Our 2022 garden: lost?

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Well, that “blowing snow advisory” has certainly been valid.

My husband noticed the piebald deer heading for the kibble house again, so I figured that was a good time to empty the kitchen compost bucket – and get her away from the kibble. When I opened the door from the sunroom, pausing to take this photo, she just stared at me until she saw me moving outside.

I don’t think she appreciated the interruption of her snack!

I topped up the kibble for the cats, while I was out.

Since it was a quick run to the compost pile, I hadn’t bothered putting on a coat. It was only -12C/10F, after all!

Of course, that didn’t take the wind chill into account. I don’t know what it was at the time, but we’re at -13C/9F right now, and the wind chill is -23C/-9F. Brrrr!!!!

But I’m thinking of spring as we tend the seedlings. I’d mentioned in my last post that the seedlings in the mini-greenhouse were not looking well, so I decided to get some photos to show what I meant.

At which point I discovered I’d forgotten to drop and zip closed the front of the plastic cover.

Much to my surprise, the cats have made no attempt to go into it! Perhaps they’ve satisfied their curiosity already. I decided to leave it open, for now.

These are the Cup of Moldova seedlings that got potted up as we thinned them out. They are actually looking worse now than this morning, and I don’t know why. They had been doing quite well after being transplanted, then suddenly… this.

Were they over watered? Too hot in the mini-greenhouse? Not enough light? Not enough air circulation? Any or all of the above? I have no idea. I’m hoping that leaving the front of the cover open will be helpful.

The Sophie’s Choice that got eaten are… well, the two that were down to just stems are dead, but the ones that still have leaves on them… I don’t know. They might still survive.

These are the ones that got repotted after a cat lay on and crushed the original pots they were in. They actually are doing better than anything else in the mini-greenhouse. The damage done to them is more visible now. Surprisingly, the peppers and eggplants that got the most shmooshed are doing pretty good! The remaining tomatoes are showing damaged leaves, but beyond that, they look like they will recover.

I guess we’ll see over the next few days, how many are complete losses, and how many will survive.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2022 garden: gourds and shallots

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Switching up the seedling trays was definitely helpful for the newly germinated gourds!

It’s amazing how much growth can be seen, sometime in just a few hours! These still had their tips mostly in the soil when I checked them last night. The two Canteen gourds on the right were able to lift out of the soil without any issues, but the two on the left still had their seed covers stuck on the leaves. One slid off fairly easily, but I ended up tearing the leaf tips off to get the other one off. It just did not want to let go, and the whole thing wanted to come up by the roots when I tried to remove it!

We still have just that one little Wonderberry seedling in the back.

The shallots are happier in the aquarium greenhouse, too, and area starting to grow straight up again, instead of leaning towards the living room window, while in the mini-greenhouse.

I’m still a little concerned about some of the seedlings in the mini-greenhouse. Some are doing better than others, but it’s not an ideal set up for them. They need better light and more fresh air, but we can’t give them that and keep the cats out at the same time. :-( Hopefully, they’ll last long enough that we can transfer them to the sun room, even if it means setting up the heat bulb again. But then, we’ll have outside cats to deal with, too! :-( Gotta get the heated water bowl that’s still working outside, so we can close the doors again.

We’ll figure it out.

The Re-Farmer

Good morning, kitties!

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I just had to laugh when I came into the sun room this morning, and found Potato Beetle, curled up in the window.

My attempt to take a photo disturbed him.

Gosh, he looks like such a grizzled old man!

He’s only three.

Since we’ve been keeping the sun room doors propped slightly open to allow access to the working heated water bowl, he seems to be spending most of his time in there – if he can claim their favourite bed before one of the other cats gets into it!

In total, I spotted 15 cats this morning. Even Ghost Baby flashed momentarily into view before disappearing again.

I had a bit of a surprise this morning. After finishing with food and water for the cats, I popped into the sun room to get seeds for the feeding station. When I stepped outside again, I was startled by a loud HUFFFFFF!!

