Something weird has happened with my traffic stats again, today. I have no idea why this is happening to my little Canadian blog. From about 4am to 10am today, I have gotten hit with over a thousand views, with the highest number at about 8am. Most are from Lansing, Michigan, with a significant portion from Ashburn, Virginia. This has happened before, and the hits are from the same two place, artificially inflating my stats. These are obviously bots of some kind, and they do nothing good for my blog. Whoever is doing this, I wish they would go away and not come back!
With that out of the way, here is our kitten fix for the day!
It took some doing, but I managed to get a shot of the little calico.
Big brother Colby is fluffy enough that he completely hid the calico from view until he moved to the other side of the kitten soup bowl. I’m glad to see Little Sprout getting some kitten soup, though she ran away while I was taking pictures, and didn’t get much. It would be great if we could lure the babies closer and socialize them, but we seem to have very little success with the calicos. I thought we’d be able to socialize Brussel, when she had her babies in the sun room, but now she’s almost as strange as her sister, Sprout.
While working outside today, I just had to pause and snap this picture of Eyelet.
He is so, so small! Absolutely dwarfed by the rhubarb leaves.
Those incredible eyes. Wow.
Much later in the day, as we were approaching our high of the day, I was finding cats splattered all over the place, trying to find any cool spot. The kittens especially like this spot.
The like that roll of mosquito netting, too! There’s another one that they ignore. This one is smaller and lighter, and I often find it knocked off the platform.
When it’s not being used as a bed or pillow by kittens!
On a completely different note; one thing about this time of year, when tending things outside, is there are more and more little things I can pick to snack on. The radish pods are getting prolific and there are many, many more tiny pods developing. Currently, we also have some wild saskatoons to enjoy!
With how dry things have been, they are not as big and juicy as they could be, but they’re not dried out, either. One of the jobs in my list over the next while is to clear the underbrush so we can better access the saskatoon bushes – and get rid of the stuff that’s crowding them and competing for water and nutrients.
It isn’t a lot, for July, even in our short season climate, but things are progressing. Hopefully, we will have another long, mild fall for an extended growing season.
Ha! I just checked the Government of Canada average first frost date for our area. I’ve been going by September 10. According to the updated map, if I go by the town to the north of us, it’s now between Sept. 18 and Sept. 21. If I go by the town to the east of us, it’s between Sept. 21 and 24. Yet another source has it between Sept. 21 and 30.
The Farmer’s Almanac still has our last frost date at June 2, and first frost date at Sept. 10, for a 99 day growing season. Frankly, I think the Farmer’s Almanac is the most likely to be correct.
We shall plan accordingly – both for the garden, and for taking care of the kitties!
While our garden is officially in, things will still be planted! We’ll be doing some succession sowing later in the month, but today, it was damage control.
The first bed I worked on was the corn and beans bed. There are now a whole three beans that have germinated, in between the corn, out of all the seeds planted in two rows! The ones planted on the same day, in between the tomatoes in the next bed over, are stating to get bigger, but not in the bed with the corn. I want beans in with the corn as much for their nitrogen fixing properties as for the beans themselves, so I decided to replant.
I still had seeds for the yellow Custard bush beans that were planted here, so that’s what got planted again.
I didn’t have to remove the protective netting, thankfully, and could just make use of the box frame to hold it for me while I first weeded the bed as best I could. There are just so many of those elms seeds sprouting! Many were still too small to try and pull, though.
If you click through to the next photo in the slideshow above, you’ll see my little froggy friend!
It’s hard to tell in the first couple of photos of the garden bed, but if you can make out some pink dots in the photo, those are the inoculated beans. I just spaced them out in the rows the first beans were planted, then went around and simply pushed them into the ground just enough to bury them. Hopefully, these ones will take! I didn’t pre-water the rows, as the soil was still wet from last night’s rain, nor did I water after, since I could hear the incoming thunderstorm.
Once those were planted and the protective netting back in place, it was off to the main garden area.
I had planted Royal Burgundy bush beans near the Spoon tomatoes. An entire packet’s worth. Only three germinated, and one of them got chomped. It seems to be growing back, though.
The one that got chomped is visible sort of between the first two tomato collars.
I could not find more bush bean seeds of any kind while out and about yesterday, so I went with something else, which you can see in the next image above. Fordhook Giant Swiss Chard. Their seeds are of a decent size, so after loosening the soil in around the few bean plants that made it, I was able to space them out fairly well while planting them. Swissh Chard is related to the beet family, and the Fordhook Giant apparently also produces an edible root. We’ve grown it before, a few years ago, but they never got to that stage. We’ll see how it goes this year. We did include Swiss Chard in one of the seed mixes that were sown in the fall. Some have come up, but they were basically too crowded out with other things to get very big. Only now, as we’ve thinned things out over time, are they starting to catch up in size.
By the time I finished sowing the Swiss Chard, it was raining, so I made my way indoors. I had picked up some yellow zucchini seeds, too, so when I head out again later, I’m hoping to get a few of those planted, too.
Maybe.
We are currently under a severe thunderstorm watch, but then my weather app says we’re raining right now, and it’s bright and sunny out there. We’re also at 27C/81F right now, but the humidex has us at 31C/88F. I’ve heard forecasts saying to expect the humidex to make it feel like 38C/100F in places. We’re supposed to keep getting hotter until about 6pm, and then it will very slowly start to cool down after 7pm. Tomorrow is expected to be slightly cooler, so it’s no big deal if things get postponed until then!
I am very thankful for what rain we do manage to get!
First off, I’m happy to say, we did get rain last night! A lovely, heavy downpour, enough to refill our rain barrel to the top.
I happened to get up at around 4am or so. I was able to see the flashes of lightning around us, and at one point, could hear the rain. My daughter was up working, and she told me we had a power failure during the night, too.
