Almost clear

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I was able to pop outside and work on the willows a bit more. I really wanted to get that power line clear.

After clearing a bit more from where we left off last time, I moved to the outer yard and worked on the willows behind the junk pile.

I’m going to be so happy when we can finally have that junk hauled away.

I used the wide angle on my phone to get this photo, which is why everything looks oddly distorted. The willows aren’t actually bent like that in their middles.

The power line is now clear of willow branches. What you see on the ground are the vines I pulled down from the trees in the process. After this picture was taken, I also cleared some of the branches that were growing over the junk pile. Working back here was a pain. The vines on the ground were a tripping hazard. The maple tree on the right was in the way of some cutting angles. I actually expected the junk pile to be more in the way, but it wasn’t. An unexpected problem was burrs. They were mostly hidden by the vines. I was pulling those off of my clothes by the handful!

The branches have been set aside for now. When it’s more pleasant out, we’ll go over them later to gather and strip the longest, straightest branches for wattle weaving. The rest will go onto the burn pile.

There are still some maple suckers that will need to be cut away, as they are getting tall enough to reach the power line. That will require different tools and more time. At some point, someone wrapped fencing wire around the maple, likely to protect it from cattle. The suckers have grown through the wire’s mesh. Since I have to work around that anyhow, I figure I may as well clear the tree enough to take out the wire completely. Hopefully, no sections of tree have grown around the wire itself anywhere.

I will also need to cut away those vines, and they will need to go into the burn pile, too, so they don’t root themselves and spread. This section of chain link fence is the only place we’re allowing vines to grow, but it still needs to be kept under control.

I feel much better now that the power line is clear again. Those willows grow back fast!

The Re-Farmer

Well, it’s a start

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Since I wanted to keep an eye on the kitties anyway, I decided to see what I could do with the willow branches. After sorting the longest ones out, I started weaving.

This is all of the branches I have so far.

Minus one that was too bent to use. At least here. When we’re ready to weave the ends, we only need pieces less than 3 feet long, so I could probably salvage it.

As we get more branches to weave in, they’ll get pounded as low as we can, with each layer added keeping everything below in place. Right now, some of them just sort of pop back up a bit after they’ve been pushed down. Until it’s all tighter together, it won’t be holding much soil in place! One more layer along the short wall, and I think we can get away with no longer debarking the branches.

I really hope those maple posts that still have their bark won’t start growing.

I’m just itching to get back out there and cut more willow branches for this, but the weather out there really sucks.

I want to keep an eye on the bitty kitties, though, so maybe…

(glances out the window and tries to convince myself the wind isn’t that bad, and it’s not that cold out…)

The Re-Farmer

Oh, no, two!

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It’s windy and damp and chilly, but I headed outside anyway. I wanted to keep an eye on the sudden kitten, and used that as an excuse to clean up the trimmed willow branches for the burn pile, and see what I could do with the wattle weaving.

I did not see any sign of the kitten I saw earlier, but then I found this.

The wind was blowing bits of plastic packaging from the shingles, and the poor thing was hissing and spitting at every movement.

I was able to go up to it and pick it up. Unlike the earlier kitten, which seemed okay with that, if more interested in finding mama, but not this one! This one was a little fireball, hissing and spitting and showing me claws. So I quickly put it into the cat house, where it immediately quieted down.

I hung around to see what happened. Caramel showed up and seemed to be looking around. Could Caramel be their mama? I was sure I saw Caramel with slightly older kittens, and that a little grey tabby that we’ve been seeing by itself was hers. That one looks old enough to be newly weaned, though, and these ones are maybe 3 weeks old.

After a while, I saw the first on emerge from under the cat house, looking around. It came out when it saw me, so I was able to pick it up and put it in the cat house with what I assume is its sibling.

Caramel looked around for a while, then took off. Whether that means she’s gone to bring another kitten, or they’re not hers, I have no idea.

One thing I noticed since we set up the water bowl shelter is that the water is not being drunk as quickly. Usually, I’d find at least the metal bowls mostly empty, and half the big plastic bowl gone, too, by morning. Now, they’re still almost full. One reason may be that other critters had been drinking the water overnight, and the new water bowl shelter is preventing that somehow. The other is, the floor of the water bowl shelter is a lot higher. I think the smaller kittens are having a harder time getting into it. I see them drinking from other places now, where they usually wouldn’t.

So, I tried this.

