Beep Beep has had all her babies, and there are four of them. Two orange tabbies, a tuxedo and a … tabby? Muted calico? Not sure yet!
The basement maternity ward is now full! :-D
The Re-Farmer
Four
Morning surprise, and checking things out
My morning routine now includes checking on the mamas in the basement. I wanted to see how Butterscotch and her babies were doing inside the old radio she decided to give birth in.
Unfortunately, we never thought we’d need to clean the inside of it.
I’m glad one of the cat beds I crocheted fit in there, because the rest of it is really dirty and gross.
Also, this old radio also has a record player in it. I didn’t realize that until I noticed a piece of it sticking out like a drawer. Turns out there is a pullout turntable. Gutted, of course, but the drawer is still there.
While I was checking out Butterscotch, Beep Beep was in the cardboard box we’d made a cat cave out of that fits under a chair. She was curled up in the back, but I could still reach to pet her. Both of them were purring furiously, too. Then, since I was taking pictures of Butterscotch, I decided to take a picture of Beep Beep, too.
It wasn’t until I saw something odd in the picture preview that I realized, she was not alone!
Two little wormy babies!
I’m pretty sure she wasn’t done, either. I expect to find a couple more, the next time I head down to check on them. :-)
While doing my rounds outside, I have been making a point of checking various areas we haven’t been able to get to throughout the winter and assessing things.
The Potato Beetle assisted me in checking out the deer damage on one of the birch trees.
This huge lake of a puddle still had a sheet of ice on the surface. We’re supposed to reach 9C this afternoon; the warmest we’re expected to get for the next week or so. I expect this is going to either get bigger, or finally start to be absorbed into the ground. When it comes time for us to plant the fruit and nut trees we are planning on, we will have to take into account areas like this that flood every spring. This area may puddle in the spring, but in the summer, all of this area gets very dry. The north-east corner is the area that is the worst. Even grass and weeds have a hard time growing in that corner.
I also took the opportunity to extend my rounds into the outer yard. If we were to do a burn, this would be the perfect time for it, as the ground is still quite wet. It would be really good to get rid of the years of dried grass built up, as it becomes a major fire hazard by summer.
With future plans becoming more solidified, I have been looking at the stuff lying about with a new eye for salvage or other usefulness. There are, for example, two really good saw horses outside the storage shed. The ones I have currently in the garage are in much worse shape, so I want to bring these ones over to the house.
Once they are no longer frozen to the ground.
There are some other things, like metal… balcony rails? … that could be set up as temporary fencing around some garden areas. There are a lot of things that have been shoved under the storage shed itself that I’ll want to take a closer look at.
Inside the shed itself, there are things that we could definitely find uses for. If we can get at it. As we cleared out my parents’ stuff from the house, we’ve shoved so many things into here, it’s going to be hard to get at things. We will have to get into there and re-arrange things, though. Some of the stacks of boxes are collapsing, as bottom boxes have given out. This shed was my late brother’s workshop, and I’m sure there are all kinds of useful things hidden away in there. I’d love to be able to reclaim it as a workshop some day, but what do we do with all my parents’ stuff? My mother is adamant that we keep it all, though she has said I could sell some of it off, if I want. She keeps suggesting holding a garage sale, which I have no interest in doing. I’ve done these in the city with little success. What good is having a garage sale this far off the beaten path? I might try using eBay or something, but am in no position to sort through things and take pictures right now.
It would be a good way to try and raise money for a new roof, though. We’ve got to come up with some way to raise the money, because we sure as heck won’t be able to save up for it with our current fixed income. Not with so many other things making demands on every spare penny. I most definitely am not complaining; that fact that we have spare any pennies at all is something I am grateful for. The reality of it is, if we’re going to keep this place up just in the basics of maintenance and repair, we’re going to have to come up with other solutions.
Any suggestions?
The Re-Farmer
Share this:
I see four
Before heading into town, I paused to say hello to the mamas. Butterscotch was content to stay in her cave and just stick her head out every now and then to accept scritches, purring away. The opening is not that big, and it’s dark in that old radio, so I tried the technological method.
Sticking my phone in the opening and taking a picture.
