Yesterday, I got started on making covers for our big fish tank, to keep the cats out. Today, I assembled the first one.
Of course, things did not go to plan.
Does anything ever? :-D
One of the things I needed to figure out was how to secure the hardware cloth to the frame pieces, for those inevitable times when a cat jumps on them. All I’ve got for materials is whatever we can find lying around the farm. While doing my rounds this morning, I went digging in the side of the garage where we store the lawnmowers and snow blowers. I knew there were some roofing nails in there, so I grabbed a while bunch and brought them inside.
Here is the first problem.
All of the nails were huge. There was only a single smaller size, and it was still too large. What I wanted to do was secure the mesh to the tops/bottoms of the boards making up the frame. Previously, we’ve used a staple gun to do that, but these were not for things where the wire mesh was expected to hold weight. Particularly not the sudden weight of a cat leaping onto it from above.
The mesh was going to have to be secured along the sides.
That meant cutting it with a half inch overlap on all sides.
I’m getting closer to the end of my roll of 1/8 inch mesh, and it really does not want to unroll at this stage! :-D I had all the boards on there to hold it down, and it still kept rolling itself back up again!
Once the mesh was cut to side and flattened, I affixed it to one side.
Normally, I would have used the staple gun to tack it in place, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. Which is really weird, because I’m the only person who uses it!
So it had to be tacked in place by screwing in the cross piece, holding the wire as taught as I could in the process.
Then I took out one of the screws in each corner.
I had placed the wood in place on the tank and marked each one with pencil, but once the hardware cloth was in place, I couldn’t really see my marks anymore. Plus, with the cross pieces a fraction too long, I had to make sure I didn’t line the side pieces up to the other end, or the while thing would be to big.
So I quickly drilled a pilot hole in each of the other corners of the cross pieces, then went back to the tank.
This way, I could place the long pieces where they were meant to sit, line everything up, then add a couple of screws through the pilot holes to hold them in place.
Then it was back to the basement to continue.
Once each corner was secured with a pair of screws, it was time to bend the wire mesh. Since the sides would be bent in one direction, and the ends in the other direction, I first cut out the corners.
The wood pieces may have been lined up to the tank, but no matter how careful I tried to be, the wire mesh ended up uneven.
Ah, well.
Once the mesh was bent, I drilled pilot holes for each nail (to prevent the wood from splitting) and hammered them in. The flat tops of the roofing nails were perfect for securing the mesh. Very different from how I had to do it with the larger mesh on the screen “door” we made to keep the cats out of the old basement.
Time to test it out again!
Oh, dear.
The addition of mesh and nails – especially the nails – made it wider. It wasn’t so much that it no longer fit. I could have let it just rest on the nail heads, I suppose. They would, however, damage the tank’s frame.
There was a very easy solution to this problem.
Flip it upside down.
With the cross pieces being every so slight too long, I used my Dremel to take off the corners at roughly a 45 degree angle.
It now fits!
Unfortunately, the wood is a bit warped, so it doesn’t sit flat, but it should still do the job.
There are still a couple of things I need to do. One is to find some way to cover the edges of the hardware cloth, for safety reasons. I’ll probably just use Gorilla Tape, if we still have some.
The other is to find my self-adhesive felt pads. The kind that’s meant to go on the bottoms of chair legs or the like, to protect floors. Since the bottom is now the top, the screw heads are facing down, and each corner screw is sitting on the plastic ledge in the corners of the tank. It wouldn’t be an issue, if I weren’t expecting cats to jump on it, so a bit of padding would be a good thing. I haven’t seen them since we packed for the move, though. :-/
Aside from those 2 things, this cover is done.
The other one will wait for another day! :-D The earliest we should be starting any seeds is in late March, so we have time! :-)
I was so excited to finally get our bulbs this morning!
Here are the three varieties of garlic we ordered.
I appreciate how they add things to the label, like “best for roasting” , “rich, spicy flavour” and “big cloves with bold flavour”.
This is what 1 pound of each variety looks like. I wasn’t sure how many bulb heads or cloves that would translate into. That was the main reason I wasn’t sure if the two beds I’d prepared for them would be enough. At least I was reasonably sure it wasn’t going to be too much space! :-)
Today turned out to be a very windy day, so my daughter and I broke apart the cloves inside the house.
Those old take out containers were perfect for keeping the varieties organized!
Also, they made the house smell absolutely amazing!
I had been watering the prepared beds, to try and get moisture down to the layer of compost and straw buried inside. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to do that as often as I’d wanted to, so I gave them another thorough soak.
The frame used as a guide to dig 4′ x 8′ beds fit in the next space, inches to spare between it and the ring around the new compost pile. It was ready, just in case I needed a third bed.
