After giving the leg ends a second coat, and filling in any spots that looked like they got missed, this morning, I finally flipped the bench to pain the top this evening.
Once it was right side up, I could also see spots on the legs and cross pieces that got missed, simply because it was more difficult to see and reach while upside down. I also took the time to make sure paint got well into any holes or cracks in the wood, so no water can come in contact with unprotected wood.
I thought it might need three coats of paint on the top, but now I think one more coat on the top, and it’ll be done. The paint filled things in better than I expected. I don’t know what this seat board was salvaged from, but it’s got saw cut markings on it, nail holes, and even several small nails and some kind of heavy duty staple stuck in it that I couldn’t get out without damaging the wood. Nothing the paint can’t smooth over.
For something thrown together in an afternoon, using scraps dug out of the barn, I’m really happy with how this bench has turned out.
Potato Beetle did well at the vet, and back home again.
He came out of the carrier, active and alert, and immediately going for cuddles – then food!
We’re supposed to keep him from eating too much, but he is good at self regulating, so it’s easy to do.
While they had him, he was looked over. I had mentioned he was favouring a front leg. They did find a puncture wound and some swelling, and he got a 14 day slow release antibiotic inject – on a rear leg! I never even noticed him favouring that leg in all the time he’s been in the sun room.
Though we had been told he’d need 4 days to recover, but when I picked him up, I was told to try and keep him quiet for 7 – 10 days. So that’s more time with him in the sun room. More time for him to put some weight on, without being harassed by the visiting toms. I do have some concerns. Without his nibs, he should be more passive. I’m hoping the toms will somehow recognise he’s not a “threat” to them when it comes to spreading his genes, and they will leave him alone.
Now, we just have to reschedule the ladies. I’ve kept the Cat Lady updated and their spays are still on the books.
It’s coming up on noon, and we’ve already reached out high of 27C/81F, with the humidex at 29C/84F. Usually, we don’t reach our high until about 5pm! They’re also predicting rain, though, so hopefully that includes our area, and things will cool down a bit.
Some things seem to like the heat, though.
That one giant pumpkin is noticeably bigger, every day!
I put our very first tomato that I just picked, and a Magda squash, down for perspective.
Those ants were all over the tomato, immediately!
I have since placed an ant trap at the hill. The main part of the hill is next to the other giant pumpkin plant, and it’s looking like the ants are finally starting to damage it. I put traps next to two other ant hills as well. Usually, I prefer to leave them since ants are pollinators, too, but these ones have to go. There are plenty of other hills in the area, so it’s not like we’re making much of a dent in the population by doing this.
Here we have this morning’s harvest. Our very first tomato – Sophie’s Choice. I will leave the family to taste test it, since I can’t do raw tomatoes. They make me gag. Which, I’ve learned, is a thing, similar to how cilantro tastes like soap to some people, but not others!
Those pea pods are the first peas from our second planting. Remarkably, the first planting of peas is still green and trying to produce.
I didn’t pick any yellow beans tomorrow. There should be a good amount to gather tomorrow, though.
On another note, I got to pick up and pet the black and white kitten with the black splotch by its nose. I was happy to see it, since I did not see it at all, yesterday. It did not run away when I came by, and had no issues with being picked up and cuddled.
One of my daughters and I had just loaded the 3 cat carriers into the van for their appointment with the vet, when my other daughter came running out.
She had just found the cat food bin in the basement had been knocked off the shelf, spilling kibble all over the floor.
Which means Tissue and Big Rig would have eaten during the night.
I went into town with all three, anyhow. Once parked near the clinic, which wasn’t open yet, but I had a signal. I texted the same person who contacted me the first time we tried this, even though I wasn’t sure she even had a shift today. As I was messaging her, I did see someone unlock the door and go in, though.
