s usually at least one big snowstorm.

Even knowing that, it was a bit of a surprise to see our temperatures above freezing, and a snowfall warning at the same time. Especially when my app was saying “snow will continue for X number of minutes”, and we had no snow falling at all.

Well, the snow has reached us.

There is a storm coming up from the US, and the southern areas are expected to get 10-15cm (4-6 inches) of snow.

We will be getting the snow, but not as much, and not the storm conditions.

I don’t think the cats were happy about it when I came out to top up their food!

The snow is supposed to stop during the night. Tomorrow is supposed to be a bit colder. Hopefully, road conditions will still be good. I just made arrangements to go to my mother’s and help her with her Easter shopping!

The Re-Farmer

Where do you share?

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Views and follows of this blog have been slowly growing over the years. A bit thank you and welcome to those who most recently joined the family! I really appreciate that there are people out there who are enjoying what they find here enough to hit that follow button! I hope you find things interesting and useful. 😊

One of the things WordPress does in their “insights” section is show how many shares the blog gets, and where they are shared to. It’s no surprise that Facebook and Pinterest shares are pretty high on the list – they’re pretty much equal for second and third place among platforms shared to the most. I was rather surprised to see that shares to Telegram pretty much blow away everything else. There are almost twice as many shares to Telegram than all other platforms put together!

Which has me curious.

If you share my posts, where do you share them to, and why do you share to that particular platform? Also, what kinds of posts inspire you to hit that share button?

Thanks in advance for any feedback!

The Re-Farmer

Wimpy!

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One of the things we had to do because the cats were so determined to dig up the soil in our house plants – especially Cabbages! – was cobble together barricades around each individual plant or pot. For smaller plants, we used the plastic containers from cheese balls and pork rinds we found at Costco. Containers I meant to save to use to protect plants in the garden. I’d cut them into strips to put around the inside edge of the pots and, when that wasn’t enough, to loop over the plants. That worked for things like the aloe vera, but one pot with a jade tree in it was just too big. I ended up using some 1/4 hardware cloth I had – again, something I bought to use for something else entirely – to make a wall around the entire pot. It took 2 pieces to go all the way around. This pot is a square with an inner pot that can be removed. The outer pot has a reservoir for bottom watering, and we had to jam the hardware cloth between the two. It was the only way to keep the cats from simply pulling it out. That still wasn’t enough, and we had to make a “roof” over it, too. I only had 1 inch hardware cloth left, but it was enough. Sometimes, we’d find Cabbages sitting on top of it, looking out the window!

Now that the living room is barricaded and can be used as a plant room, most of our house plants have been moved over. The one hanging in the kitchen can stay, since the cats have been leaving it alone up there. A couple of larger pots, however, needed a second person to open and close the door in the barrier and keep the cats out.

Yesterday, that finally got done.

One large aloe vera handled the transfer well. After removing the plastic strips around it, it was a bit floppy, because some of its leaves were forced to grow into curves by its protective force field.

The jade tree in the big pot had outgrown its cage a while ago. Branches were starting to grow through the larger holes of the “roof”, so that had already been removed. My daughter was a sweetheart and was able to manhandle the pot into the living room for me – the thing barely fits on the largest shelf of the plant stand we’ve been using for them! Once it was in place, I wrestled with the hardware cloth to get it off.

As soon as it came off, everything fell over!

There were three main stems in the pot and, with the cage around the pot holding them up, they didn’t have the strength to hold their own weight! On top of that, the branches were twisted around, some around each other, in various directions.

It took some doing, but…

I got it supported.

I had some thick doweling left from my outdoor kitchen model. They’re short, but strong enough that I could put them around the thickest stem and use super long twist ties to support it at the base. I was even able to support a smaller stem to those as well. The third stem got its own support.

That still left floppy tops, though. After scrounging around, I found a couple long cherry wood stems in the basement we’d saved with the intention of eventually carving something out of them. One of those is now shoved into the middle of the pot, and I was able to weave some paracord around various branches and stems and get them lifted up and supported.

The top broke off one of the smaller stems, along with a whole lot of leaves. After cleaning up all the broken leaves, I planted the broken top. Jade trees are remarkable in their ability to propagate. If I wanted to, I could have started up a new plant out every single one of those fallen leaves. I think the broken stem has a good chance of survival.

It will take a while, but eventually the stems will gain strength and be able to support themselves. Still, it’s interesting to see how the cage that was there to protect the plant also weakened it so much.

There’s a life lesson in there.

Meanwhile, now that these last two big plants are moved away from the dining room window, it suddenly seems to much bigger and brighter in there! 😄

The Re-Farmer

Our 2023 garden: new sproots!

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Our newest seedlings are starting to show!

I few days ago, I spotted our first Spoon tomatoes, but they are so fine and spindly, I waited until today to try and get a photo.

Still no sign of peppers, but there’s about 8 or so tomatoes sprouting, and signs of more seedling elbowing their way to the surface. They are so bitty!

