Okay, I definitely over did it yesterday. Which happens a lot faster these days, then it used to!
I was preemptive on things, though. Before going to bed, along with my usual painkillers, I made sure to treat all the usual muscle groups that I’ve had Charlie horse issues with, with Tei Fu lotion. Just in case.
Once outside this morning, I did my usual rounds, starting with feeding the kitties. Including these hungry little wildlings.
I didn’t see the garage kittens until much later, and not both at the same time, but they are there, and getting their own bowl of kitten food. I should start moving the bowl closer to the back door, to encourage them to go into the yard and discover all the amenities, awaiting them!
I should have watered the garden this morning, but my body was giving me a great big FU on the subject. I did manage to get a tiny little harvest, though.
Just a few Spoon tomatoes. In the next photo, there’s a few sugar snap peas, the Spoon tomatoes, a few tiny little strawberries from the old kitchen garden and some raspberries. I was able to leave a bowl full of berries and tiny bowl with the Spoon tomatoes for my husband, as a morning treat when he woke up.
Once back inside, I pain killered up and went back to bed for a few hours.
Being old and broken really sucks sometimes – and I’m still almost the most able bodied person in the household! Both girls are feeling better, though, hence the “almost”. My younger daughter still has to watch herself with the wrist, and has been doing mild recovery exercises. I heard her talking with her sister today, marveling at how much better her wrist feels, even with the remaining pain and discomfort from the surgery, without Squidly wrapped around the bones. She’s so happy to have been able to get that done!
On a completely different note, thanks to some assistance from my older daughter, I was able to pay the deposit for getting the main door and frame replaced. We had 30 days to accept the estimate. After that, we’d have to get a new estimate and, with the way prices are going up, the cost would likely increase if that happened. I’m okay with them taking a while to get the job done, though. That’ll give us time to raised the balance without having to use more debt. *sigh* It needs to be done, though. It’s not like we can go a winter with nothing but a storm door there!
Ah, well. It is what it is. We’ll manage. We always do!
I was going to simply say “the morning,” until I realized it’s not even 10am yet. 😄
We had the crock pot going all night, making food for the outside cats. I was up early to take the bones out and finish making the “cat soup”, so it had more time to cool down at least a bit before it was time to feed the kitties.
They really miss their kibble! Even the inside cats. You’d think they would find having all wet cat food would be a real treat for a change, but no. They keep begging for kibble!
I’ve heard from my brother this morning. They’ll be able to go into the nearest town to switch the insurance, so we can drive their vehicle legally. That’ll take a couple of hours so, once I get the word, I’ll be making a trip to pick up kibble. Which is good, because we’re almost out of the meaty bones we’ve been using to make the cat soup base for the outside cats. Doing this has certainly made more room in the chest freezer!
The yard cats still seem a bit perplexed about the cat soup they’ve been getting. They’re eating it, but they don’t prefer it. Except the really feral ones. The ferals will scarf down anything.
I did leave a bowl of food in the garage for the secret kitties, just in case. I have no idea where the mama moved then, but she still comes back to the garage – that’s her “home”, it seems – and I’m hoping her kittens are old enough to come out on their own and go back to a familiar place. Or, better yet, discover the inner yard, and all the things in there for the kitties.
I did see three of the four other feral kittens this morning. Colby is definitely the bravest of the bunch.
I love that first picture! I caught him in a yawn (just guessing he’s a he, because gingers are more likely to be male). He watched me from the tree and let me come pretty close. Later, I saw him going into the isolation shelter, where there was still some food left in the bowls in there.
I was able to get a surprisingly good picture of his torie sister. I had to zoom in from quite a distance.
I might have seen the white and grey, but I’m not sure. We have several really small adult white and greys, and this kitten is almost as big as they are. When they’re running around all over, it can be very hard to tell who I’m looking at.
After the kitties were fed, I did my morning rounds. I did not need to do any watering today, so they didn’t take too long. I did pick some sugar snap peas this morning, but it wasn’t really enough even for a day’s meal.
So I ate them for breakfast.
I thought there would be raspberries to harvest, but not really. There are lots of red berries, but they’re not “ripe”. Between the heat and the lack of rain, the berries don’t have a lot of moisture in them, so they aren’t letting go when I try to pick them, unless they’re almost over ripe. I’ve been trying to water the patch when I can, but it would need me to set up a sprinkler for an hour, every few days, to make up for the lack of rain this year. So I’ve been snacking on a few raspberries in the morning, but there really isn’t enough to do an actual harvest.
While checking on the eggplants, looking for flowers, I found this.
Give the location, I would guess it is a Black Cherry tomato, as that’s what was growing here, last year. No chance of it reaching maturity, this late in the season, but I’ll leave it be. If the eggplant seems to be covering it too much, I might transplant it to where it can get more light, but that’s about it.
I did find some eggplant flowers, on another plant.
They were set back quite a bit by that one cold night last month, so it’s good to see them recovering. Hard to say if they still have enough season to produce eggplants to full maturity, though. If we get a long and mild fall, they might have a chance.
Before heading inside, I did one last harvest of rhubarb. I’ve been leaving them without harvesting for quite a while, giving them plenty of time to recover from the previous harvest. After today, they will be left to recover and store their energy to survive the winter.
I trimmed the leaves and ends outside and took advantage of their huge leaves, using them as a mulch around where my daughter’s surviving double daffodils are trying to grow. Just one cluster has emerged, and they’re not doing well. We certainly won’t be getting any flowers from them this year, but if they can last long enough, hopefully their bulbs will have enough energy stored to grow and bloom next year.
Once the rhubarb was trimmed outside, they got a thorough washing inside before being cut up.
Years ago, I read in a homesteady/pioneer living type book (I no longer remember where; it wasn’t in the book I thought it was in) that growing radishes for their roots only is a pretty recent thing. Our pioneers more often grew them for their seed pods, and that they were often pickled.
