jade tree

Potting up and look what I found!

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This morning, my daughter helped me get all our plants out of the cat free zone (aka the living room) to the table I set up for them outside. The living room doesn’t have very good light unless things are right in front of the window, and there just isn’t space for the large pots that we have. Plus, the living room has become an oubliette, and what goes in there tends to get forgotten about! It’s a good thing we’ve got mostly succulents, and they can handle getting dried out rather often!

Getting the plants out is not an easy task. I can carry the pots well enough, but we’ve got the makeshift door to the living room that my daughter would open and close for me, making sure no cats dash into their forbidden zone. Then I had to make my way to the front door. The cats, of course, were very curious about what was going on, so we were wading through cats to get to the entry. Then there are two steps I need to go down. Normally, I need to use the arm bar for any steps in the house. No such option with a plant pot in my arms! Thankfully, the washing machine is right there, so I could put the heavier pots on it. Then my daughter could squeeze past and open the door to outside for me, where we had to run interference on a Sir Robin. The little bugger is fast! He almost got into the house!

After many trips, we got all the pots out and I could start repotting, as well as giving things a thorough soaking.

It didn’t take me long to realize I didn’t have enough potting soil, nor enough pots. At least not prettier pots. I’ve got lots of greenhouse and nursery pots, suitable for the garden or food forest, but not really for house plants.

I got our smaller succulents repotted – one of them was in a pot that was so old, the plastic was starting to crumble and crack, every time I moved it! We also have the coffee tree that I got for the girls a while back. It was a sort of cluster of trees when I got it, but they all started dying off. We were down to two, when I brought them out today, and one was dead. The other, however, had burst into new life, with bunches of new leaves! It didn’t need a new pot, but it did need an immersion soak for a while.

When I did as much as I could, I decided I needed enough stuff to make it worth a shopping trip. The garbage dump is also open today, so I did our dump run first. I really hate doing dump runs now. The area in front of the pit is worse, every time I got, and it’s getting to the point that there’s hardly room for vehicles to get in and turn to back up to the pit. Normally, they use a front end loader to push the stuff along the edge further into the pit, but it’s just not getting done.

Bah.

Anyhow.

I ended up finding what I was after, in three places. My first stop was Canadian Tire. I thought I might find the potting soil there, but what they had was not the right kind, and they were sold out of quite a bit. I did find some other things that we needed, though, plus I got a couple of extra bags of stove pellets. One for the litters, one for the garden, as mulch.

From there, I went to the Dollarama, and that’s where I found the pots I was looking for, and much more reasonable prices. The challenge, though, is finding pots stable enough to hold large, heavy jade plants. Most are really narrow at the bottom, and get quite tippy, but I found some square ones that were only slightly narrower on the bottom.

Then it was off to the Walmart. They had a large display of bags for the garden outside, and I found large bags of the potting soil I was after. I was very tempted to pick up some peat and more manure as well, but not today.

I grabbed two of the biggest bags of potting soil

Then it was inside to pick up a few more things, including more canned cat food for the outside kitten soup, and kibble for the inside cats.

By the time I was done and home, it was getting close to feeding time for the outside cats. Since I needed to get them away from the truck that was pulled up to the house, I went ahead and did that early.

After I parked the truck, I spotted someone!

The toritie… calico… tortico is back!

It has discovered the joys of kitten soup, too.

I did eventually catch glimpsed of the fluffy orange kitten, with the white and grey, that always seem to stick together. Those two have become fairly regular visitors to the food bowl, but I haven’t seen this … toritico, since we first spotted the kittens, not long ago. I think there is still one more out there, possibly a calico, but I’m not sure.

Then it was back to potting up the plants.

Which took way longer than expected.

I probably could have used more pots.

Ah, well.

Here are the before and after pictures.

There was one large jade plant in a very tiny pot. That one was pretty easy, as it just got transferred to a bigger pot. The other two big pots where something else, entirely! For starters, there are a lot of individual plants in those pots, largely due to broken branches regrowing. They were also a lot floppier, as neither of them could get the full sunlight they needed.

There are now ten jade plants, plus two tiny pots of little jade plant babies. Nine of those came out of the two big pots. I could actually have gotten more, but I chose to pot some smaller trunks together.

With some of the pots, you can see black “pipes”. There were four of them in one of the big pots. Those are spare parts from plastic shelves that I set up in the old basement. The ceiling is too low for the full height of the shelves, and the unused vertical pieces came in very handy to add support the jade plant when it started falling over under its own weight. Then I discovered that they worked really well to water from below. So now, I’ve split up the pipes between four pots.

You can see three pots with orange paracord in them. That’s what I used to tie some of the more bendy, floppy stems to vertical supports. Once they have had lots of sunlight for long hours, the should get strong enough to support their own weight. There’s one pot that could have used some supports, too, but I ran out of anything of suitable size.

The biggest, square pot didn’t get fully repotted. I took out the smaller side stems, but left the biggest ones, and just worked in fresh potting soil at the top.

Two of the aloe vera just needed to have their soil refreshed and topped up. One pot, however, had two plants in it – plus three babies! So now there are four large pots and three tiny pots.

The big, purplish succulent in the rectangular pot was bigger than I thought. It really could have used a longer pot! This plant lays down on the ground and sends new roots out, all along the stem. It also propagates very easily, so there are a couple more in another pot, along with the tiny survivors of another fuzzy leaved succulent.

With so many pots now, there’s no way we have enough room for them all. I’ve started offering them out and, so far, have one taker. Hopefully, they will take several pots! If we got the jade plants and aloe down to just one pot of each, that would be great!

They’ll be staying outside for the rest of the summer, so hopefully, we’ll find new homes for them before they have to come back inside.

