Spring snow

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Well, the forecasts were actually right for a change!

Somewhat.

When I checked the forecasts last night, they were suggesting the southern areas of our province might not get any snow at all, or if they did, it would be just a bit. The system was expected to hit more of the Northern areas of the province. The city, in particular, was predicted to get maybe a couple of centimeters of snow (about an inch).

We’re more central, so either of those forecasts could have included us, but we should have gotten at least a little snow.

When I checked the weather radar this morning, the system was over three provinces, and their bordering US states.

What caught my eye in all the blues of snow was the circle of pink and purple directly over the city. Pink and purple denoting severe weather. So while the rest of us were getting an ordinary snowfall, the city – and only the city, at that time – was getting a storm!

It has since moved on, but the area of snow is still over us, and it will continue through tomorrow.

We started out with rain, yesterday evening, and it was still warm enough that the cat’s unheated water bowls did not freeze overnight.

They just got slushy with snow!

The outside cats were more than happy to be out in the weather once their kibble bowls were filled again! Even Junk Pile cat almost came close to me!

Their bowls are completely empty every morning, after nightly visits from skunks. I’ve only seen one, once, when I popped outside at night to investigate something, and found it inside the kibble house. They can get in easily enough, but they have a harder time getting out, over that board that keeps them from knocking the bowls out, with their short little legs. We catch a whiff of their presence in the night, fairly regularly. I don’t mind them too much. Sure, in the summer, they dig up holes in the lawn, but they’re eating up the grubs, and the divots can be put back. Still, cat kibble is not good for them, so we don’t refill the food bowls in the evenings anymore. It means that cats are pretty hungry by morning, though. :-(

We may be getting snow, but we are still just barely below freezing. Our expected high for today and tomorrow is -3C/27F. Today, we’re supposed to get between 6 and 12 cm of snow (about 2 1/2 to almost 5 inches), and another 2-4cm (roughly 1 – 1 1/2 inches) tomorrow.

In the sun room, however, it was nice and warm. The thermometer was at 10C/50F, though with the heat under the seedling trays, they would have been a bit warmer than that. No danger of them getting too cold in there!

The snowfall was pretty light, this morning. Changing up the memory cards on the trail cams was a bit funny. I could really tell which way the wind had been blowing! One of the trail cams had its front face covered with snow, and under that was a layer of ice that I had to scrap off the lens cover and the motion sensor. It still managed to record some videos, though! The other camera’s front was clear, but one side was coated with ice and snow. The side with the latches to open it, of course. ;-)

I’m really happy with what we’re getting right now. The temperatures are still mild. There’s no deep freeze expected, and no high winds. While there are a few patches of severe weather in the system, they’re not anywhere near us. We’re just getting the snow. Looking at the long range forecasts, the temperatures will rise just above freezing for the next while, and we’re even expected to get more snow as we go into May, which means a slow melt, and all that precious moisture is going to be absorbed slowly into the soil, rather than being washed away. This is exactly what we need!

The girls and I have been paying particular attention to where we planted all those bulbs and corms last fall. With it being so dry, we were concerned. We planted 200 grape hyacinth and another hundred crocuses. The crocuses in particular should be starting to poke through, and even blooming, while snow is still on the ground. We’ve had so little snow this past winter, though. Add in the tulips and irises the girls planted – with the tulips coming with instructions saying NOT to water them! – and it’s hard to guess how many have survived the winter, and the very dry spring we’ve had so far. Getting that polar vortex with so little insulating snow on the ground certainly wouldn’t have helped.

Well, we won’t know how they are for some time yet. If they survived the winter, this snowfall will be a huge boost for them.

I am really happy to see this snow. If things keep up like this, the fire bans might even be lifted. Some local farmers had managed to do controlled burns earlier, but the more of those that are done, the less wildfires we need to be concerned about later.

This snow is such a blessing right now!!!

The Re-Farmer

Ginger and the orange boys

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I missed my morning ginger cuddles, but that’s okay. He got other cuddles!

That’s Keith on the left, and Cheddar at the top. Cheddar is the one that came indoors after we found him walking strangely, and could feel what we at first thought was a dislocated rib. It turned out he had somehow impaled himself with a stick, at about his armpit. It was surgically removed, and he never went back outside.

I still have the “cheese stick” in its vacuum sealed tube. And yes, the vet actually labelled it “cheese stick”. :-D

Keith came indoors some months after Cheddar, so all three of these guys are “rescued” yard cats.

