Yes, the tiny strawberries are still growing, still blooming and still producing berries! Only a couple were ripe. Whatever variety of strawberries they are, they are certainly appropriate for our climate! It should be interesting to see how they do, when they are transplanted somewhere they can grow wild.
My trip to my mother’s was productive, though she was physically not up to climbing in and out of the truck to go to the bank. Hopefully, my sister will visit on one of her days off and can take her with her car. It’s much easier for our mother to get in and out of her vehicle.
At her request, I picked up a large pizza for our lunch. Today was her first day on the Meals on Wheels program, though. We were done eating before it arrived, and my mother still has half a pizza. That will be two or three meals for her, right there, and the Meals on Wheels will be her supper.
The place that cooks the meals usually sends out invoices at the end of the month, but my mother wanted to pay in advance. She doesn’t trust the post office, though, so she asked the volunteer delivery person – who happened to be one of the social workers that hosts all sorts of activities in the building – to hand deliver it. My mother has been making use of their services on an as-needed basis and always paid cash per meal directly to the delivery person, so we knew this was acceptable.
Lack of volunteers means they only deliver meals three days a week. As we were talking about the delivery days, the social worker told my mother that, if she wanted, she could request more than one meal. She could, for example, order two meals each on Monday and Wednesday, then order three meals on Friday. This way, she could have a meal for every day of the week. My mother was happy to hear that, and said that she would think about it. For now, we’ll just see how the three days a week works out for her.
The meal comes with a container of soup, which my mother wanted to eat right away, leaving the rest of the meal for later in the day. So I headed out with her list and did her shopping for her. It didn’t take long, even with going to both the pharmacy and the grocery store. My mother is set for a good while now.
By the time all was done and I was heading home, I noticed that I would reach our area in time for the post office to reopen for the afternoon. I knew one package was expected today. Another was due in a couple of days, but sometimes they come in early.
There turned out to be three packages waiting for me!
One was the pair of clamp lamps, the other was the ceramic bulbs. I tested both lamps and bulbs, then set them aside for now. We won’t need to set them up for a while, yet, and one of them is meant to go into the cat isolation shelter. We have a larger clamp lamp that we used last year, but the bulb didn’t make it through the entire winter. When the budget allows, I should pick up another two pack.
The other package was a chainsaw sharpening kit. My husband, sweetheart that he is, sharpened the chain on the mini-chainsaw (battery powered pruning saw) for me. I’ll have to find the spare and get him to do that one, too, plus the chain for our larger electric chainsaw.
My husband likes sharpening things. 😁
After having the supper my older daughter prepared, I headed outside to take care of the eggplant and pepper bed. I removed the plastic that was surrounding it and rolled it up around a couple of narrow boards for storage. We might use one section to put around the catio for the winter, so for now, they’re being stored on the catio roof.
The eggplant leaves were definitely killed off by the cold, but I was surprised by how well the eggplants held out.
Even some really tiny Little Finger eggplant seemed salvageable. Only a few were too frost damaged to bother picking. There were only three Classic eggplant left to harvest, and all three had minimal frost damage on them.
That plastic did the job, even if it couldn’t completely protect the plants!
The Cheyenne hot peppers in the middle of the bed fared better. There were SO many peppers, and none of them were too frost damaged to pick!
I should have used the bigger colander! It’s being used for something else, though. When I brought them inside, they almost filled the basin I’d dug out of the old kitchen recently.
We don’t have the space to spread them out, so I guess we’ll have to string them and hang them. They should continue to ripen.
We most definitely don’t have the space for all the things that need to ripen indoors, though!
Which is a good problem to have, I suppose!
I’m just happy to have a harvest in October.
After this, the potatoes need to be harvested. Oh, and the red onions are still hanging in there!
The sunchokes should also be harvested, but they are still quite green and growing. The frost hasn’t really bothered them at all. I’m curious as to how well they did, after not harvesting them at all last year.
In a few days, we’ll be bringing the rest of the winter squash from the garage to the root cellar.
The root cellar is going to be pretty full this winter!
Not too bad, considering what a rough start the garden had this year. I’m quite pleased!
My younger daughter and I were able to get so much done today, all before our expected first frost.
Depending on which weather app I look at, we’re supposed to drop to either -2C/28F, or 1C/34F tonight.
Either way, we’re looking at frost tonight.
Strangely, there are absolutely no frost warnings. Perhaps the humidity is too low. The temperature alone is enough to cause damage, though.
Last night, my older daughter helped me cover the two beds that actually can be covered, and I’m glad we did. We dropped to 3C/37F last night, and that was enough to kill off the last of the squash and melon leaves. Even the Crespo squash was droopy, and they were the only ones that were still lush, green and growing.
My daughter started off by checking on the biggest Crespo squash. As she rolled it aside, the stem broke right off its vine.
The two that were growing in the bean trellis didn’t get to full maturity, so they’ll need to be eaten sooner, too. Or we could cut make a puree to freeze or something like that.
My daughter started off harvesting the tomatoes in the old kitchen garden ahead of me. She’d collected all the Forme de Couer and had moved on to the Black Cherry tomatoes by the time I was able to start helping her. The Black Cherries were so tangled up in the lilac branches, we had to cut our way through to be able see, never mind reach, the tomatoes. After a while, I grabbed a pile of cut up tomato plants to take it to the compost pile when I realized, there were plenty of tomatoes in the compost pile to gather.
