When it comes to deciding what to plant each year, I like to pick at least one thing to grow for fun.
For the past few years, one of those things has been luffa.
While these are supposed to be edible in their young stages, what I’m after is the fully mature sponge stage – and the seeds that come with it! Which needs an insanely long growing season we don’t have, so they have to be started indoors quite early. Then they have to survive transplanting, and have a the hotter temperatures they prefer, and… and… and…
Not an easy thing to grow in our climate and short growing season, but the challenge is the fun of trying!
So far, we’ve had only one year where we almost had a sponge, but it was too underdeveloped when it got hit by our first frost.
This year, I’m planning something different. They will be grown in pots, in our portable greenhouse.
I set 4 older seeds to pre-germinate, got three seedlings, one of which died off. A second one just sort of stopped growing, and a third seemed to do all right. Especially once in the portable greenhouse.
Then we got that day of high winds that actually blew the greenhouse askew and knocked all bins of transplants to the ground.
Amazingly, not only did the big one survive, but the little one I though was going to die ended up finally sprouting true leaves!
With our overnight temperatures and the protection of the greenhouse, I decided it was safe to pot them up and set them to where they will spend the summer.
I had three pots with soil that needed refreshing, so the first thing I did was empty them into the wheelbarrow.
Next I added some cow manure and a decent amount of a rehydrated brick of coconut fibre, which you can see at the top of the pile in the wheelbarrow.
One of the trays of chitted potatoes had spilled much of its stove pellets that I was using to absorb moisture from the cut edges of the potatoes. A lot of those pellets ended up on one of the pots below, and I just left them, so that would add some sawdust to the mix as well.
The largest pot did not have any drainage holes, and I ended up making a nail hole a couple of inches from the top, so rainwater could drain out rather than drowning the lemongrass that was growing in it at the time. The bottom of that pot had a layer of grass clippings added, before the soil. When I dumped that pot out, I found the grass layer on the bottom was still there, and absolutely matted with roots. The roots were dead, of course. I pulled those out while I was mixing the soil amendments together as best I could, then watered the whole thing down.
I left that for the dry stuff, like the stove pellets and manure, to absorb the water, then scrubbed out all three pots.
I have only two luffa seedlings, so I decided to just refill the two matching pots. They have large drainage holes, and there are no trays for them, so I took the root/grass clipping mats I’d set aside and used those to line the bottom of the pots, so keep the soil from getting washed out the bottom.
I also prepared the spaced for them in the greenhouse. I expect these to climb the frame. I took the wire shelves off of the space directly above them, so they can be more easily accessed, and the vines can follow the frame without going through the wire shelves. As they get bigger, I can train the vines to grow where I want them to.
After refilling the clean pots, I set them in their spots, then did the transplanting. I made sure to well water the holes in the soil I made for the luffa, first. I find pre-watering the planting holes makes a big positive difference.
The fiber pot for the larger one had been damaged when the wind knocked things over, so it had been set into a Red Solo cup, to keep it from falling apart. That seemed to work quite well, and there were plenty of roots visible. I did remove the fiber pot, though. These are supposed to be the kind where you can bury them in the ground whole, so as not to disturb the roots, but I find they don’t actually break down very well. While the luffa roots grew through where the pot had cracked when it fell, there were no roots at all growing into the pot walls, even though I made sure to keep it well hydrated. The root ball held together, though, and was easy to just tuck into the pot. The smaller luffa didn’t have much of a root ball at all, but that’s to be expected.
The tray of failed chitted potatoes that did not fall over still had plenty of stove pellets. I’d been hanging on to those! The very hot and desiccated potatoes finally went to compost, and I scattered the stove pellets around the luffa, to act as a mulch. Then it all got a gentle watering. The stove pellets immediately start swelling up and breaking into sawdust, and do a great job of covering the soil surface.
With the wire shelves above the pots removed, that meant adjusting the bins of transplants a bit. Most are too tall – either the bins or the transplants – to go on the top shelves, without touching the plastic cover. Contact with the plastic could potentially burn them.
So that is finally done! The luffa will now spend the summer in their pots in the portable greenhouse. Hopefully, this means we’ll finally have some actual luff sponges to harvest in the fall!
I’m closely monitoring the forecast over the next while. In the 10 day forecast, we’ve got a few colder nights, and then it seems to warm up enough to potentially start transplanting things outside.
Then I see the long range forecast.
*sigh*
Apparently, around June 5 and 6, we’re supposed to get rain. Rain which is supposed to continue through the 7th, which is supposed to have an overnight low just above freezing – then on the 8th, the rain is supposed to turn to snow, and the overnight low is expected to be below freezing. Even once that has passed, it’ll be several more nights before things are warm enough for transplants.
Which means that for the things that need to be transplanted out sooner, we would have to find a way to cover them with frost protection.
It’s so warm and pleasant right now, it’s really hard to resist getting things planted! It is, however, still just past the middle of May. We’ve got nearly 2 more weeks before it can be considered safe to transplant things!
I admit I’m chomping at the bit! I guess it’s really a good thing I’ve had to do so much running around. While it keeps me from getting much done outside, it’s also keeping me from putting things out too early, too!
The bigger kittens are really enjoying the cat house. They’ve pretty much taken it over, and the adult cats are letting them have it. Even the moms just go into nurse them!
The second photo shows all eight of the older kittens in the two cat beds. Just adorable!
It will be a few weeks before Poirot’s bitty babies are big enough to start moving around. I’m hoping that, at that point, Poirot will finally accept her babies being in the cat cage, rather than up on the shelf, or they’re going to end up falling to the floor!
In other things…
I checked the tracking on our plum and haskap this morning, after the post office was open for a while, and it said they were still in the city, and expected tomorrow. Dang. I was really hoping to get those in the ground today!
This morning, while checking on the garden beds, I took a change and removed the plastic cover on the high raised bed, just tucking it all on one side.
It also gave me a chance to very carefully weed anything I was absolutely sure was a weed, that could be removed without damaging any seedlings. In the first couple of photos above, you can see seedlings for beets, radishes and carrots. Possibly turnip? Plus some tiny onions. Others, I just can’t tell, yet.
The last photo was taken much, much later.
My goal for today was to finish with the weed trimming around the house. Before doing that, I grabbed the ice scraper to clear the overgrown areas between the sidewalk blocks and concrete in front of the sun room. It does a great job. Unfortunately, my body was making it very clear that, after yesterday, I was pushing my limits. So I shifted gears and got out my brother’s riding mower. I could at least work on the southeast and east lawns, where I’d weed trimmed yesterday. It still took quite a while to get done.
When I did as much as was ready for mowing, I decided to go around to the food forest area, where the plum and haskap will be planted. The plum has a space prepared already, but I’m still not 100% decided on the haskap. I could put them in line with the three current plantings, or use them to fill the space just to the north of them. The apple and plum tree would partially shade them there, but not enough to be a problem.
Hmmm… I think I’ll plant them in line with the others, and plant something that gets taller to the north of the plum and apple. As long as it’s far enough away from the buried telephone line, we can get away with planting taller trees there.
The taller grass had a lot of thatch in it, so I went over that a few times with the riding mower. The clippings, a mix of dry and green grass, will make excellent mulch.
By the time I was done all my outside stuff, including taking care of the evening yard cat feeding, it was past 5pm.
Which is unfortunate.
It turns out the plum and haskap did arrive at the local post office today. They closed at 5. I won’t be able to pick them up until tomorrow.
Ah, well.
In other things, I got a call while I was making a lunch before heading back outside. It was the insurance company about the online claim I made for the truck. When I mentioned that I’d called around and no one was quite sure if the insurance could pay for a truck box cover, she was all “oh, yes, of course it does…” 😄
So I now have an appointment for an inspection and estimate on Thursday (today is Tuesday) morning. I’ll be meeting up with the inspector in town (they come out one every two weeks for appointments like this) and they’ll make any final decisions. It’s still possible that, while the damage to the truck would be covered (the cracked tail light and the twisted metal of the box frame), the box cover might not be. If, for example, the inspector decides there was pre-existing damage or something that contributed to the cover being blown off. Once the inspector makes his determination, we’ll decide on next steps.
If the claim proceeds, we’ve got a $500 deductible that will be paid to the company we take the truck to for the work. I was also informed that they do not cover the cost of a replacement vehicle to use while the truck is in the shop. Hopefully, that will not be an issue. Ideally, the company would order everything they need and it’ll just be in the shop for a few hours. I can just hang out in town while it’s being worked on. If it takes longer, we might have to borrow a car from my brother again, and I really don’t want to do that to them again!
