Okay, I definitely over did it yesterday. Which happens a lot faster these days, then it used to!
I was preemptive on things, though. Before going to bed, along with my usual painkillers, I made sure to treat all the usual muscle groups that I’ve had Charlie horse issues with, with Tei Fu lotion. Just in case.
Once outside this morning, I did my usual rounds, starting with feeding the kitties. Including these hungry little wildlings.
I didn’t see the garage kittens until much later, and not both at the same time, but they are there, and getting their own bowl of kitten food. I should start moving the bowl closer to the back door, to encourage them to go into the yard and discover all the amenities, awaiting them!
I should have watered the garden this morning, but my body was giving me a great big FU on the subject. I did manage to get a tiny little harvest, though.
Just a few Spoon tomatoes. In the next photo, there’s a few sugar snap peas, the Spoon tomatoes, a few tiny little strawberries from the old kitchen garden and some raspberries. I was able to leave a bowl full of berries and tiny bowl with the Spoon tomatoes for my husband, as a morning treat when he woke up.
Once back inside, I pain killered up and went back to bed for a few hours.
Being old and broken really sucks sometimes – and I’m still almost the most able bodied person in the household! Both girls are feeling better, though, hence the “almost”. My younger daughter still has to watch herself with the wrist, and has been doing mild recovery exercises. I heard her talking with her sister today, marveling at how much better her wrist feels, even with the remaining pain and discomfort from the surgery, without Squidly wrapped around the bones. She’s so happy to have been able to get that done!
On a completely different note, thanks to some assistance from my older daughter, I was able to pay the deposit for getting the main door and frame replaced. We had 30 days to accept the estimate. After that, we’d have to get a new estimate and, with the way prices are going up, the cost would likely increase if that happened. I’m okay with them taking a while to get the job done, though. That’ll give us time to raised the balance without having to use more debt. *sigh* It needs to be done, though. It’s not like we can go a winter with nothing but a storm door there!
Ah, well. It is what it is. We’ll manage. We always do!
I was going to simply say “the morning,” until I realized it’s not even 10am yet. 😄
We had the crock pot going all night, making food for the outside cats. I was up early to take the bones out and finish making the “cat soup”, so it had more time to cool down at least a bit before it was time to feed the kitties.
They really miss their kibble! Even the inside cats. You’d think they would find having all wet cat food would be a real treat for a change, but no. They keep begging for kibble!
I’ve heard from my brother this morning. They’ll be able to go into the nearest town to switch the insurance, so we can drive their vehicle legally. That’ll take a couple of hours so, once I get the word, I’ll be making a trip to pick up kibble. Which is good, because we’re almost out of the meaty bones we’ve been using to make the cat soup base for the outside cats. Doing this has certainly made more room in the chest freezer!
The yard cats still seem a bit perplexed about the cat soup they’ve been getting. They’re eating it, but they don’t prefer it. Except the really feral ones. The ferals will scarf down anything.
I did leave a bowl of food in the garage for the secret kitties, just in case. I have no idea where the mama moved then, but she still comes back to the garage – that’s her “home”, it seems – and I’m hoping her kittens are old enough to come out on their own and go back to a familiar place. Or, better yet, discover the inner yard, and all the things in there for the kitties.
I did see three of the four other feral kittens this morning. Colby is definitely the bravest of the bunch.
I love that first picture! I caught him in a yawn (just guessing he’s a he, because gingers are more likely to be male). He watched me from the tree and let me come pretty close. Later, I saw him going into the isolation shelter, where there was still some food left in the bowls in there.
I was able to get a surprisingly good picture of his torie sister. I had to zoom in from quite a distance.
I might have seen the white and grey, but I’m not sure. We have several really small adult white and greys, and this kitten is almost as big as they are. When they’re running around all over, it can be very hard to tell who I’m looking at.
After the kitties were fed, I did my morning rounds. I did not need to do any watering today, so they didn’t take too long. I did pick some sugar snap peas this morning, but it wasn’t really enough even for a day’s meal.
So I ate them for breakfast.
I thought there would be raspberries to harvest, but not really. There are lots of red berries, but they’re not “ripe”. Between the heat and the lack of rain, the berries don’t have a lot of moisture in them, so they aren’t letting go when I try to pick them, unless they’re almost over ripe. I’ve been trying to water the patch when I can, but it would need me to set up a sprinkler for an hour, every few days, to make up for the lack of rain this year. So I’ve been snacking on a few raspberries in the morning, but there really isn’t enough to do an actual harvest.
While checking on the eggplants, looking for flowers, I found this.
Give the location, I would guess it is a Black Cherry tomato, as that’s what was growing here, last year. No chance of it reaching maturity, this late in the season, but I’ll leave it be. If the eggplant seems to be covering it too much, I might transplant it to where it can get more light, but that’s about it.
I did find some eggplant flowers, on another plant.
They were set back quite a bit by that one cold night last month, so it’s good to see them recovering. Hard to say if they still have enough season to produce eggplants to full maturity, though. If we get a long and mild fall, they might have a chance.
Before heading inside, I did one last harvest of rhubarb. I’ve been leaving them without harvesting for quite a while, giving them plenty of time to recover from the previous harvest. After today, they will be left to recover and store their energy to survive the winter.
