Yay! WordPress is finally loading for me – including the editor.
I hereby celebrate by sharing a photo of this disgusting creature. (I kid, of course.)
In my butt spot, as usual. What a beast! He will sometimes lie there, on his back, and start clawing at the chair like it’s the scratching post he’s too sluggish to walk over to.
The poor cats. Inside and out! It’s 32C/90F with a humidex of 36C/97F right now, and it’s almost 7:30pm as I write this. While we can make sure the outside cats have lots of water, and the frozen water bottles to help keep things cool, there isn’t much else we can do to help them.
We managed to get a few things taken care of in the garden, once things started cooling down.
But first, kittens!
I wasn’t able to get pictures of all four of them, but these two seem to be a bit braver. :-) I also saw Rosencrantz and her two babies. It looks like they are actually living in that junk pile now.
I also saw the woodchuck again, this time diving under the garden shed. I don’t know if it was just trying to hide from me, or if that’s where it’s new den is.
One of the things that finally got done today was transplanting of the Hopi Black Dye sunflower seedlings that we’d tried starting indoors so long ago. There was a total of 8 to transplant. I also transplanted the few pink celery seedlings. I don’t expect them to grow, but I figured I’d give them a chance.
While I was refilling the watering can for the transplants, something caught my eye among the green peas.
Our first pea pods are developing!
The green pea pods are surprisingly large, for the size of the plants. There turned out to be quite a few of them we found as we watered. I didn’t see them this morning, but I may have missed them.
There was no missing these ones, though!
These pods are SO purple! I love them! :-D Among the purple peas, we only found two pods, so far.
Oh, I am so excited. :-D
Before I transplanted the sunflowers, which you can see in the row in the foreground, I hoed around the remaining Dorinny corn. Of the 7 rows we planted in this block, there are 4 rows left, and all of them have gaps. I did transplant about 5 corn plants from the other three rows into the larger gaps. They seem to have handled the disturbance well. Even the corn plants that got munched on seem to be recovering!
It’s hard to see, but after the watering was done, the girls put up the wire mesh on the last section of the squash tunnel. My younger daughter has been diligent in getting the winter squash, gourds, melons and peas trained to climb their various structures.
While they were putting up the wire mesh, I got another corn block hoed.
Even though we had already watered everything, I was finding the soil so dry, I watered all the sweet corn and sunflower beds, over again. Little by little, I’ll be hoeing all the blocks. Since these rows were just new garden soil placed directly on the ground, with no cardboard layer, nor any sort of organic matter underneath, what few plants that were growing here are working their way through. As this corner gets so baked in the sun, what little had been growing here can handle drought conditions. Their roots are incredibly tough and hard to pull. Now that the area is being watered for the first time, these plants are growing like I’ve never seen them before. I don’t want them choking out our corn and sunflowers, but my goodness, they are hard to dig up!
With these beds being so far from the house, we’re doing a lot of dragging of hoses around. Today, a pair of hoses gave out. The joined connectors both started to break, spraying water with remarkable pressure. So tomorrow, I’ll have to head into town to find both male and female connectors to replace the broken ones. Both of these hoses were purchased last year, but considering what we’re putting them through, I am not at all surprised that they would break where they did.
Oh, my daughter tells me that the potatoes are blooming now, too. When I watered them this morning, they still just had buds.
So much growth is happening right now!! :-)
On a completely different note, my husband got a notification email. Our StarLink kit is on its way. Our area should get coverage by mid to late this year – and we’re already midway through the year. I’m really hoping this new service works out, even though we would still be in Beta. Our satellite internet bill keeps going up, while the quality of our connection keeps going down. That is annoying enough in general, but I’m finding the WordPress editor seems to need higher connectivity than pretty much anything else. The editor simply won’t finish loading in any browser but Chrome and Tor. While everything loads much faster in Tor than on any other browser, the block editor does not work well if I have to go back and edit or adjust things, because blocks end up overlapping each other. Today, Chrome stopped working, too. Nothing will load except the tool bar across the top, and the question more icon in the bottom corner. The rest is blank. And sometimes, I don’t even get that much. Instead, WordPress just keeps timing out and I get error messages, instead.
