He was very happy to see me this morning. So happy, he flung himself onto the ground at my feet, rolling around so I could pet his belly!
Right. On. His. Injury.
*shudder*
He was moving around so much, it was hard to get pictures!
To refresh his water, I decided to quickly open the doors to outside and toss out the old water, he actually made a run for the door! This boy wants to go outside!
I’m sure his misses his brothers, Nutmeg and Creamsicle baby! But he will have his sister, Cabbages, and a whole lot of other cats to play with, when this is over.
This morning, I called the vet clinic to ask about having him fixed while he is with them tomorrow. The last thing we’re going to do is get him all patched up, then send him back outside where the coyotes and other predators can get him. She talked to one of the doctors who said that yes, they can, but first they will see how the amputation surgery goes since, obviously, that’s the priority. If that goes well, he’ll get a quick snip while he is still under.
We also talked about the financing.
Full disclosure and transparency, here.
Thanks to the generosity of so many, both through the Ko-fi fundraising, and direct donations, we have enough to cover the lower end of the estimate. Ko-fi works through PayPal, and I set up new accounts for both at the same time. The PayPal account is linked to completely separate bank account from our personal stuff. The down side is, PayPal takes several business days to transfer funds. Plus, they went and put the first donation we received on hold. Apparently, that’s a normal thing for them to do with new accounts, but it may be another 7 business days before the hold is removed. Only then can it be transferred, which can take several more days.
So we will also be looking into the third party financing option. We may not need it if the total is on the low end of the estimate, but if it’s on the high end, we will.
With that in mind, if you do wish to support Ginger Snap’s surgery, you can do so by buying him a coffee (donations can be as low as $1 Canadian), sharing or reblogging this post, or the Ko-fi fundraising page.
Many thanks!
The Re-Farmer
Update: Well, I tried to go through the pre-approval process with the third party financing. It didn’t work! I got stuck right at the beginning, with our address. It seems we don’t exist. Their system couldn’t even accept our little hamlet, never mind our box number or our physical address. I wasn’t even getting any error messages. It just kept looping back to the address input area.
I called the clinic to let them know it wasn’t going to happen. It turns out, we’re not the only clients they’ve had, who have had this problem.
This was just in case things did not go well and the bill ended up on the high end of the estimate. They are aware of the situation, and have been really awesome about it. In fact, they’ve been pretty awesome, all around!
It won’t be worked on today. The mechanic was missing some information on file to be able to order a new tire. Which is fine. I’m just glad I had my daughter follow me in the van!
I talked to him about what happened, and was saying the tires were maybe 2 years old. He told me they couldn’t be that old, because he hasn’t owned the garage for 2 years yet! He’s the one who replaced all 4 tires for us. I think he had just taken over the garage at the time; I remember the signs on the building still had the previous owner’s name. They have definitely seen two winters, though. So they are, at most, a year and a half old.
One of the things that I told him was that I had not hit anything, and the tire had been fine, previously. He thought perhaps the extreme cold we had might have had an effect, but I don’t think so. I mentioned the guy changing the tire thought it might be defected. Either way, I asked him to do an inspection of the other tires, just in case! Which he will do.
That done, my daughter and I headed to a nearby small town where we could drop off the paperwork for her taxes. We tried to do her taxes last night, using TurboTax, but weren’t able to Netfile it. We couldn’t tell if the problem was with TurboTax or the CRA. I actually think it was both. We figured it would be easier to just take them in and pay someone to do them. Our first year back, we’d gone to someone in town that had done my parents’ taxes for many years. He screwed up badly; my husband ended up owing thousands of dollars, and he didn’t even file a return for me, because I have no income. The next year, we went to another company in another town. The person who did our taxes has a disability herself, so not only did she fix the previous year’s taxes, but told me I qualified for the caregiver tax benefit, and was able to fix my husband’s file to reflect his disability tax credit. He still ended up owing money from the previous year, but that’s just part of moving back to this province. We’ve ended up owing money every time we’ve moved back here.
So I knew this was someone that we could trust!