I trimmed the leaves and ends outside and took advantage of their huge leaves, using them as a mulch around where my daughter’s surviving double daffodils are trying to grow. Just one cluster has emerged, and they’re not doing well. We certainly won’t be getting any flowers from them this year, but if they can last long enough, hopefully their bulbs will have enough energy stored to grow and bloom next year.
Once the rhubarb was trimmed outside, they got a thorough washing inside before being cut up.
After what happened with our vandal yesterday, my older daughter joined me while doing my morning rounds. My own personal bodyguard.
Nothing was untoward; he didn’t come back and vandalize anything in the night. I’ve gone through the trail cam files. It was interesting to see that he had stopped at the end of our driveway with his tractor, when going in the other direction, before my incident with him happened. He didn’t actually do anything other than look like he was about to climb down, but then kept on going. It’s like he was just looking to start something, so the timing of my coming home as he was returning was an “opportunity” he couldn’t pass up on.
This morning, however, has been routine, other than extending my rounds to include more of the outer yard. My watering last night was thorough enough that I didn’t need to water again this morning. Which is good, because we never really cooled down during the night. We apparently briefly dropped to 20C/68F at about 6am, and immediately started heating up again. We’re supposed to hit 31C/88F or higher today. We’ve got severe thunderstorm warnings and, to be honest, I’d love a good thunderstorm right now. It’s really muggy out there. Everything seems to be passing to the north and south of us right now, but there is a large system making its way across the prairies that might reach us, maybe by tomorrow. We shall see.
The yard cats were already feeling the heat. They got their kibble and kitten soup – I actually saw Sprout eating inside the isolation shelter, though she ran off right away. I refilled the garbage can “heat sink” reservoir in the greenhouse, as it will actually help cool things down during the day. The luffa pots are on the ground, where it’s coolest, and they are heat loving plants, but I don’t want them to get cooked!
After filling the reservoir, the water in the hose was almost cold (our well water usually gets ice cold, even in the summer), so I refilled all the cat water bowls. The one in the sun room was filthy. I heard distinctive racoon noises in the sun room last night. When I went to chase out the racoon, I spotted the two baby racoons, struggling to hide between the lower window and the counter shelf. One couldn’t quite squeeze in after the other. So I left them be. They do leave the water bowls incredibly filthy, though!
I also put frozen water bottles in all the water bowls. By the time I finished my rounds, they were almost thawed out already. I will switch them out, once the previous ones have had a chance to freeze again.
While checking on the grapes before coming inside, I spotted an adorable Eyelet.
That top step to the storage house is a favourite spot for many cats!
With the heat, manual labour outside is not going to happen today. So we made other plans. My older daughter is treating us to Chinese food, as I have a birthday this month. We’ll be loading up on the proteins, as we can do the vegetables and rice ourselves. The girls are thinking of doing a stir fry, so I went out to gather a few things to include with some of the vegetables I harvested yesterday.
Just enough for today. There’s a variety of radish pods from both beds with them, plus a few of both types of sugar snap peas. Then I figured, why not? and gathered a few herbs. The plants aren’t very big, so I didn’t want to pick much. On the right is some basil, with a few lemon balm leaves, sage in the middle, a few sprigs of thyme – just one sprig of the lemon thyme, as it’s smaller than the English thyme – and then some dill fronds on the left. These are self seeded, so picking these was a bit like weeding. There are even some poppies coming up – most likely the “wild” double poppy that’s been growing in that area since before we moved here. I did try growing bread seed poppies in this location before, but when it comes to self seeding, it was the old variety that has been coming up, just like the dill has been, for years!
We’ll be heading out this afternoon, when the post office reopens, to pick up a package along the way. We had tried to get my daughter a cane for her birthday, ordering one from Etsy, but that never made it, thanks to the delivery company f*****g with us. My husband contacted the maker about it and they took our physical address, but nothing came of it and, as far as I know, my husband was never refunded the money.
So he bought another cane for my daughter, from somewhere else, and it came in yesterday. The store the post office is in closes at noon on Wednesdays, so by the time my husband got the email notification, we couldn’t pick it up anymore.
We’ll pick it up today, then go to town to pick up the food order. My younger daughter will be coming with me.
Her surgical site is doing fantastic, as is her recovery. So fantastic, she’s had to wear a wrist brace, just to keep from using her hand too much. She has full mobility, and the pain of the surgery is far less than the pain of the ganglion. She is so thrilled to have finally evicted Squidly!
She also finally got the call back from the endocrinologist today, confirming an appointment in October. We’ve looked up the clinic address in the city. I am not looking forward to trying to find parking! It’s basically in the heart of downtown. There are plenty of parkades to choose from, but the streets are all one way and it’s always a hot mess of stupid traffic, a major transit hub and suicidal pedestrians. I used to work in the area, many years ago, and even lived across the river from there. So I still sort of know it.
Really not looking forward to driving around there. We’ll have to make sure to leave extra early, to give plenty of time to drive in circles to get into where we want to go.
Today and tomorrow are supposed to be in the 30C/86F or higher range. I made sure to water the garden beds last night. This morning, I gave everything another watering, including the food forest additions that need it. I even watered the raspberries growing on the old compost pile. I’m starting to see the first red berries, and might even be able to pick a few by the end of the day! The garden will get another watering tonight, and the whole shebang will get watered again in the morning. After that, we expect to be staying below 30C/86F again, at least for a few days, so I will probably just water in the mornings again.