So I’m using Tor right now, and am hoping that I can eventually load WordPress in one of my other browsers enough to open the draft and fix any weird formatting that might happen.
Hopefully, once we’re on StarLink, we’ll have a more stable connection. We’ll also have unlimited data, so we won’t need to have two accounts anymore. Switching could save us a couple hundred dollars a month, possibly more. Well worth the initial expense of setting up, which is pretty high, but doesn’t get billed all at once. For now, we’ll just be charged for the kit that’s being mailed out to us, which includes the dish, router, tripod and all the cables, parts and pieces needed to install it. My brother knows quite a few people already on the service, and they are really, really happy with it.
For now, though, I have to keep juggling browsers, just to be able to keep posting on this blog. I suppose I could use my phone, but I really need the big monitor and full size, ergonomic keyboard! That and the editing software I use to resize any photos I include, so they take up less storage space in WordPress.
So we’re getting a little bit of technical progress to go with our garden progress. :-)
With the expected heat today, I headed out earlier to do my rounds, and stayed out to do extra watering with the hose fertilizer attachment.
When I first went outside, at about 7:30am it was almost chilly. An hour later, the heat was already hitting. The above photo was taken between 8:30 and 9am. The thermometer read 25C/77F but my weather app listed only 17C/63F! Still, in the time I was out there, the temperature rose almost 10 degrees in under 1 1/2 hours.
Later on, after I’ve gone over the instructions, I’ll be going back out to use the Critter Ridder. I didn’t see any new damage in the cord and sunflower beds, but I think the big carrot bed is still being chewed on. Even the carrot greens in the old kitchen garden showed signs of being nibbled on, though nowhere near as bad as the others.
One of the things I found yesterday was another solar powered spotlight with motion detector. This one will be set up on the side of the house, over the old kitchen garden. I want to position it so that smaller creatures eating our vegetables will trigger the light. Hopefully, that will startle them away. We won’t be able to set the light up facing south, as instructed, but that area gets lots of light right up until sunset. Not even shade from the ornamental apple trees reach it, so I think it should be able to charge up just fine.
The girls set up their new box fan in their window and had it running while my older daughter could finally work on some commissions, all night. This morning, before heading to bed, she told me that having the van made the upstairs the most comfortable part of the house last night! Which is a HUGE difference.
The forecasts have changed for today. We were expected to hit 28C/82F as a high, but now they’re saying we will get a high of 31C/88F, with the humidex at 34C/93F. Tomorrow, we’re now supposed to hit a high of 36C/97F, and the day after, 37C/99F. On Sunday, we’re supposed to reach “only” 31C/88F with a chance of thundershowers. I don’t expect any thundershowers to actually reach us, but it would be nice! Until then, we’re just going to have to be diligent with that watering! The girls have been waiting until after 8:30pm to do the evening water while it’s cooling down, so as not to shock the plants with cold hose water. I’ll have to keep heading out early to water again, before the heat really starts to hit. As disappointed with the loss of our carrots and lettuces, and the one beat bed, I’m very happy with how the beans, tomatoes, onions, corn, sunflowers, squash and melons are doing! The peas aren’t very big, but they are blooming, including more of the purple peas. The cucamelons are also quite small, still, but more of them are big enough to start training up the chain link fence.
It’s worth heading out early to beat the heat and tend to them. Even for someone who really, really dislikes mornings! :-D
Today was our day to head into the city for out monthly shop, so my morning rounds were a bit earlier than usual. Which seems to confuse the outside cats! :-D
Yesterday evening, when things started to cool down, my younger daughter was a sweetheart and crawled around inside the upside down kibble house, to complete the first coat of paint. It was dark by the time she was done!
Once the paint is cured, we’ll flip it right side up again and start the second coat.
As I write this, in the early evening, we’re at 29C/84F. In the city, it was 30C/86F with a humidex of 34C/93F. Before doing the shopping, I was able to visit my brother, who lives not far from the city, and got a tour of their grounds and all the things that are growing. Or not growing, in some cases! Sounds familiar. They don’t have groundhogs/woodchucks/marmots (woodchuck is the Canadian name for them) right now, but are having to deal with rabbits. The temperatures were still increasing at the time, but it was just baking out there!