I called her this morning and explained our situation. Which is when I found out that TurboTax has been really buggy this year. She had tried to use it to file her own personal taxes from home, and ended up doing them in the office, because she couldn’t get it to work! Plus, there is the CRA issue. There was some sort of security issue (but not a security breach) and they suspended the secure login information for 800,000 people. I got the email notification about that, but was able to log on through my bank (which is how I usually log on), and was able to reset things on my own file. My daughter, however, kept getting error messages, instead. We couldn’t even print out her file to mail it, because the printouts had a watermark saying, “Duplicate copy: do not mail” on them. We couldn’t get the proper forms for mailing in, anywhere! In the end, it just wasn’t worth the hassle.
With the crazy doing on right now, the tax preparers just ask people to drop off their paperwork, and they’ll call for pick up when they are done, so that is what my daughter and I did, after dropping off my mother’s car. It’ll take longer for her to get her return, but at least it’ll be done. Her sister is going to try the software first, but if it messes up for her, we’ll do the same for hers. After talking to the tax preparer, I don’t expect it to work, to be honest. The software couldn’t handle a bare bones return, never mind a self-employment one.
We took the opportunity to run some errands, and even remembered to go to the post office.
There was one odd thing that happened when we were heading out. After my daughter backed the van out of the garage, I started to close the door…
… and something fell, hitting me on the way to the ground.
I found a large screw.
I quickly popped into the garage and closed the door the rest of the way
Above the door, there is a part of the garage door mechanism, held in place with a plate. That plate is now sticking out, behind held in place with only one screw at the top.
The garage door is larger than usual, and I was thinking it looked like it’s starting to sag in the middle. My guess is that that’s exactly what’s happening, and as it sags, every time we opened the door, it was hitting that piece, pulling it further and further out, every time, until the screw finally fell out. Of course, this can only be seen if we are inside the garage, while it’s empty, and the door is closed. Which pretty much only happens when we’re trying to repair things (or get rid of wasp nests).
So for now, the door is going to stay closed, so as not to damage things even more. We’ll need to drag out the A-frame ladder from by the building my parents’ stuff is stored in, and see if we can simply screw it back on again. It’s really windy right now, so while it’s a marvelous 12C/54F right now, I’m in no hurry to be carrying a ladder across the outer yard …as I watch the trees out my window suddenly start waving around even more, in an especially strong gust! This is a day when I’m going to be checking for broken branches, and seeing if any new trees have fallen down, as part of my rounds. I might even skip the evening rounds and save it for morning!
Not knowing how quickly we’ll be able to get it done, I decided to park the van in the inner yard, where it won’t be visible from the road, in case our vandal decides to take a walk past our place again. With my mom’s car in town, that means the garage is actually empty right now! This would be a good time to take a rake to the dirt floor and tidy up a bit. :-)
After the plate is fixed and we can open the door again, though. Otherwise the dust will be insane in there! :-D
Little by little, things will get done.
The Re-farmer
Obligatory fundraising promo! Ginger’s surgery is scheduled for 2 days from now. If you would like to help support him, you can buy him a coffee (donations can be as little as $1 Canadian), or share the Ko-fi page on your own blog, or social media.
So this lends weight to the “defective tire” theory.
I checked the trail cam files from yesterday. With the one camera, there just isn’t a view of that tire, but with the other…
I cropped this from a screen cap of the video. It’s the best I could get.
Even taking into account that the tire is sunk in mud, it looks really low!
The last time the car was used was then I took my mother grocery shopping about a week ago. It has been sitting in the garage every since. The only reason I took it out at all is because my sister helped my mother with grocery shopping, so I wanted to make sure the car got some time on the road.
I’ve just taken it out and checked the rest of the tires as much as I can. I’ll be asking the mechanic to give them a quick inspection once he has it up on the lift.
I was telling my brother and his wife about what happened, and they had the same immediate thoughts I did; could it have been deliberate? In their case, they actually know someone who had … issues… with someone else, and that person vandalized the inside of their tires. All four of them!
I don’t think our vandal did anything, though. Not just because it would be physically difficult; where the car is parked is so cramped, there is no way anyone of his size and lack of mobility could have gotten to that tire. Plus, he wouldn’t have been that subtle. If he was going to damage our tires, he would have just slashed our tires. So I don’t think this is the result of an act of vandalism.
It should be interesting to hear what the mechanic has to say when he finally sees the tire this afternoon!