I do hope this can be done fairly quickly. We haven’t done a dump run since we lost the box cover. If we have to, we can use a tarp or something to secure the load. A lot of people don’t bother – I certainly see plenty of trucks at the dump, with no box covers and nothing to secure their loads.
I’ve also seen, and had to avoid, more than a few garbage bags on or beside the highway that clearly flew off of someone’s truck, and I don’t want to be “that guy”!
We’ll see how it works out. We’ll probably have to do at least one dump run before we have a cover for the box again.
Ideally, we’ll get it done before our next stock up shopping trip! There’s no way we’d be able to fit a typical Costco run in the cab. With how much I’ve found things moved around when we get home and start unloading, I’ve been very thankful for that box cover!
Anyhow.
Tomorrow, my priority is to pick up the plum and haskap at the post office, and get them in the ground as soon as possible.
Mmm…. the house is starting to smell wonderful. I picked some more rhubarb before coming in, and my daughter is making an upside down rhubarb cake. I’m quite looking forward to it!
Last night, things did drop to freezing, so I’m glad we brought the transplants in from the portable greenhouse last night. When I headed out to do the morning rounds, it was only about 1C/34F, but it was just below 10C/50F in the portable greenhouse, so they got moved back in this morning.
After I did some repairs.
The garbage can I’m using as a heat sink doesn’t have a lid, so I’d been using a square of leftover 3/4″ rigid insulation as a lid, weighed down with a brick, and holding the thermometer. With the tears at the bottom of the door zippers from wind damage, cats can get in and out. They don’t jump up onto the wire shelves much; the wire forms 1″ squares, and I don’t think it’s comfortable for them to try and walk on. They do like to sit on the insulation, though.
Well, I came out one morning, and the insulation was broken in to, fallen into the garbage can, along with the brick and the thermometer. I haven’t spotted where it’s leaking yet, but it was less than half full at the time.
Looking around for something else to cover the garbage can with, the only thing I found that was large enough was one of the old window screens we used for things like curing onions in the fall. The smallest of the screens is still a pretty long rectangle, but it cover the entire top of the garbage can, so I gave it a try. Unfortunately, for the last couple of nights, I’ve been finding it knocked off the garbage can. This morning, it was knocked off again, in spite of my efforts to stabilize it, and this time a corner tore through the back of the plastic cover on the greenhouse.
*sigh*
I taped it up as best I could with clear duct tape. For now, I’ve tried covering the garbage can with overlapping bin lids and the broken pieces of rigid insulation from before.
Most of the transplants are too call to use the lids on the bins, so we can’t stack them all like we could before. Being able to use lids on just two of the bins to stack on top of is the only reason we can fit all the trays and bins on the chest freezer in the old kitchen. So the transplants got to spend the day in the relative warmth of the portable greenhouse for the day, but we’ve already brought them in again for the night. From the forecast, we’ll probably have to do it again for one more night before we can safely leave them in the portable greenhouse overnight again.
The winter sown bed that has a plastic mesh cover on it seemed to handle the overnight cold just fine. I can see there are some carrots coming up, and the others whatever radishes, beets and turnips that survived the winter. The radishes should grow the fastest, so we should be able to identify and harvest those earliest. That will make more space for the other root vegetables in the process. For now, though, I have no real clue what is what!
In the next photo, you can see the plastic over where we’d winter sown flowers was torn badly by the wind. All it took was a small tear at one end, from the tip of one of the bamboo stakes set across the top, and this morning, it was all wrecked.
There are a lot of seedlings coming up in there but I recognize them from when we grew pumpkins and gourds here, last year. They are all weeds.
This bed will be replanted with flowers, soon.
In the last photo, difficult to see against the soil, is a potato sprout! Some of the potatoes we planted already had pretty long sprouts on them, and one of them broke through the soil rather quickly.
The mesh over this bed is good for keeping the cats out, but the mesh isn’t fine enough to keep the Chinese Elm seeds out! The seed development hasn’t anywhere near its peak, yet, and already there are seeds everywhere.
I so look forward to when we can get rid of all the Chinese elm. They cause way too many problems!
After I did my rounds, I had a quick breakfast, then headed out. Before I get into that, though, I must share the cuteness!
In the first photo, if you look carefully, you can see there are 7 kittens, from 3 litters, mashed into that cat bed! The only one “missing” is Sir Robin, who was already out and running around.
The next photo was taken while I was gathering the bowls out of the cat house entry, for the evening feeding.
I was able to get a good photo of Poirot’s three this evening. The black on (Inspector Japp) looks like it’s got a sticky eye that will need washing. The mostly white one – Miss Lemon – is getting pretty active, and I’ve actually seen it fumble out of the carrier briefly, then scramble right back on. The white and grey – Captain Hastings – is also pretty mobile but, so far, has not gone all the way out of the carrier door. Once they get too mobile, Poirot is going to have to put up with them being brought down to floor level!
Last of all is the crowd inside the isolation shelter. I left things plugged in today, for the heat lamp, and it seems they really appreciated it!
Today was too cold and wet to get much done outside, so it was a good time to run some errands, mostly at Walmart. I did get a start on one wet and potentially messy job, though. The new septic ejector is working great, now that it’s no longer frozen, but with the excavation, there is now a lower area at the end of the metal sheet we have to divert the fluid away from the ejector. Normally, it would have naturally flowed towards a low spot nearby, but now it forms a sort of pool. I headed out with a garden hoe and used it to create a small trench to drain the fluid towards the low area, but to get the pool to drain, more small trenches had to be made, because it is all so uneven. In some places, I was able to use the hoe to move some of the clay/gravel nearby, into the lower areas around the edges. What it really needs is for the deepest parts to be filled, but that will be a job for another time. For now, I just want more of it to drain away. The last thing we want is for a small pond to form so close to the ejector. That will prevent the saturated ground around the ejector from drying out, and it’ll just freeze again, next year.
Of course, I sent progress photos to my brother and his wife, so they were up to date about it.
No, I’m not going to post pictures of pooled septic greywater here! 😄
When I did as much as I could and headed back to the house, I made sure to hose down my rubber boots. So much clay was stuck to the bottom of my boots, they felt a couple of pounds heavier, each!
Once I was cleaned up and changed, and had a quick breakfast, I headed out. My brother and his wife aren’t too far away from the Walmart I was going to so, before I left, I messaged them where I was going and asked if they wanted to meet for lunch or something. It turned out their schedule was open, so we made arrangements to meet at a restaurant near the Walmart I was going to.
I got there early, so I went to my other intended stop first; the dollar store nearby. I wanted to pick up more ground staples – can’t have too many of those! – as well as packages of shorter stakes. I got two packs of 25 bamboo stakes, which I am thinking of using to around the snap pea bed to support whatever I find to set around it and keep the deer from eating our peas. I also picked up four 2 packs of 2′ metal stakes. I am thinking to use them to support the hoops intended for the two 4′ square beds. I will probably cut them in half, though. We’ll see when the time comes.
Once done there, I made my way to the restaurant and met up with my brother and his wife. We had a lovely visit. They also talked about some of the things they are planning to do here at the farm, that we aren’t able to do. One of the things that is badly needed it to get more gravel on our driveway. My brother, however, remembers that the last time my late brother used gravel from our own gravel pit, it turned out to make a real mess when things got wet. Likely because there’s so much clay mixed in. They are thinking of buying crushed limestone, or even slag. Slag would be ideal, as it compacts to form a sort of concrete surface. They covered their own driveway on the property they sold with slag, and were very happy with it.
They also told me that they will have a push mower for us to use! We already have permission to use their riding mower, which is currently being stored in the garage near our truck. They’ve actually used it themselves, around where their trailer is stored, but that area is way too rough. Once they can access the tractor stored in the garage again, they’ll use their big rotary mower to cut that area, and my SIL wants to harrow it to level it somewhat.
With our “new” push mower (it’s just a couple of years old) in the small engine shop still, as they try to find the parts needed to fix it (which is highly unlikely), my brother told me about my mother’s old lawnmower that I had talked about wanting to bring in to get fixed, instead. I know it needs a new prime pump, along with general servicing, after sitting for so long. It turns out this mower was actually theirs, originally. They’d bought another push mower for my mother, but the self propeller was too fast for her, and she couldn’t understand that if she let go of the bar, the self propeller would stop and she would just push it. This lawn mower’s self propeller wasn’t as fast, so they ended up trading, and she was very happy with that! My brother told me not to bother taking it in to be serviced. He said he would look it over and could probably fix it himself.
Which means he would be doing that here.
Which means my daughters and I will have the chance to watch and learn, and eventually be able to do it ourselves!
I look forward to that!