Thankfully, I didn’t!
Porcelain Music Garlic
The first variety I planted was Music. Directions for planting hard neck garlic I have looked up, say to plant cloves 4 – 8 inches apart, in rows about 12 – 18 inches apart. Since we are doing beds rather than rows, I laid them out in a roughly 6 inch grid. The soil is so soft here, I was able to plant the by just pushing my gloved fingers in to the correct depth, without the need for any tools.
Purple Stripe Garlic
With the number of cloves we got from the Purple Stripe, my grid wasn’t quite as even at the end. :-D The corners on this bed seemed like they would collapse a bit, so I moved the cloves that would have been planted there to the other side.
Once the two varieties were planted, I added boards to mark where the grid ended, and the third variety, which would be in both beds, started.
Racombole Garlic
The last ones to plant were Racombole. Which sounds like a Pokemon.
The Racombole turned out to have a lot more cloves, including more smaller ones. It was almost like soft neck garlic that way. So these were planted slightly closer together. More like 4 inches apart, rather than 6. I probably shouldn’t have bothered to plant the smallest ones, but I didn’t want to waste a single clove!
Those boards across the beds also came in very handy to put a foot on to brace myself, making it easier for my short little arms to reach the middle. ;-)
Planting in these beds really demonstrated for me that building much higher raised beds for accessibility is a very good idea!
The next step was to add the mulch, and this is where the wind became a real potential problem.
Thankfully, I thought to put the chopped up straw on a tarp.
It was easy to slide the whole thing into the path between the beds. I could then grab handfuls, keeping them low and out of the wind as much as I could, to spread out.
I then had to rush to give the mulch a soak with the hose, more to weigh the mulch down than anything else! As you can see, the wind was already starting to blow the straw away!
The last step was to cover the beds with plastic – which the wind certainly made challenging! Thankfully, we’ve found a couple of rolls of plastic while cleaning up the house and basements, so we have plenty, and I could unroll it directly on the mulch, adding weights as I did.. The plastic is actually folded in half on the roll, and I didn’t bother to unfold it, so this is a double layer of plastic on the beds.
As you can see, those board across the beds came in handy for the weights, too!
The plastic isn’t something I’ve seen suggested, in general, but we are in zone three, and most of the places I’ve looked up are in at least a zone 6. While October is the month for planting hard neck garlic for them, we probably should have planted these at the end of September – and would have, if they had not been back ordered.
The issue is overnight temperatures. We’re consistently hovering just below freezing. In the long range forecasts, our highs for the day will be just barely above freezing.
There are a few things going for these beds that should help with our planting this late in our zone. Burying the organic matter at the bottom of the beds means there should be some warmth generated as they break down, just as it would have if it were in a compost pile. The mulch will also help regulate the temperatures and, finally, the plastic should help keep things a bit on the warm side. I don’t want it warm enough for the garlic to start sprouting, but they do need to start their growth below ground before winter temperatures set in.
I might remove the plastic later on. Snow also acts as an insulator, plus these beds should not need any watering throughout the growing season. Between normal precipitation and the mulch, they should have enough moisture. Letting the snow cover the beds would give them that first burst of moisture in the spring, and the beds being slightly raised means they should thaw out faster than the ground surrounding them. However, the plastic will also keep the moisture they already have from drying out before the snow falls, and will help the soil warm up even faster in the spring, giving the garlic a chance to start growing a bit earlier. I would then remove the plastic once I saw that greens were making their way through the mulch.
My mother grew garlic in the old kitchen garden, but she never used mulch or plastic or any of the other techniques I am using that irritates her so much. :-D So I can’t go by how she did things, in past years.
So if there are any experienced garlic growers here, I would love to hear how you have done it! And would you leave the plastic, or take it off before the snow falls?
I’m really looking forward to seeing how these do. When it comes time to harvest them next year, we will be looking to save the largest bulbs for planting. Hopefully, we’ll have enough large ones to have more to plant than what we started with.
Since I went and build up a bed and walkway yesterday, I kinda had to continue today! :-D
Here is where I left off, yesterday.
The goal was to create another bed with compostable material buried in it, and make a second walkway.
The first thing that had to be done was to break up all the soil inside the frame and pull out any weeds and roots I found. Then I loosened the areas the walkway was going to go. This area had been mulched with grass clippings, so there weren’t a lot of weeks that needed to be pulled out of there.
Then it was time to dig out the new bed, just keep enough to start hitting gravel. Of course, there were more roots – and rocks! – to take out.
There wasn’t much in the new compost pile I could use for this, so I also loaded up a wheel barrow full from the old compost pile. That got topped off with another wheel barrow full of old, damp straw.
