One of my daughters took care of feeding the outside cats for me this morning, so I could get a bit more sleep after doing a wellness check on my husband.
My first attempt at lying down got interrupted by a phone call. It was the pharmacy. They noticed I was to get prescriptions delivered today, but my husband’s were listed as a pick up. Did I want his delivered, too? After confirming that an in person pick up was not required (which sometimes happens, due to regulations around some of his meds), I absolutely said yes! That made things more flexible for me when it came to getting the mail and going to town.
Then my daughter was a sweetheart and kept a handset with her upstairs, so she could answer the phone if it rang again.
After I got a couple more hours of attempted sleep, I eventually made it outside and started with the watering. The rain barrel was finally full again, so I used watering cans to do all the south garden beds and the old kitchen until the barrel was empty, finishing by using the hose to water the grape vines.
By then, I was really struggling and having difficulty standing up straight, so I went inside. I let the family know that the front was watered, but not the main garden area, but that I was going to take some pain killers and try lying down. Not to sleep, but because it was sitting was just as painful as standing. Granted, lying down wasn’t any less painful, but at least I didn’t have to try to keep myself upright.
I had meant to finish the watering after I felt better, but my younger daughter went out to finish the watering for me, leaving the phone with my husband. Over time, however, the pain increased rather than decreased. When my daughter came in to check on me, I was wanting to sit up so I could take another painkiller, but needed her to help me. My prescription says to take two or three at a time, but I was only taking one. I’m going to have to change that.
Getting up was not an option, though. So when the prescription delivery came, my daughter went out to meet him.
For my own meds, I got a refill on my topical painkiller, more T3s, as I was running low, and my new prescription. My older daughter just came down while I was working on this to take a look, because she’s on the same medication, but my dose is 5 times higher than hers. It turns out to be a different type of the same thing – and a lot less expensive. It is covered 100% by our provincial pharmacare system, though, so it’s not even billed to my husband’s insurance. It is also the only medication I’m on where the time between doses makes a difference. It says to take one before bed, and I never get to bed at the same time, so I’ve set a daily alarm for myself.
For today, though, I took my first dose right away, after getting a daughter to help me sit up again. Then it was back to lying down. My SIL messaged me around this time, and we talked about the bill for the bin for trash that was hauled away already, and asking about the bill for tree removal that my brother hasn’t received yet. They’ll be coming out for the weekend again and my brother plans to check the roof and the window where it’s leaking. A major concern would be mold. I know the roofers put an extra layer of underlay on that section of the roof, because it’s such a low slope, and it has held out fine until this year, and even before the new roof was put on, it had never leaked with rain. Just from the ice dam that forms during spring melt. So something has gone very wrong up there, but we can’t see it from the ground, and none of us are able bodied enough to climb onto roof to see.
I’m really hoping the new meds help, because what I was dealing with today was some of the worst pain yet. The T3s, at least, seemed to finally kick in, and was was feeling much better later. Well enough that I could feed the outside cats – and got to see Sprout bringing her little white and grey kitten to the food bowls under the shrine! That’s a first that we’ve seen.
I even felt well enough to finally rake up some grass clippings that were thick enough to start killing the lawn under them, and even do a walkabout. As I was doing that, spotting the kitten and then the skunks coming in, too, I realized something. I haven’t seen Domino for a while. We let her out of the isolation shelter just before Sweetie came back, and Sweetie broke out during the storm her first night here. I think Domino disappeared soon after that. I haven’t seen Adam for about a week now, and today I realized that I haven’t seen Havarti for several days. That’s three cats disappearing in a relatively short time, for long enough that I wouldn’t expect them to come back at all. Domino is the missing one that bothers me most. She was at the rescue for a couple of months, could not adapt to the indoor life, so we took her back. She seemed so happy to be back and let me pet her far more often than she ever did, before she’d gone to the rescue. Now, she’s just gone.
*sigh*
Anyhow.
In the end, it was a pretty rough day. Even my family later commented on how much better I was looking this evening, and how terrible I’d looked earlier!
Tomorrow will be my first test on how the new meds are working, but the real big test will be on Saturday, when I plan to have my table at the market open from 10am to 8pm. Those last four hours should be the busiest, as the large animal rescue has a big event planned.
Personally, I’ll be happy if I can just stay upright all day tomorrow, and not end up back in bed, curled up in pain, for hours again.
One thing is for sure. I am incredibly glad I didn’t try to do the market today.
I did the usual morning stuff, including watering the garden. My brother had his zero turn mower out already, which amazed me, because the grass was still so very wet from dew. He just did the areas he needed to work around, and this mower can handle it.
Then they started loading things into the bin!
After I finished the outside stuff, I came in and started making myself breakfast. Between the fan and the cooking noises, I could hear nothing elsewhere in the house, so it was a surprise when my oldest daughter came rushing in, telling me my husband had been calling for me.
He had his door closed to keep the cats out, and when I got to him, I found him sitting on the side of the bed, barely able to sit upright. He kept falling backwards, and he couldn’t speak. He tried to, but could only manage making noise, while his lips simply could not move. While I was holding him up, he managed to gesture towards the top of his medication fridge, where his Dex 4 bottles were sitting.
He was suffering from low blood sugar. I helped him down a couple of the sugar pills and, once I was sure he wouldn’t fall over again, got a glucometer. During that time, he took a couple more sugar pills. I used the glucometer – which was not easy, as he doesn’t bleed well – and got a 2.5 For those of you in the US, that’s a 45.
By that point, I was on the phone with 911, which was a pain because I could barely make out what the person who answered was saying. I got transferred to the ambulance dispatcher and while I talked to her, my husband visibly improved, in that he could speak, though very slurred. He was able to open the bottle of Dex 4 and took 3 more sugar pills while I had the dispatcher on speakerphone.
Once the ambulance was on the way and the dispatcher got the other information she needed, I tested him again. He was still at 2.5, but already getting much, much better. His could hold himself upright and could speak more coherently. He told me that he’d had to drag himself into consciousness. He had ripped his CPAP mask off, though at the time he wasn’t even sure what he was removing.
Meanwhile, I told my daughter an ambulance was on the way and to open the gate. I had sent a quick message to my brother and SIL, but they were outside so my daughter had shouted out to them that there was an ambulance coming, but she didn’t know why.
Once she was back inside, she started moving stuff around to make room for a stretcher to come through but, in the end, that wasn’t needed. With help, my husband was able to get dressed and use his walker to get outside, where he waited by the front steps, with half a loaf of bread, as he needed to eat something but couldn’t stomach anything else. I’d offered part of my own breakfast that I’d been making (which a daughter tended to and later finished for me), but that was too much for him.
Meanwhile, my brother came over to talk to us. My SIL was at the road, ready to direct the ambulance. My brother told us, they always drive right by – they’ve had to call an ambulance for my late father in the past, and that’s what what had happened before.
Once he was outside, I tested his sugars again and he was up to 3.1mmol/L, which would be about 55mg/dL He was looking and acting dramatically better by then, too.
The ambulance got there very quickly. When they arrived, my husband was able to walk up the steps through the side door while the tended to him, and one of them stayed to ask me questions. My husband had told him he’d dropped to 1mmol/L (18mg/dL). I told the paramedic that the last time that happened, he was in the hospital and they’d given him too much insulin. So the paramedic understood that my husband knew what a 1 felt like. I told the paramedic what readings I’d gotten and, with how much my husband had clearly improved, he jokily apologized that they took so long to get here, we fixed him ourselves.