I figured I’d get this out as quickly as I could, because I know people are interested!
While checking on him yesterday, the sun room was actually getting too warm! So we turned on the ceiling fan and opened the inner door to the old kitchen, so cooler air could circulate through screen window of the outer door. My daughters have taken on giving him his evening pill. It’s supposed to taste like cat treats, so they give it to him with a couple of treats, and have had no problem with him eating it.
This morning, he was eager for attention – and very curious about my phone when I tried to take pictures!
He is eating and drinking well, though he ignores the wet cat food. It was chilly by morning, so I made sure he got some nice warm water. When I brought warm water for the cats outside throughout the winter, Ginger would be the one coming over and drinking out of the jug while I knocked the ice out of the water bowls and cleaned out the heated water bowl. He’s a big fan of warm water! :-D
I was somewhat concerned about the litter pan still looking mostly undisturbed. This morning, however, I found that he’s been using the spilled dirt I’d swept into a pile, after Potato Beetle knocked a plant pot over,during his own convalescence in the sun room. The sun room has concrete floors, so I’m not too worried. Once things are warm enough and the yard is dry enough, we basically empty the sun room every spring to clean the floor and get things re-organized. This is where we keep our frequently used yard tools, as well as the critter food, while also keeping my late father’s swing bench open so we can just sit in there and enjoy the warmth and sunshine. The cats love that swing bench! We will also be it as a green house for our seedlings, too, once I pick up a shelf to hold them all, and the overnight temperatures are warmer.
Since we are also using it to isolate injured kitties, we’ve got leftover pieces of rigid insulation on the floor in front of the box bed, and under the food and water, so little paws don’t get too cold on the concrete!
Yeah. We’re sucks, when it comes to the cats! :-D
Did I mention he wanted attention?
Poor baby is lonely! He’s used to at least having his brothers, Nutmeg and Creamsicle Jr, to play with. And he does want to play! It’s hard to visit with him because he gets so excited, and starts moving around too much. Of course, we can’t not visit him, because we need to check on him and give him some loving.
While the temperatures were warm this morning – it was 1C/34F when I headed out – there was a very cold wind! I’m so glad we have been able to keep Ginger in the sun room. We weren’t able to, when his mom ended up with stitches. Yes, he was a regular user of the heated cat shelter, but clambering in and out of there would not have been good. That and Nicky the Nose has been showing up again, and he’s been starting fights with the males. Not so much with Ginger and his litter mates. They were born so late in the season last year, they aren’t sexually mature yet, and not a threat to him. We think he might be responsible for Potato Beetle’s injury, though, and with things warming up, the baby boys are going to start being interested in the girls soon, and Nicky is not going to like that. We chase Nicky off when we see him but, just this morning, I saw him out my window, slinking away through the trees towards the empty farm across the road.
Anyhow.
Ginger is doing remarkably well. As he moves around, he does keep trying to put weight on that leg. !!! Thank goodness I’m not squeamish, because every time he does, things move in ways they just aren’t meant to! Of course, when he sits or lies down, he has no way to move the leg out of the way, so… yeah. Not pleasant. At least he doesn’t seem to be in pain.
He will be having a much easier time after the surgery, that’s for sure!!
Which leads me to our fundraising promo. Ginger’s surgery is scheduled for 2 days from now. If you would like to help support him, you can buy him a Ko-fi (donations can be as little as $1 Canadian), share and/or reblog this post, or share the Ko-fi page.
Actually, I’m paranoid about vehicle break downs and troubles in general, but especially about tires.
My mother’s car got all new tires after we didn’t hit a deer, a couple of winters ago, and drove through a ditch, instead. With how infrequently my mother’s car is used, they are still in very new condition. In fact, the coloured markings on them haven’t worn off yet!
I have no idea what I could have hit that caused this! I hadn’t reached even 5 miles from home when it blew.
This is my best guess.
Every winter, as the snows melt off the gravel roads, the surface gravel is mostly gone, and a lot of rocks start protruding. These tend to be very rounded rocks, not angular ones, but sometimes they end up sticking out quite far. Because of the direction I was going, I took a different route to get to the highway. It added an extra mile of gravel road, and the final two miles are a smaller road than the one we usually take to get to the highway. (This route has the added bonus of us not having to drive past our vandal’s place.) It was a rough ride, and though I drove slower and tried to avoid the rocks, I did hit some. My mother’s car is very light in the back, so I was feeling every bump more than with our van, as it was.