I am not a fan of radishes, though my family is okay with them. I was curious to find out if I would like the seed pods, instead, and wanted to know what they were like, pickled.
The past few years, I’ve tried to grow radishes with very little success. They either didn’t germinate, germinated but got eaten by something, or when they finally did grow, they didn’t grow well. The one time a radish bolted and went to seed, it was too late in the season for any pods to develop.
This year, I put the last of my old radish seeds, plus some from a seed pack I was given, into my root vegetable seed mix that was direct sown in the fall. I can’t remember exactly, right now, but there was at least four, possibly five, varieties in the mix.
For the first time, we got radishes! Including yellow ones. Some of them immediately bolted – with the heat we had, that is no surprise – which I was quite happy with.
They do grow into a rather large and pretty plant! The seed pods that have been developing have ranged from a little, round pea sized ball to long and slender pods. Some all green, some with red stripes. The branches of the plants tend to be somewhat fragile, though.
I’ve been snacking on radish pods while doing my rounds or tending the garden for a while now. I definitely like them better than radish roots. I find they have a mild radish taste, and just a hint of a kick to them. They have a nice, satisfying crunch.
Since I never found where I’d read about pickling the pods, and the recipe I think was there as well, a friend was a sweetheart and sent me this link. Interestingly, the beginning of the post describes the pods as being more intensely flavoured than the roots. I wonder if the variety makes the difference, because I find it to be the complete opposite! It does say “winter radishes” tend to be milder than spring or summer ones, but I can’t tell if they mean varieties, or sowing time. If it’s sowing time, then that would explain why I find ours to be milder, not more intense, in flavour.
Last night, my older daughter was able to mixed up a double batch of the brine from the website, so that it would be fully cooled down by morning.
The recipe calls for both rice vinegar and white wine vinegar. I’m not sure if we had any white wine vinegar left, and keep forgetting to ask my daughter, but if we were out, she would have used basic white pickling vinegar (5% acidity).
This morning, I picked a whole bunch of the larger pods, shooting for about 4 cups worth, in total.
I collected from the bed in the East yard garden first, which is most of what you can see in the colander in the first photo above. The pods there were all long and slender. The big plant in the high raised bed was mostly the round “pea” looking ones, but there were a few longer ones. Plus, there are a couple of other plants in there.
After collecting the radish seed pods, I also gathered some sugar snap and super sugar snap peas as well. I’ve tried and compared both varieties. I find the flavour is pretty much the same, but the sugar snaps tend to be a touch for fibrous. Stripping the top of pod, where the flower is, and removing the string gets rid of that.
Once inside, they all got a good wash and I left the radish pods to soak while I separated out the peas and put them in the fridge for later.
When it was time to set everything up, I lifted the seed pods into a measuring cup, and it seemed to be just a bit under the 4 cup mark. I was using two 500ml jars for this, so I thought I might be a bit short. In the end, I found I had some left over! They aren’t easy to pack into the jars. I didn’t want to crush them.
Since this is just a quick pickle, I filled the jars with the brine to the top, and used screw on caps instead of lids and rings.
I found myself with some extra brine, too.
I ended up making a third jar with the pea pods jammed into the bottom, then the last of the radish seed pods on top, then emptied most of the leftover brine into it. I didn’t bother taking a picture, though. All three jars are now in the fridge, and we will taste them tomorrow.
One thing I can say from the start about the difference between growing radishes for their roots, or their seed pods. Growing them for their pods would be more efficient. You can grow lots of radishes for their bulbs, and each one is one bulb, and it’s done. They’re all used up. When growing for their pods, one radish plant can provide a surprising amount of edible pods. So just a few radish plants would give you enough pods for both fresh eating and for preserving.
As long as the deer don’t eat them first!
If all goes to plan, I’ll be writing about how they turned out, by tomorrow evening!
It was just at one end of the bed in the east yard, and there’s still plenty left. What I ended up doing is gathering pretty much the last of my support stakes to create a carrier around three sides. Hopefully, it will be enough of a deterrent.
This morning, I “stole” kibble from the inside cats and made a big bowl of cat soup for the outside cats. There isn’t enough kibble to do that again. There’s plenty of wet cat food for the inside cats, but not enough for the outside cats, too, other than what I had already been using to make kitten soup on top of the dry kibble feedings.
I made sure to leave a bowl of food in the side of the garage where the kittens are, leaving one of the doors open. This would be their first taste of anything besides what their mama has been bringing – and she’s been acting very hungry when she comes to the house by herself. I did see the kittens run and hide but that was it.
My plan was to head to the feed store, using my brother’s vehicle, when they opened at 9am. I found their website and they’re open for short hours on Saturdays and closed on Sundays.
Thankfully, my brother messaged me, first.
I thought they’d gone into town yesterday about the insurance on their old vehicle stored here, but it turns out they ran out of time because they stopped to help me with the broken down truck, instead. They checked the insurance this morning, and saw they had only storage insurance on it. It can’t be legally driven.
The public insurance company wouldn’t let them change the insurance online or over the phone. They would have to come in, in person.
They are at a campsite with their son and grandsons right now, and the nearest insurance place is closed on Saturdays.
After much searching to find another location that was open today, the nearest one turned out to be over 2 hours drive away. Which meant at least 6 hours to do the drive, switch the insurance, then drive back again.
No. Not going to happen.
My brother was so apologetic!
I assured him, the only thing we needed was dry cat food, and we’ve got wet cat food we can use for now.
We are, however, completely stuck at home, with no transportation.
The feed store website said they could do deliveries, though. So I called them up and left a message, saying what I needed and asking if they could deliver to where we are.
Because they were on short hours today, I tried again about an hour later, and left another message.
They never called back.
So, no kibble delivery.
After looking at our options, we got some meaty soup bones out of the freezer and started those going, boiling the bones for a couple of hours, then putting the meaty bits back into the stock. I ended up making a very modified cat soup, thickened with a bit of rice, using the immersion blender to make the meaty chunks smaller, plus adding and a couple of cans of regular cat food. I even tossed the bones out for them to pick at, and for the raccoons to chew on, later in the night.