Butterscotch was not too keen on that whole “flash” thing! :-D
I did, however, manage to get a picture of the kitties!
Unless there are others hidden somewhere, it looks like she’s had 4 kittens again; three orange tabbies and one grey and white tabby.
They. Are. So. Cute!!!
Judging from how active Beep Beep is, she might not be due for another week or two. :-D But who knows? We might have more kittens sooner than that.
I’m glad we have the mamas inside. Today has been an odd day, weather wise. When I did my rounds, it was rather pleasant. After dropping my daughter off at work, it was a combination of rain and snow. By the time I got to the dump, it was snowing, then when I got home, it was raining one moment, snowing the next. Well. More snow than rain.
This turned out to be not very pleasant for my daughter at work. They’ve had to close down the staff lunch room, because it’s too small to maintain physical distancing. For most of the staff, that didn’t matter. They live close enough that they could just go home for lunch. My daughter picked up lunch at a nearby grocery store, then ate outside. Which meant she was sitting on a concrete sidewalk in the cold for almost an hour, because there is no indoor public place anyone can sit and eat anymore. :-( Thankfully, she’s one of those people with a built in furnace and isn’t as bothered by the cold.
Also, it’s a good thing we still have my husband’s disability income to live on during the current lock down, because she’s down to just one shift a week. Her employer is actually adding a bonus to people’s wages to make up for some of the loss of hours, but of course, it isn’t much. Who knows how long any of this can be sustained.
I headed into town very early, because as far as I knew, the hardware store closed at 4. As I was approaching the doors, I saw a staff member putting away the outside displays already, so I made sure to look for the hours. I found the sign saying they closed at 3. It was 2:55! I commented to the guy, apologetically, about how they were about to close and was about to leave. He stopped me and asked me to go ahead in, assuring me I they wouldn’t lock the doors on me! :-D Thankfully, I knew exactly where I needed to go to find the sandpaper I was looking for. Normally, I would have looked around for anything else I might need, but not today.
As I was paying for it, more people were coming into the store, and no one was telling them the store was about to close. Normally, this would be one of those times you’d read about in Not Always Right, and the rude customers forcing staff to stay long before their shifts have ended because they came in after closing. I did not get that impression today. I got the sense they would love to have stayed open longer, and wanted all the customers they can get right now! Even a large, national franchise like this one can only take so much loss. :-(
The grocery store nearby, however, had no such time restrictions. Happily, I was able to find a large box of cat litter (the last one, hidden way in the back of the shelf) and a large bag of cat food. If we’re careful (and keep the kibble bin in the house, instead of the sun room for the skunks to get into), we should be okay for the rest of the month.
So we are well stocked and, aside from a trip to the vet with another cat on Monday, and my daughter’s 1 shift a week, we can be homebodies for the rest of the month. If the weather co-operates, I hope that means I can start cleaning up all the fallen branches in the yard, now that the snow is almost all gone, and get some black plastic over some of the areas we are planning to garden in this year, to help the soil warm up faster. :-)
There is certainly no shortage of things that need to be done. :-)
The Re-Farmer
Share this:
We have babies!
I can’t see them, but at least one of them was very loud when I visited the mamas this morning.
You might have to turn the sound up to hear them.
Butterscotch seems quite comfortable in her cave. :-)
The Re-Farmer
Share this:
Found it!
No, we didn’t find the source of the knocking in the van.
We picked up the van, dropping off my mom’s car at the same time, then did a quick trip to the grocery store before we had to pick Two-Face up from the vet. My daughter also made an appointment to get our original Mama, who showed up as a stray on our balcony, years ago, and brought us her baby. She has been acting very ornery lately, growling and hissing at the other cats, and sometimes nothing at all. So she will be brought in for a check up on Monday.
Then we headed home, and…
The van is running smooth as butter.
We had talked to the mechanic for a while, and we still can’t figure out what caused the knocking and shuddering. If it had been the CV joint, it would have made a different noise. Still, I’m glad that in the process of trying to track down the noise, we were able to find and fix another problem before it became a bigger problem in the future.
Two-Face, meanwhile, seems to be doing okay. She’s found a place to sleep things off, and I haven’t even seen the surgical site yet.