Some things are just loving this heat, though. Like these guys, still in their morning shade.
The two seedlings next to each other on the left are the Tennessee Dancing Gourd. The others are the Ozark Nest Egg gourds. They have had a pretty huge growth spurt in the last few days!
While in the city, I made a point of checking out the gardening section and picked up something I hope will work.
It was the only one that included groundhogs on their list of animals. When I was loading the van, I sent a picture to the girls, who looked up reviews. They are… mixed! Some people wrote that the squirrels were eating the stuff! :-D I figure it’s worth a try. It’s inexpensive, too, so we’ll be easy to pick up more if it does.
I might even dare plant in those empty spinach beds, now that there’s some hope that any sprouts won’t get immediately eaten.
With the heat wave we’ve got right now, I’ve changed up what I intend to plant. Lettuces are no longer on the list; those will be planted later in the season. I still intend to plant radishes, but don’t expect bulbs in this heat. They will be just for their seed pods. If we get bulbs, too, that’s just bonus. I also picked up some chard. I’ve never successfully grown chard before, but they are one of the few greens that actually like the heat, so they will be a sort of replacement until we can plant lettuce and spinach again.
It’s interesting to see people’s reactions to this heat wave. There is a lot of “this is going to be the new normal” sort of panic out there. Which is curious. I checked the historical data. We’re supposed to hit 34C/93F in a couple of days, then it will drop back down to average temperatures. The record high for June in our municipality is 37C/99F, in 1995. The record low is 0C/32F in 2009. That’s just our area. As hot as it is right now, we’ve been hotter – and much colder – in the recent past, and “normal” just means the average over a span of 30 years, +/- 5 to 10 years. You’d think we’d be used to it by now, but every time things swing to one extreme or the other, we tend to freak out a bit! :-D
While I was in the city, the girls were finding ways to help the outside cats deal with it. The water bottles we put hot water in to protect the tomatoes when there was a chance of frost, are now filled with water and in the freezer. An ice pack was added to the bird bath, and the frozen water bottles will be put into the cats’ water bowls. A plastic coffee can was filled with water and put in the freezer yesterday. Today, it was placed near where Butterscotch’s kittens are, so they can rub against it to cool down, if they wish.
In the past, we’ve tried filling balloons with water and freezing them, then removing the balloon and leaving the ice in the cats’ water bowls and the bird feeder. It worked, but I think using water bottles as ice packs is better. No garbage, and they can be refrozen and used over again.
So far, we’ve only seen Butterscotch drinking from the bird bath with the ice pack. :-D
The ones having the hardest time is the girls. The upstairs gets insanely hot. My older daughter can’t work, because she has to shut off her computer and drawing tablet, because they are over heating. They haven’t been able to sleep from the heat, so they’ve been hanging out in the cooler living room, or my room, as much as possible. We want to put in a window air conditioner upstairs, but the entire second floor has only 4 outlets, and only 2 of them can handle the power needs of an air conditioner – and those are being used to power their computers!
Well, we won’t be able to do anything about it this year. I was able to get them a box fan today, to fit in one of their windows. Once that’s set up and cat proofed, they can use it to bring in some cool night air. The pedestal fan they have right now just moves warm air around!
We’ll deal. I’m more concerned about making sure our gardens are doing okay!
These are the miniscule Spoon tomatoes! Several plants are now showing baby tomatoes, and they are so tiny and green, the only reason we could see them was because we were wrapping twine around stalks to the chain link fence to support them. Only now have enough of them gotten big enough to do that.
While watering the Montana Morado corn this evening, my daughter called me over to see some new growth.
Most of these handled their transplanting well, and the larger ones almost all now show these developing spikes. I somehow didn’t expect them to show up until the corn was taller, but we’ll see.
Now for the unhappy stuff.
While watering the corn and sunflower beds, I made a point of checking more closely where I saw the deer in the trail cam. Sure enough, a couple of corn had been nibbled on. I also found some Mongolian Giant sunflowers had been nibbled on. None of the larger, transplanted ones.