When I set that out, the cats were… confused. They would eat it, but not for long. They seemed to like it, but maybe not like it, but they did like it? But not… 😄
The more socialized cats, that is.
The more feral cats inhaled it. I ended up moving a tray I’d put on the cat house roof that was being ignored, under the shrine for the feral kittens, because they’d already finished off what I’d put there earlier. I wanted to make sure there was enough for the two shier ones. I also put a bowl in the garage again.
When I went to check on the bowl I’d left in the garage, it was already empty, and the mama was licking it clean.
I did my evening rounds, then came back to retrieve the bowl.
The mama, Pinky – a grey tabby with white, and a very pink nose – is one that has let me pet her at times. While I was in the garage, she was acting totally feral, but wasn’t quite ready to run off and abandon her babies.
The babies ran into the stuff in the corner, but did come out to take a look at me.
I thought the one was looking very Siamese, but maybe not? From the red glow in the picture (no, the flash did not go off), I’m thinking it might have eyes like Ghosty. That fur colour is soooo interesting! It gets darker towards the tail, and the tail is almost black.
When I had the chance, I messaged the Cat Lady, who is out of town right now. She’s mentioned to me that she only makes her own cat food now – and that’s for a LOT of inside cats – so I asked her for her recipe. I’ve tried looking up recipes, especially for “costs less than store bought!” recipes.
Yeah… no.
Not only did they tend use expensive meats, like rabbit, but they all included supplements that would require a trip to a health food store, and are also very expensive. Yet these recipes all claim to be cheaper than store bought cat food?
It turns out the Cat Lady just uses chicken drumsticks. That’s it.
She had less than flattering things to say about the online recipes.
The only exception is The Wolfman, who is allergic to poultry. He gets a salmon fillet a day, plus some herring dry kibble.
Oh, the tragedy… 😄😂
We actually do have a big family pack of drumsticks in the freezer right now, but we won’t use that unless we absolutely have to. We can use a meaty bone broth as a base, along with some leftover cooked meats and other suitable ingredients.
To make things easier for tomorrow, we’ll put more bones in the crock pot overnight, for the morning cat soup.
There were, of course, all the other usual things that need to be done, but by the time I was doing my evening rounds and seeing that the garden needed to be watered, in spite of rain we got early this afternoon, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to do it. The last few days have drained me completely, and I’m burning out.
The worst of it is, I’m the most able bodied person in the household right now.
My younger daughter is still limited in what she can do while her wrist heals. She does as much as she can, though. Her sister, however, is down with PCOS related… issues, shall we say… She can’t lift, bend or stretch in any way at the moment, without unfortunate consequences.
My husband, of course, is pushing it just to go from his room to the kitchen or to the bathroom.
Thank God my daughter was able to get us all that early birthday take out food before we lost use of the truck! All we’ve had to do for the past couple of days is just reheat leftovers.
Still, I can feel myself giving out. I’ve tried to rest as much as I can, taking naps when I get the chance, but there’s just been too many things in too short a time.
I need to slow down and pace myself, but there’s so much that needs to get done. Thankfully, the temperatures will continue to be more reasonable for the next while, so at least I’ll be able to have some progress with the outside projects I’m falling behind on, little by little. We just have to watch for the smoke. We’re still under air quality warnings, and it’s still pretty bad. Everything is under a haze of smoke right now.
Little by little, it’ll get done.
I just wish it wasn’t quite so little, some times!
After a morning that turned out to be way more hectic than it should have been, going out to water the garden was a much needed stress reducer!
It actually did start raining a bit while I was watering, and it’s rained a bit more since then, but so little, the watering was still needed.
What I’d really like to see is a whole lot of rain going over all those wildfires. Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be happening in the near future.
When watering the beds in the south east yard, I noticed more missing tops of greenery along one side of the winter sown bed. I’m actually not too worried about that, as the deer aren’t eating the radish pods I want to keep. I do have some lettuces I’m leaving to go to seed, though, so I might have to do something to protect what’s left in this bed. The other two have netting around them, and the little square bed has plastic around it. The deer can reach over, but I don’t think they like winter squash or corn plants. Corn cobs, yes, but not the plants.
It was when I got to the main garden beds that I found more damage.
Most of the damage was in the high raised bed, which is really just the right height for a deer buffet. A whole lot of beet greens disappeared. In the trellis bed (the next image in the slide show above), a single Hopi Black Dye sunflower lots its top. It will probably grow a new one, though.
While doing the watering, I was seeing all sorts of frogs coming out of the mulch. Some of them were huge! Well… huge for our native varieties of frog, that is.
There was one tiny one that emerged that really caught my attention, though. Would you look at that colour!!!
What an incredible green! That is not a common colour for frogs here, at all. It’s almost metallic.
I did the trees in the outer yard, too. To do that, I drag the hose out to the outer yard, where it almost reaches one of the Korean pines. Then I go back to get a couple of watering cans. I keep those next to the rain barrel (which still isn’t even half full) with water in them, so they don’t blow away.
Since they already have water in them, I got straight to the two furthest walnut trees. The one seed that had been almost dug up did survive, and a seedling has finally emerged!
As I was watering it, I notice the watering can seemed to be getting clogged. That happens a lot with this can. It has some algae, I guess it is, stuck to the inside that I haven’t been able to get off. It comes off in bits, which then clogs the holes in the rose. When that happens, I take the rose off and use the water to rinse off the stuff clogging it while still watering the plant.
Except that there wasn’t anything clogging the rose.
Then something landed in my hand before falling to the ground.
First, I grabbed some support posts and traded them out for three of the post I have with pinwheels at their tops. I put a couple in the corners of the high raised bed, where the beets are, and one at the end of the trellis bed where the sunflowers can be reached. The other end doesn’t have anything the deer like near the end, and the side that doesn’t have the trellis netting is lined with onions, which are a bit of a deterrent for deer, so it was really just the one end that needed something.