After a very enjoyable lunch, we parted ways briefly. They needed to shop at Walmart, too, so we crossed paths a couple of times there, too!
One of the things I wanted to do was look at the garden centre, but it was too cold for the plants to be outside. Instead, the shelves were all jammed around the outdoor furniture displays, and not really accessible. Aside from being crowded, there was a group of people that were just hanging out around the display furniture, while their kids ran around. I didn’t actually need anything, so I moved on.
The main thing I needed to get was more kibble for the outside cat and canned cat food for the inside cats. My brother had gifted me with one of his vehicle hands free devices, so I can take calls while driving. After checking with the girls at home to see if we had an extra USB-A charging cable, I ended up grabbing one for the truck. It took me and a saleswoman quite some time to find one! They only had two, and I picked the longer cable. So I can now link my phone to this device and it will automatically pick up calls for me. My brother is pretty much the only person who calls me on my cell phone – either him, or home care to say there’s no one to cover for my mother’s med assist – so I don’t expect to use it often, but it’s good to have. I never, ever, touch my phone while driving. We’ve lost friends to people talking while driving.
The shopping done, I had a much more pleasant drive home than the drive in. When I left home, it was rather nice, but the further south I drove, the worse the weather. At first, it was like there was a mist all over. Then I saw precipitation, but couldn’t tell if it was rain, or snow! Then it became very clearly snow, and coming down pretty heavy. It all melted on contact, though, so there was no accumulation anywhere. Just poor visibility!
Then it was done and gone, like driving through to the other side of a wall!
The drive home, however, was warmer and dry, which was nice. Once home, the girls helped me unload and they put the groceries away while I did the evening cat feeding, including wet cat food for the kittens. I was able to close up four of the bigger kittens in the sun room, so they could eat their fill. With the bowls that get set into the cat house entry, it’s more of a hope that they and their moms will get a chance to eat their special food (for inside the cat house, I include kitten kibble, too) before some of the other adult cats eat it all. Once they had a good long time to fill their little bellies with wet cat food, I opened up the sun room again and a daughter helped me do my evening rounds, then bring the transplants in for the night.
We’re at 5C/41F as I write this, just past 8pm. It is supposed to very slowly keep getting colder all night, reaching our expected low of 2C/36F at about 6am. That has been the coldest time of the night for the past while, too. Our daytime highs are supposed to warm up nicely over the next few days, but the overnight lows aren’t expected to get much better for some time. At least the days will be warm enough to get work done outside. Including our first mowing of the lawn, once we get the wagon out and go over it to pick up all the smaller branches that have been coming down all winter. The temperatures will be perfect for getting some manual labour done!
So overall, today has been a very good day – but then, any day when I see my brother and his wife is a very good day! 😊😊😊
It looks like we’ve got at least two blue eyes babies among the three mostly white kittens. I think we’ll call this one Zipper. In the next image, there’s a white and grey/black in a cuddle puddle inside the cat house. That one is Grommet, and I don’t think he’s got blue eyes. Eyelet is in the last image in the series, and he’s got blue eyes. It’s too early to tell with the grublings, of course. Their eyes are just starting to open, still.
After checking on the kittens, I did my evening rounds. The chitted potatoes in the portable greenhouse are clearly dead; if they weren’t already dead, the heat in there cooked them. So I brought out the new bags and laid them out in trays to get some light. Both bags of potatoes were growing, one quite a bit more than the other.
At first, I was just going to leave the trays of potatoes in the old kitchen, where they wouldn’t be affected so much by temperature extremes. It was such a lovely evening, though, I decided to prepare a bed for them.
I decided to use the bed that had been winter sown with summer squash seeds. There’s been no sign of any squash germinating. This bed already had protective netting over it, so I decided to just go for it.
The first thing to do was lift the netting off to one side and remove the support posts, for access. Then I went over it with a garden fork to loosen things before weeding it. Inside the bed was mostly crab grass and maple seedlings. Along the edges was dandelions and crab grass.
This bed has seen a few years of amending, even taking into account the whole thing got shifted over last year. Which means these potatoes are going into the softest, fluffiest soil since we’ve been gardening here. Which should also mean, bigger potatoes.
We shall see.
While weeding, I did find some squash seeds. Not a lot. There was no evidence of germination on any of them. Some felt “empty”. As if only the outer shell remained. It’s entirely possible that we’ll still have some summer squash show up later on, but I think it highly unlikely. If any do sprout, I’ll probably transplant them. Meanwhile, along with some flower seeds, I did pick up a packet of zucchini to go with my white patty pans as back up summer squash seeds.
Once the weeding was done, I used a thatching rake to create a wide, flat trench down the middle, so accommodate a double row of potatoes. I then emptied the rest of a bag of sheep manure into the trench and worked that in with a garden fork.
From there, my daughter helped me bring the trays of potatoes out. She gave the trench a thorough watering while I went through the potatoes and cut a few of the larger ones into two.
We then planted the potatoes in a double row, but found ourselves with 5 or 6 “extra” potatoes. Not enough to start another bed with. So we set them in the largest looking open spaces down the middle. Which makes things rather other crowded for potatoes but, to be honest, I don’t expect them all to make it.
Once the potatoes were set out in the trench, we mounded the soil over them and evened it out.
Then came the “fun” job of putting the supports and netting back. They’d been set pretty deep, as I was originally trying to put the mosquito netting over them, so there had been a lot of slack with the black netting I ended up using, instead. We put them back without pushing them so far down, which took up some of the slack in the netting. The twine ended up sagging more in some places and too tight in others, so it took a while to get it close to where it was supposed to be, before tacking down the edges of the netting.
That didn’t stop Magda from finding a way inside and then having trouble finding her way out again!!!
Once the netting was set and secured, the whole thing got another thorough watering.
We’re supposed to get about an hour of rain tonight. I won’t be holding my breath on that, since I kept getting notifications this morning about how long the thunderstorm was going to last, when we didn’t even have a drop of rain. It’s supposed to start raining again tomorrow evening, then keep raining all through Friday. Tomorrow’s high is supposed to be a bit on the high side, though nothing like the past couple of days, then the temperatures as supposed to drop significantly on Friday. At least we’re not expected to get temperatures below freezing on Friday and Saturday nights, but it’s still supposed to get quite close to freezing.
For now, I want the potato bed to get as much rain as possible, but when the overnight temperatures are expected to drop closer to freezing, I have plastic that’s large enough to cover the netting on the entire bed, with enough excess to weigh it down along all sides. We should have only two nights where it’s supposed to be cold enough at night, that it might kill things off.
In the photos, you can see how well the garlic is doing. We are quite looking forward to having scapes to harvest!
So, there we are! One more thing planted in our garden.
It’s just past 5:30pm as I write this, and it’s all I can do to keep my eyes open. I am SO tired! Please forgive any odd sentence structure or typos, because I’m sure I’m going to miss many when I got over things before hitting publish!
The cats had me up at about 5am this morning. I got up and fed them – the morning feeding includes kicking all the cats out of my bedroom except Butterscotch and Freya. After the dry kibble is dispensed, I pour some cat milk into a small bowl for our elederly Freya (Butterscotch gets the rest of the little carton), and then I sit beside her on my bed, holding the bowl for her while she eats until she is done. This saves her from having to jump down from the bed to eat, and she can stay all curled up in whatever cat bed she’s in.
Yeah. I’m a suck for the cats.
After a while, I let the other cats back in, then tried going to bed for a couple more hours. I swear, the cats know exactly when I fall asleep for real, and that’s when they start getting into things they shouldn’t, and start making loud noises. Or just going crazy. Tissue got the zoomies this morning. So what sleep I did manage to get was highly interrupted. I can’t even keep the door closed, because then they start scratching at it and that keeps waking me up.
The temperature had dropped to 2C/36F at 5am. By about 8am, it had warmed up to a whole 8C/46F. Which was about when I started heading out. First, the kitties got fed, and I got a daughter to help out. Not with the feeding, though. With kitten catching! Kale and Sir Robin the Brave are incredibly fast about getting into the old kitchen, and haven’t learned to stay away from moving feet, or closing doors! After luring the adult cats away with kibble, I closed the inner door into the sun room and my daughter started handing me bowls of wet cat food to set out for the littles, plus one with both wet and dry cat food for Poirot at her cat carrier nest. Another bowl with part kibble and part wet cat food went into the cat house for Caramel and her babies.
Then I continued my rounds, leaving the sun room closed up, even though all three mamas were out. The white and grey mama has been seen nursing the creche babies more often, now that her third baby is in the sun room again.
Poirot’s grublings are getting more mobile, so I set up a a bit of a shield for them.