While watering the high raised bed, I decided to do some thinning of carrots and beets.
I ended up harvesting some of the biggest beets we’ve ever grown!
The one white thing is also a beet. There were some albino beet seeds in the mix, but very few germinated, it seems. The Uzbek golden carrots are from the same bed. Some of those bolted, and I’m leaving one of them to go to seed.
In the other root vegetable bed, I’d included our collected lettuce seeds that basically took it over. More than we can possibly eat. I’ve been thinning those out and found several turnips crowded together, so I picked those. I found two others that have bolted and I’m leaving those to collect seed.
All along one side of the bed, the tops of plants have been monched. Looks like a deer has been snacking on the way by. !! The damage isn’t too bad and, after one got eaten, they seem to be leaving the radishes and their pods alone! All that extra lettuce is now protecting other things in the bed from deer.
In the greens bed in the old kitchen garden, after the spinach bolted and I pulled most, leaving some to go to seed, the Swiss Chard has started to grow. They were being choked out, before. There aren’t a lot of them, but a couple have leaves and stems large enough to harvest. Just a few.
While watering the flowers next to the high raised bed, I spotted some colour this morning.
The Cosmos are getting tall enough they were starting to grow through the protective netting, so I removed that. I left the hoops, though, just in case I need to add something on the sides, to keep the cats out.
I have to figure out what I can add to the sides of the trellis bed. Along the edge on the side with no trellis net, and thankfully where no seedlings were affected, I found evidence of cats burying their “treasures” in there already.
I had been thinking that today, I’d be cutting the maple suckers I’ve been allowing to grow larger, so use in the wattle weave bed. With how quickly it’s getting hot, I might not get to that. It’s also getting really windy.
A trip into town to refill water bottles is going to be needed, so I might do that and avoid the heat, and the mosquitoes. The mosquitoes are insane right now!!! Oddly, I get attacked my mosquitoes more in the old kitchen, while preparing the food for the outside cats, than outside. There’s one window that’s open just enough to allow extension cords through, so I assume that’s where they’re getting in, but so many of them? It’s brutal. Every now and then, I’ll see the back of my hand or part of my arm, and there will be five or six mosquitoes, sucking me dry. Thank God I don’t react much to mosquito bites!
I keep forgetting to look for our cans of bug spray, too.
I’m very happy with what is our first substantial harvest. All of which is from beds sown in the fall. Without that, we’d still have next to nothing to harvest!
Yup. Direct sowing in the fall is definitely going to be a regular thing for us from now on!
The plan for this morning was to head out nice and early to get the garden watered before things got too hot.
The problem with that was, at 4am, we were still at 21C/70F out there. We never got any cooler than that, overnight.
Still better than today’s expected high of 31C/88F, so I was heading out somewhere around 6am to get started. The outside cats were a bit confused by the early feeding, though! 😄
The sky was certainly dramatic as I continued my rounds.
(Major interruption; I got a call from home care while typing the above. Guess who had to drive to my mother’s for her morning med assist again? It … was not really a good visit. More on that later.)
Where was I…
Ah, yes.
While I was doing my rounds, I could hear thunder in the distance, but I went ahead and did all the watering, anyhow. It did start raining while I was out there, but barely enough to get my shirt wet.
I did snag what look to be the last of our turnips.
I plan to include them in a large crock pot meal that won’t heat up the house, so we can just reheat individual portions whenever we want. In this heat, none of us have much for appetites, and no one wants to cook.
As I was finishing up outside, I spotted this adorable sight.
With the heat and humidity, the kittens are sleeping a LOT. I didn’t see the wild kittens at all this morning. Hopefully, they had a chance to have the cat soup I put out for them, before the adults ate it all. All the bowls I use for that were empty before I was done, and I was able to gather them all up to the old kitchen, ready for their evening feeding.
Thankfully, what rain we did have made things more pleasant while I was doing the watering.
Once inside, I did have a chance to have breakfast before I started on this blog post, when I got the call about my mother’s med assist. They couldn’t find anyone to cover her 9:30.
Looking at the time as I talked to the scheduler, it was 9:32. They do know it takes me a while to get to my mother’s (just the prefix on my land line would tell them that). I called my mother to let her know I’d be coming and…
She started asking me if I was okay for coming over. After a bit, I figured out she was wondering if I had any appointments or such that was being interfered with. I assured her that I did not; my appointments were yesterday, not today.
She then started to suggest I didn’t need to come. She could take her pills herself.
???
It turns out that, when the pharmacy delivered her bubble pack refills yesterday, she tucked one pack aside (a week’s worth). The home care aid put the rest in the lock box.
I assume the home care aid did not count how many packs there were, to make sure they were all there.
This is not a good thing but, to be honest, I can’t fault her for doing it. Home care has not been reliable.
I told her, don’t touch it. I’ll be right there!
After a quick change, I was on the road and soon at her place.