No, what I found today was the source of an odd pain I would get in my foot, when I wore my runners. One of those little stabbing pains that I couldn’t quite tell if something was stuck in my shoe, or stuck in my sock. Then, while I was moving things we’d taken from the basement to the barn, I happened to step on an edge of concrete, and something stabbed me in the foot again. Hard.
So I took my shoe off right there in the barn and this time, I could feel something inside my shoe. It took some hunting on the sole, but I finally found what stepping on the concrete had pushed into my foot.
Thankfully, among the things we brought to the barn from the basement was a tray full of odds and ends, including the remains of a small standard tip screwdriver. I was able to use it to pry the nail loose from my shoe. It had to be pushed in really deep before I could finally find it from the inside! I have no idea when I stepped on this but, thankfully, it went in at an angle, or it would have gone right into my foot.
Meanwhile, the girls and I were able to clear most of the stuff away from the front of the house, either to the barn, the burn pile or the junk pile that we’ll need to get hauled away with a trailer. What’s left needs to go to the dump. The van has already been filled, ready for tomorrow. We’ll have to make sure to take multiple trips this week, to catch up on all the trash and recycling we normally would have taken to the dump earlier in the week.
It feels so much better not to have all that stuff in front of the house!!!
My other project of the day meant I got to spend some time with the (still pregnant) mamas in the basement. I dismantled the hanging frame I made for the cheese and started cleaning up and sanding the wood.
Some of the wood needed to be shaved and smoothed with a knife, first. One of the side pieces had a bit of a crack in it, so I glued and clamped it. I’ll need to pick up some coarser sandpaper before I can continue working on that one. I was able to get some progress with the rest of the pieces, though.
Here’s a before and after, so far. I was able to whip the rig together in about half an hour, and it did the job. I just want to get it finished properly, now that there is no rush. My daughter has a shift tomorrow, so I should be able to swing by the hardware store and pick up more sandpaper and be able to continue.
Well. Not right away. With the van already packed for the dump, I’ll have to do that first. I’ll just have to remember to go back into town to pick up my daughter early enough to catch the hardware store before it closes.
I am so happy to have our van back.
The Re-Farmer
Share this:
Morning
One of the things I’m appreciating about doing my morning rounds earlier, is our longer days. Along with the increased light is the increased critter activity.
Along with my feline followers, I was hearing all kinds of cranes and Canada geese calling. Sometimes, I can see the geese out in the pasture behind the barn, or watch the geese and cranes flying overhead. Every now and then, I hear the thrumming of prairie chicken wings as they drum up their presence, and the staccato knocking of a wood pecker getting at some grub. :-D It’s fantastic!
The temperatures fluctuating above and below freezing so much (more below than not, lately) had an unexpected result this morning.
One of the icicles from the cracked bird bath created a hat of ice on the gnome! :-D
This morning, my daughter and I took my mother’s car to bring Two Face for her appointment with the vet. Since they are just blocks away, I dropped my daughter off at the vet and continued on to the garage to get a status on our van. Parts have been ordered and are on their way from the city. It will be ready by the time we return to pick up Two Face.
I am so looking forward to having our van back!!!
I just don’t like driving my mother’s car. I don’t like how it feels. I don’t like the noises it makes (and I don’t mean the noise from the differential that I will be getting checked; just it’s normal car noises). I don’t like the small size. There is so little leg room for the back seats, it may as well be a 2 seater.
It actually is a good little car. It does have a decent amount of space under the hatch, and the spare tire is easily accessible. Also, the front seats have butt warmers. :-D I’ve just been absolutely spoiled by minivans. Living here, having two vehicles is more necessity than luxury, but if I had any choice in the matter, our second vehicle would be one of those big, ostentatious, jacked up trucks.
With a plow attachment and a trailer hitch.
Funny how priorities change when you’re living in the sticks. :-D
The Re-Farmer
Share this:
Lemon cheese, end result
Here is how the lemon cheese turned out! :-D
This photo was taken right after the bag was taken down from the hanging rig.
Of course, I gave it a taste.
It has very mild in flavour, as to be expected with a cheese like this. Lightly salty – I probably could have added maybe an extra half teaspoon, instead of the quarter teaspoon or so I added, to adjust for using 4L instead of 1 gallon. It has a light, almost creamy texture to it.