I was unfortunately, heavily disturbed during the night, so I didn’t get much sleep. I tried to leave my door open to allow all the cats in but eventually had to chase them out so Butterscotch could eat and use the litter without being bullied and attacked. That meant frequent scratching at the door for the next while. I’ve finally figured it out. It’s Ghosty, scratching at the new mat I have under my door, to replace the one they shredded. She doesn’t want in. She just wants to scratch at the mat under the door! I finally let them in again after a while, only to have to chase them out again after a couple of hours.
Interrupted sleep is far worse than no sleep at all!
It did mean the inside cats got fed early – I make lots of noise doing a barely there top up on their kibble to lure them out of my room – so I tried sleeping in a little bit before going outside to feed the yard cats and do my morning rounds. The plan was to do my rounds, which would be short, since no watering was needed, have breakfast, then get to work on the permanent trellis before things got too hot.
*sigh*
I was about half way through checking the garden beds when my cell phone rang.
It was home care.
*sigh*
No one was available to do my mother’s morning med assist, which was scheduled for 9:30.
My mom is right that they keep coming later and later. Her meds are supposed to be done between 7 and 9am.
I had time to quickly finish checking the rest of the garden on my way back to the house, update my family on our group chat, since I thought everyone else was asleep, grab my purse and go, still wearing my gardening grubbies.
My younger daughter, it turned out, was up and had come down to check on what was going on.
She was walking with a cane again.
I wasn’t the only one to have a bad night!
I haven’t talked to my mother since I walked out on her abusive behavior on Monday, and today is Friday. I did quickly phone her to say I got a call from home care and that I was leaving for her place right away.
I got there just a little bit before her scheduled home care visit time, so that worked out.
My mother was up, dressed and ready, complete with her cup of water and a cracker to eat with her pills. She noticed what I was wearing and commented, and I told her I was in the garden when the call came, so I just dropped everything and came over. She seemed surprised about how early I was working in the garden (I was actually a couple of hour later than usual) and I told her, I was trying to get things done before it got too hot out. She actually understood.
She seemed genuinely apologetic about my having to come out to do her meds again, and expressed gratitude that I did it. Which is actually pretty rare with her. She did say she didn’t want to do the inhaler, which I was okay with. She was prescribed the inhaler only to see if it would work, and she doesn’t feel it’s making any difference. I don’t really know why her doctor wants her to continue it, if it’s not doing anything. My mother, however, then said she didn’t want to take it because she woke up with a really dry mouth, and she thought it was because of the inhaler (she takes it in the evening, too). Usually, she tries to blame it on her food, or her other pills. Somehow, she just can’t accept the idea that she’s sometimes simply sleeping with her mouth open.
After she took her medications, she asked me…
Would I be able to stay and do her grocery shopping for her?
I told her I couldn’t today, explained about getting new tires yesterday, and that I would be going straight to the garage from her place to get our tires torqued (without using the word, since she wouldn’t understand it), rather than making another trip in the afternoon. I then mentioned that I’d asked my sister if she had a day off during the week when she could do it, and she said she could come today. My mother told me that yes, she was coming. !!! It was already arranged, but she still asked me to do her shopping for her!
She prefers I do her grocery shopping for her. I’d taken her for her errands so often before she could no longer go herself, I know what my mother likes, what substitutes are okay and sometimes even what to add to her list if it is within budget and I thought she might need/want it. I also know how to go over her list with her before I leave and notice if she missed anything, and what questions to ask. My sister doesn’t. She simply never had to do it before.
I told my mother to just make sure she has a good list and talk to my sister about it. My sister does the best she can. My mother assured me, she already had a list ready!
That done, I quickly updated my family and headed to the garage, which is about a half hour drive from my mother’s town. When I got there and the mechanic that worked on the truck saw me, he immediately grabbed the torque wrench and came out to take care of it. As we were chatting, I told him how glad I was that I asked them to check the tires, and that I hadn’t realized how much they were bothering me until the new tires were on. I could feel the difference right away. He was nodding along when I asked, just how bad where they? He told me that, in some places, they were worn down to the metal.
!!!
I mentioned to him that I’d originally intended to come in the afternoon, but had an unexpected trip to my mother’s town this morning. That got us to talking about distances and where I lived.
Turns out, we’re “neighbours”.
Okay, he lives about 5 or 6 miles from us, but in this area, that’s “neighbours”.
That done, I messaged my family and my older daughter started messaging me. Normally, she would have been in bed by then, after her night’s work, but was staying up because her sister was feeling so terrible. I was going to pop into the grocery store to grab something to eat on the way home, since I’d skipped breakfast and was starting to feel light headed. My daughter ended up sending some funds with a request for birthday cake and heat and eats for her sister.
(As an aside, we don’t tend to celebrate actual birthdays, but instead do nice things for the birthday person, all month)
That done, and another top up on the gas, since the extra driving basically used up what I’d put in yesterday, I finally headed home.
By then, it was already starting to feel warm, but I was still hoping I could get outside to work on the trellis.
Instead, I found myself falling asleep while checking the trail cam files on my computer. I finally gave up and tried to lie down for a nap. The hottest part of the day wasn’t expected until 4, so I might still get something done.
After a couple of hours, I woke to find a message from my husband, saying a prescription refill was called in and ready to be picked up in an hour.
…
???
Normally, he calls his prescriptions in for delivered on Thursdays, but obviously wasn’t going to do that on a Friday. Especially since some of his medications cannot be filled until 3 days before he’s out, because they are listed as controlled substances. But why did he call it in after I’d already come home from town?
