Getting stuff done, a small miracle, and an attempted kitnapping

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It’s mid afternoon as I start to write this, and time to take a break from the heat.

Depending on which weather app I look at, our expected high today is supposed to be 22C/72F or 24C/75F. As I write this, one app tells me we are at 23C/73F, while another tells me we are at 21F/70F, with the humidex putting us at 25C/77F.

All our outdoor thermometers are in full sun, so they’d be reading high, but given how I felt while outside, I’d say at least the humidex making it feel like 25C/77F is accurate!

My morning rounds finished off with watering all the garden beds, trees and bushes. For the vegetable beds, I set up the fertilizer sprayer, because of this.

These are the Arikara squash, but all the winter squash and melons in the main garden area are also getting yellow and droopy like this. So are all the tomatoes. They’re still blooming and stuff, but looking very sickly. These seems like more than transplant shock.

The peppers, eggplant and herbs show no sign of this.

I looked up possible reasons for why this could be happening, and there are many possibilities. Most could not apply for various reasons. One very possible cause is lack of nitrogen; for all our amending, our soil is still nutrient deficient, being low on nitrogen in particular, though it is starting to improve.

The fertilizer I got was and 18-18-21; a tomato, fruit and vegetable ratio. With the hose attachment applicator, I went through most of the container by the time all the beds were done. It’s recommended to apply every 7-14 days. I’ll need to get another container before then, because there isn’t enough to do a complete watering with what’s left in the cannister right now!

When I got to watering the walnuts and Korean pine, I had a couple of surprises.

The first photo is the year old sapling, and it’s doing very well. The second photo, though, is what I found after removing the mulch that somehow ended up on top of the plastic collar, completely covering where the seed was planted.

Something was digging in there!

My first thought was that a squirrel or something stole the walnut seed. Still, I started digging, just to confirm it was gone.

I found it.

Whatever was digging had stopped a couple of inches above the walnut seed! So I just replaced the dug out soil and gave it a thorough watering.

I was encouraged to find that the soil was still moist at the level of the seed. Just barely, but at least it wasn’t dried out!

Then I found what looks like our first sprouted sapling. At least I hope that’s what it is. Until the leave unfurl, it’s hard to tell. While I tried to remove any roots I found while digging the hole for it, it’s still possible something else is sending up shoots.

Speaking of sending up shoots, I saw our first zucchini sprouts today!

Just in 2 out of 3 spots planted, so far. No sign of the white scallop squash, but I remember those took a lot longer to germinate compared to other summer squash we planted last year. We are seeing a remarkable number of frogs this year – more than we’ve ever seen since moving out here – which gives me hope that the squash sprouts will survive. I haven’t seen a single slug this year, yet, and I’d say we have all those frogs to thank for that!

My daughter, meanwhile, headed out this morning to start mowing the lawn with the riding mower, after I came inside for lunch.

Some time later, I heard a knocking at my window.

My daughter needed help. She had tried to mow closer to the crab apple trees. She got caught on a branch that flung off her hat…

… and her glasses!

Crabapple branches are horrible for that sort of thing. It’s like they reach out and grab at you, like something out of a cartoon scare scene!

She had been looking for them but, without her glasses, she couldn’t see very well. So I went out to help her look, but had no better success. Her biggest fear was that she’d run over them with the mower, so of course that was the first place she looked, but when it came to the grass, who knows how far a springy branch could and flung them!

After a while I suggested she go inside to get her prescription sunglasses while I kept searching. Then she would at least be able to see while looking!

While she was gone, I remembered her worry about having run over them, so I decided to look at the mower, too. She had stopped it well away from where the tree branch had caught her.

When I found them, I just had to take a picture, or no one would believe me.

There they were, sitting like someone had very carefully folded them closed and put them in the safest spot possible. They couldn’t even be accidentally stepped on in that spot. While needing a lens cleaning, they were completely undamaged.

An absolute miracle! I brought them to the house just as she reached the door to go back out with her prescription sunglasses. She was so incredibly relieved!

Then she was happily back to mowing.

When I headed back to work in the garden, I didn’t get much done. It was getting way too hot by then, and I was in the full sun. I went through the soil in the kiddie pool we tried using to grow zucca melon before, only to have them eaten by slugs. The soil was full of crab grass but, being contained as they were, it was easy to clear them away. I then used about half of it to top up the row of asparagus, against the log border. I wasn’t able to dig down to the proper depth when they were planted, as it gets too rocky, so I was glad to have the soil available to top them up.

If there is anything alive to help out. I strongly suspect that it took too long for use to plant the asparagus and strawberries. I don’t expect to see the asparagus quickly, but the strawberries should have appeared by now. I’ll keep watering the new bed, just in case, but it might be a total loss.

One thing I’ll have to do later today, and hopefully snag a daughter to assist, is set netting around the trellis bed. This is where the red noodle beans and Hopi Black Dye sunflowers were planted, along with the free pumpkin seeds and the baby onion sprouts I found while cleaning up the bed Aside from overwintered onions and the collars where the pumpkins are planted, this bed is pretty open.

The cats have been digging in it.

