Clean up: reclaiming the old kitchen

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The girls took care of a huge job for me, in emptying out the old kitchen!

Well. As much as it will be.

Here is how it looks now, while we take a break and get out of the heat.

When we first moved here, my younger brother had his larger freezer where the one in the photo now sits. They moved it out shortly after we moved in, freeing up some space for us.

There was a shelf in the corner, filled with a variety of things hidden behind a curtain. My mother had a thing for putting curtain rods on shelves, then hanging light and lacy curtains to hide the contents. I don’t think she understood that she was damaging the shelves in the process. Mind you, with most of the shelves, it really didn’t make much difference.

This corner is where our current freezer, which had belonged to my parents, used to sit. When I was a kid and we were still using this kitchen, there was a fridge in this corner.

I have zero memory of there being a fridge in this kitchen!

When I started cleaning up the old kitchen before, I had put a utility shelf in this corner. In no time at all, things ended up dumped in front of it, because we had no place else to put them, and it became completely inaccessible!

That corner is where we will be putting the plastic couch from the sun room.

After taking this picture, I took down the curtain over the window that doesn’t have aluminum foil on it. It has a screen, so I tried opening it to get some air circulation, but it would only open half an inch. Ah, well. Better than nothing!

The window with the foil over it is supposed to get replaced. The replacement window is actually leaning against a wall, between the doors to the house and to the sun room.

We are not going to be replacing the window just yet, but I will keep that in mind as we set things up again.

Ah, the old wood stove! This is what my mother cooked on, until the addition was added to the house and we got an electric stove, to go with having running water and an indoor bathroom.

The hinges on the door are broken, as if someone tried to stand on it while open.

There are still ashes in there!!

Eventually, I want to clean it up and pick up some stove blacking – I even found some in one of our local hardware stores.

It’s amazing that this stove was going almost all day, every day, and the kitchen never caught fire. There is NOTHING protecting the walls and floor.

We will not be doing anything to what’s on the shelves in that little nook just yet.

Of course, there were all sorts of things the girls cleared out. The dresser in the photo being one of two larger items, plus lots of things like this sifter screen. It was used to clean the chaff and dirt out of seeds. It’s old and the wood is rotting, but it’s being kept. It’s very likely my dad made it himself. The screen is ordinary metal window screen. The wooden frame was very likely salvaged from a peach basket or something like that.

As the girls took things out, I started hauling some of the stuff either to the junk pile, or into the storage house, which is where that sifter went. I hate that we’re adding things into there. We’ve made no attempt to start cleaning it out. When we do, we’ll definitely need to use masks and gloves. If I can find some coveralls that would fit us, that would be good, too.

Among the things I took in were a large and a small shop vac. When my daughters started talking about using a shop vac on the floors, one of them wondered if the large shop vac worked. I had taken a look at it while carrying it over, I thought that, while it might run, it probably doesn’t vacuum anymore. The little one was

(Aaaannnd… that’s it. I’m done for the day.

As I was writing the above, the phone rang. My sister had taken my mother to the cemetery, and accidentally locked her keys in the car. Long story short, it turns out her car has a combination touch screen she’d forgotten about, but since they were in the area, my mother wanted to see the yard. I am now completely drained. We’ll finish the job tomorrow.)

Where was I?

Ah, yes. The little shop vac. It was wrapped up in a plastic bag, so my daughter didn’t realize what it was. The old kitchen had (and still has) lots of jars that we put into the wagon, so before my daughter had to go back to work, we brought the wagon to the storage house and assembly lined passing them all up the stairs and stacking them in a space I’d prepared for them. Then I brought the little shop vac to the sun room to plug it in and test it out.

It works! So we have a little shop vac – small enough to fit into a grocery bag! – to help clean up the floors. This will be a huge help in the old kitchen, with it’s bits and pieces flooring.

After doing the glass, we stopped to take a break, and I started on this post. Then I got the call from my sister. It turns out she’d tried to call several other people first, including her husband who has spare keys, before being able to reach me. The concern was, there is no shade at all in the cemetery, and it was way too hot for my mother to be in the sun.

So I headed out to go get them, thinking to bring them here to wait for my brother in law – or I could take my mother straight home.