Ginger is very close to Keith in size and shape, though Ginger isn’t even a year old yet – and Keith is not a small cat! You can see in this photo, a bit of why we would sometimes look at Ginger and think we’re seeing Keith!

There’s no mistaking Cheddar, though. He’s a big, hulking block of cheese, that boy!

I have a shelf against the wall next to me, when I am sitting in my office chair. The chair has a high back and rotates/tilts freely. Parts of the shelf are kept clear for the cats to use, including the very top, so they can take naps next to the ceiling. They’ll sometimes use my chair to get to the top of the shelf but mostly they get down from the top by jumping into the padded headrest of my office chair, then down to the floor.

I gotta say, when Cheddar is the one jumping down, and I’m sitting in the chair, I practically get whiplash! It’s amazing how much force that boy has when he lands, and the chair slams back as far as it can tilt!

Beep Beep even hopped up to check out the new boy.

She doesn’t like him very much, and ended up driving both Ginger and Cheddar away, so she could snuggle up to Keith and start grooming him. :-D

Also, this is why my bed is so hairy all the time. It’s constantly covered in cats!

Having brought Beep Beep indoors to have her babies last spring, this will be her first year of NOT getting pregnant. She seems quite content with that! She also seems quite content with her new life as an indoor cat. Even when she went into heat, she showed no desire to go outside to visit the (intact) boys in the yard. We don’t know how old she is, but I have pictures of her from when we made the drive out and stayed here with my dad, back in 2015, and she was definitely an adult cat at the time. That makes her a minimum of 7 years old. I would guess she’s closer to 10, and she would have had a litter of kittens every year of her adult life, until now. She is a wonderful mama, but I’m sure she’s more than done with the babies by now! :-D

Meanwhile…

Ginger’s surgical site is looking really good and healing well. He displays no sign of pain or discomfort, and it’s not slowing him down at all. Which is starting to be a problem, as he is exploring more and trying to get into things he shouldn’t be! We’ve been able to train most of the cats to stay away from/off of certain areas and, of course, he hasn’t learned that yet. :-D

There is some tension between him and some of the other cats, but not in any out of the ordinary way. Some of our cats are just more ornery than others, so it’s not just him.

He’s such a sweet boy!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 Garden: expanding onions

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After seeing how much the K-cups were drying out, I had to find a way to move them out so they can be watered thoroughly, without over watering the Jiffy Pellets.

At our last city shopping trip, I picked up a couple of cheap little baking sheets, to make it easier to move the red solo cup transplants later on. I wasn’t sure if it would fit on the shelf with the other tray, but I figured I’d give it a shot.

It fit. :-)

Because I have a heat source below, both trays need to be on the same shelf, so I’m glad it worked out.

I discovered an unexpected potential problem after taking out the K-cups.

As you can see, trying to keep the K-cups hydrated left the Jiffy pellets really damp. The algae growing on them should not be a problem, though. The potential problem is that, protected by the larger K-cups, the seedlings have roots growing through the mesh of the Jiffy pellets – and you can see where one seed grew out the side!

With the K-cups moved away, those roots are now exposed and will dry up.

What to do? I didn’t want to move them and cause more damage to their roots.

Well, it’s a good thing I don’t like to throw away anything that might be useful. Even old Jiffy pellets.

When I started squash and gourds last year, with their large seeds, I planted one seed per Jiffy pellet. I ended up with a lot that did not germinate, and they’ve been sitting, all dried out, in an old ice cream pail, ever since.

Except for the ones the cat dig out. They really, really like to bat them around and tear them apart. Which is disconcerting, in the wee hours of the morning and I don’t have my glasses on, but I can see enough to tell there’s a pile of brown on the floor. :-D

Well, it turns out I had juuuuusssttt enough left to fill in the spaces.

Two spaces were bits and pieces of Jiffy pellets, rescued from the cats. :-D

I added more water to the reservoir below for them to absorb and expand a bit, and the roots can grow into them.

I did transplant the one growing out the side of a Jiffy pellet into another one that didn’t have anything in it.

I didn’t expect growing onions from seed to be this troublesome, but I guess that’s to be expected when resources and options are limited! The water also has half-strength vegetable fertilizer dissolved into it, so I hope that helps.

We’ll see if the spindly seedlings make it!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 Garden: just a little trim, and strong babies!

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Thanks to some feedback from Kensho Homestead, I decided to go ahead and trim our bulb onion seedlings this morning.

