Morning harvest, and … that really sucks

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When to do my morning rounds these days is a bit of a conundrum. I can wait until later in the morning, but find it gets too hot, too quickly. Plus, the kitties will be hungry. Or I can do it earlier when it’s cooler, but get eaten alive by mosquitoes. I went earlier this morning and not only were the mosquitoes out in full force (and I didn’t want to use bug spray when I wasn’t going to be outside for very long), but it was so humid out, my glasses fogged up while I was picking beans, and the dew got me completely soaked from the knees down!

Still, there were some decent pickings this morning. The purple beans are starting to really kick in.

Normally, I would have set it up all pretty before taking a picture, but things did not go as expected this morning.

I was planning to make jokes about feeling “chipper”, because I got a call from the tree guys yesterday. They will be coming in today to chip our branch piles. The problem is, I’m not feeling the least bit chipper this morning, and this is why.

There is supposed to be a trail cam there. The post the camera screws onto is snapped right off.

In the off chance something bigger, like a racoon, broke it, I checked the ground around the post, both on our side of the fence line, and the road side. Nothing. It’s gone.

Obviously it was there yesterday morning, since I switched out the memory cards. I was watering the garden quite late, but I didn’t check it, so I can’t say if it disappeared during the day, or at night.

Now, the most obvious assumption is that our vandal took it. While in court with his civil suit against me, one of the things he kept bringing up is that I have cameras all over the place because I’m trying to “catch” him and put him in jail. That camera is there because the sign with my late father’s name on it that was mounted on the post had disappeared. A reflector that had been mounted to overlap the top of the sign was broken in half. Half is still on the post, and I found the other half on the ground. So we made the new sign and put the camera on it as a deterrent. In fact, one of the pictures our vandal submitted to court as some sort of evidence against me (???) was of the sign, with the camera beside it circled.

I would have preferred to have the camera further back from the fence, but there was no way to mount it and still record the area in front of the sign. So it’s very been very visible from the road, and can be easily reached.

The irony of it is, this camera has been having problems. Unlike the other trail cam, where you can see that the batteries are slowly dying in the night shots (infrared flash is not as bright, flickering lines across the frame, etc), when the batteries go on this one, it tends to be very sudden. I’ll open it up and the LCD screen won’t turn on, and the camera will be dead. Usually, I just change the batteries, reset the time and date, and it’s done, but the LCD screen never came back. The camera was still recording, but the time and date was on default, and reset to default every time I changed the memory card. I was planning to replace it, but all our extra funds are going towards paying the tree guys to chip the branch piles today. Still, I was expecting to replace the camera fairly soon.

Now, there’s no camera to replace.

*sigh*

So once I was back inside from doing my rounds, the girls took care of the vegetables for me so I could look up and call the non-emergency RCMP number for our area.

There was no answer, so I left a message.

I could report the theft online, but after going over their options, I decided against it. Because of our vandal and the restraining order we have against him, this theft falls into several categories – and we can’t even say that he is the one who took it. Yes, he’s the most likely person to have done that, but would he really be THAT stupid? Yet, there is no one else who would do something like that. Even if one of his buddies decided to do it, they would know he would be the one immediately suspected and that it would get him in even worse trouble.

*sigh*

What a start to the day!

The Re-Farmer

August garden tour (video)

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Oh, my goodness. This took way more time and effort to make than usual! Starting with going back later in the day to record new video because I made too many goofs, the first time around. I mean, how did I accidentally say “corn” when I meant to say “peas”? Repeatedly!! 😂

It also took all day to upload the file. Yes, it’s more than half an hour long, but it still shouldn’t have taken more than 8 hours to upload.

But, here it is. A tour of our garden, including fruit trees this time. It’s been a very rough year for the garden, with some complete losses, but we do still have something to show for it, at least!

I hope you enjoy it, and please feel free to let me know what you think!

Our 2022 garden: surprise!

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Look what I found this morning!