So far, they don’t seem to have actually dug up any seeds, but they did dig up at least one or two tiny onions. I’ve set the rest of my tall metal plant stakes, plus some bamboo stakes, around the bed to hold the netting. I’ll wrap the entire bed in netting, like I did with the corn and beans bed. That should be enough to keep them out.

In the process I found my first red noodle bean sprout! There was just a bit of stem visible, elbowing its way through the soil surface, so I didn’t bother taking a picture, but I’m very happy to see it! There should be others, soon!

I’ve set things up so that, after the netting is in place, it won’t block access to where the remaining three vertical support posts for the permanent trellis need to be installed. Keeping the cats out of the bed is the priority right now!

That will wait until things start to cool down a bit, though. I just don’t have any tolerance for heat anymore!

On a completely different note, I have some cuteness to share with you.

We still don’t have a name for this mama. For a mostly feral cat, she is thankfully quite comfortable hanging around the house. Very unlike the other more feral mamas! She takes very good care of her kittens – and any others that happen to be around!

There is a gorgeous long haired tabby that I decided to start calling Rabi, because I thought it might be Kohl’s brother, but I think I’m wrong. While we can’t see to know for sure, I think he might be a she.

This is what I caught her doing, today.

That’s her, trying to kitnap Havarti!

I saw her trying to carry off Hastings, yesterday.

She’s acting like a mother cat trying to carry her own kittens away, but these aren’t her kittens, and they don’t want to be carried off by her!

It has me wondering if perhaps she lost her own litter, and some maternal instinct has her wanting to carry off other kittens to mother. I’ve noticed she (I’m going to just assume “she” at this point) has been following me around the yard, but never quite allowing me to get close or reach out to her. I can’t say she ever looked pregnant – another reason we thought she might have been male. I don’t quite know what to make of it!

We’ll have to keep an eye on her. Hopefully, we can get her friendly enough to get her into a cat carrier end get her spayed!

The Re-Farmer

Getting stuff done, and birthday take out

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The cats had me up ridiculously early this morning. I ended up just doing the outside cat feeding and going back to bed, instead of doing my full morning rounds. Thankfully, I did actually get some real sleep the second time around, even if it meant having Butterscotch basically lying on my head. She seems to associate my being in bed as “it’s safe now”, and she’ll come out of hiding from under the armchair and start demanding attention before curling up and sleeping right against my head and neck.

My daughter’s appointment at the hospital wasn’t until 4:40, and we were planning to be on the road by 3:30, so I did have some time in the afternoon to get the weed trimmer out and start clearing around the house. We were way behind on that in some areas, particularly around the portable greenhouse. I had just a bit left to do around the north side when the weed trimmer simply stopped. Usually, when that happens, it means the plug in the handle had come loose, but that was fine. I checked all down the extension cords (I need three 300′ cords to be able to reach everything), but everything was fine. So I messaged my daughters asking if one of them could check the breakers, but none were tripped.

We might be down a weed trimmer.

I’m hoping it was just over worked and will start again when I test it tomorrow. By the time we confirmed it was not the breakers, I had to put everything away, so I could clean up and change before we had to leave.

I did remember to prepare the cat soup variation for the kittens, and had it all ready for my older daughter to take care of while we were gone. The kibble mixed in with the canned cat food and warm water would have had plenty of time to get nice and soft by then.

One of the things I started before the weed trimming was replace the hose end with the pin prick hole in it with one of the new couplings I picked up. It was definitely the quickest and easiest fix I’ve ever had! No screw clamps on these things. It took me a while to understand how the rest worked, though. It just didn’t make sense to me, but the shut off valve is basically just pulling the female coupling part right off. That can be screwed into the end of another hose, or into a nozzle, then popped back in place for the water to start flowing. Which works well enough, except that I was attaching this to a soaker hose. Then, after about an hour, to a different soaker hose in another bed. The hoses are different brands and their mail couplings are designed slightly differently. One is a lot deeper than the other, and both were difficult to screw onto the new coupling’s end properly. It’s really designed to work with the same brand’s matching male couplings, not regular hose ends. I haven’t tried it with a sprayer nozzle, yet. One of the sprinkler hose connections leaked a fair bit, but I just move it so it would lean into the mulch near one of the plant collars in the bed that was being waters.

It might actually be worth replacing the other hose ends with this new type I got. A lot of the ones with screw clamps on them either still leak, or they are hard to attach and detach, because the screw clamps are in the way.

Anyhow. Just the two beds got watered, so I’m going to have to make sure to do a full watering of everything else, tomorrow morning. We’re expected to reach a high of 23C/73F tomorrow, then a high of 26C/79F the day after, so everything is going to need it!

My daughter had a questionnaire they’d sent to her all filled out to bring along for her appointment. It was close enough to her appointment time that I dropped her off at the doors before finding a parking spot. When I caught up with her, there was absolutely no one else in the waiting room, so she got called in right on time.

The first person (a nurse?) took her sheet with the questions, but the only reason they went through them at all was because my daughter hadn’t quite understood some of their questions, and hadn’t answered them. After a little while, she was taken to see the surgeon that will be operating on her wrist.

Most of what they asked was, in a nutshell, are you really sure you want to do this? Is it really so bad you’re willing to go under anesthetic and have someone digging around in your wrist? The surgeon was, at first, careful with how he phrased things but, after hearing how my daughter answered, realized he could go right into gruesome detail without any issue. So my daughter got a very intense description of what the surgery will entail, and was she really sure it was bad enough to go through this?

