figuring things out

Found it! Also, my mother’s car is very small

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I had a bit of time this morning to prepare before working on the old kitchen garden. My plan had been to use the four foot length of logs left over from when the branch piles were chipped to build up the walls of garden bed, end to end, held in place by stakes. As I was doing other stuff around the spruce grove yesterday, I realized a tree top from a dead tree we’d cut down was still stuck in the cherry trees we need to get rid of (they are non-productive, and invasive), and it was nice, long and straight.

So this morning I worked on getting that out, then went through the spruce grove to see if there were other dead trees that were already on the ground I could make use of. That was then I spotted something red among the dead grasses.

Look what I found!

These are the bird feeder parts that disappeared, a year and a half or so ago!

This was about 40 yards away from where it had been hanging. No wonder I couldn’t find it back then! I guess it really was the racoons that stole it away.

The cannister was still intact, but the rest was broken into many pieces, which got cleaned up.

I did manage to find more useable trees that I dragged closer to the old kitchen garden, and then I headed out to see my mother. I left early because I wanted to go to the pharmacy first, then grabbed some fried chicken and wedges for lunch. My mother has told me not to, in the past, because she decided the chicken was making her sick, but she had no complaints at all when I showed up with it! The other choices weren’t open today, or opening later, so there wasn’t much choice.

So we had lunch, then she gave me a list of the few things she needed at the grocery store and I picked those up for her. While visiting longer after that, I discovered our vandal has been swinging by her place again, and had left more phone messages. I listened to those and recorded them with my phone. I’m concerned, because our restraining order is expiring about now. I’d hoped to not need to file to renew it. I still sometimes see him on the security cameras, just going by. He hasn’t been doing things like coming up to the gate and messing with it, or giving the finger down the driveway, nor has he done things like follow me home and yell at us from the road – but once the restraining order is expired, there’s nothing to prevent him from starting that up again. From his messages, he’s clearly still obsessed with us living here on the farm, and still portrays himself as a victim, and me as trying to put him in jail and destroy his life. Truth is, I don’t even think about him until he shows up on the camera files, or starts bothering my mom again.

Frustrating.

Anyhow.

After finishing up my visit with my mother, I went to the hardware store. I found some things to use to keep the frames I want to build from bowing out, and also to pull in the walls of the raised beds. The long sides are made with board that are 6′ pieces and 3′, joined by attaching them to pieces of 2×4. What I didn’t expect was for the 2×4 to start splitting lengthwise! So all three beds are bowing out, some more than others, at the joins. If I can get those pulled in and straight again, the frames I want to build will sit properly on top.

For the frames, I wanted to get 1″x2″x10′ boards, but when I got there, they only went up to 8′ long. Since these will be moved around a lot, I did not want to be cobbling the long sides together to make 9′. The next option was 1″x4″x12′ I’d intended to get a dozen of the 1″x2″, but went with 10 of the larger size. After taxes, it came out to just over $80, which was more than I’d wanted to spend! But, I needed the lumber.

So I got the lumber, then drove into the yard to have it loaded into the car.

Slight problem with not using the van right now.

If I’d been able to get the 10′ size, it would have worked, but at 12′ long… well…

I folded down the front passenger seat, so they could be slide right up to the windshield, but they were still sticking out the back. They gave me a flag, but didn’t have any ties. I had to go back inside and buy a couple. The car happens to have metal loops on the sides so I could attach the longer one across the boards to secure them, but I still had to secure the hatch. The shorter tie was still too long. I went back in to try and find shorter one, but there was nothing. The hatch had a small hole I could put the hook into and that’s all there was to secure it there, so it’s not like I could use rope or something. I ended up pushing the end of the tie through the loop in the middle that the hatch locks into, shortening it a bit, and that was the best I could do.

I drove home doing only 80km/h all the way (speed limit on the highway is 100km/h), with one arm over the boards! I did pull over at one point to adjust them higher into the front of the car, and even used the flag to tie around the ends of the boards (in the photo, it runs under one board, to keep it from sliding off), just to secure them a little bit more.

The ties I got are going to stay in the car, and I’ll probably get some cord or rope to include in our emergency kit, too! That’s the red and black bag to the right of the lumber in the photo.

As I was driving home, I was thinking about how these 4″ boards would be just too wide for the frames I want to build, when it finally occurred to me that I could just cut them in half, length wise!

Which means, I could have gotten away with buying only 6 of them, instead of 10.

Ah, well. It’s not like the extra will go to waste!

So that’s the plan with these. After I’m done with the old kitchen garden, and the girls have finished with the sun room, I’ll drag the table saw out of the sun room and use it to cut a few of the boards in half, length wise, to start with and then build the first frame. I think I’ll make the first one over the spinach bed. I don’t like the floating row cover sitting right on top of the soil. As light as it is, it just seems like it’ll weigh down the seedlings when they germinate. That will be my prototype, so if I need to make any changes in the plans I have in mind, I’ll do that when making a cover to replace the hoops and plastic over the carrots.

But that will have to wait.

I’m not sure if I’ll be working on the old kitchen garden tonight, anymore. It’s supposed to be warm out there – we’re at 11C/52F but the winds are still high. It’s not just about being chilly. Even with a hat on and wearing the hood on my jacket, I still got ear aches from the wind.

We shall see.

I’m hoping to be able to set up for another time lapse video of the process. I have a GorillaPod to hold the phone I’m using to record video, but it’s a smaller one, which limits what I can attach it to. There are several options, though, so it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out.

I’ll decide whether I’ll start on it tonight or tomorrow, when I do my evening rounds and see what the conditions are like.

Now that I’ve got the lumber, though, I’m really itching to build those frames!

The Re-Farmer

You’d never know

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My daughter took care of feeding the outside cats early this morning, so I headed out a few hours later to do the rest of my rounds, including checking to see if any fallen branches needed to be cleaned up, etc.

You would never know that, just a few days ago, we looked like this.

The day after the snow stopped, not only was all this new snow gone, but so was a lot of the remaining older snow! Right now, the only snow left on the ground is either from the deepest piles, or in the deepest shade. Which actually goes a long way to helping me identify where to prioritize new growing zones and high raised beds.

With so little snow and not a whole lot of accumulated water, either, I checked out a few areas in the outer yard I now have access to.

Removing the maple that was allow to grow at the back of this old cabin means there are no longer branches causing damage to the roof, but we have lost a few more pieces of that corrugated tin. There are pieces from a shed that collapsed long before we moved here that can be salvaged to replace the missing and damaged ones, but we have no way to safely get up there to put them on. I really want to cover these patches of roof. This is the last of the log buildings that hasn’t collapsed, and I want to salvage it, if at all possible, but that’s not going to happen if we don’t at least patch up the roof. Ideally, of course, we’d replace it entirely, but that’s not going to happen until we are in a position to repair the building, and that’s not going to happen for a few years, yet. We’ll need to continue cleaning up around it, and cutting away the trees that have been allowed to grow against the walls.