Where I found her with a recycling bag on the floor, the contents of her recycling bin all over, as she was sorting and stacking the various Meals on Wheels food containers (I don’t even know if they can be recycled). Once I figured out what she was doing, I told her she didn’t need to do that; just put it all in the bag. Today was her town’s day for picking up the recycling, so I helped her bag everything so I could take it out to the stack in front of her building for pick up.
She became angry at me for not tying off the bag correctly.
While this was being done, I noticed my mother had a page from the local free weekly paper she gets. It was the obituary/memorial section.
There was a picture of my later brother and father in there.
The beginning of July is the anniversary of my brother’s death. He’s been doing this for the last 15 years now. When my father passed, he changed the picture to one with both my brother and father in there. The text is a bizarre and completely false claim in regards to this property and a cottage that doesn’t exist. My mother, however, was all gooey about seeing the ad, and isn’t our vandal so wonderful for doing this? He does it every year. No one else does. He pays to do this!
I said to her, you do realize he’s not doing this out of the kindness of his heart, right?
One the one hand, I’m glad his passive aggressive and very public attack on the family is going right over her head. On the other, I’m frustrated, because it’s working. All the abuse and lies and theft over the years, but he paid money to put a picture and lie about my late brother, and that makes him better than me or my siblings.
*sigh*
Anyhow…
After dropping the recycling bag off outside, I went straight into the washroom to wash my hands before getting her meds. The door was open, so she could see me. As I left, she asked me, did you wash your hands?
…
I got her morning meds out, along with her inhaler, making sure to check the front of the bubble pack to get the Friday morning bubble, before opening it from the back.
It wasn’t until I updated my siblings after getting home that I realized, something was wrong.
When I was there to do her morning med assist on Wednesday, I was trying to figure out why her Tuesday meds were still in the bubble pack. When confirming which bubble I needed to open this morning, I saw that yesterday’s meds were gone, as were Wednesday’s…
… and Tuesday’s.
I’d taken a picture of the active bubble pack when I was there on Wednesday, as well as the pack in the lock box, because the pack in the lock box should have had the two Monday evening pills still in it, and it didn’t.
What the heck is going on?
I didn’t clue into that at the time, though, and just kept going.
I had decided that, since I was in my mother’s town, anyhow, I would stop at the grocery store to pick up some of their deli meats that are priced so much better than elsewhere. I told my mother I was going to go to the grocery store, and asked if she needed anything that I could pick up for her?
She thought about it for a moment, then said I could change her bedding for her.
…
Okay.
So I did that, which took a while. Then put away her clean laundry so I could use the basket. Changed her table cloth out for her, too. That done, I explained again that I was going to go to the grocery store after, and did she want anything?
It turned out she missed the part about planning to go for myself, anyhow, and couldn’t figure out why I was going to go to the grocery store for her, when she didn’t need it. I explained again, and she had me check her fridge for her. I pulled a couple of things out of the freezer, but she was still okay in general.
Then she wanted to have a serious talk with me.
*sigh*
Long story short, my mother is still convinced that we should be able to go directly to the nursing home she wants to go to and ask them to take her in. I tried to explain to her that this is not how things work. They’re not like an apartment that you can rent. They are part of the health care system, so they have no say. Plus, the only time they have open beds is when someone dies, and then they have a waiting list of people who want to get in. She kept cutting me off and getting angry as I tried to explain this, and said, they are kind people. There are still kind people in the world. Unlike you.
…
She managed to throw that one at me several times.
She also thinks my SIL, who has always been so incredibly kind to my mother and stood up for her, so many times, is “pulling away” my brother from her. That’s why he never calls (he does) or visits (we were both there just this past weekend).
She also thinks the home care staff that I have to cover for are not showing up because they don’t feel like it.
My mother is a great one for projecting all sorts of motivations onto people, and if I make any attempt to suggest there might be other reasons, she accused me of always taking “their” side on things, and being against her.
*sigh*
After a few more comments about how other people were so kind “unlike you” and making digs at my brother and SIL, my mother started talking about her stuff and how we need to decide who gets the pictures, or if she will donate them to a museum.
She has no understanding of what museums take or why, but she’s convinced these old prints have some sort of incredible value, because she likes them, and she understands that there is value in things…
She also brought up about her health and I reminded her that, if she’s really feeling bad, use the life line. That’s the fastest way to get help, plus they would contact me.
Oh, you know I’m not good with technology.
I reminded her, she just needs to push a button. That’s it. She has pushed it by accident, leaning against her table, as it is.
She’s angry about having the life line, because she’s paying more than $50 a month for it, and they’re not doing anything.
…
*sigh*
So all in all, it was a pretty unpleasant visit with my mother this time. Then, after all her digs about how unkind I was, she actually thanked me for coming out and gave me gas money.
Her digs against me were no big deal. She always has something, and it’s water off a duck’s back for me. The things she was saying about my brother and SIL – two of the most awesome people who have done so much to help her for so many years – that got under my skin. I’m still ticked off.
As for the rest of my day, I suspect the evening watering will be skipped again. The heat is supposed to linger until late, and we currently have both heat warnings and severe thunderstorm warning happening right now. It’s past 2pm as I write this, and we’ve reached 29C/84F, and the humidex has us at 34C/93, and it is MUGGY out there. I hope we do get the storms, but from what I can see of the weather radar, these storms are all coming up from the US and will only hit the southern parts of Canada.
