garden

Our 2025 garden – I hope!

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

Yes!!!

It felt so good to get a really productive day outside. It’s been so long!

I did have to wait until the afternoon, when it warmed up to our expected high of 6C/43F. Even so, some of the areas I worked in that were shaded longer were still partially frozen.

The first thing I did was finish off the bed I was working on yesterday. That little section was shaded and still rather frozen, so it took longer than it normally would have. When I was done, I grabbed a nearby roll of plastic that was rolled up and waiting to be put away for the winter and laid it out on the bed, starting from the shaded south end. It wasn’t long enough to cover the entire bed, but all I really wanted was to get the end that got more shade to warm up a bit, once the sun was able to start hitting it.

Once that was done, I shifted to the old kitchen garden and cleared the rectangular be that had the Forme de Couer tomatoes this year. That bed was shaded by the house on one side so it, too, was partially frozen. After clearing it of weeds and mint rhizomes, I grabbed one of the plastic sheets that had protected the eggplants and peppers earlier, and laid it over the soil. This bed is shorter, so the plastic was plenty long enough.

I had decided to use the high raised bed, which is already prepared, and the open section of the garlic bed for winter sowing, so I didn’t need to clear another bed, yet. Leaving the plastic to warm the soil, I headed into the house and started going through my seeds.

I had already considered what I wanted to winter sow earlier, but I’m always flexible on stuff like that.

After going through my seeds, I decided on some ordered chaos.

I’m also going to need to clear one more bed.

Most of the seeds I will be sowing are older seeds, so I don’t expect a very high germination rate for some of them. I also decided to include some additions.

Here are the beds I was able to finish planting before it started getting too dark.

The first image of the slideshow above is in the old kitchen garden. With that theme in mind, I’ve got more “kitchen” greens. These include:

– spinach – four different varieties
– Swiss chard – two different varieties
– Shallots – saved seed collected from a lone surviving shallot a couple of years ago
– Kohlrabi – both purple and green
– Hedou Tiny bok choi – we got these as free seeds a couple of years ago, but they were smothered by elm tree seeds after they sprouted. A couple of seedling survived and bolted, so I let them go to seed and saved them.

Lastly, I included some onion seeds collected this year. Hopefully including the onions and shallots will keep the deer and damaging insects away.

These and another group of smaller seeds were added to a repurposed herb/spice shaker container, along with some seed start mix and vermiculite I had left over from starting seeds indoors in the spring, and given a thorough shaking.

After emptying this container into the old kitchen garden bed, it was mulched with a thick, insulating layer of leaves that was topped with some grass clippings, as was done with the garlic already planted.

In the next image, you’ll see the bed I had started on last night. This one is now a summer squash bed. Years ago I had accidentally bought three collections of summer squash when I meant to get just one. We’ve been using the seeds for several years now, but they are starting to get old. The only new seeds were the White Scallop patty pan squash. The others are Sunburst (a yellow patty pan), Endeavor (green zucchini), Goldy (yellow zucchini) and Magda (mottled pale greens, similar to zucchini). I don’t expect much for a germination rate for the older seeds.

With these larger seeds, I scattered them from end to end on the bed, then pushed each one into the soil, spreading them out more evenly in the process, used a rake to gently cover them over, then mulched with leaves and grass clippings.

The next two photos – the remaining end of the garlic bed and the high raised bed – have root vegetables, plus protective onion seeds. These include:

– the last loose seeds of Uzbek Golden carrot (I still have the home made seed tape of those)
– pelleted Napoli carrot
– beets – three red varieties left over from before, plus a white Albino variety given to me
– Purple Prince turnip
– radishes – three red varieties left over from before, plus a yellow variety given to me.

Plus, protective onion seeds were added as well.

I used the shaker over the small area next to the garlic, but I honestly couldn’t tell if any seeds got out. I mulched it anyhow, but when I got to doing the high raised bed, I took the shaker lid off and just scattered the mix. I could at least see the pelleted carrot seeds! This bed is shorter, and I ended up not finishing off the container. I’ll find somewhere else to sow the rest of the seeds.

After mulching the high raised bed, I moved the wire cover onto it for winter storage. The wire is open enough that it won’t prevent snow from covering the bed, and the snow is an important part of this winter sowing process.

This left me with two containers of seeds. I decided to plant the flower seeds. I wanted those in the main garden area and decided to use the space by the high raised bed where the pumpkins and drum gourds had been planted. It’s a small space and did not take long to clean up. That last space got:

– Butterfly Flower: Orange shades (a milkweed) that I tried starting indoors this past spring, but never got to direct sowing the rest.
– Forget Me Nots – given to me by a friend
– Nasturtium; Dwarf Jewel Mix – I got those this year and never got around to planting them.

I look forward to (hopefully) have a busy patch of flowers for the pollinators in the main garden area next year! The Nasturtium should also act as a trap crop, luring in insects that might harm some of the other plants.

For flowers, I also have two packages of Western wildflowers mix. I have an area along the edge of the maple grove that has been covered with the insulated tarp, folded in half, since it was taken off the septic tank lid in the spring. I’m hoping that did the job of killing off any weeds under it. Once the tarp is removed, that is where I intend to plant the wildflower mix. It has 16 varieties of annuals and perennials native to Western Canada in it.

I am now left with one last container of seeds to plant, but I was losing light and need to prepare another bed for them. This container has:

– Dalvay peas, including seeds I collected from the ones we planted this past year
– King Tut purple peas; from collected seeds
– Royal Burgundy bush beans
– Hopi Black Dye sunflowers – just one of the two packages I had
– Mongolian Giant sunflowers – I had only one packet of those
– a small number of Montana Morado corn. We’d grown them a couple of years ago and left them to go to seed, as we were going to test grinding them into flour, only to have the cats dump the entire bowl of collected seed. I managed to salvage a few seeds – less than a dozen.

I chose this combination so that the peas could climb the sunflowers, while the pole beans can shade the ground. This group of seeds did also get onion seeds added to it. Everything in here is prone to being eaten by deer, so I’m hoping the onions will be enough of a turn off for them.

After talking to my daughter about it, we figured the place to plant this is in the long, narrow bed along the chain link fence. It’s mostly clear already, as it had potatoes in it this past year. There’s just one self seeded tomato plant still needing to be cleaned up. Plus, the kittens have been using it as a litter box, so that needs to be cleaned out, too.

So that is my plan for tomorrow. To get that last group of seeds winter sown seeds in. Then, I’m hoping to get a bit more clean up before taking the garden tour video I’d originally intended to take in the middle of the month. This will be the last garden tour video of the year.

