I am so enjoying today’s cooler temperatures! Yesterday, we reached at least 31C/88F, though I’m sure we got hotter than that. I headed out to top up the kitty kibble and was actually feeling nauseous from the heat by the time I got back inside. Of course, the upstairs is much hotter, and it really hit one of my daughters hard, and she was quite ill for a few hours.
Today’s high is supposed to be only 19C/66F or 21C/36F, depending on the source. Quite enjoyable! By the time I got out this morning (having been kept up most of the night by a naughty Nosencrantz constantly making noise and getting into things!), it was only about 18C/64F. Which is about perfect, as far as I’m concerned! 😁
The current conditions are keeping things going in the garden quite nicely. I got a decent harvest of green and purple pole beans. The Red Noodle beans are still not even blooming, but the shelling beans… well, take a look.
They are still so very small and delicate – but they are LOADED with pods, and starting to dry out. I suspect they are smaller than they should be, but I do hope the beans we get will still be tasty.
I was surprised by how many ground cherries I found on the ground this morning, though some greener ones fell off while I was trying to reach to pick them up. They are related to tomatoes, so I’m hoping if we just leave them, they’ll continue to ripen.
I picked our first G-Star patty pan squash! One of the plants seems to have suddenly become limp, though. Odd.
I don’t usually let the sunburst squash get that big before picking them, but they seemed to have quite the overnight growth spurt!
I’m quite happy to have a nice little variety to harvest.
Well, the vet clinic hasn’t called back yet, but I need to get outside and take advantage of today’s lovely temperatures, since we’re supposed to heat up again over the next week. I’ll just have to let the answering machine take it. I’m sure if there were any problems with Leyendecker, we would have heard from them earlier, so no news is good news. 😊
Yesterday, Potato Beetle settled into the sun room, and stayed settled! I had a horrible, sleepless night and wasn’t feeling well as a result, so I asked the girls to feed the cats, and let Potato out if he wanted.
He didn’t want. He was still there when I came out!
I had the door wide open, and he just did this. 😁
By the time I was done the rest of my morning rounds, he was gone, but he certainly wasn’t in any hurry to do so.
I’m do wish he wouldn’t take off for days – or weeks! – at a time. I’d hoped that getting fixed would reduce his wanderlust, but it doesn’t seemed to have had that affect. Ah, well. As long as he keeps coming back!
Meanwhile…
I got a call from the vet clinic about Leyendecker. He did well overnight and they had collected quite a bit in his catheter bag. It was, however, still bloody, so it doesn’t look like he’ll come home today. The doctor wasn’t in yet and I was supposed to get a call later, but was also warned that she sometimes forgets to make her calls. It was suggested that if I didn’t hear from her by 10am, to call myself.
It’s well past that, but there was much to do. I’ve called just a little while ago, but the tech that can update me was with someone, so they will call back. I called when I did because I will be heading outside again for a few hours, but they can leave a message if they don’t call back before then.
It would be nice if we can bring him home tomorrow!
I just got back from the vet clinic – without Leyendecker.
Our first surprise is something you can’t see in the photo. When we went hunting for him to put him in the carrier, we found him under a shelf in the basement. Well. Not really a shelf. The inside of an gutted antique radio in the basement where a speaker used to be. It had been used a nest when he was a kitten. The basement is cooler, and where most of the litter boxes are. When he came out of the shelf, his white fur was orange! Especially his paws were bright orange. I’m thinking rust, maybe?
Anyhow, we got him in the carrier, then my daughter carried him up the stairs for me, since I can’t do stairs well at the best of times, never mind while carrying this big boy. I got to the clinic about 15 minutes early, but they were running behind, so we ended up waiting about 45 minutes before going into the examination room. Poor boy yowled for most of the ride in, and much of the time in the waiting room, too.
My daughter had sent me a list of the symptoms they saw that I read off to the vet when she came in. One thing the girls noted was the first time it started. He had been using the litter box, though they couldn’t tell whether he was trying to poop or pee. By the time I finished reading the list, I think the vet had already figured it out. She gave his abdomen a feel and, almost right away, said he had a blocked urinary tract. She could feel his bladder. The poor thing probably hasn’t been able to pee for days!
