The cats spend most of their days, sprawled all over various surfaces, usually in bizarre positions, sleeping away the hottest parts of the day.
None, however, can match David the Magnificent, in all his glory.
He looks like he’s broken! :-D
We’ve been trying to brush him as often as we can. Oddly, he has almost no fur coming off on the brush! Then there’s Cheddar, who has very short, coarse fur, that fills the brush in only a few strokes!
Unfortunately, David will not let us brush his armpit area, which is the only place he’s getting clumps in his fur. We end up having to cut them off.
I have to admit, after yesterday’s damage, I was quite trepidatious about checking the garden beds while doing this morning’s rounds!
I was, however, greeted with a happy sight, first thing.
Potato Beetle is still here!
With him being gone for so many months, there’s no reason to assume he’s here to stay, so every day that we see him will be a gift. :-)
The down side is, he’s been mean to the other cats. Though he used to be part of the crowd filling the kibble house since we built it last fall, he chased all the other cats away this morning. Yesterday, he went after Nutmeg for no reason, and even growled at Junk Pile cat while she was hiding under the cat shelter. I’m hoping this will settle down once he’s been back for a while.
I found an Ozark Nest Egg gourd blooming this morning. Between the density of the leaves, the chain link fence and the protective wire around them, there’s no way I can look to see if there are any female flower buds developing. Of the few I could see, they were still only male flowers. The vines are pushing their way through the chain link fence, and we should be able to start training them up the fence soon.
If they don’t get eaten, first!
More and more tomatoes are starting to change colour. Until today, the most Spoon tomatoes we’ve had ripe at the same time was only three. Plus, we have our very first ripe grape tomato, from the Mosaic Medley mix of seeds!
Alas, there was more deer damage this morning, though nothing like what we found yesterday. This time, it was the yellow beans that got nibbled on.
I was able to pick a small handful of both green and yellow beans this morning, but I am not finding anything in the purple beans. While moving aside their leaves to look, I was seeing a lot of stems, and I wonder if they’d been eaten. The purple beans have so much more foliage, it’s harder to tell, compared to the other beans.
While the sweet corn and sunflowers appeared untouched, I found an entire Dorinny corn pulled out of the ground. The plant next to it has a big chomp taken out of the cob.
The ants were all over that cob!
I also found a cob that had been torn off another plant, with nothing but a nibble off the top. Curious, I went ahead and shucked it.
It was almost completely ripe! It was so well pollinated, too.
Well, I wasn’t about to let it go to waste, so I washed it and ate it raw.
It was delicious!
However things go for the rest of the season, at least I can say I’ve tasted both the Dorinny and the Montana Morado corn this year. :-D
I had one more find that I wanted to share, but I saved the photo for last. If spiders bother you, you might want to quickly scroll on by.
…
Still here?
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I found a garden friend among the purple bean leaves.
I had been pushing aside and turning the leaves, looking for beans underneath, so it was a real surprise to see this spider, not being startled away. Just look at the grip it’s got on that egg sac! It didn’t move at all while I got close to take the photo. Such a good mama!
When I was done, I took the leaf off and put it on the ground in between some bean plants, where it was more sheltered.
Once I was back inside, I checked the garden cam files and confirmed that yes, it was a deer that had done this morning’s damage. The only other critter that triggered the motion sensor was Potato Beetle, while he was keeping me company in the garden yesterday evening.
I have a few ideas on what to try next to keep the deer out, but I’ll need to go into to town to find the materials for it. Today is a holiday here in Canada, and there is a festival going on in town right now, so I’m going to avoid it completely. :-/
Things have been a bit odd with our garlic this year. I am sure part of it is because of the drought, but others, I’m not so sure!
We did a partial harvest and curing of our Purple Stripe garlic a while ago. The remaining garlic looked like it was ready to harvest for the last week or so, but I wanted to be sure of them before I dug them up. Here is how the beds looked, before I started.
In the foreground are what’s left of the Purple Stripe garlic, and the other half of the bed is Rocambole.
This bed has the Porcelain Music in the foreground, and the other half of the Rocambole in the other side.
