damaged

Grubling update, and a near disaster

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Before I get into today’s stock up shopping post, I wanted to share an update on the grublings. Here are some video clips I took just a little while ago.

In the first video, we have the three kittens that don’t really leave the cat cage. The calico has, and has even figured out how to get out at the bottom, rather than climb out the “doorway”.

In the second video, we have Brussel’s black and white, who insists on climbing up the inside of the cat cage to clamber out the second level height doorway. This, even though he knows there is a kitten sized opening under it. He’s even used it. He just prefers to climb! He not clambers out as soon as we go into the sun room and wanders about. We really need to watch our step!

Oh, and he has a name, now. Oofus The Brave. 😄

The next video is of another brave baby that is constantly leaving the cat cage and wandering around. These two are also very much into eating solid food, which I’m sure is giving Brussel a break!

We haven’t seen the third foundling in a while. I have to assume the mama found a “nest” somewhere, and her baby has stayed with her. The other two seem content to stay with Brussel.

Last of all are Caramels other two little grublings. They seem so small compared to the others!!! I do wish we had a small door into the cat house in that back wall. That way, we could check on the babies, but also reach in to give them wet cat food. Right now, the only way into the cat house is by lifting the roof, and it’s definitely showing its age when we do that!

On another note, we had a near disaster with our transplants yesterday. Our first time using the portable greenhouse, and we almost lost and entire bin of tomato seedlings!

It’s possible the bin was knocked over by a cat – the door was tied open to keep it from getting too hot inside. It was also really windy, and that bin had been tucked into a corner on a top shelf. It’s possible the wind pushed the plastic enough to knock the bin right off.

My daughter helped me gather up the soil and repot the seedlings that had fallen out entirely. Some cups had very little damage. One seedling was completely buried in soil and it took some careful searching by my daughter to spot it. We lost a fair bit of the soil, as there was no way to scoop it all up out of the grass without getting too much debris, but I’ve got that bucket of reconstituted coconut fibre in there, and we were able to use that to top up the cups.

Once these were repotted, everything went back into the old kitchen for the night. Before I headed out this morning, the greenhouse has warmed up enough to move them back in. I even left the doorway partially unzipped so it wouldn’t get too hot. Happily, everything was fine when I got back! It was also warm enough that I opened the door all the way and tied it off. It’s nice enough today that we don’t need to move them back into the old kitchen for quite a while. I still don’t dare leave them in there overnight.

It’s too early to tell with the potted up seedlings, but the squash transplants show significant improvement after just a couple of days in the greenhouse. In the basement, when the true leaves started coming in, they were pale and almost on the yellow side. They needed better light. Looking at them today, there is no sign of yellowing in the leaves, and the plants are even looking more robust and slightly bigger! The luffa were really struggling, and we lost one of the three seedlings. A second one was just not growing, and still had only its seed leaves. Now that they are in the greenhouse, the one that had its first true leaves is showing definite signs of growth, and I think I’m even seeing the beginnings of true leaves showing up in the other one! The melons are going to do a lot better in there, too. Even the chitting potatoes hadn’t been showing any real growth while in the basement, and a few pieces simply shriveled up. Now, they’re starting to show some signs of growth, too. It would have been so much better if we could have put them into the greenhouse earlier! Ah, well. It’s our first time using it, and I’m happy with it so far!

Looking forward to calling an early night tonight, after the transplants are brought back inside. Doing the stock up shopping always wipes me right out. I’m glad I got it done, though. I’ll post about that, soon – after I have the supper my daughter has made for me!

She’s such a sweetie.

The Re-Farmer

Morning mystery… solved?

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Though my husband had been able to feed the outside cats this morning, when I headed out an hour or so later, I found some of the kibble trays already needed to be topped up. While I was doing that, I came upon some mysteries.

The most obvious one was the knocked over concrete pedestal. We often see a cat perched on top of it. It’s heavy, but because of the height, not as stable as I would like, which is why it’s not being used to hold the concrete Mary statue that I think it was originally used for.

This was more of a surprise.

The shrine was not maintained over the years, so there’s quite a lot of rotted wood, but what on earth could do this sort of damage? The cats like to go up here, too. Could there have been a massive cat fight? Even so, how could the cats have done this sort of damage?

Then there was this. That chicken wire is what had been protecting the cucamelon and gourd bed. Last night, it was in the upright wheelbarrow, waiting to be put away for the season.

