deer damage

How does the garden(s) grow?

/ Re-Farmer / 3 Comments

I realized I’ve neglected to take progress photos of some of our garden beds, so I got a few this morning.

Here are our two potato beds.

I was shooting blind, because my phone’s screen went completely black in the sunlight. Still, you can see the potatoes among the mulch, separated by a path of grass. Some have bloomed and the plants are starting to die back. We could probably harvest baby potatoes now, if we felt like digging under the layer of straw. I’ve never grown potatoes this way, so it should be interesting to see how they did.

This next photo is the second squash bed.

I just happened to catch a locust flying by in the picture!

We are currently inundated with grasshoppers and locusts right now. Hopefully, they won’t eat up too many of our vegetable plants.

This second bed is the one we planted the day after we were hit with one last frost. The sunburst squash are huge, with many flowers and many little squashes. The mixed summer squash has a couple of plants that are doing well. Interestingly, it seems that plants on the south end of the bed are struggling more than the ones at the north end, rather than any particular type of squash having a more difficult time.

Here is the first bed that got planted.

These are the ones that got frost damaged, even though we had covered them for the night. Some died completely, but a surprising number have managed to survive – with some downright thriving!

This picture is the same bed, from the other end.

The transplants had died at this end, so when some gourds in the seed tray actually germinated, I transplanted them here. Three of them are marked with bamboo poles. Much to my surprise, the one that got dug up by a skunk digging for grubs is surviving. Given how late they germinated and got transplanted, I’m not actually expecting much from them at all, but it will be interesting to see how much the manage to grow.

Then there are the pumpkins.

These were from seeds that were being given away for free at the grocery store near my mother. I had taken one (it even had a sign asking people to take only one), and then my mother gave me two more. Clearly, she didn’t read the sign, because she still had a pack she kept for herself and planted in her own little garden plot that she has this year!

The pumpkin in the above photo is the one from a pack that had 5 seeds in it (the others had 3 seeds). This is the only one of the 5 that germinated, and it came up much later than the ones that germinated in the other two mounds. One mound had 2 seeds germinate.

In spite of such late germination, this one is probably the biggest of the bunch.

It is also the Northernmost mound.

When we started planting here, I’d made a point of planting in the Northern 2/3rds of the area we had mulched. The south side of the area has a lot more shade from the spruces my parents had added to the north side of the maple grove. I didn’t even try planting at that end for that reason. The middle third of the area still gets a lot of sun, but the north third gets basically no shade at all, at any time of the day.

I think that might actually be why I’m seeing differences within the same beds of squash, and the pumpkin mounds.

Something to keep in mind for any future planting in here!

Then there are the beds we made where the old wood pile used to be.

This is the layout of what we planted here.

The beets we got were a collection with Merlin (a dark red), Boldor (golden yellow), and Chioggia (alternating rings of purple and white)

In the foreground, you can see the parsley bed in both photos. It is doing very well. To the left of the parsley bed are the deep purple carrots, with white satin carrots on the right. The carrots could be doing better, but overall, they’re okay.

In the midground of the photos, there is a bed of rainbow carrots above the parsley bed, and beets on either side . Another bed of beets is in the background, beyond the rainbow carrots.

I don’t know how well you can tell in the photos, but there are not a lot of beet greens. The deer have really done a number on them. :-( We should still have some to harvest, though.

Of the two muskmelon we bought to transplant, one died. This is the survivor.

We planted a lot of kohl rabi, but this is all we have that came up and survived.

The large leaves that you are seeing are from 2 plants.

Yup. Out of all that we planted, only 2 survived.

Actually, there had been four.

It turns out that deer like kohl rabi, too. You can’t even see the second one that was nearby; it, too, was reduced to a spindly stem!

In case you are wondering about the plastic containers…

Those are what I used as cloches to cover the muskmelon overnight, to protect them from colder temperatures after transplanting. The containers used to hold Cheese Balls that we got at Costco. I just cut the tops off, then drilled holes around near the bases for air circulation.