Though our temperatures dipped below freezing lat night, the sun room remained nice and warm. I didn’t even bother putting the plastic cover over the mini greenhouse to keep more of the heat from the ceramic heater bulb in.

Now that they’re trimmed, you can really see the difference between those in the Jiffy pellets, and hose in the K-cups. They’re both peat, so the growing medium is not the reason.

This tray was designed for the pellets, and to water from below. The bottom of the tray has channels for the water, with a felted mat on top, then a molded tray that holds the pellets, while also keeping the bottoms in contact with the mat below. The K-cups have drainage holes, but they don’t seem to have enough contact at the bottom for watering from below to work well, and they dry out much faster. At first, the ones in the K-cups were doing better, but now it’s the ones in the Jiffy pellets that are noticeably stronger and healthier.

I did water them after this photo was taken, making sure to get the K-cups thoroughly wet. I’m trying to think if I have something I can transfer the K-cups to that will let me water them from blow. I think it’ll be the only way to keep them well watered, without over watering the rest.

Lesson learned: don’t mix two very different starter “pots” in the same tray. I used the K-cups because I only had enough Jiffy pellets to fill half the tray. I should have just used half the tray with the Jiffy pellets, and found something else to put the K-cups in. The K-cups do work well – as long as they can be adequately watered.

Meanwhile…

The luffa are coming in strong and healthy, and doing very well!

Perhaps too well!

I used these pots, so they can be buried directly into the ground when it’s time to transplant them, with no root disruption. Which means we’re going to have to reduce each pot to just one, strongest plant. It seems like such a waste to discard strong seedlings, but if we separate them out to plant more of them, that will create the root disruption we’re trying to avoid!

Three plants should be more than enough for our needs. Especially since we don’t even know if they’ll get the time they need to reach full maturity before first frost in September.

I bet they’d do great if we could find a way to grow them in pots in the sun room! LOL Pretty sure they’d overgrow that corner rather quickly, though. ;-)

The Re-Farmer

Ginger baby

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It is pure joy when the baby boy comes over for morning cuddles.

He doesn’t want to be picked up, and he doesn’t want to be held, but my goodness, he wants pets and scritches and snuggles, and he loves to roll and stretch and squirm on the soft, soft bed. :-)

If only we could get the outside cats even half that friendly!

This was the crowd that greeted me this morning. After I took the picture, I looked up and saw the sort-of-calico cat come running under the fence into the yard.

The Re-Farmer

Clean up: spruce grove, clearing to the dead trees

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Today turned out to be such a hot and sunny day, I took advantage of it to do a bit of work in the spruce grove. Specifically around the dead trees near where we intend to plant the mulberry tree that will be shipped later in the spring.

I normally post the before pictures at the start, and the after pictures near the end, but this time I’m going to set them side by side. It’s the only way I can see the difference 2-3 hours of work resulted in. :-/

Here is the first area, and where the mulberry tree will be planted.

They’re a bit hard to see in the before picture, but there are two steel wheels leaning against the reddish dead tree. Those have joined the “found object” art display for now. ;-) Then there was the remains of what appears to have been a bench made with two logs as support, and another log that I think was just there to sit on.

It must have been a very pleasant place to sit, when they were first set up.

Someone (probably my mother) had gone to some effort to make sure the seats were stable. I found these, under them.

These were under where the bench was, with a group of bricks under where each log would have been. It was a good idea to put the bricks under the logs, but nothing had been done to keep them from sinking into what is essentially composted leaves and spruce needles, so the logs started to rot from below.

It wasn’t until I found these that I realized the other log was intended as a seat, too.

I had to cut away what I thought were two small trees, just to access the area. It wasn’t until I tried to cut them down to ground level that I realized, it wasn’t two trees.

I had to dig out and cut away the roots to get them out, and they were both growing out of the same root, which ran under the bricks.

This was, hands down, the most difficult part of the clean up today. Partly because there were other roots running under the roots I was trying to cut! Some belonged to the dead spruce they were next to, but I later ended up pulling out about 8 feet of root, and never finding out what tree it came from!

While trimming the undergrowth, I realized I need to get thicker gloves than the gardening gloves I’ve been using.

Another reason to encourage the wild roses – they make great security barriers! Those spines go right through ordinary garden gloves!

I don’t mind cutting away the roses for now, though. They will grow back, and with clearing out the other stuff, they should have more sun and space to spread out, too.

It was really hot work, though, so I stopped for a rest in the shade. I look forward to when we set up new seating areas around the yard. It would be much more pleasant than sitting on concrete steps!