However, it was about a mile and a half on the highway when it happened, and there was nothing on the highway for me to hit. I just suddenly started hearing the noise in the back, and immediately pulled over. I didn’t even feel anything different in how the car handled. At least, not with how quickly I pulled over.
After quickly messaging the family to let them know what happened, I called up CAA to get a tire change. I then spent the next 10-15 minutes, trying to explain to the person I was talking to, where I was. CAA, of course, wants an address. I had none. There was nothing but trees around me. I finally got out to see if what may have been a driveway up ahead had a marker number (I couldn’t actually see one, and they are supposed to be highly visible, which means the driveway was likely to an unoccupied piece of land). As I got out, I was able to see there was actually a road behind me. It took a couple of minutes to walk close enough to be able to read the road number.
The poor woman on the phone just could not find me. She couldn’t find our little hamlet. She couldn’t find the provincial route number it’s on. She was using Google Maps, so I tried giving her the names of larger towns in the area. Every now and then, she’s say, “near [suburb near the city, an hour’s drive away]?” or “near [small town I know the name of, couldn’t tell anyone where it us, other than “somewhere north of us”]?” The road number I gave her did not come up for her at all, as if it didn’t exist.
I swear, it was like trying to explain to a delivery company, how to find the farm!
Eventually, she had enough information to give to a driver and told me it would take about an hour for them to arrive.
An hour???
That done, I messaged my family, asking someone to come with the van. My younger daughter has her license, but with all the crap going on right now, she has not been able to book the 2 hours of driver’s training she needs to do, before she can take her a road test for her full license. Which meant my husband had to accompany her for the drive.
My husband, who has been having extremely bad pain days for the past couple of weeks.
My husband, whose walker is now kept in the sun room, where it is easier for him to get in and out through the doors. Where Ginger is camped out right now.
He didn’t even bring a cane! Not that it mattered. We keep several canes in the van, and there’s at least one in my mother’s car. We collect canes! :-D
While I was waiting, I got a call from the driver, much sooner than expected. He asked some more questions about where I was. Since he’s actually from the area, I could tell him some land marks (you know that radio tower? I’m looking at it right now.) that he knew. He arrived not long after my husband and daughter did.
I would really like to invest in the tools he had! Especially the jack. The tire was changed in almost no time at all. The little jack that came with the car would have taken three times as long, just to lift the car.
Once he had the tire off, we could see the damage, and I was just amazed!! I was half expecting to see a piece of glass or something (I’d seen some on the shoulder as I walked to read the road sign for CAA).
My daughter and I were talking about how these were quite new tires, so wear and tear can’t be blamed. He took a closer look and said he thought the tire might have been defective.
The spare tire is the little donut, not a full size tire, so I drove home at almost half speed, with the flashers on, with my husband and daughter following behind.
Because at this point, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the spare tire went flat or something. :-/
Once we got home, I still wanted to run my errands, but I decided to go to town, rather than the small city I was originally planning to. That allowed me to swing by the garage and talk about bringing my mother’s car in.
I’m bringing it in tomorrow afternoon.
*sigh*
First the cat, now my mother’s car? What more can go wrong?
Never mind. I don’t want to know. The list would be too long! :-D
First up, I want to say how much we all appreciate the wonderful comments, feedback, support and reblogs we about poor little Ginger!
If you click on the button on the top of the right hand column, or click here, you can see the current fundraising status. At the time of this writing, 20% of the goal has already been reached, just overnight! We are so thankful. <3
I had checked on Ginger last night, just through the door from the old kitchen, so as not to disturb him too much. It took me a while to spot him! Then I realized there was this little nose peeking out from under the flap of the “nest” we made in a box, back when Potato Beetle was convalescing in the sun room. He had a nice, soft pillow for a bed in a nice warm nest.
When I checked through the bathroom window this morning, I found him sitting in front of the door to the old kitchen, oddly curled up with his forehead on the floor. ??? A few moments later, he started to tip over, then jarred himself awake. :-D It was like one of those videos you see, where a kitten is so tired, it falls asleep while sitting up and starts to fall over.