I’ve been saving cardboard for the garden in the old kitchen, and there just happened to be a couple of pieces of cardboard that was used as spacers inside a box that were just perfect for this. In the second picture, you can see how they’re set up to cover the gap between the shelf and the wall, and cat carrier and the wall. This should be enough of they accidentally squirm out of the carrier. As they get more mobile, we might just move the carrier to the floor, so they can go in and out as they wish.
Once done with tending the colony, the first thing I do it switch out the memory cards. As I go out to the sign cam, past where the food forest is being built up. That corner gets very sun baked and dry in the summer, but these guys don’t seem to mind at all!
They are absolutely everywhere. It’s impossible to not walk on them, but they don’t seem the least bit bothered by that. I don’t know what they are, but if I had to guess, I’d say they are some type of pansy? Whatever they are, they are pretty indestructible!
The next thing was to check on the garden beds. Especially the one where I just planted peas, yesterday. I thought they were fine until I got to the northernmost end, where I saw the cats had been digging. *sigh* Hopefully, they didn’t actually dig up any seeds, but I really couldn’t tell. I was trying to figure out some way to cover things when I remembered I still have grass clippings saved to use as mulch. There isn’t a lot left, but enough to do the job!
The soil got a gentle watering, first. After the grass was laid down, that got watered down, too. Partly so it wouldn’t blow away too easily.
The plastic covered beds all got watered, too. With the sprouting seedlings, it’s hard to tell which are what I planted and which are weeks. Some that I suspected to be weeds were starting to show their true leaves, and I was correct: they are maple seedlings. So I pulled as many of those as I could, along with identifiable stuff like dandelions – so long as pulling them wouldn’t disturb any other sprouts.
The low raised bed that no longer has plastic on it got watered. I’d tried blocking off one end of the cover and hoped that would be enough protection until I could do the other end. This morning, I discovered, I was wrong.
*sigh*
After repairing the digging damage as best I could, I got creative. This is all temporary.
In the first picture, you can see I just stuck some boards across the opening. The stick holding them in place is secured at the top through the mesh, so those could only go so high, so I used what I could find to add verticals on the inside. Hopefully, the cats won’t try to jump through the gaps.
In the next picture, you can see the twine I wove through the mesh to close up the end. Again, temporary, but this should hold for a while.
After the watering and weeding was done, I headed inside for breakfast, before going back out and continuing what I hoped to get finished today.
It was almost exactly 10am and I just sat down with my food when the phone rang.
It was my mother.
No one showed up to do her med assist this morning.
I should have gotten a call, but I got nothing. My mother had tried calling the case coordinator, but it’s Saturday; her office is closed.
So I told her, I would quickly finish eating, then head out to give her her medications. She wanted me to dispense her other two meds for the day, too, in case her med assist didn’t show up for those times, either, but I refused. Got quite a mocking for following the rules. So what will you do? she asked me. Come out two more times?
I said, yes! I will!
I told her, there’s a reason your medications are in your lock box. You were messing with your medications, forgetting if you took them, etc. Oh, I wasn’t that bad, she said. Yes, you were, Mom. That’s why you have a lock box! She actually seemed to stop and think about that!
One of the things I did was write up a note and leave it in their notebook, stating that I had dispensed that morning’s medications and at what time.
I also told her that, since I was out anyhow, I would make a trip to the nearest Walmart to do a bit of shopping. I had planned to do it later in the weeks, but I could do it now. The Walmart carries 2L plastic milk jugs, which she finds easier to handle, so I told her I was thinking of getting a plastic jug for her. I did just get her a carton, but…
She does still have milk, but it turns out she had dropped the carton while trying to open it and spilled some. So more milk, in a better container, was a big yes from her!
I ended up leaving with a small shopping list and some cash. One of the things she was running low of was the topical pain killer she’s been using on her knees. She’s now using it on her back, too, so she’s going through it faster. I had already been thinking of checking that out, too, as I figured it would be a better price.
Since it was well past 11am by the time I was going to head out, I offered to make a lunch for her, but she said she had leftovers from yesterday’s Meals on Wheels, so she was fine. Once I knew she was settled, I headed out.
My first stop was actually a Dollarama that shares a parking lot with the Walmart. There were a few small things that I wanted to pick up and, of course, I went through the garden supply section. I ended up picking up four 4′ metal posts. Not T posts, but the same idea. They have hooks in the metal to hold trellis netting. They would have been perfect for what I was doing yesterday – and easier to set into the soil! We will be trellising pole beans and more peas, though, so new posts will not go amiss. I probably should have gotten more, but I should be able to get some more next month, if I need to.
After I was done at the Dollarama, it was across the parking lot to Walmart.
I got a few things that were not on my list. 😄
One thing that was on my list was more wet cat food. Since we are giving wet cat food to the kittens, we’re going through it faster. Normally, at Walmart, I pick up cases of 32. Looking at the new prices for the individual cans, though, I realized it would actually be cheaper to buy them loose, than by case lot! I ended up using some of their cardboard flats and got 48 cans of paté for the inside cats (paté works better when making cat soup) and 24 cans of chunks in gravy for the kittens.
They had sales on canned food for humans, too, and I got a flat of 24 cans of tomato soup for the pantry, too.
I also went through the garden centre. I picked up some replacement Yukon potatoes, since I’m sure the ones I’ve been chitting are no longer viable. Their herbs and vegetables were out, so I went hunting and found a few herbs. I got English Thyme, Golden thyme, two containers of oregano, lemon balm and basil. These will go into the tiny raised bed in the old kitchen garden, which has a cat proof cover already.
As for my mother’s list, the topical painkiller she uses was there – and cost $11 less than at her local pharmacy! That’s a huge difference!
The store was very busy, so it took a while for me to get everything I was looking for (and then some), and I was really tired and hungry by the end of it. I had some frozen stuff in my cart, so I stopped to get some take out that I could eat while driving, then headed out, making sure to update my family and let them know I was on my way to my mother’s, then home.
Which is when things went sideways.
Literally.
The last part of my route to my mother’s is a provincial trunk road, from one highway to another, that leads to my mother’s town. This is an east/west route.
The wind was coming from the south.
As I was driving towards an area of wide open fields, I saw the entire horizon was covered with what looked like black smoke. Once clear of some trees, I could see it swirling over the fields – but no flames.
It was dust.
Basically, the topsoil from the south side of the road was being blown to the north side of the road.
As I was being buffeted by the wind, driving through it.
Which is when I heard and felt something behind me and looked in my mirror just in time to see the cover over the box of our truck blow off, into the ditch and keep on going!
I pulled over, but by the time I did, there was no sign of the cover. I’m sure it was still being blown across that field for some time!
I had stuff in the box of the truck, and it was already getting scattered across the box. I gathered it all together and crammed it mostly into the back of the cab, making sure nothing went to the front that could get mixed up with my mother’s stuff.
I made sure that there was no way those metal posts would be able to slide and hit a window!
Once everything was put away, I continued to my mother’s place. Wow, what a difference in how the truck felt while driving! The wind swirling into the box of the truck was very noticeable.
When I was done at my mother’s, I was able to get for damage, which you can see in the second image in the slideshow above. There was enough flex on the box when the cover was torn off that it cracked the tail light cover.
But I didn’t get a chance to see that until later.
As soon as I entered her apartment, my mother, who was lying in bed, started saying, Oh, I’m so glad you’re here! I’m so glad to see you! while getting up to sit on the side of her bed.
I’m doing poorly, she tells me. Maybe I should go to the hospital. What do you think?
I certainly did not voice what I was actually thinking. My mother has cried wolf so many times, and uses having us take her to the hospital as a way of getting attention.
I asked her questions about what was going on. She was pretty vague about it; as if she expected me to already know. She told me she took one of the new pills (the T3s), but it didn’t seem to make a difference.
I told her, these pills aren’t magic. They are just stronger painkillers. As she kept on basically about what her expectations were (take pill: pain ends utterly and completely), I told her that her prescription for these is just a couple a day, morning and evening, as needed. I’m on the same pills, same dosage per tablet, and I can take up to 9 of them in total, per day. So it really depends on the individual.
She was pretty shocked that I could take so many per day, when she had a limit of two per day.
As I was putting things away, she lay back down in bed and suggested that maybe using the topical painkiller would help (confirming, finally, exactly what it was that was causing her problems this time). So that’s what we tried. She asked me to do, not only her hips (the pain is mostly just on one side), but her entire back as well. As I was doing that for her, she said to add lots, so I did it second time. As I was putting away the tube, she started saying she could feel a difference, already!
Hopefully, that will be enough.