My younger daughter was feeling better enough to come with me, and I found out what happened as we drove. When she saw his message about the refills, she went to ask him about it. My husband knew I was planning to be in town to get the tires torqued this afternoon, so he called it in for while I was in town. He never saw my messages I’d sent this morning and had no idea I’d already been to town and back, and was taking a nap when he sent his message!
Oops.
No matter. While at the pharmacy, I picked up some supplements I was low on, too.
By the time we got home, it was late enough to do the outside cat feeding. In this heat, their water bowls get gross pretty fast, so those got a scrubbing. It took a while to get the scalding hot water out of the hose before I could refill them. Then they all got new frozen water bottles added to them. The sun room thermometer was above 30C/86F, but with the littles now much more mobile, it’s not as life threatening as it was during the heat spell we had when Poirot’s babies were really tiny and in that cat carrier up on the shelf. I do still put ice packs out around the cat beds at times, but it’s not as necessary now.
So all my original plans, and then my adjusted plans, got thrown out the window. As I write this, it’s coming up on 6:30, and we’re still at the hottest part of the day. We’re still at around 24-25C/75-77F, while the humidex puts us at about 29-30C/84-86F. We’re barely expected to cool down at all, even in a few hours when we’re expected to get more rain and possible thunderstorms.
Tomorrow is supposed to be slightly cooler, so I’ll be shifting things over to tomorrow morning and will hopefully get things done then. Along with putting up the permanent trellis supports, I want to take the netting off the potato bed, as it no longer needs the extra protection, and put it around the tomato bed in the east yard. While checking the bed this morning, one of the cats actually used it as a little box behind my bad – and dug up one of the beans to cover his business!
I was not impressed. We have very few bush beans coming up!
Before starting this post, I realized I hadn’t even taken an pictures today.
I was going to say I planned to take some garden tour video tomorrow, as it’s the first day of summer, but double checked and realized that today is the solstice, not tomorrow!
Happy first day of summer!
Maybe I’ll head out and take some video this evening, instead.
Since I have no pictures to share from today, I thought I’d finish off with some adorableness from a couple of days ago.
For month, he had isolated himself pretty much to the dining room table. He had been bullied by other cats and it was his only escape, so he and Toni (our two tripods) became the only cats allowed on the dining table. We turned a box into a bed for them, to a certain extend. It didn’t stop the bullying. For some reason, the cats that do the bullying are particular about attacking while Ginger (or Butterscotch) try to use the litter.
After a while, though, we just couldn’t keep the cats off the table anymore, and would often find two or three of them smashed together in the box bed. Cheddar and Toni have become especially snuggly.
Then Ginger started showing up in my room again.
So now, when I chase the cats out for the night, Butterscotch and Ginger get to stay together in my room. Ginger has a particular fondness for that green frog bed that was donated to the cats. The “hood” that forms the frog’s head always gets flattened, though. They seem to light it that way. In the second picture, you can see what a beautiful round loaf Ginger forms while in there!
Time for an evening walk and, hopefully, a early and good night’s sleep. I really need to get work done, before it gets too hot!
We’re expected to reach around 30C/86F today, with the next couple of days potentially getting even hotter. So I’ve been heading out early in the mornings to water the garden and the saplings. This morning, I snagged my older daughter to give me a hand, since it was already 16C/61F by 6am.
While I went to the old kitchen to start getting food ready for the outside cats, my daughter shoed up and went out through the main door. It makes things easier to pass things from the old kitchen to someone in the sun room through the old kitchen door with the missing screen.
I had quite a surprise when I opened the inner door, though!
Miss Lemon, Hastings and Japp were tucked in, between the doors again!
The old kitchen is quite a bit cooler, so I’m guessing Poirot moved her babies to get them out of the heat again.
With that in mind, we left them there for a while, and worked on the cat cage. My daughter set one of the larger ice packs right under their cat bed. As thick as the cat bed it, it should still feel cooler, and it won’t melt as quickly. We set a couple of frozen water bottles around, too, before I started passing the kittens over for my daughter to tuck them back into the cat cage. By then, Poirot had come in and was very interesting in what we were doing to her babies!
After that, I headed out with the kibble and some leftover cat soup to distract the adult cats, while my daughter started preparing the wet cat food for the bigger kittens, mixing in some lysine/pumpkin seed powder and splitting it up between all the little bowls we have for them. We switched out a frozen water bottle in one of the cat beds in the water bowl shelter, too.
My daughter then grabbed the wagon, which already had containers of water waiting, to the outer yard and watered the walnut and Korean pine trees while I did the rest of my rounds. By the time I was switching out the memory card at the sign cam, my daughter was done refilling containers to finish watering the trees in the outer yard, while I got the hose going into the leaky rain barrel, and used a bucket to water the trees out there.
The very first leaf bud on the Opal plum has emerged! It was rather strange to water a stick in the ground, not knowing if it survived its time in the mail, and being transplanted. Today, we have proof of life!
Once the food forest saplings were watered, I worked on the main garden area. There are quite a few potato leaves pushing their way through the mulch!
I think I’ll grab a small bucket of stove pellets, though, and head back to the garden before my younger daughter and I head back to the city today. The bed the flowers were replanted has no mulch at all, and it’s just baking in the sun. The high raised bed, and the newly planted strawberries, also need protection. On being watered, the pellets will break up into sawdust, so they won’t disturb the more delicate seedlings, will hold water longer, and should help keep the soil at least a bit cooler.
These lilacs are at almost full bloom in most places! The double lilacs in the old kitchen garden are also opening up. I’m not seeing white lilacs yet. The dwarf Korean lilacs by the house will bloom later on, and the variety I can’t remember the name of right now, closer to the chain link fence, will bloom last of all.
I like having such an extended lilac season.