As for me right now, I have this sudden urge to take a nap to recover my sanity.
I was out doing my morning rounds pretty early. That’s always disorienting. By the time I’m done and settling it, I feel like it should be 2 or 3 in the afternoon, only to find it isn’t even 9 in the morning yet!
Our permanent trellis may only have the vertical posts so far, but it’s already being appreciated by birds.
I zoomed in with my phone’s camera, before getting closer and startling it away, so the image quality is not very good. It’s still enough to see that this is a type of bird I don’t recognize at all. Pretty, whatever it was, and it enjoyed a nice little rest on top of one of the trellis posts.
I also got a tiny harvest in this morning. I picked what is probably the last of our garlic scapes.
You can see one is starting to split a bit; the consequence of not harvesting for a couple of days. The scape was starting to straighten out again, and getting ready to form bulbils. I didn’t notice it when I finally did a larger harvest of scapes, yesterday, thinking the straighter stem meant it was too early to pick, rather than getting almost too late to pick! That’s okay. It’ll still taste good!
As I was getting ready to head inside, I managed to get this adorable picture of Havarti.
He’s more feral than the other kittens but is starting to clue in that when I pick him up and carry him, it usually means I’m putting him next to a bowl of kitten food. We make a sort of cat soup for the littles, but some of the adult cats have discovered it and can get pretty aggressive about eating it before the littles have a chance!
Havarti’s two siblings are still missing. Every day we don’t see them, the more convinced I am that, wherever Caramel took them, they have not survived. She is always here, and I sometimes see her in one of the cat beds in the water bowl shelter, covered in kittens and napping. This is not the behaviour of a mama cat with babies in another location.
I managed to get a picture of Captain Hastings this evening.
Poirot has been diligent in keeping her babies close to the sun room, and we’ve often seen her picking up Inspector Japp and carrying him back to the house if he goes too far! Hastings and Miss Lemon tend to stay closer, though.
It looks like Hastings will be another blue eyed beauty!
I just got back from chasing a racoon and a skunk out of the sun room. I found Caramel in the water bowl house, snuggled with Havarti. She definitely is down to one kitten.
This time of year is normally when the more feral cats are starting to wean their kittens, bringing them to the house where there is reliable food, water and shelter.
That isn’t happening.
Just now, I saw Slick – aka: Octomom, as she had a litter of 8, two years ago. She was one of the pregnant ones that would come close to the house for food, but we couldn’t otherwise get close to. She is one of three ferals, for sure, that were definitely pregnant and suddenly were looking skinny again.
Slick is looking pregnant again.
Which means, she lost a litter.
As for the other two ferals, I haven’t seen any sign of kittens with them, either. At least neither of them are looking pregnant, though!
I don’t quite know what to make of it. I suppose I should be glad I’m not finding remains to bury, as happened so often last year, but it does make me wonder.
Oh, there is another possibility.
The nearest farm to ours that has someone living there full time is our vandal, and I know they care for a colony, too. I can see on our trail cams that some of our cats head in that direction, too.
Perhaps they had babies, but took them to our vandal’s place, instead?
It’s possible, I suppose. Not likely, but possible!
Anyhow.
When I first headed out this morning to get the food ready for the outside cats, I realized something.
There was a cat stuck in the old kitchen all night!
The old kitchen is our “buffer zone” between the house and the sun room. It’s sort of tacked on to the original log portion of the house. When heading out or in, we make sure to close the doors. That way, the inside cats don’t end up outside, and outside cats don’t end up inside, but if they do get through, they’ll only get as far as the old kitchen.
The problem is, the door from the main part of the house to the old kitchen is an antique door. I love it, but it doesn’t always close properly. Sometimes, I’ll be convinced it’s closed, but when I open the first door to the sun room, the air pressure change pushes open the door into the house.
Well, I guess something like that happened during yesterday’s evening feeding. My daughter was helping me and, as she started back into the house from the sun room, she discovered a whole bunch of inside cats in the old kitchen!
We thought we got them all out.
Unfortunately, the old kitchen has been used for storing things temporarily. One corner was full of cardboard set aside all winter, to be used in the garden. It is also where we put our garbage bags until we can go to the dump. Which we haven’t been able to do properly, since the box cover was blown off the truck. Without a cover, there are too many lighter bags that would end up blown into the ditches. Between that and things coming up to prevent us from getting to the dump, we have way too many bags of garbage in the old kitchen. With those, the cardboard, the furniture, chest freezer and old wood burning cook stove, there are a LOT of places a cat can hide.
This morning, while getting the kibble ready, I started hearing meowing, but couldn’t see anything. My daughter came to help with the cat feeding, and she couldn’t see anything either. Once the outside cats were fed, she and I started passing things out of the old kitchen, mostly through the door with the missing screen (which has been SO handy!), to clear space. A few garbage bags, stuff for the burn barrel we can’t burn because we’re under a fire ban still, and all the carboard I was setting aside for the garden.
The old kitchen feels down right huge, now!
Still no sign of a cat.
We did eventually track the meowing to coming from under a dresser. My daughter ended up removing its 2 drawers completely, only for the cat to run out and under the couch. We did figure out it was Tiny. No wonder we didn’t realize she was missing. She is one for hiding away on top of the closet in the entry, or other secret places, because some of the other cats bully her.
