I had to make another trip into town today, because I forgot something yesterday. I’ve been making more errand trips in the last few days than I do in most months! But that’s okay, because it gave me a chance to find and pick up other things.
Like these modifications to the squash tunnel.
The first is a solar powered, motion sensor spot light. Hopefully, it will get triggered by deer or other critters going after the garden and startle them away. Putting it at the beet or carrot beds would probably have been more useful, but we don’t have anything south facing that we could mount it to. If this works, we can get more (and better quality ones) and install posts to mount them on.
We’ll test it out tonight when, hopefully, it will have enough charge to light up, and we can make sure it is in the on position.
I also finally picked up a thermometer.
Wow.
According to my desktop app, we’re at 23C/73F right now, but out in the corner garden, in full sun, we’re at 32C/90F.
Where the squash tunnel is, there is no shade, even in the early morning hours. It is full sun from sunrise to sunset, so this thermometer will likely always read on the high side. I still wasn’t expecting a 9C difference, though!
Once these were up, I went to change the batteries on the garden cam. In the process, I noticed something very odd in the ground. A strange line of holes.
You can sort of make it out in this photo below.
It’s in between the red dashed lines I added. My foot is at where the line ends.
The meandering line made me think it was following a root or something, but why where there holes in the ground here at all?
When I tipped the camera stand down so I could access the battery case, I found myself right over this line, and quickly saw what made it.
Red ants.
And the line lead back to this.
The camera focused in the wrong place, though. It’s that blurry, reddish area in the background.
That is a red ant hill.
I don’t know their proper names, but we mostly have two types of ants here. Red ants and black ants. The black ants burrow into the ground, creating low hills in the grass with the soil they displace. They are not aggressive, but their burrowing can be destructive, killing off any plants at the roots.
Red ants build their hills with spruce needles, which they will drag over surprising distances. They will build hills on or in logs, under rocks, in the cracks of sidewalks or paving stones, or they’ll just make a hill on the ground, like this one. These hills can become quite large. The one in the photo is about mid-size. Red ants are more aggressive and will bite if disturbed.
We have quite a few red ant hills. A couple of the maple logs behind the house, from the trees cut away from the roof, now have red ant hills in them, their hollow middles stuffed with spruce needles. The metal ring used to contain the fires made to burn out diseased apple tree stumps is still out near the garden, with pieces of metal covering it. I’d moved them to put some invasive vines in the ring for future burning, only to discover it was half filled with spruce needles, and crawling with red ants! And now I’m seeing this new hill, near the garden cam.
As long as they don’t start building hills in the garden beds, we’ll leave them be.
Heading out to do my morning rounds, it was already getting really hot. As I write this, we’ve reached 28C/82F, and we’re still about 5 hours away from when the hottest part of the day usually hits. We’ve got forecasts for possible thundershowers this afternoon. I hope we at least get some rain, but I doubt it.
The spinach we set out to dry in the sun room was… wimpy. :-D I set them up outside, covered with mosquito netting, to dry in the sun and wind. We’ll see how it works. Meanwhile, once the oven is available, after making a spinach frittata, I plan to set some up to dry in there.
I had a very pleasant surprise while checking the garden.
The bigger Crespo squash plant has flower buds! Quite a few of them. It looks like it’s all male flowers for now, just like with the other squash.
Speaking of squash, we have some mystery squash!
These have popped up in the old compost pile. I’m not sure what they are. When we cleaned up the squash beds last fall, we used the old compost pile instead of dragging everything across the yard, but I didn’t think anything went in there that had mature seeds. The only think I can think of is the pumpkin. They were planted very late, and the few pumpkins were quite small and green when the first frost hit and killed them off.
It would be cool if they were pumpkins! Whatever they are, I’ve been watering them, too. :-D
Then we have these, near the pink rose bush in the old kitchen garden.
I had spotted them last night, when they were just little bumps breaking through the ground. They tripled in size, overnight.
In setting up the old kitchen garden beds this spring, one of the things I made sure to do was make paths that allowed us to enter and exit the garden in several places. The straw covered path that runs across the far end of the garden, near the beets against the retaining wall, continues around one of the rhubarbs and out the middle.
It now has a “gate.”
An asparagus gate!
It always amazed me that these are still coming up at all. There were more of them, when I was a kid. My mother had asked about them, not that long ago, and she mentioned that these were here before my parents bought the property. Which means they’ve been growing here for at least 60 years. I’ve never seen spears suitable for harvesting, but that’s okay. I love the ferns!