I find myself wondering if the best way to save this building would be to literally take it apart, log by log, and rebuild it on a better foundation (it’s sitting on giant logs that are rotting away and sinking into the ground), and put on a new roof in the process. We’d have to keep track of the individual logs so that they get put back together in the same order, since they are cut to fit just as they are.

When my parents bought this property, this building was used as a summer kitchen. My parents used it as a chicken coop, which never got cleaned up inside after they stopped having chickens, so there’s a lot of work that needs to be done inside. It is actually wired for electricity, though, with a couple of lights, light switches and outlets, so that heat lamps could be used for the chicks. I believe it was powered via the old pump shack, much like the current warehouse is now, except that my late brother buried the electrical cable between those two buildings. The pump shack and the old chicken coop are much closer together. I have no memory of it, but there was most likely a power line running from just under the eaves of each roof. I’ll have to take a closer look to see if there is any sign of where the line went into the cabin at some point.

Then there’s this old cabin.

I was able to get around to the far side of it, and it has collapsed even more. What a shame.

When I was a kid, this building used to be closer to the house, where we now have a parking area. It used to be a house. My parents bought this place from my dad’s uncle, but the family that owned it before had built the cabins. This one, and another before it, had been houses. When the family needed a bigger house, they just built another cabin. The original part of the house we live in now was the last cabin they built. I don’t know if they originally built it on a basement or if that was dug out later, but a second floor was included and what we now call the old kitchen was tacked on later, and is not built of logs. At some point, my dad had this old cabin moved here, and it was used as “storage”. Basically, filled with all the junk no one was willing to throw away, or that friends in the city gave to the farm, because there’s always room on the farm, right? I remember playing inside it as a child, before it was too filled up, then again after it was moved, and more filled with stuff. I even found the remains of the cradle I slept in as a child. I was quite startled by how small it was – way smaller than what is now considered safe for a baby crib – but I distinctly remember the little teddy bear design on the inside of what might be considered the footboard. Of course, in my memory, it was much, much bigger.

I have some very, very early memories.

I also remember playing and exploring in the other log building that had been a house. There had been a foot powered sharpening wheel in there, and I wonder if the one I found when cleaning up my dad’s old forge was from there. I doubt it, but I like to think that at least that one thing was saved. During the years I was away, I’m guessing it collapsed, too. All I know is that it was burned, and there is now no sign of it. Sadly, no one considered these buildings worth maintaining.

I’ve had it recommended that we just light a match to this, but I want to dismantle it to clean it up, and salvage what we can. There are bound to be sections of logs that aren’t rotted out, and they can be reused for things like the cordwood buildings we are wanting to build. Much of this wood is so rotted that yes, it will get burned, but there is so much stuff in there, we need to dig it out and see how they should be disposed of properly.

That oil drum in the foreground would make a good replacement burn barrel, if we had a way to cut the top off.

Because this is so close to the septic outlet, we might have to get rid of those trees that should never have been allowed to grow against the building in the first place.

What a shame.

Thankfully, the winds have died down, but to have an idea of just how windy it got…

The winds have been slowly destroying the tarp – or what was probably the roof of some kind of shelter – and I’d put the rocks and old tires to keep it from blowing around as much. The winds were high enough to actually blow that tire on the ground off the roof of the car! I pulled as much of the tarp back as I could – it needs to be replaced, of course, but a little bit of coverage is better than no coverage – and put the old tire back on top.

What’s really amazing is on the left of the photo. Do you see what looks like three sticks poking through the tarp?

Those look like maple. There’s a tree growing under there! It wasn’t there when I put the tarp on, several years ago. Somehow, it has managed to get enough light under there to grow and actually break through the tarp. Once things warm up a bit more (the tarp is still frozen to the ground on this side), I’ll have to uncover it and remove the tree.

Talk about resilient!

Usually, when extending my rounds this time of year, I’m making note of all the things that we’ll need to work on and hopefully complete over the summer months. What’s frustrating is looking at things like this, knowing what work needs to be done, but also knowing we can’t do it for various reasons. Like not being able to safely get up to patch the roof on the one cabin, so it doesn’t end up like the other one.

Well, we shall see what we manage to get done over the next few years.

The Re-Farmer

Feels wasted

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Today is Sunday and I normally try to keep it as my day of rest, but today just feels… wasted.

I woke up to a bad pain day. Enough that I asked my daughters to take care of feeding the outside cats, then went back to sleep for a couple more hours. It’s not even the worst pain I’ve been in, but it’s like all my joints just don’t want to work properly.

(As I type, retype and retype again, these few sentences repeatedly, because my fingers don’t want to work right!)

Still, I wanted to make sure I got outside for a while, do the rest of my morning rounds and get some fresh air and sunshine. It’s a really gorgeous day out there, and I didn’t want to miss too much of it!

Judgement is judging the state of my boots. 😄

Judgement and Gooby both followed me around all over. With more snow melting away, and plenty of wind, I found and picked up a lot more of those plastic strips from the new shingles being blown around.

One of the areas I can now get into is parts of the spruce grove. Usually it’s either too wet from the snow melt, or too overgrown, to get into. The snowmelt is being absorbed by the ground this spring and nothing is growing yet, so I was able to get through most of the area. There are so many dead trees in there. Some on the ground and rotting, some stuck on other trees and may actually be useable, and others that will need to be cut down. I was also spotting the poplars I want to thin out to use for the trellis tunnels we will be building. Poplar has been taking over the spruce grove. We will be keeping them to a certain extent, as they have been a very useful material, but as we cut down and clean out the dead trees, I want to plant more spruces in the spruce grove!

Feeling the way I do today, though, looking at all the work that needs to be done had me feeling my aching bones even more.

I was also scoping out locations. If things work out to plan, we’re going to have a shed delivered to us at some point, and we need to decide where to put it. It will likely be used as a chicken coop, once it gets the repairs it needs, until we can build the mobile chicken coop I have in mind. We will need some sort of base to support it, so it’s not directly on the ground. Yesterday, I was able to get into the barn and see the state of things. In the lean to side, there are a whole lot of old tires (why are there so many old tires all over the place???), some with rims, some without. It occurred to me that we can use the tires with rims to support the shed. Or just the rims. We don’t have as many rims without tires around, but we can take the tires off.