So I grabbed another bin and worked on those.
I found a surprise!
I knew there were two types of volunteer tomatoes in there. A few Indigo Blues, and a whole lot of Roma VF from last year’s harvests.
I found a third type, completely buried by the others!
They look like a slicing tomato of some kind, but I don’t remember growing a red variety of slicing tomato last year. It was also the only one that had an almost ripe tomato.
You’ll notice a lot of the Romas are very pale – almost white – in colour. These were essentially blanched from being under so many stems and leaves. I’m really surprised by how many we got in there!
It’s a shame they never got to ripen. A few of the Romas had started to show a blush. Who knows how many of these will actually ripen once indoors.
By the time I got the compost tomatoes done, my daughter was almost finished the old kitchen garden, so I moved on to the main garden area, bringing the wagon with the Crespo squash, to start harvesting the squash and melons. Then my daughter joined me and started harvesting the rest of the San Marzano tomatoes.
I found several melons were already “harvested”! One had a hole in it and was essentially hollowed out, so I’m guessing a mouse got that one. The others looked more like racoon damage.
Once the squash and melons were picked, plus a few patty pan squash, I cut down and went through all the corn stalks to find the cobs I’d left to go to seed.
This was all the racoons left me, and it’s not even dried out enough to have viable seeds.
Ah, well. Live and learn!
That done, I got another bin and helped my daughter with the last of the tomatoes. There were so many San Marzanos in the main garden area! Then we did the tomatoes that were at the chain link fence.
The bin with the cat next to it has the Chocolate Cherry tomatoes from the chain link fence in it, plus the tiny tomatoes from the volunteer tomato plant that I found among the potatoes. There were so many perfect little tomatoes! Not a single one had a chance to ripen. We have no idea what kind of tomatoes they were, either.
My daughter had already moved the previously harvested winter squash from the garage to the house, so now these squash are set up in the garage. It looks like some of the blue squash did get to fully mature, but most of them seem shy of full maturity, so they won’t be able to properly cure. They are still quite edible, though. They just won’t last as long in the root cellar than if they had fully matured and cured. Still, some time set up like this in the garage will help them last a bit longer.
Once we were done with the harvesting, my daughter uncovered the box of the truck, and we loaded up with as many bags of cans as we felt we could properly secure.
Which turned out to be maybe a third of the pile!
The whole thing got covered with a tarp and strapped down with ratchet straps. We set two up in an X across the pile, plus two more across the front and back. It was pretty windy, though, and once we got to highway speeds, the tarp was billowing under the straps more than I liked.
We stopped at a gas station to tuck the tarp back in place, then secured it more using Bungee cords. It still billowed, but nothing that was a potential problem.
This is the first time we’ve gone to this salvage place, but they were easy to find. I’d called for instructions yesterday, so we knew where to go to start. After talking to someone in the office, she directed me to where we should pull up, and staff could unload the truck.
My daughter and I started taking the straps and tarp off while they brought over a couple of bins with a forklift to bring them to the scale. All the cans are in transparent bags, so they could see that there were some tin cans in there, too.
That was okay for them, but good for us.
The tin cans go for 10 cents per weight.
The aluminum goes for 50 cents.
When they’re mixed up like this, they basically figure out something in between.
After everything was unloaded, we moved the truck again, and I went back to the office to wait. I had thought I stopped out of the way, but I turned out to be wrong, when a very large truck pulling a very long trailer came in! One of the office staff asked if we could park on the street. When I moved the truck, though, there wasn’t enough room to get by the trailer. I went back inside while my daughter waited until the truck could pull ahead, then she found a place to park.
As I was waiting in the office, I heard some staff going back and forth and saying something about “getting her a magnet”.
Then a guy came up to me and handed me a red keychain with their company name and number on it. It turns out, I was the “her”, and the keychain has a strong magnet on its end. This is for the next time we bring in a load; when we back stuff up, we can use the magnet to make sure there’s no cans with steel in them mixed in.
It means we’ll have to re-bag all the cans again, but the difference in price makes it worth is. With sooooo many cat food cans, plus the pop and energy drink cans, it is quite a loss to not get full price on the aluminum because there’s half a dozen tin cans scattered among them.
In the end, we brought 208 pounds, which got us just over $17. While they did give us an in between price, we still could have gotten quite a bit more, if we didn’t have those tin cans in there.
Live and learn!
It was very nice of them to give us the magnet, too. We have magnets, of course, but this one will be much more convenient!
That done, my daughter and I made a quick stop at a gas station, then headed home. We made a point of not covering the box again so that, once at home, we could give it a cleaning. The truck has screw holes in the bed from when it was a commercial vehicle hauling trailers. A remarkable amount of dust from the gravel roads gets in there!
I know it’s just going to get full of dust again, but it sure did feel better to finally wash that out with the hose!
Then we filled the truck again, this time with our garbage. We were overdue for a trip to the dump!
I had planned to go to a different landfill in our municipality, but I don’t know the area it’s in, so we went to our usual one.