They did not take long at all to get here. Especially considering they did not come from the nearest town.
They kept him in the ambulance for a while longer and when they checked his sugars, he was at 6mmol/L (106mg/dL) and safe. After talking to him about it, my husband decided to not go to the hospital.
While they were tending to him, my daughter finished cooking my breakfast and I went in to eat – since I was so hungry by then, I was feeling dizzy! Part way through, the paramedic came in to update me and we talked about the situation some more.
Then Leyendecker came over and demanded pets. The paramedic accommodated quite happily. The Potato Beetle came over. He was so taken by then that, when he went back to the ambulance, my husband said the paramedic and brought it up with glee. Sadly, he has two big dogs that have never seen a cat, so adopting one wasn’t an option. 😄
Meanwhile, with everything under control, I could see my brother and SIL tossing things from the junk pile into the bin, leaving behind the electronics garbage, appliances and metal. They also loaded a trailer of stuff to dump, and my brother even went and gathered the toilet collection (I think we found 6 toilets scattered around the yard in total, right after we moved here).
Once my husband was back inside and the ambulance was gone, we took advantage of so many things being shoved aside to make room for a stretcher that never came in. We moved out a couple of boxes from my mother’s apartment and cleared the top of the old dishwasher that can’t be used. It’s the sort that gets wheeled over and attached to a sink’s tap, but it won’t work with the tap we now have, nor could we even plug it in anymore. The top of the dishwasher is what we were using to hold our big jug of drinking water. Once the dishwasher was cleared, I was able to get it out of the house and roll it to the end of the sidewalk. I had to leave it there, as the wheels would not roll well on the grass, so getting it to the bin was going to be a 2 person job. Then I took out some of the electronics waste we kept not getting to the dump and set that with the appliances in the remains of the junk pile. The old dishwasher was sitting where it was for a reason; we have a cube shelf with storage cubes for winter gear that the cats kept tearing up to get into, so the dishwasher was protecting it. Now that it’s gone, we moved our recycling bins to that spot so the cats still can’t get into them.
The main thing about getting the dishwasher out, though, was that we could set up the laundry hose out the window to do my husband’s bedding.
Thankfully, my husband is almost back to “normal” (for him, anyhow). He’s going to be testing his sugars a lot more often over the next while, not to check for highs, but lows, while he adjusts how much Tejeo he is talking. This is a slow release insulin that it taken only once a day.
We have figured out what triggered this. While the girls and I were in the city, we made sure that my husband had food he could easily get for himself. The problem is, between the chronic pain and the Ozempic, he has no appetite. He ate next to nothing, all day, then went to bed early and on an empty stomach. The slow release insulin, meanwhile, keeps doing its thing no matter how much he has or hasn’t eaten. He later told me that what he was feeling this morning was WAY worse than what he’d gone though while at the hospital. It’s entirely possible his blood glucose had actually dropped below 1mmol/L(18mg/dL)
Which brings me to a huge frustration. When my husband had to start seeing a Nurse Practitioner, after our doctor disappeared (he went on medical leave and never came back), she basically ignored his back injury and was focused completely on his blood glucose and on getting him to lose weight. Even the diabetic nurse he was referred to told us that he would not be able to control his blood glucose until he got control of the pain, and he has never been able to get control of the pain, no matter what painkillers they’ve put him on. I firmly believe there is an overdiagnosis of diabetes. A LOT of things can result in high blood glucose. Sleep apnea is one of them, so my husband is dealing with both the chronic pain and the sleep apnea. Also things like high stress levels, anxiety, etc. He’s on a ludicrously high dose of Ozempic now and, frankly, I don’t know that it’s actually helping him. There’s nothing he can do about the spleep apnea; he was diagnosed at a sleep research facility and the head researcher, who was also a university professor, actually asked permission to use his test results in class as an example of how bad it can get. They actually took measurements inside his throat, and found the tissues were smaller than typical for someone of my husbands 6′ plus frame. As he ages, everything gets looser and starts to cause problems. He could lose all the “extra” weight, and would still have severe obstructive sleep apnea.
Which means he may not actually be T2 diabetic. The high blood glucose is more likely a symptom of other issues that cannot be fixed. There is no surgery. Not therapy. No anything that can “fix” the ultimate cause of his back injury, and certainly not the spine damage he was born with that wasn’t discovered until he was finally referred to a spine clinic, after 2 years of the NP focusing completely on his blood glucose and weight.
There is a lot out there about how dangerous high blood glucose is and, in the long term, that may be true. The reality is, low blood sugar is far more dangerous. High blood sugars can cause problems after decades. Low blood sugars can kill you within minutes – and my husband came very close to dying this morning.
The scary thing is that the powers that be keep lowering the threshold. It used to be that you weren’t considered T2 until our BG levels were at 8/144 or above, and after you had that reading after two blood tests (lab tests, as glucometers weren’t common yet) and after several other tests were done to factor other things out. Then the threshold was dropped to 7/126 or higher, and all it took was a single glucometer test at the doctor’s office. Then a new category was invented: pre-diabetes, which is declared if you get a reading of 6.5/117 or higher. Then there was “metabolic syndrome”.
Scarier still is that they lowered the range of “normal”. While looking for conversion charts for this post, I also got charts of what the different ranges were. “Normal” in Canada (probably elsewhere, too) is now a fasting BG of 4 – 5.5/72-99. The first time my husband was “diagnosed” with T2 (which miraculously went away once he got a proper CPAP to treat his sleep apnea), we were told that anything below 5/90 was concerning, anything below 4/72 was dangerous. The safe range was from 5-7/90-126. Now, one chart I found includes a BG reading as low as 2.6/50 as the bottom range of “excellent”.
To top it off, having T2 and higher BG readings is also increasingly viewed as a moral failing rather than a symptom or a side effect, or even just a data point. Treating T2, however, has become incredibly lucrative. I expect attitudes and treatments are going to get worse before they start getting better.
end rant
I’ll get off my soap box now. I’m just so frustrated. I almost lost my husband this morning. I am so very thankful that he recovered so quickly, though he says he’s still shaky. This, on top of the constant pain he’s dealing with. He isn’t living. He’s existing – and there is really nothing that can be done about it anymore. That window closed many years ago.
I found this while using the rain barrel to water the garden from the rain barrel. I had taken the caps off the watering cans, just in case frogs got into the filled cans again. They are kept full so they don’t blow away. I have no idea what kind of caterpillar that is, and hope it’s beneficial. It’s quite adorable.
The first image is our very first fully open winter squash flower. A male flower; I don’t expect to see female flowers for a while yet. The second image is a bit hard to see, but our caraway is starting to bloom!
Today was getting hotter and I normally would have watered the garden in the morning, but the girls and I were planning to head out a couple of hours early for my older daughter’s pre-op appointment. Thankfully, I made a comment about parking at the women’s hospital when my daughter reminded me that the appointment was somewhere else entirely! I had completely forgotten! I would have taken the wrong highway into the city!