We’ve been there often enough that they know we have limited funds. In fact, I have zero budget for any of this. My daughter said she would pay for it. Now, paying for the check up is one thing, but the procedure averages about $900-$1000, depending on how bad it is. And it would be done tonight. The alternative, if we couldn’t afford the procedure, would be euthanasia. I messaged the family right away, and before I finished telling the doctor that my daughter was paying for it and it was up to her, I got the okay.
All those commissions she’s been working so hard on are coming through for Leyendecker.
Once the vet got the okay, she quickly weighed him – he is 8.6kg/19 pounds – then rushed off with him to their kennel, while they prepped to put him under and get a catheter in him. I waited until someone else came in with the authorization form to sign.
Right off the hop, we’re at almost $475. They’re authorized for a maximum $1000, with a request to phone us if it might go over. I don’t know what my daughter’s budget is, but it will take a few days for her to transfer the funds from her PayPal account. The fortunate thing is, we haven’t finished doing our monthly shopping, so I can actually cover the amount until her transfer clears and she can send it to me. Meanwhile, my husband has even transferred some funds his dad sent him for his birthday to help contribute!
We will get a call tonight when they are done, to let us know how things went. He will spend the night at the clinic and, if all goes well, we’ll be bringing him home tomorrow, though from what I’m reading online, they tend to be kept in hospital for several days, because the catheter is left in for a while. We will find out more when they call us tonight. I think they’ll be able to give us the total damage by then, too.
One thing is for sure.
Leyendecker is now off the adoption list!
The Re-Farmer
Update: I just got off the phone with the vet a little while ago. Leyendecker was just waking up when she called. The procedure went well, though they did have some issues getting the catheter in because he’s such a big boy.
The good news: they found NO crystals in his urine at all. Which means the cause was along the lines of muscle spasms and stress, not a UTI. So far, he is recovering well, but he will stay with them for a couple of days, with the catheter in. When he comes home, it will be with a muscle relaxant and some pain killers.
The not so good news: his bloodwork was pretty bad. His kidneys tested off the charts, as did his potassium levels. This would be because he was blocked for so long. Usually, at those levels the heart simply stops. They want to test him again after a couple of weeks to see if he has permanent kidney damage.
Once he’s back home, I’ll try to isolate him in my office/craft room/bedroom. With Nosencrantz and Butterscotch still refusing to leave the room, I hope that works out. They don’t get along normally, but if he’s recovering from surgery, that may change. Keeping him here will allow me to monitor him and make sure he’s actually urinating properly. We’ll also be able to monitor his food and fluid intake and, hopefully, reduce his stress.
When I commented that he was off the adoption list, the vet actually said he would do better in a household with fewer cats. Which is true. It’s just difficult to justify after spending so much money on him and, frankly, there are other cats in our household that I think are more adoptable. The problem is, people aren’t adopting these days. All the shelters are full with mostly surrendered cats. The alternative is to start sending some of the fixed indoor cats outside, and I just don’t like that idea at all.
This morning, I headed out to start mowing the lawn before things got too hot.
I was too late.
I suppose 22C/72F isn’t too bad to start, but by the time I was done for the day, just a couple of hours later, we were already at 29C/84F. Depending on where we look, our high of the day is expected to be anywhere from 29C/84F to 32C/90F.
Just to make it even more interesting, the humidity is quite high. It’s just past 1pm as I write this, and the grass is still wet with dew! I managed to get the south and east yards done, but the north and west yards, the garden area, and the outer yard, will all have to wait. Tomorrow is supposed to be cooler.
The good thing about not being able to mow for so long is, there is lots of grass clippings. I’m not using the grass catcher, because I’d be stopping to empty it way too often. Plus, with how damp the grass was, it has a chance to dry a bit before I get the girls to rake it up for me this evening, and I can use it to continue mulching the squash and corn bed, tomorrow.
While I was mowing, I was going past the chocolate cherry and yellow pear tomato beds and could see there were some that could be picked. Once the mowing was done for the day, I went tomato picking.
Our very first Chocolate Cherry tomatoes! There are not going to be a lot of them, altogether; the plants have not been very productive. I don’t know if that’s because of the variety, or because of the growing conditions. These were grown just for fresh eating, though, so that’s okay.
I look forward to my daughters trying them, and letting me know how they like them.
After my daughters did their own walkabout yesterday evening, one of them told me they found eggplants! I had watered the garden not long before and hadn’t seen any, so that was a surprise to me.