So I continued my morning rounds while my daughter made sure to unlock the other door, so I wouldn’t have to go through the sun room and potentially scare a cat into hiding again.
By the time I finished and was back inside, I found my younger daughter on her knees, trying to persuade a cat out from under the couch. Her sister had already left a bowl with the contents of a squeeze treat in it, but the bait wasn’t enough.
My daughter did find a way to get Tiny to come out voluntarily, though.
A tin of wet cat food, and David.
Tiny loves David. The two of them get along incredibly well.
My daughter put a bowl of wet cat food in the middle of the floor, then brought David in, leaving the door from the house into the old kitchen open, standing guard to make sure none of the other cats went in.
Tiny saw David and immediately came out.
She saw the food bowl he was at and ran over to eat.
She saw the open door and ran into the house!
I strongly suspect Tiny is not going to sneak into the old kitchen again. At least not for a very long time!
Very glad my daughter was able to take care of that!
Meanwhile, my husband had his appointment at the new pain clinic today. I was finished my morning rounds so early, I was actually able to try and lie down and close my eyes for a couple of hours, before trying to drive.
My husband also tried to go back to sleep. He had a horrible night last night. Ozempic side effects. He’s been on it for years and they keep increasing the dose. I don’t know why he’s still on it. It is not working. Oh, and the weight loss side effect everyone is being prescribed it for these days? He has lost zero weight, but he HAS lost muscle mass. Which is the “weight loss” of Ozempic, though in his case, the number of the scale hasn’t changed in years. One of the other side effects, however, has sometimes been a problem. That particular side effect had my husband taking a shower and doing laundry at 2am.
Nasty stuff. I can’t understand why anyone would take it, if they weren’t diabetic – and even then, I don’t think it’s worth it!
Neither of us managed to get much sleep before it was time to start heading out. I had deliberately made a point of resting my injured left arm as much as I could yesterday, so that I would be okay for driving.
I forgot something.
The broken handle inside the driver’s side door. The one that requires opening the window and twisting my left arm around to open the door from the outside.
*sigh*
After moving the truck closer to the house for my husband, I had to give it a go, and it was way more painful than it should have been. I was still okay to get his walker out of the entry and down the concrete steps so my husband could use it to walk the rest of the way to the house. He used a cane to go through the old kitchen and sun room, to avoid the steps he’d have to taken using the main entry.
In working with his walker, however, we discovered a problem.
It’s been a long time since my husband has had to go anywhere, so his walker has been in the entry for a while.
The cats climb it, of course.
Well, one or more of them decided to pee on the cushioned seat, even though the walker was folded up. While getting it in an out of the truck, folding and unfolding it, we realized it was even still wet.
Once at the hospital, we were directed to the new pain clinic, which happens to be sharing the same area as the outpatient clinic my daughter will be going to for her surgery. We went through the registration process and my husband settled down to wait. Typically, to take pressure off his back, he will sit in a chair and lean forward onto his walker, stretching his back out.
The smell of cat pee was so bad, he took his cane out of the holder and asked me to put the walker back in the truck.
!!!
When I got back, he was already taken to see the first pain clinic specialist. This guy turned out to be a physiotherapist. My husband had a questionnaire to fill out, along with a list of his medications, and send in some time ago. They were going over that first. We went over the many things attempted before we moved, and how things went at the city pain clinic in this province he managed to get to (that was a waste of 2 years on a waiting list!) in 2020.
After going over all that, he left to consult with the doctor, who then came to get us for the second part of the appointment.
The doctor was looking at the husband’s CT scans from November, and we appreciated that he was honest with us.
There really isn’t anything they can do for him.
Which is pretty much what my husband expected to hear.
Everything that could be tried, has been tried. He’s on the medications. He’s had the various treatments. In the end there were just two things they could offer. One was information about scheduled workshops they have available online, though in person is also a possibility, for those who are able. They cover a variety of things to help cope with and live with chronic pain. My husband has been living with is for so long, he’s probably tried or has been doing them already. Still, there might be something he hasn’t tried, yet.
The other is physiotherapy.
My husband did the physio route pretty much from the start. It kept him going for a long time, and he even started to get better. He started out seeing a physiotherapist three times a week. She got him down to once a week. He was still able to work at this time, too.
The insurance covers physio 100%, but with an upper limit, so once that limit was reached, my husband had to stop physio until the fiscal year started again. Without the equipment used on him, his condition deteriorated during that break, but then he started up again and things started to improve.
Then the physiotherapist was lured away by a rugby team. The therapist that replaced her was… not as good.
There was much more going on that affected his condition as well that I won’t get into here, but it wasn’t much longer before my husband couldn’t work anymore and went onto disability. Then we ended up here, on the farm I grew up on, in a province where some of the specialists that had been helping my husband before don’t even exist.
Anyhow. That’s what we both thought of, when physiotherapy was brought up. There’s no way my husband can handle driving all that way, multiple times a week. Even when he got a prescription for physio with the first doctor he had after our move, and he could have gone to a closer therapist, it just didn’t happen. With only, at best, 10 sessions covered by insurance, why even bother? Of course now, we couldn’t afford the gas, either.
Well, it turns out they can try something different.