In the high raised bed, I put overlapping hoops on the sides, and one at the end. I set the hoops under the radish plants, so they’re not hanging almost to the ground anymore. Then I added a hoop to each end of the trellis bed, including the one that didn’t really need it. The asymmetricy without it was bugging me. 😄
I deer can still stick it’s head through, but they don’t have good depth perception, so I’m hoping the extra things in the way will prevent more carnage.
There is one massive turnip in the high raised bed. I’d left it to go to see, but it’s not bolting. What I thought was from the turnip turned out to be from another radish.
I need to look up recipes for pickling radish pods. I’ll have enough to harvest to be able to fill at least a pint sized jar or two, to do a quick pickle. Now that we finally have radish pods, it’s our grand experiment to see if we want to do this again next year – which would mean planting them this fall. I did order icicle radish seeds, but those won’t be grown for their pods (thought I might let one go to seed to actually collect seeds.
Anyhow. We’ll see how the new additions to to keep the deer from chomping more of my veggies!
After what happened with our vandal yesterday, my older daughter joined me while doing my morning rounds. My own personal bodyguard.
Nothing was untoward; he didn’t come back and vandalize anything in the night. I’ve gone through the trail cam files. It was interesting to see that he had stopped at the end of our driveway with his tractor, when going in the other direction, before my incident with him happened. He didn’t actually do anything other than look like he was about to climb down, but then kept on going. It’s like he was just looking to start something, so the timing of my coming home as he was returning was an “opportunity” he couldn’t pass up on.
This morning, however, has been routine, other than extending my rounds to include more of the outer yard. My watering last night was thorough enough that I didn’t need to water again this morning. Which is good, because we never really cooled down during the night. We apparently briefly dropped to 20C/68F at about 6am, and immediately started heating up again. We’re supposed to hit 31C/88F or higher today. We’ve got severe thunderstorm warnings and, to be honest, I’d love a good thunderstorm right now. It’s really muggy out there. Everything seems to be passing to the north and south of us right now, but there is a large system making its way across the prairies that might reach us, maybe by tomorrow. We shall see.
The yard cats were already feeling the heat. They got their kibble and kitten soup – I actually saw Sprout eating inside the isolation shelter, though she ran off right away. I refilled the garbage can “heat sink” reservoir in the greenhouse, as it will actually help cool things down during the day. The luffa pots are on the ground, where it’s coolest, and they are heat loving plants, but I don’t want them to get cooked!
After filling the reservoir, the water in the hose was almost cold (our well water usually gets ice cold, even in the summer), so I refilled all the cat water bowls. The one in the sun room was filthy. I heard distinctive racoon noises in the sun room last night. When I went to chase out the racoon, I spotted the two baby racoons, struggling to hide between the lower window and the counter shelf. One couldn’t quite squeeze in after the other. So I left them be. They do leave the water bowls incredibly filthy, though!
I also put frozen water bottles in all the water bowls. By the time I finished my rounds, they were almost thawed out already. I will switch them out, once the previous ones have had a chance to freeze again.
While checking on the grapes before coming inside, I spotted an adorable Eyelet.
That top step to the storage house is a favourite spot for many cats!
With the heat, manual labour outside is not going to happen today. So we made other plans. My older daughter is treating us to Chinese food, as I have a birthday this month. We’ll be loading up on the proteins, as we can do the vegetables and rice ourselves. The girls are thinking of doing a stir fry, so I went out to gather a few things to include with some of the vegetables I harvested yesterday.
Just enough for today. There’s a variety of radish pods from both beds with them, plus a few of both types of sugar snap peas. Then I figured, why not? and gathered a few herbs. The plants aren’t very big, so I didn’t want to pick much. On the right is some basil, with a few lemon balm leaves, sage in the middle, a few sprigs of thyme – just one sprig of the lemon thyme, as it’s smaller than the English thyme – and then some dill fronds on the left. These are self seeded, so picking these was a bit like weeding. There are even some poppies coming up – most likely the “wild” double poppy that’s been growing in that area since before we moved here. I did try growing bread seed poppies in this location before, but when it comes to self seeding, it was the old variety that has been coming up, just like the dill has been, for years!
We’ll be heading out this afternoon, when the post office reopens, to pick up a package along the way. We had tried to get my daughter a cane for her birthday, ordering one from Etsy, but that never made it, thanks to the delivery company f*****g with us. My husband contacted the maker about it and they took our physical address, but nothing came of it and, as far as I know, my husband was never refunded the money.
So he bought another cane for my daughter, from somewhere else, and it came in yesterday. The store the post office is in closes at noon on Wednesdays, so by the time my husband got the email notification, we couldn’t pick it up anymore.
We’ll pick it up today, then go to town to pick up the food order. My younger daughter will be coming with me.
Her surgical site is doing fantastic, as is her recovery. So fantastic, she’s had to wear a wrist brace, just to keep from using her hand too much. She has full mobility, and the pain of the surgery is far less than the pain of the ganglion. She is so thrilled to have finally evicted Squidly!
She also finally got the call back from the endocrinologist today, confirming an appointment in October. We’ve looked up the clinic address in the city. I am not looking forward to trying to find parking! It’s basically in the heart of downtown. There are plenty of parkades to choose from, but the streets are all one way and it’s always a hot mess of stupid traffic, a major transit hub and suicidal pedestrians. I used to work in the area, many years ago, and even lived across the river from there. So I still sort of know it.
Really not looking forward to driving around there. We’ll have to make sure to leave extra early, to give plenty of time to drive in circles to get into where we want to go.
With today’s heat, I chose a job that had me mostly in the shade.
It was still way too hot, which was bad enough on its own. Being eaten alive by mosquitoes while I worked was brutal! Gotta find our cans of bug spray!
The goal for today in this bed was simply to weed it and move the soil away from where the wattle weave wall will be.