I was really glad to have my daughter with me! The pit area is a real disaster. My daughter got out before we went into the pit area to make sure there wasn’t anything that might puncture a tire. While she kicked things out of the way, I slowly crawled along behind her with the truck until she could guide me in backing up to the pit. Not as close as we normally would have gone; too much broken glass!
And nails.
She was finding and kicking away nails, the whole distance!
This place has really gone downhill. The previous municipal council had fired the guy that used to take care of the landfill. I don’t know what the new council is doing, but the attendant that’s here now is not someone physically able to maintain the pit. Which is fine, if being an attendant is the only part of her job description, but whoever it is that’s been hired to use the heavy equipment to clean where we’re supposed to drive up to the pit is not doing a good job at all. Even the equipment being used is different, and the tracks on that front end loader is just destroying the gravel driveways.
But, we got the job done, and so far, it doesn’t look like I’ll be getting any flat tires, thanks to my daughter!
As we were leaving, my daughter wondered about being able to go to town and pick up something. It had been a long time since either of us had eaten, and she was thinking of perhaps treating us.
After talking about it, we decided that, between the two of us, we could pick up some fish and chips for all of us for supper.
Which was about when we got a message from my husband. The pharmacy called. When he had his prescription refills delivered, they didn’t have enough to fill one completely. They now had the amount they owed him.
Well, that was handy! We would have time to do that, before the pharmacy closed at 6pm.
A trip to town, it was!
As we were going along, we ended up stuck behind some slower moving traffic, so it took a bit longer to get to the pharmacy. I was going to just dash in, anyhow.
As I was walking in the door, behind two other people, a staff member let us know…
…they were closing in one minute – and she locked the entry doors behind us!
It turns out, they close at 5:30.
Thankfully, my husband’s prescription was quick to find, and it was already covered, so it just needed to be handed to me, and I could go!
From there, we went and got the fish and chips to bring home, plus a quick stop at the grocery store for something else my husband needed. We could finally go home!
We weren’t quite done yet, though!
One home, my daughter took care of bringing in the hot food, while I started bringing the bins of tomatoes into the old kitchen.
I have no idea what we’re going to do with them all.
In previous years, we kept a bin of green tomatoes out and my family just snacked on them as they ripened. They were all small grape, cherry or pear type tomatoes.
I know there are lots of things that can be done with green tomatoes; we’ve just never done them. I wouldn’t be able to eat them, so it’s a matter of finding things the family would like.
What we don’t have is the space to lay out so many green tomatoes in what should be a single layer, to ripen indoors. It would have to be in the living room – the cat free zone – but it’s a disaster right now.
Until we figure that out, all five bins are now laid out on the chest freezer in the old kitchen. That room is too dark and gets too cold to be able to leave them there to ripen.
Once we were finally able to have our supper, things still weren’t done!
It was back outside to recover the two beds for the night, so the peppers and eggplant will survive. The hoses had to be prepped so they wouldn’t have any water in them to freeze, and I even remembered to close the doors in the side of the garage the squash and melons were in, so they won’t get as cold.
And now I am FINALLY done for today.
I’m hoping to actually get to bed before midnight and get some real sleep for a change. My attempt to do so last night was a total failure! 😄
There is, of course, lots to do outside. This is one of the busiest times of the year, as we get ready for winter, while the weather holds!
We had a lovely mild morning today. We supposedly had rain last night, but nothing noticeable. I’m going to have to go back out to water the remaining garden beds today.
As I write this, my various weather apps tell me we are at 15C/59F. I just made a trip to the town north of us. There’s a bank with one of those signs with a rotating display that includes time and temperature. According to that, it was 21C/70F.
I’d say the sign is right and the apps are wrong!
I did a harvest this morning and completely forgot to take a photo of it! There were some Chocolate Cherry and Black Cherry tomatoes to harvest, an orange bell pepper and a hot pepper, a surprising amount of beans, and some San Marzano tomatoes.
What I did not harvest was melons, but something did!
Considering the size and weight of the melon, and the fact that it was taken out of a raised bed and into the middle of a path, I’d say racoons did this.
This is all that’s left of my kohlrabi, after the flea beetles were done with it.
*sigh*
Tonight, we’re supposed to drop down to 4C/39F. Not quite frost temperatures, but we’ll definitely cover the two beds where it’s even possible to do so. I don’t think we’ll harvest the last of the other things until tomorrow, though. I’m taking a chance with that, but we’ll see how it goes. Just watering the garden really well will help things handle the temperatures a little bit.
It’s all one day at a time in the garden, this time of year!
I had a long day taking my mother to her specialist appointment in the city yesterday, and now another long day with her today. I did have time to do some of my morning rounds, though, and was able to gather a good sized harvest!
In the giant colander, there are a good number of Chocolate Cherry tomatoes from by the chain link fence. I also picked a few green Seychelle beans from the bed shared with the Crespo squash, and I even found a few on the one plant next to the purple Carminat pole beans. There are even some Royal Burgundy bush beans in there.
I found a melon lying on the ground in the raised bed – it harvested itself! 😄 There are a couple of yellow peppers, plus a Sweet Chocolate. Some of the peppers that are supposed to be more orange are finally starting to turn colour. There’s a single G Star pattypan squash, plus a few San Marzano tomatoes.
When it came time to go into the old kitchen garden, I knew there would be quite a bit, so I grabbed the bin. Those are all Forme de Couer and Black Cherry tomatoes in there.