The compostable material got buried, with extra soil added from digging out the walkway. I wanted this one to be slightly narrower than the other, to give me more room for a third bed, if I decide to do another one.
I had to make many trips to the junk pile to find enough wood to do the walkway 3 layers deep, like the first one.
Once this was done, I went to clean up the mess I’d made digging for pieces of wood in the junk pile. A lot of the pieces were either too rotten, or too full of nails, staples and screws!
Cleaning that up led to finding all sorts of things, so that will get it’s own post!
So we now have to beds ready and waiting for the garlic to come in. Tomorrow, I will get one of the girls to help me move the frame and see if we can fit a third one in. I don’t even know if we’ll have enough garlic to need three beds, but if it’s feasible, I’d rather have it and not need it, then need it and not have it!
When I cleared out the old wood pile from the yard last year, the soil I found below was a very pleasant surprise. Still, there was a whole lot of clean up that needed to be done this spring, before we could plant anything. We were still finding some pretty strange things in there! The biggest challenge was all the tree roots crisscrossing the area.
Now that we’ve had our first vegetables growing in there, it was interesting to see what was coming up along with them! After being buried by a wood pile for decades, there were still seeds and root systems that managed to survive and sprout. There was plantain (the weed, not the banana!), which is not surprising; that stuff can grow anywhere and is very hardy. Clover was more of a surprise, but there was also a lot of some long, delicate green plant that I didn’t recognize at all. I thought it might be a flower of some kind, but it never had any. There were flowers that came up, too, and since they came up where the khol rabi failed, to, I let them bed until today, when they were basically done blooming, anyhow.
All this meant that in digging over the beds, I was basically stopping with every fork full to break up the soil with my hands, so I could pull out as many weeds with their roots as I could.
I also found tree roots I’d missed in the spring!
While fighting with the roots, my feet sinking into the soft, soft soil, I kept thinking about where and how we would plant the garlic. The spaces to walk on, in between the beds of carrots and beets we’d planted, was packed down harder than the rest, of course, and it almost seemed like wasted soil!
Also, I discovered that, like the girls had discovered when planting deep bulbs, it seems even here, there is only about 8 inches of topsoil before I started hitting a lot of rocks.
We’ve got three kinds of garlic coming, which meant three beds. How and were did I want to arrange them?
Then I remembered I still had a 4’x8′ frame from the goat catcher we’d built.
Those are coming in very handy!
I dragged it over, and the area I’d worked on turned out to be almost exactly the size of the frame!
That’s when I started to go a bit crazy.
I started to dig out the soil inside the frame.
Hitting more roots, of course.
By this time, plan had started to form in my mind.
All the stuff I’d added to the compost a little while before?
It ended up in the space I’d shoveled out, along with some damp straw that I raked up from around the old dog houses, where they had been used as insulation around them.
When it came time to return the soil to the space, I kinda went overboard again…
I kept digging.
The vague plan in my mind took into account walking paths, and I didn’t want to be sinking in the soil. The pieces of wood I’d used to walk on weren’t very stabled, but what if…
What if they were laid down on an area that was dug down and leveled to just above the gravel?
So after I used a hoe and rake to even out the mound of soil, I used them to even out the pathway and started laying down boards.
This is how far I got before stopping for supper.
This is where I pause to say how much I appreciate the girls. While I’m outside doing stuff like this – which I consider fun – they’re inside taking care of the cooking and housework – which I loathe.
Then I went back to finish the job, and this is how it looked.
The wood I was using was salvaged from the junk pile in the spring, and some of if was slightly wider. I used the wider ones to make “walls” on either side of the path, then laid down three layers of boards in the middle. This made them a lot more stable to walk on, and also made the path the same thickness as the height of the “walls”. I had to cut a few to size to fill in gaps at the ends, which worked out all right.
This is old wood, some of which was already starting to rot. If I’d had the option, I would have put down gravel or something. These will do the job for now, and perhaps some day we’ll replaced them with flagstones or something.
When the girls came out to see how it looked, I snagged one of them to help me move the frame to the other side of the path.
This is where the second bed will be.
With 3 varieties of garlic, it looks like I’ll have to make three of these. It looks like there is just barely enough space to do that, before reaching the metal ring around the compost, though I could put the third one at a right angle to the others, instead.
I don’t know if I’ll be up to doing three of them! I don’t know how many cloves we’ll get out of a pound of seed garlic, each. If I do only two, I could split one variety between the two beds.
We shall see, after the second one is done.
I made a whole lot more work for myself by doing this, but… I think I like it better!
Yay! The squash beds in the old garden area are now all done.