I started with the Purple Stripe, since I was curious to see how they compared to the ones that were harvested early.
I was very surprised and impressed! They are really nice and big!
The Porcelain Music has bulbs a fair bit smaller, and a lot more compact feeling. These probably should have been harvested maybe even a week ago.
Then it was time to start on the Rocambole, where I had a surprise waiting for me.
I found a pair of garlic scapes!
The Rocambole were the oddest of the garlic, and their scapes were part of that. We didn’t get a lot of scapes from them, since so many seemed to get stuck in the stems.
There was certainly a lot of them. They were the smallest of the garlic bulbs, though several of them were double bulbs. Quite a few of them had “bulbs” forming in their stems, of varying sizes.
Here is the entire harvest. I’m rather pleased with it! :-)
Each garlic type got tied off and hung to cure inside the gazebo tent.
The Purple Stripe looks so meager compared to the others. :-D
You can see some of the mutant Rocambole here. One of them had really large bulbils forming in the stem – easily as big as a head of garlic! – and almost no bulb underground.
There’s so much garlic handing in the gazebo tent, I’m a bit concerned about the weight on the supports! I wonder if we can find a way to hang them in the basement with the dehumidifier or something. It’s been so dry, we haven’t had to use the dehumidifier in the old basement at all this year.
While those are hanging to cure, I brought these ones inside.
There were a few odd little bulbs that lost their stems, or the stems were really weak. There’s even a couple of bulbils that fell of the stems of Rocambole. That’s what most of these are, though there are a few Porcelain Music in there, too. These will be for using right away. :-)
That is now it for our garlic in the garden! Now I just need to clean up the beds. I am thinking of going through the barn to see if there is any scrap wood suitable to build box frames for these beds. I don’t think we’ll be doing high raised beds here, but I do want to keep the soil from falling down the sides and into the paths. :-) Then we can think about what to plant in them, next year! :-)
When I headed out to do my rounds this morning, I found the sun room door open, and a bag of kibble on the floor, a couple of corners chewed open and kibble all over the floor.
Given the size of the raccoon I saw on the garden cam, I find myself thinking they’ve figured out how to open the door.
After I modified the row cover, I finished up the watering, then headed inside. It wasn’t until much later that I saw I’d forgotten the sun room door open after getting a utility knife, which I’d also forgotten out by the garden. So I headed outside, got the knife, then went to put it away in the sun room.
I was just reaching the door when I startled a cat, leaving the sun room.
An adult grey tabby.
What the heck???
The cat started to run off but quickly stopped and meowed at me. When I called to him, he came right over and before I knew it, I was being happily snuggled by a Potato Beetle. I didn’t have my phone with me, so it wasn’t until he went to get a drink of water that I was able to dash in to get it and get photos.
I haven’t seen Potato Beetle in months! I even checked my photos, and the last ones I have of him were taken in February. That’s when we found him with a big bite in his hip. We got him to the vet, then had him isolated in the sun room for a few days. Shortly after he had access to the outdoors again, he disappeared. The next month, Nostrildamus disappeared, then Creamsicle, and then Ginger showed up with his leg dangling and had his amputation.
It was a very rough winter for the male yard cats.
Usually, if they don’t come back for a while, it means something got them, and we don’t expect to see them again. So it was a very happy surprise to see Potato Beetle again, after all this time!
I think I spent about two hours sitting on a camp chair under the gazebo tent with him in draped across my body, sometimes in very odd angles, napping. Or cuddling. Or nuzzling my face. He was so incredibly calm and loving!
When he did finally jump down to the ground, he lay there for a while until something caught his attention in the distance.
It was Junk Pile cat and her kittens, slowly coming closer. In the above photo, she and three of her kittens are almost at the kibble house.
The fourth one had been drinking water from a container by the grape vine before joining its siblings.
This is the closest they’ve been willing to come to a human, yet! They were watching me closely, but still came to the kibble house.
It may have been a disappointing start to the day, but seeing Potato Beetle again, getting to cuddle him, and having Junk Pile and her kittens come over, has made this a very good day! :-)
When we planted for a fall harvest, we did as much as we could to make row covers to protect our seedlings. We had enough materials for only two chicken wire covers, then made do with other materials for the third bed.