The first couple of pictures in the slideshow above are the “before” views. Then I removed the sticks that were used to hold the logs used as walls in place. Most of them were broken, but a few looked salvageable.
I had intended to leave that bottom log in place, but I think I’ll leave it out. It’s not the complete length of the bed, for starters, and there were shorter logs and pieces of logs added to the ends. Plus, one end of the longest log is looking pretty rotten. I think it can still be used somewhere else. Just not here.
This bed has had a few years of amendments in it so, while it was somewhat compacted, it didn’t take much to use a garden fork and loosen it again. Which is good, because this is the first time I’ve put my left arm through this level of work since I injured it. I can use my right arm, if necessary, but it doesn’t hold out as well, and the motor control is not as good. It was more of an issue when using the garden fork. I never really thought about it before, but it turns out I use that mostly left handed. Once I was doing the actual weeding and using the little hand cultivator, though, it was less of an issue. Turns out I use that mostly with my right hand.
There weren’t actually a lot of weed in there. It hasn’t been watered, other than by rain, all year, so it was incredibly dry. What weeds did make it were easy to pull up.
It was the roots that were the main problem.
Some of the roots were from the ornamental crab apple trees. All along one section, I was pulling up smaller roots that were clearly attached to a much larger root running down the length of the bed, deeper down. From the direction others were coming from as I pulled them up, I think they were probably from the lilac bush. A few may have been from the rose bushes.
Wherever they came from, most of the debris in that wheelbarrow is tree or bush roots, not weeds!
After the weeding and loosening of soil was done, I used a hoe to pull the soil towards the retaining wall, then level out the ends and the edges, where the wattle weave will be done.
I’ve decided to make the bed shorter. At each and, I will find something I can lay down to use to step on to go into the garden from the other side of the retaining wall.
I’ve also decided I will use the retaining wall itself and add a short wattle weave wall along the middle of the bed, right on top of the blocks. I figure, if I’m going to be redoing this bed anyhow, I may as well make it a fair bit higher, so it’s easier on the back. It’s already only about 2 feet wide, which should be good for reach, but the lower the bed, the further the reach. As it has been, I could reach across, but it would get pretty painful, pretty fast. It will depend on how much material I can collect, but it would be really good if I could get this bed’s walls at least two feet high. Getting posts to weave around at that height will not be a problem, but the weaving takes a LOT of material.
I’ve been monitoring various willows and poplars and maples for potential material. For the vertical posts, I will be using maple again; the inadvertent coppice by the pump shack needs to be cleared away from the power line anyhow, and it looks like there are some nice, strong suckers suitable for the job.
With the first wattle weave bed, I kept running out of materials, so in there, I ended up using mostly poplar, but also some maple and willow. This time, I think I will have a decent amount of willow I can harvest, but I should have a fair amount of useable poplar, too. The problem is that a lot of the switches that I’d be harvesting aren’t straight all the way, but either branch off or completely split off, part way up. Since I plan to have closed ends on this, I’ll need quite a few pieces that are only about 2 feet long, so they would still be useable.
I plan to gather the materials as I need to use them. The vertical posts will be done, first, which I’m hoping to get done tomorrow, weather willing. For the weaving, I want cut and use the switches right away, so they are still green and flexible. The weaving will loosen up as they dry out and shrink, but at least they will be less likely to snap on me as I weave them around the vertical posts. Alternatively, I could harvest the switches and let them dry out completely, then soak them before use, but I don’t have anything long enough to soak them in. I’d need a water trough of some kind. Which we probably have, lying in the junk in the outer yard or beyond. Something we might plan for in the future, as I expect to make more wattle weave structures over time.
So the soil part of the job is done for now. Once the walls are built higher, more will need to be added, which will be a good time to amend with sulfur granules for next year. I might even have a chance to pick up a bale of peat to add to it as well. It’s going to take years of amending to get our soil less alkaline, never mind slightly acidic.
Since this garden is right up against the house, over time it will become our culinary garden, with herbs and greens and fast maturing vegetables that we can just pop out and harvest as we need. Herbs for tea and/or medicinals will also be included. There are a lot of herbs that can be used as all those things. I’d like to transplant the rhubarb to a better location, though. They are very handy where they are, but they’re at the foot of the crab apple trees, which keep them from getting adequate sun and rain. We’re not quite ready to get rid of the ornamental crab apples entirely, yet, and I don’t know that we’d be getting rid of both of them. It’s the one in the south west corner that is causing the most problems, but they do provide nice shade, look amazing when in bloom, and the grossbeaks love those tiny little apples.
All in good time.
For now, I’m just glad I got as much done as I did, in the heat!
The beans with the tomatoes are doing really well. At first, it seems that one of the seeds had not germinated, but it did eventually show up. That makes for a 100% germination rate of these old seeds.
Too bad a cat dug one of them up. *sigh*
In the foreground of the first photo, you can even see some of the self-seeded carrots coming up!
In the next image, you can see the second planting of beans coming up in between the corn. Of the first planting, there ended up being a total of three, maybe four, that came up, and only one of them came up strong and healthy. Considering these are the same seeds in the same bed, it’s hard to know why the first sowing failed so badly.
The last image is of the Arikara squash bed – and the corn in there is so much bigger than the ones in the other bed!
I really like using the stove pellets to mulch around seedlings. The pellets land around the small plants, rather than on top of them. Then, after being watered, the pellets expand and fall apart, with the sawdust creating a nice, fairly thing, but really light, mulch. So far, it seems to be working out with anything I’ve used them around. It helps that the 40 pound bags are so cheap, and a little goes a surprisingly long way!
Once my rounds were done, my older daughter came out to help me remove the netting around the trellis bed. We had an unfortunate surprise while pulling it out, though. I’ve seen frogs – even large ones – squeeze through the rather fine mesh but, unfortunately, a garter snake didn’t make it. My daughter found it stuck around and under the corner of the bed. It hadn’t been dead for long, but long enough that a big beetle was chewing on its head. We had to cut a section of the netting off, because we couldn’t get it loose from the netting.