It makes me wonder just what sort of things they had to deal with in the past, to make them have to asked some of these questions!

My daughter, meanwhile, was more than happy to accept the surgery. Her ganglion happens to be on the small side right now, but when it gets bad, it gets really bad. The pain gets extreme and renders her arm pretty much useless.

She left with a printout with pre-op instructions. We have a date for the surgery, but she’ll get a call in about a week for the exact time she needs to come in. It’s just day surgery, so I’ll be driving her in, then hanging around to take her home.

We’re pretty impressed that she’s getting her surgery so relatively quickly. The referral was sent in April. To get such a quick surgery date for what is classified as elective surgery so quickly is very rare. She’s still waiting on other referrals her doctor had sent out for her.

Once she was done, I asked if there was anything we needed to do, while we were in town. After messaging with her sister for a bit, it was decided that we would go to a Pizza Hut – her choice for her special birthday take out (it’s not her birthday yet, but we split things like this up throughout the birth month, instead) – courtesy of her sister. We ended up getting four large stuffed crust pizzas, plus two 22 count boneless wings with different sauces.

That cost my daughter over $200 – and that was before the tip was added!

It’ll feed us for several days, though!

The ride home sure smelled good, though – and we were both quite hungry by then!

I may not have done my full morning rounds, but I did do my evening rounds. I’m concerned about a lot of my transplants. All of the transplants in the main garden area, and even in the east garden beds, are looking strangely yellow and floppy. The eggplant, peppers and herbs transplanted into the old kitchen garden seem fine, but all the other transplants are looking like they are dying. This doesn’t look like transplant shock, either. I don’t know what to make of it, but at this point, I’m not sure any of the melons or winter squash will survive! I’ve tried looking up the possible causes, and the only thing that seems likely is lack of nitrogen.

I did get some water soluble fertilizer while in town recently, so I think I’ll be making use of that when I do the watering tomorrow!

Other things are looking just fine. Like the raspberries that have spread into the old compost pile.

Turn your volume up for these videos.

You can’t see very many, but the raspberry bushes were absolutely buzzing with mostly bumblebees. There is one huge bumble in the second video. You can even hear the much deeper tone of that one’s buzzing!

These raspberries have had zero tending to, other than my pulling some of the weeds around the edges. No watering or anything. They’re doing fantastic, though!

On a completely note, here is some adorableness for you.

I’m actually not 100% sure which cats these are, but I think it’s Mitsy and Toni all snuggled together. The cats just love this box! It’s a compromise with the cats, to allow them on the dining table; we used to allow only Ginger and Toni up there, as a safe space to get away from the other cats. When we started to find them snuggling with other cats, it just didn’t make sent to chase the 4 legged cats away from the 3 legged ones! Now, we’ll go past the box and sometimes find three large cats mashed into the box, literally hugging each other to fit. They keep moving when we stop to try and get a picture, though.

Tomorrow, if all goes well, we’ll be able to make a dump run, and my daughter plans to break out the riding mower. I do hope I can get that weed trimmer going again, as there are still areas that need to be done. Particularly around garden beds I need to work on. If not, I might be able to borrow my brother’s gas powered weed trimmer. I’m hoping they’ll be able to come out this weekend. The last couple of times they came out, I missed them entirely, and I’d love to do some catching up with them, too.

We shall see!

For now, I’m happy with what I managed to get done outside today, in the short time I had available for it, and that we got my daughter’s surgery consultation appointment done. It seems strange to be excited about getting surgery, but that ganglion has been causing her so much pain, it’s going to make a huge difference for her, once it’s gone!

I’m so glad we found this doctor and my daughter is finally getting this stuff done!

The Re-Farmer

What an awesome day!

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One that started way too early, but still an awesome day!

I had my alarm set for 6am. Unfortunately, the furry alarm clocks had other plans. It was light out, anyhow, so I got up and did my morning rounds.

It turned 6am as I was getting back into the house!

My daughters didn’t fair much better, and one of them was up working all night.

My younger daughter and I made sure to grab breakfast before we left, but did make a stop at a gas station convenience store along the way to make sure she had a couple of large water bottles to keep with her during her workshop. I’m glad we left nice and early, because we drove right past the place and had to turn around. 😁

When we got there, others had arrived even earlier than we did. My daughter had a standard waiver to sign as we made our introductions with one of the instructors/owners, then my daughter headed over to their “classroom” to pick an individual forge for the workshop, while I headed out.

The road the forge was on turned out to go almost directly to where the small Walmart we tend to go to is. Very convenient! My new shoes, while fitting where they need to, are still size 11 men’s, so they are too long, and my heels were popping out. So I went searching and found some insoles and heel thingies – I can’t remember what they are called – to reduce the problem. Once I got those into my shoes, I set a timer for myself, settled into the truck and went for a nap in the Walmart parking lot! It was much needed.

They had a 1 hour lunch break scheduled to start at noon, so after a lovely little snooze, I went to a downtown grocery store to hunt down a lunch for us. I asked during the drive in, and my daughter requested something cold for lunch, since she was going to be working with fire all morning. I knew this grocery store would have some good options. I ended up getting some fresh made sushi, a lovely little charcuterie board, cut vegetables and hummus for us to share.