I did get a response saying that they would typically reschedule, due to the risk during anesthesia. Potato Beetle was alone in the sun room, though, so he was good to go. Then she asked if I was at the clinic. I told her I was parked outside. Next thing I knew, the woman I saw going in was waving to me at my window! 😄
She took Potato Beetle in with her. We’ve been there often enough, he remembered my daughter’s name – all the cat files are under her name in their system. Her computer wasn’t even up and running, yet, so she wouldn’t be able to check him in. She told me I’d get a phone call from someone else later, and we could do the paperwork over the phone, and the ladies will be rescheduled.
Well, at least Potato is getting done, and we’ll soon be able to let him out of the sun room. He will only need 4 days for recovery. After that, when it’s time to put Tissue and Big Rig for their fast again, we can use the sun room to isolate them.
Thanks to the girls moving the bench I made under the tent, this morning’s rain did not delay painting! It was nice and dry, and ready to work on.
I placed a couple of bricks under the bench to give me some space to do the edges at the saw horses. I picked up a really cheap brush set for this job, because I knew I’d be pretty rough with it, getting into the tight spaces, as well as working with such rough wood.
The bottoms of the legs will get a second coat, just for extra protection from contact with the ground, before the seat gets painted. The seat will get at least two coats, maybe three, depending on how well I was able to rasp and sand off the rough spots.
I am really happy with that colour. The final result never quite matches what the colour swatches look like, if only because of how much more surface area there is. Once this is done, there will be enough paint left over to do a few other things. There is the tree stump bench we made last year, though I think I will wait for the flowers around it to die back, first. The stairs to the storage house needs to be painted, too. I’d love to do the laundry platform, but that would likely need a gallon of paint, all on its own. Plus, the kittens like to play on it, and it would be rather hard to keep them off while the paint dries! 😁 I might do the hand rail in front of the sun room, though. If I can figure out a good way to pull the rose bush away from it. The thorns on that thing are brutal! 😄
There wasn’t much of anything to harvest this morning. I picked a few shelling peas and just ate them right away. There was no point in bringing so few inside! At least with the first planting of peas. The second planting is looking like it will have a decent amount to pick fairly soon.
I really don’t know what to make of the beans at the tunnel. These are the Blue Grey Speckled Tepary shelling beans. They are so small and delicate looking. They are just barely tall enough to reach, but are managing to climb the mesh. I have no idea how big these would normally get, but for a shelling bean, I would have expected them to be at least as big as…
… the red noodle beans on the other side of the tunnel. These are much bigger plants, but there is still no sign of any vining happening. I’m not seeing any flowers, either. Given that it’s the start of August and our average first frost date is Sept. 10, I’m starting to wonder if we’ll get any of these at all. Even if we do get a super long, mild spring, like we did last year, I wonder if we’ll have any of these at all. At least the purple beans on the A frame trellis are blooming and producing tiny little pods, with vines extending well past the top of the trellis frame, while the green beans on the other side are climbing and blooming.
I have never grown pole beans before, but I really expected them to do better than this. This area did not get flooded out the way the bed with the green bush beans did.
Well, next year we’ll be moving the trellises closer to the house, and this area will be getting perennials planted in it. Parts of the area will need to be kept clear because of the phone line running under it, but not all of it. Hopefully, a new location for our legumes next year will be better.
The dancing gourds are doing rather well, at least! The plants are much stronger and more vigorous this year than they were during last year’s drought. So far, there is just this one early gourd growing, though I am seeing quite a few female flowers developing. This one gourd is already bigger than the biggest we had last year. For perspective, the squares in the wire mesh are 2 inches.
In between the tunnel and the A frame trellises are some hulless pumpkins. They are the last patch without the cardboard mulch. I still had the cardboard sides from the wood chipper in the garage, so I decided to use it.
This is how it was looking. There’s an awful lot of creeping charlie making it’s way through the straw mulch around the pumpkins in the foreground. There are actually less weeds than it appears, though, just because of how they spread out.
The cardboard from the wood chipper box was very heavy duty, and had even more staples holding it together than the lawn mower box I used on the Boston Marrow. Cutting it so I could put it around the plants took some doing! Sliding the cardboard in place required quite a bit of care, too. The vines were gripping the straw and weeds quite strongly.