If there had been a cat fight this violent and far ranging, we would have heard something. Wouldn’t we?

I continued my morning rounds, heading up the driveway to check the gate and switch out the memory cards in the trail cams.

I had lots of company this morning!

Though there are six cats in this photo, I ended up with eight of them, following me around!

I found it funny that Agnoos and … one of the ‘icouses (“Sadicous, I think)… found the frost covered plywood “bridge” nicer on their toes than the ground!

While the kittens kept their distance and explored the driveway and culvert, I had Creamsicle Baby, Nutmeg, Rolando Moon and even Butterscotch, all vying for attention! Creamsicle Baby in particular was so demanding of attention, he was not only winding around my feet while I walked, but even jumping up to grab my hands. I was carrying Nutmeg then, later, Butterscotch, so I couldn’t bend over to pet him. He would not let me pick him up when I tried, though.

While continuing my rounds, I made a point of checking out where our sign is going to be set up. My brother really wants to get those posts in before the ground freezes too hard. He’ll be coming out on Saturday, which is supposed to be warmer, and the posts will be installed right at the fence line, so as not to mess with municipal rules. He ended up getting four 8′ posts – two for the sign, and two, just in case. He decided to get the taller posts so the sign would be higher. If the posts are 2′ in the ground, then the top of the sign will be at 6′ instead of 5′, as it would have been with the 7′ posts he originally intended to get. Higher means more visibility, and it’ll be harder to vandalize. Sad thing to have to take into account. I’ve been sending photos of the sign in progress to my brother, and after one set of them, he answered by basically saying “it’s looking good… it’s going to get vandalized…”

With that in mind, he plans to use carriage bolts to attach the sign.

When I started working on this sign, I basically used whatever I could salvage. I found the piece of plywood in the barn, the white paint was left over from fixing the sun room door frame, I already had the reflective paint I’d bought for something else, etc.. The only money I spent was on the paint for the lettering, which I didn’t skimp on since it will be used for other things, too, and a set of craft brushes for the lettering. Since I knew the paint would ruin the brushes, I bought the cheapest ones I could find. Then my brother finds out what I’m doing, and suddenly he’s all excited about it and buying fence posts and carriage bolts! :-D The posts, alone, cost more than what I spent! So sweet of him. I’ll just have to touch up the bolts with white paint, so they won’t be big black circles in the lettering.

With that in mind, when I came in from my rounds, I paused to finish painting the sign. This time, I used a much smaller brush and used it to straighten edges, fix some serifs, and basically make it look all nice and tidy. Well. As much as I can, with my shaky hands. It’s not perfect, by any means, but not anything anyone will notice from the road.

It’s not done, and the paint has a couple of days to dry before the sign will be installed. It’s much sooner than I expected, but that’s okay. Hopefully, our vandal will find it too chilly to try and damage it.

Speaking of which, I have a court date for our restraining order, tomorrow. It’s been over a year since I filed for it. Because of the repeated delays due to restrictions and shut downs, this time the judge actually wants me there to ask me questions. Hopefully, this means it will be finally granted, and our vandal will be required to get the mental health help he needs.

Anyhow…

Once the sign was done, I finally sat down to check the trail cam files – and got a surprise!

A cow, walking up to the gate and checking it out.

!!!

The electric fence had just been fixed, yesterday!

The funny thing is, as I was walking up the driveway, I saw the hoof prints of a cow, frozen into the gravel of the driveway. I just figured they were from the cow that got caught on the trail cam, the night before.

As soon as I could, I headed back outside to check the outer yard fence line.

Clearly, something did go through here, pulling the wire into our side of the fence, but maybe a calf, not a full sized cow!

I then went to the section of fence they had gone through previously, and it was clearly where they had come through. The tall grass was trampled, and there was plenty of dung about. The one cow I saw on the trail cam clearly had company!

The time stamp on the trail cam video (it’s a good thing we have two cameras on the gate, because while both had their motion sensors triggered, the cow was visible in the dark in only one of them) was about quarter after 9pm, so by the time I was out this morning, the cows were nowhere to be seen, though I could hear them. I sent a message to the renters to let them know, being sure to tell them there was no urgency. We’ll just keep the inner yard gates closed.

The thing is; last night, while the vehicle gate was closed, the people gate was opened while my daughter and I worked in the yard. With the electric fence fixed, I didn’t bother closing it again.