Because it’s so loose, I squeezed it together in the cheesecloth a bit, then put it back into the colander over the bowl, put a plate over it and weighed it down with my stone mortar. Just for a couple of minutes, to make it easier to transfer into a container.
Since it’s such a fresh cheese, it will need to be finished quickly.
I don’t think we’ll have a problem with that! :-D
Then, because I had a big bowl of still-warm whey handy, I made up a double batch of bread, using whey for the liquid. This works out really well. Yeast seems to really like whey. The dough has a softer feel to it while kneading, and the finished bread is lighter, with a delicate crumb and a lovely flavour.
We’ll be storing the rest of the whey in the fridge to use in other baking. It would be awesome in a sourdough bread!
I’m quite pleased with the end result of this cheese. Definitely something I will be making again, and maybe playing around with adding things, like fresh herbs, to it at the salting stage.
The Re-Farmer
Share this:
Van update
I just got a call from the garage about our van. Apparently, he’s been trying to call me since yesterday, on both the land line and my cell phone, and couldn’t get through. I have no idea why; my mother phoned earlier, and got through no problem. I had just got off the phone with her when my cell phone started ringing. There wasn’t enough of a connection and the call got dropped, but I could see that it was the garage and called back on the land line. Weird, but not too unexpected out here, really.
Anyhow.
He gave me estimate for 2 options. One was to fix the boot, the other was to replace the axle. He said that a small amount of dirt has gotten into the grease. I started talking about replacing the axle right away, which was going to be his recommendation. It would cost less to fix the boot, but we’d end up needing to do the axle later anyhow, so we’ll just get that done now, before it becomes an issue.
It still shouldn’t be the cause of the knocking and shuddering, though. It just wasn’t that bad in there. Still, I’m glad it’s getting done now, before it’s a major problem.
He might be able to get the job done by the end of today, but we have an appointment with Two Face and the vet tomorrow, so we’re going to combine trips. When it comes time to pick up Two Face at the end of the day, we’ll drop my mom’s car off at the garage and pick up the van. I’ll be leaving my mom’s car there so he can check it out whenever he gets a chance, and see why there is still a noise coming from the differential. There is no hurry on this. In fact, I’d prefer it wait until the end of the month, when pay comes in, though that decision will be made after he’s had a chance to figure out what’s going on.
Ah, vehicles. They are such a necessity, but such an expense, too! :-(
The Re-Farmer
Share this:
Making lemon cheese and a hanging rig
I’ve been planning to do this for a while, and finally had the chance today: making lemon cheese. I’m using a recipe I found here. Do check this site out. Especially if you’re interested in different ways of preserving food, though there is lots more there, too.
After sanitizing my equipment, I started heating the gallon of milk.
Well… not quite.
This is Canada, and our “gallon” of milk is actually 4L, as you can see on the very handy measurement inside the stock pot I am using. A litre is just a bit more than a quart. At 4L, the difference is enough to warrant adjusting the quantities of the other ingredients.
Which are lemon juice and salt (I used Kosher salt).
For a gallon, the recipe called for 8 Tbsp of lemon juice and 1 Tsp of salt and I adjusted those quantities up slightly when I measured them out.
After heating the milk to between 185F – 190F (I got to break in my new candy thermometer. :-D ), the milk is taken off the heat and the lemon juice is added. (I used 3% homogenized milk.)
It curdles immediately.
It then gets covered and left to sit for 15 minutes.
Which is when I dashed downstairs to do a quick build. The cheese would need to be hung to drain later, and we don’t have a good set up for that. We’ve made do with whatever we could come up with when making jelly or yogurt cheese, but we plan to be doing more of this sort of thing in the future, so having a rig to hang things to drain would be very useful.
Since we have also finished the basement and have some pieces of wood handy, I can actually do something about it!
When my timer went off, I’d reached this point.
There was just enough of the wood we used to build a frame to block the entry into the old basement, to cut 2 ft long side pieces. One of them is missing a chunk at one end, but it’ll do. I then cut a matching 2 ft long cross piece for the top, and a pair of base pieces.