My brother and I are planning to be there tomorrow for Mother’s Day, so we’ll be able to check on her more thoroughly, then.
Meanwhile, whenever I had a few moments, I kept my family and my siblings updated on things. I told my mother that I had frozen things in my vehicle and had to get them home, so I was soon back on the road. A daughter was sweet enough to have the gate open for me when I got in.
After everything was unloaded, and the new transplants and bags of seed potatoes secure in the portable greenhouse, it was time to feed the outside cats. I had another daughter on kitten duty, too! Other than doing a quick check to make sure none of the raised bed covers were blown away, I was more than happy to finally settle in at home.
So much for my garden and planting plans for the day! As I write this, we have continued to get warmer. It’s past 7pm now, and the temperature has risen to 24C/75F, though with the wind, it does feel a bit cooler. Not much, though! One of the local weather groups I follow on Facebook has been posting information and the coming heat way, with significant heat warnings to come.
We’re supposedly getting rain right now, though the current systems are skirting right past us. Later this evening, we’re supposed to be getting real rain. One of the things that the weather nerds that run the group noted is what appears to be pyrocumulous clouds forming in some areas! These are thunderstorm clouds that are created by heat; you might typically see them form over volcanoes, but can also form over forest fires, if the conditions are right. Scary stuff!
Tonight, the coolest temperatures are supposed to be at around 5 and 6am, at 14C/57F, and then start heating right up. The heat wave is supposed to hit us the hardest on Monday and Tuesday, but still be very hot on Wednesday and Thursday.
On Friday, the temperature is supposed to drop right down, with overnight lows of 0C/32F, and a mix of rain and snow. Saturday is supposed to be only slightly warmer.
Spring weather is so chaotic.
Well, if we can work around the hottest parts of the day, I should still be able to get at least some of those walnut seeds planted, get more areas prepped in the garden and, if all goes well, even do more direct sowing done. Chances are, though, that very little will get done until after the heat wave passes, and we’re back into cooler temperatures. At which point, we’ll be needing to protect some things from frost! For now, we’ve been able to leave our transplants in the portable greenhouse day and night, but we’ll have to bring them inside on those coldest nights.
As for me, it’s time to pain killer up and get to bed. If the cats are going to be waking me up at 5am anyhow, I may as well take advantage of it and get work done outside, before it gets too hot! I just have to work out what time I’ll be meeting up with my brother at my mother’s place tomorrow.
I’m looking forward to taking some pain killers and going to bed early, though! 😄
But first, the cuteness! While feeding the cats this evening, I got to see the grublings while their mama was outside. They are getting way more active!
While getting the container out of the cat house for Caramel and her babies, I saw a surprise through the window.
Three kittens, snuggling together in the cat bed.
The sun room kitten has found her siblings!
She didn’t say, and was soon back in the sun room for feeding time, but I’m glad that she found and was immediately accepted by them.
Also, Kale and Sir Robin are 1) insanely fast and 2) determined to go into the old kitchen. As soon as the door is open, they come bounding for the doorway. It’s actually really quite dangerous for them, because they’re doing this while I’m carrying the kibble bowl with one arm, opening the outer old kitchen door (the one with the screen window, with no screen) with the other, and trying to get through fast enough to close the inner door (the solid one) and keep the cats out. They keep getting under my feet while I’m juggling all this. I’ve already accidentally closed a door on a tail because Sir Robin basically teleported from across the sun room.
Kale and Sir Robin want people, and they want inside!
So that’s what feeding time is like these days. 😁
One of the things I wanted to do today was get our push mower to the small engine shop in town. Last summer, it got harder and harder to start until finally, after stopping to refill the gas tank, I just couldn’t start it anymore. It’s possible this is related to the fact I was unable to change the air filter all summer, because there were none to be had. I finally found one this past winter and made sure to bring it with me. While I was at the counter, this was one of the things I mentioned. The woman filling out the paperwork was very glad that I brought the filter. It seems I was not the only one to have problems finding these, last year!
Along with basic servicing (oil change, blade sharpening, etc.) they will check the self propelling mechanism, which is broken, but not in any visible way, and look for anything that could be causing the starting problem. This time of year, she told me they probably won’t have a chance to look at it until next week, which is pretty much what I’m expecting. The nice surprise was when I gave my name and contact information, and she recognized me. We haven’t met in person until now, but “know” each other on local Facebook groups. When our truck suddenly lost oil pressure and started giving the “shut engine off now” warning, her husband was the person who stopped and helped us out. I made sure to tell her to thank him again for us, briefly mentioning some of the problems we found from this happening.
That done, it was a run to the grocery store to refill our 5 gallon water jugs and pick up a few things before heading home.
By the time I was able to head outside and work in the garden it was, unfortunately, reaching the hottest part of the day. Which, thankfully, was only 17C/63F. Still hot in the sun, though. Tomorrow is supposed to be 22C/72F with high winds again, then 27C/81F on Mother’s Day, then 32C/90F on Monday! Or 32C/90F on Sunday and 34C/93F on Monday, depending on which app I look at! So now was the time to get this done.
The first thing to do was finished getting all the weeds out of the second half of the bed. By now, the soil had baked hard and had to be broke up with a garden fork again, so I could get as much of the tap roots and rhizomes out as possible. I am so thankful for that rolling seat! It’s not comfortable to sit on while reaching down that far, but still much easier on the body than bending at the waste. My doctor may want me doing squats, but my knees are too unstable to bend that far for that long!
In the first photo of the slideshow above, the bed is cleared and leveled, and the centre marked out. I wanted to set trellis support posts down the middle, along the twine you can barely see in the image. The posts I used were old T posts we found while cleaning up around the property. They’re not in good shape and several of them are way too tall for this, but they’ll do. With the first one (set at the end at the bottom of the photo), I hit something in the soil below, and it just would not go any deeper. I tried using my chisel tip digging bar. That wasn’t getting very far, either, and I ended up having to use a spade to loosen whatever it was I was hitting, before I could set the post. Thankfully, I didn’t have to do with any of the others. You can see all 5 posts in the second image of the above slide show.
At that point, I had to stop, get out of the sun and take a break. Before heading back out, I prepared my seeds.
My original though had been to do a row of peas down the centre, then plant potatoes on either side. I changed my mind and decided to do two rows of snap peas; the Sugar snap peas and the Super Sugar snap peas. I prepped markers and set the seeds to soak while I continued.
I decided to use wire mesh for the trellis instead of the plastic trellis netting that I used last year. I found that too saggy. I went to the old squash tunnel that should have been taken down a couple of years ago, and grabbed the 1″ square wire mesh from one section of it. That leaves one more section of 1″ mesh, plus another with hex chicken wire. It’s turned out to be a rather handy way to store the wire on there. 😄
I wasn’t sure if it would be long enough, so I laid it out on the grass to check, and was very happy that it wasn’t too short! Then I realized I’d set all the “teeth” of the T posts facing the other way, and had to drag it around to the other side of the bed. 😄
In the old garden shed I had a bungle of garden twist ties and brought those out to fasten the wire to the posts. The next while was spent first getting it up, then adjusting one way or the other, to get the wire snug between the posts, without pulling them one way or the other. There was enough excess wire to actually wrap around the posts at each end, and fasten it to itself. The other posts got twist ties at the top and bottom to secure it in place.
One thing about using this wire for the trellis. When the wind blows through it, it can get pretty loud!
Hopefully, we won’t need to secure the posts with tie downs. It will depend on how much trouble the wind becomes, once there’s peas actually growing up the trellis and acting like a sail.
I took a picture of the trellis after the wire was up, but you can’t really see the wire at all!
That done, I used a garden stake to draw a trench for seeds on each side of the posts, then used the jet setting to deep water the trench only. This would also break up and clumps, plus the water would naturally level the soil a bit.
Then it was time to set out the pre-soaked seeds evenly down the trenches. There were more of the Super Sugar snap peas, but this bed is long enough that they got pretty normal spacing, while the other wise got more space between each seed. Hopefully, we’ll have a high germination rate, and there won’t be any gaps!
After pushing the seeds into the ground, the trenches got another watering, this time with a flat spray; gentler than the jet setting, but still enough pressure to settle the soil over the seeds.
While I was working on this, of course there were cats going across the freshly loosened soil – and trying to use it as a litter box! So after the seeds were planted, I took the boards that were used to weigh down the solarizing plastic and set them along the sides of the bed. Hopefully, that will be sufficient, and they won’t go under the wire in the middle and start digging there. Later, mulch will be added.