As my daughter said, it’ll be good when we no longer need to use netting! At least not this netting. It’s always a concern that a kitten or a bird will get caught in it. I never thought a garter snake would get caught!
We were being eaten alive by mosquitoes while we got the net down, stretched it out, folded it in half length wise, then started rolling it up on a bamboo stake for storage. They were after my daughter a lot more than me for some reason, so once the netting was rolled up enough, I sent her inside while I finished. It’s now tied off and in the garden shed. I made sure it was resting higher up in the shed so, hopefully, no critters will get into it.
That done, I brought out some of the trellis netting we’ve used in previous years. This netting has 4′ square spaces, making it easy to reach through to weed or harvest.
I started off by weaving a bamboo stake through one edge of the netting, where there is a pair of lines about a half inch apart, instead of 4 inches. I tied one end to the vertical post at the corner, then stretched out the netting flat before tying it to the next post. Then I added the next bamboo stake, weaving it into the netting and joining it to the first stake, before tying it off to the next couple of vertical supports, then did it again.
The netting ended on the third stake, so I added another piece of it to a fourth stake before joining the stakes and matching the netting up. That left a lot of excess netting at the end, but I just bunched that up and secured it while trying off the stake to the vertical.
I had woven in a plastic coated metal stake at each end of the bed to keep the netting straight. After the horizontal stakes were in place, I pushed the netting down so any excess was at ground level. I then took the garden stakes there were already in place to hold the protective netting that was there before, and used them in the trellis netting. Each one got woven vertically through the netting, then I used them to tighten things up a bit before pushing them into the ground. Where the two nets overlapped happened to be where there was already a longer bamboo stake, so I used that to join the sections together at the same time. Once all the stakes were woven through and pushed in the ground, I used ground staples to secure the netting to the soil, catching in the excess, to make it all fairly stretched out and tight.
I recall from using the netting before that the weight of plants climbing it can cause issues, so I added another level of horizontal bamboo stakes along the middle. These got tied to the vertical garden stakes, rather than the posts for the permanent trellis. This way, the netting is at a slight angle for the beans to climb.
This bed hasn’t been weeding since the protective netting was placed all around it. A lot of the self seeded onions I transplanted into rows were no longer visible.
I started weeding along the trellis side. I probably should have done it before the trellis net was added, but the mesh is open enough to reach through easily. The problem was more my hat constantly getting tangled in it!
As I was working my way along the beans, I spotted a little volunteer tomato plant! I remember finding volunteer tomatoes in this bed last year, too. I’m not sure where the seeds came from!
When I found one, I left it, thinking it would be fine were it was. Then I found another.
And another.
So I thought I would come back later and transplant them once I weeded and could see a space for them.
Then I found another.
And another.
And several others!
As I was working my way down the onion side of the bed and kept finding more even tiny tomato plants, I started pulling them up with the weeds, then transplanting them wherever I had enough space between the onions or the pumpkins. Then, when I finished weeding the bed, I went around the beans side to dig up the ones I’d left there and transplanted them.
By the time I was done, I counted 14 volunteer tomatoes.
Or 15.
I actually counted 13, first, after all the weeding and transplanting was done. Then noticed one I’d missed, so I counted again and got 15. Then I counted again, as I was scattering stove pellets around the bed and counted 14. I counted again and kept getting 14, so I either keep missing one, or I double counted one before.
Of course, it’s also possible I missed some volunteers when I went back to find and transplant them. If so, they’ll be easier to see, soon enough!
The last photo was taken after I’d scattered the stove pellets, but I forgot to take one after it was watered and the pellets were all expanded and breaking up.
This bed now has Red Noodle beans and Hopi Black Dye sunflowers along one side. On the other is onions from last year, going to seed, plus a whole bunch of tiny self seeded onions that I transplanted after clearing and preparing this bed for the beans and sunflowers. Then there is the pumpkins, and now the volunteer tomatoes.
This bed is going to look really interesting, once everything has reached maturity!
Today, I remembered to take some pictures of the radish seed pods that I’ve been snacking on.
The first three pictures are all from the same plant. What a difference! Some pods have just one pea-sized seed “bubble”. Others are longer, looking like they have a couple of seeds developing in them. Then there was a branch that has seed pods of all shapes and sizes!
The last pictures is of a different variety of radish in the winter sown East yard garden bed, with distinctive red lines on them. The seed mix had four different varieties of radishes in it, and I don’t know which is which, though I’m guessing the yellow variety is the one plant I’m seeing with yellow flowers.
I’m really happy with how the winter sowing experiment worked. The last time I tried it, I did the mild jug version, and it failed completely. Now I know that sowing directly into the beds, then heavily mulching, is the way to go for a lot of things. There are a few things I will now plan ahead to winter sow, but not as a mix. Beets, carrots, turnips, kohlrabi, spinach, and radishes for their pods. Also, that one variety of lettuce I planted was insanely prolific, and good at self seeding! I’ll have to be careful when collecting seeds this fall! Oh, the tiny bok choy worked, as did the chard – when they’re not being overwhelmed by other plants! There are also tiny onions all over, but they’re so far behind, I don’t expect we’ll be getting any bulb unions this year. Which is okay. We have the ones that are going to seed, so we can start onions indoors, using our own seeds, in January or February. The turnips also worked out much better than any other time we’ve tried them, so I think we will run through the varieties again to see which ones we like best.
I get the feeling we’ll be doing a lot of direct sowing in the fall from now on! Just in a more organized way. Peas are something else that are supposed to be good for winter sowing – we just have to make sure the bed they’re planted in doesn’t get destroyed by cats, to find out!
Obviously, tomato seeds survive the winter just fine. What variety they are, I have no idea, but if we’re going to winter sow tomatoes deliberately, they’ll have to be a very short season variety, if we’re going to get anything from them. If the Sub Arctic Plenty tomatoes turn out to be a variety the family likes, they would be an ideal candidate. Their growing season is so short, we could actually direst sow in the fall, then again in the late spring, to extend the harvest, if we wanted to.