Also, where the pumpkin mounds were, we now have three new beds.
Here is how it looked when I started.
The bamboo stakes are marking where I planted the seed potatoes I found while digging up the potato beds. It should be interesting to see what happens there in the spring!
Being such a narrow row, it shouldn’t have taken long to prep this area. It was, however, incredibly full of rocks. Not even big ones, really. Just so many! If we decide to continue planting here, this area would be the one most in need of a raised bed. If we do build a raised bed in this area, it’s going to be long, narrow (no more than 2 ft wide), and will have a built in trellis for a back “wall”.
Here is how the pumpkin mounds looked before I started.
The crab grass growing through it is noticeably brighter!
Once done, here is how the back row looked.
It’s hard to see through the mulch, but I turned the soil and mulch, so the more decomposed mulch was more on top, and the less decomposed mulch was partially buried. I don’t know what we’ll plant here next year, but whatever it is, it’ll need to be pretty hardy, until we can build the soil up more!
Here is how the pumpkin mounds look now.
I was pretty sure about turning one of the mounds into a larger bed, but with so much crab grass, I didn’t think I would do the others. However, after a year covered in mulch, and a lot fewer rocks then in other areas, the soil was much softer than expected, and I ended up turning them all into larger beds. The one on the left had the least amount of grass and weeds to clean up, but it also had the most rocks that needed to be cleaned out! When I started on the middle mound, the soil was so much better than it had been, I went ahead and dug another bed, pulling up as many weed roots as I could. That went fairly easily with the crab grass. They took the easy route, and their rhizomes spread like a net under the mulch, rather than into the ground. Those come up quite easily.
Then I hit a patch of Creeping Charlie, making its way through the mulch. I lost about an inch or two of topsoil, pulling up those root mats. !!
The third bed was even easier to dig up, so that went very quickly.
So this area now has 6 beds in total, ready for next year. :-)
The next area to prep will be the carrot and beet beds. I’ve been leaving them in the ground as long as possible. Which might be working for the carrots, but the beets are mostly a lost cause. Too many visits from deer! That area will be cleaned out and prepped for the winter garlic that should be coming in within the next couple of weeks.
I will leave that for tomorrow, however. Today, we need to strain the crab apple cider vinegar. We meant to do it yesterday, but so many things went sideways, it got postponed.
I am happy to say that the septic truck did show up yesterday, shortly before 6pm. The poor guy looked so tired! All I could say after greeting him was “long day?” I think he had been bracing himself to be given a hard time for being so late, because all the tension seemed to just droop out of his body as he simply said, “yeah.” He ended up spending half an hour on the tank. I honestly don’t know how my parents emptied the tank only once a year with 7 of us. We didn’t empty it this past spring, since we’d had him come out in the winter, when things started backing up into the basement. So it was more than 6 months since it was cleaned out, and it showed!
When we booked him to come in, I asked how much it would cost so I could take out cash; it’s not like these guys can take debit. ;-) I didn’t have exact change, but when it came time to pay, I didn’t ask for any, even when I confirmed the amount and he gave me a lower number! Maybe he was giving me a deal for being so late but I figure, if anyone deserves a tip, it’s the septic guy! If I’d had more to give him, I would have!
I really, really appreciate people like him. What would we do without people willing to do such dirty jobs?
Meanwhile, I have not heard back from the plumber. We’re getting near the point of having to call someone else. Our plumber knows this place and has been doing work here for many, many years, plus he’s really gone above and beyond for us, so I would rather not go with someone else. But we need to get that well pump changed. We should have done it months ago, but all our “spare” funds went to paying for the new differential on my mother’s car. If it does turn out to be something wrong in the well itself, we want to find that out now, not when there’s snow on the ground! We shall see how that pans out.
On my list of things to do today was to prep the squash beds for winter.
Of course, things happened, so I started much later than intended – past 2pm – and didn’t get as much done as I’d planned on.
Here is how it looked when I started.
The first thing I had done we pick up the bricks we’d used to weigh down the plastic we used to cover the beds in the spring, and again under some of the plants to protect the stems or support heavier squash.
You can really see which bed had the most successful plants!
Also, notice the raspberry canes to the left on the foreground? Or, should I say, the bare raspberry canes?
The deer have been nibbling the leaves off those, as well as the sunflowers!
I had brought out both the potato fork and the spade to see which would be better to work on the beds.
It turned out to be the fork. After a year under the mulch, the ground was a lot softer than before, but even with the fork, I had difficulties getting past the rocks. We have only one good spade. I don’t want to break the blade on a rock!
Here is how they looked when I finished for the day.