With how hot it was feeling, I just had to check the temperature. I was thinking we were certainly about 15C/59F Maybe even approaching 20C/68F

Nope.

It was 10C/50F

RealFeel, 8C/46F

Yeah. I know. You folks from the south are laughing at me right now! :-D

Meanwhile, the thermometer in the sun room was approaching 30C/86F. I opened the solid doors to allow air circulation through the screen doors, and increased the speed of the ceiling fan, so the onion seedlings would not be too hot!

One of these days, we should set up our own weather station, so we can have more accurate readings!

But I digress…

I did have a visitor while I was taking a break on the stairs.

I love how the woodpecker likes to get to the seeds on the ground by way of the bird feeder’s support. :-)

Then it was back to clearing away the undergrowth, and working my way towards the stone cross. Here is that section, taken from the same spot I took the first before and after pictures from.

I’m having a hard time seeing the difference between these two pictures. In fact, the “after” picture looks worse, because I didn’t line the angle up the same. :-/ Trust me. I did take out quite a bit of undergrowth in the distance!

In the second picture, you can see the tarp covering the junk pile. The tree beside it is dead, as is the tree my supplies are under. That whole area is full of spirea. It’s better to pull those up by the roots, but I just didn’t have the energy for that, today. Too hot! :-D

I worked more into this area.

In the before picture, I’d already started cleaning up the undergrowth a bit. The row of trees you can see on the right are part of north edge of the spruce grove. My older brother planted those, before I was born. It’s hard to believe they were planted at the same time as the huge spruces on the north edge of the grove, but there were three rows planted, close together. The further into the grove the rows were planted (at a time when the rest of the grove’s trees were in their prime), the less light they got, and the less growth there was. I’d cleaned up along the north side of the grove, taking out a lot of little dead spruces in the process. Hopefully, the more things are cleaned up, the better it will be for the surviving trees.

Most of the large spruces in the pictures are dead, so once those are cleaned up, that will allow a lot more light into here. If their trunks are still solid enough, I want to turn them into supports for benches and maybe a table or two. Over time, more spruces will be transplanted into the spruce grove, as well as more food trees – the mulberry tree being our first – that need the extra protection these spruces will give them. The mulberry tree should grow quite large, and will provide quite a bit of shade, so we need to keep things open around where we plant it. Long term, I want this area to be a pleasant, park-like setting. I will have to keep in mind that the benches and possible tables that I hope to make on the tree trunks nearby will end up covered with berries when the mulberry tree gets bigger! I’ve read warnings that mulberry trees can be quite messy. :-D

I’m sure the birds will clean it up for us, though. ;-)

I probably won’t get a chance to work here again for a while, as we are supposed to start snowing tomorrow evening, and it will be a few days before the temperatures warm up again. I want to get the spirea out, in particular – they’re lovely, but very invasive, so we’re keeping them in one area of the yard, and taking them out everywhere else. I know some of what I’ve already taken out today were chokecherry trees. We have lots of those, and it turns out they can be invasive, too! What we really want to clear up around are the Saskatoon bushes. These ones are still healthy, and keeping the area around them clear and open will help keep them that way. They are crowded by spirea and chokecherry right now, so when I work my way to where they are, I will back off until they are in full leaf, or even starting to bloom, so I don’t accidentally cut any down, mistaking them for chokecherry.

Today has been a very deceiving day! It got so hot, and when I was shoveling around those roots, I didn’t hit any ice or frozen ground at all. Quite a few of our garden seeds say to direct sow “as soon as the ground can be worked.” Well, that would be now, but it’s still another month an a half before our last frost date. Not only are we expected to have snow starting tomorrow evening, but we could easily get more snow later in the month, or even in May, so anything we tried to sow would likely not survive.

Which is fine for now. We can’t do anything until the garden soil is delivered! I keep forgetting to call about it. I’m sure the soil is thawed out enough to load into their trucks by now, and I still need someone to come by so we can look at where would be the best places to drop the loads.

I get excited, just thinking about it! :-D The girls and I are so looking forward to gardening this year!

The Re-Farmer

Someone lost a shoe…

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My daughter and I made a dump run today, and as we were unloading the back of the van, she noticed one of the access panels in the side of the van had fallen off. This is where the jack is stored. She popped the panel back on, and off we went.

As we were turning into our driveway, however, we heard a noise in the back that was rather alarming. At least for us, after having so many things go wrong on the van. So while my daughter unlocked the gate, I took a quick look in the back, thinking maybe something got knocked loose behind that access panel.