In the spring, once the snow is melted away, the mulch on all of these will need to be removed, to allow the soil to warm up and the seeds to germinate. If all goes to plan, this will give us a head start to our 2025 garden.

With most of these, I completely finished off the seeds I had left from previous years. I still have plenty of other things that can be started indoors, and others for direct sowing.

Next year’s garden will be very, very different from how this year’s garden turned out. Not having four 18′ beds dedicated to winter squash and melons is going to make quite the difference! We will be planting fewer tomatoes next year, too.

Even if this winter sowing experiment doesn’t turn out turn out, I could get away with not buying any new seed this winter.

I will still buy more seed, of course! Just probably not until a month or two from now. I’ve already got my eye on some rare heritage breeds that I’d like to grow, if only to help keep the varieties going.

Mostly, though, I’d like to finally get some new beds started, and get at least one permanent trellis built.

If the weather holds.

We shall see.

I’m just happy with the progress I got today!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 Garden: A quick garden bed before and after

/ Re-Farmer / 3 Comments

I had a bit of time between coming home from a city shop, and my SIL arriving to help bring our truck home. So I took advantage of the daylight and started preparing the next garden bed, hopefully for winter sowing.

I didn’t quite finish, though.

Here is how it looks so far.

Click through to see the “after” image.

This is the bed that had the San Marzano tomatoes and yellow bulb onions in it. With the onions filling in the spaces between the tomatoes, it didn’t get mulched much at all. Mostly, a grass clipping mulch was added around the outside, mostly to prevent soil from washing away when watering.

With our compaction problems, I was pleasantly surprised how almost fluffy the soil was. Aside from some Creeping Charlie showing up at each end, it wasn’t all that weedy, either, though there were certainly plenty of weed roots and rhizomes to remove. There wasn’t anywhere near as many elm tree roots invading as in the previous bed I’d worked on, either.

I did find quite a few onions missed during harvest!

The one problem I had in clearing this bed is that I could only use my right hand. I had to dig into the loosened soil to get those roots out, which is when I discovered I managed to somehow cut the tip of my index finger on my left hand. Even with gloves on, it was too painful to push my fingers into the soil – which is how I discovered the injury!

Unfortunately, when I dropped the tail gate of my brother’s trailer on my fingers later on, it was on my right hand. Now, the tip of the index finger on my right hand is all swollen and rather purple.

It’s going to make things interesting, as I try to finish the job tomorrow!

I think after I get this bed ready for winter sowing, I’ll move on to the rectangular bed in the old kitchen garden. The high raised bed in the main garden area is already prepped. It’s a much shorter bed, but with the open space left where the garlic is planted, that should be enough. I think, in the main garden area, I’ll try winter sowing summer squash in the bed I’m working on now, then do a mix of root vegetables and onion seeds in the high raised bed and the remaining space with the garlic. Then, in the old kitchen garden, I’ll do a mix that includes more onions with kohlrabi, peas and spinach, and maybe some other greens. Once the beds are ready, I’ll go through my seeds and see what I have.

If the winter sowing works, that’ll be a great head start for next year. If not, I will still have plenty of seeds to plant.

For now, looking at the long range forecast, it seems we will have almost 3 weeks before our first potential snow. With only one more city shopping trip to get done, no more trailer loads being dropped off, the hot water tank working again, the truck repaired and home… I should be able to finally focus on getting things done outside again!

Little by little, it’s getting done!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 garden! Garlic is planted, and clean up continues

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Yay!!

Today, we were expected to hit 15C/69F, making it the last really warm day of the year. We’re expected to his 11C/52F in a few days, that that will likely be the last double digit Celsius temperatures we’ll get.

My goal was to get the garlic into the bed that was already about half prepared and covered with plastic, to see if we’d be able to get any solarization happening.

There was a slight side trip, though. The rescue had ordered a kibble donation from Amazon that was supposed to arrive tomorrow. Amazon deliveries – at least those sent by mail – tend to come early, so I went to the post office, just in case.

I’m happy to say, they were there! I don’t know what kind of promo or coupon the Cat Lady took advantage of, but it was for three smaller (compared to what we usually get) bags of indoor cat food.

The outdoor cats don’t care!

When I let her know, with thanks, that the kibble had arrived, the Cat Lady told me they now have FIVE large bags of kibble for us! That is so amazing! The challenge right now is to stock up extra kibble for the winter, in case we find ourselves unable to get out. I do not want to run out again!

The outside cats, however, have enjoyed their warm morning kibble softened in sludgy bone broth (I removed the meat from the bones, put it back in the stock, then blitzed it with the immersion blender) so much, I’ve got more being made in the slow cooker right now, since the last of the first batch was finished this morning.

The kibble picked up – and a feeding done so I could drive out of the yard again – it was time to get to the garden.

First job: preparing the rest of the bed.

The first image in the above slideshow is the “before” picture. The second picture if after removing the plastic, and the grass clipping mulch in the part that needed to be cleaned up.

The part that was covered in plastic did have a few weeds in it, but didn’t need much work to get that cleaned up. The rest of it had one really bad patch of crab grass, but was otherwise pretty good – except for the very end, where some Creeping Charlie was staring to invade.

There were also elm tree roots, of course.

And rocks. There’s always rocks!

I wanted to amend this bed with some trench composting. I made the trench in the middle, from one end to the other, with the spade. The soil in this bed is not anywhere near as compacted as I’ve had issues with in other beds, so no actual digging was needed.

This was a good time to remove more weed and elm tree roots.

And rocks.

Then I used the landscaping rake to widen and level the trench some more, while also removing more roots.

And rocks.

So many rocks!

The next photo shows the filled trench. I took advantage of this and emptied the compost buckets from the kitchen directly into it. Then I pilfered the compost pile, taking most of the Crespo squash vines that were in there.

Last of all, I scattered some dried grass clippings over the whole thing, then tromped back and forth on it a few times, to tamp it down.

That done, the soil was pulled back over the compost materials, evened out and leveled. For some reason, there was quite a bit more soil at the south end (away from the elm trees) than the north end.

There was still some bits of squash vines poking through, but that’s okay.

In the process of all this, I did find little surprises!

There were three yellow bulbing onions that had been missed, and a whole bunch of little shallots! These will be transplanted elsewhere and allowed to go to seed, next year.

Finally, it was time to plant garlic!

I’d selected a dozen of our biggest garlic bulbs from this year’s garden to plant. As these beds will eventually be framed with logs (at least, that’s still the plan!), the actual growing space is being kept fairly narrow. That makes it a lot easier to reach with my short little arms! 😄

After laying out the garlic bulbs in short rows of three, they didn’t make it all the way to the end of the bed. I will find something else to plant in the remaining empty space.