So… we took a different route and stopped briefly at a gas station in the one town along the way for drinks and some fresh potato wedges to eat along the way. My younger daughter didn’t eat at all until afterwards, as she didn’t want to get sick at the start of the trip (eating in general always makes her sick for some reason).
The clinic we went to is clear across the city, and took well over an hour to get there, but the route was straightforward and there was plenty of free parking, which was greatly appreciated. We even got there a bit early, with more than enough time for my daughter to do the “first visit” paperwork.
Her appointment went well. She needs to book another pre-op appointment, but the person wasn’t in today so she’ll have to call them tomorrow. By the time she sees this person, they should have a time and date for her surgery. She was told it should be withing 3-6 months which, for Canada, is incredibly fast. She’ll also be getting a requisition for bloodwork emailed to her, which she can get done locally.
Since we were in the city, once the appointment was done, we went to a nearby Walmart to pick up cat supplies for the inside cats, plus a few other things for ourselves. I also wanted to pick up some food for all of us. This Walmart had a Subway instead of a Walmart – nothing on the menu I could eat while driving, but my daughter was able to get a sub for herself and her sister (who stayed in the truck). I tried looking around the grocery section of the Walmart for something I could eat while driving, but there was nothing. As we left, we got more gas and I went in to pre-pay, so I could use a discount coupon, and ended up getting some beef jerky to eat on the road, once clear of the city, with my daughter to hand me pieces.
Once at home and the truck unloaded, I changed and headed out. First to do the outside cat feeding, then to water the garden. After the watering, I was able to finish weed trimming around the East yard garden beds, but was not going to stay out to do more. Too many mosquitoes, even though I had bug repellant on!
I was almost done the watering when my brother and SIL showed up for the weekend. Before I headed in for the night, I quickly popped over to say hello. I was too much of a mess to go inside and visit, so it was a short one. We caught up for a bit, then my SIL remembered she had some things for us. One turned out to be a bag of frozen meat! Some butcher’s shop sausages that they found they couldn’t eat, and a packet of venison that had been given to them, but they aren’t fond of venison. If it turns out we don’t like any of it either (I already know I’m going to enjoy the venison!), we can always give it to the cats!
Oh, after looking at the forecast, I’ve decided I will skip the market tomorrow. I don’t want the truck to be baking in the heat. Not when those high temperatures somehow seems to be causing problems with the battery – or at least has the battery gauge doing weird things! Next weekend might be just as hot but for that one we will be there until 8pm, and things will be cooling down by then.
I will definitely be watering the garden again in the morning, before things get hot. I’m hoping the grass will be dry enough before it gets too hot that I can get the push mower out, as well as more weed trimming!
Last night, we were expected to drop to about 17-18C/63-64F
We dropped to 14C/57F
It was glorious. Best sleep I’ve had in a while!
I still headed out early to do the watering, after after the rest of my morning routine. While watering in the old kitchen garden, I decided it was time to remove the insect netting from the rectangular garden bed.
The self seeded poppies had pods pushing up against the nettings from below, as well as some onion seed heads. They are now free to bloom and be pollinated. The parsnip and beet greens are looking nice and lush.
The cats are going to miss their hammock!
While laying the netting out on the grass so I could fold it up to put it away, I spotted a couple of spots where eggs had been laid. When I folded the netting over, I discovered that one of them still had the spider mama on it! She would not move, and stayed clutching the cocoon of eggs.
I ended up folding the netting in such a way that the spider was on top and uncovered, then found a place in the sun room to tuck the netting away that should be safe from having cats climb on it.
Yeah, I’m a suck.
Even for spider mamas and their eggs.
By the time the watering was done, it was almost time for the general store to open, so I headed out right away. The kibble bin in the sun room was pretty much empty after this morning’s feeding, so I needed another 40 pound bag of kibble.
It is so much handier now that the local general store carries that size. Otherwise, I’d be driving to towns with feed stores, to the north or south of us.
Once back home, I had my breakfast and was on the computer when I started having issues. I was starting to fall sleep at my keyboard. Plus, the pain in my lower abdomen was back. So I decided to lie down for a couple of hours.
That seemed to help, but as I was up and about, the pain got worse again. It got so that I could neither stand nor sit properly because of it. So I tried lying down again. I fell asleep again, covered in cats, and after a couple of hours I woke feeling much better.
Until I moved.
All I did was shift a leg to a more comfortable position, and the pain was back. It went away after a while, until I had to move again. Then, just to top it off, I found I had a headache behind my eyes.
*sigh*
In the end, I had to ask a daughter to do the outside cat feeding. I’ve taken pain killers and am hoping to be able to at least do the evening watering, in a couple of hours or so.
On the plus side, we didn’t break 30C/86F again, as was being forecast last night. We “only” hit 28C/82F. The overnight low is supposed to be 18C/64F. The forecast for later in the week has also changed to less extreme highs. For me, I’m mostly looking at Friday, when I take my daughter to the city for her pro-op appointment, and Saturday, when I will be doing the market again. By myself, this time. My daughters have both been invited to a digital wedding on Saturday that they will be “attending”. For our time zone, it will be in the afternoon. It seems the couple live in different countries and are unable to travel, so they are getting “married” in a game, using their game characters as proxies. Obviously, not a legally recognized marriage, but it’s what they are able to do for now.
What a strange world we live in.
Anyhow.
My telephone appointment with my own doctor is next week. I find myself wondering what the next steps will be, if nothing showed up in those ultrasounds. An MRI, perhaps? I don’t know, but something is very wrong, and it’s causing problems. This started out as a side effect from anti-inflammatories I am no longer taking. While the initial side effect is almost non-existent now, it hasn’t gone away completely, and the pain has gotten worse. It’s gotten to the point that my husband, broken and in constant pain as he is, looks at me and comments on what bad shape I’m in, and that I’m moving around worse than he is!
Speaking of which, my husband finally broke down and placed an order for a new chair. An ergonomic, bariatric chair that he could potentially use as a sleep chair, if it ever came to that. Putting one more thing on his credit card is not something we wanted to do, but we were supposed to get it when our tax return came in, and that mess still hasn’t been sorted out. The new disability tax credit paperwork got sent in a while ago, and he did check off the box giving permission for them to go over his previously filed taxes, and that takes time. He should at least get the tax credit that didn’t come in this last time. Who knows, though. He was officially on long term disability back in 2014, and we didn’t know the tax credit even existed back then. We only found out about it after going to a different tax preparer a few years back, and she had asked me why he wasn’t getting it. She was able to set him up on it, right then and there, and set me up for the caregiver tax credit – something else we didn’t know existed.
Meanwhile, the chair he’s got now is breaking and unsafe, and this is a medical necessity. Perhaps not the specific type of chair. I suppose he could have gotten a prescription for a chair from his doctor, but that would just had more time, and he can’t really put it off for much longer. The chair he ordered should arrive before the end of the month. That’s the most important thing.
All four of us dealing with painful health issues, all at the same time, was not something any of us thought would happen, that’s for sure!
Last night turned out to be a rough night for all of us. No one got much sleep at all. We couldn’t even blame the heat for it, as we had a decently cooler night.