We’re already creeping up to 20C/68F, just in the time it took me to write this. I’d better get out there with those pellets before things get to hot!
The thermometer in the sun room was reading 39C/102F. This thermometer is against the west wall, about 3/4 of the way up to the ceiling. It does not get direct sunlight on it.
The thermometer outside my husband’s bedroom window was as high as the needle could go. If the numbers went that far, it would be about 60C/140F. This thermometer get blasted with the full sun for most of the day, in a mostly sheltered corner of the house. No shade and rarely any breeze.
The last thermometer is stored in the top of a cat shelter shelf. The shelf is in full sun, but the thermometer itself was in shade inside. It was reading 43C/109F. Of all the thermometers, I’d say that one is the most accurate to how it felt while walking around the garden beds.
Wow.
Honestly, I’ll take that over matching temperatures on the other side of freezing. Not that we see -60C/-76F, but we do see -40C/F at times, and that is far more deadly.
A couple of evenings ago, I took photos of our squash, pumpkins and melons, using my hand for perspective. Today, I did it again – but this time, I found more to take photos of! Since Instagram allows “only” up to 10 photos in a slideshow, I split the squash and melon photos up by beds.
Yes, I was able to find melons in the second bed this time! I had spotted one before, but today I moved the leaves around and found others.
I dug around in the leaves and found some “new” ones, too. In one photo, there are two melons, but the leaves and vines prevented me from getting a photo of them both, individually, so one of them is only half in the frame.
They’re getting big enough that they are starting to look like distinctively different varieties, too.
The smaller ones are getting noticeably not-small anymore!
The pumpkin vines are getting intertwined with the drum gourd vines. Those have many male flowers, but I have yet to find a female flower anywhere. It’s possible I can’t see any under all the leaves, but I think that’s unlikely. I’m wondering if they are getting enough water? These have a buried gallon water bottle buried next to their bases, so they get watered slowly and deeply, but a gallon of water might not be enough for something like this. I don’t know. It seems to be sufficient for the pumpkins, though!
The next bed is the winter squash interplanted with shelling peas and pole beans.
The first and largest one is among the few Summer of Melons mix transplants that were left over. The others, I’m not sure. They look like they are the same variety, but one was on the far side of the single surviving Cream of Saskatchewan water melon, which I know for sure are not from that mix. That would make them Sarah’s Choice melons. We grew those last year, but they were grown in a bed next to two other varieties and the vines were so mixed up, we lost track of which were which. The other melons in this bed would be the Pixie melons.
Oh, wow. I just linked those to where I bought them, and my goodness, the prices have sure gone up!!! Especially for the Pixies!
If you want to compare how fast these have been growing, you can check out the comparison posts I made on July 30 and July 28.
We may not have anything to harvest on a daily basis this year, but we sure to have a lot growing!
If the warmth keeps up, though, we might actually be able to have things to harvest. The bush beans first had to survive the slugs. Then they had to survive the deer. Amazingly, there are some that have recovered enough that they are starting to bloom! So Royal Burgundy bush beans are a possibility.
There aren’t a lot of pole beans, either, but they are also starting to bloom, so we might be able to harvest both the green Seychelles and the purple Carminate beans at some point. Which isn’t going to be easy, with all those winter squash vines growing around them! The shelling peas seem to be very prolific, with lots of flowers and developing pods, but it will probably be at least a couple more weeks before any of those can be harvested. The corn is also going to be a bit longer; they are sure releasing a LOT of pollen right now!
We also have green tomatoes developing, but nothing is even close to ripening, yet. Then there are the summer squash. I have no idea if we’ll get any green zucchini, Magda, Goldy zucchini or White Scallops, but I think we’ll definitely be getting some of the G-Star patty pans to harvest at some point. They’re not blooming yet, but there are buds starting to form, at least.
What a strange, strange gardening year. That rain we had in the spring really messed things up and set things back. We had Saskatoons blooming, but there are no berries – it was probably too wet for the pollinators. The cherry tree by the house isn’t going to have many berries, though there are some that are ripening. One chokecherry tree in the spruce grove is showing berries, but the one next to the main garden area has almost nothing on it. Even among the crab apples trees, there are a couple of trees where I’m not seeing any apples! These are the ones that have small apples the birds like to eat. The ones with apples that we like to eat do have apples on them, so the timing of blooms and pollinating seems to have been just right for those trees, but not the others.
We have plenty of pollinators, though. I don’t usually see them, but when I’m going through the garden, I can hear them buzzing. I will still hand pollinate the squash if I spot a female flower, but the melons have so many flowers that are so small, hidden among so many leaves, it’s all on the pollinators for those!
With the spring set backs, we can only pray to have a long and mild fall to make up for it!
As my SIL once told me some time ago; if we depended on our garden for food, we’d be starving! 😄
Well, we reached our predicted high of 31C/88F, with the humidex putting us at 33C/91F, and we’re not expected to start cooking down until well into the evening.
I had a much interrupted night, so the girls took care of the outside stuff for me, including watering the garden, so I could try and get some more sleep. Which is rather difficult when, every now and then, a cat will suddenly get the zoomies and parkour off my body while careening across my room. What a way to be awakened!
I did make my trip into town, late this morning. It was slightly delayed when I stopped at the post office to pick up a package, and found my daughter’s computer was in a day early! I’d even checked the tracking this morning, and it was still saying tomorrow, by the end of day. Once I had that, I went back home to drop it off, then headed into town. My daughter hasn’t tried to take it upstairs yet. Her old computer is still chugging away, backing things up onto online storage – a very sloooooow process. She’ll start getting the new machine set up during the night.