When I pause to take a photo, though, I realized something.

Garlic grows relatively shallow. Which means they won’t be affected by the elm tree roots at the north end of the bed, where there are the most roots.

So I moved the garlic from the South end of the bed to the North end.

Once the garlic was laid out, it was just a matter of pushing the root end into the soil. Once they were all in, I used the back of a fan rack to cover them.

After just a couple of passes, I stopped and got a broken piece of bamboo stake to mark how far the garlic was planted in the south end of the bed. Once the soil was raked over the cloved, there was no other way to tell how far they went!

Once the garlic was covered, I raked up several wheel barrow loads of leaves to created a nice, thick insulating mulch. Then I topped that with a thin layer of grass clippings, more to weight the leaves down, so they don’t get blown away!

After that was done, I took the time to rake in between most of the garden beds. While weeding, I generally toss the weeds and roots into the path. I wanted to get rid of that, so things like crab grass didn’t accidentally end up back in the low raised beds.

At that point, I didn’t have the energy for more digging and bending, so the next bed had to wait.

Instead, I started working on the old kitchen garden.

I didn’t bother taking any before shots.

I was quite surprised by what I was seeing in the wattle weave bed. The wild strawberries are looking quite green and healthy. The thyme was also looking great, and the chamomile actually had some fresh flowers blooming!

In the second picture of the above slideshow, you can see my garden helper. 😁

I’m saving the plastic rings that went around the tomato and luffa plants to use another season. I quite liked how that worked out.

The bed with the Forme de Couer tomatoes had a soaker hose in it. Once the tomato plants were removed, I took that out. I don’t know that I’ll use it again. It took forever to do any level of watering, and I’m not sure why. It’s possible our super hard water is clogging pores.

All the support takes were gathered up and set aside, except for the two broken ones I’m using to hold the plastic rings. The tomato and luffa plants were pulled and set aside – they will likely be trench composted, too.

That that was as far as I got today.

I’ll have to weed the tiny raised bed again. I see all sorts of grass coming through the mulch. I’m thinking of planting the remaining Red Wethersfield onions that I found among the Forme de Couer tomatoes in or near the tiny raised bed. These will also be allowed to go to seed, so I want to find a permanent spot for them.

The long, narrow bed against the retaining wall needs a bit of work, and I’m thinking of replacing the very crooked top log with wattle weave, if I can find enough materials to do it.

By this time, I had to stop. I’d completely forgotten to eat lunch, and it was getting to be supper time!

I won’t be able to continue this tomorrow. CPP Disability comes in tomorrow, so I’ll be heading into the city for our first stock up shopping trip. I’ll be using the car my brother and SIL lent to us. We haven’t heard from the garage about the truck. I think I’ll phone them in the morning. At this point, all I want to know is what’s wrong with it, and an estimate on getting things fixed. When the time comes to pick up the repaired truck, I will need to drive to the city first, to get my SIL, drive back with her to get the truck, then I can take the truck home while she takes their car back to the city.

Speaking of which, I was expecting them to drop off another load today, but I haven’t heard from them at all. There was just small stuff left. Perhaps they decided to take it to their new place, instead. They were talking about coming here, though, and my brother was going to look at the hot water tank for us after unloading. I’m quite surprised to have not heard anything from them, either way.

Well, they certainly have their hands full right now, so maybe that’s not surprising after all.

I’m just happy I got my main goal for today accomplished.

Our garlic for next year is in!

There is still lots to do. While things are expected to be cooler, the next couple of weeks should still be mild enough to get more garden beds ready for the winter, and to try our winter sowing experiment. I’m thinking I might do one or two went sown beds in the main garden area and, maybe do a third bed in the old kitchen garden.

I’ll have to go through my seeds and decide which to plant together, where. I plan to do a sort of organized guerilla gardening. I’ll be selected in what gets planted where, but once it’s time to plant, the seeds will be mixed together and scattered about.

But first, the beds need to be prepared, and there’s going to be just a few days when I’ll be able to work on it before things start to get too cold! Once the winter sowing is done and mulched, the other beds can be done at a more leisurely pace.

Little by little, it’s getting done!

The Re-farmer.

Our 2024 – and 2025 – garden: final harvest, prepping for next year, and a long, long evening

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Yes! Finally!

I got work done in the garden!

It was pretty chilly this morning, so I didn’t get started until about 10 or 11. With overnight temperatures dropping below freezing, regularly, I focused on our final harvest. The German Butterball potatoes, and the sunchokes.

I’m actually really surprised by how many potatoes we got out of the bed. It wasn’t a very large bed, and the other potatoes we planted we pretty sparse. Plus, there is our compaction problem. Even so, after removing the mulch and pulling the dead plants, I was able to gather a surprising amount, just by brushed the soil aside with my hands.

I also managed to damage only two potatoes with my garden fork! 😄

The potato bed is a foot deep and, when I prepared it in the spring, I pulled out a lot of Chinese elm roots. Today, I was pulling out even more! It’s remarkable, how much those roots invade the raised bed!

I didn’t finish preparing the bed for winter, though, and left that for later, when I have more time to do a thorough weeding and removal or roots.

From there, I went to the sunchoke bed. I harvested the nearer half of the bed before I popped inside for lunch. I even grabbed a few potatoes and sunchokes to include with my food!

They were very tasty.

The second half of the bed took much, much longer, but I think I got most of them.

If you click through to the second photo above, you can see the sunchokes spread out. I went through them to pick the bigger ones for replanting. A couple of them were big enough to split before planting them.

There is one problem with the sunchokes. I tossed a few of them because they had some sort of worm in them. I assume it’s actually a caterpillar or some sort. They seem to burrow into the chokes and then just die. Some of them didn’t even burrow all the way, and at least once, I picked one up and saw half the worm wiggling away.

Being so close to the Chinese Elm trees, I was not surprised to find a lot of roots, though I found myself hitting a really massive one. In the second half of the bed, I found myself harvesting about as many rocks as I was finding sunchokes!

If you click through to the next image, you can see that Kohl was my helper today.

Also, I was pulling out some pretty big rocks! I could feel myself hitting what seemed to be even larger ones. I couldn’t get the garden fork under anything to be able to try and lift it out. I tried to dig out as many as I could, which slowed things down considerably.

When it came time to replant the chokes I selected, I made some changes.

I decided I needed to make the bed narrower, and further from the chain link fence.

A couple of sunchokes had come up close enough to the fence that they grew through the chain link, so I dragged over a couple of boards that we found inside the outhouse when we cleaned it out, and set them up as a barrier.