Speaking of bitty, we also have our first strawberries sprouting!

Growing strawberries from seed is totally new to me, so I’m pretty happy to see these. Over time, I want to have lots of strawberries, so if growing them from seeds works, that would make it much more affordable compared to buying transplants or bare roots. We’ll probably still do both. I want to use them as a living ground cover around the silver buffalo berry bushes. Those are nitrogen fixers, so it would be a good combination, and when the bushes start getting too big and start shading out the strawberries, we can just transplant them somewhere else.

I am so looking forward to having our own berries. We all love them, but they are so expensive to buy! My younger daughter was asking about growing blueberries, but they need acidic soil. Ours is very alkaline. We will need to find a spot and focus on lowering the pH so we can plant some. Once we clear more of the dead trees out of the spruce grove, we might be able to get some good spaces in there. I’ve read the spruces increase soil acidity, so I will want to do some soil tests and see how it is now.

So many things we’d like to grow!

Little by little, it’ll get done.

The Re-Farmer

Pretty poser, possible new addition, still making space, and feedback request

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Look who followed me this morning!

This photo really highlights that mix of white and black fur he has! When the light doesn’t get these stark contrasts, he looks like a grey old man. 😄

Also, the poor bugger has SO many burrs hiding in the long fur. Every chance I got to pet him, I’d try to pull some more out, but I keep finding more. He’s got a big clump on his chest, and I found an even bigger one at the back of his belly. There’s another big one behind one of his ears, though I’m not sure if that’s a burr, or a matt of fur. We’re going to have to take scissors to this poor guy!

Speaking of poor guys. Or gals.

The girls can hear stuff outside from upstairs much better than on the ground floor, so when my younger daughter went flying out of the house, I figured it was to break up another cat fight. It was over by the time I joined her, but it was not what I expected. I figured The Distinguished Guest and Shop Towel were at it again, but nope. It was Rolando Moon…

And another orange cat.

A long haired orange cat.

Rolando Moon was in the tree in front of the kitchen window, with a tuft of long orange fur stuck in her teeth.

I got it out for her.

The cat had run away behind the storage house and, as we watched, I spotted it crossing the snow behind the pump shack. I realize I have seen this cat before. About a week or so ago, as I head up the driveway while doing my morning rounds, a cat exploded out from under the garage door and went running across the old hay yard, disappearing behind the shed and barn. With the sun rise behind it, I wasn’t sure if it was an orange cat, or a grey one, but I was leaning towards orange. All I knew for sure is that this was not a cat I’d seen before. Seeing the long haired orange walking across the snow in better light yesterday evening, I think it’s the same cat I saw before.

We’ve had long haired orange cats here before, and I have old pictures and video of one particularly mean bugger from the last time we visited the farm before my father passed away. It’s been a few years, though. Since moving here, we’ve gone from having almost all orange yard cats to only one – Rolando Moon, who is also among those photos I took so many years ago.

So it’s possible we might get a new addition to the yard cats (I counted 23 or 24 this morning). That’s assuming Rolando Moon doesn’t drive it away!

On another note, I was able to spend some more time cleaning up old blog posts to free up media storage space. I completely forgot just how many photo posts I made over the years! For a while, I was doing both Critter of the Day and Photo of the Day posts at the same time. While a lot of these posts are basically just a picture with maybe a line of text, some of them had four or five photos each.

No wonder I’ve been running out of storage space!

As I go further back, though, a lot more are full blog posts that also have a whole lot of critter photos added in. I’ve been leaving those. I also left the ones where the images are stored on Flickr. I still have more to go through, but I did manage to free up more storage space. As the seasons progress this year, the photo heavy gardening and progress posts I used to do will be a thing of the past, or I’m going to be facing the same problem in a very short time. I’ll be putting things together into videos, instead. As far as I can tell, YouTube and Rumble don’t have any storage limits.

It was a bit nostalgic going through those old photos before deleting them off of WordPress. There was one really good photo of Nicky the Nose’s face, looking directly at the camera. Gosh, Nosencrantz looks so much like him! No DNA test needed to confirm paternity! We haven’t seen Nicky the Nose for a couple of years, now. I found some old photos of Shop Towel, looking younger and less beat up, along with other toms that used to visit, but no longer do. Quite a few of our own yard cats that have disappeared in there, too. Seeing pictures of Keith as a kitten brought back memories. We sure miss him.

There are so many good photos. I can see why I posted them, and hate to have to remove them. I want to find some way to bring them back.

Hhmmm… What are your thoughts on this idea. If we were to use some of these photos on a site like Red Bubble, where they could be printed on demand on things like mugs, clothing, journals, clocks, stickers, etc., with all proceeds of sales going towards the care and feeding of the cats, how do you think that would go over? Would you buy, say, a cell phone case with beautiful bird picture on it? Or a notebook with a picture of a deer sticking its tongue out? Or a t-shirt with a cat photo?

Or maybe you have some other idea for these photos to suggest?

The Re-Farmer