We rigged what we could to protect the last bed, but the grasshoppers really did a number on the seedlings. I ended up using old water bottles with their bottoms cut off to protect the remaining bits of seedlings, hoping they would recover. As you can see by the green in some of the bottles, there has been growth!
They can’t stay under the bottles, though, as they need wind and air to be strong. However, if we just took off the bottles, they’d only get eaten by critters.
The bed nearby was pretty much wiped out by the grasshoppers.
Even though the ends of the covers were open, the critters didn’t seem to want to go under them, but there is no such barrier for the grasshoppers!
The third bed is doing a bit better. The radishes may have lots of damage to them, but they’re the biggest ones we’ve got right now. The only surviving chard is in this bed, too.
Since the middle bed was the most damaged, I decided to modify the cover and move it to another bed. In cleaning up the new part basement, we found a roll of window screen. I’d used some of it to make covers for the rain barrles, but there was still quite a bit left.
The cover is wider than the mesh. One length of it was enough to cover most of the chicken wire, but after cutting the remaining mesh in half and adding it, I was left with a small gap.
The edges of the screen were stapled to the wood frame, including enough to cover the ends. I tided down the mesh to the chicken wire just enough to keep it from moving.
A dear friend had sent us a couple of those mesh curtains that are meant to go over doors. The idea being, the mesh would keep the bugs out, but still allow wind in. They are tacked to the door frame, and the middle is held closed with magnets. The hope was that we could set them up in the old basement door, to keep the cats from going in there, but they could just push their way through the magnets. :-(
One of the panels was perfect to cover the gap.
The outer edge is stapled to the frame. The fabric is reinforced there, since it’s supposed to be tacked onto a door frame, so there is no damage there. Amazingly, the magnets are holding to the chicken wire enough to keep it one!
Once it was ready, it was time to set up the garden bed.
Even covered by water bottles, there was still grasshopper damage!! Some had never recovered from being eaten, at all. While removing the bottles, the soil wanted to stick to the them, too, and that quite nearly pulled up several of the plants. :-(
After making sure those that had been disturbed had soil pressed in for supper, it was time to add the new cover.
I’m quite happy with this.
It will be worthwhile to get more window screen mesh!
Since the ends are covered with window screen, it made it easier to add the shade cloth.
The surviving seedlings in the now-uncovered bed to things much bigger than little water bottles to protect them. The grasshoppers can still get in, but it’s still better than nothing.
Then all the beds got their shade cloths to protect them from the heat of the day.
When we make our permanent raised beds, they will be shorter. I actually like the length of these – they’re about 15 feet long – but it makes the protective covers awkward to handle, and we just didn’t have the materials to make them the same length. The covers are only about 13 feet long. I’m thinking 10 feet will work better, but we shall see when the time comes.
Until we can get the materials to build them, it’s a moot point, anyhow!
Whatever we end up with, having window screen mesh on a frame to keep the insects out seems to be more practical than the mosquito netting we’re using as floating row covers.
Yesterday evening was so lovely out, I spent as much time outside as I could! I took advantage of this to finished up the garlic we harvested some time ago. They have been hanging from the rafters under our gazebo tent to cure. It was not ideal conditions. They should be somewhere cool and dry. What we had available was outside, where it was hot and dry, or in the basement, where it was cool and humid.
I figured hot and dry was better than cool and moist!
The stalks and roots were trimmed, the soil brushed off, then they were tied up in twine.
They are not as cured as well as they should – some of the stems are still showing a bit of green – so these will need to be eaten fairly quickly. Which is sssuuuccchhh a hardship… Ha! I look forward to using them. They are currently hanging from the ceiling in the kitchen.
I think garlic soup would go over very well! It’s usually made at the end of winter, as a sort of spring tonic, but I think it’s good, at any time! I use an entire bulb of garlic to make it, but these are so small, I might just use up a whole bunch of the littlest bulbs. :-)
While these were dying back way too early and had to be harvested, the rest of the garlic is now looking ready to harvest, too. It’s still early, and I don’t expect very large bulbs, but that’s okay. We’ll be buying more to plant for next year, rather than try and save bulbs from this year’s garden.