It turned out to be a moot point. I got to the cemetery, and there was no car! Clearly, they’d gotten it open.

Then I saw a car I’d passed on the way over, coming back up the road. I haven’t seen my sister’s newer car in a while, so I hadn’t recognized it. I learned she’d gone to the house closest to the cemetery (which is off the main road and cut into the bush) to make the calls, since her cell phone was locked in the car along with her keys. After reaching me, she got through to her husband, who told her to just use the combination. She’d forgotten there was one! Along the frame of the driver’s side window is basically a touch screen of numbers. She didn’t remember the combination, but her husband did, so they were able to get in. I guess they were on the way to the farm when they saw me going by and turned around.

Since they were there, my mother wanted to come see the yard. She insisted, she didn’t want to come into the house (stairs are difficult for her). I had already told them we had emptied the sun room and old kitchen, and everything was spread out in the yard. They were okay with that, so I sent a message to my family to let them know the situation, and off we went.

What does it say that I get better cell phone reception at a cemetery in the bushes than we do here at the farm? :-D

Once we arrived, my sister parked in the shade of the yard. I asked her if my mom had brought her walker, and she hadn’t, so I went and got my father’s walker. We keep it handy for times like this (and in case I ever need it!). My sister and I also moved the plastic couch into the shade of my mother’s white lilacs, for later.

We then did a tour around the yard, and it was about what I expected. My mother had no real interest in the progress made, and all the interest in the things she didn’t like. Oh, I’d pulled up the spirea over there! Yes, Mom. It was spreading and killing things off. I want the lilacs, not the spirea.

Which is when she told me she had also tried to keep up with pulling them out of that spot, too.

And why did I want those piles of sticks all over the place?

I don’t want them there, but we have to put the branches somewhere. They will be cleaned up in time.

We went around to the old stone cross my late brother had salvaged off a building he’d demolished, which was another area I’d pulled up spirea. I’d been given a hard time about that, too, but now the area is filled with wildflowers. My mother had already graciously given me permission to pull up the spirea in that area. There is one patch of spirea by the storage house that we are keeping. The butterflies and other insects just love them, and it’s a place where we can keep it under better control. My mother was, at least, happy to see how well the grapes are doing (no comments on their no longer being buried in spirea and now on a trellis, though), only to launch into how I need to water them. I really have to water them, because they’re under a roof (meaning, the eaves of the storage house), and they’ll do really well if I just water them.

…

Yes, Mom, I know how to water plants.

She didn’t know what to make of the cucamelons.

Then we started walking towards the old garden area, and she could see the sunflowers at the far end.

What are those sunflowers doing there? Did you plant them?

Yes, Mom. We’ve been talking about that a few times, now.

What are those over there? Are they squash?

Yes, those are squash.

*long pause*

Oh, there used to be such a beautiful garden here! It used to be so beautiful!

*sigh*

She couldn’t, of course, go into the garden, because it is so rough. My sister and I went down to the end of the apple trees, and she had a few things to say about the horrible plow job. The summer before we moved here, she and her husband were the ones trying to cut the lawn in the area. The problem is that, instead of plowing in straight rows in the same direction, so the furrow overlap each other, my younger brother had gone in circles, instead. That left the mounds the were are now struggling with. We’re not sure why he did it this way, but my sister suspects alcohol was involved! :-D

Since I’d mowed a path, my mother was able to go through the maple grove with her walker, all the way to the old willow tree that we’d lost a big chunk of in a blizzard last fall. My sister remembers that tree being huge, even when visiting at the farm before my parents bought it. Then we went over to the fire pit, and I told my sister about how I found the bricks around it. She was amazed, partly because she remembered those bricks being there, and didn’t realize they’d been completely covered.

I tried to talk to my mother about some of the plans we had, but she wasn’t interested. Instead, she wanted to go to the storage warehouse, where almost all the things my parents left behind are now packed away in. I managed to convince her to first stop for a rest in the shade. After a nice rest and hydration, we made out way over.

She actually insisted in going inside, struggling up the few stairs to get in. The building is jam packed, with only a couple of narrow areas to walk in, but she squeezed her way through. Some of the cardboard boxes have started to collapse under the weight of their contents, and I found some things that could not be boxed where knocked onto the floor, including a little mirrored altar of my mothers. The original crucifix was long gone, and another had been put in it’s place. We found that on the floor. My mother decided to take it with her. It turned out to be the first gift she and my dad received, when they got married! Then she started pulling out the large framed pieces, eventually digging out a print of Mona Lisa.