Then I saw this, while watering the Dorinny corn. The surviving plants are much larger – almost as large as the transplanted Montano Morado corn. Now, we’re down even more!
Three of the largest corn plants were chomped right down. :-(
While I was watering, my daughter came over from watering the old kitchen garden to ask me if I’d harvested the lettuces.
No. No I hadn’t.
Almost every single block with lettuce in it was eaten.
It was the groundhog.
I had hoped we’d driven it away, as it doesn’t seem to be using the den we’d found, anymore. We’re still spraying water in it, and this evening I left the hose running into it long enough to flood it. Wherever it’s gone to make a new den, it didn’t go far. This afternoon, while I was putting the DSLR on its tripod back at the living room window after vacuuming, I happened to see it just outside, with what looked like a dandelion leaf in its mouth. I called the girls over and it heard me, running off behind the house. The girls went outside to chase it off, but either it was already too late, or it came back.
Interestingly, it didn’t touch the beet greens.
I am not happy.
In watching the deer on the trail cam, they seem to be just nibbling as they go by. So after I finished watering, I took some bamboo stakes and set them up around the corn and sunflower beds, then used twine to join them, and the stakes that were already there, at two heights, around three sides. I ran out of twine just as I was finishing, so only a small section has one string instead of two. It won’t stop the deer, but if they’re just passing through, it’ll sort of guide them away.
After running out of twine, I used the last of our yellow rope and strung it from one of the support posts of the squash tunnel, through the pea trellis supports, and joining it to one of the new stakes I put in around the Peaches ‘n Cream collection corn blocks. I then stole another bamboo stake and used it to put a second, higher line at the Dorinny corn.
This leaves the beds in that corner with either twine or rope along the north sides of the Dorinny corn, the pea beds and the northernmost Peaches ‘n Cream corn block, all along the east side of the corn and sunflower beds, and the south side of the southernmost corn block.
Later, we will be stringing the aluminum tart tins I picked up to flash and spin in the wind.
Once we get more twine and/or rope, we’ll put up more to guide the deer away from the garden beds.
I also want to put a barrier and distractions around the Montana Morado corn. So far, they have been untouched, but I would rather lose any of the other corn completely, then this variety.
I also moved the garden cam and hopefully it will cover more of the garden beds.
There are lots of things we can do about the deer, even though we can’t put up anything permanent, like fencing, right now. The groundhog, on the other hand, is a different issue. It can get through or under most things, and now that it’s eaten all the lettuce, there is nothing to stop it from going after the beets. Unless it just doesn’t like beets.
With the heat we’ve been having, and a heat wave hitting us starting today, it’s been hard on a lot of the garden. Not everything, though. The squash and gourds are just loving it! As long as we can keep up with the watering, of course.
It was while watering the summer squash last night that I spotted the first bebby.
Yay!!!!!
I got this next photo this morning.
Several plants have little green bebby squashes growing. We have two types of green zucchini, and it looks like we have both starting. So far, no yellow zucchini and no pattypans. When my daughter transplanted these, she forgot to keep track of the different types, so they are all mixed up. It’ll be a surprise, every time we see new ones!
I noticed that some of the summer squash had gotten to the point where they could use support, so I gently tied a few of them to their stakes this morning.
When it got dark enough last night, I did make sure to head back into the garden to test the new motion sensor light. It has an on/off switch, but without being charged yet, and too much light, there was no way to know if it was actually going to work. It did at least get enough time in the sun to charge before dark.
It was indeed on, and working!
But was it doing its job?
I don’t know. I just checked the garden cam and saw a single deer go by in a couple of files. The first one stopped and snuffled at the edge of the corn block, but did not nibble anything. Then it kept going, walking right through a bean bed! The second deer didn’t stop to snuffle anything, but also walked right through the bean bed.
*sigh*
If either of them triggered the light, it was after the camera stopped its 15 second recording.
Unless we happen to be looking out a window when something triggers the camera, we just won’t know.
I might shift the garden cam’s stand a bit, to cover that area.
Meanwhile…
Check out those potatoes!!!