Today is supposed to be hot again, so I wanted to make sure to get the garden watered early in the day, while it was still cool. I started with the soaker hose at the squash tunnel, then went around checking the melons, squash and gourds.
I was extremely disappointed to find this.
Our one and only Teddy winter squash was gone.
Et.
Munched.
Masticated.
The two Teddy plants are blooming, and there is even a female flower developing, but that one baby squash had grown so much after the rain, I was really looking forward to watching it develop.
This is one of the nearby Little Gem winter squash. There were no developing squash down here to be eaten; those are much higher on the trellis. Still, it means energy will be going to recover from the damage, instead of into developing squash.
Thankfully, that was the only damage here. The melons and gourds had no critter damage. I did find one of the nearby Dorinny corn had been gotten into, the remains of a cob on the ground. The corn may have been a deer, but I figured the squash was a groundhog. The deer don’t go along that side of the garden beds, preferring to walk through the open areas in the middle.
I was wrong.
When I checked the garden cam, I almost missed the shadow moving in the darkness. It was a huge raccoon! So big that, if it hadn’t turned at the end of the bean bed and I could make out its tail, I would have thought it was a bear cub.
I continued checking the beds, and was so disappointed to find this.
A deer got into the Montana Morado corn. In the above photo, several stalks in the outermost row are gone.
I found corn cobs scattered on the ground, each looking like they had only a single bite taken out of them.
Hoof prints left no doubt as to what was responsible for this damage.
The deer had traipsed right through the middle of the corn block, leaving damaged plants and nipped corn cobs in its wake.
These are all the cobs I picked up off the ground.
I think it would bother me less if the deer actually ate the corn, rather than taking a bite here and a bite there. and leaving a trail of damage.
On checking the cobs, you can see that a couple of them were almost completely ripe, if poorly pollinated. When ripe, the kernels should be an even darker purple.
One cob is looking like it was going blue, instead of purple!
Several of the cobs had been beautifully pollinated, full of developing kernels.
I am so incredibly unhappy. Clearly, the flashy spinny things around the corn block are no deterrent.
Not even our purple beans escaped damage. The purple beans are lusher and bushier than the green and yellow beans – except for at this end of the row, where the leaves have been thinned out by nibbling.
And here is the beast that did the damage – nibbling on a sunflower!!!
I. Am. Not. Impressed.
I even added bells to the lines around the corn and sunflower beds, but the deer came from the other side!!
Venison is sounding very good right now.
What a disappointing way to start the day.
Other things went well, though, and I will save those for other posts!
Today is our only “cool” day before things start heating up again. Our high of the day was merely 25C/77F. We’re going to have another few days hovering at or above 30C/86F, so I wanted to get some clean up done while it was still relatively pleasant out.
I decided to clear things out to uncover the woodchuck’s den opening, under the junk pile.
This was a job I’d deliberately left for a while, as there were kittens in the junk pile and I didn’t want to scare them. Plus, the spirea and other undergrowth provided them with shade, and things to play with.
Since the kittens have been chased out by the grog, it’s time to clean up!
The first thing was to cut away the spirea and wild roses, until I could remove the old pallet. Since they were just cut to the ground, rather than being pulled up by the roots, the roses will come back next year. Unfortunately, so will the spirea!
Immediately after I took the above picture, a furry little face poked out and looked at me. The grog was home! I imagine he headed out the “back door” on the other side of the pile, as I kept causing a disturbance here.
As I worked my way along the fallen tree, I was able to pull more things up by the roots. The wine barrel planter that I uncovered was not yet collapsed when we first moved here. We used to be able to watch yard cats sitting on it in the winter, sunning themselves. After the pieces collapsed, it became a favourite play area for kittens.
The bushy Chinese elm next to the log are hiding an upright barrel planter.
I also uncovered what looked like a sprinkler hose. I have no idea how long it’s been there, but it appears that the tree fell on top of it. !!
After cleaning up the collapsed barrel planter, it was time to turn my attention to the upright one. On the ground to the right of it, you can see a bit of a red brick. Like other things I’ve found around the yard, I figured I’d be finding more bricks under the planter, once I cleared it out.