After removing all those rocks and loosening the soil, I laid out the chokes I picked out for replanting. I then used the soil I’d pulled aside while harvesting the sunchokes to build up a shallow mound over them. I then used some of the old mulch that had been set aside and set it all around the mound of soil.

I think got the rake out and started to gather leaves.

The rake’s handle snapped on me, so had to find another one!

I gathered two wheelbarrow loads and set those on the mound of soil over the sunchokes. Then I used the sunchoke stalks and set them on top, to keep the leaves from blowing away, as well as adding an extra layer of insulation.

I was just finishing this up when my brother drove in, pulling a trailer, followed by a friend pulling a second trailer, and finally my SIL. They have been working to empty the sheds before the new owners take possession of it – just five more days! – and had originally expected to arrive here at about noon.

It was closer to 4pm before they finally made it!

My SIL backed the car up by the garage to unload – they had more smaller pieces of wood for me! There was even some clear plastic, like what we used on the cat isolation shelter, shelf boards, pieces of plywood and more. All things perfect for the small building projects we want to work on.

The trailers were first taken to where their storage trailer and former bread truck are parked. The bread truck is going to be a workshop, so there were tools and equipment to go in there. Then they backed one of the trailers up to the barn to unload.

Things were going into the lean-to side of the barn. When the barn got a new metal roof, for some reason, the lean-to roof wasn’t done. It is covered with metal sheets that used to be parts of billboard type signs.

They all leak, now. My brother will need to cover things in there because when it rains outside, it rains inside that side of the barn, too!

Quite a few things stored in the lean-to had to be moved around or – in the case of an ancient washing machine – out! That will be included in the scrap pick up, whenever that happens.

Once space was made, they could start unloading some things from one trailer into there.

When that trailer was emptied, the other trailer was brought over to be partially emptied. Some stuff was emptied into the pump shack for storage, including something from my childhood!

When I was little, and the “new part” of the house wasn’t built yet, we did not have running water in the house. We did have a bathtub set up in the pump shack, and a wood burning cookstove for heating water.

At some point, my mother was going to get rid of that old stove, so my brother took it.

It is now back in the pump shack!

It’s a smaller cookstove than the one we have in the old kitchen, but it still has a water reservoir opposite the fire box, and a simple warming shelf that is just a open shelf, nothing more. The one we have in the old kitchen has an enclosed warming shelf with doors that swing downward. The one in the old kitchen is too damaged to use anymore, though, but this one is still functional.

So that has come full circle!

As hard as they pushed to get things unloaded, it was soon full dark and they were nowhere near finished unloading! The big trailer went from barn to storage to the pump shack and back to the barn, several times, and then they had to unload the truck, too, which was jammed full.

When it got full dark, I used the flashlight on my phone to help them see to unload. After a while, I gave my phone to my SIL to hold, and I went to get our large flashlight.

My SIL ended up leaving earlier, once they reached a point where she could no longer help out. I couldn’t do much to help, either, but I could at least hold a flashlight, so they could see! The barn, pump shack and even the old bread truck all have lights inside them, but it was in and around the trailer itself that needed light.

Eventually, they put all they could into the barn, then went back to the old bread truck and storage trailer. At that point, I had both the flashlight on my phone, and our big flashlight, going at the same time, and lighting up opposite areas, as they went back and forth.

Finally, they got it all unloaded, but had to put away straps and various other things before they could leave. For that, they moved the trailer under the yard light, so they could see.

At that point, I said my good nights and headed inside. With all the digging around in the garden earlier, and the evening getting chillier, my pain levels were really starting to get up there. As it is, I’m having difficulty typing this post because all the joints in my fingers are trying to seize up. 😞

I expect more things will be dropped off tomorrow, and probably the day after, as well. After living in one place for 30 years or so, and my brother being “Mr. Fix-It”, they have a whole lot of stuff to clear out – and this is after they’ve thrown things away, given things away, and sent things to an auction house.

What’s being brought over are also things my brother intends to use here on the farm, for maintenance and repairs – things we haven’t been able to keep up with since the tools and supplies that used to be here were all disappeared before we moved in. He probably won’t be able to do anything much until after winter, but I am looking forward to learning many things from him!

The next few days are supposed to be pretty nice still, so my plan is to get as much as possible done in the garden beds. The garlic needs to go in, and I’m hoping to get at least one bed winter sown with a mix of seeds.

Now that the potatoes and sunchokes are finally harvested, that can finally be my priority again!

For the moment, though, I need to pain killer up and try to get to bed. Even as I was writing this, I could feel muscles in one thigh trying to cramp up. I really, REALLY do not want to deal with another Charlie horse tonight!!!

The Re-Farmer

Before and after, times four

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Oh, it feels good to have such a productive day!

Even if it wasn’t where I intended it to be. 😄

In the main garden area, I can happily say that the high raised bed is done! Here are the before and after pictures.

I got the first picture after cleaning up all the supports and netting, and collecting all the twist ties, the sheets we used to try and protect the peppers from frost, and finally removed the cover. You can click through to see the “after” photo.

After cleaning up the dead pepper plants and finding shallots that had been missed, the grass clipping mulch was removed and I started loosening the soil and weeding it.

Compaction is a real problem. That soil was rock hard!

After getting out as many weed roots and rhizomes as I could, I dug a trench down the middle of the bed for trench composting. The pepper plants I pulled out where cut into smaller pieces into the trench, and some of the grass clipping mulch went in as well. After the material was covered again and the soil levels, I scattered more grass clippings over the top and used my little hand cultivator to work the clippings into the soil. Hopefully, as it breaks down, it will help keep the soil from compacting so much.

Next, the soil was pulled away from the edged and mounded in the middle. More grass clippings were stuffed against the logs. Especially in the corners where the logs have some gaps, so the soil won’t wash out. Finally, the mound in the middle was leveled out again.

When we get to direct sowing seed to overwinter and, hopefully, get an early start next year, the beds will not be watered. We don’t want them to germinate yet. For now, however, the high raised bed got a thorough watering, to kick start the breakdown of the plants matter buried in the trench. The top of the bed got a scattering of grass clippings to protect the soil.

I was just finishing this when my brother arrived, so I headed out to help him as best I could. They are bringing their storage trailer out tomorrow, and it will be full, so he had brought large concrete pavers that will go under the tires, so it won’t sink into the soil

He also brought two snow blowers.

One of them even works!

Well… the other one does, too, but it has an issue that he needs to tweak for it to run properly.

Which means we will have access to a working snow blower this winter!!

We might get to retire little Spewie – or just use it to make paths around the house, instead of the entire driveway.