She ended up taking that with her, even though she had nowhere to hang it!

Then she started digging at the end of the path, trying to reach something. There was a bunch of curtain rods from when we cleaned out the sun room, originally. I convinced her to let me get them for her, but when I asked which she was after, she’d completely ignored me. So I grabbed several and held them for her while she picked a couple of the least damaged ones.

My sister and I eventually persuaded her to stop trying to rearrange things and start heading out.

Then she decided she wanted to go into the storage house.

!!!

My sister immediately pointed out how difficult it would be for her to get up those stairs. I had to plead with her, not to go in. I reminded her of her breathing problems, telling her I’d been in and out of there several times, and my own lungs were starting to burn from it (as I type this, I can still feel my throat burning from talking so much, after being in there). I promptly got told that I needed to leave the doors and windows open to get the smell out. I told her it needed a major cleaning, plus there are no screens on the windows, and I didn’t want anything to get in and get trapped (my sister says that’s probably how the dead squirrel that is now a skeleton on the kitchen floor got trapped in there). She still insisted I should leave the door open and open windows.

What was it she was after in there? Maybe I could get it?

It turns out she was worried about a pair of brass candlesticks, and whether they were still there. They are actually a pair of menorahs, and I assured her, they were still on the shelf, covered with a light curtain. Oh? I didn’t cover them! was her response. Well, someone did. They’re still there.

In the end, my sister and I ended up going into the storage house, and we each grabbed a candlestick, took them to the door and showed them to her.

As we put them back, my sister and I were talking for a bit, but I just couldn’t stay in there any longer. My lungs were burning. Even my sister was already noticing it affecting her, so we headed out. I got more lectures on how I needed to leave the door open, and how I need to clean things. Eventually, my sister pointed out that I had stopped cleaning things, and they should probably leave so I could get back to it.

Which they did, but by then, I was done. That hour or so with my mother drained more energy out of me than two days of working on the sun room and old kitchen. I would so love to have a better relationship with her, but she just can’t seem to find anything good to say, without undermining it with by making sure I know what a bad job I’m doing, or how wrong what I’m doing it, etc. I’ve reached a point in my life where she can no longer hurt me, but my goodness, it just sucks the energy right out of me! She couldn’t even resist making a snarky comment about the sweatpants I was wearing; the ones I wear when I know I’m going to be doing dirty manual labour, that used to be my husband’s. They have elastic around the ankles, to help keep the wood ticks out. No recognition at all that I dropped everything to go and get them when they were stuck at the cemetery, and that’s why I was still in my grubbies.

But I did get a lecture about how she won’t be around forever, and after she’s gone, we’ll remember and miss her.

*sigh*

I wouldn’t be surprised if my mother lived to be 100. For all her complaining, she’s got an amazing constitution. Even when she had abdominal surgery and they kept her in the hospital for a week, she recovered faster than when I had a much less invasive day surgery! I was about to say she could get hit by a truck and survive, but… she’s already done that.

So I’m done. Wiped out. Exhausted. Not physically, but mentally.

My daughter headed out to secure some of the stuff so they won’t blow away. I’m going to go do the watering with fertilizer I’d planned on doing, once things cooled down a bit.

I’ll at least be able to say I finished one thing, today, after that!

The Re-Farmer

Good news!

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And it only took 2 years and 5 months.

My husband got a letter from the pain clinic in the city today. He has an appointment for next month!

Which will make it almost exactly 2 1/2 years since he was first put on the waiting list.

It took 2 years and a new doctor making some noise just to finally get their 14 page (or was it 17 pages?) questionnaire. That got sent in, but then the lock down happened and my husband, like so many others, got knocked off the priority list for health care.

He had to call in to confirm, then answer pandemic related questions. He was also told if he doesn’t have a mask, they’ll provide one.

He had a little chat with our daughter, and she will be making him a pirate mask.