The first thing to do was pull out the pieces of wood. I was then able to remove the top metal ring (I’m keeping all of them), but the bottom ring has a smaller diameter, so it had to wait.
I can cut away the Chinese Elm that had been growing in this planter before, and what was growing this year was from the remains of the ones I cut last year. You can almost see the “stumps” that the new growth emerged from.
This is the wood from both barrel planters, plus a few odd pieces I found as well. Since doing a burn would still be stupid dangerous right now, these all went on the junk pile in the outer yard, waiting until we can hire someone to haul it to the dump.
After clearing away the wood and the metal ring, I broke up the soil so that I could take out the roots of the Chinese elm as best we could. Then I started poking around with a garden fork to take out any bricks that I expected to find buried under the planter.
I found a third metal ring, completely buried in the soil.
I also found that it was mostly flat rocks under the planter, not bricks! The one long, concrete brick I found was buried under where the collapsed barrel planter was likely sitting, before it got knocked over.
I find it interesting that care was taken to make sure the planters were on something solid, rather than on bare ground, yet they were sitting there for so long, everything sank into the soil.
After spreading out the soil that was in the planters and filling in the holes I’d made while pulling shrubs out by their roots, I dragged out the hose. I figured it was junk, since it seems to have been sitting there for a long time. I’ve found many hoses scattered about in sheds or the barn, and most of them were so old, they were brittle and cracked. I figured much the same with this, but decided to hook it up to a hose and test it out.
Much to my shock, it actually worked! The couplings were leaking, but all they needed were new rubber washers. There were two hoses together, and they both work. Which means, if we pick up some end caps for them, we can set them up in garden beds, like we currently have the soaker hose at the squash tunnel, for more efficient watering.
It was about this time we reached the hottest part of the day, so I stopped for now.
To get at the stuff where the sprinkler hose was, I’ll need to clear away the underbrush on the other side, then cut up the fallen tree to remove it in pieces.
Which will give me access to the back of the junk pile, too. There appears to be some wire fencing that may actually be usable back there!
This is the next area that needs to be worked on. All the underbrush to the right of the path through the trees needs to cleared out. This will give access to the dead trees that need to be cut down, as well as the back of the junk pile.
Clearly, that junk pile didn’t start out as a junk pile. The wood was carefully stacked and covered with tarps, but then junk got tossed on, the tarps blew off, and now the stacked boards are badly rotted. They’re also very full of nails and screws. !! I’d already cleared underbrush to access this side of the pile of wood, which was used when I worked on what are now the garlic beds, but what I cleared up is now mostly full of thistles. :-/
Where I’m standing to take this photo is about where we plan to build the cordwood practice shed that will become an outdoor bathroom, with composting toilet. We had intended to start work on it last year, but not it will wait until all those dead trees are taken down, since they would need to be felled towards where the shed will be. As it is, the new location for our compost pile, and the beet bed, may be in the way. These are very tall trees!
So that’s progress for today. It isn’t a lot, but it’s amazing how much difference even that little bit makes.
Plus, we now have a couple of “new” sprinkler hoses!
Oh, my goodness, what a difference a single day of good rain makes! No amount of watering with the hose can compete.
While we have been able to pick a Spoon tomato or two, every few days (there were three ripe ones yesterday, that my brother and his wife to go try. :-) ), the Mosaic Medley tomatoes still have a ways to go. Two plants have tomatoes that are starting to ripen, though, with this one being the furthest along.
Though pickings are slim right now, I can see that we will have lots ripening, all at once, soon! They are all indeterminate varieties, and with the Spoon tomatoes alone, we’re probably going to be picking lots, daily.
The Little Gem winter squash, in particular, got noticeably bigger overnight! There is easily several inches of new growth on the vines.
The Teddy winter squash has pretty much doubled in size since I checked it, yesterday morning.
Even the pea sprouts, among the sweet corn, are visibly bigger and stronger – and their stems are barely two inches high right now! :-D As short as they are, the sweet corn is starting to develop their tassels, too.