I now have them set up near the surviving muskmelon and the kohl rabi. When watering the garden beds, I fill those with water. The water slowly drains out the holes I’d made for air circulation, giving a very thorough watering to the plants. The first time I’d tried this was with the muskmelon, which was pretty small and spindly. The next morning, it had grown noticeably bigger and stronger! So I put the second one by the struggling kohl rabi, and the difference the next day was just as dramatic.

Until the deer ate the two littlest ones.

This worked so well, I’m trying to think of ways to use other cloches we have, most made from 5 gallon water jugs I’d bought for the fish tank, to set up near some of the more struggling squashes.

This morning is the first time I’ve harvested some of the parsley, along with a few carrots. What I don’t use right away will be set up to dry. Which is what will happen with most of the parsley we planted, as we tend not to use fresh parsley all that much.

And now I’m going to stop struggling with our nasty internet connection, which really doesn’t like inserting photos right now, and start on the scalloped potatoes I have planned for supper. I think I’ll find a way to layer some carrots in with the potatoes, too! :-)

The Re-Farmer

Sunflower finds

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Of the first sunflowers that we planted, several of them are now taller than me!

Unfortunately, the smaller ones from the second planting are still having deer issues.

Right next to the nearest sunflower in the above picture is this one.

This is one of the ones that had had its head bitten off a while back. It had been recovering, but this morning, almost all the new leaves have been eaten.

Then I found this one.

Newly decapitated, with so many leaves eaten, I wonder if it will recover.

Like this one.

This is just a couple of feet away from the newly decapitated one. Just the head had been eaten off, not the leaves, and now it’s growing a new head out the side.

We will have to think on how to protect the sunflowers from the deer in the future. We intend to plant more in general, plus more of the giant varieties. There’s also variety that is used to make a purple dye that I’d like to try. They only need to be protected when they’re little; once they get big, the deer leave them alone. My daughters and I have been talking about different temporary fencing ideas, though another possibility is to companion plant things that deer don’t like. Or we could try both.

Having deer come right into the yard is one of those things that we have now, that never happened when I was growing up here. Most likely because there was just too much activity, plus we always had dogs. My mother never had to deal with deer eating her garden! I love having the deer, and that they come right up to the house, but they can sure cause some problems! :-)

The Re-Farmer

Evening visitors, and growth progress

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

Yesterday evening, I happened to glance out my window facing the garden and saw a deer making its way into the yard. Something startled it and it ran off, but I figured that would be a good time to do my evening rounds – and check the sunflowers!

I headed out through the sun room and found another visitor.

The cheeky little bugger completely ignored me and the noise I was making as I came out the sun room doors.

He seems to have some odd matting in his fur. Or maybe something it caught in it?

It wasn’t until I started moving further from the doorway that he started paying attention to me.

(Yes, I was zooming in to take photos, and then I cropped the photos. I was staying well away from Stinky!)

He was not a happy Stinky! I just kept moving away, and he eventually ran off through the old kitchen garden.

So I made sure to go around the other side of the house, to check the garden! :-D

After checking the sunflowers and making my way back to the house, I saw Stinky again – with a friend! – running through the back yard towards the old garden shed. Of course, that was the direction I needed to go! I was able to skirt around them, then use the garden hose to discourage them from coming closer.

Alas, we did lose one of the smaller sunflowers.

I took this picture this morning. This is one of the third variety of giant sunflowers that we planted much later, to replace the ones we lost in the original planting.

The survivors of our first planting are doing pretty good, I think!

Most of them are approaching 5 feet in height, now. Once they got higher than a couple of feet, the deer seemed to ignore them. One of the last ones that got its top chomped off is surviving quite well, and is growing a new “head” from the side of the main stalk. I have high hopes that the most recently decapitated sunflower will do fine and grow a new head, though being one of the variety planted the latest, chances are it won’t have long enough of a growing season to fully mature. We shall see.

I’m just really impressed with how big the pattypan squash plants are getting! They are also filled with buds and blossoms, and little baby squashes. None of the others are even close. There’s a good possibility these will be the only squash that actually produce this year. Which is okay. This year is our experimental year. Anything we get is bonus, and we’re learning a lot.