Finally, he’ll be able to talk to a specialist about managing his pain. Who knows what will come of it. At the pain clinic before we moved, he had a team of 5 different specialists overseeing his case. The heart clinic out here has a team of 5 specialists, too, but they all work together on the same things, so when he comes in for an appointment there, he can see any one of them. At the previous pain clinic, each team member focused on a different area, such as pain medications, physical pain management, etc, with one primary care giver. We have no clue what to expect out here. So much of the health care in this province is different from before. Even with basic health care, they do things slightly differently, though at least part of that is the difference between living in the city, or in the boonies, like we are.

I am really hoping this is the start of some sort of treatment plan to at least get the pain under better control. We’ve known for some time – and at least one specialist made sure we understood this – that my husband will never be not-disabled again. He will never be 100% pain free. The best we can expect is an improvement in quality of life. Any improvement at all will be a blessing.

The Re-Farmer

Reclaiming the sun room: part one

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Today, I finally started on a job that should have been done at the start of spring! Between the rain and the heat wave, and various appliance catastrophes, we just never got to it.

It’s still 24C (75F) out there as I write this, so it was still uncomfortably hot for the work, but it’s much more bearable than what we had last month!

My goal today was to empty out the sun room, so I could sweep up the concrete floor.

Here is what it looked like once I emptied it (except for the table saw; I’ll move that when I’m ready to use it).

This is after 2 winters of the sun room being used by the yard cats as a shelter, and 1 summer as a kitten maternity ward.

Also, visiting skunks. Most of the poop on the floor under where the plastic couch was sitting is skunk poop, which is distinctively black in colour.

Here is how it looks now.

It was a pretty gross job, but still nowhere near as bad as it was when we first cleaned it out.

Washing the floor will wait until we are done with a whole bunch of other stuff, first.

The cushions from my late father’s swing bench – one of his favourite things was to lie on that for a nap in the sun room! – have been hosed off and are hanging to air out. I set up the kiddie pool we ended up using to mix soil and peat, and it now has some of the dirtier old blankets, pillows and cushions we’d given to the cats, soaking in it. Other items are draped and got hosed off, and the biggest blanket is waiting for its own soak, tomorrow.

I hosed down some of the furniture and shelves, too, and it will all stay in the yard overnight. Tomorrow, the girls will empty the old kitchen out, as much as possible. Once that’s done, I’ll do what I can about the floor in there (I doubt I’ll be able to wash it), and the plastic couch will go into there instead of the sun room. The utility shelf currently in the old kitchen will go into the sun room.

I’ve also finally taken off the parts of the door frame I need to trim narrower, so we can finally close the replacement door. Once they were off, however, I discovered something odd. In spite of being sized to the old door, carefully measured and trimmed, I still couldn’t close it once the frame pieces were off. It was hitting the bottom. I had to lift the door in order to close it.

I remember the old door did that, too.

Once I lifted it and closed it, I looked at the hinge side and discovered that the frame itself is wider on the bottom than on the top. !!! So the door is hanging at an angle, and that’s why it needs to be lifted to be closed. Which, of course, pulls the hinge away from the frame. From the looks of it, that’s been a problem for a very long time!

Well, I’ll just have to figure out how to fill the gap, then rehang the door.

Replacing the old broken door turned out to be a much more complicated job than any of us expected!

By the time we’re done, though, we should not only have the sun room reclaimed, and my husband will be able to use it again, but the old kitchen should be a usable space, too. Other than to just shove things in that we have no other place for, that is! LOL

Little by little, it’s getting done.

The Re-Farmer

First cookout!

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Yesterday was a perfect evening for a cookout!

Well… except for the mosquitoes. The bug spray we used is supposed to last for 8 hours. It didn’t!

Unfortunately, my husband wasn’t up to joining us, so it was just the girls and I. One of whom helped me unload the riding mower for the van, while the other tended our first fire in the new set up. :-)

Those blocks turned out to be very handy, in many ways!

With the pit all cleaned out, we were reminded of just how big it really is!