In my case, when I finally fell asleep, I was down so hard, I never even heard a cat knock a display off a shelf, onto the floor. Ghosty, for some reason, has been determined to climb up onto the shelf, through or over the display shelf, to jump down the other side, rather than simply walk on the floor to get to the same spot. It’s an ongoing problem, and she only does it when I’m asleep! I discovered it when I had to get up to go to the washroom and had to pick everything up, just to be able to get to my door.
*sigh*
I was outside, feeding the outside cats and doing my morning rounds early enough that I could go back to bed for a few hours.
Well… I tried to, that is. Didn’t actually get much sleep, again. I didn’t put the display shelf back again, figuring it was just an invitation to disaster, which meant half a dozen cats all wanted to explore the now empty top of the shelf it rested on.
Loudly.
Eventually, I gave up and headed out to get the mail and pick up a few things, including a 40 pound bag of kibble for the outside cats. Later in the afternoon, my older daughter joined me and I found out her night was bad, too. She has her pre-op appointment booked next week, but she’s considering finding the doctor’s phone number to talk about increasing her meds again. The girls and I had plans to do a deep clean of several rooms today, but with how we’re all feeling, it’s going to have to happen piecemeal, over several days.
Towards the end of the afternoon, I headed out to do the evening cat feeding and rounds. I was coming about to go to the isolation shelter when I realized there was a cat inside, watching me.
It was Sweetie! She actually was willing to go into the isolation shelter again!
She took off when she saw me walking towards the shelter, but at least we know she’s coming closer for food, and willing to go into the space she spent so much time in, before going to the rescue.
I saw Slick this afternoon, too.
Slick is no longer pregnant. *sigh*
She’s lost two litters this year. It’ll take time before we know if this one survived.
No sign of the one kitten I spotted not long ago, still. Hopefully, it will start showing up at the furthest food bowls, and we can start working on socializing it, or at least getting it comfortable with coming to the house for food and shelter.
After the cat feeding, I watered the south garden beds from the rain barrel. We’re not expecting rain again for almost 2 weeks, and it’s supposed to get above 30C/86F on the weekend. After today, I’ll be making a point of trying to get outside early, before the heat hits, to water the garden. On the plus side, the water table is high enough that I don’t need to water any of the trees and berry bushes. It’s only the garden beds that drain and dry out quickly, even if there are still puddles in the lower areas.
In the old kitchen garden, I actually did a tiny harvest.
Next to the peas are three self seeded tomatoes. They won’t have time to reach full maturity, but I’m leaving them be, anyhow.
In the next image of the above slide show, growing along the edge by the path along the wattle weave bed, there are a few self seeded chamomile, including one that has started blooming!
After the south beds were done, I watered the main garden area, too, though with a hose. One of these days, I’d like to set up a water tank so that the main garden area can be watered with ambient temperature water, rather than from a hose. By the time it’s done, the well water is so cold, it can shock the plants.
With that watering done, I went to check on the food forest trees and bushes, and spotted something that made me smile.
They are unripe and still rock hard, but we have them!
Unfortunately, by the time I was finishing up, I was starting to have pain issues. It seems to kick in after I’ve done a fair bit of walking. It’s almost at the point where I’m wondering if I should go to the ER or something. My own doctor is away right now and we have a phone appointment booked for when she gets back, but if this keeps up, I might have to find an alternative. There are no urgent care clinics out here. We don’t even have any walk in clinics any closer than my doctor’s clinic, so the ER would be pretty much the only other option. If I did that, I would expect to spend many hours in the waiting room, since I would not be an “urgent” case. At least the diclofenac works, though it can take a while to kick in. When the pain hits, it doesn’t matter if I’m sitting, standing or lying down.
Oddly, while talking to my older daughter and describing where the pain it, it’s almost identical to the pain she is having! Hers is worse in other ways, given what the cause is for her.
Ah, well. Nothing much either of us can do about it right now. I don’t even have a diagnosis, and I won’t until I talk to my doctor. Even then, that would only be if the ultrasounds actually found something.
Still, I’m managing to at least get outside and get at least a few things done. I’m quite excited that we have our first gooseberries since getting planting that bush. It brings back memories. We had a gooseberry bush here when I was a kid and I used to love eating them fresh off the bush. In retrospect, I was eating them under ripe, but I loved that sour taste. I did taste one of the biggest gooseberries today. It was pretty nasty! 😄 They still have a ways to go before they are edible!
On my list of things to get done in the garden over the next while, along with loosening up the area near the corn bed and sowing tillage radishes, it’s getting time to uncover the corn and put a mulch down around them. Right now, there are a lot of weeds and I’ve been leaving them, since they are acting a bit like a living mulch right now. We’ll see what I manage to get done over the next while. If the yards dry out enough, I might be mowing, instead. That, at least, shouldn’t trigger the pain levels like walking does.
We were expecting a very hot day today, so I was up early to water the garden thoroughly before things got too hot – even though we have rain in the forecast. Depending on which app I check, we’ll either get rain or thunderstorms. Just before I started writing this, our phones started going off with tornado warnings, but it looks like the system will be passing to the north of us. We might get some rain from the edges of it. We did hit 31C/88F today. As I write this, past 7pm, we are at 28C/82F right now, with the humidex making it feel like 30C/86F.
After I did the morning cat feeding (with some cats very confused by the early hour!) and garden watering, I went back to bed. I must have been really beat because I slept for about 3 hours, checked the time, then passed our for another 2 hours.
Unfortunately, today has turned out to be a bad pain day, and not just for me. My daughter somehow ended up getting a sun burn yesterday, even though she was in the shade most of the day. I’ve been getting so much sun since it got warm enough to work outside longer, I don’t get burned, though apparently I’m quite the redneck right now. 😄 Meanwhile, my other daughter has had increased health issues again. Her pre-op appointment in the city is a couple of Fridays from now – the day the bin my brother is renting is supposed to be delivered! My younger daughter will have to stay home so she can meet them and tell them where to drop the bin off.
Aside from the pain related to why I got those ultrasounds done, my left hip has decided to start working wrong again. Not a lot of pain there. The joint just isn’t moving right and wants to give out.
I am so thankful for all the arm bars and hand rails that were installed for my father, all those years ago!
Eventually, though, I did head outside. I had to use the walker for it, but I set up the new deer scarer my brother picked up for me.
I’ve set this one up by the corn, which is going to need the netting removed from it pretty soon. I set the other one up by the peas to keep the deer away with the sound of a dog barking. With this one, I expect raccoons to be more of an issue, and I set it to the ringing of a bell, since I think raccoons would get used to the sound of a dog barking very quickly.
Once that was set up, I wandered around and checked on various things. In the next image in the slide show above, you can see some chard leaves. These are planted between the garlic and are finally starting to grow! Still pretty much nothing on the spinach in the other row; what little germinated and survived promptly bolted. It does look like we will at least have some Swiss Chard for greens this year.
In the next image, we have a red nasturtium flower. The seeds I collected were from a package with a variety of colours in it, and so far we’ve had yellow and red. They are still quite small, but adding that straw mulch once they got big enough has really helped.
Next is the row of summer squash. Those are picking up quite nicely. The plan is to grow them vertically, but I’ll need to remove the netting to do that, and they still need that protection for now.