I had intended to see what errands I could do while I was in town after sanitizing and filling our water jugs (it’s a different grocery store than where I usually go to, that has a sanitation station with their refill fountains), I got a message from my husband asking if I could swing by the Greek restaurant and pick up a couple of gyros for him. I found out this morning that my husband had eaten almost nothing all day yesterday – he just didn’t have any appetite – and his blood sugars dropped dangerously low. He had to pop glucose tablets to get himself back up again. The water refill station at the grocery store happened to be next to their pharmaceutical section, and they had some of the glucose tablets in stock, so I grabbed a bottle. With his Ozempic dose being doubled, the danger of his blood glucose levels dropping are much higher. Which ticks me off because I am 100% certain that is his chronic pain could be brought under control, he blood sugars would normalize. However, there’s no fix for his back, and so far, no pain killers tried have been able to get it under control. At best, it become more bearable. It’s like when he was diagnosed diabetic the first time. After that he was diagnosed with sleep apnea and started using a CPAP. Almost immediately, his blood sugars normalized and he lost about 100 pounds. I suspect the increase in dose for the Ozempic is more for the potential side effect of weight loss, but he’s been on this stuff for years now, and it has had zero effect on his weight. Plenty of other side effects, like losing much of his sense of taste, a loss of appetite, loss of muscle mass and intestinal distress, but his weight just won’t change.
Needless to say, when he asked for the gyros, my other plans went out the window, got his food and headed straight home with it, and skipped the other places I was going to check out.
I had been thinking of going to the dump later today, when it opens for the evening, but we really don’t have enough garbage and recycling to make it worth burning the gas in another trip.
My other plan had been to try and get some lawn mowed this morning, before it got hot, but that didn’t work out. Tomorrow is supposed to be a little bit cooler, so I will see if I can get it done then. In fact, our entire 10 day forecast has changed and, after tomorrow, we’re now supposed to be closer to 20C/68F instead of in the 30C/86F range.
I just got back from refreshing the cats’ water bowls outside, and adding frozen water bottles in a couple of them to help keep them cooler. The cats are just splattered all over, trying to keep cool
So happy to see Button in there, getting some nip!
I’m just looking back at some of my garden posts from a year ago. At this time, our garlic was all harvested and curing, and I tried planting beets, radishes and spinach in the empty bed (they did not do well at all). I was also harvesting bush beans, turnips and G-Star pattypan squash. Not a lot, but at least something! I was even getting some yellow zucchini and the odd green one from the plants that survived getting eaten by slugs. We had Black Beauty tomatoes getting so big and heavy, we had to add extra supports. Our Spoon tomatoes were turning red, and our Sweet Chocolate peppers were covered in developing fruit. We even started harvesting some Indigo Blue tomatoes, and our Pink Banana and Georgia Candy Roaster had so many huge squash developing!
I’ll be doing another garden tour video in the middle of the month. Hopefully, things will have progressed between now and then! It should be interesting to compare the two.
For now, though, the main priority is to keep things protected from the heat.
This was our third attempt of sowing these, and I planted two pairs of seeds in the bed with the onions and shallots. There are still none in the pot (sowed them twice in there) and I had been thinking of what I could plant in the empty space where the Magda and White Scallops had failed, only to find these! So far, it’s just the one pair of seeds. No sign where the other pair was planted, but if it took this long for the first ones to show up, there is still hope!
Now, they just need to survive.
Still no Magda here, but a second one germinated in the pot on the steps.
There is also a nice little row of tiny kohlrabi seedlings popping up in the potato bed at the chain link fence.
I got a surprise phone call this morning, too. The scrap guy was going to be in our area. Did we want him to come by?
Today???
Yes, today.
*sigh*
I’m taking my mother to her medical appointment today, so that won’t be an option. We talked a bit about the state of the ground for getting to the barn and stuff. He’s going to be in the area again later – he has to wait for the ground to dry out more, first, so he can’t say exactly when, but he can call us first, if we want.
Yes, please!
We need to re-bag the aluminum, anyhow. Between the cats, racoons and skunks, quite a few bags have been torn up. That’s the down side of having so many cat food cans in there!
Since I’m going to be in the area, anyhow, after I bring my mother home from her appointment, I’m going to head over to my homesteading friend that sells eggs. She’s overwhelmed with eggs again – this has been a good year for eggs for a lot of people! – and is all but giving them away. When she posted about it on FB and someone asked the price, she just said “whatever is reasonable!”
We still had eggs, but the girls cooked some up with their supper, and boiled the rest for egg salad, so there is room in the fridge again. I’ve asked for 4 flats. I remembered to ask if she needed egg trays, and she does, so I’ll be bringing a bunch of those over for her, too.
With all the driving around, plus the likelihood that my mother will be seen late (hard to say; I’ve actually been seen early, at this clinic!), and a trip to pick up eggs, I’ll probably not get home until well into the evening.
Today, we’re supposed to reach a high of 28C/82F, and now the forecast has the same high for the next two days. As I write this, we’re at 23C/73F, but the humidex is already at 31C/88F! Humidity is at 81%, but apparently there’s just a 9% chance of rain this afternoon – or thunderstorms, if I look at a different app!
Next weekend, we’re supposed to reach highs of 30C/86F, and stay there for days.
I do wish we had better forecast regarding rain or storms, so we know whether the garden needs to be watered or not! I probably will anyhow, tomorrow morning, just so the garden can better handle the heat.
We’ve got a hot day coming, so I wanted to give the garden beds a solid watering, to help them cope with the coming heat. It was already 22C/72F at the time. I can’t remember what the humidex was.
While doing my morning rounds, though, I got a bit of a harvest.
There were quite a lot of scapes to harvest! There’s a few left to harvest over the next few days, but at this point, the bulk of them are harvested. We just need to figure out what we want to do with them all!