When I checked on Ginger this morning, he was still by the door and didn’t want to move, even as I had to open the door over him! He just squished down, then became very interested in the old kitchen! Which we are not going to let him into, right now.
I’m happy to say that Ginger was looking really good this morning. He was moving around, wanting attention and pets (!!) and meowing at me. I actually wish he wasn’t moving around quite so much. Seeing that leg flopping around the way it does is rather horrific. It isn’t stopping him, though!
He also seems to have a very good appetite. The dry kibble bowl was empty. He didn’t seem to have eaten any of the wet cat food we’d also left for him. I thought maybe he didn’t like the pate, so I brought a can of shredded cat food for him. He still preferred the dry kibble.
While the sun room is warmer than outside, I had considered turning on the terrarium heater bulb we had set up for Potato Beetle, when it was still much colder. Unfortunately, we have no way to set it higher. I didn’t want to risk him stumbling and falling against it, so for now, there’s no heat source for him. Thankfully, the weather is getting warmer every day for the next while, so he should be just fine.
The sun room is where the cat, bird and deer food is stored, and normally I’d be going in and out through the outside doors. We don’t want other cats running in with Ginger right now, so the plan was to do things the long way around; go into the sun room through the old kitchen, collect the containers of feed, take them through the house to the main entry, then head outside with the warm water.
That’s a lot of containers to get through the door, while trying to make sure none of the inside cats make a run for it!
I did the short version of my morning rounds, because I wanted to call the vet clinic when they opened.
I had company.
Ginger’s brothers, Nutmeg (camouflaged in the grass) and Creamsicle Jr. followed along. Butterscotch did, too, but she stayed well back in the trees.
Potato Beetle emerged as well, and paused to say hello to Nutmeg. :-)
I had a chance to check his back leg. The wound is still quite visible, but all closed up and the fur the vet shaved away is starting to grow back. There is no sign of a limp, and he doesn’t seem to be favoring the leg in any way, so all seems very well.
For those new to this blog, Butterscotch and Potato Beetle both had trips to the vet this winter. We found a gash inside one of Butterscotch’s back legs. While she is one of the friendlier yard cats, she does not like to be indoors, and doesn’t even like to be in the sun room. We’d converted the sun room into a maternity ward a couple of years back, in hopes of socializing and adopting out kittens, but once those babies were born, she kept breaking out. She tore right through the screen at the top of the door that was there at the time. So while we were eventually able to get her into a cat carrier and get her to the vet for some stitches, we were not able to keep her isolated as she healed. Her wound was a clean cut, so it is likely she had fallen over something sharp. Sadly, there are lots of sharp things all over the farm! It may not have even happened here, as she does visit the neighbouring farms.
Potato Beetle then showed up with blood on his fur one day, but it took us a couple of days before we could find where it was from. He had clearly been in a fight. By the time we could get him to the vet, the wound had already started to heal. He did not need stitches, but he did get cleaned up and was given some antibiotics. We set him up in the sun room for a few days to heal, with a nice warm nest to sleep in, and the terrarium heater bulb nearby. Which also kept his water from freezing! Thankfully, we don’t have to worry about that now. The outside water bowls still freeze over, but in the sun room, Ginger’s water bowl was just fine.
When I got back to the house, I found Rosencrantz (on the right, drinking water) had come out. She’s been hanging around more often lately, which is good. Junk Pile cat (with Potato Beetle, in the kibble house) doesn’t seem to wander off like Rosencrantz, her mother, but she still won’t let us anywhere near her. Her mystery baby is even shier, but at least we see her? him? in the cat house, snuggling with Nostrildamus (aka: Nosey).
I haven’t seen Nosey for several days. I am concerned. Hopefully, he’s just out visiting the neighbouring farms and discovering some lady cats.
For those who are new, you can read up about how we got our current cat house here and here. It now has a ceramic terrarium heater bulb to keep the kitties warm in winter. You can also read about the kibble house we built, here and here. (All links should open in new tabs, so you don’t lose your place. :-) )
I just got a call from the vet while I was writing this!