I placed some of the protective poles back, around the patch, and will be adding scythed hay mulch on top as I am able, but I find myself wondering if I should make a support frame for the vines to climb. I don’t know if that would actually help these or not. At the very least, I’ll be adding cord around it, to discourage deer from walking through.
There were quite a few female flowers on the vines, but I found only one male flower, so I used it to hand pollinate as many of the female flowers as were ready. While moving the vines onto the cardboard, one of them had already fallen off, because it had not been pollinated. Hopefully, the hand pollinating will help.
All three varieties of hulless pumpkin have at least some developing pumpkins. Some of summer squash is also finally picking up; the sunburst patty pans are starting to show female flowers again. The Madga squash seems to be doing the best, and we finally have yellow zucchini starting to develop. Not so much of the green zucchini, though.
At least we will have lots of the determinate tomatoes. Even the Cup of Moldova tomatoes are starting to show more of a blush in them.
If the weather holds and the frost stays away, we might still have something to harvest this fall.
We had some rain this morning, which made the temperatures much more pleasant outside, though it did start heating up again awfully fast. We dipped to a low of 10C/50F overnight, and are expected to hit 29C/84F by this evening!
When I headed out this morning, there were many, very hungry kitties waiting for me.
Even Ghost Baby was waiting. She was so very wet, and so hungry, she didn’t run away! She jumped onto the roof of the cat house and hissed at me, but stayed close. So I made sure to put some kibble on the roof for her, and she dove right in.
The bitty kitties are no longer in the board pile, so I brought the trays I was using for food and water over to the kibble house. The cats like having a bit more space between them when eating.
I toss a couple of handfuls of kibble into the shelf shelter, and this little tabby was quite happy with that!
This is the black and white that I have not been able to touch. It usually runs off as soon as it sees me, but with the food tray on the ground, it was willing to hide under the kibble house and eat at the same time.
Hungry babies!
Hungry Ghost Baby, still eating, even as I kept moving around her, leaving kibble in the usual spots. She didn’t even run away when I used the hose on the water bowls!
I so want to socialize this one. She looks like she’s having a rough time of things. 😢
Cheddar has a thing about invading my butt spots. Usually, he takes over my office chair. At night, he tends to jump onto the bed and WHOMP himself down against my butt. I’m so used to it, it doesn’t even wake me up anymore.
One morning, however, I found he was not alone!
Nosencrantz was managing to snuggle both our butts!
I saw one good thing when heading into town with the cats this morning. The gas prices dropped 10 cents per litre, overnight. At 169.9 cents per liter, it’s still higher than it should be, but every little bit helps.
I was going to fill the jerry can after dropping off the cats, but the cats didn’t get dropped off. On deciding to head into the city, that will just have to wait again.
Before hitting the Costco, I went to a Canadian Tire to pick up a couple of bags of stove pellets for cat litter. I also picked up some ant traps. I would prefer not to kill off ant hills, since ants are also pollinators, but there are a couple of hills that are large enough to damage some garden plants, plus we’re seeing more of them in the house.
We’ve hardly used the van this month at all, and the gas tank was almost full when I left home. Costco gas prices were 159.9 cents per liter for regular. A considerable difference! So I topped up the tank, anyhow.
I had expected doing a Costco shop in the middle of the week would be quite, but nope. It was insanely busy! At least I wasn’t fighting a flat cart around crowds of people. With the other stock up shopping done already, I didn’t need to get more dry cat food. I was able to just just a regular cart for a change!
In the end, I didn’t get much at all.
With reason.
This is what Cdn$350 looks like. Plus change.
Under the cart is a package of Kirkland brand toilet paper, a package of 60 eggs, and a case of the cheaper canned cat food. 48 cans in that size.
I also got 10 pounds of butter (at $5 a pound, that’s at least a dollar cheaper than other no-name or house brand butters, but higher for Costco prices), a package with 3 whole chickens, a triple pack of all-beef wieners, and a pork tenderloin. There’s a 6 pack of canned chicken, mayonnaise, peanut butter, cooking oil, AAA batteries, 2 packages of tortilla wraps, and a 2 pack of hot dog buns. Oh, plus a package of white button mushrooms and a big block of marble cheese.