There was a new and different flower among the dancing gourds, and it turned out to be a luffa!

Which means there may actually be two surviving luffa gourds that got transplanted.

Along with this open flower, I found some teeny, tiny female flowers developing as well. Unfortunately, there isn’t a single male flower or bud to be seen, so this luffa likely won’t get pollinated.

It’s way too late in the season for something like luffa. We started them indoors early enough to have given them the time, even after the Great Cat Crush, but everything got set back by the weather so much after transplanting, any advantage we had was lost. Still, it was a nice surprise to find they did survive!

The Re-Farmer

New faces!

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Feeding the kitties has developed an unexpected challenge. The one kitten that has decided he really likes people after all, has also decided he likes to get underfoot.

Literally.

I tried to be careful, but still ended up bopping him once.

I got to see Broccoli and Broccoli Baby sharing a food tray. That kitten is looking like it may end up with much longer fur than its mama.

I think this is the first good picture I’ve managed to get of this guy! He’s one of Junk Pile’s kittens. He, the black and white and the tuxedo, have been hanging out around the house and old kitchen garden a lot more lately. As you can see, they don’t run off quite so much anymore, either.

What a handsome boye.

If he’s a boy. No chance to see, one way or the other!

Then I saw someone different…

I guess this one would be considered a tortie?

I’ve actually seen glimpses of this one before. Just flashes of “is that a new kitten?” running by. This is the first real sighting.

I’m pretty sure this is another Broccoli baby, but there is just no way to know.

Then there was this sighting.

My first thought had been, “Oh, look – Junk Pile has joined Broccoli Baby for breakfast.”

Then I realized, this is a kitten, about the same size as Junk Pile’s “teenagers”.

This picture was taken on May 6. These are Junk Pile’s kittens. You can see the tuxedo in the back, the tabby and the black and white in the foreground. Those three are here often.

There are two other kittens in here that are just “dark”.

No Junk Pile Mini Me.

The above picture may actually be two litters, being co-parented, as we did see one one of the ‘iccuses in with here, too, before they moved their babies away from the commotion of human activity.

Either way, though this new kitten looks old enough to have been born at the start of May, like these ones, it isn’t from one of the litters we knew about. The only other cat that I can think might have had a litter around the same time is Ghost Baby, and she’s such a ghost, it would take her kittens to be big enough to be on their own before we’d see them show up by the house. So that’s a possibility.

So this would put the number of sighted kittens at about 14. Plus I know Rosencrantz had a second litter after loosing her first one (she rolled on the ground earlier today and, from the looks of her belly, she is nursing at least 4 kittens), and now Junk Pile no longer looks pregnant.

Which means we can expect to see more new faces over the next few months, still.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2022 garden: evening harvest – first potatoes

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We were out of potatoes and I wanted some for supper, so I decided to see what I could get out of the garden.

*sigh*

I chose to dig under plants that I remember had come up the earliest, and were the farthest from the most flooding.

First, the good: the soil under the mulch and cardboard is SO much softer, instead of the usual rock hard. It was cool in the 27C/81F heat, and moist. There were lots of worms, though there were also lots of crab grass rhizomes. A single season under an “instant garden” made a HUGE difference in the soil.

Now, the not so good:

There were almost no potatoes. I dug up three of each type of potato, and that’s all there was.

I didn’t pull out the plants completely, leaving the remains of the seed potato and the soil around the base, digging them down a bit deeper than they started, returned the mulch and watered them well. Who knows. They might survive and still produce more potatoes. Unlikely, but it’s worth a try.

With the condition of the plants, I didn’t really expect much, but I still thought I’d find more than one or two potatoes per plant!

I then thinned out some of the Uzbek golden carrots, checked out the Black Nebula (there’s one in there, hidden by the yellow carrots), and they’re still really skinny but getting bigger. I also picked some of the smaller onions. Over the next while, if we want fresh onions, we’ll dig up the little ones, leaving the bigger ones to get even bigger for winter storage.