This metal ring is one of several my late brother had acquired. He worked in demolitions, and once had the job of dismantling a coal fired electric generating station. A company in the States had purchased it, so my brother and his team had the job of dismantling the pieces that would go to the train station for shipping. Dismantling them was very dangerous. While the station had not been used for many years, there was still coal dust all over, and coal dust is explosively flammable. What wasn’t shipped to the purchaser was demolished and went to the landfill, so he was able to salvage sections of pipe. This is one of three that I know of, that became fit pit rings. :-)

As for our cookout, we have a terrible habit of starting to cook way too early. We’re just too impatient to wait for proper cooking coals! :-D So we deliberately didn’t being the food out until later. The question was, how to set up the food and fixings? The picnic table is in the process of being prepped for painting. The folding table we’d used before is now being used for something else. Plus there was that whole bug problem.

Solution found!

Yup. The mini greenhouse! We could put everything in, the close it up to keep the bugs out. :-D

The only thing that was a bit of a problem was how wide the mesh is on the shelves. The squeeze bottle kept tipping over. :-D

Ah, perfect!

Did I mention how handy those blocks turned out to be? :-)

After we’d had a bunch of hot dogs, we build the fire up again, then tossed in a packet of stuff to make colourful flames. I’d actually bought them last year, but with the fire bans, we never had a fire to use them in!

I’m sure the colours would have been much more dramatic if we had waited until it was darker. :-D We’re saving the second one for another time.

Unfortunately, no one remembered to read the packet to see how long the stuff lasted. We still had S’mores to do, and a coloured fire is not for cooking over. I was eventually able to find that it could take from 1 – 2 hours, depending on the fire and conditions. So we built the fire up more, until it was all burned up, before letting it get down to cooking coals again.

Then we made S’mores. :-)

The problem with that is, while we all love to toast marshmallows to golden perfection, none of us actually like eating them all that much. :-D I could sit there and toast marshmallows all day, as long as I had someone else to eat them! :-D

It was a wonderful, peaceful evening. While the girls and I were out there, we got visits from Creamsicle and Potato Beetle, with all their loving attention. We also got to see Junk Pile cat’s THREE kittens! Just flashes of them, really, as they’re even more skittish than their mom, but they are now coming to the house – even into the sun room! – with her. We also got charmed by a chipmunk on the stacked wood pile, and even Stinky came by, determined to dig for grubs among the nearby hawthorns.

With our big shop coming up some time next week, the girls and I will have cookouts in mind when we make our list. :-) I can definitely see popping on the racks and cooking supper out there.

Hmmm. As I’ve been working on this post, I’ve noticed some connectivity issues. We had still not received a call from a tech about coming here to check out equipment. The secondary account is still getting no signal at all, while the primary account is also kicking out much more frequently than usual – and no winds or storms to account for it. At least my daughter can still work. That’s the main thing!

Now let’s see if the connection is back, and I can hit “publish”! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Bringing it home

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This afternoon, my daughter and I headed into town, first to pick up the riding mower, then to pick up fixings for a wiener roast.

Since the mower was too far gone to fix everything, it cost less than $45 for the work that was done to put the drive chain back on and tighten things as much as he could.

As I paid for it, I asked for help to load it into the van, then went out to set up the ramps. The woman who processed the payment came out, while a guy from the shop started up the mower and drove it over.

The woman that was helping me expressed surprise that it would fit in the van at all. After the guy drove the mower over and lined it up with the ramps, he came over as I showed them the drop on the inside. The guy asked if I was sure it would fit, and when I said yes, he thanked me for warning about the drop…

Then got back on the mower and started driving up the ramp!

Thankfully, the back wheels got a bit hung up on the bottom edges of the ramp, because he was basically ignoring my hand waving and couldn’t hear me saying not to drive it up until he was right next to me. Once I told him he couldn’t drive it up (how did he expect to fit under the roof???), he complained a bit. Then he and the woman started pushing from the back, while I steered and pushed from the side.

They had a hard time of it. The girls and I have loaded it into the van a few times, and that was before we had the nice new ramps by brother bought for me, and I don’t remember having that much of an issue.

Of course, once it got to the top, the front wheels dropped and the mower could no longer go forward. I told them that this was where I had to go inside, and climbed in through the side door.

In the end, I ended up picking up the front and and hauling it the rest of the way in, because they didn’t seem to have issues with the back end.

The guy did compliment me on the ramps as I was putting them in with the mower, though, so I told him where my brother got them from. :-)

The mower and the ramps fit just fine in there!

