figuring things out

Morning activities, and a change in plans

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We’re supposed to get quite hot for the next while, so I tried going to be very early. Usually, I don’t go to bed until 2 am or so. Especially this time of year, when it’s still light out for so long. So “early” usually means “before midnight” for me. Instead, I tried to be in bed by about 8, hoping to be up and about outside by 5.

It didn’t work.

Some people can fall asleep soon after lying down. My husband has always been able to do that. I’ve never been one of these! I think I did finally fall asleep before midnight, but didn’t wake up any earlier.

Also, I need to start being very careful rolling over at night, because I’m starting to wake up with kittens chewing on my toes!

Anyhow.

The first order of business outside was to feed the cats. One of the first cats to show up was Octomom! I think the girls had called her Slick, but she’s around so infrequently, the name didn’t stick.

She is such a beauty! She didn’t like me being around, though, and kept moving away as I set kibble out in different places.

Last of all, I put kibble in the bowl in the garage for her. It was not only empty, but I could see in the box nest, that she had been digging around for any remaining kibble that might have been left behind in there.

Since the mama was at the kibble house, I took advantage of it. I grabbed one of the blankets, then went over to the barrel the kittens are in. After removing the “cover” (a sheet of aluminum weighed down with a brick), I took out the rotted pieces of the barrel top that had fallen inside, then lay down the blanket on one half of the bottom – which, I could not see, is just dirt. The barrel is upside down. The pieces I had taken out used to be the “floor” of the barrel. Now, it’s open at both ends.

After moving all the kittens onto the blanket, I went and got the other one and tucked it into the other half. Then I found some clean pieces of wood in the garage. They used to be part of the packaging for the wood chipper, if I remember correctly. They are longer, and I put them at angles above the kittens. This gives the mama something to land on when she jumps in, and an area to perch on above her kittens, when she needs a baby break.

By the time I was putting the cover back on, the mama was returning, and she was not happy to see me! She hovered around, growling at me, until I moved away. I watched as she climbed up to the rim of the barrel and looked down, but she did not go in yet. Instead, she perched on the edge and glared at me! The last I saw, she had moved onto the other barrel and continued to watch as I continued my morning rounds. I’ve been out that way a couple of times, since, and once I saw her in the grass. Later on, I’ll have to check again, when I’m sure the mama isn’t around.

As I headed back to the sun room, I spotted this.

It’s SuperAdam!

I don’t think any of those kittens are her own, and there are kittens from at least 3, possibly 4, litters that she is nursing!

One of the things I checked this morning was the raspberries, of course.

Those purple raspberries we transplanted this spring are doing amazing! The one in the photo is the largest of the three. We have been able to pick a whole 5 ripe raspberries from the three bushes.

The other image is of the raspberries I picked from the ones in the main garden area. My mother had transplanted them in the area long before we moved out here. Now that the crab apple tree that was there has died and was cut down, the raspberry bushes at that end, and around the old compost pile, are doing much better! The ones at the other end, closer to the chokecherry tree, are not doing as well.

Also, I don’t know if you’re seeing the bowl of raspberries okay, but after I uploaded the images to Instagram, that picture now looks like it’s got a semitransparent black overlay on it. Instagram seems to have issues with multiple images uploaded at once.

One of the other things I worked on this morning was an experiment.

I took the remains of some chicken wire and added it to the box frame. It’s just held in place with wire twists. I had a lot less chicken wire than I thought; not even enough to cover one side.

We do have enough of the black netting we got last year to cover it completely, which we might use as a temporary cover. I definitely want to use hardware cloth attached semi-permanently to the sides. I will probably put some on the top, too, but not permanently. The thing it, once the sides are covered, the only way to tend the bed would be to remove the box cover completely. That would be a 2 person job, to avoid damaging the corn.

Hmm… I was just thinking, as I look at that picture. Right now, I’ve got the excess wire over the top. The hardware cloth also comes in 4′ widths. I could have excess mesh on the bottom, covering the sides of the raised bed. That would ensure critters won’t be able to slip under the bottom of the box cover. It would also serve to keep the whole thing from getting knocked off the bed by a determined critter.

Something to think about.

By the time this was done, it was getting too hot and humid to stay outside, and it wasn’t even 10am yet!

We have a change in plans for today, anyhow.

We got a call from the vet clinic about Leyendecker’s appointment tomorrow. Looks like they got a cancellation or something, because they were asking if we could come in today, instead! So he now has a 4:30 appointment today.

Hopefully, it will not be something serious, but after his last vet visits, I have my doubts. 😟

Ah, well. It will be what it will be.

The Re-Farmer

A bit more progress

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When heading out earlier, I carefully checked on the babies, and they seemed very comfortable in their new nest!

I’ve seen the mama around, but not in the sun room. While she was willing to put up with me when I put the evening kibble out, once she’d eaten, she kept her distance. I was concerned when I started hearing the kittens from the sun room, but she was going in the other direction, so I made a wide circle around her to use the main doors, in hopes she would go towards the sun room to get away from me but, instead, she went up the sidewalk to the gate. So I went inside to not disturb her, and hope that she hears her kittens and tends to them. Earlier, I even made sure to leave little piles of kibble around where the nest is, to treat her when she does.

This is what I started working on while outside.