The piebald deer had just wanted into the people gate in the chain link fence. I think we startled each other, and she was warning me off! :-D

This is the first time I’ve actually heard a deer make a noise.

It was funny to watch her as she ran down the shovelled paths to towards the back of the garage, then across to the compost pile, huffing away at me every now and then, before running into the spruce grove. There, she and another deer that was already there, stopped to watch while I put the feed out.

I later saw three of them at the feeding station, watching me as I moved around in the outer yard.

I got the burn barrel going again and, as usual, had company.

I don’t know why, but Agnoos just LOVES it when we are at the burn barrel. He rolls around in the snow, usually at our feet, asking for attention. Of all the outside cats, Agnoos seems to be the one that wants human attention the most, but never so much as while we’re tending the burn barrel!

I wasn’t able to stay out too long, though, as it started to snow. We were already at -5C/23F this morning, and are holding there for most of the day, but we are now under a “blowing snow advisory”.

Unfortunately, for all the shoveling on the roof my daughters did, the warmer weather has resulted in leaking at one of the windows upstairs. *sigh* We need a new roof so badly! We have the leak upstairs, and right now the ceiling in the sun room has icicles hanging from it. :-(

We’re supposed to cool down to between -10C/14F and -15C/5F over the next few days, so that should stop the leaking for a while, at least.

The Re-Farmer

That was fast!

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Wow, did my order from Lee Valley come in fast! After picking up my mother’s car from the garage, I swung by the post office to pick up the mail, and found this.

Only three days to get here – including the weekend!

Now we just have to wait for enough snow to melt before we can get into the old garden shed, bring out the scythe and get a good look at it.

I was doing a bit of research, and it seems the curvy handle design is called an American scythe. These are apparently known for being very heavy, but the one we have has an aluminum handle, and is very light. I remember having no issues with the weight when I was a kid and my dad was showing me how to use it. Being much older and more broken now, I expect to fully appreciate the light weight and more ergonomic design! :-D

As for my mother’s car, my daughter drove it home, and she reports it running just fine. Nothing out of the ordinary, and the check engine light stayed off. We also didn’t get charged for the check up. He did the check, cleared the codes and ran it for an hour, and found no issues. So it does look like it was simply triggered by the changing of the battery. That was best case scenario, too.

I am feeling much relieved!

The Re-Farmer

Deer visitor, and seedling status

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I guess I was just too disruptive this morning, because I wasn’t able to get any pictures of the outside cats! We’re expecting another warm day, so I wanted to make sure the sidewalk was scraped and cleared, so the concrete can warm up in the sun and melt away any remaining ice and snow.

The deer didn’t seem to mind! I saw a group of three, before I headed out, then my husband saw the usual pair, before the piebald finally came around. We are definitely seeing a lot more deer lately, all over. Sadly, that also means we’re seeing more on the side of the highways, that had been hit by cars. I’ve lost count of how many bald eagles I’ve seen, scavenging the carcasses. I’ve never seen as many bald eagles as I have this year – and it’s only the beginning of March!

While checking and tending our seedlings, I was happy to see the 4 new Canteen gourd seedlings are growing very quickly. I had been wondering about the on luffa that started to sprout, but hasn’t gotten any bigger, so when I had the chance, I checked it out.

Oh. This would be why it’s not growing.

That little bit of seedling had been right against the side of the pot, but when I touched the leaves, it fell right out.

So far, there’s just the one luffa seedling we have, which seems to be surviving the cat damage all right. I’m not as sure about the one Canteen gourd in that tray, but with that one, we at least have 4 new sprouts. Aside from the one seedling that did not succeed, there is no sign of more luffa germinating. We still have luffa seeds, so I’m thinking of adding more to the pots to try again.

The seedlings in the mini-greenhouse seem to be struggling, and not just the ones with cat damage. I suspect part of the problem is that we have to keep the plastic cover on it, to keep the cats out. I’ve put the little fan we’ve got, inside the mini-greenhouse, so there is at least going to be air circulation. They may be getting over watered, too. We’ll have to watch out for that.