The bed on the left was still a real chore to dig up. With each section I lifted with the fork, I had to break up the soil by hand. That gave me the opportunity to pull out weed roots and the more in-the-way rocks. The bed on the right was much easier to work, and I had a lot fewer rocks that needed to be pulled out. The squash plants were also buried so they can compost directly into the soil.
I was really happy with how much easier the soil was to work with. To compare, I had pushed the spade into the ground next to the mulched area. After working for a while, I took off my jacket and hung it on the spade. A few minutes later, and a gust of wind turned my jacket into a sail and down it went. So I pushed it into the ground again, this time, standing on the foot supports and bouncing my ample weight on it a few times, then hung my jacket back on the handle. The next stiff breeze, and it fell over again! And I didn’t even hit and rocks when I was pushing in the spade! What a difference, working under the mulched squash beds. Not only was the ground much easier to work, I was finding SO many worms! What a great sign. :-)
The next area I will dig up will be the long row at the back, and then the pumpkin hills in the middle. The one hill nearest the back row, I might enlarge to create another longer bed, but the other two are so surrounded with crab grass, I’m just going to dig up a roughly 4′ x 4′ area and pull out as many rhizomes from there as I can.
The main reason I had to stop, though, we because I started to feel rather unwell. It took a while for me to realize something.
I hadn’t eaten yet, other than a couple of freshly baked cookies, before I headed outside.
Usually, I do my morning rounds outside, then have breakfast while going over the trail cam files. Today, I was out earlier to make sure the gates were open for the septic truck. (Which still hasn’t shown up.) Then I heard someone in the kitchen and with our kitchen being so small, I decided to wait until they were done.
Then my husband came over and informed me we were almost out of butter. He is having a good pain day today for a change, and was up to making cookies, not realizing we didn’t have enough butter to make them. Normally, we would have done our monthly shop by now, and there would have been a whole bunch in the freezer, but we had to take care of other things. We’ll be going in a couple of days.
So I made a quick run into town to pick up a few things along with the butter. I’m glad I did, because once I had a data signal, I started getting texts from our plumber. I’d sent him pictures of our well pump when I was in town yesterday, as he requested, and he was responding to them
*sigh*
The first thing he noted was that the new pump is 1/2 hp, while the old pump is 3/4 hp. My brother bought this pump and he knows the system very well, so I knew it would work. It’s just not as powerful. After seeing the pictures of the old pump, from various angles, he thought the problem might be in the well itself. This is something my brother and I had talked about, as he thinks the foot valve might be leaking. The problem is, this is a very old system. He has actually worked in there before – about 20 years ago! – and that was probably the last time anyone has gone into the well.
So aside from it getting harder to find parts for it, it’s going to be fragile. If he starts opening things up to see what’s what, we might end up with no water at all. I could go to a company that specializes in wells, but they don’t like these old systems, either, and he said we would most likely be told we need a new well drilled. We could instead replace the submersible pump in the well, along with the pump in the basement, and that would take care of all sorts of potential problems down there. I asked him for an idea of what those pumps cost, but before he could get back to me, I had to leave town and head home, where I would no longer be able to get text messages. I sent him a message to phone me later and headed home.
Once at home, I emailed my brother to pass on the info, since he knows the system way better than I do. We both agreed that we should just get the pump in the basement switched to the new one, then see how it goes. If we still have problems, then it would be time to have someone go into the well and see what’s what. I hope it doesn’t come to that. Over the years, the well cover has been damaged. It’s a concrete circle with bent rebar handles embedded in the concrete. At some point, one of those handles got broken right off, and the other is bent down against the concrete. I’m not sure how we would get it open.
So I ended up calling the plumber back and leaving a message about starting with switching out the old pump in the basement and seeing how that goes. I also called the septic company to see if they are still coming out today, but we’ve had no call back from them, either. Which is really, really unusual for them.
I don’t like have the gate not only unlocked, but open, for so long. At least I can keep an eye on it through the live feed of the garage security camera.
It’s still afternoon as I write this, but it feels like it should be several hours later, right now!
I needed to head into town today, and when I got back, the girls were just finishing planting the last of the bulbs we had. Bulls Eye Tulips.
These have more finicky requirements. They are larger bulbs that need lots of sun, good drainage, and if we want them coming back year after year, deep planting; about 12 inches.
The area selected is in the West yard, among some crab apples and plum trees. This area was cleaned and cleared out of debris two summer ago. With all the dead trees and branches cut away, the ground does get good sunlight, while the remaining branches and surrounding trees protects it from hard rains.
While digging the holes, they found plenty of rocks – so they used them to mark out where the bulbs were planted!