With the trailer coming tomorrow, my brother wanted to clear away some low hanging tree branches, so it could get through the more solid part of the driveway past the pump shack.

So, while my brother went to unload some stuff out of his truck, first, I started a different job that needed to be done.

Clearing around the pump shack.

Across from the pump shack is a lilac bush. It had been planted with an old tire around it, but it has spread quite a bit. So I decided to cut the suckers back to the tire, widening the drive again.

Here are the before and after pictures.

First, one corner of the pump shack.

To the left of the first photo, you can see part of a maple that keeps growing back. This has become an unintentional coppice. There are some really nice, straight stems in there. I will leave them for now. I’m hoping they will do well for some future wattle weave garden beds I’m thinking of doing.

I didn’t get the “after” photos until after my brother left, and things were starting to get pretty dark! I had the charger for my mini chainsaw set up in the shack. Very handy.

Most of what got cleared away from this corner was self seeded raspberry bushes.

After clearing this corner, I went to the other side of the drive to work on the lilac bushes until my brother came over to cut the largest branch he was concerned about, which was almost directly above the lilac. I finished clearing the lilac after all the branch cutting was done and cleaned up. Here is the before and after on that.

Now that the south side is cleared away, the suckers growing behind them will get more light. I don’t mind this lilac spreading out to make a bit of a hedge, but not towards the driveway. Once I could access the tire, I could see that the parent plant had long died away. There was nothing but old and rotten pieces of it left. So this bush is basically all suckers from that original, now dead, lilac.

Once that was done, I went back to finish off the other corner of the pump shack.

Here are the before and after pictures of that.

I cleared those trees away back when I dug out my dad’s old makeshift forge, which is now against the wall. It didn’t take long for them to come back!

If you click through to the next photo, you can see what a huge difference it made to clear those away!

When my brother started using his extended pole chainsaw to clear away the big branches, he also used it to cut down the largest of the trees coming up by the pump shack for me, too. I still went back over the stump with my mini chainsaw – there were about 4 stems coming out of one tiny old tree stump! – to get rid of as much of it as I could. Drained one of my batteries in the process!

Most of this clean up was done with a pair of loppers, though. The mini chain saw was only used for the few things too large for the loppers, including the dead lilac stems I uncovered.

All of this, including the branches my brother cut away, went onto the burn pile. Some of the branches will need to be broken down further, though.

The large branches are all maple. As they get broken down, I think I will set some of them aside for fire wood, for future cookouts in the fire pit.

Eventually, we will need to burn that pile. It’s not something that can be chipped, as we have been tossing things like diseased apple trees and squash vines with powdery mildew on them. With how big the pile is getting, this will likely happen after there is snow on the ground, when it will be safer to burn.

My brother had a couple of surprises for us, as well. For my daughter, he brought over an old bike his son had attached a motor to. His son had even used it to get to work! It needs new tires, but he’s pretty sure the motor still works. That would be very handy for quick trips to the post office, rather than taking the truck.

He also gave use several boxes of spray paint, most of which have never been opened, new tubes of caulking, roofing tar and even a caulking gun. All stuff that will come in very handy here, that he doesn’t need anymore.

He even loaned us a socket set. A very unusual one, with all super large sockets! We’ll be able to use it to practice removing the anode rods from the old hot water tanks.

Tomorrow, I’m going to call the hot water tank company. We shouldn’t be able to get another replacement tank on warranty, but it is still within the 6 years, and this tank only lasted one year after installation. It’s worth a shot.

If not, we’ll see about getting replacement heat elements and, hopefully, that will be enough to get it working again. And if we replace the anode rod with the powered one that should arrive next week, they will hopefully last longer, and we won’t have that sulfur smell in our hot water anymore. Even if we do get a warranty tank, we plan to install the powered anode rode. We might be able to get a plumber to install it, too; it won’t be as expensive to have a hot water tank installed, if we already have everything needed.

We shall see.

So that is where we are at now!

Tomorrow, we are looking at another nice day, with an expected high of 20C/68F. While I do plan to work in the garden more, I want to re-bag our aluminum, removing any mixed metals in the process, and see if I can get it to the salvage yard either tomorrow or the day after. The bags are mostly old cat food cans, to the outside cats keep digging in them and making a mess! Plus, once we remove any mixed metals that got in there, we will get a much better price, and I really want to get those bags cleared away.

As for the garden beds, based on the long range forecast, I am looking to have enough beds ready to do the winter sowing in the beginning of November. We’ve got some cooler days coming up, but only one day with possible rain, and then we are supposed to be slightly warmer. There’s even a day predicted to be 22C/72F before the end of October!

We shall see.

Meanwhile, my daughter got the last coat of milder resistant primer over the spacers around the tub. Which means that we can start installing the new tub surround, tomorrow!

Little by little, it’s getting done!

The Re-Farmer

Little by little, it’s getting done

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

It is turning out to be a lovely day today! We’re at 19C/66F right now, which is our predicted high of the day, with almost no wind at all. Which means I’ve been able to get some stuff done in the garden! Finally!

The first thing to get done was take down the last of the nets and support stakes on the future trellis bed and around the strawberries. I was surprised to find more strawberry plants have been eaten, though! As near as I can figure, a deer managed to get its heat under the netting on one side.

*sigh*

I had some chicken wire around the side where a hole had been made in the netting. Once everything was cleared, I put the chicken wire over the bed for now. The strawberries – what’s left of them – will be heavily mulched for the winter, but at this point I’m thinking we may need to transplant them closer to the house, where we can more easily keep the deer away. I’ll decide that later.

With all the hardware collected and set aside, I started cleaning up the high raised bed – mostly because it’s easier on the body!

I was expecting to find shallots that I missed harvesting, once I started cleaning up the dead pepper plants, and I was right. I found quite a few, actually, considering how small the bed is.

I’ve decided I will find a place to transplant these and mulch them over the winter, so that next year, we will have shallot seeds.

I removed the grass clipping mulch on the high raised bed and got about half way through digging out weeds and their roots, when I got a message from my brother. He’s on his way over with another load. He plans to cut away some tree branches while he is here, as they have a storage trailer they will be bringing out tomorrow, and they are in the way.

I’m more than happy to get those branches cleared away!

So I paused in the garden to come in and have lunch before he gets here, as I plan to help my brother as much as possible once he gets here.

While I was waiting for my food to heat up, I tended to the dehydrated peppers.

This is three trays of peppers, combined into one. They’re back in the oven for now, while it cools down (we used the “warm” setting at 150F to dehydrate the peppers). Later on, we might pop them into a jar for storage, or perhaps powder them. I’m not the pepper eater, so I will let the family decide which they would prefer.