I’d called after I finished my rounds and talked about booking the surgery and payment options. They just called back and the surgery is going to happen on Sunday, three days from now.
Gosh, that’s a long time for Ginger, but it’s the earliest they can do. We’ll be dropping him off at 8:15 in the morning.
Ginger will be staying in the sun room, of course, which will make it much easier to have him fasting for the required 8 hours before surgery.
As for payments, they don’t do it themselves, but contract out to another company. It’s all on a pre-approved basis, so they would have paperwork for us to fill out, they do the surgery, and then we’d make arrangements with this company.
:-/
With that in mind, if you wish to help with Ginger’s vet bills, you can do so by going to the Ko-fi page, or even just reblogging and sharing this post or sharing the Ko-fi page.
Meanwhile, Ginger is going to be pampered as much as possible!
Poor baby!
The Re-Farmer
ps: my husband is hilarious. He just came over and suggested a name change for Ginger.
This morning, while doing my morning rounds, the kitties all came out to say hello.
Then I saw Ginger.
Walking on three legs.
His right front leg was dangling and swinging in a most unfortunate way.
I tried to go to him, but he “ran” away. I didn’t want to risk losing track of him or hurting him more, so I went inside. My younger daughter was handy, so I told her about it, and she went outside with the cat carrier to try and catch him, while I called the vet clinic.
The doctor was in surgery at the time, so we were told to bring him in for 3pm. My daughter had caught Ginger, and we had a few hours, so we set him up in the sun room, where he would be safe and we could check on him through the bathroom window.
It was encouraging to see that he had jumped up onto the swing bench to nap in a sun spot. Also, his injured leg is not visible in the photo. He’s lying on that shoulder.
I had hopes that it might not be too bad. After all, he wouldn’t be lying on the injury if it was really bad, right?
So we brought him to the vet and my daughter went in, because she can wear a mask. She texted me updates whenever she was able. At first, the doctor thought there might be a dislocation, but they had to sedate him to take x-rays. He is the friendlier of the litter, but he’s not fully socialized, by any means, so it took a bit longer for them to examine him.
What the x-rays revealed was a badly broken elbow. What the doctor thought was a dislocation was a broken bone, sitting on top of another bone.
Not only was it a very bad break, but in a very bad spot.
We were presented with two options. One was a surgical repair. The last time the doctor had gone that route, it ended up costing $2200. The other option was amputation. My daughter texted me while they looked up the cost of that, but my immediate reaction was that an amputation would be far less traumatic.
For the amputation, we got two estimates. Which it would be depends on if it takes 2 or 3 hours to amputate, and how difficult things turn out to be. The price range was just over $1300, to just over $2000.
Ouch.
At that point, they woke him up to give him more pain killers so we could take him home and talk about it. Once in the vehicle, my daughter was able to give me more information. The surgical repair is something they couldn’t even be sure would work, largely due to the placement of the break and how bad it is.
Oh, and we did ask what they thought might have caused the injury. He clearly had not been in any sort of fight. They think it was most likely a really bad fall. :-(
The problem isn’t deciding what action to take, but how to pay for it. Even the money set aside for the garden soil and the emergency fund together would cover the lower amount, but that would screw us over for all our gardening, repair and maintenance plans over the summer. I don’t think I’ll even tell my family about it. Their response would be to have him put down – and not necessarily having the vet do it, for the gun owners.
We’re not going to do that.
In fact, what we’re likely going to do is have him fixed and, after the surgery, turn him into an indoor cat.
Hopefully, the vet will let us make monthly payments. However, I have also done something I have had quite a few people recommend I do over the past several years. I’m loath to do it, but for the kitties, I will.
You may have noticed a new button at the top of the column on the right. We now have a donation page set up with Ko-fi. Anyone who would like to support taking care of the kitties can click and donate any amount they wish.
Currently, I’ve got a fundraising goal of $1300. If it costs more, we should be able to cover it. If we raise more than the goal, it will go towards getting Ginger fixed so we can bring him inside. My older daughter tells me she’s planning to open up to more commissions to raise funds, too. There are only so many she can take at the same time, though.
Tomorrow, we call the vet back and talk about setting up the amputation and payment options. Until then, we’ve set up the sun room for Ginger’s convalescence, and he is there now. In fact, my daughter just have him the first of the treat flavoured painkillers we brought home with him, which he is to get every 24 hours.