There were a few sugar snap peas large enough to pick. The little strawberries are the ones grown from seed last year, and the larger ones from the bare root plants we planted this spring. There is one plant among the asparagus that has berries, but the other three have been eaten, in spite of the barriers I put up to discourage the deer. *sigh*
I have spotted our first female pumpkin flower. The camera on my phone just did NOT want to focus on it, though. After I got the picture, I found a male flower and hand pollinated it. I later found a new female flower among the winter squash and was able to hand pollinate that one, too.
After a quick breakfast, my older daughter and I headed outside – my younger daughter is out of commission and walking with a cane again. 😢 We finally got around to removing the insulation around the base of the newer part of the house. This uncovered two windows – a third was already uncovered. These two windows don’t have screens on them, so I’m hoping to build some new screens for them. This way, we can have the windows open and allow more air circulation in the basement and hopefully help it dry out.
The insulation was taken to the barn for storage. My daughter took the smaller pieces in the wagon, fighting her way through the tall grass. With both of us, though, it took only two trips to get it all stored away.
Since I was going to be watering the garden anyway, I had decided to use the hose attachment and water soluble fertilizer. We have the 30-10-10 Acidifying fertilizer we’d found when cleaning out the old kitchen. Everything in the box was well sealed in plastic bags, so even though the box got wet at some point, the fertilizer is fine. With our alkaline soil, I decided it was worth trying. The peas and beans, of course, won’t get any benefit from the high nitrogen content, but anything that makes our soil at least closer to neutral will be a help.
I had a bit of trouble getting back into the sun room to get what I needed, though.
I was NOT about to interrupt Button getting some nip. Especially when he wasn’t having to fight the bigger kittens for it.
So I took advantage of the time to clear things on the patio blocks in front of the south facing basement window. The swing bench is there. The seat cushions have needed replacing for years, but I keep forgetting to get the measurements for cushions. Being out in the elements, moisture and debris gets caught in the fold between the back and the seat portions, so I undid the Velcro holding them in place and flipped the folds backwards for them to dry.
We stuck an old wooden bench against the wall that my daughter helped me move away after the insulation pieces were taken out. I ended up taking it off the patio blocks completely. All sorts of buckets and other things were stored under the bench, some of which got garbaged, some hosed off and set to dry in the sun. After that, it was old leaves, twigs, and other nature debris that needed to be scraped off the patio blocks and swept away. The window and the basement wall, of course, had to be swept clear of debris that got between the wall and the insulation pieces.
By the time I finished clearing that, Adam and Button were done, and I could fill the hose attachment and get to watering. The box of fertilizer has one large bag in it, with four smaller bags. One had been opened, but hardly anything had been used. Each one of the smaller bags was premeasured to put into the hose attachment. Handy! Of course, I used the one that was open already, even though it was missing a small amount, and set it up on the hose at the main garden area.
All the beds got a watering then, after the first watering had time to be absorbed by the soil, a second watering. Hopefully, it will be sufficient to protect the plants from the heat, even though a lot of these are heat loving plants.
I don’t know if the last Zucca melon will survive. When I did my evening rounds and checked on it, it was just covered in slugs, eaten to the point the stem with the newest growth on it broke off while I was removing the slugs! It still got a fertilizer watering, though.
That done, I switched to the front yard hose and did the East yard garden beds, and the beds along the chain link fence. There’s a section where we planted the Purple Caribe potatoes that never came up. I’m thinking of direct sowing something for a fall crop. I’m told we can actually still plant kohlrabi now, so I might do that. There is a single self seeded Jebousek lettuce that showed up in the gap, and I’m leaving it to go to seed, as it would be acclimating to our local conditions quite nicely by now. That, and the seed it came from survived the entire bed being reworked!
By the time the south and east beds were watered, the water in the attachment was looking pretty clear, so for the old kitchen garden, I switched gears. I used watering cans and water from the rain barrel, opening another bag of fertilizer and adding measured amounts into the cans after filling them. As I was watering, I spotted some Forme de Couer tomatoes developing!
I just realized; I forgot to water the green zucchini in the pot. The Magda and White Scallop pots still have nothing in then, and I’ve figured out part of the problem. I’ve got stakes to keep the cats out, but the kittens still fit! I’ve been finding kittens curled up in between the stakes, right over where the seeds were planted.
*sigh*
Oh, that reminds me. We now have all four G-Star seeds I planted, in the bed with the onions and shallots, germinated and starting to show their true leaves. Still nothing with the Magda and White Scallop I planted at the same time. I was really hoping to get those. We quite enjoyed the few Madga squash we’ve been able to grow over the years, and the White Scallop patty pans are a new variety we were really looking forward to trying. The G-Star, however, seem to thrive here, so we should at least get some of those!
After everything was watered, I took the time to put away some plastic for the garden. I’d laid the pieces out on the grass, weighted down to keep them from blowing away, to dry. Instead, it rained, and ended up with puddled. After a while, they were starting to kill the grass, so I finally gave up on that idea. Yesterday evening, I hung them up on the clothes line, instead. They’re pretty long, even with the biggest piece folded in half, so there was a risk the cats would start playing with the ends and tearing them up.
The wind was starting to pick up, and the plastic was starting to get twisted on the line, so I took them down. The biggest piece got folded smaller, before being rolled up into a bundle. The other pieces were long and thin – mostly clear garbage bags with the sides cut, and used to solarize a garden bed. Those got rolled up around a stick.
By the time I got inside and checked the temperature, we were – and still are – at 28C/82F, with the humidex at 31C/88F. The high for today is expected to reach 30C/86F.
I can’t complain. In the city we lived in before moving here, they hit 36C/97F with the humidex at 40C/104F, yesterday. Mind you, we’re expected to reach a humidex of 40C/104F today ourselves, even with a lower expected high. Most of the prairies, now extending into southwestern Ontario, are under extreme heat warnings. Tomorrow is supposed to be much of the same.