When I got back, it was too early for lunch break yet, but my daughter showed me some of the hooks she had made, using various techniques. She finished one last hook before break was called.

This place has a really good set up – one with extra care taken, since they’re under a fire ban, too. All the forges had new hoods put on them, and everything was set up under a roof. The walls were open, but several sections were covered with a particular sort of cloth/netting. I’d thought it was to prevent sparks from blowing out, but it turns out it was to keep flammable cottonwood puffs from blowing into the fire zone!

The entire grounds were fascinating, with all sorts of equipment – some modern, some antique – around. Even the house was amazing, built out of huge logs. It may have had a modern metal roof but, from the aging of the logs, I wouldn’t be surprised if the house itself is probably close to 100 years old.

The grounds were also very open and spread out, and they had a picnic table available in the shade of some trees for those who wanted to have lunch on site. The instructor/owner that has met us when we came in soon joined us, along with her husband, and some of the other students had brought their own camp chairs and settled in the shade nearby, too. We all had some grand conversation; the other attendees were very interesting people!

Then my daughter’s cell phone rang, which is always a surprise. She uses her phone as a phone even less than I do with mine! 😄

It was from her doctor’s office.

She quickly got up and went aside to take the call until she needed to come back and clear some dates for me.

Her surgery to remove her ganglion is going to happen in July – about 3 weeks from now – and she’s got a consultation appointment to go over the details, tomorrow, late afternoon.

The hospital is in the same small city we frequent in between stock up trips, and it basically across the street from the vet clinic that’s been doing our spays and neuters, so it’s all familiar territory for us.

Of course, other people heard us as we put the appointments into my calendar. Afterwards, we learned that one of the guys that joined us at the picnic table had had a massive ganglion removed some 25 years ago – large enough that he still has a scar! So he and my daughter commiserated about how painful those things can be, for a while. 😁

When the scheduled lunch was done and everyone went back to the workshop, I went back to the city and spent some time actually looking for stuff this time. We need at least one more garden hose, but the only ones that were affordable were the ones that keep breaking on us. In the end, I ended up picking up some replacement couplings, instead. Hopefully, higher quality ones. They also have a built in shut off valve, so you can switch attachments and not have to turned the water off at the tap or, like I usually do, kink the hose to stop the flow – which is part of why they end up breaking so quickly. Oddly, the one that’s leaking on me right now developed a pin hole in the metal of the female coupling. How that happened, I have no idea, but it’s enough to send a tiny, barely visible stream of water shooting out at least a foot!

I also picked up some water soluble fertilizer for the vegetable garden, and some potting soil. Our massive jade trees need repotting. We need to find a new home for them. We have to keep them in the cat free zone/living room, and there just isn’t enough light for them in there. Maybe rehoming plants will be easier than rehoming cats!

That done, I took my time checking out a couple more stores, just to pass the time until I headed back to the forge.

This time, I hung out in a seating area they had in the “classroom”, where my daughter was conveniently set up. They were working on long implements at the time, with a twist in the handle.

My daughter was in absolute heaven.

It was an interesting group to watch. There was about 10 people there, each at their own forge (there were a couple of “spares” that weren’t being used). Most were men that looked to be about my age, give or take a decade. There was one other woman there, who looked to be in her 60s. My daughter was clearly the youngest person there. Everyone seemed to be really enjoying the workshop, too.

Talking about it later, my daughter said she was 99% sure she would love blacksmithing, but there was still that 1% she wasn’t sure of. After today, she is 100% she is in love with blacksmithing! She’s really looking forward to building her own forge and smithy here at the farm. It will take time to acquire the materials, and set up a safe area to work in. Particularly since the area that makes the most sense to build it in is where the fire pit currently is, and there are several dead or partially dead trees with branches overhanging the area that we need to clear out! I plan to make our outdoor kitchen in a different area, so the fire pit area will be available to her. Thanks to this workshop, she also knows which things she prefers to have, such as a hand operated blower instead of an electric one. We do already have some of the tools, since my late father had done some blacksmithing here, though his forge got scavenged at some point. One pair of tongs I found were broken, but another is fine. My daughter says she has seen other tools that are suitable, laying around, including ball peen hammers of the appropriate size and weight. There is a tiny anvil, made from a piece of railroad tie. When I was growing up here, I remember we had a full size blacksmithing anvil in the pump shack, but that is another of the things that grew legs and walked away over the years before we moved in. So it really wouldn’t take much for my daughter to be able to set up her own smithy!

Here are the things my daughter made, by the end of the workshop.

The first image is a series of hooks including one that is meant to be hammered in like a nail. The others have different shaped flat parts, including one leaf shape, with screw holes in them. The screw holes were added towards the very end, using a special hole punch. Then there is the handle; getting the swoop shape it was supposed to be was not easy!

The second image has a fire poke, with a twisted handle. The other thing is a steak flipper. Not something either of us is familiar with!

The owners/instructors welcomed people to stay as long as they needed to put on any finishing touches on their projects before leaving, and most of them did stay longer. My daughter just needed to use the hole punch before she was done, so we had a chance to chat with the other owner/instructor.