In other things, I got word from the garage about my mother’s car. It’s ready to be picked up. He checked it over, reset the codes and found nothing wrong with it. Most likely, the check engine light and codes were triggered by changing out the battery. Which is a relief to hear, but I still don’t know what made that “pop” noise when the car died! We’ll head in this afternoon to pick it up and hopefully, I’ll have a chance to talk to him about it.

It’ll be good to have the car issues over and done with for a while!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2022 garden: new sprouts, and an update

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With all the damage done to our seedlings, we’ve been keeping a close eye on them. So far, it looks like most of the damaged seedlings will survive, except maybe the two little tomatoes that were reduced to just stems. I’m still leaving them. Who knows. New leaves might still emerge! Probably not, but one can hope. ;-)

The pots and trays in the mini-greenhouse need to be rotated regularly, since most of the light comes from the window, off to one side. I was very happy to see not one, but two, new seedlings!

Two canteen gourds are popping up. :-)

From the looks of the repotted seedlings in the big aquarium greenhouse, we should be able to switch trays again.

My tax return should be coming in soon, and I’ve been thinking of things we need to pick up. Certain tools come to mind, but I also spotted this, at Home Depot (photo belongs to Home Depot); a soft sided, walk in, portable greenhouse.

At $355, it’s a much more reasonable price than I expected. I could get a larger one for the same money, but this one comes with shelves already, which I think is worth the trade off. I’ve seen reviews people have done with small greenhouses made of these materials, and they have all been quite positive, with a few surprised by how well they stood up to severe storms. It might be too late for this spring’s seedlings, but we do need a better space for our seed starts. Plus, since we are also starting tree seeds that will be staying in pots for their first couple of years, this would help overwinter them. I was checking the baggies with the seeds and misting them with a bit more water the other day. My daughters had set them up, with one seed per baggie with a bit of seed starting mix, and this was the first time I went through each of them individually. I had a bit of a surprise – instead of 20 tulip trees, there was 26! There were extra seeds. :-) If we have even just a 50% germination rate, that would mean 6 paw paws and 13 tulip tree seedlings in pots, and we’ll need somewhere safe to keep them them all.

Plus, my brother says we have a frame in the hayloft of the old barn that we could use to create a small polytunnel. We would just need to get the appropriate plastic to cover it. We don’t even have a path dug out to the barn this winter, so we’ll see about that after the snow melts!

So… do I get a portable greenhouse?

Or do I get certain much needed power tools?

I might be able to get both, but we also need materials to build temporary fencing around our garden beds.

There are so many things we need to get, and only so much cash is coming in.

Ah, well. We’ll figure it out!

The Re-Farmer

Sunday kitties

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A bit of adorable cat therapy for the day.

Beep Beep and her “baby”, Turmeric, were all shmushed together adorably, looking so sweet and innocent.

They lie.

;-)

I counted a total of 14 outside cats this morning. They were very happy to see me. The water bowl in the sun room was completely dry, and all the kibble was gone. From the state of things, it looks like something other than cats has been into it. We’d given them a big, meaty turkey carcass to pick at, but something made off with most of the bones last night.

I stayed out longer this morning, hauling more snow away from the pile at the well cap, and getting the burn barrel going again, to burn away more of the sawdust from the cat litter. It keeps going out. :-/ Not enough air getting into the barrel to keep it smoldering.

Before going back inside, I found Agnoos had claimed prime real estate in the sun room. :-) One of my daughters headed out later, to continue working on the snow pile, and Agnoos was still there!

Feeling the need for some cat therapy right now. I just got a call from my brother, who had made the drive out to visit our mother. I can’t go into detail here, but it turns out my mother has, yet again, stabbed him in the back and kicked him in the teeth. She actually did it over a year ago, but he just found out about it today, and the betrayal is just heartbreaking.

