cleaning up

A good day – mostly

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I’m happy to say that I woke feeling very well today. It was also a lovely, warm day, which meant getting things done outside. That included moving the cat stuff out from under the canopy tent to dry in the sun.

I got this picture before they got put back under the canopy tent for the night. The self warming mats were dry, and I ended up putting them into the catio for now, and the smallest cat bed was dry enough to go back into the shelf shelter it had been in before. The rest will eventually go back into the sun room, after that finally gets cleared out and cleaned.

In the back, you can see the summer window for the basement. It got a very thorough hose down, after the winter window was put back in. I’m glad I put hardware cloth as well as window screen on that. The screen has all sorts of little holes and tears in it. Without the hardware cloth, we would have had cats and probably racoons and skunks getting into the basement!

One of the top priorities on the list for today was to finally get a dump run done. My younger daughter helped, though there was nothing so heavy that I needed to be concerned about lifting it. The one thing I noticed during the drive, however, was that frustrating oil pressure gauge reading. As the engine warmed, the pressure reading dropped even faster than the last few days, just barely within the “normal” range, even at highway speeds. It wasn’t that long ago that the gauge didn’t start reading that way until we’d reached the city, and it would drop when I was stopped in traffic for one reason or another. When stopped, the needle dropped below the normal range. Not enough to set any alarms, but not where it should be.

*sigh*

I think we’ll be sure to not drive anywhere until we get it to the garage on Monday!

After the much needed dump run was done, I stayed outside while my daughter headed in. I’d pruned the dead branches from the pink rose bush in the old kitchen garden last night, and today I added to the branch pile. The white Cherokee Rose bush in front of the sun room it remarkably tall and tied back, but when I had tried to get to the laundry platform, I was having to duck under violently thorn covered branches drooping over the path. We can now get to and from the laundry platform without risking serious injury! 😄

My daughter came out soon after with heavy leather gloves and cleaned up the pile or rose branches, straight to the fire pit rather than the branch pile. I got things moved out of the way in preparation to mow the lawn with the riding mower while she did that. My brother and SIL had gone out with their truck and trailer early in the morning, and they got back while I was doing that. I went to say high and mentioned I was planning to mow the lawn in the inner yard. My SIL was concerned, and she had been planning to do the lawn mowing herself, but I told her I can use the riding mower. I just can’t use the push mower. She still looked worried and told me she would do whatever areas I wasn’t able to get it.

Then I had to fight off my daughter from using the riding mower. 😂

So she switched gears and started working on the old kitchen garden, doing a job I can’t do right now. She started bringing wheelbarrow loads of wood chips to the old kitchen garden.

She got the one path done before her back started giving out. This is quite a thick layer of wood chips over the closely trimmed path. Hopefully, that will keep the weeds and grass from growing back for at least a couple of years! There are a couple more paths to cover, but that will be slowly worked on while the weather is good.

It was just reaching 1pm when I got the riding mower out and got started. In the half hour or so before my alarm went off to take my afternoon meds, I was able to get the southeast and southwest lawns done. The grass was still pretty wet, but it couldn’t really wait any longer. Then I parked the riding mower beside the pile of elm tree pieces that is still by the house, then went in for my scheduled painkillers and a late lunch.

At this point, I should not that the riding mower was working fine the whole time, and there were no bumps or ruts or other such things that might get run into.

Which means I had no warning for when I got back.

I started the mower, put it in gear, released the brake and…

Nothing.

It wouldn’t move.

I spent the next while trying different things, turning the mower off and on several times. Everything seemed to be working just fine until I tried to move.

Nothing.

Now, we had that happen with the riding mower my brother and SIL bought for us soon after we moved here. A chain kept falling off. This mower doesn’t have a chain.

I went to my brother’s caravan and my SIL was there. I told her what happened and she let me know my brother was working on his tractor – something he’s been trying to get to for the past three weeks!