Including a rude looking tomato! Click over to the next photo to see what I mean. 😄
After that, I left things to my daughters and headed out to my mother’s.
Long story short: her apartment finally got sprayed for bed bugs. There were no sign of any, so they will have to come back only one more time. Her neighbour got sprayed, too. I get the impression that apartment has been the main source of the problem in the building.
My mother then had to stay out of her apartment for 6 hours. Technically, she should stay out for 12 hours, as she has respiratory issues, but she refuses.
The neighbor says they only need to stay out for 4 hours, but I have no idea where she got that from. The notification letter they all get says the same thing. At least 6 hours.
We made sure to take along my mother’s supper time medications, as well as the information sheets the eye clinic gave her, yesterday, to go over. While we were waiting for the exterminator to arrive, I did go through some with her. I took the grid eye test, which is a flat magnetic sheet, and put it on her fridge. The grid has a black dot in the middle that is supposed to be focused on. I spent some time explaining the test to her, how to do it, and that she should be checking her left eye with it, every day. I even held it for her while she did the test, as instructed.
While explaining the grid test to her, how to take the test, what she’s looking for, I was saying, your left eye this, your left eye that, with your left eye…
Yet she still stopped at one point and said, “with my right eye, then…”
…
No. Your right eye can’t even see the dot in the grid. It’s for your left eye.
It’s going to take a while for it to stick, I think!
We had a nice chat with the manager while her apartment was being sprayed – she parker her walker across from her door and would not move until the exterminator left.
Then we had to find something to do or somewhere to go for six hours.
I was going to move the truck into the loading zone in front of the doors, to make it safer for my mother to get in, but the exterminator’s truck was in there, and he was chatting with the manager. When I got there, I did apologize for my mother’s behaviour over all this.
She is still utterly convinced the exterminator rifled through her closet to find and steal 70+ year old passports. In fact, at one point when it came up in conversation, she started saying, “maybe I should call the police?” When I said no, she said I was accusing her of lying. I told her, I didn’t think she was lying, but that she probably just put them somewhere and forgot where. When she moves, she’ll probably find them again. Her response was that I was “against” her.
*sigh*
Anyhow…
It was a good thing I caught up with them, because the manager remembered to ask if my mother’s bed had mattress covers. She doesn’t, and the exterminator said she needs two – one for the mattress, one for the box spring. Then he remembered he might have one and checked in his truck. He did have one and gave it to me for my mother’s mattress. We’ll still need one for the box spring.
Then I mentioned I needed to move my truck so my mother could get in, and we said our goodbyes.
By this time, though, my mother had come out and was sitting in her walker, watching us suspiciously. She called me over before I moved the truck and started asking me questions… why was the exterminator still there? Why was the manager sitting in his truck? etc.
Oh, gosh. I just realized what she was getting at.
She thought they were waiting for her to leave, so the manager could use his master key to get into her apartment, so they could steal things.
*sigh*
Anyhow.
We got her into the truck and then headed out for lunch. There was one place she wanted to go to, because someone new bought it and she wanted to see how it was, now that it wasn’t “browny” people that owned it (it had been owned by a Korean family). *sigh* The place was still being worked on, on the inside, but when she saw the worker’s vehicles in the parking lot, she thought it was open and wanted me to go inside and check. I had to tell her, no, you can’t just walk into a construction zone!
So we went to a chicken and pizza restaurant.
She ended up ordering a vegetable pizza this time, which I normally would not have thought much of, except that my mother is once again deciding that the reason she’s having trouble with her eyes is because of food, and so she needs to eat more vegetables and green things.
There is no known cause for macular degeneration, and there is no food she can eat or not eat that will make any difference. But she heard something somewhere – maybe last week, maybe last month, maybe 30 years ago – and just latches on to things.
We’re going to have to watch her on that, because she’s going to start causing malnutrition in herself if we don’t.
I had something else, so she had a small pizza to herself, with some left over that was packed up for later. We took our time eating, though – we did have 6 hours to kill! – then went across the street to a little department store she wanted to check out, while she was out and about. I helped her get across the street, then moved the truck to park by the store, so she wouldn’t have to cross the street again. The nice thing about that was that I was able to pull up really close to the curb – and that extra height made it downright easy for her to get into the truck when she was done!
We then both went in and did a bit of shopping.
There’s only so long we could drag that out, though.
There was nowhere else she wanted to go, and there is nowhere in this town where one can just hang out. We even tried driving around parts of town we’ve never gone into before, but there wasn’t a whole lot of that, either. 😄
We managed to use up about 2-3 hours before finally just going back to her building and sitting in the common room. No one else was around, so we brought out the information the eye clinic gave her and I went over it with her. Most of it, the doctor had already explained to her really well.
It didn’t take long to go through it all.
I was completely prepared to stay with my mother until 7pm, but she told me that I could go home. She was really tired and was going to just sit and close her eyes for a while. She had her leftovers for supper, and I’d added a bottle of orange juice I’d gotten with her meal on the way home from the city yesterday, that got forgotten in the truck, so she was prepared for taking her medication with her supper while in the common room.
So I headed home.
When I got home, my younger daughter was adding more supports to the tomatoes at the chain link fence that yesterday’s winds had managed to blow partly over. I ended up helping her with that, then she moved on to start breaking down the tree that the winds blow over and onto a crabapple tree.