I had considered putting the shed near the barn, where we would have access to electricity if we wanted, but we have other plans for the outer yard, including permanent raised garden beds and the outdoor kitchen, so I’m thinking it might get to be too much. My daughter is also looking to build a shelter for a forge in the outer yard, though in a different area. The space is going to be filled up quite a bit, and we still need to make sure that there are lanes to drive through with large vehicles. There are also pipes from the well and septic tank running through towards the barn, with the septic pipe running off to the outflow pipe and water pipes running to an old cattle fountain and the barn. The area over them needs to be kept clear, in case they ever need to be excavated. Some day, I would like to be able to turn that water on again, but not until we’ve been able to replace our well pump and upgrade to a larger pressure tank. The shut off valve for fountains and barn is in our basement. There are two cattle fountains are designed to refill automatically, and they keep the water from freezing in the winter. One fountain, we can see from the house. The other is behind the barn, set up to be accessible both inside and outside of a pen. I’d like to have both of them checked out and repaired as necessary. We’re not planning to have cattle, but if we end up having goats or something, or even have it available for the deer or the renter’s cows, that would be good. That is years in the future, though. As for the tap in the barn, it’s been bashed into at some point and needs repair, too.

In the end, I decided the best place to set up the shed would be near the garage. There’s an open space there that no longer has a branch pile in it. We would have to line it up with the front of the garage, which should keep it from shading out the asparagus and sunchoke beds along the chain link fence. With the chain link fence and the garage, we would have to fence off only two sides to create a run for any chickens. It would be a small run for just a few chickens, but enough to start with. The shed would need to be far enough from the garage to access the wall and roof. Now that the branch pile is gone, we can finally clean out the eaves on that side of the garage!

That branch pile was never meant to be there for several years!!

Having it by the garage gives easy access to electricity, plus better storage for feed and bedding, and still be fairly close to the house, where we’d be getting water from.

To prepare for the shed here, the ground will need a small amount of leveling, and the tires/rims can be brought over. I don’t know the dimensions of the shed yet, so I’d just want to have them nearby until I know where to put them. We even have a chain link gate in the storage house, sitting on the remaining section of stairs to the basement, that could be used to access the chicken run after we fence it off. The shed itself needs its floor replaced. It has a flat roof that leaks, which is why the floor got damaged, so I want to put an angle roof over the existing one, with an overhang on all sides.

Little by little, it’ll get done.

The next area I wanted to scope out was the maple grove behind the house. The two branch piles there are now gone, so it’s nice and open again. The old garden shed is slowly rotting away. My late brother got it second hand from who knows where, and it was basically shoved in between some trees, on top of rocks. I don’t know if any attempt had been made to level it when it was first brought in, but it’s certainly not level now. The trees are holding it up, though!

Since the outdoor bathroom we were planning to build as a cordwood practise building will have to wait until we’ve cut down and removed about a dozen dead spruce trees, I want to make a garden shed as a cordwood practise building. My original thought was to place it next to where there is a path through the maple grove to the main garden area, with the door facing the path.

The bare ground the branch piles had been on will be planted with a lawn replacement mix of seeds, but as I walked around, I considered using one of those patches as a better location for the shed I have in mind. It’s not going to be very big; the interior is planned to be 6’x8′, plus the width of the cordwood walls, so we have some options. One thing to keep in mind, though, is the water. There is a tap near the old garden area. It used to be right at the path along one side of the garden, but the garden grew smaller over the years, as my parents planted more trees closer to the house, instead of along the north fence line. There are now trees on the other side of the old path, where garden used to be. A lot of trees have been cut down since it was installed, and there’s even a stump right at the tap that still keeps sending out shoots. Other trees have gotten much bigger since it was installed, too. The water source is a tap at the back of the house, and there is a hose buried in the ground. I’ve tried hooking up the hose end, only to have water spraying up from the ground, at the edge of one of the branch piles that was there. One of the goals of this year is to dig up the old hose and replace it. My thought is to get some heavy duty hose and run it through a PVC pipe from tap to tap. That way, if we ever need to replace it again, it would be relatively easy to pull it out and put a new one in, without having to dig a new trench.

Digging that old hose out is not going to be easy. There are going to be a lot of roots in the way!

The main goal being to have that tap at the main garden area working again. It would be a better place to hook up a hose for watering the garden, and I want to make a vegetable washing station. Having the new garden shed near the tap would also be convenient.

The more I walked around the area, the more I realized the best place to build the garden shed would actually be on the other side of where the hose is buried, closer to where the current shed is, and closer to the tap. There are fewer tree stumps to work around, among other things! There would also be more open space in what would be the front of the shed.

In planning the cordwood walls for this, we intend to place longer logs in parts of the wall to support a bench on the outside at one end, which would be closer to the tap. We could even include some longer logs higher up to support a small table or shelf, too. The other end will be facing south, and we plan to have a window and bottle bricks on that side for natural light. With the new location I’m considering, there won’t be as much light, since there are more large maples there. At least one of them is dead and needs to be cut down and untangled from the live tree that’s holding it up. Others are leaning so far over, I plan to cut them to where the trunks are still straight, which will encourage new growth at a lower height. That will be better for the trees, but will eventually block out more light from the planned shed. I don’t mind that too much, though. As long as we have a good, strong garden shed!

So…

Lots of plans. Lots of work to do this summer.

I guess today wasn’t that much of a wasted day, after all.

The Re-Farmer

These are two different cats, plus some updates

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A while back, I was seeing the one ‘iccus that was still around. Chaddicus? Thadiccus? I know it’s not Bradiccus, because he had a white tail tip and was… well… male… and I don’t think it’s Saddicus…). This cat was very pregnant, so when I heard a kitten squeaking that one day, I assumed it was … Thadiccus. I’ll settle on Thadiccus.

But then I started seeing the mama, and finding dead babies, and when she came to me for comfort and cuddles, I realized it was Junk Pile.

Except this morning, I saw both of them at the same time.

That’s Junk Pile on the right, sitting on the roof. She no longer lets me touch her, never mind carry her, but at least she doesn’t run off quite as much.

That’s Thaddicus in the kibble house.

Junk Pile has more white on her chest area, but if you can’t see that area, they look almost identical. We also don’t often see them both at the same time, and I hadn’t seen Junk Pile for days before the kitten sadness.

Thaddicus is not pregnant anymore.

Which means, there is a litter of kittens somewhere outside the yard. If they survived being born this early in the year.

*sigh*

Thaddicus tends not to relax when people are around, so the chances of her lying in a position where I might see if she’s nursing is very low.

Meanwhile, Rosencrantz is also getting pretty big. She tends to have her litters in the junk pile by the chain link fence. I was really hoping we’d be able to catch her and get her fixed before she got pregnant again.

At least last year’s kittens were mostly male, and the Cat Lady has been able to help us with the females that we’d been able to socialize. Still, we have three calicos and two torties that are quite feral, so we will potentially have quite a few litters again this year.

*sigh*

Well, we’ll see how many of the males disappear over the summer, and find their own territory somewhere else.