We just need to be sure we actually enjoy eating them, first.
It’s taking us years to get things worked out, with a couple of major set backs along the way, but those set backs have actually helped us in our decision making for the future. Like now knowing that parts of our garden area are prone to flooding during wet years! Having beds raised even just a few inches has saved come of our plantings already.
I do look forward to when we can make the low raised bed higher, though. Working on the bed this morning, while much improved from working at ground level, was still pretty painful! Plus, the lower the bed, the shorter the reach. Even though these beds are 4′ wide on the outside, it was still hard for me to reach the middle of the bed. With the high raised bed, I can reach clear across, if I wanted to, without difficulty.
All in all, I’m pretty happy with the morning’s work.
My next garden project will be finally working on the old kitchen garden bed that will get wattle woven walls, but I’m going to have to put another job higher on the priority list. When going through the trail cam files this morning, the gate cam had over 100 files – and this camera is set to just take single still shots. Most of those were from the poplars coming up on the other side of the fence, blowing in the wind. Which is not really a step back, since some of them, at least, are of a size that could probably be used in the wattle weaving!
Lots to do, and the weather is finally cool enough to get to it. I’m loving every minute of it!
Today was much cooler than the last little while, and I took full advantage of it!
Which means it’s now almost 10:30 and I’ve only now been able to settle down to start writing some posts. They will be much shorter than my usual rambling! 😄
Things are looking quite good in the garden right now.
The sugar snap peas are developing all sorts of pods, though none are ready for eating yet. Some of the plants are starting to die back at the bottoms already, though. I had hoped for a longer growing season with them!
In the next image, there’s the largest of our developing kohlrabi. I am so thrilled with those! I will most definitely be getting more seeds and planting a bed of them in the fall for next year. Winter sowing worked really well for us with those!
The next image is of the Hinou Tiny bok choy. These are from seeds we managed to collect from the couple of plants that survived being smothered by elm seeds a couple of years ago. The seed pods were really tiny. These are huge, in comparison! Amazing what not being smothered by elm seeds and choked out by elm roots will do, eh?
I neglected to get a photo, but the radish seed pods are starting to develop. I’ve got several different types of radishes now producing pods, and some are large enough to give them a taste. I don’t like radishes in general, mostly because of their bite. The pods have a mild radish flavour and just the tiniest bite. I’ve started to snack on the pods when I work in the garden now. Not very many, though. I do want to have enough to harvest and try pickling, as well as eating fresh.
The last photo is of our grape vine friend. I wasn’t sure if I’d find any of them again (I found two, before). I was able to get hold of the collapsing trellis the grapes are on and tip it away from the storage house. I don’t want it climbing the walls and getting into the exterior blinds again. I’d also like to be able to get around the back of it to get rid of the spirea that’s invading, but everything’s just too big right now.
With today being cooler, I didn’t water the garden this morning, but I did give it a watering this evening. Of the summer squash I thinned by transplanting, we have definitely lost the one that was transplanted into the high raised bed. There’s another among the winter squash that may not make it but, we’ll see. It looks like most of the transplanted strawberries will survive, too, though I don’t expect to get anything from them this year.
The second sowing of beans in between the corn has come up, with a high germination rate. I don’t know what happened to the first sowing, but at least the second one made it! The seedlings are large enough now that I scattered more stove pellets over the bed of corn and beans, as well as the tomatoes and beans bed. I went ahead and added some to the Arikara squash and corn bed, too. The corn in that little bed is getting really big, compared to the ones in the corn and beans bed!
Tomorrow, I need to snag a daughter to help me get the protective netting off from around the trellis bed. It will still need protecting from the cats, somehow, but it needs a serious weeding, and I have temporary trellis netting to add to the back for the Red Noodle beans.
All in all, things are doing pretty good. I can’t help but feel we’re quite behind on things, except for the winter sown stuff. I should check my photos from last year and see how things were at about this time and compare.
The plan for this morning was to head out nice and early to get the garden watered before things got too hot.
The problem with that was, at 4am, we were still at 21C/70F out there. We never got any cooler than that, overnight.
Still better than today’s expected high of 31C/88F, so I was heading out somewhere around 6am to get started. The outside cats were a bit confused by the early feeding, though! 😄
The sky was certainly dramatic as I continued my rounds.
(Major interruption; I got a call from home care while typing the above. Guess who had to drive to my mother’s for her morning med assist again? It … was not really a good visit. More on that later.)
Where was I…
Ah, yes.
While I was doing my rounds, I could hear thunder in the distance, but I went ahead and did all the watering, anyhow. It did start raining while I was out there, but barely enough to get my shirt wet.
I did snag what look to be the last of our turnips.
I plan to include them in a large crock pot meal that won’t heat up the house, so we can just reheat individual portions whenever we want. In this heat, none of us have much for appetites, and no one wants to cook.
As I was finishing up outside, I spotted this adorable sight.
With the heat and humidity, the kittens are sleeping a LOT. I didn’t see the wild kittens at all this morning. Hopefully, they had a chance to have the cat soup I put out for them, before the adults ate it all. All the bowls I use for that were empty before I was done, and I was able to gather them all up to the old kitchen, ready for their evening feeding.
Thankfully, what rain we did have made things more pleasant while I was doing the watering.
Once inside, I did have a chance to have breakfast before I started on this blog post, when I got the call about my mother’s med assist. They couldn’t find anyone to cover her 9:30.
Looking at the time as I talked to the scheduler, it was 9:32. They do know it takes me a while to get to my mother’s (just the prefix on my land line would tell them that). I called my mother to let her know I’d be coming and…
She started asking me if I was okay for coming over. After a bit, I figured out she was wondering if I had any appointments or such that was being interfered with. I assured her that I did not; my appointments were yesterday, not today.
She then started to suggest I didn’t need to come. She could take her pills herself.