It’s one of the leftover scrap boards we used for the walls and floor of the water bowl shelter. One end is split, so I tucked that end under the sledge the cat house rests on, so it won’t be easily knocked about. If nothing else, the kittens will be curious enough to go up it and into the water bowl shelter. Once its roof is done and the shelter is positioned close to the kibble house, I’ll see if it’s still needed. Depending on how they line up, cats should be able to go from inside the kibble house up into the water bowl house.

I have a shorter board that I’m thinking of putting in front of the cat house entry, so the bitty kitties can use it to get in without help. I just have to find a way to stabilize it while still keeping it temporary.

As an aside, I shared a picture of our set up with the water bowl shelter added in. She asked if she could use the picture to show as an example of how to make cat shelters! She works with rural rescues only, so she sees a lot of farm cats that don’t get a lot of help. A lot of people say to let nature take its course, or to just shoot them. Well, with our outside cats, we know nature will take its course no matter what we do, but we can at least provide them with food, water and shelter by the house, and the closer they are to the house, the better their chances. She wants to use our set up to show people that they can still provide shelter for their feral and semi feral cats, using what’s on hand. Of course, I gave permission to use the photo, and gave more details about them that I hope are useful. Especially about adding heat in the cat house. Which I really hope will be enough for the newest babies!

I wonder if I’ll find another bitty kitty when I go outside again, later?

The Re-Farmer

Yesterday’s progress: trellises down, and pruning willow

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Things turned out to be rather pleasant yesterday afternoon, so I took advantage of it to get some stuff off my to-do list.

First, the trellises.

The netting and bamboo stakes are all put away. I even unwound the blue twine from the pea trellis. We won’t be planting vegetables here again. We’ll be planting food trees and bushes in the area, instead (except for the area over the phone line, wide enough to drive a vehicle through, that we’ll be keeping clear). So, the trellises are coming down!

The five uprights from the pea trellis all broke at ground level. I was able to pull the others straight out of the ground, with only a little big of wiggling. You can tell by the dirty on the ends, which pile has those!

Since I had the materials, I used some of the pieces to make a buck and pole “fence” over the sea buckthorn. Only two have survived, so I only wanted it long enough to go over those. Hopefully, that will dissuade deer from nibbling on them. The gap in the hedge is right near here. One end is far enough out that it should make a deer not want to jump the fence there at all. On the trail cams, I’ve been seeing quite a few deer walking around this corner of the property, so it seems they are already not jumping the fence here much. There is another spot they prefer to jump the fence at.

Later on, I decided it was worth working on the willow. I’m after branches to weave into the wattle wall I’m building in the old kitchen garden, so this is getting two things done at once.

The trunks were barely visible from all the branches that had grown along them. Thankfully, we have an extended pole pruner that I can use for the higher branches, instead of trying to get at them with loppers from a ladder. You can see the vine has climbed it quite a bit, too!

The power line to the house is still not clear of branches. This job will be continued later, and includes the trees on the other side of the chain link fence.

The longest and straightest branches were kept, stripped of side branches and leaves, and a daughter started debarking the biggest ones for me while I pruned more, until it started raining. Then I grabbed a knife and helped debark. Wattle fencing isn’t normally debarked, but I want to debark the branches that are going to have contact with soil – because the last thing I want is for willow to start growing right next to the house! I love willow, but that is not a tree you want close to infrastructure!

There were some really straight, thin branches I kept, too, putting them on the pile of maple and cherry wood that’s already there. Who knows. We might find some use for them.

This is all the branches we got out of there, so far. Not even close to how many will be needed to weave a wall. Only the bottom few inches needs to be tightly woven, as it will be holding soil in, but eventually that will be on all sides, not just the “back” that is the focus to get finished first. The high parts of the back wall are to keep things out, rather than in. It’s going to be a challenge to find enough suitable branches for this!

Today is supposed to be a semi-warm day – with both rain and snow expected – then we’ll have several days with highs just barely above freezing, before it warms up again and stays warm for about a week. Hopefully. At least the rain will keep those willow branches from drying out. I’m hoping to at least get these ones woven in, some time today!

The Re-Farmer

Oh, no!

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I was nearing the end of my morning rounds, walking past the kibble house, when I spotted something both adorable and heartbreaking.

A new kitten.

A tiny, cold, wet, alone kitten.

It was not there when I did their kibble. I did a head count and I think I counted 25 in total, with 3 or 4 of them being adults. Even Rolando Moon showed up for breakfast.

Because it’s so small, I was able to pick it up and try to warm it up. It is so young, its eyes are still blue! I put it near some kibble, and it completely ignored it.