I had gone to talk to her when our phones both dinged. My husband had sent a message.
My mother had called and left a message on the answering machine. Something about her keys?
I had completely forgotten.
While digging in her purse at one point, my mother gave me her keys to put in my pocket, so they wouldn’t get lost.
They were still in my pocket!!!
I had dashed into the house to get my purse when the phone range again. It was my mother, trying again – from the number on call display, a neighbour had let her use their phone. I told her, I was leaving right then and there!
When I got there, so was so apologetic about having me drive all the way back again. Meanwhile, I was apologizing for forgetting I had her keys! It was pretty funny!
Enough time had passed that she had eaten her supper and taken her medications. It was still early to get into her apartment, but by less than an hour, so we went in anyway.
I had offered to come back to help her put things back and she had said no, so this actually worked out.
I was able to put the mattress cover on her bed – and found out that they’d given her, and others, mattress covers long ago. She didn’t want me to put it on her bed, and basically scoffed at the fact that they had been given them in the first place.
*sigh*
So, somewhere in her closet, she had 2 more of these. Maybe when my sister next visits my mother, she’ll be ablet to find one and get it onto the box spring.
I made up her bed and put a few things away.
If she didn’t have to wait until the health care aid came to help with her nightly medications, she would have gone to bed right then and there!
I did make sure to set out the little miniature tagine bowl and lid I’d brought for her. She thought it was adorable! This will be a handy container for the health care aide to put her pills into, after removing them from the bubble pack, so they can both easily see that the right number are in there. Plus, my mother can more easily pick up the little bowl to take them, rather than trying to use her hands. Some of her fingers are deformed with arthritis.
The extra trip was good for another reason. I had forgotten to hit a bank machine earlier, to take cash out for the septic guy. We’re almost into October. Time to get the tank emptied for the winter.
We’ll need to contact the septic repair company again, too, and hopefully get a date on when they can come and repair the leaking pipes at the expeller!
I really hope we’re not getting ghosted by this company. We’ve had this happen before with other companies, in the first couple of years after we moved here. I have reason to believe it has something to do with our vandal defaming us, though I have no actual proof. Our vandal has a past history of trying to prevent companies from doing things here at the farm, and even on property in the heart of our little hamlet that my parents used to own. Then, when they tried to sell it, he drove off two potential buyers!
Yes, he felt he was entitled to that property, just like he feels he’s entitled to this property, too.
Of course, it could be this company is just really busy, trying to get jobs done before winter. Unfortunately, with past experience, I can’t help but wonder.
Well, if we don’t hear from them after trying to call them back several times, there is another company we can contact again. They are in a completely different town that our vandal doesn’t really go to, that I know of, so the chances of them having any contact with our vandal is very low.
The main thing is that this gets repaired before the ground freezes.
Thankfully, our system has still been working so far, even if the greywater is all just soaking into the ground, as if we had a septic field instead of an expeller. The leak must be pretty close to the surface for the ground to become saturated like that, so if it doesn’t get repaired, the whole thing will freeze, the greywater will have nowhere to go, and the ice will break the pipes even more.
*sigh*
Tomorrow, I will hopefully not have to go anywhere, except maybe the dump. I don’t know if I dare to to the nearest landfill again, with how bad it has gotten lately (I don’t want another flat tire!), but the next nearest one is also open on Saturdays. I just need to find it.
If all goes well, though, I’ll finally be able to catch up with stuff here at home!
Like prep and freeze a whole lot of bell peppers and melons, and either freeze whole tomatoes, or start another sauce in the Crockpot.
I had another sleepless night last night (courtesy of the cats!), so my daughters took care of most of the morning stuff. That let me get at least a couple of hours of sleep before I headed out to the garden, just before noon.
We got a smattering of rain yesterday evening, so I used one of the side walls from the broken market tent to cover the onions that were curing outside. Once things were warmer, I uncovered them again, so they could get some sun and air flow.
We’ve got some warm, sunny days coming up, and mild overnight temperatures, so I lifted the bottom half of the vinyl sheets wrapped around the box frame over the eggplant and hot pepper bed.
As you can see in the foreground of the photo above, Syndol is checking out the eggplant and hot peppers I harvested out of there this morning!
This is the rest of today’s harvest. We have a first today!
Yes, a couple still have some green on them, but I wanted to get some of the weight off the plants. It was much the same with the few tomatoes I collected today.
Also, yes, that is a mutant Little Finger eggplant on the left! I actually remembered to bring pruning shears to cut the stems – they are surprisingly spiky! – and it was rather a surprised to cut one stem and get two eggplants! There are two Classic eggplant in there, too. I’m harvesting a bit smaller, as the large ones we’ve harvested before were getting pretty seedy inside. Mind you, we could leave some longer just to collect the seeds, but it’s probably too late in the season for any of the ones still on the plants to have viable seeds to collect.
The long, straight hot peppers were easy to harvest, but the curled one was so twisted around the stalk and another pepper, I ended up breaking off the top of the pepper itself, rather than the stem.
We also have one melon today, and one purple Dragonfly pepper. The colour is very much the same as the eggplants!
Pretty darn good for near the end of September in our area!