I will plant something under where the boards are, later. I haven’t decided what, yet. The potatoes I’d planned on will get their own bed, I think. If they get planted at all. I may have to buy new seed potatoes. When I prepped the potatoes for chitting, they seemed to be find, but have just… stopped. No sprouts, no leaf buds, no growth. Some of the potatoes have even started to shrivel up and dry out, instead. They were sprouting in their bag when I bought them, and then just… didn’t.
I suspect our basement set up has something to do with it. I hoped they would start growing once in the warmth of the portable greenhouse, but nope. No change at all. I could – and probably will – still plant them, but I think getting more potatoes is in order. It’s not like we can have too many potatoes! It’s just a matter of space.
For now, I’m thinking and early bed time and an early start tomorrow, before the heat hits, which is supposed to be in the early evening. I’d like to get some more walnut seeds in, but I also need to start digging a trench for the asparagus crowns and bare root strawberries I picked up awhile ago. Then there’s the trellis bed that needs to have the rest of its vertical supports attached, the log frame of another bed assembled, then the bed cleared of weeds… and then… and then… and then… Lots of work to do before we can do more direct sowing and transplanting!
For all the heat we’re supposed to get within the next few days, in the long range forecasts, the temperatures are supposed to drop quite a bit, again, with overnight temperatures barely above freezing.
What we really need is rain. It’s wildfire season, and there are quite a few going right now. The closest ones to the north of us are mostly now listed as under control, but the further north you go, the bigger they are, and they are all listed as out of control. Rain and no wind. That’s what we need!
From the 10 day forecasts, we might get some next week, but just for a couple of days.
We shall see.
For now, I’m happy to have gotten that bed done, and some direct sowing accomplished! Peas really could have gone into the ground quite a while ago, but this should be okay – as long as the heat doesn’t kill them! It sure feels good to be digging in the dirt again.
Even if my body is now saying very nasty things to me right now. 😄
Despite being well anchored, the portable greenhouse still got blown over. You can see that it came apart at some of the connectors. The base wasn’t moving, since it’s well weighted down.
My daughter and I spent the next while rescuing seedlings. The damaged wasn’t as bad as I was afraid it would be, however with so much root disruption, we might lose some transplants. The tomatoes should survive, but the melons are not as hardy.
Once everything was picked up and the frame set back again, my daughter moved two of the tie downs, so it is less likely to get blown over – at least from winds in that direction! We pulled the cover down as best we could, and tried to tuck some of it under the frame itself, though the base was still weighted down so that wasn’t as thorough as it could be. My daughter brought out the clear duct tape to secure some tears. With the plastic coming loose from the zipper so much on one side, she simply taped the cover to the frame itself. We won’t be able to zip it closed anymore.
In the next picture, you can see how we’ve put everything back again, and I moved some of the soil and manure bags to weight down the side that’s getting hit by the wind so much. That, alone, will make a huge difference.
As I was picking up other things that were blown around, I heard a noise from the East yard garden beds.
Everything that had set over the plastic to weigh it down got blown off, all at once, by a single gust of wind.
I didn’t even try to put it back and simply removed the plastic completely. No chance of putting anything to close up the ends of the cover, but hopefully the cats will have no interest in going under there in this wind!
The door to the outhouse got blown open, which I actually saw as a good thing. It means it was successfully straightened out again, after the tree was removed. When the tree fell, enough weight landed on the outhouse to misalign the door frame, and the door was slightly jammed in one corner. It doesn’t have a handle on the outside to pull it open yet, which meant that we had to stick our fingers into the largest gap we could reach into and yank with our fingertips.
Other things were getting blown around, too. Thankfully, the plastic covers on the other beds are holding. No trees have been blown over that I could see. This was the largest fallen branch I found, so far.
Tomorrow, we’re going to have to go through the yard and trees to clean up fallen branches.
Depending on what app I look at, we are at either 27C/81F, 25C/77F or 19C/66F. Our winds are at 40kmh/25mph and will continue through the evening. I’ll probably head out a couple more times before it gets dark, just to check on things. Hopefully, there won’t be any more damage.
The seeds still need to be done, but they are not as urgent.
I had debated where to plant the sapling, and decided to plant is to the south of the ash tree. This location is almost straight out from the gate by the fire pit, so if we need to, it would be fairly easy to get a hose out to it. It’s also closer to the ash tree than the Korean Pine that got drowned out. When things were at their wettest, this area did get wet, but not to the point of standing water.
In the first photo, you can see the area is thick with dead thatch. I actually started out by pulling a lot of it out by hand, around the marker, before going over it again with a rake. In the second photo, you can see it after the raking. The dead grass I raked up is basically hay, so I set it aside to use as a mulch, later.
The next step was to dig out the sod around the marker. Since a sapling is going into here, I dug it wider than I would need to do if I were planting a seed.
Of course, I hit rocks.
After removing wedges of sod to the side, I dug around to loosen the soil and get it a bit deeper. Which wasn’t very deep before I started kitting gravel. Quite a while was spent finding and removing the flat pieces of rock that you can see in the next photo. These would all be from a single piece of limestone that fractured in layers, which is very typical. There was also a big chunk of granite.
The soil here is very black, very sticky and very heavy! It wanted to stick to my spade like clay.
After digging down as much as I intended to – just to the gravel layer – I went through the chunks of sod to remove any larger roots, and to loosen them up a pit. Then, leaving them upside down, I put them back into the hole, slightly beyond the edge, so the points of the wedges all sort of sunk downwards. Then a hacked at the sod around the middle with a hoe to loosen more soil and refill the hollow in the centre a bit. On top of that, I added about half of the soil I brought. My brother had a leftover bag of soil he passed on to me. After reading the label, I decided to use that instead of making our own mix.
I then used about half of the container of water I brought to water the hole before planting the walnut sapling. I wanted to make sure it would be slightly higher than what the ground level was when I started, but also wanted to make it so any rain would drain towards the middle before getting absorbed by the soil. I’d brought a collar to put around the sapling as well, which will help with both keeping it slightly higher, and also allowing water to percolate into the soil slowly around the sapling itself, rather than draining away and eroding the soil away from the transplant.
Then, since I had these handy flat rocks I needed to do something with, I set them around the sapling, on the upturned pieces of sod. This would both direct water flow towards the sapling and keep any grass or weeds from coming up around it. While this area gets pretty wet at times, we tend to have more drought conditions than flooding conditions, overall.
The marker was placed near the sapling. I forgot to bring something to gently secure the sapling to the marker, to keep it upright. Something I will want to do sooner rather than later, to keep it secure in place until its roots become established.
Last of all, the raked up hay/dried grass was set around the collar to act as a mulch. I ran out, but it was just a matter of raking nearby to get more.
Little by little, over the next while, we’ll get those walnut seeds planted at the other markers. For those, at least, they won’t need as large a hole to be dug!
After that was done, I decided to finally work on one of the garden beds that was being solarized.
Ha!
That didn’t quite work.
The thing with solarizations is, the plastic has to have direct contact with the soil. It needs to be held down tightly. Which we weren’t able to do – and with this bed, it just became a greenhouse for weeds!
In the first picture, you can see how “puffy” the plastic looks, as it gets lifted by the greenery below.
The second picture shows how completely overgrown this bed had gotten! It is mostly dandelions – which were even blooming on the north end of the bed, where it gets longer sunshine.
This bed has had a few years of amendments to it, and was completely reworked last spring, so the soil would be nice and loose. Between that and how large the weeds were, it was going to be a lot easier to clean it up than it looked! The first thing to do was go over the entire bed with a garden fork to loosen the soil and root systems. Once that was done, I brought out my little hand cultivator to loosen it more, so I could remove as much of the root systems as possible. Along with the dandelion tap roots, there were some crab grass rhizomes, and waaaayyyy too much Creeping Charlie. Creeping Charlie roots really do creep, mostly near the surface of the soil, as it spreads. These mats of roots would even get all caught up in my hand cultivator, making it easier to get them out. Unfortunately, even the tiniest remaining root can start growing and spreading, but at least I could get the bulk of it out!
While working on this, I disturbed a surprising number of frogs, and even a Wooly Bear!
With the bed so low to the ground, though, this was an uncomfortable and painful job. I brought over the rolling seat, which helped, but I was only up to weeding one side. Since this is all infested with Creeping Charlie roots, it all went into a wheelbarrow to add to the burn pile, rather than to compost.
Tomorrow, if all goes well, I’ll finish the other half of the bed and get it planted. I have decided
The caterpillar was something I ended up picking up and moving. My apologies for the terrible picture, but it was in the leaf litter under the nearby black currant bush, and I had to zoom in quite a bit!
The frog in the next picture was really tiny, so I caught that one and moved it, too. The others I disturbed were larger, and I left them to hop out of the way on their own!