The last picture is of the fennel and chicory. They’ve had a bit of a growth spurt! Unfortunately, some of the fennel at the end of the bed got flattened. Stinky found his way under the netting and I found him lying there. I opened the netting up at the other end, so as not to spook him, then moved to scoot him in that direction. Instead, he panicked and started running into the netting over and over before I finally got him to go out the open end. *sigh* He didn’t do too much damage, at least. We added more rods to the hoops over the fennel and it’s getting so tall, it’s almost touching the top of the netting again!
We just got another tornado alert on our phones while I was writing the above paragraph. While that is passing to the north of us, our region and the entire south end of the province are currently under a severe thunderstorm watch this evening and overnight. The warning includes 4-6cm (about 1.5-2.5in) hail, 50-70mm (about 2-3in) of rain and wind gusts up to 100km/h (about 62m/h). For us, we’re to expect rain starting around 4am tonight and lasting until about 10am.
We are definitely not going to be hit with the worst of it, for which I am thankful, but my heart hurts for the people that have been slammed by these storms, over and over again.
Today turned out to be a bad pain day, so I didn’t get much accomplished. I did my morning rounds, as usual, but as the day wore on, things just kept getting worse – and I was mostly just sitting at my computer, crocheting some new items for the market on Saturday, not attempting anything active or physical!
I did remember to call my doctor’s office to make a telephone appointment to go over my ultrasound results. It turns out the doctor is leaving for holidays for 2 weeks, so I wasn’t able to book it until the 20th. The fact that the clinic hasn’t contacted me for an appointment by now means either 1) nothing showed up in the ultrasounds or 2) the doctor hasn’t seen the results yet. All I can say is, there is something wrong and it causes problems that fluctuate in severity.
It was bad enough that I asked my daughters to take over the evening feeding of the outside cats (still no sign of Sweetie). One of the things on our to-do list was to pick up prescription refills for both my daughters, but in the end I asked them to call them in for pick up tomorrow, because I wasn’t up to the trip into town. I have a couple of other places to go at well, and I really should visit my mother, too.
Thankfully, by around 7pm I was feeling well enough that I could go outside to walk around and get some fresh air with my younger daughter – until the mosquitoes drove us inside. We decided to give the last few garlic scapes another day before a final harvest, but I also spotted a couple of firsts, today.
Our very first nasturtium flower has emerged. These were direct sown using seeds we saved from last year. All the flowers in that bed are doing much better, now that they have a straw mulch around them.
In the next photo of the slide show above, I have a couple of Albion Everbearing strawberries. I’m not expecting much from these at all this year, so it’s nice to see at least a few strawberries developing.
It was while I was walking with my daughter in the early evening that we spotted our first tomato! (Which you can see in the next image.) I hadn’t even noticed any flowers, but we have one Manitoba tomato plant with a few flowers and a developing fruit. With the weather we’ve been having, the tomatoes aren’t actually growing much, so seeing this was a nice surprise.
The last image isn’t a first, but more of a last – the last of the flowering bushes. The mock orange has just exploded in blooms! It is definitely liking the weather we’ve been having.
The sad thing is, we’re going to have to move it at some point. My mother planted it against the laundry platform, and it’s in the way when we try to hang things. Not that we’ve been able to use the clothes lines much this year, but it is something we want to use as often as possible in the summer. The other thing is, we’re going to have to do some maintenance on the platform itself, including lifting it and replacing rotting wood. It needs to be on bricks or blocks or something, so that it no longer has direct contact with the soil. I suspect it has actually sunk into the ground a fair bit. The bottom step is almost lower than the patio block that is butted up against it, and is quite rotten. Some of the boards on the floor of the platform need to be either replaced or reinforced. To do that, we need to access the platform from all sides, and the south side is completely covered by the mock orange. So, it will need to be transplanted at some point.
I’ve just been watching the Gardening in Canada video released today, and it was interesting to hear her comment about the super El NiÅ„o we’re supposed to be getting this year. It depends on where you live, of course, but she talks a bit about how it will mean a cold, wet summer, and a long hot fall. Something to consider, when it comes to planting in July.
Right now, I’m thinking of re-sowing bush beans in the square raised bed. Only a few of the seeds I planted have come up, and a few of those look like they got munched by insects. The seeds I used are older, so I’m not surprised by the low germination rate. I’ve also got more seeds germinating in that tray of winter squash and melons! If we really do get a long, mild fall, they might actually have a chance to reach full maturity. Either way, I plan to give them a chance. I’m also looking to plant spinach again – we have yet to have any spinach or chard succeed this year, though we do have a few new seedlings right now – and more peas.
I was able to get a couple of big jobs done in the garden. It’s going to be an odd growing year. We had another cold night last night, dropping to about 6C/43F It looks like the cold has killed some of the melons and at least one winter squash transplants that managed to germinate in the tray that got resown after a mouse got to the seedlings. A couple more winter squash have germinated in the tray and I’ll transplant them when they get their true leaves, but it’s really too late for them, unless we have a super long, mild fall. The next time I have a chance to check out a garden center, I’m hoping to find more winter squash, at least.
Right now, I’m thinking of what can be direct sown for succession sowing. I’ll be doing more peas and bush beans, I think, and possibly some beets, but that’s not what I sowed today.
The first bed I worked on was the winter sown kohlrabi bed.
The down side of having a cover that can keep the cats out is, it’s much less convenient to weed.
Lots of crab grass. Thankfully, the remaining mulch kept most of the elm seeds from germinating. That is getting to be a real problem in other areas. Especially inside the protective collars around the tomatoes in the bed next to this one, and in the chain link fence bed.
In the next image of the slide show above, you can see my little surprise. There are actual kohlrabi growing! Absolutely tiny, but surviving. I was going to leave them to grow bigger but, as I was clearing the weeds, there were rhizomes going right under the little cluster. I ended up transplanting them to one end – a whole four tiny seedlings that probably won’t survive, but at least there’s a possibility.
The rest of the bed got completely worked over as I pulled all the rhizomes I could. Unfortunately, there were quite a few tree roots in there, too, and there isn’t much I can do about those. In this location, the roots could be either from the elm in one direction, or the cherry trees in the other. Both are close enough and spread roots far enough to be possible. It might even had been both, not just one.
Once the weeding was done, I have the bed a deep watering. Especially in the three rows I planned to sow into, which you can see in the third image.
In the fourth image, you can see what I decided to plant. American Spinach, Rainbow Swiss Chard, and I had some seed tape of Uzbek Golden Carrots left. They are old seeds so I don’t expect a good germination rate, and I hoped there was enough to lay down a double layer.
Before sowing anything, I noticed my brother had left some cardboard in the garage for me that was just right for this bed, so I cut strips to lay it down as a mulch between the rows, plus a couple that would be used to lay over the carrots to protect them until they germinated.
I didn’t need much. I had only enough of the home made seed tape left for half a row. I thought I had more seeds left in the packet and went looking, but couldn’t find it. So I grabbed the Hedou Tiny bok choy seeds we collected last year – something got to the ones planted in the old kitchen garden. The rest of the new row in the middle got those. The carrots got covered with the strip of cardboard, but not the bok choy.
Then the spinach and chard got planted in the rows still marked by twine on either side. There weren’t a lot of seeds in the packets, relatively speaking, and both got emptied in the planting. Then the cat proof cover got set back on.
