Those eyes!
We are working to socialize this one, as he already has a family that wants to take him home. Progress is slow, unfortunately.
The Re-Farmer
What a beauty!
Hello, Mom!
Three of the four bebbies in the pump shack, running out to greet Mom.
This would be Junk Pile’s second litter. The oldest cattens in the yard are hers, and she pays no attention to them at all anymore!
Unfortunately, while I was watching them this morning, she looked like she was trying to lead them away from the pump shack. I really hope she doesn’t move them somewhere further away.
On that note, I did see two of Rosencrantz’s kittens on the junk pile this morning. I don’t know of they are back, or if they were just there waiting their turn for the kibble bowl. There is an older grey and white catten that shows up every now and then. It seems to be on its own, and I don’t know which mama it belongs to. For all I can tell, it showed up from someplace else entirely and discovered reliable food.
Last night, I also saw two dark kittens playing in the old kitchen garden. I believe they are Caramel’s babies. As far as I can figure out, those should be the last of them, but when it comes to yard cats, who knows?
The Re-Farmer
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Handsome!
Our 2022 garden: a sad little potato harvest
This afternoon, my daughter and I got working on the remaining potato beds.
The first bed I worked on was the mid season Bridget potatoes. They have been ready to harvest for a while, now.
Based on how things went after harvesting the early season Caribe potatoes, my expectations were very low, but it needed to be done.
I started off by pulling away the straw mulch. Most of the plants I dug up had nothing under them, but every now and then…
…I would pull back the straw, and there would be these lovely little potatoes, just sitting on top of the cardboard layer!
We had company while we were working.
This little bugger kept trying to climb my daughter while she was using the garden fork!
This one was content to just be held, but we had to put him down so we could work. It was so cute to seem him starting to fall asleep among the summer squash!
The soil was greatly improved since we first made these “instant garden” beds with the cardboard and straw. Granted, two days of almost constant, gentle rain did help soften the ground a lot, but it was much easier to dig into the soil with the garden fork. There were lots of worms and while I saw slugs, there wasn’t as much as I’d seen with that first bed I’d harvested.
The late season All Blue potatoes had more of a return.
This is it. We had 10 pounds of each type of potato. I doubt we got the same amount back. Certainly now with the Bridget potatoes.
One of the reasons I chose these varieties is because they are good for storage, but with so few of them, that’s not going to happen. Normally, we’d cure them, then bring them inside, but these got a wash down and we’ll be eating them right away.
Though we got more of the All Blue, we might actually have less. Unlike the Bridget, quite a few had insect damage. They also had scab on quite a few of them. I don’t think I’ve ever seen scab on potatoes grown here before, even when I was a kid.
The straw got loosely returned to the bed. There may not have been a lot of potatoes, but there was an insane amount of crab grass rhizomes. We tried to pull out as much as we could as we worked, but that is something that requires a lot to get rid off. For now, the straw is back to try and keep them from getting worse.
I am thinking that these beds are a good place to build some permanent squash tunnels. At the very least, we can use the path between the beds as the path inside a tunnel. Though this has been a terrible year for the squash, we got enough growth that I could see which ones are the most enthusiastic climbers. I look forward to trying them again. For the permanent squash tunnels, I plant to make low raised beds on the outside. Since we wouldn’t be able to access the beds from the inside of the tunnel, they would only be two feet wide, with a four foot wide path inside the tunnel. I think I would like to build at least three tunnels, though we might not be able to get them all done this fall. They are going to be a lot stronger than the ones we slapped together to start with, though even those lasted longer than we expected them to.
Now that the potatoes are harvested, and since the melons in these beds are a loss, we can actually go ahead and start building something in this area as soon as we can.
The Re-Farmer
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Tree protector, and good roof news!
Last night, I finished off a section of chicken wire salvaged from row covers from last year’s garden, and made a protector for the ash tree sapling my mother gave me to transplant. I sprayed it with the high visibility paint last night, so it was dry and ready to set up, this morning.
You can’t see them, but it is pegged to the ground.
This should keep it safe from getting eaten by deer or something!
This afternoon, we were outside harvesting our potatoes, which I will share about in my next post. While we were out, I got a message from my brother, on his way home from our mother’s. Once he was home, we were able to talk on the phone.
The short version: my mother agreed to one of the estimates, and provided my brother with cash for the deposit.
We’re getting a new roof.
As expected, she did start to back off and starting saying maybe someone else could pay for half of it. My brother reminded her that if she started playing her games again, he would simply cancel the whole thing and the roof won’t get done. There is a possibility she’ll try again, but if it comes down to it, he will use his Power of Attorney to make sure the company gets paid. She can’t mess around with people like this, but has a long history of it. For now, she is following through with her promise.