???
It turns out that, when the pharmacy delivered her bubble pack refills yesterday, she tucked one pack aside (a week’s worth). The home care aid put the rest in the lock box.
I assume the home care aid did not count how many packs there were, to make sure they were all there.
This is not a good thing but, to be honest, I can’t fault her for doing it. Home care has not been reliable.
I told her, don’t touch it. I’ll be right there!
After a quick change, I was on the road and soon at her place.
Where I found her with a recycling bag on the floor, the contents of her recycling bin all over, as she was sorting and stacking the various Meals on Wheels food containers (I don’t even know if they can be recycled). Once I figured out what she was doing, I told her she didn’t need to do that; just put it all in the bag. Today was her town’s day for picking up the recycling, so I helped her bag everything so I could take it out to the stack in front of her building for pick up.
She became angry at me for not tying off the bag correctly.
While this was being done, I noticed my mother had a page from the local free weekly paper she gets. It was the obituary/memorial section.
There was a picture of my later brother and father in there.
The beginning of July is the anniversary of my brother’s death. He’s been doing this for the last 15 years now. When my father passed, he changed the picture to one with both my brother and father in there. The text is a bizarre and completely false claim in regards to this property and a cottage that doesn’t exist. My mother, however, was all gooey about seeing the ad, and isn’t our vandal so wonderful for doing this? He does it every year. No one else does. He pays to do this!
I said to her, you do realize he’s not doing this out of the kindness of his heart, right?
One the one hand, I’m glad his passive aggressive and very public attack on the family is going right over her head. On the other, I’m frustrated, because it’s working. All the abuse and lies and theft over the years, but he paid money to put a picture and lie about my late brother, and that makes him better than me or my siblings.
*sigh*
Anyhow…
After dropping the recycling bag off outside, I went straight into the washroom to wash my hands before getting her meds. The door was open, so she could see me. As I left, she asked me, did you wash your hands?
…
I got her morning meds out, along with her inhaler, making sure to check the front of the bubble pack to get the Friday morning bubble, before opening it from the back.
It wasn’t until I updated my siblings after getting home that I realized, something was wrong.
When I was there to do her morning med assist on Wednesday, I was trying to figure out why her Tuesday meds were still in the bubble pack. When confirming which bubble I needed to open this morning, I saw that yesterday’s meds were gone, as were Wednesday’s…
… and Tuesday’s.
I’d taken a picture of the active bubble pack when I was there on Wednesday, as well as the pack in the lock box, because the pack in the lock box should have had the two Monday evening pills still in it, and it didn’t.
What the heck is going on?
I didn’t clue into that at the time, though, and just kept going.
I had decided that, since I was in my mother’s town, anyhow, I would stop at the grocery store to pick up some of their deli meats that are priced so much better than elsewhere. I told my mother I was going to go to the grocery store, and asked if she needed anything that I could pick up for her?
She thought about it for a moment, then said I could change her bedding for her.
…
Okay.
So I did that, which took a while. Then put away her clean laundry so I could use the basket. Changed her table cloth out for her, too. That done, I explained again that I was going to go to the grocery store after, and did she want anything?
It turned out she missed the part about planning to go for myself, anyhow, and couldn’t figure out why I was going to go to the grocery store for her, when she didn’t need it. I explained again, and she had me check her fridge for her. I pulled a couple of things out of the freezer, but she was still okay in general.
Then she wanted to have a serious talk with me.
*sigh*
Long story short, my mother is still convinced that we should be able to go directly to the nursing home she wants to go to and ask them to take her in. I tried to explain to her that this is not how things work. They’re not like an apartment that you can rent. They are part of the health care system, so they have no say. Plus, the only time they have open beds is when someone dies, and then they have a waiting list of people who want to get in. She kept cutting me off and getting angry as I tried to explain this, and said, they are kind people. There are still kind people in the world. Unlike you.
…
She managed to throw that one at me several times.
She also thinks my SIL, who has always been so incredibly kind to my mother and stood up for her, so many times, is “pulling away” my brother from her. That’s why he never calls (he does) or visits (we were both there just this past weekend).
She also thinks the home care staff that I have to cover for are not showing up because they don’t feel like it.
My mother is a great one for projecting all sorts of motivations onto people, and if I make any attempt to suggest there might be other reasons, she accused me of always taking “their” side on things, and being against her.
*sigh*
After a few more comments about how other people were so kind “unlike you” and making digs at my brother and SIL, my mother started talking about her stuff and how we need to decide who gets the pictures, or if she will donate them to a museum.
She has no understanding of what museums take or why, but she’s convinced these old prints have some sort of incredible value, because she likes them, and she understands that there is value in things…
She also brought up about her health and I reminded her that, if she’s really feeling bad, use the life line. That’s the fastest way to get help, plus they would contact me.
Oh, you know I’m not good with technology.
I reminded her, she just needs to push a button. That’s it. She has pushed it by accident, leaning against her table, as it is.
She’s angry about having the life line, because she’s paying more than $50 a month for it, and they’re not doing anything.
…
*sigh*
So all in all, it was a pretty unpleasant visit with my mother this time. Then, after all her digs about how unkind I was, she actually thanked me for coming out and gave me gas money.
Her digs against me were no big deal. She always has something, and it’s water off a duck’s back for me. The things she was saying about my brother and SIL – two of the most awesome people who have done so much to help her for so many years – that got under my skin. I’m still ticked off.
As for the rest of my day, I suspect the evening watering will be skipped again. The heat is supposed to linger until late, and we currently have both heat warnings and severe thunderstorm warning happening right now. It’s past 2pm as I write this, and we’ve reached 29C/84F, and the humidex has us at 34C/93, and it is MUGGY out there. I hope we do get the storms, but from what I can see of the weather radar, these storms are all coming up from the US and will only hit the southern parts of Canada.
As for me right now, I have this sudden urge to take a nap to recover my sanity.
The Re-Farmer 