Part of my morning rounds has been to check the garden beds for deer (or other critter) damage. Since we lost several Mongolian Giant sunflower transplants, there has not appeared to be any more damage in that area. In the main garden beds, there has been little more than a few spinach that the row covers aren’t long enough to cover, showing signs of nibbling. That’s it.
As for the garden cam, it’s been getting video of cats going by lately, and that’s it.
This morning, I saw no new damage to the garden, though one of the support poles holding the rope and twine in one of the sunflower transplant rows was fallen down. It had broken and is a bit shorter than the others. I’d tied a plastic grocery bag to it and the rope at the top, but with the winds we’ve been having, it was no surprise to find it fallen. Those bags sometimes act like sails! When my daughters first set this up, the middle support poles were simply slipped through the divided strands of the rope, rather than tied, so for the shorter pole, it would have easily just slide off.
Other than that nothing else was amiss in the garden beds.
Then I checked the garden cam.
I’d say we are very fortunate that there was no damage this morning!
Yes, that is a deer and her fawn off in the distance!
I saw in earlier files that the support pole was already down before they came by, so it was not them that knocked it over. That grocery bag hovering near the mama is hanging off the rope the fallen support pole had been holding up.
In the next file, I watched as the mama casually ducked under the rope, which is what it’s in the middle of doing in this image.
Clearly, the ropes, poles, and flappy noise makers are no longer acting as a deterrent!
There was one last file, and then they moved on. You can just see the spots on the baby in this image!
Watching the files was interesting. While they did snuffle about, they did not try to eat anything in the rows. There are so many miscellaneous plants coming up here that, other than the sunflower transplants, they’d have to seek out individual seedlings in between the weeds. So… the weeds are basically protecting our seedlings right now!
They also very gingerly stepped OVER the rows. Which makes sense. The soil in between the rows is harder, so their hooves won’t sink.
Another thing I noticed is that this pair came from a direction I did not expect. We will need to keep that in mind as we increase our deer deterrents.
There was one more night time file after this; Nicky the Nose making his way between the rows!
The girls and I will move the trail cam again, later today. I want to try it at the opposite end of where it is now, and further away from the beds, so it will cover more ground. Since this camera is not a wide angle camera, it missed a lot where it is sitting right now.
Though it did a great job of capturing these deer!
I tried to do another post last night, but simply could not load the WordPress editor, our internet was so crappy. My husband tells me it was working fine when he got up at 2am, which suggested that their system was overloaded, on top of the weather wreaking havoc on our signal. Satellite can only handle so much traffic at once.
It seems to be working well now so, to start, here are the photos I meant to post last night. :-)
I just had to share this little cluster of family adorableness!
This is part of a strange thing that’s been happening lately. Nicco (the grey and white) is the cat all the other cats seem to bully all the time, poor thing. Including bullying by Beep Beep (at the top), her adopted mother, but Beep Beep is still very much a yard cat in attitude, so she bullies pretty much all the cats. ;-) Lately, however, Beep Beep has been hunting Nicco down for aggressive cuddles and grooming. In fact, as I write this, they are mashed together, asleep on my bed, with Beep Beep using Nicco as a pillow.
The sudden love and attention is wonderful to see, but then there’s Turmeric.
If Turmeric sees Beep Beep and Nicco snuggling, she will go over and squeeze herself in between them. Sometimes, it’s to join in the grooming and cuddling session, but usually, it’s to try and nurse on Beep Beep.
Who is letting her!
The kittens are a year old now, and Beep Beep was never shy about weaning them. For the spice girls, they found solace in “grandma”, who would let them nurse on her.
Very noisily.
Irritating, but when we introduced new yard kittens as part of our ‘population control program’, and she let the new babies try and nurse on her, how could we stop it? She played a big part in getting the new babies settled into the colony. ;-)
Any that attempted to nurse on Beep Beep, however, would get smacked away. Eventually, they stopped trying, even on “grandma”.
Until now.
That Turmeric is trying to nurse again, after all this time, is maybe not that surprising, but Beep Beep allowing it certainly is! So is her sudden affection behaviour towards Nicco.
I wonder if it is some sort of reaction to her not having kittens this year, for probably the first time in her adult life? Normally, she’d be nursing a new litter right now.
Curious.
Meanwhile…
We had furry visitors last night, of the smelly kind.
After taking some pictures, I used the hose to drive them off. The big one went running to and under the storage house, but the little one disappeared around the cat house. I went around and fired the hose off at it again, and it ran off towards the storage house… then turned around and ran back! I got some video of it, but was never able to upload it (maybe I’ll succeed today). I kept trying to spray towards it, but it was willing to get wet, to get food. I don’t normally try to spray them directly, if I can avoid it, and this little guy was clearly very, very hungry, and I just couldn’t do it. I left it alone and let it eat.