One thing is for sure. I am so very thankful that my brother owns the property we are on, not my mother. If my mother still owned the farm, we’d probably have moved out by now. Knowing all this is part of my mother’s slowly failing mental faculties does not make it any better. She’s just well enough to function independently, but also just far gone enough to really mess things up, with no understanding of the consequences of her actions.

And my poor brother is baring the brunt of it.

He deserves so much better.

The Re-Farmer

Got part way done

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With all the vehicle troubles we’ve been having, we still haven’t done our monthly Costco trip and, frankly, I didn’t even want to think about it. Aside from that fact that I dislike shopping in general, the unexpected work on the van and my mother’s car has me just plain not wanting to drive, if I can avoid it. I keep expecting something else to break down!

In the end, I decided to make the shorter trip to a nearer Walmart, since some of the stuff we need isn’t available at Costco, anyhow. I’ll save the Costco trip for after my tax return comes in, which should be in less than a week.

After I got back and the girls took care of hauling things in and putting it all away, I took advantage of the -4C/25F temperatures and chipped away at the snow over the well cap.

We can at least access it now, though as you can see by the height of the snow the shovel is leaning against, we have a lot more to haul away to prevent spring flooding in this corner.

Most of the outside cats were very unhappy with the commotion I was making and ran off, but Tuxedo Mask stayed to watch me from the warmth and comfort of their shelter. :-)

Oh, my goodness! As I am writing this, a deer has just shown up on the live feed for the driveway cam. Usually, it goes down the driveway and to the road, but this time he went up the cat path to the old shed we shovelled out. It isn’t shovelled all the way, because of the things buried in the snow at the far end, but it looks like she went the rest of the way through, and disappeared into the shed!

Too funny!

Now I’m trying to remember if there’s anything in there a deer might damage. ;-)

Where was I?

Oh, right…

Tuxedo Mask had front row seating in their shelter, but I found that Potato Beetle had claimed prime real estate inside the sun room.

He was more than happy to get some attention, too! What a sweetie!

While at the store today, I did pick up something extra. We’ve still got those beef bones in the freezer, and I want to make and can bone broth. That would require using the pressure canner, which we still haven’t even tested out. It turns out we can’t use a pressure canner on our new glass top stove. I kept finding contradictory information about that, but eventually concluded it’s not something we can do.

The stove we have is the type cycles the heat on and off, rather than reaching a temperature and then maintaining it. Which means the pressure doesn’t remain constant, either. I have used the smaller pressure cooker on it, as a sort of a test, and it did have some issues. I noticed that when we did water bath canning, it was difficult to keep the water to temperature as well, because of the cycling.

We can make it work with the little pressure cooker and with water bath canning, but the potential problems with a pressure canner ranges from not being able to maintain the correct pressure, to shattering the glass cooktop. !!

So, when I spotted this, I decided it was worth the splurge. It was only about $25, anyhow.

We actually do have a two burner countertop cooker we found while cleaning the new part basement, but I have not yet dared to test it out. It looks like sometime from the 70’s. It might be useable, but not for something as large and heavy as a canner.

This new one should be safer to use, and with a more controllable temperature. We’ll test it out the next time I use the little pressure cooker, first. I might even find something to use our big stock pot as a water bath canner again. If it can handle the size and weight of that stock pot, it won’t have any problem with the size and weight of the pressure canner!

When my daughter bought the new stove, none of us expected to have any sorts of problems like this! We thought the glass top would make things easier, not more complicated! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Our 2022 garden: NOOOooooo!!!!!

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Argh!!!!

For all our efforts, a cat still managed to get into the mini-greenhouse. My daughter found Susan … SUSAN! … sitting on the second lowest shelf. I would have expected Tissue, or even Turmeric, but not Susan! My daughter got her out but Susan didn’t seem to be into anything, so she thought things were okay.

I went over to see where she got in and how to block it better, when I saw this terrible sight.

She ate the Sophie’s Choice tomato leaves! Two of them, right down to the stems! A couple others even looked like the soil was dug into.