My daughter still wants to clean up the stuff she made with a wire brush to give them a more finished look. She plans to give some to my brother and his wife, as a thank you for their birthday gift of this workshop. The steak flipper and fire poker are both going to get use when we do outdoor cooking again – which might be a while. With the current fire bans, some fires are allowed, but with our own fire pit area we aren’t going to chance it for some time.

With staying longer to finish things off and chat for a bit, it was getting pretty late, so we went into the city again, and I made sure my daughter got fed! She ended up choosing to go to a Subway, but she was so tired – especially her hands, from all that hammering! – she could barely hold her sandwich! My husband messaged me to see of I could find something at Walmart for him, and she stayed in the truck while I popped in. She was so tired this morning, was absolutely fine during the workshop, but once it was over, she was basically crashing!

It was absolutely worth it for her, though!

By the time we got home, it was well past time to feed the outside cats, so I took care of that while the girls took care of bringing stuff inside. I ended up bring out a bowl of warm water to wash leaky eyes, assembly line style. Kale and Zipper are still the worst for it, and I’m afraid that Kale might lose an eye. She has missed some eye washing, simply because we couldn’t reach her, or she wasn’t around at the time. Most of the other kittens look like they are recovering quite well.

When I go out to take care of the cats, I’m always on the lookout for more kittens. So far, nothing. I am seeing Sprout more often and, this evening, I could just make out as she ran passed me, that she has at least two active teats, but we can’t get close enough to really see. With others, I just can’t tell. Not even with Slick, who will jump up onto the roof of the cat house to eat. She doesn’t give us a chance to see her belly!

Today turned out to be a really lovely day in the weather sense, too. The high of the day was supposed to be 18C/64F, but we did end up reaching 20C/68F, but with a lovely breeze to keep things from feeing too hot. We’re supposed to get warmer over the next few days, but nothing excessive.

I am very glad I got the garden in when I did, that’s for sure. If I hadn’t, I probably be dealing with dead transplants right now!

Mostly, though, I’m just so happy my daughter enjoyed the workshop, and is now sure that blacksmithing is something she really wants to continue with.

The Re-Farmer

The good the bad and the ugly!

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Or should I say sickly?

I was able to get a bunch of photos of the kittens this evening. As we have discovered is typical, the older kittens start to get eye infections once they start eating mostly solid food and aren’t nursing as often. It’s a strain of herpes that we’ve since learned is particularly difficult in our area.

So… just fair warning that some of the kittens in the slideshow below look a hot mess, after getting their eyes washed.

I started with Poirot’s cuties first, though.

A rare image of some of Inspector Japp’s white belly and chest spots!

It looks like Captain Hastings (next photo) is related to Ghosty. She has those shadows of colour on her head. When Ghosty was that size, she had those hints of pattern in her fur, but was otherwise almost completely a cream colour. Those shadows kept getting darker as she got older, and now they are very brown. Which is why we think she might be an albino tabby. That and her eyes that glow red when the light hits them. Hastings has a dark tail and dark ear tips, and such pale eyes!

Miss Lemon is the biggest of the three and very assertive! 😄

I’ve contacted a local large animal rescue that had reached out to me last year about possibly taking a more feral pregnant cat to socialize and integrate into plans for opening their rescue to the public for events and tours, but we didn’t have one at the time. They ended up not being able to open last year, largely due to weather. They’ll be having a grand opening later this month, though. If they could take in Poirot and her babies, that would be amazing.

The next image is Sir Robin the Brave. He was all curled up in the grass, napping, and did not appreciate being interrupted! His eye is actually looking much better right now. I didn’t see his sister, Kale, this evening. She was looking pretty sick. We’ve been bringing her into the house for eye washing in the mornings lately. I do hope she’s okay, and was just napping somewhere.

The next image is of Havarti and Little Rig, both of whom are looking much, much better now! I’ve been able to catch Havarti every now and then, but he really doesn’t like it and keeps his distance.

Then Grommet came by. His eyes are looking better, too, but he still got an eye wash after I got that picture. He’s slightly more socialized than his brother, Zipper. Zipper looks just terrible after his eye wash! The only reason I was able to catch him to wash his eyes is because they were both stuck completely shut! Normally, he would fight me off, but he’s so sick, he actually let me wash his eyes, while I had him on the roof of the cat house. Then he just stayed up on the roof, in the warm sunshine, making snorking noises.

The next image is Eyelet and Wormy snuggled for a nap. Wormy has one slightly sticky eye, but nothing of concern anymore. Eyelet’s eyes are… well… check out that last photo!

That blue is so pale, his eyes look almost white!