I keep forgetting to take pictures of the potatoes. They actually look rather sparse, as far as foliage goes, but some have started to bloom, so we can definitely look forward to having our own potatoes this year. Whether or not we use the same method to grow them will be decided when we harvest them.

I also found a rather dramatic surprise this morning, when checking on the carrot and beet beds.

This is a chokecherry tree growing among the sour cherries that are doing so poorly. When I went past it last night, the berries were all still green!

This one is mostly by the cherry trees and a lot of other stuff that we will be taking out (the cherry tree by the house has ripening berries on it, but none of the ones in this other location). I want to make sure to keep the chokecherry tree, since it seems to be doing so well, now. Our first two summers here, this tree didn’t even bloom, so we didn’t realize what it was!

There is another chokecherry tree, in behind where the sad little Saskatoon bushes are, that also decided to bloom and produce this year. It is in an area still filled with spirea that we need to clear out.

Another surprise this year is that we have more, stronger and healthier Saskatoon bushes, hiding behind the stack of boards and junk that have Junk Pile kitten her name. (No kittens in there, this year!) They are still producing big, juicy berries. There is another chokecherry tree growing with them. It’s berries are still very green. In this location, this tree is in shade most of the time, whereas the other two get a lot of sun.

Which had me curious about the other trees we’d gathered chokecherries from, over the past two summers.

It was pretty windy when I tried to take this photo, so it’s not very clear, but you can see there are no red berries on here, yet. A few of the berries are starting to show just a bit of a blush on them. This tree has more shade, being planted so close to the maple grove and rows of spruce trees my parents added on the North side over the years. The berries on this tree ripened later than the other two I checked next, but the berries it produced were larger and juicier.

This chokecherry tree is being choked – by lilacs! It is tipped way over and hanging down. My daughters and I have been talking about what to do with this one. I’ve been thinking of cutting away the lilacs surrounding it, then adding some sort of support I can use to train the tree to start growing upright.

My daughter suggested we leave the lilacs, and get rid of this chokecherry! The lilac hedge serves as both a privacy and dust screen from the main road that goes by on this side of the property. It has quite a lot of traffic, for a gravel road. The reason my mother spent so many years planting and extending this hedge was partly because of just how much dust drifts in, every time a vehicle drove by. Plus, every now and then, vehicles going by would slow down to peer into our yard and garden. And not just the year we grew “konopie” from seeds my mother got from Poland, after regaling us with stories from her childhood. It turned out that konopie is Polish for hemp, but someone thought it was marijuana and stole a row and a half of it.

Anyone who tried to smoke that would probably have gotten rather ill rather than high!

Anyhow. The lilacs serve a purpose, and in that location, privacy and dust screening is more important than having chokecherries. Especially since it turns out we have so many more, elsewhere.

This chokecherry tree is also among the lilacs.

Unlike the other one, this one is growing from the inside of the hedge, instead of out from the middle of it somewhere. So it is growing straight and tall, rather than falling over. In the last couple of summers, I found that of the two among the lilacs, this one also produced better berries, and ripened sooner, than the one that’s falling over.

There is also a small chokecherry tree growing in the middle of the area I move, near where the falling over chokecherry is. It likely sowed itself, but over the years, it has been allowed to grow, rather than getting mowed over. We will likely leave that one be. In the open as it it, it will have lots of light and space to grow straight and tall, and eventually produce lots of berries.

It’s a good thing we like chokecherries. I like to eat them straight off the tree, even though they are very … astringent, I believe the word used is. Given how many trees we’ll have producing berries this year, we can expect to have lots to make things with!

The Re-Farmer

Let’s give this a try

/ Re-Farmer / 9 Comments

While my daughters and I were in the city, my darling husband finally got through to our internet provider and had a little chat with them.

We had internet soon after.

The problem is still not solved, though. It’s just a make-do until a tech comes out to check the secondary account’s satellite disk.

When they first brought this up with my husband, they said it would cost us $125, just to have someone come out.

By the time he was done with them, that fee was waived!

Also, we are back to using our primary account for now, and we will NOT be charged double the price per gig. However, anything we do use is that much more on our bill, so we will be rationing our data for a lot of things.