Meanwhile…

My attempt to find a new doctor has not been successful. I found a third clinic in the town we’ve been going to and called them this morning, but they are not accepting new patients. When I asked, the receptionist knew of only one doctor that was accepting new patients, and that was in the smaller city where the specialist I took my mother to see is located, and I know that would be more than my mother would be willing to put up with. My husband and I still have some options to explore, but unless we’re willing to go to the cities, there are no doctors available for my mother.

So, we’ll likely wait to see when new doctors transfer to our doctor’s clinic, to replace the three that are leaving.

In between all that, I’ve been cleaning up and cleaning out this blog, to reclaim media storage space. It has been unexpectedly frustrating.

I’ve been taking out my old Critter of the Day and Photo of the Day posts. I hadn’t realized just how many of them there were! I started doing these in 2018! Most of these had only a line or two of text, or none at all. All had at least one image, with some having two or three images. So far, I’ve deleted images from and trashed over 270 posts. The first frustration is that so far, this has only recovered a little over 1% of my 13 gigs of storage space. On the plus side, 1% storage space is enough for a lot of photos!

I was going to start with the oldest posts and work my way to the more recent, since it was a while before we figured out how much to reduce our file sizes and not use up memory too quickly, so a lot of those files are larger, even though we had already started to crop and resize fairly quickly. A number of them won’t be removed, since the images in them are stored on Flickr. Flickr limits the number of files you can upload, however, so I can’t use that anymore, without getting a Pro account. I don’t want more annual fees.

The biggest frustrations I’ve been having is with WordPress’ lack of media organization. Everything that’s uploaded is there by date of upload, but if you try to do a search for, say, all images uploaded in a specific year and month, the only thing that will come up are images where the year and month are part of the file name. The only way to see all the images for a month is to keep scrolling back in time. Which is fine for the most recent couple of years, but this is a very photo heavy blog, and after a while, WordPress starts really struggling. Then I start getting pop ups saying WordPress is not responding, asking me if I want to wait or cancel, as thumbnails of images stop loading for a while before suddenly whole groups of them will appear. Then I can scroll down a bit more, and the while thing starts over again.

Last night, I did that for hours, just to reach 2019, when suddenly there was a glitch and I had to reload – but the reload put me right back at the start.

There’s a reason I was trying to scroll back through all the images to get to 2018 (I never got past 2019). What I had started to do was do a search for all Critter of the Day posts. You’d think all the posts with Critter of the Day in the title would show up, but nope. Every post with the word “critter” or “day” would also show up. Still, it made it easier to go through the old posts, and I did even get some going back to 2018 that I tried to deal with. I would open each appropriate post in a new tab in edit mode, then open the image/s I wanted to get rid of in another tab. From there, I would cut and past the file name of the image into another tab I had for the media files and do a search for that specific file. Once it came up, I could delete the image, go back to trash the post, then move on to the next one.

The problem?

Sometimes, the searches just didn’t work.

Obviously, the image is somewhere in my media storage, but they don’t come up in the search. This was a particular problem with early images, when I was using only descriptive words for the file names. I’ve since changed to starting every image file with the numerical year, month and day. That way, if nothing else, I can do a search for the numerical part of the file name and a whole bunch of files will come up. I then find the exact one I’m after, delete that one, then trash the post it was in.

Except sometimes, even that didn’t work. There are some files that simply will not come up in the media search, even though I am copying and pasting the exact file name as it shows on the image. The search cannot have the .jpg or .png file extension, or it won’t come up. Some images had an _ added to them for some reason, and most of the time, if those were there, the image wouldn’t come up in a search (but today, I had a whole bunch work, anyway!).

So while I was able to clean out almost 300 images, there are some that I will have to find the hard way. By scrolling through years of images to get to the date the post was made.

After much wasted time and frustration yesterday, I tried again today, slowly scrolling through media files in between doing other things. I still barely made it to 2019.

So instead, I’ve been going through the post files, looking for the picture of the day titles, from more recent to older. These newer posts have images that are all coming up in a media search, so it’s been a lot more productive.

But I still have only freed up about 1% of storage space total.

This is going to be a long, slow, monotonous job.

Looking through all those old photos, though… Gosh, there are some really good photos! I had fun with them, too. Especially the silly deer faces – I had a whole daily series of photos just for silly deer faces! But, this is not a photography blog and, unlike other posts that are still getting hits years later, they are just taking up space. Aside for the first day or two after being uploaded, no one sees them.

Ah, well. This is all a learning process!

I’m done with that for today, though. There’s probably another two or three hundred more posts to go through before I’m done!

Time for a break from that!

The Re-Farmer

Finally done! (video)

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I’ve been working on a project for some time now – with a major delay while we fought with the cat barriers and other things.

One of the things we are planning to build is an off-grid type outdoor kitchen. Before we can build the cooking areas, though, we need a shelter. After much discussion with the girls, we hashed out a plan, discussed location and materials, and figured things out as much as we could. Then, to help figure out some of the details, I made a scale model.

Here is the making of the model, and our plans explained.

I hope you like it!

The Re-Farmer

Strange Behaviour (sad update)

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I tried to do a head count while feeding the outside cats this morning, and I think I counted 23. What concerned me is that I couldn’t see the mama cat anywhere, nor could I make anything out through the windows of the cats’ house. I think I may have heard a squeak, but it could easily have been something else.

While switching out the memory card on the gate cam, a whole bunch of cats came running up the driveway to follow me around. Including one that had me doing a double take.

It was the mama.

(I’d thought she was one of the ‘iccuses, but now I realize she’s Junk Pile!)

This is a cat that I’ve only ever been able to touch by sneaking while she ate, and that was rare. Today, however, she was coming right up to my feet. I reached out to pet her a few times and at first, she nervously backed away, but when I finally got to stroke her back, she stopped and let me pet her.

While trying to walk back to the inner yard, she kept running ahead, then stopping and blocking my feet, then running ahead, then blocking my feet, over and over. Finally, I picked her up – and she let me! I started walking again, which was too much for her, so she jumped down, but was running ahead, then blocking my feet, all the way to the house.

At that point, went down another path to cross the main garden area, and switch the memory card on the sign cam. There is just a narrow, hard packed path through the snow, and if my feet slip off the packed snow, I find myself sunk up to my knee. I often have cats following me, running ahead, and trying to trip me up, and this morning, there were the usual 3 or 4 of them.

On my way back, there she was.

She was doing the same thing; getting under my feet, then running ahead, getting under my feet, then running ahead. On this path, that’s actually kind of dangerous, so I picked her up again and tried to carry her.

Not only did she allow me to carry her all the way back to the house, but she actually snuggled up against me!!!

This from a cat that wouldn’t even let us touch her, without being sneaky about it, before.

It wasn’t until I got in front of the house that the finally wanted to jump down, but allowed me to lower her closer to the ground, first. She ran ahead of me towards the cat shelters, then ran into the cat house.