I took the trays off the two bottom shelves, rearranged the box we put to block the back and used packing tape under the corners, taping the plastic cover to the bottom shelf. Hopefully, there are no more gaps a cat can squeeze into.

The tray with the eaten tomato seedlings then went onto the bottom, where the light is, and the tray with the gourd pots went up a level.

There is a Canteen gourd breaking soil, so there’s at least that to be happy about.

We still have some Sophie’s Choice seeds left, so we can start some again, but the instructions for these said to start them much earlier than other varieties. Hopefully, we still have time.

Hopefully, some of what we already have will survive, too.

Once that was all done, it was time to do some research and…

Yes. Tomato leaves ARE toxic to cats. However, it takes quite a bit to make them sick, and quite a bit more to endanger their lives. For the amount she ate, she might throw up or something, but nothing major.

This is just so, so frustrating! And potentially alarming.

We’ve had issues with cats going after our plants before. Usually to dig in the dirt, not to eat them, though there was that one succulent we had that they just couldn’t resist.

Notice I said “had”. :-(

We’ve got all sorts of barriers around our remaining house plants to keep them out. As much as the damage done to them bothered me, right now we’re trying to grow food, not decorations, so this is bothering me more.

Why are the cats so determined to destroy our seedlings? There are the barriers, the space around the trays is tight, the pots and trays are wet – we just refilled the bottoms of most of the trays to water from below – and you’d think something in the nightshade family would taste pretty gross.

I am not at all happy right now. :-(

I will, however, share a photo of some well behaved kitties I took earlier.

When I headed outside to get a meter reading, I spotted these two, cuddling together in the sun room. Agnoos is fine with us, but the ‘iccus he was cuddling with is one of the more feral cats. I had to move fast to get a picture before he (she?) ran away. I’m not sure which one this is, but from the facial markings, I’m guessing this is the one the girls named Sadiccus. He looks like he’s been crying!

Which is kinda what I feel like doing right now. Crying in frustration!!

The Re-Farmer

Remembered to order: from Lee Valley

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One of the things we found after moving here, was my father’s scythe, hanging in the old garden shed. I remember my father showing me how to use it, long ago, when our rag tag collection of lawn mowers happened to all be broken down at the same time. The lawn got so tall, my father used the scythe to cut the grass.

I wasn’t very good at it, but my dad made that thing sing!

I was very happy to see the scythe still here, and would love to be able to use it, but we have not found a sharpening stone for it. I can’t even remember what my father used to sharpen it. I’ve been looking for a scythe sharpening stone, but they aren’t available locally. No one carries scythes, either, so that’s not surprising. I did finally find one at Lee Valley, and after much forgetfulness, finally remembered to order one, last night.

Images belong to Lee Valley.

This is a “Water Stone for Traditional Austrian Scythe”. The Austrian scythe is what Lee Valley carries. It is not what we have. I think I prefer what we have, as the handle has a curved, ergonomic design.

Since this is a wet stone that gets used frequently while cutting, I needed one more thing.

A “Watertight Holster for Scythe Stone”. This holster can be clipped onto a waistband, pocket or belt, and water kept in it. The water not only keeps the stone appropriately wet, but any grit on the stone will get washed off as well.

In some areas of the outer yard, a scythe is going to be the only way we can cut the grass and weeds. We haven’t done it since moving here, and it drives me nuts, because it’s such a fire hazard.

Which means we’re going to have to get into the swing of scything!

Here’s a video I found that shows both how to sharpen the blade, and how to use the scythe.

You can definitely see why keeping the blade really sharp is going to make a huge difference! Can you imagine trying to do that with a dull blade? :-D

We’ll have to be super careful using it in the outer yard, though. The ground is uneven, and there may be rocks or sticks hidden in the grass. I would hate to finally be able to use the scythe, only to break it on a hidden rock somewhere!

So the order is in and still being processed. There’s no real hurry, since we can’t even get into the garden shed, yet. The main thing is, it’s ordered and will be here when we need it.

The Re-Farmer