This little baby has started to actually come up to me, wanting attention!
Such a cutie!
The Re-Farmer
Photogenic
Our 2022 garden: evening harvest – first potatoes
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
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Our 2022 garden: mulching, growing and harvesting
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
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Spider cat, and looking mean!
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
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Mix and match
I spotted this mama, engulfed by nursing babies.
Two of these kittens are hers. The other two are from an older litter.
The mamas are pretty laid back about mixing and matching each other’s kittens!
The Re-Farmer
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Our 2022 garden: confirmed
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
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Cutting back
My original plan for this afternoon was to continue mowing, but I decided it was going to get too hot to be walking back and for for hours in the sun.
So I decided cutting back trees for hours was somehow better. 😁
Oh, to be fair, pruning the trees did allow me to spend more time in the shade than if I were mowing.
Except when I was hauling branches to the chipping pile.
Ah, well. The job needed to be done! It did eventually get too hot, though. We were supposed to reach our high of 25C/77F at 6pm. Instead we hit it by 2pm. As I write this, we’re at a humidex of 27C/81F. Definitely not good for me to be outside doing manual labour.
I didn’t even think to take “before” pictures, as I’ve taken so many pictures of the area for other reasons. This is what the area in front of the outhouse looks like now.
The arrows point to where two large branches were cut away. They were in the path of that big, dead spruce tree, when it gets cut down. There is now a clear gap for the spruce to fall. Removing them did take out some of the shade, but this is an elm. It’ll sent up new branches in no time, and they will grow in dense and bushy, so there will be share here again, soon enough.
These are the cut down pieces of the second branch I cut away from that tree. Both of them were about the same size, so there was about twice what you see in the photos that got broken down before they were manageable for hauling away. There were also quite a few dead branches that got cleared out, too.
There is another elm nearby that has many dead branches on it, but it won’t be cleaned up just yet. The way it’s leaning, the pieces might fall on the garlic and yellow pear tomato beds. It can wait until those beds have been harvested.
Once everything was hauled away and cleaned up, I was quite ready to go inside, but decided to clear some of the branches overhanging the sunchokes and asparagus beds. Then a few more… and a few more…
I did finally stop, though there are still more branches to take down. It was just getting too hot, and I can’t handle heat like I could in my younger days! I did move the gate and some old branches that were too big for our chipper to go around the other side of the chain link fence and clear the tall grass away, too.
When the tree guys come with their industrial chipper, they’ll have more than just rotting branches that have been sitting for years to chip. 😊
Time to cool down inside for a little while!
The Re-Farmer
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Insistent!
My daughter and I made a quick morning trip into town, and came back to kittens all over the place.
Which makes backing the vehicle up to the house a bit nerve wracking. I was more than happy when we unloaded and I could park the car.
While putting around afterwards, I could hear one of the mamas growling, so I took a look at what was going on.
There were three kittens trying to nurse, and she was not happy about that!
They were very insistent. Especially this one…
Poor mama just can’t catch a break! Not even to eat!
I know how she feels. There was a time… 😜 🤣
The Re-Farmer
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A surprise critter!
One of the things about leaving the sun room doors slightly open for the kittens is that sometimes, other critters get in, too.
Usually skunks.
Last night, the girls went to see the kittens and work on socializing them, when they saw a strange critter running around. If looked kinda like a squirrel, but the we have red squirrels around here, and it wasn’t one of those. Possibly a chipmunk? Seeing it run around some more, they thought it looked like it might be a flying squirrel, which couldn’t be possible. Could it?
I tried to get a picture, but this was the best I could manage.
We did get a better look at it as it tried to climb the walls and around the tops of the windows.
It was most definitely a flier.
It turns out that we do have a native flying squirrel! The Northern Flying Squirrel.
Not once, even as a kid growing up here, have we ever seen a flying squirrel. Just our usual red squirrels.
They are SO flippin’ cute!
I want to snuggle it. 😂
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 