I also suspect he’s deaf.

~~~back from a quick run outside to switch soaker hoses in the garden~~~

Well, I found Kale! She’s sleeping in a kitten pile in the cat house. 😁

Adorable kittens aside…

Today, my younger daughter and I headed out for some errands. One of the things I needed was to get myself a pair of non-work shoes. Finding shoes for my messed up feet is never easy, so my daughter suggested we go into the bigger city, rather than the nearest Walmart in the smaller, nearer city. We had just started driving when my cell phone started ringing.

It was home care.

They weren’t going to have anyone for my mother’s morning med assist.

Which is supposed to happen between 7 and 9am.

It was about 9:20 or so when we got the call.

*sigh*

On the plus side, my mother’s place is along the way, so we were already part way there. I called my mom to let her know about home care, and that I was on my way. The hands free unit my brother gave me sure came in handy!

My mother wasn’t happy. When I got there, she started talking about hiring someone, though the home care office, to do med assists for her. Just one person doing her assists, all the time, and always at the same time (she says they keep coming later and later). I had to explain to her, they can’t do that – and she can’t just hire some random local person to do her med assists, either. There are laws about that.

She doesn’t accept that.

I couldn’t stay long, though, and was soon on my way. My sister was going to be showing up after lunch and taking her to the cemetery to visit our family gravesites. While it will be easier for my mother to get in and out of my sister’s car, I knew it would still take a lot out of her!

That done, my daughter and I continued on our way. Neither of us had had breakfast yet, so lunch was the first order of business.

Then my daughter, sweetheart that she is, busted her butt, trying to find me shoes. She knows me too well! I’m terrible when it comes to buying things for myself. Especially things I need. Add in how difficult it is to find shoes that fit, I would have given up after the first couple of pairs where I couldn’t even get my foot in. I used to be able to wear men’s size 9’s, triple wide. That’s the size of my work boots. That’s the size of my inside shoes I was wearing at the time, that are wearing out and falling apart. In the end, the only shoes I could get my feet into where men’s size 11’s, wide, and even then, some styles still didn’t work.

In the end, we found a pair that fit, but were absolutely tacky. The grey was okay, but the bright neon yellowish green accents were a bit much. Being the only ones I could find that fit the bill, I was willing to get them, until my daughter spotted another display shelf.

I got the same shoe, in bright red. It matches my new dress. 😄 They look like runners, but the “laces” are fake and stretchy, so they’re actually slip ons, not lace ups. I think they’ll work out just fine and, thanks to my daughter, I wasn’t going insane by the time we found them!

From there, we had our shopping lists to get. We were both pretty tired – my daughter actually fell asleep during the drive in! – so we took our time about it. Which worked out, since my husband remembered a few things he messaged us about, too.

We didn’t refill our water jugs in the city, though. We were going to do that locally, so I could get my “buy 10, get one free” freebie. During the drive from the city, though, I did end up pulling over so my daughter could take over driving while I tried closing my eyes for a bit. The energy drink I got for the ride accomplished nothing!

By the time we got to town, though, I was feeling much better, and was able to drive home after we finished in town.

I’d better get to bed early tonight and, hopefully, get some real sleep, because my daughter and I have an early start tomorrow! My brother and his wife got her a blacksmithing beginners workshop for her birthday this month, and we have to be there before 9am tomorrow. The drive will be almost an hour, as the forge is just past the smaller city. The workshop is all day, with a 1 hour break for lunch. I’ll probably pick something up in the city nearby, so we can have a picnic on the grounds (something they say is available) during break. It’s going to be a long day!

With that in mind, I’d better start winding down for the day, kick most of the cats out of my room, and try and get some sleep!

The Re-Farmer

We have cows

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Not our cows, but they’re here!

I’ve been hearing them for at least a week, probably two, but the renter’s cows didn’t come close to the barn area until yesterday evening. I got this shot, this morning.

I do love hearing the cows in the morning!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 garden: Arikara squash, and a little harvest

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Today is feeling downright cold!

When I checked the temps in the wee hours, we were at 7C/46F, but it felt like 4C/39F. As I write this, we are now at 10C/50F, but it feels like 3C/37F! The expected high of the day is only 16C/61F.

I don’t know if we got one last rainfall during the night. Wind is the real issue this morning. For the first time in a long time, though, I have not been seeing smoke, so I’m hoping all that rain has made a big difference for the wildfires.

While doing my morning rounds, I finally gave in and took the netting off from above the Arikara squash. The elm seeds are mostly dropped, and it was doing nothing to keep the cats off. In fact, as I was starting to pull the ground staples to remove it, one of the yard cats (a tabby with no name) jumped onto the mesh and immediately fell through over a squash and started to roll around in a panic!

Thankfully, the collars around the squash did their jobs, and nothing was crushed.

What we do have, however, is buds and even a blooming flower!

What is strange is that these are all female flowers. No male flowers! I’m used to the male flowers blooming first. I’m not sure if I should be pruning these off so the plants themselves can grow bigger before starting to bloom again. I’ve never grown these before. I’ll have to look that up. I’d hate to have to prune them but, without any male flowers to pollinate them, the baby squash are just going to wither away, anyhow.

At the high raised bed, I decided to pick these, as the plants were getting big enough to crowd other things out.

I’m leaving one Purple Prince (I think) plant that has bolted to go to seed. Tiny flower buds have started to appear. I picked the other larger ones; perhaps I waited too long and should have picked them at a smaller stage. As for the red thing in the middle, I thought it was a beat, but as I was cleaning and trimming it later, I could see that it’s white on the insides to… a big radish?