Of course, this morning I had to go looking.
No wonder I didn’t see them!
They are just barely visible.
These are Little Finger eggplant, which should grow rather long and thin. I chose them partly because they are a shorter season variety. Which, the way things are going this year, is probably the only reason we’ll have any at all! These are from the plants in the dollar store “raised bed” of black felted fabric. It’s really more of a shallow grow bag. The ones planted in the regular low raised bed are not doing anywhere near as well, even though they got transplanted earlier. The ones I planted in the fabric container had been missed when I transplanted the first ones. I think the black fabric is what is making the difference, as it would be keeping the soil warmer. Just a guess, on my part, but it seems the most likely factor contributing to how much bigger and stronger they are.
I’ve never grown eggplant before, so this is pretty exciting!
Last night, as I headed out to do my evening rounds, I was quite happy to see Potato Beetle was back! I left the sun room door open while I did my thing, and he went straight in to his private dining area, and stayed! He was quite content for me to close him up in the sun room for the night.
This morning, he really wanted attention…
Dang, that boy is sharp!
He had no interest in leaving, though. I left the door open while doing my morning rounds. I came back to find him lounging on the swing bench, with kittens! He didn’t stay long enough for me to get a picture of them together, though.
Unlike some of the other adult cats, he and the kittens get along just fine!
On another note, I did a bit of a rush on my morning rounds, so I could call the vet clinic when they opened. Layendecker has been behaving strangely for a few days now. I don’t see him often, but the girls tell me he’s been very lethargic. The alarming thing is that, every now and then, he will suddenly start making this horribly distressed wailing sort of meow. Even the other cats will come running to see what’s going on, when he does it. About the only thing we can think of is that he is feeling some sort of intestinal distress. He doesn’t seem bloated or gassy, that we can tell, but one of my daughters observed that when she tried to palpate his abdomen, he would start panting. He clearly doesn’t like it, and doesn’t like being picked up, either.
I was able to get an appointment for him this evening. The clinic has greatly extended their hours, since the lockdowns and restrictions got lifted. I imagine they have a lot of catching up to do and, like with clinics and hospitals for humans, a lot of animals didn’t get the treatment or diagnosis they needed. As a “medical facility”, they are still required to require masking, but when I’ve told them I can’t wear one the first time I went in without one, they haven’t said anything to me, since.
Hopefully, whatever is wrong with Layendecker will just need some simple treatment, but of course, we worry. On top of that, I don’t have the budget for it. My daughter is paying for today, and we’ll see what the diagnosis and treatment ends up being.
Oh, my daughter just sent me a list of the symptoms they noticed. That will be useful at the vet’s. Interesting. Apparently, the first time the yowling started, he was in the middle of using the litter. It doesn’t look like he’s eating, either, though he does seem to be drinking.
Poor Layendecker. I do hope things work out well for him!
Thanks to my daughters taking care of feeding the yard cats for me, I got to sleep in a bit, after a late night of getting the hard crab apple cider started. I’ve been pretty good about getting to bed at around midnight of late, so I’m not as used to being up past 2am anymore. 😄
I am really enjoying checking the garden while doing my morning rounds. The Red Kuri squash are ripening nicely, and the chocolate cherry tomatoes are slowing turning colour.
I’m a bit surprised these are taking so much longer, considering they get more sunlight than the Yellow Pear tomatoes, which we’ve been able to harvest for a little while now. My older daughter, for whom I bought this variety for, is really looking forward to trying them.
I remembered to get a picture of the newly supported kulli corn and Yellow Pear tomatoes. You can see some of the corn is still leaning way over. Those stalks are from the middle of the bed, and I wasn’t able to do much to add support in there. The tomatoes had all been leaning into the pathway, too, but I managed to straighten them up and add more support to their tops, and now the pathway can be walked in again!
I just love the look of these Ozark Nest Egg gourds! They are doing so well. I was even able to hand pollinate a couple more this morning.
While seeing what else could be pollinated, I was happy to see the G-Star squash I’d hand pollinated seems to have taken. I was able to hand pollinate another Boston Marrow and a couple Lady Godiva hulless pumpkins, too.