Hopefully, these will take. We do have some seedlings from the rainbow carrot mix growing, but very few. I might try planting more carrots later on, but we’ll see. The chard and spinach planted between the garlic are just not growing, and what seedlings there were seem to be disappearing. It would be nice to have some greens that survive!
That done, I moved on to reclaiming the small, square bed near the compost ring.
The first image is the “before” picture. The boards on the side are from a same size frame that had been around another bed. They’re pretty rotted out, but they should last at least a couple more years. They still had their screws, so I took those out, first.
In the next image, the bed is all weeded, and the soil pulled away from the sides.
My original plan had been to join the corners opposite of how the frame already in place is, but it turned out the pieces weren’t all quite the same length, so I mixed and matched to get them to line up to the existing frame as best I could. Once the corners were screwed together, I had to be careful shifting it around to lay on top of the bottom frame properly. The wood is dry and rotten enough, I could hear it cracking at the corners.
I rummaged around in the scrap lumber pile in the garage for a while, and found some pieces I could cut into eight 8″ lengths, which is the new height of the bed. Four of them were screwed into corners, and four into the middles of the sides. One side didn’t line up at one corner. After screwing the vertical support piece to the bottom board, it left a gap between the support and the top board. More rummaging in the scrap lumber pile and I found something thin enough and cut it to 4″ in length. It was a bit narrower than the gap, but nothing the 3″ screws I was using couldn’t secure.
That done, I cleared a path to the remaining pile of garden soil we bought years ago and uncovered it. I thought I might be getting two wheelbarrow loads but, in the end, only needed one to top up the bed. In the next image, you can see the finished bed, all cleaned up, topped up and leveled.
The next thing was to protect the bed from being used as a litter box!
I had decided to use the rods from my hoop kit to made supports, running to opposite corners and crossing in the middle. This time, I decided to try something different. I found a drill bit that was the same diameter as the rods in this kit and drilled holes in each corner of the frame.
Which was fine for three of the corners, but one corner is a lot more rotten. There was no solid wood near enough to line up with the rods in the other corners, so I had to make do with what was there. Hopefully, it will be enough. The hoops will not be holding anything heavier than netting, and there shouldn’t be a lot of stress on it.
In the end, it took 6 rods to create each hoop. The hoop set into the rotten corner is a bit wonky, but otherwise it’s holding.
For the netting, I decided to dig out some green dollar store netting from last year, instead of the black netting I’ve been using elsewhere – the black netting that snakes can get caught in. The green netting is quite long, and I wasn’t sure it was wide enough to simply drape over the top, so I decided to wrap it around, instead. It was wrapped low enough that the netting could be secured to the ground with ground staples in the middles, outside the frame, while also being clipped at the bottom of the hoops at each corner.
I still had a lot of leftover netting, but I didn’t want to cut it, since it’ll be used elsewhere, some other time. After fussing with the netting to gather the excess toward the top and securing it with clips, I just pulled the excess length up and over the top and back again, before securing it in place with a clip, too. You can see the final mess in the last image of the slide show above. 😄
With this bed, I might transplant the one Arikara winter squash that has germinated in the middle, and then I will likely plant bush beans around the perimeter.
But not today.
That done, I headed inside for supper before coming back out to do the watering.
Which is when the phone started ringing. I hadn’t bothered to tell the family I was outside, so when the phone started ringing, they thought I was in my office and could answer. After four calls and no messages left on the answering machine, my daughter came looking for me. I went in and saw it was my mother, which was a surprise. I’d gotten a call from the nursing home this morning – at her request – to be informed that my mother was not feeling well. They’d already informed my brother yesterday, as he’s the primary contact, and he let me know. I was told she’d had a very rough night and was doing worse today, coughing, having a hard time breathing and talking. I was informed as to what treatment she was getting, and that she’s still in quarantine. She’s not the only one that’s sick, and if enough people in her ward are ill, they have to shut it down to visitors. For now, she can get visitors that need to wear a gown and mask, which rules me out because I can’t wear a mask.
I had asked the nurse that called me to let my mother know that I knew she was having a hard time talking, so I would not be phoning her. So it was very odd that my mother would phone me! She would have gotten the message, but when I mentioned it, she didn’t say anything about getting it. She did say that the nursing home phoned me this morning because she asked them to, but I told her they’d also already contacted my brother, yesterday. I told her about the medical treatment she was getting. She knew about the antibiotics but was saying they weren’t helping – I had to explain to her that it takes at least a few days before she would feel any difference, but she expects immediate response. I told her about the medication to help with her breathing, but she couldn’t remember anything about that one, then told me whatever pills they give her, she takes. I think she’s having a harder time remembering what she’s taking and when.
Of course, she started saying how she was so sick and didn’t think she was going to live much longer. Which she has been saying for the past… five? six? or so years. Thankfully, she is in the nursing home now. She’s coming up on 96 years old, and a simple cold can be dangerous at that age.
That got her to talking about the funeral and what I thought of it, and how she was surprised to see so many people. Then she told me, in a round about way, that she wanted us to make sure that her funeral had lots of friends there. I told her, we would let people know, but didn’t mention that she’s pretty much outlived most of her friends already.
By the end of the call, her voice was getting pretty squeaky, though she sounded a lot better than I expected, and even seemed to be in good spirits. Finally being where she has wanted to be for so long has definitely made a positive difference in her, even when she’s feeling sick.
After the call, I took the time to update my brother, then headed back out to finish watering the garden beds before it got too dark.
There are a few things I want to get done tomorrow, which is Friday, because I’m going to be doing some driving around on Saturday. June is a birthday month, and Sunday is Father’s Day, so we will be combining both on Saturday, to avoid crowds. My older daughter has offered to spring for Pizza Hut, which we haven’t had in at least a year. The nearest one is about an hour’s drive away. I’ll have other errands to do as well, including a dump run, which I did not do while we had my brother’s car and the truck was in the garage. Next week has got medical appointments, my daughter’s blacksmith workshop (she’ll be bringing home a forge when it’s done), and our first stock up shopping trip. So the more I can get done in the garden in between all this, the better!
Hard to believe we’re coming up on the solstice and the first day of summer already. With the cold nights we’ve been having, it feels like it should be April or May, not coming up on the end of June!
After waiting for the call from my doctor until well past the clinic closed, I headed outside to finish up.
The bi-color pear gourds transplanted, I wanted to sow the short season luffa next to them. I also wanted to mark where they were and protect any seedlings, but I was out of collars, so I grabbed more 4L water jugs and cut them to make more. The packet has only 9 seeds, so I cut 5 collars to plant them all in.
Along with the luffa seeds, I brought out the two types of sunflower seeds I have.
I wasn’t sure at first which of the sunflowers I would be planting, but I prepared the bed anyhow. First up, I loosened the soil and set in the collars for the luffa, giving each collar a deep watering. Then, while waiting for the water to be absorbed by the soil, I loosened the soil along the front of the bed, from end to end, then gave that a deep watering. By the time that was done, the water in the collars was absorbed enough and I planted the 9 seeds into the 5 collars. If the germination rate is high, I will probably thin by transplanting.