Because the swing bench is a favourite place for the cats to nap, we moved it around and set up “stairs” for him to use, so he doesn’t have to jump up onto it, as he had in the earlier photo I took.
The poor broken baby! He’s being remarkably calm and stoic about the whole thing.
Pretty soon, we might have to consider changing his name from Ginger to Tripod! ;-)
As we acquire the tools and supplies we’ll need to preserve the bounty we hope to have from our garden this year, we have been picking up canning supplies and the materials do to water bath canning.
We also want to can low acid foods, and were on the lookout for a pressure canner.
My family found something we thought we could use, but alas, it was not to be. We did decide to keep the pressure cooker, though. It’ll still be useful!
As I posted about our conundrum, I had some wonderful people leaving comments and helping me along with something we have never done before, which was greatly appreciated.
Then one wonderful person – you know who you are! – went above and beyond.
Today, we got a large, very well packed box in the mail.
We have been gifted with a pressure canner!
The only thing that’s missing is the instruction manual, which can be downloaded online.
Did I mention it was well packed? :-D
There are even extra parts and pieces!
Also, the cats were very curious. Especially about those packing peanuts. Even after I boxed them up and closed up the flaps, I caught Susan sneaking a paw in and stealing a peanut. Twice!
The internet can be rather unpleasant, especially with all the crazy going on right now, but then something like this happens, and it reminds me that there are some very wonderful people out there, quietly making the world a better place. :-)
Yes! We managed to resist temptation, and not start the tomatoes too early. :-D
After a fair bit of research, plus an evaluation of our cat-safe spaces, I chose to start our tomatoes using the “double cup” method.
I’d already picked up a large package of the red beer cups, and those were the types recommended. The first thing to do was to make drainage holes in half the cups we’d be using.
These will later be used to start our squash and gourds, so I didn’t mind putting drainage holes in extra cups. I’ve got a bag of 250, so we’ll be putting holes in at least 125! :-D
These are the seeds from one packet of Spoon tomatoes from Baker Creek. They are so tiny!!! And we didn’t even end up using them all!
Now, we’ve considered quite a few options for starting our seeds, including peat or similar pots, Jiffy pellets, starting trays of various types, and even looking at the pots of various sizes we found while cleaning out the basements. I settled on these cups for a few reasons. They are the size I want, you can get a LOT of them for a very low price, and I expect to be able to reuse them for many years. In some of the gardening videos I’ve watched, there are people who have been reusing these cups for as long as 10 years.
If I had the budget, I would prefer to use coir pots. I like the idea of those, or peat pots, as they can be put right into the soil with the transplants to break down, resulting in far less root disruption. The problem is, for the sheer volume of these that we would need, they’re just completely out of budget. Peat pots are fairly easy to find, but coir or any other biodegradable pots are things we’d have to seek out, and are far more expensive. :-/
The double cup method has added benefits. I can water them from below, using the outer cup, and not have to have them sitting in trays. That makes them more flexible for our spaces. Particularly since we’re using fish tanks as makeshift greenhouses. Using double cups means we can fit them inside the big tank, along with the trays of bulb unions and shallots.
Another benefit to using these cups for starting tomatoes is that we won’t need to “pot up” the tomatoes.
We filled the cups only half way with peat. The loose peat we’re using takes a long time to moisten, so I made sure to set some up in a container with water to saturate overnight, first.
As a bonus, the double cups hold the labels in place very well!
Once the seedlings reach a size large enough that we would be potting them up, we can just add more of the peat around the stems. No disruption of the main root, and the “hairs” on the stems will become new roots, making them hardier for when they finally get transplanted outside.
We planted 4 seeds in each cup. We shall see how many germinate, and how many make it to the transplant stage! The goal is for a total of 8 plants, but if we have extra… well, we’ll figure it out when the time comes. With the Mosaic Medley, it is a mix of cherry and grape tomatoes, so we will hopefully have several different varieties from the seeds that were planted, but I really don’t know how we’ll be able to tell until they start fruiting, really. There are plenty of seeds left in that packet, too.