I was able to collect a far larger harvest this morning than I expected. The larger colander I use for harvesting was not available. Usually, that’s not an issue, as the smaller one is quite enough – but I didn’t expect to be picking more tomatoes this morning! I ended up having to use my pockets, too. 😄
There were more pole beans to pick than last time – and from the looks of some of them, a few got missed before! I was happy to pick more Magda squash, and to have one green zucchini ready to pick.
The tomatoes are all Cup of Moldova, and they went into the freezer with the rest. We still had some Sophie’s Choice that I picked yesterday, and they are now sliced and dehydrating in the oven.
Today is the last business day of the month: payday. Normally, I’d be in the city right now, doing more of our monthly stock up shopping. We are still good from the trip I did on the weekend, and we need to process the tomatoes in the freezer to free up space, so the trip can wait a bit longer.
I think, however, I might still make a jaunt into town. My husband’s birthday is coming up, and he wants a pizza night for his birthday. 😊
Last night, my daughters and I got some hard crab apple cider going, with some minor changes from when we made it before.
I started on the apples while my daughter’s sanitized the 5 gallon carboy and set up the juicer. Each apple got cut in half, the stem removed, and any damaged bits cut off. We were able to get to the apples faster than when we made it before, so they had noticeably less bits to cut off this time around. The cut pieces went into a giant bowl with water and lemon juice while waiting to be juiced. We had a small colander set up over a bowl that we would scoop batches of pieces into, that could be kept close to the machine while I continued cutting apples
My younger daughter did the juicing again. We knew we would have more juice this time, so she set up the sanitized carboy with a funnel on a chair under the juicer nozzle; fresh, raw juice went straight into the carboy, instead of first into a pitcher, then into the gallon glass carboy.
The juicing took such a long time.
The machine could only handle getting a couple of pieces put in at a time; far less than when juicing other fruit. These are small apples that don’t have a lot of juice in them, so we didn’t get a lot for the work. After a short while, the sound of the juicer would change, and my daughter would have to stop it, open it up and peel off the shoe-leather strip of accumulated pulp that did not go into the collector, like it was supposed to.
It was past 2am by the time we were done. Which was fine for my daughters, since they are still up at night and sleeping during the day.
This is what the more than 5 gallons of apples got us.
We got about two and a half gallons of juice. We calculated roughly 5 cups of sugar for the amount of juice we had (the ratio is 1-1 1/2 pounds of sugar per gallon of juice). The handy thing about it being only half full is that, once the sugar was added, it was easy to just pick it up and shake it to dissolve the sugar. A half packet of yeast was hydrated, then added and it got another shake before being set up with the airlock.
I didn’t bother taking a hydrometer reading.
This is how it looked this morning, after having roughly 9 hours to settle.
The airlock was bubbling about every 23 seconds when I checked it, and the temperature of the liquid is 20-21C/68-70F. We’re supposed to reach 28C/82F today, so it’s definitely going to get warmer.
I’d hoped to have more juice, but it’s still more than we had last time. We do still have lots of apples on the tree to pick, if we want. We don’t have another large carboy, but we do have the 1 gallon ones, if we want to make more hard cider. I think I’d rather make more cider vinegar, but we don’t have more of the large, wide mouth jars right now. For the amount of apples we’d have, I wouldn’t want to use smaller jars. It would be a waste of jars and space. There are other things we could do with the apples, too.
Now that it looks like making hard crab apple cider is a thing we will continue to do, we want to acquire a cider press. The juicer is great for other fruit, but does very poorly with these little crab apples. There are table top versions that are reasonably priced. Building one is another option. It’s something we wouldn’t for another year, so we have time to figure it out.
I’ve been asking my mother about how my dad made fruit wine. I remember him using the same crock my mother used to make sauerkraut. I remember watching him one year, as he layered sugar, then raspberries, in the crock until it was full, then … I can’t remember. Most likely, he weighted it down then covered it with a cloth, but did he add water to it? And how much sugar to fruit did he use?
I described what I remember to my mother, and she just brushed it off. They just combined fruit with sugar, covered it and let it sit, she told me. They didn’t add water. That’s how she’s got the cherries she picked while here set up, right now. She didn’t have a lot of cherries, so it would be just a small jar. She couldn’t tell me how much sugar they used; apparently, they just winged it.