The package came with 8 bulbs in total. When the back ordered items come in, there will be more tulips, which will also be planted in this area. I contacted Veseys, and we can expect our back order in the first or second week of October. Weather Canada has said to expect a long and mild fall and, from the looks of the long range forecast, we should still be good when they come in.
The girls got these in just in time. Shortly after, the winds started to pick up, and it’s blowing pretty good right now. We might be getting another rainfall tonight.
Drainage will definitely not be an issue in this location. In digging the holes for planting, they found the topsoil was only about 6 – 8 inches deep. Then they hit sand and gravel. As far as I know, this whole region is like that. I can remember when the will was dug by the house, after the well in the pump shack failed, and we finally got running water. A trench was dug towards the barn, and pipes laid to provide water to the barn and a couple of drinking fountains for the cows, plus the pipes that got diverted to the septic field. I was pretty young, but the top soil did look quite shallow, and I remember the trench being all through gravel and clay.
Another reason we want to build our soil up. Literally!
I’m happy to say, that a day of rest seems to be just what the doctor ordered. In fact, I felt so good, and it looked so beautiful outside, I decided to see if there was something I could get started on today.
Because I’m an idiot like that.
The beautiful looking day lied! :-D It was still cold and windy out there! Those lilacs are looking gorgeous, though.
When I went to check the forecast, though, I found a weather alert. We’re supposed to get frost tonight.
I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t get those transplants done!
The girls and I headed out to make sure everything was covered.
The squash bed was a challenge. I didn’t have very many of the plastic containers I was keeping to use as cloches for exactly this purpose. We did, however, still have the five gallon size water bottles from when I did a complete water change of the fish tank (which, I am happy to say, shows no signs of turning cloudy or that mass of algae growing back; it was definitely our well water that was the problem!). I cut a bunch of them in half, and we got all the squashes covered!
I don’t know that the bricks balancing on the necks of bottles will do much good, but it’s worth a try, to make sure the cloches don’t get blown away.
The girls covered the new garden bed with plastic, as well.
The plastic row covers are sandwiched between pairs of boards, so the sprouts won’t get flattened too much.
We didn’t bother doing anything with the potato beds, since the straw mulch will insulate them just fine.
Based on the long range forecast, this should be the last frost of the year. We’re going to start getting hot again, tomorrow.
Meanwhile, here are some more smiles for you! :-)
The girls went to visit with the kittens for a bit, but only Big Rig stayed still long enough for a decent photo. :-D
As David does so well with the kittens, the girls let him come down, too.
I didn’t get a single kitten picture today, to share with you! I never had the chance.
I did visit the kittens, of course. One of the first things I do in the morning is head down there with fresh water for them. When I opened the basement door, Beep Beep was sitting in the window ledge above the stairs, waiting for her moment. As soon as the door opened, she launcher herself into the air and through the door!
In my hapless effort to block her, the door got left open a split second too long.
As Beep Beep raced into the dining room, five cats exploded into the basement.
The kittens, meanwhile, had come running to the stairs, as they usually do.
Fenrir has been the most dedicated at trying to get into the basement, but she does not like the kittens. As soon as she saw them, she bolted back up the stairs, then crouched in the entry, staring at the door, like a hairy gargoyle.
Keith was quite taken aback by the horde of kittens.
Keith is also a bundle of nerves and anxiety.
Next thing I know, Keith is hissing and spitting at a kitten, in total fear. The kitten – Nicco – was busily making himself look big, hissing, spitting and advancing on Keith.
Who ran away and hid under a table.
Two Face was running around, trying to snag a kitten to groom. Every now and then, one would come too close, and she would grab it, do a barrel roll as she wrestled it to the ground, before aggressively mothering it. It would take a few moments before a disheveled kitten would squirm it’s way out, and she would do it again to another one.
Cheddar doesn’t seem to know what to think of them. He kept going from kitten to kitten, sniffing and staring. Once again, it was Nicco who made himself look big, staring him down. Until Cheddar casually reached out with a paw and smacked Nicco vaguely around his head.
David, meanwhile, is totally chill with the kittens. He kept going around, sniffing and grooming and snuzzling, kitten after kitten.
Beep Beep, meanwhile, came down, then went back up, then came down and beep beep beeped at me with her distinctive meow that gave her her name.
Then her daughter, Two Face, started beeping, too.
She has a much higher voice than her mother.
I tried to cuddle Beep Beep, and she was reveling in the attention, but would soon run off upstairs again.
Eventually, I had to grab a broom to try and persuade Keith to come out from under the table. Then I tried to sweep the cats towards the stairs. I was finally able to grab them, one at a time, and toss them into the entry way, closing the door each time, so none would come back down.