Eventually, I put it in the cats’ house, which is the warmest, driest place for it. It stayed there for a while, but when I came back later and it saw me, it started coming out. Then more cats came around.

It kept going from kitten to kitten, looking for mama. I put it inside the kibble house – it’s so small, it can barely climb over the board that keeps the trays from being knocked to the ground.

Rosencrantz was the only mama around at the time. The little one was meowing for mama, and Rosencrantz did come over to give it some sniffs, but later on, she growled at it.

I eventually put it back into the cat house and quickly left, as seeing me (as well as it can see at this stage of life!), hoping it would stay. We will have to check frequently, to make sure it doesn’t end up stuck outside. I don’t think it can climb into the cats’ house on its own.

I am hoping that its mama – whichever cat that is! – has decided to move her litter into the cats’ house, and that this is the first one. If I’m right, I hope that means we’ll find a litter of babies tucked away safely in the warmth.

It’s the middle of October, and we’re getting snow.

We will monitor and see how things go. If necessary, I’ll contact the cat lady for advice. She’ll be giving us dates for two females (Tissue and Big Rig being the last indoor cats to get spayed) and one male (whichever of the male yard kittens we can grab this are old enough) soon. She’s also looking to get ahold of some donated cat food for us, too.

On top of all this, I checked my mother’s car. It took several days, but her tire is flat again. We won’t have room in the budget to get it fixed until the end of the month, so we’re going to have to use our van to drive my mother around. *sigh*

Now, excuse me while I have my lunch while worrying about a teeny, tiny kitten outside!

The Re-Farmer

So many bebbies

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What a crowd this morning!

There are no adult cats in this picture, though the oldest kittens are very close to adult size. The tiniest unit is the little grey tabby on the far right.

I tried to do a head count this morning. The chimney liner at the bottom right corner has three white kittens on it. Including the ones that I spotted hiding in various places, waiting for me to be gone before coming out to eat, I counted 24 cats this morning. Only one, for sure, maybe two, were adult cats. Most of the mamas seem to just take off somewhere, coming back only briefly. They seem more than content to leave their babies for us to feed!

It’s shortly after noon as I write this, and we are at 4C/39F. The accumulated snow predicted did not happen here; the rain took care of that! We’re supposed to reach a high of 6C/43F this afternoon, with a mix of rain and snow. Still too wet to do some of the outdoor things I want, but there are other things we should be able to work on. Tomorrow is supposed to be warmer, followed by a couple of cold days, then one day where we are supposed to get a high of 10C/50F. That would be a good day to get to the marsh my mother wanted to go to, and see the migrating birds. It might be too cold to have the picnic outside she wanted to have, but there is a small cafe there, with an excellent view of the marsh.

Hmm… Looking at a different app, their 10 day forecast has us getting even warmer, reaching as high as 16C/61F, two Sundays from now! I hope that one is more accurate. We could use every nice day we can get to get work done outside!

The Re-Farmer

Kitties’ first snowfall!

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We’ve had the odd snow flurries before now, but this morning is the first real snowfall, where some snow actually stayed on the ground.

Most of which is already got at the time of this writing, but we’re still supposed to get more tonight and tomorrow.

For most of the yard cats, this is the first time they’ve seen a real snowfall!

There are at least two, maybe more, kittens hiding under the kibble house, where there is a sheet of rigid insulation to help keep their tootsies warm. It isn’t visible, but there is another sheet under the floor boards, so under the kibble house is a good little shelter for nervous babies.

A bit more work needs to be done on the water bowl house, but there will be no more coats of paint this year. I moved it to roughly where it will go to stay, and put the water bowls inside. Now the cats just need to figure out where the water is.

After the roof is done (you can see the piece of metal roofing for it, held down by stacks of rejected shingles to keep it from blowing away, behind it), I want to put hooks under the roof of the kibble house, and at least one under the water blow house. Once things are in place, we’ll run the extension cord that’s plugged into the cat’s house, up and under the roof edges, to power the heated water bowl in the water bowl house.

You can tell by where there is no snow on the roof of the cats’ house, that the heat bulb is doing its job! I am still putting kibble on the roof, usually on either side of the peak near the entry, but now I’m making a point of putting some over the warm spot.

I will no longer be putting kibble by the pump shack door. The kittens seem to have all moved closer to the house, so at this point, it will just attract things like skunks or raccoons. I brought over the kibble tray and will later tuck it just inside the entry into the cats’ house.

I’m seeing kittens inside the cats’ house through the windows, but they really seem to prefer the shelf shelter. I think they like the smaller, more enclosed spaces.