That’s it.
This is one of the smallest Costco shopping trips I’ve done, but it still came out to pennies over $350
That’s just painful! There aren’t even any fruits or vegetables in there, either.
I suppose it wouldn’t be so bad if our own garden was producing, but it just barely is. Most things are, if not a complete loss, at least a month behind in growth and development.
This morning was our date with the vet, to get Potato Beetle, Big Rig and Tissue spayed and neutered, as arranged by the Cat Lady.
I had a chance to text with her last night, as she reminded me to have them fasting. She herself was going back to the hospital today. The poor thing has been in and out of hospital all summer, and yet she still manages to help with cats. She just brought home a couple more because they were sick, and no one else was willing/able to take care of them. She is so awesome!
She did warn me that there is a shortage of vets, and there was a possibility of cancellation. So when my phone started ringing while I was driving with the three cats, I had a sinking feeling. Of course, I couldn’t answer while driving. It started ringing again, then I suddenly started getting notification noises, one after another. *sigh*
The calls were from one of the staff from the clinic – but she was calling from home! When she couldn’t get through to me, she called the Cat Lady, and both of them were trying to text me at the same time, letting me know that the vet wasn’t coming in today. All surgeries were being cancelled.
I got all these when I parked in front of the clinic.
After responding to both of them, the lady from the clinic said she would call me when she got into the office to reschedule, then I headed home.
The cats were not happy with all this. I was concerned about Potato Beetle. He’s already been stuck in the sun room for over a week. Yes, he has cool places to lie down, and we make sure there’s a frozen water bottle in his water bowl, the ceiling fan is going, and the small box fan I found the the garage is set up. Still, it gets quite warm in there and, as much as we try to go over and pay attention to him, he’s mostly all on his own.
Thankfully, the clinic was able to reschedule us for this Friday, so tomorrow night, we do the fasting again.
Since we no longer to dash to and from town to deal with the cats, I took advantage of the change in plans and decided to do our Costco trip today, instead of next week.
But first, I had to do my morning rounds, switch out the memory cards in the trail cams, and check the garden beds.
The Carminat pole beans finally have pods forming!
The one giant pumpkin is growing so fast!
I looked around and finally saw another pumpkin forming. Just to be on the safe side, I hand pollinated it. The vines of the two plants are overlapping each other, but as far as I can tell, this one, plus another female flower I found that is still just a bud, is on the same plant as the pumpkin that’s growing so big. The second plant has lots of male flowers, but I can’t see any female flowers on it.
I’ll keep checking and, as I find them, I’ll hand pollinated them, just to be on the same side.
Which I am also doing with the Red Kuri (Little Gem) squash, in the south yard. These are doing really, really well here. I have hand pollinated several female flowers already, and I can see more budding. I’m happy that these are doing so well, because these may be the only winter squash we get this year!
The cherry tree by the house is doing well, too. This is the most we’ve seen on this tree since moving here. The other trees at the edge of the spruce grove have nothing. Being close to the house seems to be providing the microclimate it needs. I don’t know the name of this variety; only that the original tree was from Poland, which has a longer growing season than we do.
The cherries at the very top look ripe, or close to it. We’ll have to bring over the step ladder and start picking them!
Speaking of picking things…
This is this morning’s harvest. Along with the bush beans, there was a single pea pod from the row that was planted first. That row is almost done, but the ones that were planted later have quite a few pods that should be ready to pick in a few more days.
I also picked our very first two cucumbers! I picked this variety as it is supposed to be good for both fresh eating and pickling. Whether or not we’ll have enough to make pickles, I’m not sure yet, but we at least have these ones to taste test now!
There was also a few raspberries to pick. Maybe 3/4’s of a cup in total.
It’s not much, but it’s enough to enjoy with a meal. Certainly better than nothing at all!
That done, I was off to the city to do the last of our monthly stocking up, but that will get it’s own post. 😊
The Re-Farmer 