Once in the garage, I just had to get a picture of what I found.

The jack had been visible before, and we had seen part of the back with the pieces to use the jack. I think one of the plastic pieces I found was originally a bracket to hold the jack in place, so it wouldn’t get knocked about, but I have no real idea what it’s for. Then there was the pliers. And odd find, but I can go with that.

The child’s shoe, on the other hand, is a bit harder to explain! :-D I know the previous owners had kids – when I test drove it before buying it, and before it was detailed, there was still ample evidence to be found! :-D I do find myself curious how the shoe ended up tucked under the jack and the tools! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Technical difficulties: still figuring it out

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First up, many thanks to Fyreglass and her hubby for all the help with my technical difficulties! So far, the problem hasn’t been solved, but my goodness, my computer is working much more efficiently! :-D

In fact, as I type this, the text is showing up as a combination of black and magenta. I am also still getting things like this.

Which isn’t too bad, compared to the neon green I usually get.

I spent hours last night, trying different things. This is what I’ve been able to figure out.

It’s definitely a Firefox issue, more than anything else. I did sometimes see it in Chrome, while in my email, for example, but getting the new monitor somehow solved that. Things actually appear on the screen faster than before, which is not something I expected to see a difference in. That’s usually an internet connectivity issue, but apparently, my old monitor – which was much older than my current computer – didn’t process as quickly.

Re-installing Firefox did not fix the issue. I’ve noticed that Firefox is a data hog, compared to other browsers. I use it for this blog and under my Re-Farmer profile simply because I don’t like having to log in and out repeatedly in the same browser, and I use Chrome for my personal stuff. I’ve also used Explorer in the past, and tried several other browsers. They all have their issues, and I keep finding myself going back to Firefox and Chrome, because the issues they have are easier to work around than the others I’ve tried.

I’ve used Glary and cleaned up all sorts of things. By this morning, when I double checked with my husband before deleting a couple of games he’d installed on this computer, before he was able to replace his own that died during the move, I’d freed up about 100 gigs of space.

I checked my drivers, and they are up to date. My video card is working fine.

Anything on WordPress – especially the editor – is the most affected, but it also affects things like Facebook and Pinterest. I’ve gone back and forth between browsers to test things out and, while there are definitely loading issues in general, which would be an internet issue, it is only on Firefox that the weird colours and text issues are showing up.

In fact, I’m going to pause and take a screen capture, just to show you what it looks like right now, as I work on this post.

WordPress is one of the platforms that I have the most loading issues with. Especially the editor, but just about every WordPress blog I try to visit has major issues, from the “like” button never loading, to the formatting going completely haywire, to simply timing out and not loading at all. Over and over and over again. Anything embedded in a post (like a video, or a reblog) generally fails to load, and trying to leave a comment is almost impossible. While using Chrome, the loading issue seems more limited to the editor and admin pages, than while visiting blog pages. The stats in particular reeeeaaaallllyyy don’t like to load, even though everything else around it (side bars, headers, etc.) will load just fine.

It’s not just WP, though. I get it in Facebook and Pinterest as well, though not as bad, nor as often. Since doing some PC maintenance, and my computer is working faster, I no longer have the problem in my gmail, as in the screen capture I’d posted yesterday. I might even be able to catch up on my emails now! :-D

And, just to make things even more confusing, it will often change, right before my eyes. For example, if you click on the above image to see it larger, check out the text in the bottom left corner. Before I took the screen capture, that’s what the text in my side bar on the right looked like. After capturing the image, then resizing it before uploading it, that text went wonky again. As I am writing this right now, the text in my side bar is messed up, not clear and legible, as it is in the image I screen captured just a little while ago.

Oh! Now it’s blinking back and forth!!

So now I’m thinking the problem is a combination of two things.

One: it’s a loading issue. Even though I have a WiFi booster (which I even moved to a different location, in hopes it’ll get the signal better), something about the corner my “office” is in does not connect with the internet as efficiently as other parts of the house.

The other is Firefox: while I have problems loading things on other browsers, it is only on Firefox that the weird colours and disappearing text is happening the most. Where other browsers just take longer to load, Firefox does the weird text and colours.

*sigh* I’ve even saved my draft and reloaded this several times while working on it, but that magenta text just won’t go away – and it’s only happening here, in my editor, as I write this. It’s not happening when I load a published post.