I’ve had to brace all three levels with some scrap fibre board, because they break the insulation when they get startled and rush out. I throw a handful of kibble into each opening, including the top shelf where one corner has been boxed off with insulation to form another little shelter. I’ve left us with about 2/3rds of 1 shelf for storage!

I’d like to find something sturdy to put at the top of this shelf. What I rigged up for last winter worked, but slowly broke apart over time. I want to put something more weather proof up there, that can also handle having cats jumping all over it. Every now and then, I’ll come out the door and startle a pile of 4 or 5 kittens all curled up and napping!

Who knew, when we took this shelf out of the house but found it too heavy and awkward to easily move to storage, that it would be used like this! It has come in incredibly handy.

The tuxedo was just loving playing in the snow on the water bowl house roof! Every now and then, he would start sliding down. 😂 I don’t think they’ll be playing up here as much once the scrap piece of metal roof is installed. The metal will be a lot colder in winter, and hotter in summer!

Looking at the security camera live feed right now, I can see we still have flurries, but I can no longer see any snow on the ground, anywhere. According to my phone’s app, we are at 2C/36F with a ReelFeel of -5C/23F. We’re still expected to get 3-6cm/1-2in of snow accumulation by tomorrow afternoon, before it turns to rain.

Hopefully, things will dry up enough that we can finish that water bowl house roof, and all the other little things that need to be finished up outside! I had hoped to continue working on that L shaped bed in the old kitchen garden yesterday, but it was just too wet and windy for the work. So I got my day off after all. Today will be another write off for the outside stuff, but we still have lots of tomatoes ripening faster than they can be eaten, so this morning, I started cooking them down for a tomato sauce. It’s mostly made with yellow pear tomatoes – it’s amazing how prolific those ones were! – but I used all four types of tomatoes we grew this year in it, including one last little Sophie’s Choice tomato.

I’d really rather be working outside, though!

The Re-Farmer

A day “off”?

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Things were looking pretty good when I headed out to do my morning rounds.

I got a giggle when the tuxedo moved off the chimney liner and, instead of the one white kitten I thought was behind him, there were three! I had a head count of “only” seventeen this morning. I couldn’t tell if any cats had stayed in the cat house, with the heater bulb plugged in again, overnight or not.

It was clear we’d had some rain last night – and a fair bit of wind!

The joy of time stamps. The gate cam stand got blown over just before 6pm last night. My daughter and I were still outside, cleaning up after finishing the kibble house roof, at the time. The winds had certainly picked up by then!

As I write this, it’s 4C/39F out there, with a “reel feel” of -4C/25F. It started raining after I finished my rounds and was back inside. I might have a day “off” from working on the old kitchen garden today, though it is supposed to clear up this afternoon and warm up to 8C/46F. The more I can get done, the better, because tomorrow we’re either going to get more rain, or between 5-10cm/2-4in of snow, depending on which app I look at.

I’m happy to say that, while I did have pain issues last night – I had to get one of my daughters to open a can of wet cat food for me, because I couldn’t – I’m in a lot less pain today then I was expecting to be. I even got sleep last night.

Oh, that reminds me. I’d written before about some sleep issues I was having, unrelated to pain or even my usual “busy brain.” It was centered around a strange sort of pressure and almost a buzzing feeling in my head, as soon as I went to bed. A clue to the cause came when my husband and I traded phones, because my phone’s Bluetooth wouldn’t work with the new OBDII reader he got me. That turned out to be a known problem with my model of phone, but not with his, newer model.

My habit when going to bed was to put my phone on the charger, then set it up on a phone stand on my nightstand, or on a wireless charger in the wall shelf where a headboard would be, if my bed had one. I preferred not to use the wireless charger, as I kept having to take my phone out of its case for it to work properly. My phone serves as my clock and alarm, but I also do my nightly devotions on a Bible app at my bedside, and often set it to play relaxing music for several hours to help me sleep.

I’d already suspected my phone when the discomfort in my head was slightly worse if the phone was in the shelf near my pillow, rather than on the night stand. When it got so much worse after switching to a newer phone that sleep was increasingly difficult, I tried an experiment. I can’t just shut my phone off for the night since, as I mentioned, I use it as my alarm clock, etc. So I just set my phone up on the charger, further away from my bed. Just a few feet, really.

The strange pressure/buzzing in my head went away, and my sleep has improved.

Well. As much as possible with cats in my room. 😁

I have no idea what the phone is doing that is causing the problem. It only seems to be an issue when I’ve got it on a charger, not while using it normally, throughout the day.

Weird.

The Re-Farmer