As I write this, it’s still sitting in the van. I’m about to go help get set up for the wiener roast, and I’ll snag the girls to help unload it while we’re out.

I am so looking forward to it! We’re just going hot dogs, but it’s been more than a year since we’ve used the fire pit. It’s going to be awesome!

The Re-Farmer

Wired

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Shortly before my husband and I left for town this morning, I happened to glance out the window and saw a couple of the renters cows.

On the wrong side of the fence!

So I quickly went out to close the vehicle and person gates in the chain link fence, then messaged our renter to let him know about it.

Next to the barn is a wide open area in the fence that used to have a barbed wire gate at some point. That has long since disintegrated. There’s no real point of trying to built another gate, since the posts themselves have shifted. We’d never get a straight gate out of it, and it’s really not worth the effort to try and straighten those huge posts.

The only thing stopping the cows from getting through is an electric fence.

Our first summer here, the electricity cut out, and the cows made their way through. The first time it happened, it was just a few of them, with a cow and her calf making their way into the inner yard before we saw them. It happened again in the fall, and this time the herd went on a stampede!

Last spring, I made a simple rope gate across the opening. There’s no way the rope would stop a determined cow, but it would at least be something the cows could see as a possible deterrent.

Well, it didn’t really work. :-D

As I was heading out to prep the van and moving it closer to the gate (normally, I would drive into the yard to pick up or drop off my husband and his walker), I startled the few cows that were in the outer yard, and they went back through the gate by the barn.

When we got back, I went over to check the state of the ropes. The top one was doubled, and both were broken. One, I was able to tie back together, but the other seemed to be missing a few inches, so I just wrapped the ends around the line.

The bottom one had been pulled well into the barn side of the fence. Pulling it up, I found it was pretty tattered and wet. When I tried to pull it towards the other post, it broke again. So I took the broken part and hung it on the post, on the side with the caribiners.

As for the wire for the electric fence, I could see no sign of it in the tall grass. Just the insulated holders were still standing.

When I headed out to go into town again, several hours later, I found that the renter had already come by and fixed the electric fence. We never saw or heard him!

He also changed things up a bit.

He made use of the bottom caribiner! He took off the bit of rope that was still tied to it, and now it’s holding the wire securely. The insulated wire that makes up the end of the fence is now tied around one of the other large posts. It’s looking a lot more secure than it was before.

Not that it would stop a cow, if the electricity stops again. :-D

You can see part of what used to be the bottom rope. It actually looks like a cow had tried to eat it!

The rope itself has been out there for more than a year, and the sun and weather has clearly weakened it. I could probably tear it apart with my hands, at this point. When I get the chance, I will replace it with new rope.

And get another caribiner, so this one can be just for the wire. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Our first haskap berries

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I was out doing my rounds a lot earlier than usual, though I skipped tending to the kittens for later. My husband needed to go into town to get his blood work done – something that has been postponed several time already – and we were planning to get there for when the lab opened.

Of course, since I had something scheduled in the morning, my brain decided that sleep was not going to happen.

Yeah. I was up all night.

It turned out to be a gorgeous morning. We were at 9C! (48F) It was absolutely wonderful!

Not wonderful enough to make me a morning person, but I did appreciate it. :-D

One of the things I made sure to check was our haskap bushes. The flowers in the bed around them have grown high enough to almost completely hide the bushes, even though I made a point of pulling up anything growing near the haskap. In time, the haskap will be taller than the flowers, but that might take a couple more years.

I was sure the female haskap had died last fall, but it has recovered remarkably well. I had noticed a couple of flowers, and then some berries forming, so I wanted to see how they are doing.

There are actually 2 berries here; one is still green, and is hidden by the ripe one. In another spot, I found a couple more berries, one ripe, one green.

It looks like that’s all we’ll get this year. Which I am happy with, since the alternative would have been trying to find a replacement female plant, and I just haven’t seen them at all in the garden centres this year. I had hoped to get 1 or 2 more female plants anyway (the ratio for pollination on these is 1 male for every 3 females), but there were none to be had.

That’s okay. Next time, I want to order them from Vesey’s instead. I think I’ll get better quality plants from them.

Until then, I am happy with our bitty baby berries!

The Re-Farmer

Fire pit mods, done!