I tried looking through the windows, but it’s so hard to see into there. The larger windows have too much reflection, and the small one is too dirty on the inside. I tried moving the strips of carpet over the entrance and could finally see her. The larger cat bed in there has been moved (and it pretty torn up!) and is now next to the litter box (which has not been changed in months, because we can’t easily get at it; I doubt the cats are even using it anymore), and I could see other cat blankets pushed around. While I was looking, she moved to the cardboard box with the pillow in it that’s still in the other corner, and where I saw movement yesterday morning, when I first heard kitten noises.

With this very unusual behaviour, I can’t help but feel that she is asking for help.

The problem is, with the snow around the back of the cat house, the counterweight will probably not be able to drop as far as it should, which means needing someone to actually hold the roof open. My daughter and I will be doing that soon; I want to wait until it’s a bit warmer (it was -17C/1F with a wind chill of -28C/-18F while I was out this morning). We’ll bring the hard sided cat carrier out, in case we need to move babies, and hopefully be able to straighten things out inside the cat house a bit as well.

If we do end up moving the babies, then what?

With her strange behaviour this morning, I’m guessing Junk Pile would be willing to come along. The question is, do we set up a “cave” for her in the sun room?

Or do we take her inside.

I still have the baby jail cage in my room. The other cats like to go into there for naps, or just when they want to be left alone.

Well… we’ll make that decision after we see what we find in the cat house.

The Re-Farmer

Update: warning; some graphic details to follow

well, it’s done. After having to chip the packed snow away from the crates supporting the counterweight, my daughter and I were able to open the cat house roof, with the cat carrier nearby for any babies we found.

My daughter is absolutely devastated.

What we found were pieces.

Nature at work. When mamas lose their babies, they “clean up” by eating the remains. If it wasn’t the mama, any of the other cats could have done it. I hadn’t mentioned before, but even yesterday, when I found the second dead kitten in the shelf shelter, it was missing its head, so the cats had already been at that one.

While my daughter looked away, I got the large pieces out, then had to use the snow scraper to bring the smaller bits close enough for me to reach them. A couple of times she looked back, only to be telling me where I’d missed another piece. Once we were sure I got all the bits, we straightened out the cat beds and blankets, then closed the roof up again. At that point, my daughter took the cat carrier in while I finished up.

After clearing the snow out of the hole and putting the crates back under the counterweight, I got a bucket to pick the bits up out of the snow to add them to the other remains awaiting cremation (it’s too windy to start a fire now). Only then did I realize there were two tails parts. These were the remains of two kittens, not one.

*sigh*

I guess the mama coming to me for attention this morning was her looking for comfort after losing her babies.

We knew the chances of survival for kittens born this early in the year was low, but this is the first time we’ve had to clean up the bodies. My daughter is very tender hearted, and having a hard time with it. She was totally unprepared for what we found.

*sigh*

Unexpected progress

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What a gorgeous day it is today! As I write this, we are at -2C/28F, with beautiful sunshine and next to no wind. Snow is melting all over the place! Including our nice new roof – with not a single leak into the sun room!

I’m not sure how many cats I saw this morning – I lost track after 20. That long haired tabby even let me pet him, as he followed me up the driveway. On the way back, I spotted The Distinguished Guest, tucked into a path in the snow, waiting his chance to come closer to the house and get some food.

I got a message from the garage, letting me know our van was ready to pick up. The final bill was $216 and change. It meant setting a little bit less aside for our “car payment”, but not by much.

We got to talk about his trip to the auction, and no, he was not able to find anything, and he was able to explain the issue.

We actually got approved for a larger amount loan than the cost of the vehicle we were interested in. The problem was that the monthly payments would have been $750 a month, because of the interest. As my credit score is so bad, the interest rate would have been 29%. Which is insane. To get a vehicle that meets our needs, with payments we could afford, that was also 2014 or newer, with a maximum 180,000 km… well, it just doesn’t really exist.

Of course, right now, we have nothing to improve our credit rating. We have no debt. No rent or mortgage. Nothing that would improve our credit rating.

His suggestion?

Get a credit card.

More specifically, get a card with a $300 or $500 credit limit. Max the card out every month, and pay it off every month. Which we could easily do with a single Costco shopping trip. In 6 months, we’d have a good credit score. Together with the money we are setting aside every month towards a down payment, he’d be able to get us a much newer and better vehicle, with payments within our budget.

While we were talking, his mechanic joined the conversation. He knew full well what we were going through. Thanks to the lockdowns, he lost his small trucking business 2 years ago. It wiped him out completely and, of course, his credit score was wrecked. He wanted to get a loan for a truck to start over, but couldn’t get one. He got himself a $500 credit card, maxed it out and paid it off every month, and it repaired his credit rating enough that he was able to get a lone for a truck – and those things go for about $200,000!

It’s basically the only way we have available to us to repair my credit score, so when I got home, I went online with my bank and started looking up what was available. Once I got to a certain point, though, I decided I needed to talk to someone, so I called it in. As I spoke to the representative, he told me the main issue was that I have no income – it will be based on household income. My chances of being approved was pretty low, but I could apply for a secured credit card. That, however, had to be done in person. He recommended I do that, rather than continue trying to apply over the phone.

Well, it was early enough in the day, so off I went to the nearest branch, in the town my mother lives in. I tried calling my mother to see if she would need groceries, but got no answer, so I took her car just in case.

I got in to see someone fairly quickly and explained our situation. We started the application for a secured credit card. The down side of this is they work it by locking the amount – in this case, $500, which is their minimum – in our account, so that if we ever reneged on a payment, they would get their money out of the locked funds. However, she suggested we go ahead and try for an unsecured account, first, and see how it that went.

Much to my shock, I got approved for a $1000, unsecured credit card!

I asked if it could be reduced to $500, which she was able to do.

I should be getting my card in 7-10 business days.

The whole thing was shockingly painless!

Once it comes in, it will be used only for gas and groceries, within our usual budget, that’s it!

With that done, I finally managed to connect with my mother and popped in for a visit. She only needed a few things, so I just ran out and picked them up for her. She commented that she wasn’t feeling that well, after the procedure – then started to tell me again that if they couldn’t do what she was there for, because she was on blood thinners, then what was the point? I told her, she was there for the scope; the taking of samples would have been only if they found something of concern, and for that, they would have had her come back. She started to get angry and insisted she never left the room and never had the procedure. She watched other people come and go, but not her. I explained the light sedation to her, and told her I don’t remember getting my bronchoscopy, either. Turns out she’s working herself up to thinking that the stuff they sprayed in her mouth, and lying about doing the scope on her, and her now not feeling as well is them trying to kill off old people to save money.