Beep Beep ended up upstairs again, and I found myself alone with 5 kittens attacking my feet and trying to climb my legs.
I finally got their water changed, then took advantage of the situation and gave them a little packet of wet cat food. That distracted them enough that I could escape and find Beep Beep. As I suspected, she was looking around the food bowls upstairs. She was looking for wet cat food.
So I snagged her and managed to get her downstairs, where the treat was waiting for her.
By the time it was done, the whole thing left me feeling like I’d been spun in circles! :-D
So…
No pictures of kittens this time.
*sadness*
Today did turn out to be a nicely productive day. I made a trip into town to check out a place I’d seen ads for, saying they did lawnmower maintenance. If I could find a place I could take the mowers to, instead of having to go three quarters of the way to the city, to the place my brother bought our riding mower, that would be great. I never expected having trouble finding a small engine shop locally! There are probably quite a few, but no one that advertises. This place is connected to one of the hardware stores, and carries a lot of the big stuff, and even has a chipper that can be rented. For the amount of wood we need to get chipped, we’re going to go ahead and hire the company that did our trees for us, instead. This place also carries the garden soil, manure and peat that the hardware store itself just doesn’t have the room for.
Walking into the place is like heaven. Everywhere I turned, there were riding mowers, push mowers, weed wackers, all sorts of tools and…
Was that a chain saw display in the back?
Why yes! Yes it was!
I had had zero luck in finding a new chain for the electric chainsaw that we had checked out, last year. We never got to use it, nor the gas powered one, at all last year.
The first thing I asked about, was the lawn mower maintenance. When I told him I wanted to get some work done on our riding mower, his first question was, is it still working? I explained that yes, it’s running fine, but I just want to get some basic maintenance done and the blades sharpened. He told me that I could just drop it off – no appointment needed – but they are really busy with lawnmower maintenance right now. He said that, since it’s still running (not in need of any repairs), to just keep on using it and give them about 2 weeks before I drop it off.
I’ll just leave it for next month.
I then asked him about chain saw chains. He said he would need to see the chain saw to know if they carried the right chain, but they do have sharpening services, too. So I will bring it over one of these days for him to take a look at, and he’ll be able to determine if I just need to get it sharpened, or if I need a new chain.
I then bought a bale of peat and some bag of soil mix. He came out with me to help load it into the van, which was kind of funny, since the lift gate is still broken, and I keep a pole in the back to prop it open. I joked about it being something else I need to get fixed, as he deftly maneuvered around the pole to load the bags into the van.
That done, I decided a stop at the garage would be a good idea.
I asked about my mom’s car. He told me he was going into the city tomorrow, and going to a wreckers. Among the things he’s looking for is the part for my mother’s car. He’d hoped to head out this afternoon, but had too many cars to work on, already. I then asked him if he serviced AC systems. Our air conditioning was working last year, if not particularly well, but this year, nothing. The cost was very reasonable, so we went to book that on his calendar. Then I remembered to ask about the lift gate. Since we’re going to be hauling a lawn mower in the back of the van, using the nice new ramps my brother bought for us, it would be good to not have a pole in the way. ;-) These aren’t very expensive and don’t take long to install, so that’s going to get done, too.
I also remembered to ask him about the driver’s side door hinge. When we bought the van, the original door would drop when opened, and we would have to lift it to close it. Eventually, the latch on the door snapped. It was actually cheaper to replace the door, and the garage we went to at the time tried to find a second hand one for us, but never did. We spent most of the first year we owned the van with a Bungee cord keeping the door shut. Including the drive across provinces, during the move.
My brother had been able to find a door, but because the driver’s side door has the only key lock, he had to take both of them apart and cobble the two together. The original hinge pins broke in the process, but he’d snagged the ones from the vehicle he had salvaged the door from, so that worked out. The door does, however, still drop ever so slightly, and we don’t want to go through all that again. If we can get it fixed now, before it becomes a problem, that would be good.
The problem is, he would have to take it apart and see, in order to give me an estimate. But there are only two possibilities. One, we need new bushings. Two, they would need to take it apart, precision drill a new opening, and weld things back together.
If it’s one, that’s not a problem.
If it’s two, he basically says it would take so long, it might not be worth it, because it would be really expensive, just in shop equipment fees, never mind the time.
So the bushing kit, which is not very expensive, has been ordered, and he will check it and see. I’ll be dropping the van off on Monday morning, and just hanging out in town until it’s done.
It was a rather short trip into town, but it felt like I’d accomplished quite a bit in the process!
Once at home, we were getting into the hottest part of the day, so we stuck to inside stuff until things started to cool down in the evening. I didn’t even bother unloading the van until then. That wagon we got last month is awesome. I was able to haul the bale of peat and bags of soil, all at once, over to the old garden area. Then I started mowing the old garden area with the push mower.