By the time I was done, it was time to feed the outside cats for the evening. With giving the littles wet cat food, what I end up doing is chasing out the adult cats and closing up the door to the sun room, to give them a chance to eat. With Caramel and her babies, I set a bowl with both wet and dry cat food inside the entry to the cat house – and spotted Caramel peaking at me from around the opening inside! I couldn’t see her babies but, when looking through the window next to the entrance, I couldn’t see her babies in their cat bed, either. I went to the other window, where I could see Caramel from the other side, and could just spot her darker kitten half under her, waiting. She was already bringing her babies to the entry, expecting food for them! This is a good sign!
While tending to the kittens in the sun room, I noticed Kale’s front leg had a scab fall off, so I got a daughter to bring the cat safe polysporin to put on the leg. It’s not bleeding, and the wound is closing up, but there is still a chance of infection. There is also the wound on her back leg but, right now, there just seems to be a spot of matted fur. My daughter had to look at it while I tried to hold on to a squirming Kale. She thinks the matting is from dried puss, but she can’t see anything other than the matted fur right now. The wound there seems to have closed up. We can’t say for sure what caused these wounds, but I still think it was from being excessively licked after some squeeze treat accidentally dripped onto her while I was giving it to Brussel.
That done, I was glad to get inside and sit down to the supper my daughter had made for me – but did remember to call my mother, first. I’ve been forgetting to take her in for her monthly blood work. This time, she’s also got a requisition for fasting blood work. We are now arranged for me to take her to the lab when they open at 9am, so that she won’t have to wait too long before eating. When I told her not to eat anything with her morning pills, she told me that she would stop eating for the rest of today; the home care aid for her suppertime meds had left just before I called. I told her she could still have a snack before bed or something; just not breakfast. It seems she’s gotten it into her head that it’s somehow a morally superior thing to not eat for the rest of this evening, too. That would be way too long for her to go without eating!
I remembered to ask her about her new prescription painkillers, to find out if she’d taken them before bed, as I’d suggested, and how they worked. It turned out she hadn’t taken any at all, but was feeling enough pain that she was just about to. I’m glad I asked about it, because she thought that she was supposed to take 2 tablets at a time, “as needed”. The actual instructions are to take 1 tablet, twice a day, as needed. As we went over the instructions again, she started saying that maybe she should not take them at all until she finished her other ones – the extra strength Tylenol she normally takes. I had to explain to her that she could take both; that if, for some reason, she had taken her prescription painkillers twice, but was still feeling pain, she could safely take a Tylenol, because they are in the same family of painkillers (which is the same thing for me, with the different painkillers I’ve been tried on so far). While I was trying to explain that if she had taken the prescription painkillers, she kept interrupting me to tell me that she hasn’t taken any at all. I’d say again, yes, I know, but IF you had taken them… I haven’t taken any of them! she would tell me, again and again, cutting me off before I could finish what I was trying to explain to her! I did finally finish what I was trying to say but, by then, I’m not sure she was still following me along, or if her mind had already gone somewhere else.
So… I think she was still going to take one after we were done on the phone, and knew that she could take a second one before she went to bed if she needed to, but I am not sure what she will actually do.
She also brought up, in the middle of everything else, that she has been having troubles with her headaches and her chest. I had to ask her what she meant by her “chest”. Oh, you know… my head and my chest…
No, Mom. I don’t know! I understand headaches, but what to you mean by chest?
I had to clarify, because sometimes she complains about different physical pains in her chest, but sometimes, she means her breathing.
It turned out she meant her breathing.
I asked if she was seeing any swelling in her legs.
Oh, yes… but it’s my chest that’s the problem.
*sigh*
She then started saying that she’s fine if she is just sitting, but when she walks around, she starts having trouble breathing.
So I had to explain to her again, the doctors warned her that if she has swelling in her legs and has trouble breathing, she might need to go back to the hospital. She couldn’t make the connection between the swelling and her breathing, so I explained again that if she has swelling in her legs, that means her body is holding water, and she might have water in her lungs, too. She then wondered how this could be happening, with all the pills she’s taking.
*sigh*
She has somehow convinced herself that, because she is taking soooo many pills, she should never get sick with anything. I told her that there is only one pill she is taking that has anything to do with her swelling, and that’s her water pill. The other pills are for different things, and none of them are specifically about breathing.
We’ve had similar conversations many times, so I expect she will have forgotten it already. I did suggest that she ask the home care aid to check the swelling on her legs tonight; the last time I was there and she said she had swollen legs, when she showed them to me, they weren’t swollen at all. She actually had sagging skin, which suggests that she did have swelling recently, but it had gone down by the time I was there to see, one way or the other.
The home care office is closed, but I’ll call up the case coordinator and leave a message with her. She was at the meeting with the doctor in the hospital before my mother was discharged, so she is aware of what we were told to watch out for.
The lab I’ll be taking her to, tomorrow, is in the local hospital. Which isn’t really a hospital, since they don’t have the doctors to actually do anything, but there are Nurse Practitioners in the clinic in the same building. That’s where she had gone when they saw that she needed to be hospitalized, and she was transferred to a hospital that has actual doctors, a functioning emergency room and can admit patients.
At this point, my mother being hospitalized again could actually be another of those “blessings in disguise” when it comes to getting her into some sort of assisted living or long term care situation, like she wants so much. With the updates to her panel application for long term care, it might just be enough to get her in.
The first image is under the cover of the low raised bed in the East yard. This one has a root vegetable mix of seeds, plus 1 type of lettuce and onion seeds. There are a lot of sprouts in there! I’m guessing mostly radish and beets. I’m not seeing signs of carrots or onions sprouting, but it’s really hard to tell at this point.
This bed was getting the most difficult to tend to with the high winds, so when I took the cover off to water it, I spent a lot of time securing the plastic after the cover was put back on. The plastic on all the beds is meant to be there only until the plants establish themselves and don’t need as much warmth or protection. It will likely be replaced with netting later in the season. So securing the plastic involves a lot of rolling and carefully tucking under the frame. With this one, that also meant completely redoing how it was weighted down on top. Hopefully, it will hold. We’re expecting high winds again, in a few days.
There wasn’t much to see in the high raised bed or the ground level bed with mixed flowers in it. There are sprouts, but not very many. The main thing is, they are no longer being dried out by the wind, nor dug into by the cats!
The next picture is of the old kitchen bed. There is quite a bit of spinach coming up in there, and I can even see tiny onion sprouts. The cluster of larger leaves visible came up very early and I thought it had to be a missed onion from last year, but now I can see that these are most definitely garlic. We had garlic planted in here, two years ago! I did try to pull things that were most obviously weeds – crab grass and dandelions – but only if I could do so without disturbing any seedlings, so there wasn’t a lot I could pull.
The other winter sown beds got watered as well. I think the summer squash bed, and the end of the garlic bed, are lost causes. The only things coming up in the summer squash bed is clearly not summer squash, and the few feet of the garlic bed shows nothing at all. I don’t think they made it!
There are more sprouts coming up in the mesh covered bed at the chain link fence, though still just the one pea shoot. This is the bed that has Dalvay shelling peas, a few King Tut purple, Royal Burgundy bush beans, Hopi Black Dye and Mongolian Giant sunflowers, a few black Montano Morado corn seeds, plus onion seeds. So there should be more pea seeds showing, as peas prefer to germinate in cooler soil. That suggests to me, most of the peas did not survive the winter. As for the sprouts I am seeing, about all I can say right now is that none of them are corn.
Unfortunately, while covering the bed with netting will protect it from the Chinese Elm seeds that are forming right now, the net only partially protects from the cats. There are a few smaller cats that are absolutely determined to get under the netting. Then, when I go to get them out, instead of leaving through the open space next to them that they got in on (the netting slides on the wire hoops), they run down the length of the bed, bashing themselves against the netting every now and then, in a panic. Or, like this morning, they simply climb on top of the netting and play on it! This set up wasn’t designed to actually hold that kind of weight, so quite a few of the wire hoops are now bent out of shape. It is really frustrating.
This bed is still made with temporary materials. Along the path side and ends is loose bricks. The chain link fence there are old boards to keep the soil from spilling through. When we finally have the materials to make it more permanent, we will need to keep protection in mind. It’s not enough to just cover it with netting to keep the elm seeds from smothering the bed, stop the cats from using it as a litter box, or keep the deer from eating whatever is grown there. We need the cover set up to be able to hold the weight of cats – we just can’t keep them from going right on top of any of the covers!