It’s getting very hard on the eyes, so I’ll go ahead and post this. I might have to just stop using Firefox and find another browser to use for my Re-Farmer profile. Trying to use the WordPress editor has been even worse in other ways, in the various browsers I’ve tried, which is why I kept coming back to Firefox.

*sigh*

The Re-Farmer

(ps: I just edited this post to fix a typo I missed, and the magenta text is gone, as is the weird blocky, unreadable text in the side bars. No consistency at all!)

Our 2021 Garden: onions – to trim or not to trim?

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I remembered to get a photo of our onions in their new location in the sun room.

I ended up removing the plastic on the mini-greenhouse frame, so it wouldn’t get too warm, and so there would be air circulation from the ceiling fan.

This is early enough in the morning that the room is still “dark”, but once the sun comes around, it gets many hours of sunlight. The ceramic heater is just enough to keep the seedlings from getting chilled overnight. We’re supposed to get snow starting tomorrow night, at with point I might put the plastic cover back on.

There should have been trays for three types of onions in here by now, but the shallots died off and I had no seeds left to try again, and the reseeded bunching onions are still in the aquarium greenhouses inside, for a while longer. By the time those are ready to be moved over, we’ll be bringing the tomatoes and gourds into here, too.

I have a question for those who grow onions from seed.

Should I trim these?

I’d read that onion seedlings should be trimmed when they reach about 6 inches, to about 3 inches, while they await transplanting. I would have done it by now, however, I’ve since heard from people who say to NOT trim them, because then you get smaller bulbs. They were pretty adamant about it, while others were just as adamant about the opposite.

I’m inclined to trim them, but I wanted to hear from anyone with more experience than me with growing onions from seed. I am more than eager to listen to the advice of others!

Did you trim them, or not?

What do you recommend?

The Re-Farmer

Some Ginger beef

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Last night, we decided to close the other cats out for the night. Not because there were any issues with cats not getting along, the night before, though. The other cats are really liking access to Ginger’s food and water bowls (as well as his litter box). With the other cats around, he spent most of the night in his bed at the bottom of the closet, and by the time he came out in the morning, all the food and water was gone. He does the stairs to the basement really well, but I’d rather he didn’t have to do that because the other cats were too lazy to! :-D

The bonus was, morning cuddles with Ginger!

As soon as he realized all the other cats were out of the room and the door was closed, he jumped upon the bed and started roll and stretch and squirm, while demanding face skritches. :-D He did eventually go back to his “cave” in the closet for the rest of the night, but by morning, he was back for more cuddles.

After a leisurely breakfast from his still-full food and water bowls. :-D

I think he enjoyed the break from the other cats! He is certainly enjoying people time, too.

I was talking to my daughter about one of the things I noticed about him. He and his sister, Cabbages, are the youngest cats in the house. Yet he is bigger and burlier than her, and even his older sister (half-sister, I suppose), Nicco. The spice girls are both downright tiny compared to him, and even Tissue, who is about the same age as the older kittens, is smaller than he is. Our Ginger is a beefy boy! He’s about as big as his Aunt Beep Beep, who has been filling out since coming indoors. He hasn’t caught up to Big Rig, but then, Big Rig got her name because she was so much bigger than the other kittens. I don’t think he’ll get as big as Cheddar or Leyendecker, but I’m sure he’ll be at least as big as David and Keith, soon.

He was always a bit bigger than his brother, Nutmeg, but Nutmeg is definitely filling out, too.

So is their mother, Butterscotch (on the left).

Who is looking decidedly round in the belly.

*sigh*

Rosencrantz is another beefy one. If she’s pregnant, we might not even be able to tell until we start seeing kittens running around again.

Thankyou to Wolfsong for passing on the name of a vet that does a barn-cat spay day. It’s a long drive for the cats, but we’d be able to do 4 females for about the same price as the local vet doing only one, so it would be worth it. We will definitely be contacting them to find out when their next spay-day is. The only challenge will be to catch yard cats like Junk Pile (I haven’t actually seen her in a little while), and I’m sort of assuming Rosencrantz’s baby, the sort-of calico, is female. It’s not like we’ve been able to see her well enough to confirm, either way. Just like Junk Pile; we didn’t know for sure that she was female until she showed up with kittens following behind. In fact, because she never looked pregnant, I had thought she was a he!

At least we’ve been able to get the indoor males snipped for now, including Ginger. Can you imagine the poor boy being intact, recovering from an amputation, and surrounded by a house full of female cats in heat? LOL

The Re-Farmer