They are just loving these grow bags.
When we did these bags, the idea was to keep filling the bags as the potatoes grew, to have more potatoes in the bag. However, it turns out that potatoes, like tomatoes, come in “determinate” and “indeterminate” types.
Determinate types grow their tubers all in one layer. They need to be hilled to protect the tubers from the sun, but there is no benefit to keep hilling them higher and higher in a tower or grow bag.
Indeterminate types, on the other hand, will keep producing tubers up their stems if they get buried. So adding more soil or mulch and increasing the height will increase the yield.
Which meant I needed to figure out which we had. Seeing how tall the Norland potatoes are, I thought they might be indeterminate, but nope.
All of these types are determinate. Adding more to the bags will not mean more potatoes, and will not help the plants themselves. Hilling them as we already have is enough.
Well, that saves us a bit of work.
Also…
They are starting to develop flower buds!
Both types of fingerling potatoes have plenty of buds on them. One plant of the Norland potatoes has buds. So far, nothing on the Yukon Gem. Which is good. The fingerlings were chosen for their shorter growing season, and short term storage and eating, while the Norland and Yukon Gem are both types that mature later and can be stored longer. Not that I expect we’ll have enough to last us the winter, but we’ll at least be able to have them for a while after harvesting.
This year’s garden seems to be one of extremes: things are either doing really, really well, or not at all! :-D
I had to make another trip into town today, because I forgot something yesterday. I’ve been making more errand trips in the last few days than I do in most months! But that’s okay, because it gave me a chance to find and pick up other things.
Like these modifications to the squash tunnel.
The first is a solar powered, motion sensor spot light. Hopefully, it will get triggered by deer or other critters going after the garden and startle them away. Putting it at the beet or carrot beds would probably have been more useful, but we don’t have anything south facing that we could mount it to. If this works, we can get more (and better quality ones) and install posts to mount them on.
We’ll test it out tonight when, hopefully, it will have enough charge to light up, and we can make sure it is in the on position.
I also finally picked up a thermometer.
Wow.
According to my desktop app, we’re at 23C/73F right now, but out in the corner garden, in full sun, we’re at 32C/90F.
Where the squash tunnel is, there is no shade, even in the early morning hours. It is full sun from sunrise to sunset, so this thermometer will likely always read on the high side. I still wasn’t expecting a 9C difference, though!
Once these were up, I went to change the batteries on the garden cam. In the process, I noticed something very odd in the ground. A strange line of holes.
You can sort of make it out in this photo below.
It’s in between the red dashed lines I added. My foot is at where the line ends.
The meandering line made me think it was following a root or something, but why where there holes in the ground here at all?
When I tipped the camera stand down so I could access the battery case, I found myself right over this line, and quickly saw what made it.
Red ants.
And the line lead back to this.
The camera focused in the wrong place, though. It’s that blurry, reddish area in the background.
That is a red ant hill.
I don’t know their proper names, but we mostly have two types of ants here. Red ants and black ants. The black ants burrow into the ground, creating low hills in the grass with the soil they displace. They are not aggressive, but their burrowing can be destructive, killing off any plants at the roots.
Red ants build their hills with spruce needles, which they will drag over surprising distances. They will build hills on or in logs, under rocks, in the cracks of sidewalks or paving stones, or they’ll just make a hill on the ground, like this one. These hills can become quite large. The one in the photo is about mid-size. Red ants are more aggressive and will bite if disturbed.
We have quite a few red ant hills. A couple of the maple logs behind the house, from the trees cut away from the roof, now have red ant hills in them, their hollow middles stuffed with spruce needles. The metal ring used to contain the fires made to burn out diseased apple tree stumps is still out near the garden, with pieces of metal covering it. I’d moved them to put some invasive vines in the ring for future burning, only to discover it was half filled with spruce needles, and crawling with red ants! And now I’m seeing this new hill, near the garden cam.
As long as they don’t start building hills in the garden beds, we’ll leave them be.