Then my timer went off and I headed upstairs. Thankfully, my daughter was handy, and she took over with putting the curds into a cheesecloth lined colander over a bowl, to drain for 10 minutes. That was just enough time for me to finish my rig.
I used what screws I had that were long enough, which were really way too long for the job, but whatever. I also added a cup hook to the centre of the cross piece to hang things from.
It is a pretty ugly rig right now. Normally, I would have sanded the pieces and used more appropriate screws. It’s kinda wobbly, but steady enough for the job.
By the time I took it upstairs to give it a good cleaning, it was time to add salt to the cheese curds.
Here they are, after salting.
This is basically cottage cheese, really. My daughter had given it a quick taste after salting it and says it tastes quite different from cottage cheese, but we’re not washing the curds or anything like that, either.
The recipe then says to hang it for 30 minutes for a spreadable cheese, or up to 2 hours for a dry and crumbly cheese.
We were using a fresh cheese cloth, without cutting it down to size, so I ended up tying the cheesecloth around the cross bar instead of using the hook.
We checked it after half an hour and decided to let it hand for the 2 hours. We’ll see how it looks, then!
When we’re done with all this, I will probably take the rig apart and finish it properly. Give the pieces a good sanding, then screw it back together, with some wood glue to make it more stable.
I am so loving having that space in the basement to be able to do projects like this!!!
The Re-Farmer
Share this:
Destructive cats, and a winter tree casualty
So… that didn’t take long.
In re-arranging the living room, the girls and I also moved around the plants. The living room is the only space we have for our bigger plants – and some have gotten very big since we’ve moved out here! – so it’s a bit of a challenge.
One of the things we have a lot of is jade plants. The jade plant that we thought might not survive the move is now a massive, healthy beast of the tree. We also have lots and lots of aloe vera. I knew that aloe propagates itself easily, but I didn’t realize how easily jade plants do as well. It turns out any leaf that breaks off can grow into a new plant.
Leaves break off easily. Especially with our cats. They keep trying to get into the pots, lying in the dirt, and generally wrecking havoc. I recently ended up using the extra legs of the plastic utility shelf we got as supports for the big one, because it was almost completely flattened. (As a bonus, because these are tubes, I can now water the plant through the tops.) This is not a good thing, since jade plants are poisonous to cats.
One of the treats I’ve started to get at Costco are these large plastic containers of Cheese Balls. I’ve been keeping the containers because I thought they’d make great cloche coverings in the garden at some point. When the cats were determined to use one of the plant pots as a bed, mashing the jade plant flat, I put one of these over the plant to protect it. It worked well, but when we arranged things, I figured the plant was big enough to not need it any more and took it off.
Well… they did leave that one alone.
Another smaller one, not so much. The pot was knocked over, the poor little jade plant was on the carpet, and there was soil all over.
I’m glad we thought to put that plastic over the shelves to protect their tops!
I put the soil back and replanted the jade plant. It should actually survive this, but we’ll see. Meanwhile, this and another pot are small enough that I cut the tops off of two of those plastic containers, so that they are not straight sided, and they can completely cover the pots and their plants, with room to grow.
This morning, I ended up using the cut off tops to put over a couple more plants that showed signs of cats bashing their way through them.
Meanwhile, while doing my rounds this morning, I remember to check on the pair of trees my mother planted right against the chain link fence. One of them had looked like it was dead, but I wasn’t up to slogging through the snow to check it. The snow is mostly gone now, so…
Yeah, that is one very dead tree. Both of these were fine in the fall.
I had wanted to transplant them away from the fence, but my mother demanded they stay right where they are. When I pointed out that they would eventually grow big enough to damage the fence, and were too close together, she said they were exactly where she wanted them to be, and she didn’t care if they damaged the fence.
Now that one of them has died, knowing my mother, she’s probably going to think I killed it because I didn’t want them there.
Ah, well. I’ll deal with that when the time comes.
One of the things that has really hit home for me as we’ve been cleaning up around the yards, is how incredibly important it is to think years ahead when planting trees. We intend to plant many, many trees, with a focus on food trees, and this gives us an opportunity to learn from what my parents did 10, 20, even 40 years ago.
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 