While we do have a signal with this dish, it is not the same as it was, before all these problems started, just a few days ago. Data transfer speeds are insanely slow, and it can take several attempts just to get a web page to load. WordPress has always been troublesome, but it took me about 8 minutes just to get the editor loaded so I could write this post!

Still, it should mean I can catch up on posts with images. I always resize the images into smaller file sizes, so they don’t take up much data. The following photos all uploaded faster than I could get the editor to load!

So these go back a couple of days. :-)

In the last while, we have been regularly putting the kittens and Beep Beep in the basement for the night, then my husband is usually the one who opens the door for them in the mornings. So we still have cat food both upstairs and down.

The cats, of course, always act as though they’re starving, even though there’s plenty of food in the upstairs bowls. What they’re really begging for is wet cat food, and they get that only once a day. The dry kibble is always available.

Since the adults cats now go into the basement regularly, they’re also going for the kittens’ food bowls, so I added larger tin, so that the kittens could still get at some.

Just look at those buggers! They’re crowing around the smaller containers, like they haven’t eaten in a week!

We have been mixing kitten kibble in with the adult kibble. I think the adult cats like the kitten kibble better! :-D

While I was tending to the kitties that day, it was also the day to check the temperature and humidity in the root cellar. While there, I noticed something I had forgotten about.

The two bottles of our most recent batch of mead!

We were supposed to taste test a bottle after different lengths of time. One of them was supposed to be opened up on my birthday. I completely forgot about it!

At some point, I’ll grab one and bring it up for a taste test. :-)

While checking the garden plots, I discovered something unfortunate.

All three beds of beets had quite a lot of their greens missing. It seems we had a deer visiting! She especially seemed to like this Baldor variety.

In the squash bed, I had a more pleasant surprise.

The largest squash plants that I thought were green zucchini turned out to be…

… sunburst squash!

From the number of buds we’re seeing, it looks like we’ll have quite a lot of them over the summer, too. :-)

I had one last surprise that morning.

While checking the usual spots for fallen branches, I went by the fire pit, which hasn’t been used in over a year. I noticed the skunks had been digging in the dirt, right beside it, and something in the dirt caught my eye.

That white you see?

That’s a glazed brick. One of the many we have all over the place.

Looking around at other spots the skunks had dug up, I saw signs of more.

The fire pit has a ring of bricks around it, completely buried.

It must have taken years for them to be covered by that much soil!

With no fire bans right now, we can actually use our fire pit, and uncovering the bricks will be a good thing to get done, too.

I am really looking forward to being able to do cook outs again!

The Re-Farmer

An interesting night!

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The predicted thunderstorms did pass over us last night. Not the severest part of the system, but enough that we had quite the light show. More are expected today, though I think we will, once again, just get hit by the edges of the system.

I had intended to actually *gasp* go to bed before midnight last night, but I noticed something odd in the live feed from the garage security camera.

One of the side doors was open, and swinging in the wind.

Which is when I remembered: I had intended to do a dump run yesterday, so I prepped garbage bags in the garage, then left the main door open, for when I came back for the van.

I built a screen for the basement door, instead. By the time I remembered, the dump was closed. I completely forgot I’d left the main door open.

So one of my daughters and I went out in the storm; me in my nightgown, rubber boots and an umbrella. :-D My daughter didn’t bother with an umbrella.

We had already lost internet for a while by then. It was up and running again, but then the power flickered out long enough that everything re-set. The router took a while to get going again, and the security camera put itself in default position, rather than facing down the driveway. The power flickered off again later, but not long enough that we had to fuss with things all over again.

It did, at least, cool down! As I write this, we are at what now feels like a fairly cool 22C/71F (“real feel” 25C/77F). The humidity is at 73%. When I did my rounds this morning, it was actually raining, every so slightly.

The rain we’ve been having has been awesome, though. I’ll put up with the overgrown weeds and lawn for things like this.

This is part of a Saskatoon bush we’ve got next to where we are planning to build the cordwood outhouse (though at this rate, I’ll be amazed if we can manage to remove the sod and create a base for it by fall!). Just look at all those berries! This tree isn’t even particularly healthy, either!