That’s one thing about using a seed mix for the winter sowing. This one was a mix of whatever root vegetable seeds I had left. There was only one type of turnip, which makes it easy, but there were several times of radishes and beets, and two types of carrots. One type of radish – the French Breakfast – has a distinct shape that makes it easy to identify. Everything else is “root vegetable surprise”. 😄

I just hope today isn’t so cold that the seeds recently planted will die off and rot instead of germinating. Things are supposed to get sunny and warm up over the next while, without extreme heat, which will be nice. Those overnight temperatures, when they start dropping below 10C/50F, could be a problem, though. The transplants should handle things fine, but the direct sowing… well, we’ll see how those go. At the very least, it will slow germination down.

Well, hopefully, we will have a long, moderate fall and a late first frost, to extend our growing season.

Meanwhile, in the time it took me to write this, our temperature has actually dropped, instead of getting warmer! We’re not supposed to reach our high of the day until 7 or 8 this evening. I’m( seriously considered plugging the cat house in again. It’s overcast enough that the light sensor for the heat bulb will turn on for the kittens.

Definitely “brrrrr” out there!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: pumpkins planted

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Last year, I picked up the free pumpkinfest seeds early enough to start them indoors. I picked them up just a few days ago, so there’s no time for that, this year!

While we have been getting a few rainfalls, off and on, and don’t expect more rain until tomorrow morning, our province is actually getting special weather alerts for possible funnel clouds. I got messages from my brother, saying they had rain pretty much all day, with occasional massive downpours. It’s been knocking his internet out often enough that he ended up linking to his phone to access the internet, so he could work.

From home.

On a Sunday.

Because my brother just never seems to stop working. Ever.

He’s always been like this, even as a kid. How he hasn’t burnt out, long ago, I have no idea!

While I had completely forgotten about the pumpkin seeds when I was working on the bed earlier, it was probably a good thing, in the end, given that I started to get rained on before I finished what I did remember to plant!

So here is how the bed looks now.

The row with the transplanted onions had enough empty space for four seeds, and the last one was planted in the remaining space of the sunflower row. I used the plastic collars to mark where the seeds would go, then planted one in each collar. They may not all germinate. Last year they have out 3 seeds per packet. I pre-germinated them, and they all sprouted within a day, so I do know they give out very healthy seeds.

I had some stove pellets left in the bag I’ve been using in other garden beds, and I finished it off here, including adding a few into the collars as well. Then everything got watered, even though it just rained. The collars got partially filled with water a couple of times, to make sure the pumpkin seeds got thoroughly soaked. The watering was also to get the stove pellets to absorb moisture and start breaking up into sawdust. They will do as a light mulch for now. Later in the season, after things are fairly big, more mulch will be added.

I don’t expect to use the mulch that I pulled off this morning. In the photo, you can see it raked onto the taller grass. That is where this bed’s twin is going to be built. Once things are dry enough to drag out the weed trimmer, I’ll clean out that area, trimming it as close to the soil as possible, then lay cardboard down on it, in preparation for building the next bed. The mulch I’ve set aside will eventually get buried in the new bed.

So I think I can NOW say the garden is officially in! 😄😂 There’s still lots of work to do, of course, but what needed to be planted is now in the ground.

🍾🥂🎉

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: beans, sunflowers and unexpected transplants

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I managed to get it done, just as the rain started to hit!

I think I can now officially say, our garden is in! Sure there are some things, such as fall spinach, that can be planted, but for all our expected spring planting, it is done.

Yay!

I waffled between planting along the chain link fence in the south hard, or in the trellis bed in the main garden area. In the end, I decided to go for where I knew there would be the most sunlight.

The first image above is how the bed looked, after the mulch was pulled off. Last year, we grew melons along one side, onions for seed on the other. The onions were replanted in the fall, with just one half of the bed being prepped, then covered with leaves for mulch. The other half had melons mulched with cardboard, bark and grass clippings and, in the fall, I just pulled the melon plants and left the rest in place to protect the soil.

That made cleaning the bed up much easier!

This bed does have an issue, though. You can see that – sort of – in the next two images.

To make these beds, we’re using logs as straight and even as we can find. Which is surprising difficult. Especially when looking to use 18′ logs. With this bed, on the trellis side, one of the logs was quite bent. We put that one on the bottom, with the bend going into the bed, while the top log is straight. That’s what the remaining three vertical trellis support posts are going to be secured to.

What that means, though, is that there is an entire log, just inside the top frame of the bed, in the middle. The bend is extreme enough that there’s an actual gap formed between the two logs. Over time, it won’t matter as much, as we are aiming to eventually make the beds all 4 logs high. Until then, though, the gap is getting stuffed with skinny pieces of wood, bits of bark and even grass clippings and dried leaves.

Once the mulch was removed, I went over the bed with the garden fork first, to loosen the soil and make it easier to pull the weeds. As I went along, I started to find other things besides weeds, though – and I was not at all surprised. The onions that had gone to see had dropped some of their seed before they could be harvested.

Once I got to where the onions had seeded themselves, I worked a lot more carefully, and gathered every one that I could find.

Along the way, I also found a couple of plants I recognized as the flower I allowed to grow at one end of the bed, last year. I removed those as well.