Some hours later, I heard cats fighting, so I went outside to check. I never found what cats were fighting, but I did find this.
Two skunks in the kibble house!
Neither of which was the little one. That one was over here.
I have a container with water next to the steps that the cats like to use, and I think Little Stinky was drinking from it.
So, we’re now up to three skunks.
I did use the hose to chase them away. The two big ones in the kibble house did not get along, and as they ran under the lilac bushes over where they get under the storage house, I could hear one of them grunting and growling at the other. The little one by the stairs didn’t want to leave and tried hiding under the lilacs, but I think that has as much to do with the grumpy skunk as the water.
Hopefully, we won’t be getting more stinky visitors!
Meanwhile…
We had more rain during the night, but by this morning, we were bright and sunny again, though still quite windy. Of course, while doing my rounds, I checked all the garden beds and kept an eye out for more fallen branches.
The tomatoes are doing fantastic. I don’t think we could have picked a better spot for them! They get the sunlight they need from their southern location, while still getting protection from the driving rain from the trees above. They got plenty of rain, and are showing lovely new growth, with no signs of damage at all.
These roses were a surprise to see this morning. This rose bush is in front of the sun room, at the stand-alone rail between the door and the laundry platform. My mother had planted it there to help shade the sun room, but it keeps blocking our paths. When we were hauling loads of soil to the old kitchen garden, I tied the bush back, so we could get through without fighting it all the time. It worked out so well, I left it like that. It’s a mass of greenery right now, and these flowers are tucked away under the bulk of the branches, having burst into bloom overnight. The other flower buds I see are still quite small. There are more roses of this time in the old kitchen garden, and they not blooming yet, either, so these hidden roses were a pleasant surprise.
I had another surprise I didn’t get any pictures of. While checking on the Montana Morado corn (some of the smaller stalks look a little beaten down by the rain, but all still look very good), I passed the little kiddie pool we’ve been using to mix soil. There was still a bit of soil on the bottom I wasn’t able to get out when I was transplanting the Crespo squash. Just a smattering, sitting at one side. I’d added water into the pool, just to keep it from blowing away, but of course there’s more water in it now.
This morning, I found a frog floating in it.
We’ve found drowned frogs in the bird bath before, because once they get into containers like this, they can’t get out again, and that was my initial thought. Dead frog. I grabbed a garden tool to fish it out, only to have it dive down and try to burrow into the bit of soil on the bottom. I knew the frog wouldn’t be able to get out of the pool on its own, so I tried leaning a stick across for it to climb. That seemed too light, so I tried a brick. That would have worked, but the poor little frog looked like it was having a hard time, so I managed to get it out. I don’t now now long it was stuck in there, but it was looking really tired as it tried to get away from my hands, eventually letting me lift it out. I think it was quite happy to be on solid ground again!
I left the brick in the pool, leaning against the side, just in case something else falls in. We’ll bail the pool out until it’s drained enough to tip over without breaking it, later.
I like frogs. We’ve been seeing them in the garden, quite a bit. :-)
One of the last things I checked this morning was the potatoes, and found another garden friend.
A pretty little ladybug, on a potato leaf.
I’m happy that most of what we’ve been finding among our plants have been beneficial critters, like frogs and ladybugs, and not the problem critters! Even the skunks are good for eating grubs that would otherwise be causing damage, and so far, other than a tulip, they’ve been digging in the lawn, which does just fine when the divots are put back later.
Now that the weather is turning again, we’ll have lots of work to catch up on in the garden. Especially weeding, but we also have one last bed to build for the cucamelons and the late sprouting gourds, along the chain link fence. We also have pink celery sprouts, but they were started so late, and are so tiny, I don’t know that they’ll ever be transplanted outdoors. We might be able to grow them in containers, though. Then they can be moved into the sun room in the fall, to give them a longer growing season. We shall see! I definitely want to get more seeds for next year, though, and start them indoors much earlier.
Here we are, so early in our gardening season, and I’m already thinking of next year’s garden! :-D
More tulip flower buds and leaves have been eaten, even with the efforts we made last night to deter the deer.
It might not be deer.
Or maybe not “just” deer.
You can see it a bit in the photo; something has been digging in the leaf mulch. It looks like skunks were digging for grubs.
It turns out skunks eat tulips. too.
I am thinking of setting up one of the trail cams over the area. Meanwhile, I think the roll of wire fence that I intended to use on the squash arch is going to be pressed into tulip protection duty.