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We have been talking about using the fire pit to do an actual cookout tomorrow (weather willing!). That will require a trip into town to pick up things we want to cook over a fire, so I cleaned out and modified the fire pit today.

The first thing to do was empty out the ashes. I have done that once before, in our first year here, but not as thoroughly as I wanted before adding modifications to the pit.

I filled our large wheelbarrow twice! The first load was pretty much all ashes, while the second was a mix of soil and composted ashes.

I dug down far enough that I was starting to fight with root mats. Then I started hitting a… mat?

I pulled out the buried remains of… whatever this is.

It’s some sort of woven material that looks similar to a tarp, but… not.

When I pulled it away, I had another surprise under it.

Do you see those whitish specks among the roots?

Those are ants eggs!

Ants have somehow managed to survive in the fire pit! Considering how hot it would have gotten, just last night, I’m amazed. They weren’t just under the sheet, either. I found more around the edges, elsewhere.

Well, I hope they move on to someplace else because, now that the ashes and dirt are gone, they’ve lost what protection from the heat they had!

Clearly, this fire pit has been used to burn garbage, too. Along with the green mat I pulled out, I found broken glass and old nails, along with more expected things, like chunks of wood and rocks.

Once the pit was cleaned out and raked even, it was time for the concrete blocks.

We have a few of them around, but most of them are where they are, for a purpose. Like the ones around the storage house, that are holding various panels to cover what used to be the top of the basement. I haven’t moved them to try and see what they are covering yet, so I’m leaving them be for now.

I did have one available that wasn’t being used, and there was another in the middle of the tire planter, that had been buried in the middle to support the bird bath, which is now set up in a different location. So I dug that out and hosed out the dirt that had filled the openings.

I then had to decide how to orient things.

I decided to orient it with the nearby gate. That gap where the wind usually comes from, and I wanted some air flow over the fire. The openings in the blocks will allow for some air flow from the sides, too. I used one of the oven racks to determine how far apart to put the blocks.

I wanted to have the option of using both racks, so I also brought over the 1 half-block we have.

It’s shorter than the full blocks, so I added a couple of bricks under it, to make it level with the others.

Then I hosed everything down.

We now have several options.

If we want to do a simple wiener roast, we can leave the racks off, and the blocks can be used to support our roasting sticks.

Once we’ve built up the coals, we can place both racks on, like in the picture, for a large cooking area. If we need to, we can still easily feed the fire from one end.

Or we can use one rack across the middle, supported by the two large blocks.

Or, we can have one rack towards the end, supported by all three blocks. We’d be able to keep a fire going at the open end, and push hot coals under the cooking area as needed.

We can also fill the half block with coals for anything that needs high heat, like setting a pot or kettle of water to boil, and have the one rack covering it as it is in the photo, for air flow. To do this, though, we’ll need to get a long handled, metal scoop, like are used to clean fireplaces. Mind you, it’s entirely possible we already have one, hiding in one of the sheds. LOL

Now that the set up is complete, we can keep it in mind when we go into town tomorrow. We still might go for an ordinary wiener roast, but who knows what we might find to inspire us, instead. :-)

I’m really looking forward to it! I hope the weather co-operates. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Clean Up: fire pit ring

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Yesterday, things were a bit cooler and finally nice enough to start a fire in the fire pit!

I’ve been putting small branches and the invasive vines I’ve pulled up into there since last summer, so it felt good to finally burn that stuff away!

While I was at it, I decided to clean up the bricks around the fire pit that the skunks revealed while digging for grubs.

Knowing that these were the glazed bricks we’ve got all over the place under there, I decided to use the sidewalk ice scraping tool. Just a flat blade that would slide across the surface, and cut away the root mats at the same time.

It worked remarkably well!

In the above photo, I’d finished uncovering the bricks all the way around.

There was some seriously thick root mats covering some of them!

The next step was to hose them down with water, including using the jet to pressure wash some of the dirt out from between the bricks, and between the bricks and the fire pit ring.

Where the water pooled showed me the most uneven areas of the brick ring.

What I will eventually be doing is taking them out completely, leveling the base off as best I can, then putting them back.

Ideally, I’d be adding a layer of gravel under there, first.