I am so glad my brother was able to get that thing running for us. There is no way we could do this area with the riding mower. It would break in no time!
Also, that drill attachment sharpener I got for the mower blade has made a huge difference! When I sharpened it yesterday, I found it so bashed up, it was hard to tell which side of the blade was beveled, and which was flat!
I’m also so happy we found that bag attachment for this mower. It isn’t very big, and I had to stop to empty it often, which makes for much slower going. However, I am getting so many grass clippings, I decided to keep mowing into areas I would normally use the riding mower for, just so I could get more!
And since I had all these wonderful grass clippings, I decided to use them to mulch around where we planted the sunflowers.
The areas mulched are two wagon loads of clippings. I stopped after finishing this end of the old garden area, and then had to stop. After two hours, I was pretty knackered!
Also, I really need to remember to keep a water bottle with me when I’m doing this!
Meanwhile, after the girls finished what they were working on inside, they came out to remove the logs that were used to frame the area we chose to mulch last year, and where I am planting the squash this year. They have served their purpose, and now they are starting to be in the way as we go around with wheelbarrows or wagon, hoses and soil mixes.
We will not be able to continue this tomorrow, though. Tomorrow is our day to do the monthly shop in the city.
I am really hoping it goes better than last month. Last time was pretty brutal. :-( Even on a good trip, though, we’re pretty wiped out by the time we get home, unload and put everything away.
As for me, I am done like dinner! Time for a shower and, hopefully, early to bed!
I’m going to have to try getting outside to work on things much earlier in the day. It’s getting too hot, way to fast!
I’m not sure I’m up to getting out there when it’s cooler at 5 am, though. :-D
Anyhow…
Today, I dismantled the kitty pool and brought it out to be dirty pool. ;-)
This is two bags of garden soil, two bags of compost, and the remainder of our bale of peat; about 1/3. The pool was just enough for all that, plus room to mix in water.
Which Creamsicle found absolutely fascinating.
The peat takes quite a while to absorb the water, so after spending some time mixing, adding more water, mixing, adding more water and mixing again, I decided to let it sit for the peat to fully absorb as much water as it could. Considering the hottest part of the day was still to come, I figured I would continue when it got cooler in the evening.
Which didn’t happen. :-D
I went into town to meet my daughter for lunch, then took advantage of the time to stop at a hardware store to pick up a few things, including a small coping saw and a file to sharpen our other saws that saw so much use in the last couple of years. It was hot and sunny when I went into the store. When I came out a few minutes later, it was still sunny, but the ground was wet. It had just started to rain.
On the way home, I seemed to drive out of the rain, only to drive straight into a massive downpour and thunderstorm! It wasn’t too bad while I was still on the highway, but a little more than a mile away from home on the gravel road, the deluge came down. I had to slow to a crawl and could barely see past the front end of the van! The rain was hitting hard, but… was that hail, too? I couldn’t tell.
It slacked off a little bit by the time I got to our driveway. I still got soaked as I unlocked the gate. I ended up just leaving it open and, after parking in the garage, left the garage door open, too, as I ran for the house with my bags. By the time I reached the house, I was completely soaked!
The storm didn’t last long, but one thing is for sure. That peat mixture is going to be plenty saturated! :-D
Later, I saw someone in our municipality posting pictures on Facebook, showing the lawn furniture in their back yard that had been blown around, and the marble sized hail that had drifted into corners of the building. !!!
By the time I drove back into town to pick up my daughter, it was down to a light rain. Just this one downpour made a huge, visible difference! It’s like every growing thing just perked up. For all that we still had standing water in ditches and ponds, we still needed that rain!
We’re supposed to get rain tomorrow afternoon, too, but if I can get to it early enough, I should be able to get the soil mix into the holes we dug, and the sunflowers planted, first.
Meanwhile, we have been making a point of visiting the kittens and Beep Beep as often as we can throughout the day. It was my turn to do the litter tonight, so I spent some extra time with them in the process.
Here we have Leyendecker, sampling the cat kibble in the container he’d knocked over, while Beep Beep is eating the kitten kibble. :-D
They seem to quite like all the run around space, even if they do tend to stay close to the bed frame/platform, and their little nest underneath!
I had some interlocking foam squares, like the kind sold as yoga mats or children’s rooms, that I used for blocking crocheted projects. I decided to give them to the kittens. The girls were kind enough to set them up on the concrete in front of the bed frame.
Because I’m a suck. That’s why.
Thankfully, for all the rain we had, the fan is still keeping the floor in the corner nice and dry.