Physio, done at the pain clinic, is covered by our medicare system, for starters. It would also be just once a month, with my husband being given a regimen he can do at home until the next session, when things can be adjusted as needed.
Once a month with a 45-50 minute drive one way, my husband can do.
We are now booked with the first guy we saw today, next week!
Beyond that, however, there really isn’t anything that can be done about my husband’s condition. His doctor is going to get a report, and she can take it from there again.
That done, my husband and I headed out. As difficult as it was for him with just a can and not his walker, it was lunch time, and he wanted McDonalds. 😄 It’s probably been more than a year since he’s been to one. So we went to the nearby Walmart and had lunch, then I left him to enjoy the fries he had been craving to do a bit of shopping. My first city shopping trip is in just a couple of days, but we were going to run out of cat food before then.
During the drive home, we actually drove through some rain! Not a lot. We still need much more! Thankfully, the kibble I got that was in the box of the truck came in plastic bags, not paper, so the rain wasn’t an issue.
We kept the girls updated the whole time, so when we got home, my daughter had the gate open for us, and was able to help me bring things inside. As careful as I was, my arm was really throbbing by then.
Oh, I discovered two things while taking my husband’s walker to the truck.
One, I really, really like using a walker.
Two, my right arm hasn’t completely escaped damage. While leaning on the walker’s hand bars, my left arm was actually quite a bit better than when my daughter brought it out to help me get back to the house after my fall. My right arm, however, seems to still have some damage to a triceps. Nothing I notice unless I am pushing down on something, though.
Once everything was inside and taken care of, my daughter took care of my husband’s walker. She took it outside and scrubbed the whole thing down, top to bottom, hosed it down, then took the carpet and furniture shampooer to it. That thing looks brand new, now!
It’s also now stored in the old kitchen, where the cats can’t get at it!
Unless they sneak in and hide overnight, like Tiny did!
With all this, my husband is completely worn out and drained, and in so much pain. Hopefully, he’ll be able to actual sleep tonight, and not end up feeling sick again.
As for me, I’m happy to say the arm is doing better. I was able to get a bit done outside this evening. I went over the pink rose bush again, looking for any scale insects I missed. There were a few! I treated it with another soapy water spray, too. It’s only been a day, but I think the rose bush is already looking less droopy than it was, yesterday! We only have the one pink rose bush, so I would hate to lose it.
While checking on the rest of the garden, I noticed insects on the winter squash again – possibly thrips. They got the soapy water treatment, too. The winter squash are trying to bloom like crazy, but the plants are not looking very healthy at all. The transplants were very strong and healthy, so this is disappointing.
So, that has been our day today! It’s been a wonderfully cool and, at times, rainy day today. The only downside is, our overnight low is currently expected to drop to 6C/43F tonight – which is actually an improvement! This morning, they were saying we might drop to 4C/39F. With temperatures that low, I’d be looking to cover some of the garden beds to prevent cold damage! Meanwhile, the 10 day forecast has us looking at temperatures approaching 30C/68F, soon.
Good grief. It’s hard to believe we’re almost at July already.
Oh! I forgot one bit of good news!
We got a call from the door guy at the hardware store I went to last week. We now have an appointment for three days from now. He’s going to check out the damage, take the measurements he needs, and we’ll start talking what options we have, and how much it’ll cost.
I know it’s going to be painfully expensive… well… everything is painfully expensive right now. However, once that door and frame is fixed, it’s going to be really nice to not have frost showing up on the bottom of the door every winter!
So I’m both dreading and anticipating getting that door fix.
What to do with the cats while the work is being done is a problem we’ll have to figure out when the time comes!
I can appreciate mornings. The cooler temperatures and softer lighting are great. Especially for working in the garden. Unfortunately, my body just can’t handle it. I’ve never been a morning person. The absolute best scheduling I ever had was when I worked the night shift at a gas station. I was alert and motivated all night, slept well all day; physically and mentally, I was at my best!
Unfortunately, I’m not able to do that now, and this time of year, I find myself being awakened earlier and earlier, no matter what time I make it to bed. This morning, I was up at 4 – 4:30 and just could not get back to sleep.
Still, I managed to get some thing done in the garden after doing my morning rounds.
I finally got this bed weeded. I had to wait until things got bigger. I still had to be really careful, and pulled only what I was 100% sure was a weed. In the first photo above, you can easily spot the nasturtiums and Cosmos. In the second photo, there are little sprouts of what I hope are the asters. I’ve never grown asters from seed, and I’m not sure what they are supposed to look like at this stage. I’ve even looking at photos online and am still not 100% sure. There are just too many things that look like this at this stage!
I couldn’t get everything, of course. I’ll be weeding those awful elm seeds all summer, I’m sure.
I had a surprise when I got to the winter squash bed. I’m not sure what these are.
Those are insects of some kind. They were only on the blossoms, and only on the squash. They’re so tiny, I can’t make out any identifying features. I tried asking in a gardening group and did get a response of one possible thing, but on looking them up, they seemed much bigger. Pretty much anything would be bigger! The solution was to spray with soapy water, so later in the day, I tried that. The blossoms were closed by then, though, so I don’t know how much good it did.
They’re smaller this year. When picking them, I tuck the coils over a finger to carry them. Last year, I was putting them around my wrist.