On my way over there, I walked past his dump truck and, for a moment, I though he might have been working on that. The last weekend they were here, he’d been able to set concrete blocks under the tires, so they wouldn’t sink into the ground, with wooden blocks in front of the tires to keep them from rolling forward into the driving lane. The truck had been rolled backwards, completely off the blocks and onto the grass. As we walked past it later, he asked if we had moved it. !!! Of course, we hadn’t.

It had been rolled off the blocks by the wind!!!

I found my brother under his tractor and told him what happened with the mower. He went over to take a look as best he could. I shifted from reverse to forward to neutral while he tried to see what was wrong. He could see nothing.

In the end, he pushed the mower back to the garage, so he could go back to working on the tractor. He was going to have to put the mower on a lift so he could see better, but that will have to wait.

Since I could no longer mow the lawn, I worked on other things. I cleaned out in front of the basement window, put on the winter window and hosed down the summer window before setting it aside to dry. Then I cleared out along the side of the entry, next to where the basement window is. There were a few things being stored there, and others that just ended up there. I needed to empt the area because those *(^&$#%&$(#& elm tree seeds were sprouting. Plus, a larger elm sapling I’d cut away during our first spring and summer out here has been growing suckers. So everything got moved out and either set aside nearby or it went into the junk pile. Several things needed to be hosed down first. There was a whole lot of leaves, elm tree seeds and dirt to clear out and I had to start out with the landscape rake, then the fan rake and, finally, a broom to get most of it out. It needs to be hosed down, but the row of bricks closest to the house are all leaning towards the house and would drain against the root cellar wall that’s there. The area there is lined mostly with the glazed brick that we have around the house, which gets incredibly slippery.

My daughter had gone inside by then, so I was able to grab the wheelbarrow to haul the debris away. As I was putting it back my SIL rode their zero turn mower into the yard and stopped to talk for a while. She had been doing the outer yard and wanted to know how much I’d done on the inner yard before the little riding mower stopped moving. I told her what had been done, then we just talked. I told her about where I was working on, and the enameled bricks. We wondered where on earth my dad had managed to get so many! They are everywhere! I told her about how dangerous they are when wet, and that I wanted to pull them all out from around the house and lay down gravel, instead. Much safer! She agreed with that. The bricks are really nice and I told her I could see being able to use them – just not as a floor!

She had seen the water bottle collars I used when starting the summer squash stored on some T posts along the retaining wall and asked about them, and we talked garden stuff for a while before we both went back to work. I just had some things to put away, as I’d done as much as I could for the corner. Then I gathered the cat stuff and took care of those before heading inside.

Before I did, though, I made one last pass around the south yard to check the things growing on the chain link fence. Which is where I spotted this…

Four bees found the one late blooming sunflower (Mammoth variety) to gather pollen from! Some of the Mammoth sunflowers are looking to be more than 7 ft tall right now, and several have small seed heads that haven’t opened yet. Hopefully, that means more pollen for the bees. There isn’t much else blooming right now!

All in all, I’m rather happy with how much I was able to get done outside, though unhappy that my brother’s lawn tractor stopped moving. He has so many other things to deal with!

The main thing for me is that I’m still feeling good. I didn’t push myself too far and am not feeling any abdominal pain. Hopefully, it will stay that way!!

The Re-Farmer

A bit of this, a bit of that

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Well, the stump grinding didn’t happen today. It started raining around the time they were expected to arrive.

So… next week some time.

This morning, while feeding the yard cats, I got a head count of about 17. The highest in quite some time.

Not counting the skunks, one of which came bounding across the yard like one of the cats, while I was still putting the kibble out! There’s one little skunk that absolutely loves the cat soup. Even as I come closer, and I can see it is preparing to run away, it just keeps licking up the soup as fast and as desperately as it can.

I don’t mind chasing away the bigger ones, but the littles that I think have been orphaned… I just can’t do it!

One thing I noticed was the kitten. It is very nervous around the other cats, and completely ignored by mama. It kept trying to go for different food bowls and I saw it keep trying to get up into the isolation shelter.