There were a few zucchini we were keeping an eye on and leaving to get bigger, but by this morning, some of them were almost getting too big!
Plus, I picked our VERY FIRST beans!!!! Just a few yellow and green beans. No purple beans were even close to being ready to pick, yet. I’m pretty thrilled with just the handful we have now, and seeing how many I could see developing on the plants. :-)
This morning, I uncovered the beet bed near the garlic. This was the first bed that got major damage, almost wiped out by a deer. After several attempts to cover it, we ended up putting on mosquito netting as a floating row cover, though I had to keep adding more weights around the edges to keep the woodchucks from slipping under and nibbling on them some more. Once the floating row cover was on, it basically remained untouched until this morning. We kept watering it, but that’s it.
It got a thorough weeding this morning, and I picked a few young beets as well. My daughters really enjoy baby beets and their greens. :-) The bed is covered again and will probably get ignored for awhile, other than watering. The other beet beds are also covered with mosquito netting as floating row covers, and they’re going to need some tending as well. That’s one down side of covering them like this. It’s a pain in the butt to move all the things we scavenged to weigh down the edges, so they are just being left alone.
In looking back at our gardening posts from last year (this blog is my gardening journal, too! :-D ), there were posts about the heat waves we got last July. It wasn’t as severe as this year, but it was the most severe we’d seen since our move at the time. By this time our sunflowers – which we’d lost half of to deer and replanted with other giant varieties – were growing their heads and some were even starting to bloom. This year’s sunflowers are nowhere near that stage! We had also been able to do quite a lot of clean up and fix up jobs that were out of the question in this year’s heat. The drought and heat waves have set us back quite a bit, as far as getting things accomplished. We were also harvesting carrots and sunburst squash, regularly, by the end of last July. It’s hard not to be disappointed with how things are turning out this year, but there isn’t much we can do about the weather, and very hungry animals that have lost their usual summer food and water sources.
Speaking of animals…
I had finished up at the furthest garden beds and was making my way to the main beds closer to the house, when I realized I was being stared at by a little furry face on the gravel over what used to be a den! A woodchuck, the littlest of them, was just sitting there, watching me come closer. I started to shoo it away, and it would run a few feet, then stop and look at me, run a few feet, stop and look at me… on it went until I finally got it to run through the north fence and off the property. By then, I was standing next to the purple corn, at the opposite end of the garden area. Since I was there anyhow, I decided to check on the purple corn, turned around and…
… discovered I was standing next to another woodchuck! It had just frozen in place until it realized I could see it, then ran off. I chased that one past the north fence, too!
Thankfully, there was no sign of critter damage in the gardens this morning, but my goodness they are cheeky little buggers!
After their visit yesterday, and seeing some of the issues we’ve been dealing with, my brother messaged me this morning with some photos. There’s a store they were at that had electric fence started kits. The one he showed me uses D cell batteries, but he knew of another store that has solar powered versions. The basic kit he sent me a picture of covers 50×50 feet, at a very reasonable price. It wouldn’t be enough to cover our farthest garden beds, but we could easily pick up the parts and pieces to cover more area. We’d need a second kit to cover the other end of the garden area.
Something to keep in mind. Particularly when we start building our permanent garden beds. We’d still need to find ways to stop the woodchucks, but it would be a good start, and cheaper than building tall fences!
As I write this, we’ve had several rainfalls, and even a couple of downpours. We’ve had more rain today than we have had all year until now! It is so exciting!
We actually got our first bit of rain this morning, while I was quickly doing my rounds. In fact, it was a bit of a problem at the time. While changing the micro disc cards on the driveway cam, the card I took out of the camera slipped through my fingers and fell to the ground.
I never found it.
I had a fresh card to put in and came back several times today, and nothing. I have extras, but I’d really hate to have lost it completely!
When checking the garden beds, I found a couple more sunflowers got nibbled on.
Almost every one of the transplanted Mongolian Giant sunflowers in this row have had their head bitten off. :-(
The culprit was caught on the garden cam!
Anyhow.