I am seriously considering taking the wagon and a shovel out to the old gravel pit to see what I can salvage out of there!

Until then, we make do.

My next step was to use break up the ridge of soil and root mats around the ring some more.

Every now and then, I’d find a small rock, but then I hit was seemed to be a much larger rock.

A strangely flat and smooth rock.

I found another brick!

For a moment, I thought maybe there was a second ring of bricks, but the angle of it was too random for that.

Somehow, a single brick got left to one side, and got buried with the others.

The ones around the fire pit getting buried makes sense, but how does a lone brick on the side get left there long enough to be buried, too? Did no one try to mow there, before it got covered? Did people using the fire pit (and I know it did get used) simply walk around it until it disappeared, along with the other bricks?

So very strange!

I set it aside with another brick like it, that I’d found under some nearby maple trees. :-D

(These glazed bricks have been around for as long as I can remember. I have no idea where they came from, but they would be at least 50 years old, and probably quite a few years older. While I intend to take them out of the various areas they are in now, to replace them with what should be there instead (like infill around the house!), these are going to be kept and repurposed. They’re too slippery to use as a “floor” for anything (which is probably what they were salvaged from originally), but I think they would be great on walls or something, at some point.)

Once I broke up the ridge, I used the metal blade on the scraper to push the soil away, to try and level things a bit more.

The grills in the fire pit, btw, are the racks from our old oven. After burning away what was already in the pit, I started working on the pile of branches by the collapsing log cabin. When a solid bed of coals was formed, I put the oven racks in it, then built the fire up again on top, to burn away any grease or whatever that got on them while being used. We basically didn’t bother to clean the oven when we knew we needed to replace it fairly soon. It did have a self-cleaning function, but we didn’t feel it was safe to use. With elements on the stove sparking, we didn’t want to find out if anything electrical would give out in the oven, too!

So I used the fire pit to get the cruddy bits off.

Shortly after this, my daughter joined me, and we built the fire up once again, to get rid of more of the branch pile.

I also used a metal rake to spread the soil out more, then took the hose to it, to break up the clumps. The water no longer pools at the bricks. :-)

After a while, my daughter took out the oven racks and set them aside to be hosed off, later.

The next thing I want to do is empty the fire pit of ashes, which will be spread over a garden area or two.

Once it is cleaned out, I want to add some cinder blocks or bricks into the pit. They will be there to hold one or both oven racks. This way, if we wanted to, we could use pots and pans for cooking over the coals. I do have a campfire rack, but it’s meant to put food on directly to cook, not hold the weight of cooking utensils. The oven racks and bricks will open up more possibilities for what we can do on our fire pit. :-)

While I was working on uncovering the fire pit ring, I had help.

Not the most useful kind of help!

More like the “pay attention to me or I’ll trip you” kind of help! :-D

Eventually, he got tired of trying to make me pick him up and went for a nap. :-)

Such a cutie!

He would make such a loving indoor cat, but we’ve had no luck in adopting him or Creamsicle out. :-(

Lately, Potato Beetle and Creamsicle have perfected the art of rubbing against our legs WHILE we are walking, somehow managing to maintain contact and pressure even as we pull our legs away.

Such determined creatures!

Also, Potato seems to like my new shoes. Maybe that’s it. He’s happy I no longer have these.

My left shoe had actually blown out like the one on the right, but I’d used Gorilla Super Glue on it. Amazingly, it is still holding! The other shoe was only coming loose at the toe tip, so I glued that – only to have the sides blow out, soon after! The tip managed to hold on for days longer.

I’m not a shoe person. It’s so hard for me to find shoes that accommodate my feet, I don’t bother. I have one pair of regular shoes. Maybe a pair of sandals, too, if I can find them. Not this time of year, apparently. :-/

Women’s shoes don’t fit me, at all. I can wear extra wide men’s shoes, but to get the right width, I go with a size that’s a fair bit longer than my feet. Which is why I keep catching the toes of my shoes on things. :-D It means my shoes wear out on the sides faster, as my feet bend in a different area than the shoes are designed for. It doesn’t matter if they are cheapies, or if I spring for a higher end shoe. By the end of a year, all my shoes end up looking like this!

Which, if nothing else, is entertaining!

The Re-Farmer