For supper, I used these, plus some of the beans I picked this morning, and the turnips I’d picked before, along with some thinly sliced pork to make a sort of Hodge Podge.

I love being able to cook with food almost entirely out of the garden.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2022 garden: mulching, growing and harvesting

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I didn’t get a photo of the finished squash patch last night, so I got one this morning.

All the paths are now mulched, too. There’s no carboard under the paths, so I expect things to start growing through, but at least it will be more sparse.

The plants themselves are seeing new growth and lots of flowers. It’s a race against time and the weather to see if we’ll have anything to pick this year.

I love that you can see the giant pumpkin from so far away!

I swear, this thing is visibly bigger, every day.

Of the two other pumpkins spotted, this one is making it and growing fast. The other did not get pollinated, and withered away. I see no other female flowers, so we’re probably just have the two.

In checking the Red Kuri squash and Apple gourds, I found both male and female flowers blooing at the same time, so I went ahead and hand pollinated. The Red Kuri is doing well, but with the Apple gourds, all the female flowers so far have withered. This morning, I found a female flower on one plant, and a male on another, si I made sure to hand pollinate

Thankfully, tomatoes are self pollinating.

The are so many of them changing colour right now! I have to check myself, to make sure I don’t pick some of them too early.

The one big Sophie’s Choice tomato I recently picked was enough for the girls to make a tomato salad out of it. I’m glad they’re enjoying the variety.

I finally picked the one bigger golden zucchini this morning. There were not a lot of yellow beans to pick, but there were more of the pole beans, with many more little ones on the vines. There will be more peas for a while, too. There may not be a lot of quantity from each of them, but altogether, it’s pretty decent.

The only down side this morning are my pain levels. I over did it yesterday, while pruning the trees. I was so distracted by the heat, I missed my other “time to back off” warning signs. Frustrating.

Ah, well. That’s what pain killers are for. Today is going to be a hotter one, with possible thunderstorms, so it’s not going to be a day for significant manual labour, anyhow.

The Re-Farmer

Spider cat, and looking mean!

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The kittens were out in full force, this morning! I had a chance to sit on the scrap wood bench for a while, just watching them. And those I couldn’t see, I could hear!

The tuxedo from the oldest litter was doing the Spiderman thing. So were many of the kittens; I could hear scrambling all around and above me! Even the bitty babies were climbing all over. 😊

Broccoli Baby was the only other one I could get a picture of, though.

Doesn’t she look so mean and angry! Too funny!

I’ll bet she’s a total softy. 💖

The Re-Farmer

Our 2022 garden: confirmed

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After doing some watering with the hose, I hooked up the soaker hose on the tomatoes, then let it run while I finished mulching the paths in the squash patch.

Our straw bale is now completely used up, and all the paths in the squash patch are now mulched. Yay!

Somehow, I didn’t think to take a picture, though. Too focused on getting the watering done!

The rain barrel at the trellises was half empty, so I set the hose to fill it and use the watering can, taking my time to give the barrel time to actually fill up in between my taking water out. That gave me the chance to train more of the cucumbers up their trellis net, as well as the mystery gourd.

Which is no longer a mystery.

The labels had worn off, but I figured they were either luffa or ozark nest egg gourds – and they didn’t look like luffa.

While training some of the vines up their trellis net, I found some baby gourds.

Which officially confirms it. They are Ozark nest egg gourds.

Which mean that none of the luffa transplants survived at all.

Hopefully, this year, we will actually have some mature gourds! Last year, once the heat waves and drought conditions eased off, the Ozark nest egg gourds absolutely exploded with new growth, and many baby gourds. Unfortunately, it was too late in the season by then, even with our unusually long and mild fall, and they were killed off by frost.

Hopefully, these will have more time! The gourds aren’t particularly large at their mature size, so there is a chance for them.

I would love to finally have some gourds to cure and use for crafting!

The Re-Farmer