The cover that we have over the old kitchen garden bed is the one that was made using fence wire. When it was done, I swore I never wanted to work with that again! It’s so thick, I had to double up the frame on the sides to secure it in between, then double up the ends, just to keep it from falling apart. However, while it was on the high raised bed, I found it worked out really well, in that I could reach through the wire to tend to the bed, without having to remove it. The openings are not all the same size, though. It’s meant to be installed with the narrower openings at ground level to keep small critters out, while the larger openings at the top are all that’s needed to keep mid sized critters out. Which means there are spaces where I cannot fit my hands through, but I can still reach around from other openings.
The wire is also strong enough that no support hoops were needed. Not only can it hold itself up, but when the plastic was placed over it and the cats started jumping on it, it held their weight, too!
The cover that’s on the winter sown bed in the East yard is almost there. The hoops are strong enough to hold weight; especially now that I’ve secured them permanently, and they no longer slide through the pieces of metal strapping I used to hold them in place. I originally thought it would be useful to be able to remove the hoops at some point, but that potential convenience caused more problems than solved any. They do, however, still bend inwards, slightly. Particularly the ones at the ends.
The hoops are supporting a plastic mesh that is stiffer than netting, but more flexible and easier to work with than hardware cloth. As you can see in that first photo, it’s wide enough that it creates more shade, so this is a cover that would be idea to use for things like lettuces, which like more shade. The plastic mesh does sag when the cats jump on it. My plan is to add horizontal supports in between the hoops. These would keep the hoops at the ends from being pulled inwards, plus keep the plastic mesh from sagging downwards. I am hoping it will only need horizontal supports across the very top, but it might need more halfway up each side, too.
Once the plastic sheet is no longer needed, I will have to put something across the open ends, to keep the cats out. I have some black plastic mesh that should work out well, once I figure out how to secure it!
I don’t want to be spending too much time or effort on these covers, though. These were my first experimental raised bed covers. Now that I know how these have been working out, I plan to build new ones using better and stronger materials, taking into account what we have found works, or doesn’t work, with these ones. These ones still have a few years in them, though, and we will keep building more raised beds, so we will need more covers as time goes by.
Meanwhile, as I was watering the bed at the chain link fence, I took a good look at the haskap bushes.
*sigh*
I have one “Mr. Haskap” and two “Mrs. Haskap” bushes – cross pollinating varieties. With haskap, you need two varieties for cross pollination. The “Mrs. Haskap” is the Borealis variety. I can’t remember what the “Mr. Haskap” is, but that one still has its label, so I can check later.
The first image is the “male” haskap. It’s leafing out beautifully and, in the second picture, you can see it even has flower buds forming!
The next two photos are the “female” haskaps.
The larger one was bought at the same time as the Mr. Haskap and, at one point, I was sure that one had died. It has barely any leaves opening on it. The smaller one is still really small, even though it’s only one year behind the other two. At least it has more leaves, but still, they are way behind their pollinator variety! This is why, after all these years, we’ve never had more than a small handful of berries. They simply aren’t blooming at the same time long enough for proper pollination.
The varieties I have coming later in the month are Aurora (the pollinator) and Boreal Blizzard. These will be planted out in the food forest area, near where the apple and gooseberry just got planted. The Opal plum should be shipped at the same time as the haskap, and it will be planted in that area, too.
Hopefully, this will work out better than what we’ve got now, and we’ll finally have berries to eat! Two bushes should be enough to meet our needs; they are supposed to be quite productive. We’ve got three, and have barely had enough to taste.
At least we know we like them!
So that is how things were in the garden this morning. With today being a calm day, I hope to get back out there soon, and get some work done!
As things got hotter in the afternoon, I headed out again, hooking up an extra hose to the front tap to water that bed again, as the winds are drying everything out. Inside the portable greenhouse, it was above 50C/122F. Since this is just a plastic covered frame, there is no way to vent the heat, other than to keep the door tied fully open. So I misted everything in there, several times, to try and cool things down. Even the chitting potatoes got misted, a little bit.
The wind was threatening to blow away the plastic covers in the East garden bed and on the high raised bed. The heavier plastic on the old kitchen garden bed cover was handling things much better, even though that cover is slightly elevated by bricks and whatnot, allowing some air flow underneath. I did open up one end and gave it a watering, too. Normally, I would have lifted the cover off completely to water that bed, but that was just not going to happen with this wind!
The covered raised bed in the East yard was getting hit the worst. I ended up tying some more sticks together to drape across the top, but they were still too light. This bed did get a watering, too, and I kept tucking the excess plastic under the frame itself, but the wind kept blowing it loose. I even tied it down around the entire base of where the mesh connects with the frame, but that just got blown loose, too. Eventually, I raided a pile of rocks I’d taken out of the sun choke bed and stacked against the garage, grabbing the larger ones, and using them to weigh down the edges more, rolling them up in the excess plastic where I was able.
The high raised bed was also being blown around like a balloon. Even the extra hoops on the outside of the plastic were getting pulled loose from the stakes they were set on. I used the 3′ extra piece of pipe at one end to give a bit more something to keep the plastic from ballooning in the wind. Between that and the stone and board I already had to secure it, it finally held.
This bed got a pair or sticks joined with twine draped over it, too. These sticks were heavier, but still not heavy enough. I had already used rocks rolled up in the excess plastic as weights, but they were not heavy enough, so I raided another rock pile for larger ones to weight the edges. One of the hoops on the outside kept getting blown loose and I finally had to find a longer piece of bamboo stake – going from about an 8″ piece to one almost 2 feet long – before I could finally secure one end enough that it couldn’t get blown loose again. Once that end was secure, the other end was no longer being pulled loose.
In between fighting with the wind, going back and forth between the two beds, I also set up several hoses from the back tap to the main garden area and got a daughter to open the valve in the basement. I managed to water inside the high raised bed cover first. I’ve got one of those long reach spray guns and the sprayer end can be adjusted up and down. I had it spraying upwards, into the plastic, to rain down, so I wouldn’t accidentally damage the sprouts under there with water pressure. The weight of the water also helped with securing the plastic cover a bit.
The garlic bed also got a thorough watering, including the end that has the same mix of seeds as the high raised bed. The bed winter sown with summer squash got a thorough watering, too. There are things sprouting in the squash bed, but definitely not any squash seedlings, yet!
The one bed I didn’t have to do anything with is the one with flower seeds winter sown into it. When my daughter and I covered that one with plastic last night and weighted down the edges with bricks, I ended up using the mulch set to one side and basically burying the edge of the plastic along that side. That was all it took to keep that bed’s cover from being blown around! I could also see condensation inside the plastic, so I knew it wasn’t going to need watering yet.
Tomorrow, we’re expecting heat again, so I’ll be doing more watering early in the day. I’m hoping the wind will die down by then. One of my weather apps says possible rain tomorrow might, but looking at more detail, it’s only a 1 or 2% chance of rain. So I’m going to keep watering.
Weather willing, I am hoping to get to the outer yard and transplant that Walnut sapling. The way things are going, I’m going to shoot to do just one planting out there a day, starting with the sapling that should have already been planted by now. The walnut seeds are less urgent for planting. Each is going to be a big job on its own. I’m rather dreading to see how many roots I will be hitting when I try to dig transplant holes!
I watched this video this morning, and I might be changing up a few things.
After watching the video, I checked and it seems our last average frost date has changed from June 2 to May 21-31. This is based on the town to the north of us, which is now the same as the town to the East of us. The town to the East of us had a last frost date of May 28, so it’s still in that range now.
This means that, once I get the beds ready, we should be able to get things into the ground about a week earlier than I expected to. Some of the direct sowing can be done now, if I had beds ready for them. I’ve got a couple of beds solarizing that will be easier to prep, and I want to get the potatoes in soon. We still need to finish building the trellis supports on one of the low raised beds, but the climbers I want to plant there can be planted before the trellis is ready.
We’re supposed to cool down to more reasonable temperatures in a few days, then get hot again. The overnight lows are still expected to drop to just above freezing a few times. We’ll see how it actually turns out, when the time comes!
For all the fighting with the covers in this wind, I’m glad we got them on.
On a related note, the water table is high enough that I had to set up a the blower fans in the old basement, where water is starting to seep through. The sump pump has even gone off a couple of times, which will be great for the bed in the old kitchen garden it is set up to drain at. My brother came over again today and checked on the ejector; the stand pipe still has ice in it, but with this heat, I’ll be testing it more often, to see if we can finally start getting through the venturi pipe. Even if it’s just a dribble, once fluid starts going through, it will thaw out faster at the bottom.
It’s hard to imagine, with how hot it is today, that the ground is actually still frozen further down!
The Re-Farmer 