Well, whatever my dad did, his raspberry wine in particular got rave reviews. I remember picking pin cherries (those trees are now gone) that he used to make wine, as well as the hard little plums that are more stone than fruit, that we still have in the yard (though the trees seem to be dying). My parents had no wine making equipment. They used no commercial yeast (yeast for brewing was not something that would have been easily found back then). I wish I could ask my dad what he did. I don’t think my mother paid too much attention to it, and what she’s doing now is not what I remember seeing him doing. Maybe one of my siblings remembers more than I do. I should ask them. 😊
For now, though, I’m content to make hard cider with our crab apples. I prefer that over wine, anyhow. 😁
This evening, I headed out to see what I could to about fixing the wind damage in the garden. Particularly with the corn. I ended up stealing some bamboo stakes running across the hoops in a couple of other beds, but that still only gave me four. I did have one more, plus a stick, already in the sweet corn, supporting a couple of stalks that had fallen over previously. They were still standing, while the corn around them was flattened!
I ran twine between the poles from end to end of each row, wrapping the twine once around each stalk in that row to hold it up. Even as I was working, I had the wind pushing the stalks, so I scrounged up another pair of sticks. I set them up on either side of the middle, then ran twine between them, catching the support twine in between. This way, whichever direction the wind blows, there will be some support.
Some of the stalks where still trying to fall over, but I could only find one more stick. It was enough to add extra support to the twine in the rows.
The cobs are actually filling out quite nicely! Some of the silks are even starting to dry up, and they should be ripe soon.
The hard part while doing all this was trying not to step on the poor little bean plants on either side of the corn. Since I was there, I checked them over and found a pretty decent little harvest!
I didn’t have a container with me, but I managed to shove them all in a pocket. 😄
There was have it. Our very first harvest of green bush beans, planted late to replace the ones that drowned out.
When watering this bed, I do try to make sure to water the beans more directly, but as I was harvesting, I could feel that they could really use more water. We’ll have to focus in them a bit more!
The next area I worked on was the group of ground cherries that had been flattened.
I managed to find a couple more sticks – I think my daughters intended them as walking sticks! – and grabbed a couple of short pieces left over from hula hoops we used to make row covers last year. The ground cherry plants are a lot more delicate than other plants, and I felt the twine might damage them more, so I threaded it through the pieces. As careful as I was, I could hear branches cracking as I lifted them. I’m not sure all of it will survive.
They are, however, still covered with many flowers, so we’ll still be getting more berries developing.
Once these were done, I started on the kulli corn. I completely forgot to take pictures, though.
One side was fairly easy to do. I lifted the netting up, then used the existing scavenged T posts to hold the twine, which I wrapped around stalks to hold them up. This was on the north side of the bed, and the gust of wind had come from the north, so it was pretty easy to reach things.
The other side was far more difficult. We did lose the top of one stalk completely, and the others were leaning onto the nearby bed of tomatoes. If the net wasn’t there to hold it, they would have fallen onto the other bed, but instead they created a sort of arch.
The tomatoes themselves were outgrowing their supports and falling over. I had to add more support to those, just so I could keep working on the corn without breaking tomato branches. Some of the stakes were leaning over from the weight of the tomato plants, so I just zig zagged some twine between them to pull them together, which gave me enough room to work on the corn.
With the corn, I ended up doing much the same thing; zig zagging twine bank and forth, wrapping it around the top line of twine that was already there, to support the netting. I was able to wrap twine around a couple of the bigger stalks in the middle of the bed to give them extra support, but there really wasn’t much I could do for them. I can’t even guess how well they will recover from this. 😔
Then I went back to the tomatoes and added higher support from end to end to catch the newer growth. They’re looking much better now. There were even a few ripe tomatoes to harvest!
That done, I checked the late garlic in the next bed and decided it was time to dig them up.
The two by themselves on the left are the only two survivors transplanted from the bed the tomatoes are now in. I didn’t bother keeping them separate when I moved the bundle to the canopy tent. We’ll let them dry a bit, then brush the biggest dirt off and either lay them out or hang them up to cure. I’m kind of impressed by them. They’re pretty big, considering what a rough time they had of things! It’s a shame. The bed where only two survived had 90 cloves planted in it. The other one had over 80 cloves planted in it. This is all that made it.
This fall, the garlic will be planted elsewhere. I kept the biggest bulbs from the one bed that did so well, but would really like to plant more. We shall see how it works out, when the time comes.
The Re-Farmer 