This morning, I made a trip to the smaller city to do the Walmart part of our monthly shopping, then swung by town on the way home to pick up my husband’s prescription refills. It wasn’t until I got home that I realized mine weren’t in there. I’ll have to remember to call them and get mine delivered. I only have one prescription, compared to my husband’s bubble packs and injections.
I wanted to make sure I got all the errands done early, because we were going to have visitors this evening. My brother and his wife were going to swing by, on their way to somewhere else. I’ve been sharing photos of the garden progress with them, and they wanted to see it in person.
It was while they were on the way over that the first thunderstorm hit. It stopped and started a couple of times, then stopped before they arrived. Meanwhile, during their drive, they saw no rain at all! It wasn’t until they got close that they finally saw wet highway. When they got here, we did the tour, including my showing them where the groundhogs have been hiding out.
I saw one crossing by the spruce grove just before they arrived, heading under the junk pile. When I took a look, there it was, watching me!!!
The cheeky little bugger.
While checking out around the junk pile, I was disappointed to see this.
These are Saskatoon bushes. We have a couple of them here, and they are in terrible shape. Not only do they show signs of fungal disease, but their leaves are riddled with insect damage, and little growths where insect eggs are. There is even a sudden grown of lichen on the trunks and branches! Lichen is supposed to be slow growing, yet these bushes, and even the dead branches on nearby spruce trees, have suddenly turned bright green and thick. Or perhaps it’s just the rain waking up what was already there? That sounds more likely.
There are a few places where we will have to clear out the diseased trees and bushes, then not plant anything nearby for a few years.
We were just finishing off our tour of the garden beds with my brother and his wife when it started to rain heavily again. We still have the gazebo tent set up, where we had painted the kibble house. The kibble house it back where it goes, so we had plenty of room to be sheltered from the rain, while still enjoying the lovely cool wind and freshness. They were really hoping some of the rain would make it their way; they’ve been pretty much as dry as we have, and while they have had a bit more rain than we have this year, it’s been more like a tease than anything else.
When the rain let up a little big, we made a dash to the pump shack. I had asked my brother if he remembered when the pump got changed, and he wanted to see what I was talking about.
He had no idea.
He remembers better than I do, what the set up was like before, when there was a motor to operate the pump with electricity. When I pointed out that the current pump was not attached to anything, but just sitting on the pipes, loose enough to move while I was pumping, he mentioned something interesting. It seems the pipes into the well are “floating”, and the pump itself will actually move up and down with the water table. !! He also described the piston system at the bottom of the well. The fact that I could get water but couldn’t keep it going suggest to him that the O rings are giving out.
We are still left with the mystery of what happened to the motor and the frame that supported it.
Later this evening, my mother phoned and I remember to ask her about it. Not only does she not remember, but as far as she knew, there was never electricity to that pump. She insisted it was only ever manual. This tells me that it was my dad that had it set up, after they moved out here. As far as I remember, there was always the electric system, which suggests that it was installed in the 5 or so years before I was born, but my mother no longer remembers this at all. I find that a rather strange thing to forget!
Which leaves us with the mystery of what happened to the old pump system. I suppose it’s possible my late brother had it removed, perhaps with plans to get the old well repaired? I can’t think of any other reason someone would have removed it. If he had, however, the parts and pieces would still be around, and they aren’t. So what happened to it?
It seems that there is no longer anyone alive that could tell us.
By the time we were done looking at the pump, it was starting to pour again, and my brother and his wife still had other places to do, so they had to quickly head out. I’m really happy they were able to stop by, and we could show them how things have been going. Including with the woodchucks. My brother brought up a possible solution, and it’s one I’d already taken steps towards. Hopefully, it’ll work and I’ll be able to post about being free of woodchucks! We shall see. Until the problem is solved, however, I’m not even going to try to plant the fall spinach and lettuces I was planning on. I’m not going to go through the effort, only to have it eaten!
I think I may have come up with a way to keep the grasshoppers off, too. They are decimating our poor radish and kale seedlings as thoroughly as the groundhogs have been wiping out our carrot beds!
At least our garden beds have finally had a thorough soaking. No amount of watering with the house can match a good, solid rainfall!
Here’s hoping the rain helped with the wildfires to the north of us, too!
The Re-Farmer 