Here they are, all in a row along the front of the big tank. Once they start sprouting, if it seems they aren’t getting enough light, we can place the extra aquarium light over the tank above them.
At which point, I call your attention to the onions, behind them.
The bulb onions (Norstar) in the self-watering tray are doing all right. The K-cups are actually doing better than the ones in the Jiffy pellets, which was a surprise for me. In fact, so many seeded pellets didn’t germinate, I reseeded many of them (plus a few K-cups), and they seem to be doing better now. The K-cups dry out much faster, and don’t water from below as well as the pellets. Unfortunately, watering the taller K-cups without also over watering the pellets has been a challenge. In the future, I would not want to mix the two again.
As for the shallots in the egg trays… Hmm.
I had thought that the wet cardboard of the egg trays might help the plugs stay moister, longer, but they seem to have done the opposite. They seem to be drying them out faster, and with this set up, I don’t have the space to put trays under them, to be able to water them from below. I’ve been using a spray bottle to water them from above, but … well, they really seem to be struggling. And I can’t even plant more, because all of the shallot seeds were used up in these trays.
Then there are the bunching onions, in the small tank.
*sigh*
The cat damage didn’t just wreck a lot of plugs, but it looks like the peat was contaminated, too. On one tray, a white mold has started to grow, while on the other tray, there is what looks like a more yellowish mold. Lack of air circulation in the tank certainly wasn’t helping matters.
That will not be as much of a problem now, at least. The window screen I found in the shed to replace the lid seems to be working, even though it is bigger than the tank. The frame along one side juuuuussssttt fits in the narrow gap between the tank and the wall, which means the tank itself helps hold the screen in place. A couple of 5 pound hand weights on the back, and it seems to actually be working. Yes, we did have a cat knock it off by going on the overhang, but since the weights have been added, that seems to have solved it.
On removing the light fixture from the lid, I had a slightly different issue. There is no “back” to the light bars, and while the waterproof tubes the lights are in have a dark strip along where it would have been against the lid, there was still a lot of light in every other direction. For now, I’ve simply placed the fixture on top of the metal mesh of the screen, then placed a somewhat-cut-to-size piece of rigid insulation, wrapped in aluminum foil, on top. All that “wasted” light is now being reflected downwards. It seemed darker in the tank, possibly because of the mesh itself, so I put aluminum foil around the sides of the tank, too. The foil wrapped “backing” for the light seems to be working well, so I plan to attach the light fixture to it, rather than just have it sitting loosely on top. I had intended to mount the light to the underside of the screen, but it actually seems to be working okay, sitting on top. As long as the cats leave it alone. They don’t seem to like the overhang of the screen, though, and only a couple of the kittens have been willing to make the effort to get past it.
We have a very small, light fan that can sit right on the screen and provide air circulation in the tank. For now, we’ve been switching the little fan back and forth between the tanks, until we feel it’s time to start using the oscillating room fan that’s on a stand.
I’m pretty sure those bunching onions are a lost cause, though.
So we had two things to deal with; the too dry shallots, and the dying bunching onions.
The girls took care of the shallots for me, while I made a run to the post office. They had to get creative, because… cats.
They put the seedlings into baking pans with water in them, to water the seedlings from below. That needed time, but they found that the under-bed storage container that we’ve been using to contain our potting mess was large enough to cover and protect both trays.
They successfully foiled the cats!
There was room for three more cups in the big tank, though, and we still had seeds for the bunching onions. So when I got back from my errands, I decided to plant more of them.
The shallots were well dampened by then, so I slid them back onto the pieces of insulation we’re using tho carry them, and put them back in the tank. Then I filled three double cups with peat and put about a dozen seeds, at least, in each cup. The seeds are all about half an inch apart, so I’ll be able to easily thin them, if necessary, or separate them for transplanting, later on.
And I still have seeds for the bunching onions left over!
So that is done. Tomato seeds have been planted, shallots have been, hopefully, rescued, and new bunching onion seeds have been planted.
The next batch of seeds that we will need to start are the gourds.
But not for another month or so.
Hopefully, by then, it will be warm enough even overnight, that the onions and tomatoes can be safely transferred to the sun room, so we can use the fish tank aquariums for the next batch of seed starts.
The Re-Farmer 