While talking to my brother, I told him about how, in her efforts to lure us out here, my mother insisted that this place was “perfect”. We didn’t need anything. We could leave everything behind and move right in, because everything we needed was here. Everything was “perfect”.
Of course, we knew that wasn’t how it would be, but we were still thrown by just how bad we discovered things had gotten. As I put it to my brother, my mother didn’t keep up her end of the bargain, in her efforts to get us to move out here. Now her habit of making promises, then backing out of them when it came time to follow through, is costing her thousands of dollars more than if she had followed through on the roof situation back in 2019.
There is one possible thing we can do to help with that, though. Since the court ruled against our vandal (and he now owes me $500 in court costs), he had 30 days to appeal. I’m not sure if that was 30 calendar days or 30 business days. Either way, I’ve not been served with anything. Which means we might be able to get a scrap dealer out here to get rid of the old cars and other metal junk our vandal was trying to get money from me for. I don’t expect we’d get more than a few hundred dollars out of it, but who knows. It’s not something we’d do until spring, though.
The main thing is, we’re getting a much needed new roof. The work will likely be done in November, though their schedule might allow for something in October. We shall see.
I’ve sent an email and phoned the company to start the ball rolling. I hope to hear from them tomorrow, though they might contact my brother directly for the financial part of it, first.
I wish I could say I feel relieved, but I probably won’t feel that until the work is done and paid for!
The Re-Farmer
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Newfound baby, and a follow up
I have been avoiding going into the pump shack for the past while, because I was pretty sure there was a litter in there, and didn’t want to disturb the mama. They tend to move their litters further away when that happens.
Last night, I figured it was long enough to check things out.
Look what I found!
I only saw one, but could hear others. This one looks a lot like most of Rosencrantz’s babies, except smaller. Which makes it pretty clear who the daddy is! I’ve been calling him Sad Face, because he has this permanent tragic expression. I found out recently the girls have another name for him.
Shop Towel.
Because he is the daddy of Tissue…
*face palm*
Given the size of the kittens, I decided to bring one of the kibble trays over. I was going to leave it in front of the hole at the bottom of the pump shack door, but it was still raining and the roof overhang isn’t enough to keep it dry. So I tucked it inside for now.
I still think there is at least one more litter we haven’t seen yet, either in the collapsing log building or the threshing machine, near the fire pit. All I heard was maternal “mama is here” type noises, though, not kitten noises.
Being born so late in the year, these babies are going to be at much higher risk over the winter, no matter how many shelters we provide for them. Hopefully, we will be in the area expected to have a mild winter this year, rather than the area expected to have exceptionally cold temperatures. We’re in a sort of ambiguous border between the two areas, and the lake effect can change things dramatically.
On another note, my brother is taking the roofing estimates to my mother today. I pray my mother will actually follow through with her promise to pay for a new roof, and not choke once she sees the numbers and back off, as she has in the past. She still thinks things should cost what they did, 50 years ago. I well remember how, as part of our deal to move out here, she agreed to pay for the movers, only to try to back off when it came time to actually fork over the cash. Even when she finally did, she refused to pay the full amount, and my brother was kind enough to cover the balance. My mother can be very cruel and manipulative. My brother has already told her that if she starts doing that sort of thing again, he will not put up with it, and will stop the process completely. The last thing we need is to hire a company to do the roof, only to have her refuse to pay after it’s done. Neither my brother nor I can afford to cover the cost if she does that sort of thing again.
If she does follow through, we are looking to have the roof done in November. Which would be so amazing. I am afraid to hope it will get done, though. I’ve got too many knives stuck in my back as it is.
The Re-Farmer
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Making yellow tomato sauce
There are only two people in our household that enjoy eating fresh tomatoes, but even they are getting tomatoed out when it comes to the Yellow Pear tomatoes! They were starting to accumulate, so I decided to make a small batch of tomato sauce.
Along with the Yellow Pear tomatoes, there were about five or six Chocolate Cherry tomatoes, and two Cup of Moldova tomatoes on hand, so they wall went into the pot together!
Being so small, they got mushy very quickly, so it wasn’t long before I was running them through the finer colander we have. Some of the seeds still get through, but no one seems to mind that. If I were making a tomato paste, though, I’d run it through a sieve as well, to get rid of the seeds.
After straining the tomatoes, I fried up some finely chopped onions and garlic in some olive oil until soft, then added the strained tomatoes back to the pot. For seasoning, I added salt and pepper, a bit of sugar, and a bay leaf, then cooked it down until slightly thicker.
It wasn’t quite enough sauce to fill a 750ml jar.
What a colour!
Not too long ago, I found some large mouth screw on jar lids – usually I can just find regular mouth. Since this is going into the fridge, I much prefer to use the screw on lid, rather than the canning lids and rings. I’ll have to pick up more of these when I find them again. Most of the canning jars we have are wide mouth jars.