Looking at the extended forecast, we’re not supposed to get any more rain until the beginning of August, and temperatures are expected to remain high. Given the heat and humidity levels, though, I wouldn’t be surprised if we get sudden thunderstorms in there.
Well, all those squash and melons, peppers and eggplants, are going to love the heat! They might get a chance to really get growing.
Hmm. This is interesting. I just checked a completely different weather app, and it says we have a 100% chance of rain on Saturday, Sunday and Monday.
Every app seems to have a different forecast!
We shall see.
Until then, we’re going to hunker down inside the house. It’s not supposed to cool off out there until 7pm, and even our overnight temperature is supposed to be a low of 21C/70F!
Gotta love the prairies. We get as hot in the summer as we do cold in the winter!
We did get one thing done this morning; the Dwarf Korean Lilac is kicking into full bloom, so we finally got our group picture done. By the time we finished that, it was coming up on 9am, and that’s when I finally started on the next garden bed.
As an aside, though, it looks like the kittens in the sun room, and the old garden shed, have been moved. I saw the kittens this morning, at feeding time, but by the time I was coming in from the garden, they were gone. I’m hoping they’re just staying cool under the cat house. Unfortunately, we’ve seen both skunks and racoons going for the kibble today, and that might have been just too much for the mama. As for the garden shed babies, I left food inside the door, but saw and heard nothing from the back.
We shall see if they’re still around somewhere.
The main thing I wanted to work on today was that next garden bed.
I’ve been really dreading this one. In the end, I decided all I can really do is work on the area that was path, first, and just flip the sod. There’s no way it can be properly weeded. It’s not even worth trying to sift it.
I started at the north end of the bed, where it has been extended to 18′, but only got maybe 2 1/2-3 feet of sod turned. Around then, I got a message from my husband, asking when I was planning to go to the post office to pick up some parcels. I had originally thought to do it after I’d turned the bed, but it was already 19C/66F, and I was baking in the sun. My app said the “feels like” was also 19C/66F.
It lies.
So I stopped at that point and picked up the parcels. I now have my tips for my new impact driver! A really good range of shapes and sizes, too.
After I got back, my daughter made us lunch – cold chicken salad sandwiches, because no one wants to cook in this heat! My daughter is still recovering from arm damage, trying to mow the lawn with the push mower. Yesterday, her grip strength was so non existent, she actually had to ask me to finished changing the toilet roll for her, because she couldn’t squeeze the stretch spindle enough to fit it back into the holder. Today, she is much improved.
Which is great, because I needed her help with the riding mower, after lunch.
The last time I used it, last year, it was only the second use after my brother had fixed and upgraded all sorts of things on it and brought it back, when I stopped the mower to move something out of the way, and then it wouldn’t move. The engine was still running. There was just no go, forward or reverse. I didn’t want to bug my brother about it, so we just used the push mower for the rest of the season.
The challenge for us was how to safely look under it to see what was going on. When this happened before, there was a chain that fell off. My brother got that replaced and adjusted a number of things to ensure it would not happen again. I figured, that must have somehow fallen off again.
With the truck, however, we now have a way to get a look under the riding mower. We opened the tail gate and set up the ramps my brother gifted to us. Then we pushed the mower onto the ramps, then blocked the wheels, so we could safely look under it.
Well. Under the front of it.
After not finding the problem from there, we reversed it, so that the engine was up the ramp. That was rather more difficult to manage, because of the weight distribution. Even blocking the front tires didn’t want to work as well, since they wanted to turn and roll off, anyhow!
We got it secured, though, and my daughter ended up crawling under it to see. She found a loose belt that the pedal at the front should have been engaging. After fighting with it for a while, she asked me to fight with the pedal, to see if I could get it to lift up more, rather than push down. Which I was able to do, and that gave her the slack she needed to get the belt on. We tested it out (after charging the battery!) and it worked!
I started some mowing while my daughter put stuff away and went back inside, but not for very long. It was just too hot. So I parked the mower in the shade and took a hydration break. When I came back out to continue, I made sure to have a wet towel to drape over my shoulders to help keep cooler. It really helped a lot.
The poor riding mower was really struggling. The grass is so tall, it’s going to see, but there are some types of grass in the driveway area that is different, and more fibrous. This old mower just doesn’t have the juice to handle them. Sometimes, if I go just a couple of inches forward at a time, I can get through without it getting too overworked, or getting clogged. In a few places, I would have to go over the same patch several times, and even reverse over it, before getting it properly cut. It seems counterintuitive, but it seems to work better when I have the blades set lower, rather than higher. You’d think I could go over it at the highest setting, then lower it for another pass, then lower it again for a final pass, but nope. When it’s higher, the blades just bend the grass, without cutting anything!
Meanwhile, the grass is still pretty wet and not trying out, because it’s so tall, so things clog up, too. After my second mowing session, I parked the mower in the shade to cool down, then used the hose to try and wash off anything stuck around the blades. I’ll head out again to try and mow a bit more. There’s no way I’m getting more done on the garden bed today. We’re at 24C/75F, and the humidex puts it at 28C/82F. It’s not going to start cooling down until about 8pm – three hours from now – and won’t reach reasonable temperatures until maybe midnight. If I’m going to get progress done on the beds, I’m going to have to be out there, digging, at 6am.
Which means I’ll be doing a bit more mowing before putting the riding mower away, then heading to bed early. The problem is, even if I head to bed early, that doesn’t mean I’ll be able to sleep! I tried that last night, and had all sorts of disruptions keeping me up. 😢
Meanwhile, I am totally behind on visiting blogs, so if you’ve got a blog that I follow and you haven’t heard from me lately, I’ve just not been able to spend the time online for it! I’ll have a lot of catching up to do, when I finally get the chance.