Unfortunately, Pinky was up there and she batted the little one away. She did get a chance to eat, though it was by moving from bowl to bowl.

I so hope we can socialize it!

While checking on the garden, I took the time to secure some of the summer squash higher up their vertical support stakes. The yellow zucchini doesn’t really need it. They aren’t developing a long stem to accommodate vertical growing. I did finally pick the only two zucchini available.

The larger, half green, half yellow one is actually the younger one. The bright yellow one hasn’t been growing as fast. The plants are all nice and big, but not really producing much.

In the early afternoon, I was back outside, wanting to be around while the stump grinding was done. I used the wagon to move some of the pieces of elm over to the fire pit area. The thinner pieces will be left to cure and will make good fire wood next year. Some of the logs are large enough that I’m thinking to trim them and set them up as seats around the fire pit. One disk cut from the main trunk will be cut in half to make a pair of round “cutting boards” for when we do our cookouts. There’s one piece I want to bring over to use as a splitting stump, but it’s quite heavy and awkward. I might need to get one of the girls to help me load it into the wagon, to make sure it doesn’t flip or roll in the process.

There are still many more pieces to move, but I wanted to work on the fire pit. It’s quite full of ashes. I’d already removed the fire bricks for the Dutch Oven, and cleared out the old cinder blocks that were used to support grilling racks, but split and cracked in the heat. I ended up removing the round grill that can be swung aside, along with the half cinder block that had been protecting the base from the fire. Several small loads of ashes got cleared out into the wheelbarrow. I was at a loss as to where to dump it, since finding out we shouldn’t use ashes in the garden (in increases alkalinity, and we need to increase acidity). I ended up taking it to the cat litter compost and scattering it over that. It should help reduce any smell, and help it break down a bit faster.

After clearing out the ashes, I spent the next while digging around the inside edge to loosen it. I haven’t gone anywhere that I can pick up a new handle on my garden fork, which would have made things easier, and had to use my spade. Eventually, I could level the inside using my old thatching/landscape rake, or whatever they call that style now. Once it was level, I set the rotating grill back, setting the fire bricks back in place last of all.

You can see a pair of smaller bricks on top of the concrete brick around the grill’s support post. The concrete brick has one side cracked right off. Made it easier to put back, but I didn’t one that one side to fall over. So the other two bricks were set on top to support it. I first set them on the sides, but they’ll just get in the way of any fires we make, so we’ll see how it works, this way.

I quite like the size of this fire pit. There is enough room to have a fire going a bit off centre, under the grill, with room to move coals over to the fire bricks and set up the Dutch Oven. The ring is a salvaged piece of pipe from an old coal electricity plant my late brother’s demolition team took apart, with pieces sent to a buyer in the US, and the rest dismantled and demolished. When I was a kid, the fire pit’s walls were dry stacked bricks. I used to enjoy taking it apart to clean up, then rebuilding the fire pit wall in either a circle or a square, depending on what I felt like at the time.

Those two bricks on top of the concrete brick may very well be left from those original fire pit walls!

Off in the top right corner you can see part of a pile of rocks from the garden. You can also see the disturbed ground around the outside of the fire ring. That is where the enameled bricks had been. The soil there needs to be loosened, cleaned up a bit, then leveled before the rocks will be spread around it.

Not today, though. Partly because it started raining while I was doing this and I was quite wet by the time this was done. Partly because I want to use my garden fork for this job, and I need to get a new handle, first.

With my surgery coming up (four more days!), I am planning to head out tomorrow to do a top up shop that I would normally do later in the month. I’ll have a chance to swing by a hardware store and hopefully there will be replacement handles in stock this time.

Meanwhile, we can still use the fire pit for cookouts. There are no fire bans at all. I had pretty much just finished when my SIL arrived, so I went over to their caravan to say hello. They have friends coming out with their camper (they arrived before I started this post) for the weekend, so I let her know that the fire pit was cleaned out and available, if they want to use it. They probably won’t, but at least they’ll know they can, if they wish.