Not being a fan of tomatoes in general, I didn’t actually taste this to see how it turned out. I’ll have to get my husband or daughter to do a taste test and let me know what they think!
The Re-Farmer
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Our 2022 garden: deer damage and harvested squash
When doing my rounds, one of the things I’ve been making sure to check is for damage to the berry bushes we plants. Especially that one highbush cranberry that has been eaten, twice. Putting the old saw horse over it seems to be helping, and there are even the tiniest of green leaves appearing again. We’ve had a pretty constant and gentle rain since yesterday evening, so that is sure to be helping as well.
This morning, I found this.
Overnight, the self-seeded sunflowers had almost all their leaves eaten. The green beans also had a lot of their leaves eaten, along the length of about half the trellis. The pods got left, though. We have stopped harvesting the beans, though we could probably still be picking the green ones. They are still blooming and producing new pods, though in much reduced quantities.
Two of the self seeded (well… bird seeded…) sunflowers by the sweet corn also got et. There is no new damage to the corn, though. It doesn’t look like the deer went into the bed. Just munched the sunflowers at the edge.
I’m not sure if this is deer damage, or some small critter. One of the sweet potato bags got torn apart more, and the grass mulch turned over, which isn’t too unexpected. The bottle waterer in the black grow bag being knocked out is a bit of a surprise. Nothing else in that bag was disturbed.
Happily, the eggplants were completely undisturbed. I put everything back, including the mulch, and in the process found that the sweet potato vine that got pulled aside seemed undamaged, too.
I checked everything else closely, and nothing else seems damaged. I did, however, decide it was time to harvest the ripe squash and pumpkins, just in case. Except the giant pumpkins. We could harvest both of those, but I’ll come by with the wagon to carry them to the house, another time.
There is the one Kakai hulless pumpkin and three Baby Pam pumpkins. Both have more green ones on the vines that I hope will get time to ripen fully. I also harvested seven Red Kuri squash, leaving one to ripen a bit longer on the vine. These are all now set up in the kitchen to cure.
With all the other squash I looked at, I’m rather impressed with the Boston Marrow. We will still likely get only two that can be harvested – one of which is starting to turn colour – but I’m seeing a surprising number of little ones developing, plus more female flowers. It looks like they would have been very prolific, had we not had such a terrible spring. Definitely something to try again next year.
The Baby Pam pumpkins are supposed to be an excellent pie pumpkin, but with just these three little ones, there isn’t enough to make one! We’ll find some other way to enjoy them. I do look forward to trying the seeds in that Kakai pumpkin. We already know we like the Red Kuri squash, and I promised one of those to my mother. I think next year, we should plant more of them.
I’m thankful that we at least have these to harvest. We planted so many more that just didn’t make it. Hopefully, we’ll have better growing conditions next year!
The Re-Farmer
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A puddle of fur
After doing my evening rounds yesterday, I spent some time in the sun room, being violently cuddled by two kittens.
Other kittens were not so aggressive in their cuddles.
Of the three in the box, only one of them is socialized, though the calico does sometimes let us pet it.
I’ve found at many of six kittens shmushed together on the pillow in that box, including some of the oldest, biggest kittens squished in with the smaller ones!
What an adorable puddle of fur.
The Re-Farmer
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Our 2022 garden: not much going on
We got a small harvest this morning.
With the beans either done, or being left to dry – and the red noodle beans still don’t even have pods yet! – and the cucumbers and peas finished, there isn’t a lot to harvest on a regular basis. The carrots, turnips and beets are being left to get as big as they can before we pick them. Same with the potatoes. The peppers and eggplant could use quite a bit more time to mature. The sweet corn still isn’t ripe enough to pick. The Yellow Pear tomatoes have huge amounts of still green tomatoes on them, and are also ripening the fastest. The other tomatoes are ripening much more slowly. There are quite a few green patty pans growing, but not so much among the rest of the summer squash. The winter squash, of course, need to stay on the vines for as long as possible. What we have of it, anyhow!
These cucumber leaves show one of the reasons we want to focus on barrier hedges as we plant trees and bushes. This is all dust from the gravel road. Thank goodness my mother’s lilac hedge is there, or it would be so much worse!
The green zucchini is still having issues with the male and female flowers not blooming in sync, so pollination isn’t happening. The developing squash soon turn yellow and die off. This one has been chewed on by a mouse or some other small rodent. I suppose it’s good that the squash still feeds something!
We had a super light rain this morning, which is supposed to continue off and on throughout the day. Then we’re supposed to warm up again over the next few days. It should be interesting to see how much more things manage to ripen during our mild grace period!
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 