So… could it be that a cow came into the yard, and did the things I found in the morning? There’s no chance of seeing tracks in the grass and leaves. I can see knocking over the wheelbarrow and pedestal, but how would a cow cause the damage to the shrine?

Is my mystery solved? Or not?

The Re-Farmer

A bit of snow, and a bit of a disaster (averted)

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It started to snow lightly last night, and is still snowing now!

Nutmeg, Creamsicle Jr. and their mom, Butterscotch

From what I can see on the weather radar, the heavier snow passed just south of us, and we will continue to have snow for at least a few more hours.

Which makes me extra happy to have gotten the clean up in the trees done, yesterday. It looked so good, as I walked by while doing my morning rounds! It’s going to look so much better, when it’s finally done. :-)

A nice, light snowfall and a slow melt is just what we need right now. The temperatures are hovering around freezing, and we’ll be getting just a touch warmer. That moisture should stay in the ground, where we need it.

In other things, we had a cat disaster this morning.

A crashing noise in my husband’s room had us running. (Well… hobbling. None of us can run anymore. LOL) He has an extra comforter on the top of his wardrobe, near a window, that the cats love to hang out on. Somehow, that had gotten knocked off.

That was not the disaster.

The disaster was it hitting my husband’s incense bowl on the way down, knocking it over his computer, filling it with fine sand and ashes. And everything else in the area, of course, but the computer was the only thing at risk.

My husband spent the last couple of hours, carefully dismantling the computer, blowing out all the sand and dust, then putting it back together again.

Just moments ago, he let me know that it is working again.

*phew*

Disaster averted, I guess!

He’s not too happy with the cats right now. It’s not the first time they knocked the bowl down. At least last time, it was just a mess to clean up, though the handle on the lid did break. It’s a small, hand thrown pottery bowl I got from a very skilled and talented potter in the city we moved away from, so it’s not something that can be easily replaced. :-(

Ah, well. We’ll deal!

The Re-Farmer

Clean up: progress on the old wood cookstove

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Looking at the weather forecasts, it’s looking more and more like our planned outdoor gathering with family to celebrate multiple birthdays and anniversaries is going to be an indoor celebration!

So today, I focused on tidying up the Old Kitchen a bit more, so my mother, at least, can sit in it comfortably. Between the Old Kitchen and the sun room, we should be able to fit all of us, if a bit tightly. Of course, if my mother is up to doing the stairs between the old and new parts of the house, we can always move to the dining room.

While wiping things down, I started doing a more thorough cleaning of the old wood burning cookstove. It’ll probably just have a tablecloth thrown over it and be used to hold the food, but I wanted to get some more progress in cleaning it out. Including several decades old ashes in the fire box!

Here is how it looked after I removed the top pieces, and brushed the ashes through.

I should be able to remove the metal plates at each end, which would allow me to remove the grate at the bottom, but I couldn’t see how to do that. For now, I just tried to sweep away as much as I could.

Doing so revealed something strange about the inside wall.

The middle plate looks absolutely destroyed!

I left that for later. First, I wanted to get rid of the ashes. Under the grate are three rollers that can be turned from the outside; a crank handle to do that seems to be missing, but I was able to turn them with my fingers. This allows the ashes to fall into the box below.

I had mostly emptied this box before, so this is all ashes from the fire box.

I’m not sure where that unburned piece of… paneling? … came from. I might have simply missed it, before.

The piece to hold one end of the handle is broken.

After taking the ashes out to the compost, I hosed it down. Then used a chisel to scrape off things stuck to the sides and bottom that were definitely not wood ashes. :-( After hosing it down again, I set it aside to dry, then went back to working on the fire box.

I ended up taking out the bottom of that destroyed panel completely.

This is thick, cast iron. Just how hot did things get, for this top happen?

Once it was out, I tried to sweep away more ashes.

I ended up knocking out chunks of packed ashes, like this one. More was jammed behind the top piece of the metal panel, and I took that out to get at the rest.

Ashes are not supposed to be able to get in there!

I then started sweeping out the space the ash box fits into. In the ashes I swept out, I found some odd things, like old nails and…

What is this???

That, my friends, is the screw end of a light bulb.

Later, I found the filament in the ashes, too. No glass, thank God!

Why on earth would someone toss a light bulb into the fire? The nails, at least, I can see happening. Scrap wood would have been burned, and if they had nails in them, no one would have taken the time to pull them out, first.