The sad thing is, I can’t fault her for thinking that. However, our “wonderful” health care system is now using MAiD – Medical Assistance in Dying – for that, so there’s no need for the elaborate scene she’s building up in her mind. So far, no one has tried to talk her into offing herself, at least. It’s a good thing we don’t live in BC. 😕

Anyhow, I temporarily mollified her, but I know it won’t last long. Aside from that, it was actually a really good visit, and I even got to talk to her about our plans for getting chickens (which she enthusiastically supports), and to make it so that if things happen, like the power going out for a long time, we’d be okay. Every time I bring that up, she starts talking about being able to use the old wood cookstove in the old kitchen, and I had to explain to her again, how badly damaged it is, and why it would be wildly unsafe to use it, even if we did manage to repair it. We may some day be able to fix it up, but until then, there are other things that we can do that we can do ourselves, at little cost, like building and outdoor kitchen under a shelter. In the past, she would have mocked me for the things I was talking about, but she doesn’t do that anymore. Since we’ve moved here, she gave us the hardest time over our plans, because they were so different from how she did things, and she didn’t believe we would actually do them. One example being the retaining wall I wanted to build at one end of the old kitchen garden. When I described to her what we had in mind, she laughed out loud. Then she told me how the family that used to live across the road from here (no one lives there now) had all sorts of grand plans for how they wanted to fix up the property, with retaining walls and garden beds and more. In all the years they lived there, they never did any of it. Therefore, neither would I.

Then I build the retaining wall, and we did several other things I’d told her about that she laughed at me over, or even became angry over, because she would not have done things that way. But they worked. So now, she no longer laughs.

Progress!

For now, anyhow.

So it’s been a pretty productive day, even if not in the ways I expected or planned on!

I’m okay with that. 😁

The Re-Farmer

Oh, what a lovely day!

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It’s almost 6pm as I start writing this, and not only have we reached our predicted high of -10C/14F (my app says there is a wind chill of -19C/-2F, but I just got back from topping up the outside kibble, with no jacket on, and there was no wind), but it’s supposed to keep getting warmer overnight!

The grey tabby that has suddenly become friendly – it’s the one between the black tabby and the white and grey at the top – managed to sneak into the old kitchen while I was coming out with kibble. He not only let me pet him, but I was able to confirm he is male.

Now why can’t any of the females suddenly become friendly? They still won’t let us anywhere near them! The calicos and torties are pretty much guaranteed to be female. Not sure about the rest of the tabby cattens, besides Judgement and the newly friendly one.

They are just loving the warmer temperatures, and so am I!

I’d made arrangements to get some farm fresh eggs this afternoon. Then I got a message saying they had to make a trip to the city to try and find a part, so that got postponed until they got back. With the warmer temperatures, I’ve been feeling so energetic and antsy, I ended up going into town to pick up a few things, even though we were planning a trip to the city soon. I was home long enough to get a chicken carcass in the slow cooker to make stock when I got the message that they were heading home, so I was back on the road soon after.

Aren’t they beautiful? I love the green ones!

I am always so inspired when I visit this place. This is the same person we’ve been getting our cardboard from, to use while making new garden beds. Today, I got to meet their new additions – a pair of fainting goats, and two emus!

Emus are flippin’ huge!

This is in addition to their alpaca, horses, donkeys, hens, Guinea hens, and probably other birds I don’t know about. Once we have our coop, I’m hoping to be able to buy chicks from them, too.

While I did a small trip today, I’ve decided to do a big city shopping trip tomorrow. We’re expected to have a high from 0C/32F to 2C/36F, depending on which app I look at. I figure I may as well take advantage of the warmth. This time, we’ll be going to a different wholesale place, where I know I can get things like the big buckets of ghee and restaurant size bags of pasta. It’s time to restock pantry supplies we’ve been using when we weren’t able to make our usual big trips. We didn’t have the extreme cold we usually do, other than the past week or so, but with the holidays, December and January are always the worst months for making these trips. I’m actually looking forward to the outing, even though I’m not at all looking forward to the shopping!

My younger daughter has different plans for tomorrow. Getting back to cleaning the basement! The cats have made a mess of the new basement, and she’s using that as an excuse to do a deep clean and organization of the space. That basement, however, isn’t much warmer than outside, even with the extra insulation added around the base of the house in the winter. During our recent deep freeze, it simply got too cold to work down there. It should get much better, and stay better, from now on. She wants to get it to the point that they can paint the basement. White paint on the ceiling (which is the exposed beams of the floor above) and special anti-mold and mildew paint for the walls. I don’t know if they want to do the walls white, too, but definitely a light colour. There are quite a few lights down there, but it’s still really dark.

We have a lot of big projects planned for when things warm up. Too many, really. The girls are focusing more on the inside, and are also talking about getting flooring for the kitchen and dining room, and refinishing the kitchen cupboards. Outside, I want to get that mobile coop built (and if that isn’t possible, we’re supposed to be getting a shed given to us that can be used until we can do the mobile one). Another project that will take probably quite a long time, as we acquire materials, is the outdoor kitchen. First priority is the timber frame roof. Once there’s a roof, we can be more leisurely about what we build inside. One side will have a smoker, clay oven, a “stove” opening to fit a large wok, and a grilling area. Two sides will have moveable work stations, and the fire pit will be added. The eaves of the roof will be longer past the wall of one side, where my daughter wants to have a forge.

Since we aren’t able to build the outdoor bathroom where we want to, until after a number of dead trees are removed, I want to do another, smaller, cordwood practise building. We need a new garden shed, so we can build a smaller shed – about 6’x8′ on the inside – in the maple grove, where a couple of trees had been removed while the power lines were being cleared. That is less of a priority, but since things will need to be built in stages, as we get materials, we might actually be able to get started on it this year.

Of course, there are also the high raised beds that need to be built. The outdoor kitchen actually solves something I was trying to figure out. The dead trees that we need to take down are quite large around. Too large to be practical for the high raised beds. I was considering cutting them in half, length wise, but now I’m thinking they’d be extremely strong upright supports for the outdoor kitchen frame. We can cut the lower, thickest, part of the trunks to the length we want, and then use the rest of the trunk for the high raised beds. It’ll mean more trees need to be cut down, but we need to do that, anyhow. With more than 20 dead trees that need to be removed, that’s more than enough to do both uprights for the outdoor kitchen, and the high raised beds.

Of course, there is the garden that needs to be worked on, including building new, permanent trellis tunnels, and other mobile trellises and supports. Plus trees and berry bushes to plant.

Oh, and on top of all these projects, we still need to dismantle that shed with the collapsed roof. We’ll be salvaging parts of it for building projects, such as the chicken coop I want to build. Plus, if we get that done first, I can use the space to build the outdoor kitchen, leaving more space available for the eventual garden beds we’ll be making nearby, where we get much better sunlight.

Feeling so energetic as the weather warms is kind of dangerous. I’m starting to plan way too many things! In the end, how much we actually end up accomplishing will depend on weather conditions. Last year, the flooding prevented a lot of the work I wanted to do, and the year before that it was the extreme heat. But if all we manage is to dismantle the shed, cut down some dead trees, and start setting aside the logs to use for the timber frame, that would be good.