It wasn’t part of the plan, but since I had them, every since baby onion I found got transplanted. The flowers got transplanted at the opposite end of where we grew them last year.

While preparing to transplant the onions, I also carefully pulled some of the onions that were growing against each other, broke them apart, then replanted them separately.

One half of the bed had fewer onions survive than the other, so that was the first area I started transplanting onions the tiny onions. I still had enough left over that I made a second row for the rest. They filled a little over half the bed’s length before I ran out, so there’s still room to plant something else, if I wanted to.

After that, I planted the two flowers (possibly a wild salsify) I’d found, then marked off two more rows in the soil in the other side of the bed. Those were for the Hopi Black Dye sunflowers and the Red Noodle beans.

There were not enough sunflower seeds to fill the row. I spaced them about 6 inches apart, which is close for sunflowers. I don’t expect a 100% germination rate, though. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if none germinated. These are older seeds.

The red noodle beans, on the other hand, are fresh seed. These got planted nearer the edge of the bed, where they will be able to climb the trellis that will be built on that side of the bed. After filling the row from end to end, I had only 6 bean seeds left. So I stuck them into some of the gaps among the sugar snap peas, since they have a trellis already prepared. The planted rows then got marked off at the ends with plant stakes, so that if I decide to plant something else there, I know where the open spaces are.

Oh! I completely forgot! I was going to plant the pumpkins in this bed!

I can still do that. For those, I plan to set up plastic collars to mark where the seeds are.

In fact, I see the rain has passed and the sun is out. I’ll go do that right now!

The Re-Farmer

We have nasturtiums!

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They’re finally big enough to get a decent picture, too.

I re-sowed into the little flower bed at the end of the high raised bed, when nothing at all made it from the winter sowing experiment. Actually, some may have started to germinate, only to get killed off. Mostly by rolling cats. What did come up was massive amounts of tiny weeds.

Which happened her last year, and is starting to happen again now!

The pairs of roundish leaves are the nasturtiums. They have such large seeds, I was able to push them into the soil in two evenly space rows. They are very easy to identify. The other seedlings, not so much! There are asters and cosmos in here, but it’ll be a while before we’ll be able to know for sure what their germination rate is.

What I can identify, however, are the weeds. The darker green sprouts with the red stems. Those are the weeds that infested this bed, even with the gourds and pumpkins covering everything. When I started cleaning up the bed in preparation for sowing new flower seeds, these same weeds were already starting to take over, and now they’re back again!

I don’t know what it is about this particular bed. The garden soil is from the same pile we bought a few years bag and used to amend all the other beds, and none of them have it. These are a common weed for our area, and I remember pulling them when helping my mother weed her garden here, decades ago. Since we’ve started gardening here, I haven’t seen many of them, until they showed up in this bed, last year.

For them to come back again, in such numbers, several times in the same space really has me wondering how this particular patch of garden got infected with their seeds so badly!

I can’t even try and weed them right now, as at this stage, as there are so many, I’d be pulling up other seedlings, too. It’ll have to wait until everything gets bigger.

I know asters can grow here – we have them growing wild, even – and I remember my mother used to grow cosmos here, too. I’ve never grown nasturtiums, though.

It should be interesting to see how they do, here!

The Re-Farmer

Morning kitties

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Just have to share the cuteness, first!

And the gorgeousness.

I’m not 100% sure, but I think that stunning cat in the first image might be Kohl’s brother, Rabi. He seems to want to be around me when I’m out and about in the yard, and even follows me while I’m doing my rounds at times, but will not let me come close. The problem is, once Kohl and Rabi got bigger and more mobile, we simply couldn’t get close to them. Kohl’s calico pattern made her easy to identify, but Rabi was one of several fluffy tabbies with white we had that year. I’ll have to go through my old photos from when they were little, and maybe I can tell.

The next photos are of Poirot’s kittens, and Poirot, enjoying breakfast.

It was pretty wet when I headed out – not actively raining, but still wet enough that the older kittens were all hunkered down in the warm and cozy cat beds inside the cat house. Which means it wasn’t until much later in the day that I saw Kale and Sir Robin. Oh, my goodness, they each have one really badly infected eye. We were able to get their eyes washed, but the antibiotics we had left in the fridge had gone fuzzy, so we don’t have any medication for them. Havarti, the orange tabby, has one messed up eye, too, but he seems to be getting better. Other kittens have leaky eyes, too – it seems to always happen when they get big enough to be weaned – but from what I could see today, these two have it the worst. 😢 I was thinking of contacting the Cat Lady about getting some more antibiotics through her, but she is slowly stepping away from rescue and may not even be in the country, with all the stuff going on with her kids.

I’m not sure how we’re going to manage once her rescue is done in a few months. The one other that I contacted, based on the Cat Lady’s recommendation, basically blew me off. They’re too full, anyhow. They all are. It’s no wonder the Cat Lady is burning out! I keep hearing people say to contact the humane society in the city, who are also full up, but when I looked into them before, they wouldn’t have anything to do with anyone outside the city. There’s a local branch, and they stopped doing intakes long ago, yet are still always full. It’s pretty ridiculous.

Well, we do the best we can for the kitties. What other choice is there? Besides calling the municipality to send someone out with a rifle, that is. That’s the only “help” they offer for rural colonies. We certainly aren’t the only ones will a yard full of cats! Not by a long shot.

Ah, well. It is what is it, and we play the hand we’ve been dealt.

The Re-Farmer