But a light bulb???

Then I used the miracle of technology that is my phone camera, to see what I couldn’t see otherwise!

This is where the as box slides in. The flaps above divert the falling ashes towards the box.

The camera focused on the flaps, but you can see the rollers above, that keep the hot coals from falling into the ash box.

I did as much as I could for now on the fire box side. Next was the cook top above the oven.

As you can see, the oven box is covered with ashes. Now that I’ve seen the broken panel piece in the fire box, I know why.

I didn’t even try to get those out. The metal pieces can be removed for easier access, but…

… they are held in place by screws, and there is no way I’m going to try and take those screws out now!

Though I’ve taken the ring plates out before, somehow I never looked at the bottoms of them.

!!!

It seems the fire was allowed to be built up too big and too hot to cause all that damage in the fire box, which then lead to ashes and sooty smoke getting into the space around the oven box. I was quite young when this was still being used, and don’t remember much about it, but I may well have been among those causing the damage. :-/

I really wonder, at times, how we didn’t burn the house down back then!!

I just brushed off as much as I could from the underside of the ring plates. The panels over the water reservoir didn’t need as much.

I didn’t even try to clean the inside of the water reservoir this time.

I did go into the drawer under the oven. The handle and a piece of hinge from the broken oven door is in there, along with …

… the lifter for the ring plates.

I just used my hands to lift them, but when the stove is in use, this tool is vital.

I… can’t imagine what was done to it to cause this damage. !!!

The final thing to do was give it all a wipe down, then leaving it to dry completely before closing it up and putting everything together again. The cook surface and parts like the front of the fire box, and the panels below it, are the only things that are not enameled. Eventually, I want to use stove blacking on those parts. The rest still needs a very thorough scrubbing and rust removal, but I really don’t know far I’ll bother to go with that. We can’t use it – partly because of the damage, partly because we’d lose our insurance if we did – so mostly, I just want to keep it from degrading further. It would be great if we could get it all fixed up but… I’m not sure that it’s worth it. Especially since, there is another one in the storage shed that I know my late brother used, back when that building was his workshop. As far as I know, it’s in good shape. It’s not as old as this one, but is almost exactly the same design.

Who knows. When we finally build our outdoor cooking area, maybe we can include the wood cookstove as part of it. I think I’d really like that.

The Re-Famer

How does the garden grow?

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Check out this sunflower!!

It’s just towering above the others! I figure it’s getting close to 7 ft tall. :-)

There are a couple of others that are getting really tall, too. Like this one.

You can really see the huge seed head developing on this one – and it should get much, much bigger!

But… something’s wrong with another tall one. It’s head is gone?

Nope.

Just fallen over.

It looks like some sort of grub got in there.

This is actually above my head, so I am seeing it better now, in the photo, than I could while looking at the sunflower. The head is still alive, so I’m hoping it’ll survive. It’s the only one that has this.

While going through the squash and harvesting some – the sunburst squash is very prolific! – I spotted an odd looking squash and took a closer look.

This green, bulb shaped squash is a sunburst squash! It looks completely different from all the others on the plant.

I left it, and look forward to seeing how big it gets, and if the shape changes. :-)

The girls and I have been talking about what we want to plant next year, and sunburst squash is definitely staying on our list!

The Re-Farmer

That looks like it’s toast…

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While doing my rounds this morning, I was able to take a closer look at the bird bath.

Throughout the winter, when chipping ice out to add water, I’ve been very careful not to touch the bird bath itself. It already had cracks showing on it, and now that the ice is melting away again, I can see that at least one has gotten worse. I’m sure my ice chopping didn’t help. :-D

Yeeeaaahhh…. I’d say the bird bath is toast.

The kitties still like it! :-D

Since completing my rounds outside, it has started to snow. A gentle snowfall, just enough to start coating the trees again. It won’t last long. Looking at the long range forecast, we’ll be staying above freezing every day. By Sunday, we’re even supposed to hit 10C (50F)! It’s going to get muddy out there, but I’m looking forward to the warmth, and the snow melting away enough to be able to extend my rounds again.

The girls and I have decided it’ll be worth heading to the city to try and do our monthly shop, though I expect we’ll split it again, make a smaller trip and go back again later in April.

I should try and find some rubber boots again. Last year, I couldn’t find anything that would fit over my burly calves. :-D

The Re-Farmer