I am so praying for good weather conditions this year, for the garden and for all the work we need to do outside! The last two years have been so brutal, we could really use the break!

The Re-Farmer

One step forward…

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… one step back, shuffle to the left, take another step forward and do-see-do!

Ugh.

What a day yesterday was!

But first, let us appreciate this handsome boy.

Gooby followed me out to the gate while I was doing my morning rounds. This little boy LOVES attention and wants to be held.

Nothing like having a cat claw its way up your leg, while you’re trying to switch the memory card out of a trail cam!

Once in my arms, he happily burrowed into my neck and violently started licking my nose.

He has a thing about noses!

As I was heading back inside after my rounds, I was greeted by this.

Walnut’s siblings and cousins, minus one. The three smaller ones (two in front, one in the back) are siblings. The three larger are from a slightly older litter, as is the one that was elsewhere when I took this photo. The one with the orange head is called Pinky. His fur is an unusual combination of orange and grey that sometimes makes him look pink! The little one in the back has spots that are almost completely black, rather than the grey tabby markings the others have.

Walnut, meanwhile, did get spayed yesterday and, while it took a long time for her to wake up, is doing very well. Walnut and the bitties are all getting treated for ear mites, and getting medications to treat upper respiratory infections. Itty Bitty Bobby was found to have some fluid in his lungs, but Sprite has just “uncomplicated” URI.

Oh, and guess what?

They all already have homes waiting for them!

Walnut will be going to a household that has one cat – a rescue the Cat Lady placed awhile ago. The bitties will stay together, going to a home with an older couple, and first time cat owners! They’re going to be hooked on cats with those two. 😊

Tissue, on the other hand…

I’m still waiting for word on whether or not she’s been caught. They found no sign of her. The garage is being renovated, so there’s not a lot in there, but they even opened up the drywall, looking for her. Nothing. Not even a peep. There’s no possibility that she got outside, as there was no access to outdoors. They did finally open the garage doors, with the workers all standing there, to back the car out (after checking to make sure she wasn’t in the engine block) and look again. Nothing.

It’s a heated garage, and they set a trap up. Hopefully, they will find her today, but I’ve not heard anything yet. Once they have her, they will leave her in the trap, and we will meet in town. We will take her back, trap and all, and hang on to the trap until we connect again. The vet, meanwhile, as offered a free spay near the end of February, but if we want to get Tissue done, we will have to take her to and from the vet ourselves.

Honestly, at this point, I’m not worried about getting her fixed. Clearly, she is not adoptable, and I just don’t want to put her through that again. She will stay with us, indoors, permanently.

As for her escape, they are utterly amazed. We knew Tissue was a burly girl, but they were astonished by how strong she is. She was in a hard sided carrier that they’ve used to transport ferals. They’ve never had a cat break out of it before. The Cat Lady had set the carrier down to open her car door when it “jumped” and Tissue was gone. The door was torn off and the carrier broken apart.

The Cat Lady is just beside herself with worry over Tissue. They’ve all been looking for her, off and on, all day yesterday. All they could do in the end was set the trap and leave it. At least they can look into the garage from inside the house, through a window, and check regularly.

For now, it’s just a waiting game.

While that was going on, we heard from the financing company about our application for the replacement vehicle. Since my husband is the one with the income, we were doing this all in his name. He got an email from them, saying it was tentatively approved. They just needed some banking information to confirm our income on the application, an ID such as a driver’s license, health care card or passport, and a few other little details confirmed.

Well, my husband doesn’t drive anymore, and we never got his driver’s license transferred after the move. The one time he went in to try, they wouldn’t do it, because his name on his old license didn’t perfectly match his birth certificate. In my husband’s family, no one uses their first name. Tradition is, everyone has three given names, and uses their second name. This was a bit of an issue when he was in the military, but all they did was reverse his first and second names on some paperwork. Everywhere else, he just used his second name and surname. Well, that’s not okay here anymore, and after much painful waiting, he was finally told he needed to change his legal name to…. His legal name. We did eventually contact the ombudsman who confirmed my husband only needed to have at least two bills or bank statements with his full legal name on it, and he could get his license. By then, however, he was in no condition to go physically go back and go through the process. Not even to just get a photo ID.

Well, it turned out the bank the financing company works with wanted a driver’s license or passport – our health care cards don’t have photos on them. He has neither.

So we had to transfer the application to my name. The financial information didn’t change, since it’s household income and we’re working with a joint account, however they not only needed my driver’s license, but the banking information we sent needed to have my name on it. Which doesn’t show up on the paperwork unless I selected the print option, with letter head. We’ve been sending in phone scans of the required documents, which does make things easier.

It took a few tries to get something legible but, by then, it was late in the evening. On top of that, yesterday was a statutory holiday, which meant few staff and everything was slower. Which is understandable. We’ll find out today whether the application, under my name, is approved.

Oh, one of the things that they needed to know is what “company” I worked for. Which confused me until she mentioned that we said we had a custodial arrangement, leaving us with no rent or mortgage payments. She thought that meant we were the custodians of a building, like an apartment building or something, owned by a company. So I explained that, and now my brother’s name is on the paperwork as the company/owner we have an arrangement with. They don’t need to contact him. They just needed something on the paperwork. I also explained to her that I can’t have my own income, because anything I earn would be deducted from my husband’s disability payments. That cleared up some confusion on her part.

Meanwhile, a daughter and I went out and emptied the van of our belongings, then put the set of all-season tires in the back. We won’t need them anymore, and with dozens of tires scattered around the farm already, I didn’t want to add to the piles! If the approval goes through, I can just grab the van and go, and come back with the replacement vehicle.

If it doesn’t go through, well… we’ll just put the stuff we need back, and keep going as is.

I’m really trying not to get my hopes up about getting this vehicle. True, we’d do better with a truck or van but, my goodness, even a 2013 Escape will be the most luxurious vehicle we’ve ever owned if we get it! We’ve never had a vehicle newer than our 2007 Grand Caravan, and that was quite a few years old when we got it.

Well, we shall see how it goes.

Hopefully, we’ll get all sorts of good news today, both about the vehicle, and Tissue!

The Re-Farmer

Analysing our 2022 garden: starting seeds indoors, and other physical challenges

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Okay, it’s that time! I’ll be working on a serious of posts, going over how our 2022 garden went, what worked, what didn’t, and what didn’t even happen at all. This is help give us an idea of what we want to do in the future, what we don’t want to do in the future, and what changes need to be made.

Our 2022 garden had a lot of challenges, and a lot of failures. Some of challenges and failures started well before we planted a single thing outdoors.