I just hope the bulbs have enough energy left in them to grow more leaves and survive this.
Today, I finally got to harvesting the garden beds we planted where the old wood pile used to be.
This is what we started with, in the spring.
You can read about how the garden plots were doing by August, here, so I won’t repeat myself in this post.
One of the things I’ve been thinking of, while working in the rocky soil of the old garden area, is that we need a soil/compost sifter. That would make clearing the rocks and debris out much easier.
While looking up different design ideas to build one, I suddenly realized…
We already did build one.
The screen “door” we made for the old basement doorway is basically the same idea as the steel mesh sifter my dad had made for gravel, decades ago. It just uses 1 inch mesh instead, and has a support bar across the middle. I’ll just need to reinforce the mesh before using it for something bigger or heavier, since it’s basically just stapled on in between where the wood holds it in place.
Last night, I realized it would also be great to use to lay out the carrots and beets after I harvest them.
It turned out to be perfect for the job.
Here is how I set up to start.
The saw horses were too narrow to support the screen, so I laid out a couple of 8 ft boards we didn’t use when building the goat catcher this past summer, to support the frame. I set up near the new compost pile, as I figured there would probably be a lot going into there!
It turned out to be less than I expected.
The few kohl rabi plants went straight in. That was a disappointment. So few came up and, between the bugs and the deer, only two got big, and then they got eaten. For those, I knew there would be nothing to harvest, so there were no expectations in that regard. I do want to try growing it again, but I’m not sure we’ll try again next year. I think it would benefit from a cold frame to plant earlier, and definitely something to protect from deer. Nothing we grew got attacked by insects the way these were, so we’ll need to keep that in mind before we try growing anything in the cabbage family again.
Of the one remaining musk melon, the frosts killed that off, and it didn’t even make it to the compost pile. It just shriveled away to almost nothing! When clearing away the bricks that were supporting the cloche that doubled as a slow watering container, I found some … friends…
Slimy friends!
That left the carrots, beets and parsley.
As far as expectations, I figured we would get a decent amount of carrots. We’ve been nibbling at them all summer, so I had a good idea of what I would find. I wasn’t expecting many, though, and not very many large ones.
With the beets, I was expecting nothing. Not long ago, the girls picked the biggest ones they could find and cooked them, and with the deer continuing to eat the greens, I didn’t expect any worth keeping at all.
I was pleasantly surprised!
We actually got quite a few decent sized carrots. Not the full size the varieties had the potential to grow to, to be sure, but still more than I expected.
As for the beets, I did actually find some of each variety that were big enough to not go on the compost heap. The smaller ones, this late in the season, were pretty leathery and not salvageable. I expected that of all of them, so getting the few we did was bonus. There’s basically enough for one meal, if we combine then all together. :-D
The last thing to harvest was the parsley.
Parsley is something that I could have left alone. They would come up next year, and I do plan to do that eventually. When I do, I will choose a permanent location for the plants. We don’t actually use parsley all that much, so these will be dried.
Since these were not hidden underground, I got exactly what I expected. A whole lot of parsley! I had to do some cramming to get them in that crate!
These all got left outside while I worked on cleaning up the garden beds – which ended up being completely different than planned, so that will get its own post! At the end of the day, because it’s been getting pretty chilly at night, we brought the entire screen into the old kitchen. The beets will be cooked soon, but we have to figure out what we want to do with all the carrots. :-)
The parsley, on the other hand, will have the greens picked over and trimmed, washed, then laid out on trays to dehydrate in the oven overnight. The new oven has a “warm” setting, which should be the perfect temperature for the job.
Once everything was harvested, the beds needed to be prepped for when the fall garlic finally comes in – hopefully, not too late!!
And… I went a bit nuts on that.
You’ll be able to read about that in my next post…
When I headed out to do my morning routine, I had a rush of outside cats come running as soon as I opened the door! And who was in the lead?
Little Braveheart!
She ran right up to me. She still won’t let me pet her, but she’s coming the closest.
While in the sun room, filling a container of kibble at the storage bin, there was a crowd of cats going in and out, including Butterscotch, Potato Beetle, Junk Pile cat and her 2 kittens. When I felt a cat rubbing against my legs, I looked down, expecting to see Potato Beetle, who has been begging for attention these days.
Nope.
It was Little Braveheart! Weaving around my feet.
*melt*
The mystery kitten came out from under the cathouse again. That seems to be a favorite place now. I’m glad she’s willing to hang out so close.
Once he’d eaten his fill, Potato Beetle accompanied me for the rest of my rounds.