Today, I finally started painting the kibble house. The temperatures were pretty warm. It is “only” 22C/70F as I write this, but after today, we’re supposed to get hit with another heat wave over the next week, peaking at 34C/93F, so I’m glad to get it started today. And glad we aren’t expected to see the 40-45C/104-113F temperatures that some provinces are getting hit with right now!
Under the tent, it was much more pleasant. If fact, I could forget the heat, until I stepped out into the sun for a few moments!
The first coat, I’m happy to say, is done.
Mostly.
We won’t be able to do the rest until the paint has cured enough to flip it, and the floor pieces, upside down.
The roof may or may not get a second coat. We will likely shingle it, but until we do, the paint will be enough to protect it from the elements for now.
Even with just one coat, it’s looking so much better already. My daughter chose a lovely colour. :-) This is REALLY going to brighten up the yard!
If we end up not putting on shingles, I’m thinking we should paint garish designs all over the roof. :-D
I tried to get the more reachable parts underneath, but not under the overlap of the roof itself. And not just because I didn’t want to disturb this beauty!
What a gorgeous moth!
As far as I know, it’s still there, too. :-)
I’m not sure if we’ll bother painting the underside of the roof. Maybe just around the overlap, if at all. I do want to get the inside walls, though. That will make it easier to clean up after dirty kitties! The gaps under the roof are there partly so the cats and get in and out through them, if needed. They did use those gaps over the winter, which meant muddy paw prints, all the way up the walls. :-D
It is not unusual for me to be up at 2 or 3 am. If it were feasible, I would sleep all day and be up all night. When I had a job working the night shift at a gas station convenience store, it was fantastic. I was awake and alert all night, and had some of the best sleep during the day, ever. At least I did when I wasn’t getting phone calls from people who knew I was working nights, but figured that since I was home during the day, that was a great time for them to call and chat. :-D
My daughters are much the same as I am. Usually, that works out. Our general routine is just shifted over. When others are having lunch, we’re having breakfast. That sort of thing.
Since I do the morning routine and the girls do the evening routine, I do try to get up earlier to make sure the outside cats have food, etc., but it’s still later than average, shall we say.
Then there are mornings like this.
I was awakened by the distinctive sounds of a cat in the basement, climbing the screen barrier between the basements. I’d found and blocked where they had been getting through, so I tried to ignore it.
Until I could hear Beep Beep in the old basement, making her distinctive beeping meow, and starting to claw at the screen at the top of the old basement steps. The screen we use to keep the cats out of the basement, while we have the door open to keep the house cool.
It was just before 6am when I dragged myself out of bed. When I got into the old basement (navigating those stairs is never a good thing!), I discovered Turmeric was in there, too! I managed to get them both out of the old basement without killing myself on the stairs, without either of them scratching the heck out of me, and without letting any of the other cats, waiting at the basement door, down, so that was a win. :-/
The next while was spent fussing about in both the old and new basements, to figure out where they were getting through. They’d managed to create an opening through my last blocking attempt, so I scrounged up something else to put across the gap.
Then, after going to the bathroom, I was going to go back to bed when I started hearing a noise. Flushing the toilet had triggered one of the pumps in the basement, which is not unusual, but this sound was something else entirely. It was a strange, high pitched, pulsing, vibrating noise.
So I unlatched the screen and hobbled back into the old basement.
It was the septic pump that had turned on, but as I walked towards it, I passed the noise.
It wasn’t coming from the pump.
It was coming from a space above the basement wall.
The old basement is very low, and even short little me can see the top of the basement walls, where the floor beams rest. On the other side of the wood is the crawl space under the old kitchen. The old kitchen is where the breaker box is. When my brother set up the laundry in the entry, he had to run new wires through this spot, and he even ran an extra set of wires, in case we ever need to install something else. It was such a pain to run the wires through, he wanted to save future hassles.
So all I’m seeing in this spot is the new wire, neatly bundled up on one side of a floor beam, and another older wire running through holes in the floor beams, and is one of the wires that powers the pumps and tanks. It doesn’t even enter the basement at this location.
Which means there is nothing in this spot that is mechanical that might be making the vibrational noise. At least, not in the basement side. But what could possibly be in the crawl space, on the other side of the wall, that could make that noise?