After I was done my rounds, I headed inside for breakfast and planned to go back out to start working on the trellis bed. In the end, I didn’t make it. I was falling asleep in my chair. I finally gave up and went for a nap. Something I’ve found myself having to do fairly regularly.
I get better sleep in those 1-2 hour morning naps than in an entire night! It is a bit disorienting to wake up and it’s still morning, though. 😄
My goal for today was to get started on the remaining vertical supports for the permanent trellis bed.
As good as I felt, this put me outside at the hottest part of the day.
My goals got shifted, and progress was made. Just on something else!
When I checked the temps in the wee hours, we were at 7C/46F, but it felt like 4C/39F. As I write this, we are now at 10C/50F, but it feels like 3C/37F! The expected high of the day is only 16C/61F.
I don’t know if we got one last rainfall during the night. Wind is the real issue this morning. For the first time in a long time, though, I have not been seeing smoke, so I’m hoping all that rain has made a big difference for the wildfires.
While doing my morning rounds, I finally gave in and took the netting off from above the Arikara squash. The elm seeds are mostly dropped, and it was doing nothing to keep the cats off. In fact, as I was starting to pull the ground staples to remove it, one of the yard cats (a tabby with no name) jumped onto the mesh and immediately fell through over a squash and started to roll around in a panic!
Thankfully, the collars around the squash did their jobs, and nothing was crushed.
What we do have, however, is buds and even a blooming flower!
What is strange is that these are all female flowers. No male flowers! I’m used to the male flowers blooming first. I’m not sure if I should be pruning these off so the plants themselves can grow bigger before starting to bloom again. I’ve never grown these before. I’ll have to look that up. I’d hate to have to prune them but, without any male flowers to pollinate them, the baby squash are just going to wither away, anyhow.
At the high raised bed, I decided to pick these, as the plants were getting big enough to crowd other things out.
I’m leaving one Purple Prince (I think) plant that has bolted to go to seed. Tiny flower buds have started to appear. I picked the other larger ones; perhaps I waited too long and should have picked them at a smaller stage. As for the red thing in the middle, I thought it was a beat, but as I was cleaning and trimming it later, I could see that it’s white on the insides to… a big radish?
That’s one thing about using a seed mix for the winter sowing. This one was a mix of whatever root vegetable seeds I had left. There was only one type of turnip, which makes it easy, but there were several times of radishes and beets, and two types of carrots. One type of radish – the French Breakfast – has a distinct shape that makes it easy to identify. Everything else is “root vegetable surprise”. 😄
I just hope today isn’t so cold that the seeds recently planted will die off and rot instead of germinating. Things are supposed to get sunny and warm up over the next while, without extreme heat, which will be nice. Those overnight temperatures, when they start dropping below 10C/50F, could be a problem, though. The transplants should handle things fine, but the direct sowing… well, we’ll see how those go. At the very least, it will slow germination down.
Well, hopefully, we will have a long, moderate fall and a late first frost, to extend our growing season.
Meanwhile, in the time it took me to write this, our temperature has actually dropped, instead of getting warmer! We’re not supposed to reach our high of the day until 7 or 8 this evening. I’m( seriously considered plugging the cat house in again. It’s overcast enough that the light sensor for the heat bulb will turn on for the kittens.
The weather apps say we’re anywhere from 24-26C/75-79F out there this evening but, strangely, it felt much cooler! Very enjoyable, in fact. Well. Except for the blood red sun from all the wildfire smoke.
I decided to head into the outer yard and check on the walnuts this evening; something I usually do in the mornings, but my daughter did the watering out there today. I was very thrilled to see this.
It was very hard to get the camera to focus on such a small spot! Surprisingly, it did better when I accidentally took some video. Of course, it didn’t help that I had cats pushing their way into things!
What we have here is our very first walnut tree leaf bud! It was taking so long, I was starting to think it might not have survived being transplanted. I’m so happy! No signs of anything from the walnut seeds, yet, but hopefully they will start emerging soon.
This evening I decided to take the cover off the winter sown bed in the east yard. It has the same mix of seeds as the high raised bed, plus lettuce from our own saved seed. The two beds could not be more different!
For starters, the one thing that is thriving in this bed is the Jebousek lettuce, which is the only variety of lettuce we planted this year. The rest is onions and root vegetables. There’s so much lettuce, though, it’s choking things out!
So I thinned some by picking a bunch out by the roots. I grabbed a couple of radishes, too.
We’ll need to thin the lettuce out more, as I could see scrawny beet greens being crowded out by them. There are some larger leaved plants in there I wasn’t sure of, so I carefully took a closer look at their bases. It looks like we have a few Zlata radishes growing! These seeds were gifted to me, and I’ve never seen them before. They are very round and have a yellowish colour to them. I’ve left them for now. The radishes I did pick are the longer French Breakfast variety. The first lettuce and radish harvest for this year! I ended up picking another French Breakfast radish from the high raised bed, the picked some spinach from the old kitchen garden. We’ve been using the spinach mostly in sandwiches, but we’ve got the makings of an actual salad from our garden right now!
And it’s not even June, yet.
Yeah, I’d say winter sowing like this is something we’ll be doing again!
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!!!