He did not want me to put him down, either! :-D
The biggest seed head on the mutant sunflower, with its 20 or so seed heads, is opening up quite nicely!
Once back inside and chatting with my daughters, I noticed a kitten on a side table. They are allowed on this table, but it’s also where the hard crab apple cider is sitting, and the kittens have been going after the airlocks. So I went to move her away and…
… noticed both airlocks were gone.
!!!!
I had checked the temperatures before heading outside, and didn’t notice they were gone. I guess it’s a good thing it’s been relatively chilly; they both read at 17C/62F this morning, while the ambient temperature is 16C/60F. They are both wrapped in a towel to keep the warmth of their own fermentation in, but at these temperatures, there’s not a lot of activity in the airlocks.
I found the airlocks, upside down, between the towel and the wall. The bungs were quickly covered with plastic wrap. The main concern is that we have a fruit fly problem right now, and we just can’t seem to get rid of them all. Another reason to be glad the cooler temperatures mean slow fermentation, I guess. They weren’t attracted to the open holes in the bungs! There were no fruit flies in the jugs. *phew*
They can’t have been without airlocks for long, but even so, could this be a problem? Will they be okay?
I have no idea.
We need to find a way to warm them up. For the mead, we used an electric heating pad, but there is no electrical outlet anywhere near where we have them now. We were thinking of wrapping something warm around them, like those microwavable neck warmers, but we don’t have any.
Hhmm… I could warm up a towel and wrap them in it.
*sigh*
Well, we will just have to keep a close eye on them and see how they turn out!
Yesterday evening, while doing my rounds and walking around the back of the house, I startled some babies!
Butterscotch seems to have moved her kittens from the junk pile to under the garden shed.
Her kittens are getting so much bigger and more adventurous, wandering further afield in the yard.
I suspect this has something to do with why Butterscotch as moved them. Wherever they are inside the junk pile, it must be getting a bit tight for her and the 4 of them to fit!
Which means that, with the wasp nest gone and the kittens elsewhere (though they do go back to the junk pile to play), I can continue cleaning up in that area.
Now, if only Butterscotch had been willing to move them to the other side of the house, where the food bowls and the old dog house are!
When topping up the kibble, I put one of the containers in the entrance to the doghouse. Recently, I was noticing a definite skunk smell in there, so yesterday, I lifted the roof, fluffed up the straw and left it open to air out for a while. I am trying to think of other ways to encourage the cats to go in there for shelter, but I think it’s going to take winter temperatures to finally convince them!
As for bigger things, look what I found this morning.
It’s the only one that got big like this!
It seems we had a light frost last night (there were no frost warnings), and some of the little squashes actually look a bit frozen. At this point, I don’t think they’re going to get much bigger. I will check them later today, and might just pick what’s left, then start cleaning up the beds in preparation for winter.
This morning, I got a shipping confirmation for part of the fall plantings we ordered. Unfortunately, the garlic was among the things that are back ordered, so they will be shipped later. Still, we will be able to get started on the varieties of flowers we will be naturalizing in the maple grove. I can also leave the beets and carrots in the ground a bit longer, while we wait for the garlic that will be planted there once they are harvested.
It looks like I’ll be able to accomplish more in a few weeks in the fall, than I’d been able to over the past few months, with this summer’s heat! :-)
Today, for the first time since we had produce we could harvest from the garden this summer, I collected nothing at all this morning.
Normally, I would have at least collected a few sunburst squash. With the cooler temperatures, though, the many little squashes out there are growing a lot more slowly. I like to pick them, and the zucchini, while they are still quite small, but not that small!
Amazingly, even though we dipped to almost freezing last night, one of the bottleneck gourds has started to bloom! This is one of the last ones that got transplanted. Of the tray of seed starts, a few germinated well after the others had already been transplanted, so I planted them, even though it was so late in the season.
I suppose I could have harvested some carrots and beets this morning, but they do better in the ground until we’re ready to use them. The potatoes are ready to be dug up, but it’s going to warm up a bit over the next few days, so I might wait a day or two.
I’m really hoping this little cool down is an aberration, and we’ll have a long, mild fall. If the pattern of that last couple of years continues, though, we should have a blizzard right around Thanksgiving in October! :-D
More and more of the sunflowers are opening up, and today I spotted one that’s different.
Most look like this.
Bright, sunny, mostly yellow with light oranges and greens around the developing seeds.
Then there was this one.
The camera actually lightened it up a bit. Compared to the others, this one looks almost black in the middle! Very dramatic.
This may be the first of the slightly shorter variety of giant sunflowers we first planted, so start opening its seed head. If so, I expect to see more. :-)
The Re-Farmer 