So, no stump grinding today, but I did get progress on one of my projects!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2026 Garden: poppies, melons, and a deluge

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I was rather late in heading out this morning to feed the outside cats and do my morning rounds. A thunderstorm rolled in when I normally would have gone out and lasted a couple of hours.

We got a lot of rain in a very short time! The upstairs window started leaking again; the same one that used to leak a lot when the snow started to melt in the winter, before we got the new roof. This is the second time it has leaked during a heavy downpour. I’ve contacted my brother about it, since he had the warranty papers and was able to pass on details he thought the company would need. He’ll let me know what he gets back from the roofing company.

The usual low spots that were finally drained were full again. Even the inner yard had standing water all over the place. I was rather hoping to be able to mow the lawn or at least do some weed trimming. Lawn mowing was out of the question and likely will be for a while, but I did managed to get the weed trimmer going to clear the paths in the old kitchen garden. It’s higher there so no standing water there. I kept trimming until I went through all three batteries.

The lower eavestroughs are terribly full of elm seeds that are sprouting. None of us are able to get up to them safely with a ladder. Last year I got a cleaner brush that can be used from the ground. It came with two brushes, and the first one broke rather quickly.

The second one broke before I could get very far with the cleaning.

*sigh*

My daughter has been looking into hiring someone to do it for us. Someone with a lift or a harness… and insurance. Meanwhile, I’ve just ordered a hose attachment, but it won’t get here for a couple of weeks.

After failing to get much done on the eaves, I switched to working in the garden. There are a couple of things I want to get done. One of them is to work over the entire area that was supposed to be planted with corn to loosen the soil, then scatter sow the tillage radish seeds I got a while back as a cover crop. These can grow up to 6 feet long and should be able to force their way through the layers of gravel, sand and clay under our shallow top soil. They are left to freeze and die off over the winter. The decomposing radishes create channels and enrich the soil, and the leaves can be worked into the topsoil to compost in place. At least, that’s what I’ve read they can be used for. Over time, this area will be getting a combination of perennials, annuals that self seed and can be treated as perennials, and possibly some shorter, 12′ long raised beds. We’ll see.

The exposed ground that had been under the black tarp is starting to get taken over, even though it’s pretty compacted. I will work on that later. For today, I decided to work on the small bed where I’d planted the giant poppies. A few actually survived, but the area was being overtaken by weeds.

I forgot to take a “before” picture, so the first one in the slide show below is after I’d started clearing around one side of the poppies.

The second picture shows the area all cleared. The soil here is really, really good. I could dig into it easily with my bare hands. Which I needed to do to try and get as many of the tree roots as I could.

*sigh*

With more than half of this little bed empty, I decided to transplant into it. In the next image, you can see a couple of little sprouts. One of those was quite a bit smaller this morning, and the other was barely breaking the surface. They just sort of exploded in a few hours! So I figured, why not. These are Canary Yellow melons, with 80 days to maturity. I made sure to get a photo of the label, since I haven’t been labeling anything from my own transplants. I’m using my photos as a record of what things end up where.

We have about 60-70 days left to our average first frost date. At this point, I’m counting on that Super El Nińo giving us an extended growing season.

I transplanted them in protective collars, then mulched the whole bed heavily with straw. The soil was still moist from today’s deluge but, once the straw was down, I gave the bed a thorough watering, focusing more on getting the straw soaked through.

In the last photo, you can see one of the poppy buds. This variety can potentially get poppy heads the size of a softball. I don’t expect to get any that big, considering how relatively small the plants are right now, but it should be interesting to see how large they do get by the end of the season. I did get another packet of the seed when I thought none had survived, but plan to save seed from these, too. The seeds are edible, but there won’t be enough poppy pods to harvest for eating. There should be plenty of seeds to save for planting.

Unfortunately, by the time I was done with this, my pain levels had kicked in pretty high. Once inside, I was able to take some painkillers, hydrate and start this post while my daughters made supper – and brought some over to me so I didn’t have to get up again! That was much appreciated.

Time to eat before it gets cold! 😁

The Re-Farmer