Time to head back into the main garden area until my brother gets here. Now that all the stakes and netting are down, it should go faster. My goal right now is to prepare as many beds as I can to direct sow into, then cover with leaves for the winter. Hopefully, we will get a head start on the garden next year by doing this, but if it doesn’t work, the beds will still be ready for planting in, in the spring.

Little by little, it’s getting done!

The Re-Farmer

Processing

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Well, we may not have had many yellow peppers in the garden, but now that they are ripening in the living room, we have a LOT of yellow peppers!

I neglected to take any photos, though, so here is a WordPress AI generated version…

I specifically told the AI generator “long slices”, but it gave me rounds, instead. 😄

There are two types of yellow peppers in the short season collection we got. Yellow and orangey-yellow. Once I had them under the kitchen like while washing them, I could finally tell the difference!

I prepped and sliced enough yellow peppers, plus I think one or two orangey-yellow ones, to fill a gallon size freezer bag.

The remaining orangey-yellow ones were starting to dehydrate all on their own, so I sliced those ones super thin and set them to dehydrate in the oven. That got me three 9×13 baking pans, which required a bit of creativity to fit on the two oven racks. I’ve got a tray meant to cook vegetables on the BBQ, so the bottom is perforated, to use as a spacer between two pans on top of each other.

There were other purple and Sweet Chocolate peppers that could have been processed, but I left those for later and got almost all the tomatoes that are in the living room. A few ended up in the compost, as they were over ripe. The rest got washed, then topped and tailed. I was able to fill one gallon size freezer bag with San Marzano, plus some Roma VF (I assume) compost pile tomatoes. Another gallon bag got a mix of the Forme de Coure and what are probably all Black Cherry tomatoes. There might be some Chocolate Cherry tomatoes mixed in there. Once off the vines, I can’t tell them apart.

The bags all went into the small freezer for now. The chest freezer has bins and boxes of ripening tomatoes covering it right now. I go through them regularly and pull out the ones that are ripening the fastest, and move them into my harvesting colander. Once that’s full, they get transferred to the living room to continue ripening.

Eventually, we will be able to combine the contents of bins so that there’s fewer of them, and have easier access to the chest freezer. Moving a bin or two is not an issue. Moving five bins, a box and a colander to get into the freezer it something else entirely!

All in all, that’s a pretty good haul to quickly process, considering these are all things that were harvested early, before they got hit with frost. There are many more tomatoes ripening, including the ones from the compost pile that look like Indigo Blue Chocolate, though I suppose some might be Black Beauties, from last year’s garden. The basin of unripe hot peppers in the living room is looking more and more red. There are still a lot of green sweet peppers, some of which I can tell are the purple Dragonfly peppers, with a very few Purple Beauty left, and others are the brown Sweet Chocolate peppers. The remaining ones, I expect to turn yellow or orangey-yellow.

So we will have plenty more vegetables to process for the winter over the next while.

Tomorrow we are supposed to reach a high of 19C/66F and, more importantly, we are NOT expected to have high winds again. Since there is nothing more we can do in the bathroom until the sealant has finished curing, that means I should be able to finally get outside and clean up in the garden, and prepare beds for fall planting. It’s time to get garlic planted – we will be using our own garlic from this year’s harvest – and I want to try fall sowing seeds that will hopefully survive our winter and give us an early start in next year’s garden. At this point, looking at the monthly forecast, it seems we will be in for a relatively mild winter. I certainly hope so. We’re supposed to have a La Nińa winter this year which, for our region, usually results in bitterly cold temperatures.

I could really do without that.

While I can no longer tolerate heat like I used to, I find I am absolutely dreading the cold of winter more and more, every year. Especially this year, as we have not been able to slowly stock up quite as much as we have in the past, on the assumption that we will get snowed in or whatever, for weeks or even months again. Everything is so much more expensive now, it’s getting harder and harder to get any extras at all.

So the more we can process from our garden and put up for the winter, the better!

The Re-Farmer

Garden clean up started, and water woes update

/ Re-Farmer / 3 Comments

Today is the first of a short spell of warmer days we are expecting. As I write this, at almost 7pm, we are at a lovely 12C/54F. The weather app says it feels like 5C/41F, but it doesn’t seem that chill around our home.

This afternoon, I took advantage of the warmer temperatures and finally got to work, cleaning up in the main garden area. What I’m shooting for is to get some beds ready to try some fall planting – because garlic, that is. I’ve been inspired once again by Gardening in Canada.

The more we can get done in the fall, the easier it will make things in the spring!

I’m surprised by just how much can be planted in the fall, with our zone 3 winters. Her list includes wildflowers; particularly poppies, hollyhocks, sunflowers, coneflowers and columbine. Now that I think about it, all of those make sense; we’ve had all but coneflowers sow themselves here, and the only reason we haven’t had coneflowers overwinter here is because we don’t have them anywhere to begin with. I do still have a native wildflower mix that needs to be sown, but those will have their own space to be seeded in.

For vegetables, she listed them in groups. One is the alliums; onions, leeks and shallots. We’ve got our own onion seed this year, so that is an option for us. We should also be able to use our own garlic for planting this year, too.

She mentions root crops like turnips, carrots, radishes and beets, all of which benefit from winter sowing by becoming sweeter and more flavourful, the following year.

Peas is something she plants all over, as she uses them as an indicator plant. You can tell how warm the soil is becoming by when they germinate.

The next group she mentions are brussels sprouts, kale, spinach, kohlrabi and possibly cabbage.

Last of all, she mentions squash and pumpkins. Considering the squash we had in our compost pile last year, we’ve already had those by accident!

They are normally a hot weather plant, but our compost tomatoes shows that, in the right conditions, tomatoes could be added to the list, too. Hmm… so can beans, for that matter.

Looking at her list and remembering what I have for seeds right now, we could plant onions, turnips, carrots, radishes, beets, peas, spinach, kohlrabi and both summer and winter squash.

What I might end up doing is just mixing up the seeds for onions, turnips, carrots and beets and planting them randomly in one bed – mostly because the onions could protect the things it’s planted with from deer. I could probably interplant onions with kohlrabi, peas and spinach, too, though I’d have to watch the spacing more. Squash… well, they take up so much space, they would be on their own, for the most part!

In order to do this, there are two things I need to get ready. First, is prepare the soil by increasing organic material. Compaction is a huge problem with our soil. I can do trench composting again, which really seems to make a big difference in production, but the soil itself needs to be amended as best we can.

Then, once seeds are planted, the other thing they will need is a light and fine mulch. Grass clippings and leaves would be what we have on hand to use. She recommends piling snow over the seeds in the winter for added insulation, but for the main garden area, I don’t see us needing to do that. That whole space gets well covered with snow over the winter!