The German Butterball potato plants have all died off, so we should be harvesting those, soon. A few of the winter squash are starting to look ready to harvest and get set aside to cure, too. The one Jebousek lettuce that seeded itself should have seeds ready to collect, too. The kohlrabi look like a total loss, though. The flea beetles just decimated them. 😢 We finally got some to actually grow, and this happens. *sigh*
As we build up our raised beds, making it so they can be covered with insect netting is going to be important! I would really like to grow kohlrabi and cabbage and brassicas in general, but it looks like that’s just not going to happen until we have a way to protect them from those flippin’ flea beetles!!
I tried going to bed early last night, which actually worked for a change, so I was able to get out and in the garden early. We were getting warnings for a possible thunderstorm (which never happened), so as soon as my morning rounds were done, I wanted to work on my tomatoes.
The first of the Instagram slideshow photos is as far as I got with the San Marzano tomatoes in the main garden area.
I was even able to pick a few tomatoes, first. They were so tightly packed in with the vines, a couple were weirdly misshapen, having had to grow around stems and even one of the bamboo supports.
With this bed, though, only the main stems were supported by the stakes. These weren’t pruned, so they all have suckers on them. The three southernmost plants (in the foreground) had suckers spread out and lying on the ground like a thick, green spider’s web! You can see a bit, how I added support to those vines.
For most of them, I couldn’t reach the stake in the middle, so I loosely tied jute twine to the stem I wanted to support, under a leaf stem, or the nub of one, if it was one that was broken off. I did prune some of the bottom leaves away, awhile back, as they were crushing the onions planted around them. The twine was then wrapped around the stem, with extra wraps near the base so it wouldn’t pull upwards. I didn’t skimp on the wraps all the way up, and made sure that any branches with clusters of tomatoes on them had wraps above and below. Once near the top, the whole thing was gently lifted, and the top tied to the support.
With so many of these branches splayed out around the main stem, I alternated sides as I worked, to more evenly distribute the weight. I also moved the metal posts that were marking the corners of the bed, as I was shifting it over. Those were brought closer in and pushed deep into the soil, so they – hopefully! – wouldn’t be pulled over. I then anchored the stake at the end of the row onto them.
As I worked on the next two tomato plants, I also straightened stakes that were being pulled down by the weight of the main vine, and secured them to the previous stake. With one plant, I could access the stake as I worked, so the jute twine was anchored to the stake at the bottom, rather than the base of the stem I was working on. A couple of vines were even anchored to the stake about half way up, as they were being wrapped. Not too close against the stake, though, but with space for air flow.
The three at the south end got done, but it took so long, I had to move on. The others don’t look like they will need individual wrapping like this. I’ll see, when I get back to them.
The second photo in the slideshow above is of the Black Cherry vines in the Old Kitchen Garden. They are getting so big and heavy, the lilac they are climbing is bending from the weight! These are already tied off and supported as much as can be, though.
Note for future reference. Find a way to incorporate stakes into the wattle weave to support things like this! The lilac can handle supporting the luffa vines just fine, but these tomatoes are just too big and heavy, and those branches are not near the main stems of the lilac.
It was the bed with the Forme de Couer tomatoes that needed help. I had to post this photo separately on Instagram, because it’s oriented differently. It was the bamboo stakes that had to be helped.
Each plant has a pair of stakes to support it. The pair in the bottom right corner of the photo were so heavy, the stakes were twisted around and starting to lean into the bath between this bed, and the wattle weave bed with the Black Cherry tomatoes. You can even see a bit, just above where the jute twine is tied, that one of them had started to split and bend. If there hadn’t already been some twine holding the pairs of stakes together, there’s no doubt the whole thing would have broken and fallen into the path.
That one got attention first. I was able to carefully pull the stakes upright again, then anchored them to the opposite corner of the raised bed. More twine was added to the pairs of stakes along one side, anchoring them to each other, then to the corners of the raised bed at the other end, before being tied off on the last pair of stakes on the opposite side. The other stakes on that side had already had support added to them and did not need more.
Once that was done, it was time to clean up and head into town. My friend from out of province had time to meet for lunch, one more time before she had to go home.
I left early so that I could stop at the dollar store, first. With one of the yard cats going in for a neuter next week, we have to start deciding which one we’ll be trying to catch. The friendliest ones have already done, but one of those is really hard to tell apart from others, now that the wound on his front leg is completely healed, without even a scar visible through is fur.
What I’ve decided to do is to try and put break-away collars on the four that have already been neutered, then another to add onto whichever cat we manage to catch and bring in next.
The store had only one style with breakaway snaps on them, so that’s what I got. They all have bells, which will need to be removed. These are outdoor cats, and they earn their keep by keeping the rodent population down. Having a bell would defeat the purpose, plus make them easier targets for coyotes.
After that, I hung around and enjoyed the day until my friend and I met up and went for lunch in the fish ‘n chips place that reopened not long ago. They’d been closed for many months, repairing and renovating after a fire (when I first saw the boarded up building, I actually thought they’d been vandalized). It’s the same owners using their same recipes, and their food was every bit as delicious as before. We quite enjoyed our lunch – and the portions were generous enough that both of us got take out containers to bring the leftover home!