Whatever it was, it stopped when the septic pump turned itself off.
This is a mystery on its own, but it’s not the only one. A while back, the well pump would make grinding noises as it lost pressure. It is old and needs to be replaced, but no plumber dares work on it, because we might have a leaky foot valve, which is in the well. Replacing the pump might cause the valve to fail, and we’d lose water. The well itself is so old, if something like that did happen, we would have difficulty finding replacement parts the right size, or might have to get a new well dug. So we’re on pins and needles when it comes to this pump. Oddly, since we’ve made the effort to never open the taps in the bath tub to full pressure, which was emptying the pressure tank faster than the pump could refill it, the grinding noise has stopped. Even with using the hoses so much to water the garden beds, and the pump running so much more than usual, it’s been fine.
However, when we were still figuring out what was going on with the pump, one of the distinctive things was that, before the well pump turned on and started making the grinding noise, I would first hear a sproinging noise. It was loud enough I could hear it from my office/bedroom, but by the time I got into the basement, the pump would be running and the noise was gone. Then, I happened to be in the basement before the well pump turned on one time. I heard the sproinging noise, and it was not coming from the pump. It was coming from the same place I heard the vibrational noise, this morning.
There is something behind the basement all at this spot, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what it is. When the old kitchen was added on to the house, it had neither electricity nor running water. The only thing that should be there is electrical wires, and there is no reason for wires to make sproinging or pulsating vibrational noises!
I have emailed my brother to ask him. He’s the only living person who would have any idea what’s under there.
By the time all that was done, there was no point in my trying to go back to bed, so I went out to do my morning rounds early.
I am somewhat encouraged.
The beet bed that was decimated yesterday actually looks better. A few beets still have their leaves and, after the evening watering, they have perked up again. There was no new damage.
I also have some hope for the carrots, too. The tallest fronds may have all been eaten, but they still had a lot of growing to do, so there are still new fronds coming up. We may end up with more spindly carrots, but I think we might still have a chance with them. The next few days will tell us, one way or the other.
We are still left with the groundhog to deal with.
This is how things got left, last night. About half the pile was pulled to one side, and once water started running into the den, the groundhog came out and hid in the remaining branches. I never saw it this morning, but as I approached the den, I heard it scramble away from the opening.
Those branches had to go!
I’ll have go come back with the weed trimmer to clean this up more.
Some of the dirt from digging the den had partially buried some branches, so moving them knocked some dirt and rocks into the opening.
I don’t know if the groundhog ran off while I was hauling branches away. I saw and heard nothing, though.
Once the branches were cleared away, I brought the hose over and started to spray into the opening, pausing every now and then to give the groundhog a chance to run out. It never did, so perhaps it had already left.
In looking up how to get rid of a groundhog, flooding the den was one of the recommended methods. It was also suggested to do it in July or August, in case the groundhog was pregnant or had a litter. That was something that had occurred to me. We’re only seeing the one groundhog at this den, but it’s entirely possible it’s a mama with some babies down there.
With that in mind, we will be taking our time in driving it away from this den, so that it can find another location for a den and, if there are any, move its babies out.
Once we are sure it’s been driven out, we will block the opening and level out the pile of soil it made.
Hopefully, the critter will move on, and we will not have to take more drastic measure. :_/
As for me, this broken and battered body of mine is giving out. Time to lie down and, hopefully, get some sleep!
Well, we had at least one good thing happen today.
I was able to finish the chive blossom vinegar.
The bottle has had two weeks in the cupboard to infuse. Any time we went into the cupboard for something, we’d turn the bottle upside down a few times, to get the blossoms out of the bottle neck and mix with the vinegar.
I was curious how the colour would turn out. The site I’d found instructions on had a final product that was bright pink. I used white wine vinegar, though, which is pale yellow.
The final colour is quite dramatic, isn’t it?
After straining the vinegar, the bottle got cleaned and scaled, the vinegar added back, and we replaced the little plastic thing in the top, that controls the flow of vinegar when pouring.
We haven’t tried it in anything yet, but the smell of it is absolutely fabulous!! I can’t wait to try it!
The Re-Farmer 