Right away, I can see that we would have a very different garden next year, if we do this fall sowing.

We shall see if we can get to that point over the next week or so!

With that in mind, I focused on the main garden area. Here is a slideshow of today’s progress.

I started off using the weed trimmer. I hadn’t been able to do much clearing of the paths, once the winter squash, pumpkins, drum gourds and melon bed vines really took off. In some paths, I could barely walk through them without stepping on a vine.

I started to use the weed trimmer in where the next raised bed that will be part of a squash tunnel will be built, but not too much, just yet. I’ll clear into there more when I have to access the stack of what will be vertical support poles attached to the existing bed.

After trimming one side of the high raised bed, I stopped to pull up the winter squash vines. All the squash got powdery mildew towards the end of the season, so all of these were for the burn pile, not the compost. In fact, the only squash that did not get powdery mildew was the Crespo squash, in a completely different area.

I ended up spending most of my time on the pole bean trellis. There were only 5 surviving plants but, my goodness, they sure took over that trellis netting!

Also, folding up that netting for storage is a lot easier when you lay it out, then weave a bamboo stake through one short end.

After the first squash bed was cleared, I moved the corn stalks over from the other squash bed, so I could get at the vines under them. Later, I plan to trench compost the corn stalks.

Pulling up the squash vines was truly interesting, at times. I couldn’t believe how long some of them had gotten! These would have been so awesome on a trellis tunnel!

The only two beds I did not clear this time were the high raised bed, and the first trellis bed. I did finish weed trimming the paths, though. Right now, the bed that needs the least amount of work is the westernmost one, where I’d already prepped half of it after harvesting the onions and covered it with plastic.

The solarization doesn’t seem to be working, though. I’m seeing a lot of green growing under one end. The problem is, that end of the bed gets a lot more shade, this time of year, so it doesn’t get a chance to get hot enough to solarize. At least not at the south end. There may be greater success towards the middle of the bed.

Around the time I finished the weed trimming, I found some messages from the family. My daughter had spent some time going through all the fittings I picked up, working out which would be needed, which wouldn’t, etc. In the end, we were going to need more of two fittings – and will likely have quite a few to return to the store, once the job is done.

It was past 3:30 by then. The store we needed to go to was the second one I’d gone to, yesterday. Thankfully, they weren’t going to close until 5:30 – the local one closes at 4. My daughter came along with me.

While she was looking at the fittings, I looked around for the hot water tank element tool I needed, then asked for help, because I couldn’t even find the section. It turned out to be tucked away in a corner. 😄 I also asked about a socket large enough to remove the anode rod but, in the end, I think the same heat element tool will fit the anode rod. I’ll test that out, later.

Then my daughter needed help, because one of the fittings she was looking for was behind locked doors! Quite a few displays in this store were behind glass. I would not have expected theft to be more of a problem in this location, that the store I usually go to!

After we got what we needed and were heading home, I missed my turn to cross over to the other highway – the streets look no different than driveways in this town! That meant we ended up driving to the town closer to home.

My daughter hadn’t eaten anything since early in the morning. Since we ended up in town anyhow she, being the sweetheart that she is, sprung for some Dairy Queen for all of us.

It now looks like we have everything we need to replace the pipes and faucet set for the tub. The hard part is going to be cutting the copper pipe to get the old pieces out. There is very little room to work in. Especially since the cutter needs to spin around the pipe.

While I might be able to assist, this is a job mostly for my younger daughter. She’s the most able bodied among us – and considering she has PCOS and all the joint pain that can come with, that’s not saying much!

Hopefully, I will be able go get more progress in the garden instead, and if all goes really well, be able to plant things for next year in a few days!

If all goes well for my daughter, we might even be able to use the tub and shower again, soon, too!

We shall see!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 Garden: not-onions curing and bean seeds collected

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Today is October 10, and yes, we have garden progress!

Last month, the 10 was our average first frost date, so I took garden tour video. I might do that again, later today, depending on how other things go. I might also leave it for the middle of the month. We shall see!

While doing my rounds this morning, I finally pulled the red onions in the high raised bed and set them to cure.

The strong fence wire on this cover was perfect to hang them on! Only a few didn’t have enough greens to hang them, so they got set out on the frame to cure.

After I took this photo, I also gathered the whole three shallots that were left by the summer squash, and hung them on the frame wire, too.

I am perplexed by these onions. As far as I can remember, these were supposed to be the Red Wethersfield onions, which have a round, flattish shape. These look more like the Tropeana Lunga or Red of Florence onions we grew before, but we didn’t have seeds for those this year.

So I decided to look at my old post about planting in this bed.

Well, that explains it.

These aren’t onions.

They are the Creme Brulé shallots.

I completely forgot that I planted shallots in this bed. I was sure I’d planted Red Wethersfield in here!

It’s a good thing I use this blog as a gardening journal!

So… those shallots are HUGE! Their size was another reason I didn’t think they could be shallots. Particularly since the ones planted in the bed with the yellow onions and summer squash were so much smaller.

Which had me wondering…

Where are all my Red Wethersfield?

Well… I did know where some of them were, but did they survive?

Not really.

I had planted some of them among the Forme De Couer tomatoes, but we weren’t able to keep the cats off of them. This was all I could find. A few got planted in the wattle weave bed, but I could see no sign of those.

I was sure I had more transplants than this, though!

Ah, well.

I will be keeping these. As we clean up and prepare the beds for the winter, I will find a place to transplant them, then mulch them over the winter. Hopefully, they will survive the winter and go to seed next year, and we can try again.

As for the bean pods with the onions, those are the Carminat purple pole beans I’d left to go to seed. There had been at least a couple more pods, but I couldn’t find them. With one, I did find the torn remains of the pod, so I’d say the racoons were at it again.

These are all the seeds that were in the bods. It looks like only one is damaged.

They will sit in the cat free zone to dry a bit more, now that they are out of their pods, then I’ll package them up for next year. These do grow very well here, so when we plant them again, I want to mark off one or two plants to specifically leave for growing more seed.

Meanwhile, it’s getting close to the time to plant garlic for next year. I will select our largest heads of garlic in the root cellar, rather than buying more.

Which means we will have onion seeds (with still more to collect from the garden), pole bean seeds, and garlic from our own garden for next year. I’ve also saved seed from that blue squash we had to harvest when it broke off its own stem, and we plan to save seed from that one big Crespo squash. There is the possibility of cross pollination with the Wild Bunch Mix winter squash we grew, though, so any seed we save there may not be true to the parent, even if I was able to hand pollinate from the same plant.