I started getting messages from the Cat Lady while I was writing this. There’s a cheap spay day coming up, and she wanted to know if we have cats to do. Of course we do, but the ones we can catch are all male. She will contact the clinic and see if they are good with a group of males. The rescue will cover the costs completely.
Oh, and her youngest daughter has a birthday coming up. The Cat Lady asked her if she wanted cash, or a new bike, for her birthday. She wanted neither.
She wants the Wolfman!
They’ve already got so many of our cats, permanently! We were afraid this would happen!
Anyhow…
When she hears back from the vet about doing males, she’ll get back to me, and let me know how many they can cover.
If we can get Sad Face done, that would make a huge difference. Hopefully, it would reduce his aggressive behaviors! It took 5 years to be able to pet him. Getting him into a carrier right now is something else entirely.
Well, time to get back outside and to a bit more mowing, then call it a night, so I can get that bed done tomorrow. We seriously need to get those last transplants in!
I managed to get a few things done before the heat finally drove me indoors. I had my lunch and a break in the blessedly air conditioned living room, then went back out again.
Alas, I was defeated, but not just by the heat.
As I write this, my computer tells me it’s 29C/84F out there. This is what the sun room thermometer shows.
Yeah, that reads 36C/97F. That’s with shade and the ceiling fan going. It felt cooler to go into the sun room than being outside.
Before it got too hot, though, the first thing I managed to do was complete our third raised bed cover. Here is how it looks, over our carrots.
I have to admit, it’s the best looking cover I’ve made so far! Appearances aside, there things I would both do, and not do, again.
The first is, I won’t use that plastic hardware cloth again. Aside from the “rigid” plastic being not rigid at all and needing support, the plastic mesh is thick enough to actually cast shade. Which would be great for a day like today over, say, a bed of lettuce or something. However, we don’t have lettuce growing in full sun right now and, as you can see, those carrots don’t need any more shade! However, it will protect them significantly. For more complete protection, I would close off the ends, too.
The second is, those hoops I took off the high raised bed worked MUCH better than the ones I tried using before. These were cut to length from a roll of PEX pipe, and I would definitely use more of this in the future. Once the hoops were secured and holding the plastic mesh taught, the excess was cut off, which was easy to do with just pruning shears. The pruning shears also turned out to be the best tool to cut the steal strapping I used to secure the mesh and the hoops to the wood. An added bonus with having the hoops is that, if this cover were used over a larger bed or directly on the soil, the ends of the hoops could be put over stakes to secure them.
The next thing I decided to do was see if I could assemble the parts and pieces for the carport thingy we found in the barn. The metal pieces had been stored in the hay loft, but the cover piece(s) were in the main area of the barn.
I didn’t realize what they were and used one of them to cover the pile of garden soil by the barn, which is why it’s so dirty in the photo. It wasn’t until I saw that the metal supports had no horizontals that I realized what the pockets in the “tarps” I found were for. Once I figured it out, I took it off the garden soil pile and tried to clean it, but it’s still pretty stained.
Each of the supports is in three pieces. Two side pieces that are hollow aluminum tubes, and one top piece that is the same material, with steel inserts at the ends to join with the side pieces. I tested it out with one set of supports, first, scrubbing the rust off the steel and wrestling the pieces together, then sliding it through a channel in the cover.
As expected, the support was far longer than the cover is wide, which would make for open sides. Which I am good with, but it does make me wonder if that’s how it’s supposed to be, or if the second cover is supposed to be used at the same time. That doesn’t make sense to me, since it would have an open “seam” at the top, from end to end. I’ve never seen this thing assembled, so I’m just guessing.
The test done, I brought the other pieces over. I plan to set it up above the tree stump bench by the main garden area, so I can paint it and not worry about it being rained on. There will be room enough to bring the folding table over for painting, too.
All the pieces got scrubbed down, removing rust and dust (at least I hope it was dust). To assemble it, I worked most of a side piece into one of the channels in the cover, then attached a top piece.
What a pain that turned out to be.
After more scrubbing, liberal use of WD40 and, in some cases, flipping the top piece to use the other end, I got them together.
Maybe not perfectly snug in places, but close enough.
After that, the pieces were long enough to push the rest of the way through the channels in the cover, and still have a couple of feet sticking out to add the other side pieces.
After much fighting, I got them together.
Excpet for one.
I fought with this long enough that I had to get out of the heat and take a break before going back out and fighting with it some more, but I just can’t get it any farther than this. I’ve scrubbed both the top piece insert and inside the side piece tube. I scraped around, and there is nothing blocking it. I even found a tire iron that fit in the tube and tried using it to scrape and possibly widen the opening. I checked to see if the side piece had been flattened in any way, and it was not.
It simply will. Not. Go all the way in.
I finally had to go in to get out of the heat for the rest of the afternoon, and will likely try again later. It’s possible that, as the day cools, the metal will shrink enough for the pieces to finally slide together.
Part of the frustration is that, aside from the straight section where the pieces join, the tupes have bends in them, so I can’t even hammer them together from the other side!
Oh, and one more thing. There are six sets of supports.
I got 10 short lengths of coated rebar to hammer in the ground to secure the supports. I’m short two! Dangit! While I was at the store, I considered getting two more, just in case, but figured I already had two extra. For some reason, I thought there were only 4 supports for the canopy, maybe 5.
Ah, well. As long as the ends are secured, it shouldn’t matter if a set in the middle is not.
It’s starting to cool down outside. I’m going to go feed the outside cats and do my evening rounds, then fight with it again.
The Re-Farmer 