With our short growing season, we need to start a lot of things indoors. That, in itself, is expected and not a big deal. Our circumstances, however, have thrown in some major difficulties.

Fourteen of them, in fact.

Well. Sixteen, when we were trying to get them going this year.

Our indoor cats.

The other challenge is a combination of space and light. This house is oriented to the East. Our largest windows face the sunrise – with a grove of 60’+ spruces not far away. Our south facing windows are smaller and inaccessible for the purpose. The exception to that is the sun room, however the sun room is not warm enough to start seeds in when we need to. Plus, during colder weather, we allow the outside cats to use it for shelter.

Which means we need to figure out how to start seeds indoors, provide adequate artificial light, and protect the seedlings from cats that are determined to either roll on them, or eat them!

The first solution was one that we started doing last year. We have two aquariums that we have been able to convert into greenhouses, of a sort. When we moved out here, we brought our big tank, with a second light fixture to replace the kit light. Both work just fine, and provide adequate light for starting seeds.

The corner of the living room the tank sits in gets cold, so we added rigid insulation against two walls for extra protection. We were also able to get a warming mat to place under seed trays of things that needed extra heat. Since the lights can’t be raised or lowered, we used cardboard boxes under the seed trays to adjust the height, with new plantings closer to the lights, and larger ones lower down, rotating and adjusting as needed. We built frames with hardware cloth to cover the top of the tank, which both protected the seedlings from the cats, but also allowed more air flow.

This above picture was taken with the hardware cloth covers removed for access. As you can see from the bedraggled seedlings, we didn’t quite manage to protect them from the cats. More on that later.

The other tank is much smaller; just a 20 gallon tank. It, too, tended to get chilly, plus the light it came with was not as bright as having two lights, as with the large tank. It has insulation on three sides to protect from the chill walls, which also got covered in aluminum foil to reflect the light.

When we first started using this tank the previous year, we used the original lid it came with. The cats were incredibly determined to get at the trays below, and were able to reach through the opening for the filter, no matter what we used to block it, completely destroying the trays below. This year, we found some window screens in a shed, and used one of those as a lid, weighted down with hand weights. We removed the light from the bottom of the original lid and attached it to a foil lined piece of rigid insulation, and simply set it on top of the window screen. The cats still sometimes managed to knock the weights around and displace the screen but, over all, it did keep them out.

The problem with both tanks, but especially the little one, was air circulation. For that, we used a tiny fan we found in one of the basements while doing clean up. We could put it right into the big tank, or on top of the hardware cloth covers, aimed downwards. For the small tank, we could just set it on the screen, also aimed downwards. Ultimately, though, we used the small tank as little as possible.

We had an awful lot of seeds to start indoors, however. Way too many to fit in the tanks. Since the seeds needed to be started at different times, we could start the earliest ones in the tanks, then rotate them out when the next seeds needed to be started.

The question was, rotate them out where?

One of my daughters had bought a mini greenhouse for me the year before, so we brought that into the living room. We also bought a long, narrow, LED shop light to illuminate it better. That worked out well enough that we later bought a second one.

We set it up as close to the window as we could, on a chair to catch more light. The only way we could use the light, however, was to hang it from a plant hook in the ceiling above, so that it rested on the chair as well, oriented vertically.

The cats were absolutely determined to get into it!

They managed to squeeze in from under the chair, so we tried taping the plastic cover to the chair.

That wasn’t enough.

We added pieces of cardboard to block the spaces they were squeezing through.

It… mostly worked.

In the end, it was a combination of taping the bottom, the cardboard, and covering the back and sides of the frame with aluminum foil – which also helped reflect light onto the seedling better.

They still managed to get in.

I came out one morning and found cats had somehow squeezed through one of the zippers, pushing it open more, and rolled all over a couple of the trays.

It was such a disaster!

We did managed to save some of the seedlings, but not all. Thankfully, we had seeds left for some of them and were able to start over.

We were eventually able to keep the mini greenhouse sealed up well enough to keep the cats out, but it meant keeping the plastic cover on and closed up at a time when the seedlings didn’t need a cover. This meant no air circulation in there at all. Even so, there were times when a cat or two managed to get in, and try to eat some of the seedlings!

I was able to rig the little fan up inside the mini greenhouse, aimed at the walls in such a way that the air flow would be pushed upwards and around the whole space.

That little fan got one heck of a work out!

So we finally got that working, but there’s not a lot of space in between the shelves. Before long, some of the seedlings began to outgrow the mini greenhouse. They needed to be moved out, and the only place we could move them to was the sun room – but we had to wait until it was warm enough!

Eventually, we were able to move the largest seedlings onto shelves in the sun room, while other seedlings got rotated into the mini greenhouse, and newly sown trays were set up in the aquarium greenhouses. We had our seeds organized by when they needed to be started, with the earliest started 10 weeks before our average last frost date, then 8 weeks, 6 weeks and finally 4 weeks.

We still ran out of space.

In the end, we set up a surface to hold seedlings over the swing bench, and eventually we could move the mini greenhouse to the sun room – and finally take the cover off! The second shop light was hung above the plants over the swing bench, and we eventually hung the one from the living room on the inside of the shelf.

For a sun room, the sunlight doesn’t actually reach far into the room.

There were so many things that needed to be started indoors! In fact, most of what we were growing needed to be started indoors, with only a few things that needed to be direct sown.

That’s not really going to be changing, so we need to figure something better out. How do we provide the seed trays and seedlings with the light, air flow and space they need, while also protecting them from the cats?

Well, the girls and I have been talking about it, and the only real solution we have is to find a way to keep the cats out of the living room completely, and turn the living room into a plant room.

The question is, how?

There are floor to ceiling cabinets between the living room and dining room. On one set, the living room side is completely covered. On the other, there is a “window” at one shelf that allows access from both sides. It’s a favourite lounging place for David! Between the cabinets is an open space somewhat wider than a standard sized door for access between the two rooms.

The only way to prevent the cats from getting into the living room is to build a barrier in that space, with a door in it, plus another barrier to cover the “window” in one of the cabinets.

Barriers which need to be strong enough to withstand cats trying to get through, yet still be easily removeable.

One of my daughters has drawn up plans for a barrier with a doorway, while the “window” will just need a simple rectangular frame to fit the space. It’s basically going to be all wooden frames and hardware cloth.

Unfortunately, we’ll need to actually buy the lumber for this, and lumber is extremely expensive right now. There is nothing in the piles of salvaged lumber in the sheds and barn suitable for what we have in mind.

It’s something we’ll have to figure out soon. Some things, like onion seeds, could be started as early as January. February at the latest. Honestly, I just don’t see how we can get the materials and build the barriers that quickly. We could start off using the large aquarium, which might give us until March to get it done, but… I’m not very hopeful.

It would be a lot easier, if the cats weren’t so absolutely determined to destroy the seed trays!

The Re-Farmer