What a flippin’ pain to attach the fence wire to the frame! I was using U nails (aka: staples) to attach them, but they were the biggest problem. They were poorly cut, and the ends were often jagged instead of pointed. There was really nothing we could do about that, either. I also had to hammer most of them to be more closed, so that they wouldn’t splay while being hammered into the wood.

I tacked a section of fence wire to the ends first, the added the third section to the middle, so that it overlapped the end pieces evenly. Once that was tacked in place, I went back and added a U nail over every joint in the wire, with my daughter holding the frame steady and passing me the best U nails out of the bag that she could find. I would not be at all surprised if the U nails simply popped right out.

I was very frustrated with them.

Ideally, I would strength the whole thing by sandwiching the fence wire between another piece of wood, but the horizontal and vertical pieces of fence wire are joined by one being wrapped several times over the other, making each join triple the thickness of the wire on its own. It would still work, but there would be a larger gap between the boards than I would want. It would certainly make the corners more stable, though. Hmm… We do still have a couple of 12′ pieces that were cut wonky. Maybe I could experiment and try it with just one frame.

By the time I was hammering the last of the U nails in, it was starting to rain again, so we left the other half for another time.

Once inside, I was going to start supper, but the girls took that over and are working on it as I write this. We did decide that there really wasn’t enough of the potatoes I picked earlier for the four of us – we do like our potatoes! – so I went out and harvested some of the Red Thumb potatoes, too.

That colour is amazing! These are red all the way through, too.

After passing them on to my daughters to prepare, I went back out and harvested some fresh dill leaves from the self seeded dill we have along the edge of the old kitchen garden, to go with the new potatoes. When the old kitchen garden is set up to be more of an herb garden, we plan to include a variety of dill that is grown more for its leaves than for the seed heads, since that’s how we use it the most. We have another variety that is more for pickling, and we plan to sow those somewhere further away, where we don’t mind them self seeding and can treat them as a perennial.

I’m really looking forward to trying these potato varieties!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2023 garden: NOOOoooo!!!!!

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Well, crud. Look what I found this morning!

Almost the entire bean bed has been eaten!

From what I’ve been able to see on the trail cams, we’ve only got one deer still coming into the yard, since we got rid of the bird feeders and stopped putting deer feed out all winter. A few nibbles here and there were found in the beds by the vehicle gate into the inner yard. I was working on plans on how to protect the corn, carrots and turnips. I didn’t think of the beans as a priority, since the deer have never really gone for them all that much, before.

This high raised bed, however, must have made for a nice buffet table for a deer!

We planted so few beans this year, too. This bed is basically it. I have no idea how the pole beans planted with the purple cord will do, since they were planted so much later.

There were still flowers, and I think the plants might recover. We shall see.

Then there was this.

Something keeps flattening the potatoes in this bed! Usually, they stand back up again on their own by the end of the day, but this is the flattest I’ve seen them yet. I don’t know of it’s cats fighting on the bed, or skunks or racoons, but something is mashing them during the night.

I ended up going out today, which I will write about later. When I got back, I repaired another leaking hose and, then set up the spray thing for the water soluble fertilizer I picked up and gave the entire garden a watering with it. I hope it helps the Roma tomatoes in particular. They’re having the hardest time, but more on one end of the bed than the other. We’ve had issues with that end of the bed in previous years, so there is something going on with the soil there.

After the watering was done, I decided on how to protect the beans from further damage. After several failed attempts, I was able to finish this.

I’d hope to be able to fix the supports for the hoops on the outside of the logs, but that just didn’t work out. It now has netting that will still allow pollinators in.

I didn’t think to take photos, but before I did this, I worked on the Indigo Blue and Black Beauty tomato supports, too.

Oh, dear. There has been scrambling noises behind me as I wrote that. A kitten has managed to get out of baby jail. This is the second one that has managed it, so far!

My daughters are now on kitten duty! 😄

Where was I?

Ah, yes. Tomato supports.

The Indigo Blue has a twine support, but the weight of them was making the vertical twines sag in the middle. The boards that were used to cover the Uzbek Golden carrots were long enough, so I lashed them to the tops of the posts, then added more twine to pull up the sagging vertical twine supports, which pulled the horizontal twines and their tomato plants up and straight quite nicely!

The Black Beauty tomatoes each have their own bamboo pole to support them, but the one at the end that broke in the storm was still tippy – and is a lot shorter now! I ended up lashing horizontal bamboo poles across the bed, just high enough to support the shorter pole. Now, each vertical pole has more stability. The tomato plant on the pole that broke also needed more support. They didn’t get pruned in time, and now they have big, extra branches that are starting to grow tomatoes. I attached the horizontal support at that end with an overhang that I could use to hold the twine I used to support the branches, with more twine added along the row to catch a few other branches that needed extra support.

It’s not pretty, but it does the job!

I was still thinking about ways to deter the deer from the rest of the garden. I want to avoid the posts and netting we did last year. They not only kept the deer out, but us, too!

For now, we’re using distractions. I went around and hammered some of the posts we used to support netting last year in strategic places, while my daughter went around and used electric tape to attach pinwheels to them. Then more pinwheels were added to things like trellis supports. My daughter added posts and the last of the pinwheels to the low raised beds with carrots and popcorn in them.

All we need now is some wind. After having high winds so often, now that we have pinwheels up all over, suddenly there isn’t even a slight breeze!

All of this took much longer than I thought it would, and were not the jobs I had planned for the day, but they needed to be done.

Ah, well.

The Re-Farmer

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