It doesn’t look like those Uzbek Golden carrots that bloomed are producing any seed. The flowers are died off, but there’s no seed. Perhaps because these are first year blooms? I don’t know.

We are slowly getting to the point where we will be able to save more and more of our own seed. I don’t expect to be 100% using our own seed, if only because I like to try new things, and we are still working out what varieties we like best in some things, but I do expect to be able to grow at least 90% of our garden from our own seed within a few years.

Just a little big closer to our goal of being as self sufficient as possible!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 Garden: a surprise harvest! Plus updates

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Okay, so the garden is pretty much done.

The red onions have been left, since they can handle the cold nights, and still aren’t quite ready for picking. With various distractions related to our plumbing issues, the potatoes still need to be harvested. The sunchokes are still green and growing, so they won’t be harvested for a while. Mostly, the beds are ready for winter clean up – once we can get to them!

What I wasn’t expecting was this.

That’s right. I harvested tomatoes this morning!

When my daughter harvested this bed, she left behind the really tiny tomatoes, or the damaged ones. However, as more of the foliage died back, I could see some green tomatoes that looked fine, and seemed to have gotten missed. The foliage in this bed was so dense, that’s no surprise. I basically ignored them, though, figuring they were frost damaged by then.

This morning I could see they had continued to ripen! Hidden in the middle like that, it seems they got protected from our first frost and following cold nights, too.

So I picked them and added them to the bins and boxes of green tomatoes in the old kitchen to ripen.

We have quite a few things slowly ripening. Yesterday, my older daughter grabbed all the ripe hot peppers, cleaned and prepped them, then set them in the oven to dehydrate. Eventually, they will be made into a powder.

Now… my older daughter is pretty much the only one that can eat these. My husband used to love spicy food, but the medications he’s on have really messed with his ability to taste or tolerate foods. My younger daughter can handle a bit of heat, but not as much. My, I can’t tolerate spicy food at all.

So she has taken over preparing the hot peppers as they ripen and, once dehydrated and powdered, she will have enough to last a very long time! We won’t need to grow hot peppers for some years. 😁

Now, these are hot peppers, but not exceptionally hot peppers. They’re not the kind where you need to wear gloves or anything.

Normally.

It turns out that, after processing about a dozen remarkably large hot peppers, that becomes a problem.

Not right away, though. My daughter had no issues at all while working on them. She was careful about washing her hands before touching things, too.

Then she made herself a sandwich.

The pepper oils from her hands – even after being washed – got onto her sandwich, and it was so spicy, it started to burn her mouth. She ended up having to drink straight cream to reduce the pain!

Then her fingers started to burn.

It happened slowly, over several hours, but eventually she could barely even use one hand.

She sprung for take out for supper, so I went into town to pick up the food. By the time I got back and she regaled me on what had happened, I could see the tips of all her fingers were bright red!

Lesson learned. Even mildly hot peppers can become a problem, if you’re processing enough of them at once!

Gloves needed!

Meanwhile, even her lungs were starting to burn!

These were being dehydrated in the oven. We had the kitchen window open and the fan running. The house smelled amazing, but we still had to stay out of the kitchen as much as possible, so as not to breathe too many of the hot pepper fumes. Even the cats were staying out of the kitchen!

Speaking of cats, they added another distraction. My younger daughter tried to go to bed early, only to discover a cat with a messy butt made a mess on her bed. She had to wash all her bedding.

We had been working to clear my husband’s bedroom, and started doing his laundry, too, so that was already set up (yes, we are still running the hose out the window for the washing machine to drain into the yard). The girls were going to start the laundry and my younger daughter was going to use her sister’s bed for the night.

Which is when they discovered more mess in the middled of her sheets, from a cat or cats that squirmed its way under her covers.

So they were both up all night, doing load after load of laundry. Some things needed to be washed twice, just because of their size. They didn’t get to bed until past 6am.

We’ll be more laundry today, too. My husband has set up his CPAP in my bedroom so he could sleep with me.

Sleeping in the same bed as my husband! Imagine that. 😄

That will give us a chance to strip his hospital bed and wash things like his pillows and body pillows, along with the extra blankets he puts under his sheets. The mattress for the hospital bed has a sort of thick vinyl instead of fabric, so it’s easier to clean. Unfortunately, it doesn’t breath, and causes my husband to sweat. The extra layers under the sheets help prevent that.

I did finally find an XL twin fitted sheet on Amazon for his mattress, which is several inches longer than a standard twin mattress. We’ve confirmed the new sheet fits properly, so we’ll need to get a few more. For now, though, he has only one fitted sheet that actually fits the mattress on his hospital bed.

We’ve been working most of yesterday on clearing his room so we can access the corner behind the plumbing for the tub. This is where we will be cutting an access panel, but it’s still covered by the wardrobe. My husband doesn’t really use the wardrobe, and the girls have said they’ll take it upstairs – but they will need to move out their little bar fridge for the space. They don’t use that much anymore, so we were already talking about moving it to my room. I’ll have to find space for that, though.

Once we get that figured out, we can start moving things around but, for now, we still have one more corner of husband’s room to clear and clean, where has his own tiny fridge to store his injections. This will give us the opportunity to defrost and clean it, too, then move it to where it will be more easily accessible.

The bonus of moving the girls’ fridge out from upstairs, to make room for the wardrobe, is that it frees up a grounded outlet.

That means they can get an air conditioner and actually be able to plug it in! The upstairs gets so insanely hot in the summer, they really need one up there.

That will not happen for a while, though, since my daughter will be paying for what we end up needing to get the bathroom walls repaired.

So all of this rearranging and cleaning and figuring things out is happening at the same time – all because the hot water tap in the tub broke.

There is nothing we can do in the bathroom itself right now. The fan it still running to dry the rotted aspenite. My brother will be looking at it when he comes out on Friday evening (today is Wednesday).

We will have to pull out the tub to be able to find and cut away all the rot, and I’m not even sure how that will be done. It does seem like the tub is in two parts; the tub itself, resting on top of a flat panel that hides the underside of the tub.

Well, we’ll find out when the time comes.

Until then, we’ll just take advantage of the disaster and do the clearing, cleaning and rearranging we need to do, anyways.

On the one hand, I’m glad this has happened now, and not in the middle of winter.

On the other, this keeps me from getting outside stuff done, and from finishing the cat isolation shelter!

Hopefully, I’ll be able to get some of that done today, since there’s only so much I can do in my husband’s bedroom before I need my daughters to help out. It’s so close to being finished, too!

Ah, well. It is was it is.

Little by little, it’ll get done!

The Re-Farmer