All the luffa and gourds fit into 1/3 of the bed (the posts for the chain link fence makes it easy to view distances). That leaves another 2/3s of the bed where I could plant climbing things. Potentially, melons, winter squash or cucumbers, depending on how things to with the second sowing in the tray. Currently there are a total of 5 melon seedlings and 2 winter squash, but zero cucumber. The cucumber can still be direct sowed, though, if necessary. Or I could plant one of the two new varieties of peas I have available to try. Or I could plant more pole beans.
After planting the luffa and giving them another watering, I hosed down the area I’d loosened along the front of the bed from end to end.
The sunflower seed packets both have about 50 seeds in them. After thinking about it, I decided to plant the Mammoth sunflower in half the bed, on the side with nothing else in it now. I figure if we plant climbing winter squash in there, the giant stems of the Mammoth sunflower could actually hold the weight. In the other half, I planted the Black Russian. The description says the stems of those are so strong, they can be dried and used as firewood! So those would be strong enough to support the luffa and bi-color pear gourds, too.
The recommended spacing for both was 12 inches, but I didn’t plant multiple seeds per spot, so I planted them more like 10 inches apart. I was eye balling it, so it’s not exact. Once those were planted, I watered them more to settle the soil around the seeds, and then I brought the netting down and secured it.
Next, I worked on the space for the black hollyhocks.
In the first picture, I’ve yanked out the tall crab grass and flowers. The flowers in this bed are ones my mother planted many, many years ago, and they are perennials. They also grow very tall. Right now, they are still a bit shorter than the crab grass.
The stones are over a cat grave. When I found a dead cat in one of the old dog houses, I buried it there, but could not dig a deep enough hole, due to rocks and roots. To prevent it from being dug up, I put a board over the grave, then weighed it down with rocks. That was several years ago, and we could removed the rocks and board by now, but I haven’t bothered.
After pulling up the greenery, I went over the area with a hand cultivator, digging up as many roots and rhizomes as I could get. Then I opened up the roll of hollyhocks to get an idea of how many transplants there were, before using a trowel to loosen the soil deeper in for the transplants. I started by planting the largest ones, closer to the rocks, and was just getting ready to plant the rest of them slightly in front when I heard my daughter.
The doctor had called. It was almost 7pm!!
So I dropped everything, hosed the dirt off my hands and went in.
My poor doctor. It was two hours past when the clinic closed, and when I mentioned I thought the call wasn’t going to happen because of that, she told me she still had two more calls to make before she could go home!
I got a quick run down on my lab results. Nothing showed up in the pap smear (the pelvic ultrasound is next week), everything was looking good except for one thing.
My iron. It’s low.
She wants me to start taking iron supplements.
My husband had the same recommendation, just a couple of days ago. We’re all low on iron.
I am pretty sure I know why, too. It’s been ages since we’ve been able to buy enough red meat for it to be anything but an occasional treat when I can get it at a really good sale price. We’ve mostly been eating pork and chicken. Any iron from vegetables isn’t really helpful, since it’s far less bioavailable.
It didn’t even occur to me to ask what type of iron she wanted me to take. I’ll talk to the pharmacist about it, the next time I’m there.
We went through my Xrays as well. Nothing showed up in my right shoulder. As for my knee, the OA has gotten quite a bit worse since the last time it was Xrayed. Likely due to that fall I had, before Christmas last year. I mentioned to her about going to the sports injury clinic, but they didn’t have the Xrays available to see yet, so I just got the injections, in both hips this time. I mentioned having the walker now, and the doctor at the sports injury clinic gave me a prescription for it, so I could claim it on our insurance.
Which is when she brought up about me getting new knees.
???
This was something that came up, quite awhile ago, but now that I’m using a walker, and with the Xrays showing how much worse my knee got, it turns out I could get a new set of knees, if I wanted to.
!!!
They’ve actually gotten a lot better lately – I haven’t even been using the topical painkiller at all, lately. So I said no, for now. I didn’t bring it up, but if there are any joints that I would want to have replaced, it would likely be my hips, first.
With that call done, I headed back outside and finished transplanting the lost of the hollyhocks, then gave them a deep watering. I’ll have to keep a closer eye on these, as the crab grass and those flowers will want to take over again a lot faster here, I think. Eventually, though, if they take, the hollyhock should get big and bushy enough that they’ll keep those from coming back as quickly.
At this point, anything that needed to be planted is planted. Next, I need to prepare the area where I’ll be planting the short season corn.
I might start that tomorrow morning. Early. It’s going to be a scorcher, so I want to get out there as early as possible. Then we need to do a dump run and, once the grass is dry enough, I want to get the push mower and weed trimmer out, and possibly the riding mower again, to get the areas I wasn’t able to do before the rains and storms came.
Meanwhile, my brother and his wife will be out for the weekend again, working on their caravan and whatever else they have on their list.
First, I just have to share an update, so you can laugh at me.
I’m certainly laughing at me. I am so silly.
I mentioned yesterday that I got a parking ticket, while waiting for my daughters at the hospital clinic. I’d been diligent about buying more time on the machine, as things dragged on WAY longer than we expected them to. I had some confusion between two receipts with times close to each other, but figured I was so tired, I somehow paid again, even though a session hadn’t expired yet. When I got the parking ticket and checked the times on my receipts, it showed I had paid and it had not expired at the time the ticket was written out.
This morning, when the parking company opened at Pacific Standard Time, I got onto a chat with an agent, which was the only way to contest a ticket. It wasn’t in their system yet, and they clearly were not in our province. The agent asked for some details on the ticket, and I gave the reference number on the receipt. In the end, I was given local contact information and a reference number to use for that.
One of the methods of contact was an email address. So I took a picture of the parking ticket and the receipt, next to each other, and emailed it in. I didn’t say much other than basically, “I got this ticket, here’s the receipt showing I was paid and time wasn’t expired yet”. I didn’t ask for anything. Just gave the information.
I got a response while I was working in the garden.
The first thing pointed out in the response…
The ticket and the receipt had two different dates on it.
I tucked the receipts into a pocket in my phone case, forgetting that I had a receipt from the last time I parked there, when we picked my daughter up from her hospital stay. The old receipt got mixed up with the new ones, and I never noticed.
The agent that responded had looked up my license plate and listed all the times I had paid for more parking, adding that it was obvious I had made the effort to keep paying for the parking.
My ticket was cancelled. Just this once, I was told.
Having made a very silly mistake, I would have been more than willing to pay the ticket once I realized it! How absolutely embarrassing. I was so focused on the time stamp for the expiration, I completely missed the equally large date right underneath.
I made sure to write back to own up to my mistake and thank them for cancelling the ticket. That was very kind of them!
Because of the time zone differences while waiting to be able to chat with an agent, I didn’t get out to the garden until quite late in the morning. Thankfully, today was not expected to get as hot, nor were we expecting more rain or storms. We’re not expecting more rain for almost a week, but in a couple of days, the heat is going to be back.
The first thing I wanted to do was get the last of the tomatoes into the ground. The one bed I’ve been working on is going to have quite a variety if things in it!!
These are the Chocolate Stripe tomatoes, and there were only 7 surviving transplants. I planted them in a block, protected by collars, like with the peppers and eggplant. These got support stake added instead of wire cages, which you can see in the second photo of the slide show above. After the picture was taken, I put a straw mulch around all the protective collars.
Then I got a seed snail of onions, choosing the roll with the smallest number of onions in it.