My friend still had some time left before she had to go, so we got to walk on the beach for a while – a nice quite beach, now that the summertime crowds are done, and it’s the middle of the week! Then she had to head back. She’s leaving very early in the morning, and has a long drive ahead of her, so she had lots to do to get ready. Including a grocery shopping trip for her mother.
That sure sounds familiar! 😁
While I was in town, I got a message from my husband, letting me know the feed store had called, and the lysine they’d ordered for me was in. So, after we said our goodbyes, I headed to my mother’s town to pick it up, along with more kibble for the outside cats.
This morning, I tried to do a head count of just kittens. That’s a bit of a challenge, as some of the adult cats are pretty small, and the older kittens are almost as big as they are!
I counted twenty.
I think.
In the photo above, with the kittens, you can see the bright white granular type lysine on the bottom of the kibble tray. That is why I was wanting to have a finer powder, like I had been able to get before, but is no longer available.
If you look at the second picture of the slide show above, you’ll see the lysine I got today. I opened one of the tubs right in the store, as soon as I paid for it.
This bulk lysine is sold for horses, so I guess they don’t bother bleaching it white, like for human consumption! It’s still granular, though. Lysine is lysine, though, so it is otherwise the same.
I think what I’ll just have to do is use that Magic Bullet set we were gifted with, and just process the granules into a fine powder. This will coat the kibble better, and the cats are more likely to actually get a dose of the stuff. Thankfully, aside from eye baby, there don’t seem to be any sick cats out there right now. Just a little bit of crusty bits visible in the corners of some of their eyes, but nothing major. None need to have their eyes washed. Even eye baby’s messed up eye isn’t leaking much. It’s just really… gross.
No, I will not inflict you with a photo!
Anyhow.
Along with the lysine (I got two 1 pound tubs, which cost just under $20 each), I got the bag of kibble I’d paid for last time, but they turned out to have only two bags in stock, not three. Then I got one more on top of that.
Once done at the feed store, I headed home.
I don’t know what’s been going on with me lately, but during the drive home, a wave of tired just hit me. I don’t mean physically tired, or even mentally tired. I mean sleepy tired!
I did get a good night’s sleep! Honest!
Once I was at home, I unloaded everything but the 40 pound bags of kibble in the box of the truck, then went for a nap. When I woke up after a couple of hours, I was feeling even more groggy than when I lay down in the first place!
So I just did my evening rounds, but let my daughter that was going to help me, know that I wasn’t up to finishing with those last San Marzano tomatoes. They will be fine for another day.
Meanwhile, the writing of this paused just had a pause to it, as I dosed and fed eye baby, while my daughter held him, wrapped up like a purrito – and there was much purring happening!
Gosh, I wish all cats took their meds as well as this little guy!
I gave his face a bit of a wash around the eye, and just laid a warm, damp cloth over the eye itself, before giving him some saline drops. I wish I knew what I was looking at with that eye. All I can say for sure is, it’s getting better – as in, it’s not sticking out as much, and not leaking like it had been, when we first started treating him. He even seemed to enjoy the cleaning.
That is now done for the night, and that’s as much as I have energy for. I’m done for the day. My younger daughter and I have plans to watch Columbo together tonight.
Well, the predicted rain did start last night, and it’s still raining now.
Sort of.
It’s a very light, barely there sort of rain. I’m just hoping it keeps up long enough to actually water the garden. It’s actually pretty much stopped right now, but it’s supposed to start up again this afternoon – quite different from the prediction of rain all morning that I was looking at last night.
This time, I actually picked sugar snap peas. The plants are well past their prime, and usually I just find a few to snack on in the morning, but today there was enough to actually bring some in – after I’d already eaten a few. 😉 There was a single green Seychelle bean ready to pick, plus a few Carminat, and one Purple Beauty pepper was ripe.
I was also happy to see the first blooming Magda squash blossom, though at this stage, it’s just male flowers. The Black Cherry tomatoes are starting to get too tall for the lilac they’ve grown into to hold them, so I’m going to have to find a way to support the vines while still keeping them in reach for harvesting. Not a problem I ever expected to have! We’ve never had tomatoes that grew this tall before!
I get the Farmer’s Almanac daily newsletter and caught a bit of their long term forecast for the fall and winter. They’re predicting a warmer than usual fall for some areas – a range that includes where we are. I hope they’re right. Even now, as I look at the local long range forecast into September, the predictions for the overnight lows has changed towards warmer temperatures. We shall see. With how far behind so many things are – and certainly not just for us! – I’ll take very frost free night we can get!
It’s sort of pins and needles time for gardeners – and a lot of farmers, too – at this time of year.
The Re-Farmer
(addendum: I’ve been using WP AI assistant to “generate feedback” pretty regularly, just for a lark. It tends to make the same suggestions, over and over. Clearly, it can’t tell that I’ve got Instagram images embedded in my posts, because it’s constantly recommending I use images or video. 😄😄)
We have a first sighting of Caramel’s babies! I thought they might be in the wood pile (which we thought was a junk pile, until we took the junk off the top), since I would sometimes see her disappear under it, but cats in general like to shelter under there.
As I was heading back to the house, I spotted a grey tabby by the opening under the tarp. When it saw me, it ducked under. For the briefest of moments, I saw an orange face peek out, then Caramel stuck her head out and stared at me. She seemed to be okay with my watching from where I was and came out. Her little grey one came out soon after, and then the orange one – which turned out to be orange and white – came out and stayed behind Caramel. I stayed long enough to see if any others would come out, but it looks like there are just the two of them.