These unripe berries are already larger and plumper than the fully ripe berries it had last year – and I watered this one that year! You see the one dark, dried up berry? That’s more like what they looked like last year, fully ripe.

Hhhmm… I wonder what Saskatoon berry mead would be like? :-)

I really need to go visit my cousin and pick up a couple of his big buckets of honey.

One down side of all the rain is, the mosquito population has exploded. It meant rushing through checking on things, and I never did go through the areas I normally do after a storm, so see what branches have come down. I did check the gardens and the sunflowers, though.

The sunflowers are really starting to grow fast! The one in the middle is the taller variety, and it already shows.

Unfortunately, another top got chomped, which you can see on the bottom. I believe I saw our culprit in the trail cams, too. The one deer that still visits regularly. It has a very distinctively long face and leggy body that makes it recognizable.

I really hope we don’t lose too many more of these. I should pick up some chicken wire or something to protect them.

Which reminds me; my intended trip into town today will be delayed until tomorrow. I completely forgot that yesterday was the last day of June.

Happy Canada Day!

Not that anyone’s allowed to celebrate it this year. :-/ Why anyone bothers with restrictions on crowds right now, after allowing all those protests without consequences, I have no idea. Not only has Canada Day celebrations all been canceled, but warnings had gone out over “rumors” that people intended to have their own celebrations.

At times like this, I really appreciate living here, away from everyone. I’ll take dealing with deer eating my sunflowers over people, any day!

What can I say. I’m a hermit at heart! :-D

The Re-Farmer

How things are this morning

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After our adventure last night, I’m rather impressed by my current lack of pain this morning! :-) I expected to at least be stiffening up by now, but at the moment, there’s just some minor tension in my neck and shoulders. I’m taking pain killers, anyway, but that’s really more for my arthritis.

I really don’t know a whole lot about my mother’s car, but my older brother had tried to help her with it a lot over the years, and knows it a lot better than I do. I wasn’t able to fill him in on what happened last night, but he was able to take a few minutes from work and call me this morning.

I was reminded of another reason it’s a good thing this happened in my mother’s car, and not our van.

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Destructive deer!

/ Re-Farmer / 1 Comment

While walking about the yard this morning, there are areas that I can see where the deer have gone.

Along the edge of the spruce grove, there are now several areas like this.

20181113.deer.marks

This patch is new.  It wasn’t there yesterday.  At the end of the row of spruces, near the feeding station, there is a patch they’ve been pawing at for a while, now, and it’s getting quite big.

I think, in the process of clearing out that area and taking out the bottom branches of the spruces, I also gave them better access to something in the moss that they like.  I can’t see what it might be, though.

While continuing around the yard and by the garage, I noticed deer tracks coming from the barn towards the yard, so I followed them.

Then I noticed something odd about one of the wire holders for the renter’s electric fence at the gate.  It looked bent.

That’s new.

Heading over, I started to find wire.

Lots of it.

So I started gathering it up.

20181113.deer.damage1

Here is most of it, along with the holder that is bent the most.

20181113.deer.damage2

The other one turned out to be bent, too.  The wire is still running through it.  Considering how much wire got dragged into our side of the fence, I think it may well have broken loose right at the solar battery area.  Which is almost at the other end of the fence.

In case there was any doubt as to what rapscallions did the damage…

20181113.deer.damage.tracks

There were plenty of tracks, showing exactly where they came through!

The fence wire would not be easily visible, and with the cows moved out for the winter, the electric fence probably doesn’t even have electricity running through it right now.  The deer probably didn’t see it to jump over it, and would not have felt any shock to cause them to back away when they touched it.

We like the deer coming around enough to put up with any damage they do; there isn’t a lot.  But this is a bit more than just digging up the yard.  The wire should be fine and just need to be re-attached.  I believe those wire holders are new, from the last time the cows broke through.  I know the renter likes the deer, too, and this sort of thing is just what we have to live with when living around here.  I just called to let him know about the damage.  With no cows here, there’s no hurry to fix it.

The Re-Farmer