These turned out to be from our own saved seed. I moved aside the straw mulch on either side of the celery block and there was just enough to fit them in. After tucking the straw back, closer to the onions, they are barely visible! You can just see them in the second photo of the above slide show.
At this point, I had just a few feet at the north end of the bed to fill. I wasn’t sure how much I could fit in there, so I grabbed the snail rolls for more onions – Red Long of Tropea – the White Vienne kohlrabi I started indoors, the caraway and the French marigolds.
I took a picture of all the rolls together. Honestly, I did try to! Apparently, the touchscreen on my phone didn’t register my touch, because there’s no photo of them in my phone. This is not the first time this had happened!
I really don’t like touch screens. They don’t like to read my fingers.
In the first picture above, you can just see the snail rolls in the bin at the top corner.
I spaced out some lines to plant in, using a garden stake, then used the jet setting on the hose in each on to smooth is out and make sure the seedlings had plenty of water below them. In spite of all the rain we’ve had, and the soil being moist on top, it’s remarkably dry after the first couple of inches.
There were barely any surviving kohlrabi seedings, and they were pretty small. I ended up with six that I planted in two short rows closer to the tomatoes, alternating them with onions. Then I planted the caraway – those seedlings were very fine and delicate! – in between onions, managing to split them into nine rows of three caraway each. The last row got just the French double marigold. There were only 5 surviving seedlings in that row.
There were still onions left in the roll to transplant elsewhere.
In the second picture, you can basically see the onions, and not much else! I couldn’t put the straw mulch in between them, but I made sure to add it on the sides and end of the bed, where all the crab grass and creeping Charlie try to invade. Not to mention all the dandelions.
That bed is now done. Hopefully, things will survive! This bed now has two types of onions, celery, two types of peppers, eggplant, tomatoes, kohlrabi, caraway and marigolds in it.
Next, I wanted to sow the pole beans, which were to go in the bed with the white egg turnip and daikon radish.
I got the weed trimmer out and cleared the dandelions going to seed in the paths before I started!
In the first picture, I’ve unfastened the netting along the sides and pushed it up to the top of the hoops. After that, I removed the remaining leaf mulch between the rows – I filled the wheel barrow twice – then did the weeding and loosening of soil.
Which is when I discovered we had only one daikon radish.
The netting keeps the cats out, but not the bugs. I know there were quite a few seedlings popping up when I removed the greenhouse poly and put the netting on, and they’re all gone. Something ate them! The turnips show signs of insect damage, but there are still quite a few left.
In the second picture, the bed has been weeding and the soil loosened, including where the daikon radish had been planted. That dark line running the length of the bed is the shadow of the netting on the hoops.
While I was working on that, I set the red noodle beans to soak, which you can see in the next picture, and got my packet of daikon radish seeds to resow. This is the one thing my younger daughter requested, so I wanted to try again. They are only 55 days to maturity, so replanting should be fine.
I prepped rows with the plant stake and the hose again, as in the other bed. For the pole beans, though, I had a bit of a problem. This is a low raised bed, which means reaching into the middle, even though it’s just a couple of feet, is harder with my short little arms, and quite painful on the back.
So I cheated.
In the next picture, you can see the bean planting in progress. I have a length of Pex pipe that never got used as a hoop support, so it is still straight. I set the end where I wanted the seed to go and dropped a bean in from the top. Since they were wet from being soaked, they sometimes stuck to the inside of the pipe, but that was easily fixed with a short puff of air.
Once the bean seeds were in place, I used the plant stake I’d made the rows with to push the beans into the soil to the right depth, buried them slightly, then used the hose again, this time on the shower setting, to settle the soil over the beans.
I still had Red Long of Tropea onions left. Just enough to transplant all along the side with the white egg turnips. I have one roll of red beard bunching onions to transplant, and that should fit along the other side, but not today. It was coming up on 3pm by the this time, we were into the hottest part of the day, and I forgot to have lunch. So I put the netting back – the ground staples hold a lot better with the leaf mulch moved out! – and will transplant the last onions in there tomorrow.
What I have left for transplants are the holly hock, bunching onions, chicory, and bi-colour pear gourds. Plus there are seedlings popping up in the winter squash and melon tray I had to replant, though not very many yet.
I still haven’t decided on where to plant the holly hock. Those can get very large.
I’ve decided I will transplant the bi-colour pear gourds into the bed I just finished redoing at the chain link fence, along with direct sowing the short season luffa. I had thought to put winter squash in that bed, too, but I don’t know that we’ll have many of those. So I will plant my sunflowers in there. The netting over that bed is keeping some of the elm seeds out, but some are still getting through, so I will have to find something else to add to it before the elm seeds dry up and really start dropping. The potatoes are coming up, so I’ll soon be able to remove their protective cover of mosquito netting, which is big enough to cover the chain link fence bed. It was used there before but, in high winds, it acted like a sail and kept getting pulled loose from the ground staples. I don’t think the clips that came with the hoops I’m using to hold the current netting would be strong enough to hold the mosquito netting when high winds hit. Like the ground staples we’d tried to use before, the clips would just go flying! More thought is needed.
The chicory will go into the old kitchen garden, where there is still room in the wattle weave bed.
I have a bed in the main garden area that I planned to put winter squash and/or melons. I also expected to be able to interplant winter squash with the short season corn I plan to direct sow, after I move the black landscape cloth or whatever it is, and loosen the soil for planting them there.
I had meant to transplant the cucumbers in an available space in the trellis bed, but there is no sign of the second sowing starting to germinate. I might direct sow one variety of cucumbers in the chain link fence bed. There should be room after the gourds and luffa are planted. The other variety can be direct sown in the trellis bed, as originally planned.
That mouse that ate all the seeds and seedlings in that tray really set things back!
There is still much to be done, but at least the more time dependent things got done. I’m even already seeing little bush bean sprouts starting to elbow their way out of the soil in the high raised bed. I need to add trellis netting to the trellis bed supports pretty soon, too – the peas in that bed are growing fast! I think I’m even seeing carrot sprouts, though it’s really hard to say for sure.
So that is progress for today.
I am battling with myself.
I keep feeling like I should get back out there and do more – if not in the garden, then with the weed trimmer or push mower, or move things so I can use the riding mower… the list goes on – while the temperatures are decent. I’m also trying to heed the warning signs my body is giving me, to avoid overdoing it. My pain levels have been pretty low for the past while, and I’d like to keep it that way! Mostly, though, I’m battling fatigue. There’s been just too much going on, too much stress, both positive and negative, too often and too close together. In the past, with similar stress levels, I would push myself anyhow until one time I reached the point of literally collapsing from exhaustion. That was long ago and I was also sick with a cold at the same time but, with the old bod giving out on me more and more, I just can’t do that to myself anymore. I wasn’t even up to going into town in the afternoon, like I’d hoped to do.
So the work will continue tomorrow, as will the trip into town and to get the mail. I just have to time it so that I’m home for my telephone doctor’s appointment, to go over my lab results.
Dangit. I keep forgetting to call the sports injury clinic. They would have had my Xrays available weeks ago, by now, and I’d really like to see if there’s anything they can do about the joint damage in my right shoulder, elbow and knee.
Ah, well. Lately they’ve been improving. It’s my left shoulder that’s still giving me grief, and that one didn’t get Xrayed.