As for things outside.
The water has been absorbed in some places, though everything is still very wet. I lifted the mosquito netting cover off the potatoes, since the elms are no longer dropping seeds, and over the chain link fence. I will leave it there for now, as the blowing of the netting should startle the deer away. Not that they’ll eat potato plants, but it might keep them from going into the yard and eating other things. I considered lifting the netting off the chocolate cherry tomatoes, too, but they don’t seem to be hampered by it at all, so I’m leaving it for now.
I took the cover off the bed with the German Butterball potatoes. They’re getting so big, they are starting to crowd against the netting. I set the cover on top of the old dog houses by the outhouse, for now. It’s pretty much the only place with enough for it, while also keeping it off the wet ground.
It looks like I will need to try planting the Seychelle beans again. Only a few have come up in one row, and none at all in the other. The seeds are a few years old and, between that and the weather we’ve been having, it’s no surprise if they don’t come up.
I did plant more of the Royal Burgundy bush beans. In fact, I had enough seeds to plant a row on either side of the original row, which has only one successfully sprouted bean plant coming up. I still have seeds left over, too. For some reason, I remember having only enough seeds to plant one short row, but these are the same brand’s seeds as before. I’ll have to check my seeds bin and see if I still have some left, after all. With only one bean successfully germinating (plus one more that broke ground and that’s about it), I figured planting two more rows on either side of the original row would hopefully ensure we have at least a few bush beans survive!
The water around the bed I was going to work on next has been mostly absorbed into the ground, and I considered working on it – but only for a moment. It’s 22C/72F out there, with a humidex of 28C/83F. I was not about to do that kind of work in full sun with this level of heat and humidity. I did do a bit of weeding, through. With the ground so wet, I could pull some of the weeds out, tap root and all. A bit of that was more than enough to convince me, turning new sod and shifting the remains of that bed over is just not something I should be doing right now! If I get out early enough tomorrow morning, though, I should be able to get it done and, if all goes well, transplant the last of the onions. Since I have so many, and this bed won’t have anything else in it, I should be able to get away with planting them a bit denser, too. It would be great if I could get all the onions, plus the last few shallots, in. It’s getting really late for onions. They really should have been planted in late May, as they prefer the cooler temperatures, but we shall see how they do.
Once that’s done, I can breathe a sigh of relief for a little while. Then I can look into seeing what I can do in the gaps where things that were direct sown didn’t come up, and replant where the spinach was sown. What little spinach came up and actually grew is now bolting in the heat! We never got anything to harvest, even out of those.
Maybe I’ll just plant more of the Uzbek carrots. I intended to plant a lot more carrots, but the beds are all full of winter squash and melons, which grow too big to interplant carrots under. I could have planted them under the tomatoes, but the onions needed to be transplanted – plus, the onions should help deter deer and other pests from the tomatoes.
Well, writing this just got interrupted quite a bit. A racoon was back in the sun room and had to be chased off repeatedly. We’re prepared to deal with it, once the opportunity arises. There is, however, a second one, and I haven’t seen both at the same time since last night.
For now, I’m going to enjoy watching kittens on the critter cam.
Oh!!! Did I just see a white kitten running by past a window??? It would be so great if the white babies came back, too! We were making such good progress in socializing those ones.
Ah, well. What will be, will be.
Oh… that’s a skunk I just saw walking by this time…
She actually came up to the kibble while I was setting it out and let me pet her a bit, but she is still really stand offish. I can see, she is making sure I can’t grab her to pick her up and bring her inside.
The downpour we had yesterday seems to have triggered a burst of overnight growth on the sunburst patty pan squash! So many fresh new leaves under the frost damaged ones, and it’s almost the end of September – and still blooming, too!
This is on a dead maple tree near the fire pit, and it wasn’t there yesterday. We get these regularly, but this is easily the largest and most beautiful cluster of mushrooms I’ve seen since moving here.
We are having good weather today (Friday), and should have a lovely day tomorrow, too – then a thunderstorm on Sunday! We’ve found ourselves with a last minute conversation with family, and it looks like we’ll be doing a cook out tomorrow evening. So today, I’ll be raking the leaves away from the fire pit, so they are not a fire hazard, and setting things up. The old picnic table is so far gone, I don’t think we can safely use it anymore, and I’ll have to snag one of the girls to help me move it, and bring over the folding table we made this year. I’ll also have to empty the fire pit of ashes. It’s been a while!
I’m thinking a pot roast in the cast iron Dutch oven would go over very well!
While checking on the garden yesterday evening, I noticed some of the melons were getting pretty heavy, so I dug out something I’d made the first year we tried to grow melons, and succeeded. This morning, I got some photos.
I might have to make more. There are quite a lot of melons getting nice and big in the makeshift trellis!
I look forward to when we have permanent and portable trellises. I am really happy with how some of our climbing vines have been doing. Especially the melons in their kiddie pool raised bed! There are three varieties in there, but they are all climbing so vigorously, the vines are all twisted around each other. We’ll figure out which is which, when it’s time to harvest them.
The Re-Farmer 