When this was finally done, it was starting to get pretty late. I did the evening watering, including the new food forest additions. It was getting pretty dark by the time I was done!

It’s now coming up on midnight, and I haven’t even eaten supper yet!

I am so ready for bed.

Food first!

😄

The Re-Farmer

Wimpy!

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One of the things we had to do because the cats were so determined to dig up the soil in our house plants – especially Cabbages! – was cobble together barricades around each individual plant or pot. For smaller plants, we used the plastic containers from cheese balls and pork rinds we found at Costco. Containers I meant to save to use to protect plants in the garden. I’d cut them into strips to put around the inside edge of the pots and, when that wasn’t enough, to loop over the plants. That worked for things like the aloe vera, but one pot with a jade tree in it was just too big. I ended up using some 1/4 hardware cloth I had – again, something I bought to use for something else entirely – to make a wall around the entire pot. It took 2 pieces to go all the way around. This pot is a square with an inner pot that can be removed. The outer pot has a reservoir for bottom watering, and we had to jam the hardware cloth between the two. It was the only way to keep the cats from simply pulling it out. That still wasn’t enough, and we had to make a “roof” over it, too. I only had 1 inch hardware cloth left, but it was enough. Sometimes, we’d find Cabbages sitting on top of it, looking out the window!

Now that the living room is barricaded and can be used as a plant room, most of our house plants have been moved over. The one hanging in the kitchen can stay, since the cats have been leaving it alone up there. A couple of larger pots, however, needed a second person to open and close the door in the barrier and keep the cats out.

Yesterday, that finally got done.

One large aloe vera handled the transfer well. After removing the plastic strips around it, it was a bit floppy, because some of its leaves were forced to grow into curves by its protective force field.

The jade tree in the big pot had outgrown its cage a while ago. Branches were starting to grow through the larger holes of the “roof”, so that had already been removed. My daughter was a sweetheart and was able to manhandle the pot into the living room for me – the thing barely fits on the largest shelf of the plant stand we’ve been using for them! Once it was in place, I wrestled with the hardware cloth to get it off.

As soon as it came off, everything fell over!

There were three main stems in the pot and, with the cage around the pot holding them up, they didn’t have the strength to hold their own weight! On top of that, the branches were twisted around, some around each other, in various directions.

It took some doing, but…

I got it supported.

I had some thick doweling left from my outdoor kitchen model. They’re short, but strong enough that I could put them around the thickest stem and use super long twist ties to support it at the base. I was even able to support a smaller stem to those as well. The third stem got its own support.

That still left floppy tops, though. After scrounging around, I found a couple long cherry wood stems in the basement we’d saved with the intention of eventually carving something out of them. One of those is now shoved into the middle of the pot, and I was able to weave some paracord around various branches and stems and get them lifted up and supported.

The top broke off one of the smaller stems, along with a whole lot of leaves. After cleaning up all the broken leaves, I planted the broken top. Jade trees are remarkable in their ability to propagate. If I wanted to, I could have started up a new plant out every single one of those fallen leaves. I think the broken stem has a good chance of survival.

It will take a while, but eventually the stems will gain strength and be able to support themselves. Still, it’s interesting to see how the cage that was there to protect the plant also weakened it so much.

There’s a life lesson in there.

Meanwhile, now that these last two big plants are moved away from the dining room window, it suddenly seems to much bigger and brighter in there! 😄

The Re-Farmer

Ouch

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Well, today is going to be a day of rest, whether I intended it or not.

And a day of painkillers.

Last night, I finished setting up the living room so that, once we build the cat barriers, it will be a plant room.

We hardly use the living room. The aquarium greenhouses are there, so of course I’m checking on those regularly, as well as tending the few plants we’ve been able to keep in there without the cats absolutely destroying them. My husband’s leather working desk is there, but between the pain and the mind numbing meds, he doesn’t use it as often as he’d like. The TV (which was here when we moved in) is there, which we tend to forget even exists.

So it’s been cat heaven in there.

The whole room needed to be complete rearranged, which meant taking a lot of stuff out completely, then working section by section. Move stuff out of the way. Vacuum. Empty the cat hair filled cannister after a few passes. Vacuum again. Empty the canister. Clear the next section. Repeat.

The frustrating thing was discovering all the spots a couple of our boys has been spraying. Yes, all the males are fixed, but we have two that still spray, and in the most inconvenient and inaccessible spaces. Leyendecker didn’t start spraying until after he got blocked and miraculously survived. Gee, thanks, dude. 😕

It was also the time to do little things, like replace a ceiling hook with something stronger (I had to get my younger daughter to climb the little step ladder to do that for me!) for the grow lights, and set up a power bar in a better space, since where it was hanging before would be blocked by shelves. Thanks, M, for the Alien Tape! It works great!

We had the couch in the middle of the room, close to the TV, since when we do watch movies, we always use the subtitles. It’s a big TV, but it’s still hard to read the subtitles from across the room. Well, that had to change, so I took advantage of the situation to not only use the pet hair attachment on our vacuum cleaner on all sides, but to tip it over so we could find where that piece of spring I found when I first moved it came from. How that cats managed to snap that, I have no idea!

My daughters helped as much as they could, but it really was a one person job for the most part. One of the things that had to be moved out was this monster.

This is my older daughter’s jade tree that almost got killed during the move, because of how cold it got in the van when we stopped to try and sleep in the drive out. What started out as three small plants now has 7 trunks, and is thriving – in spite of many attempts by cats to destroy it! It is just massive, heavy, of course, and very awkward to carry! 😂 I can hardly imagine how big it would be, if it hadn’t had so many branches lost to the cold during the move, or broken off by cats.

We had the pair of these cheap, square Ikea tables side by side before but, with the new arrangement, they are now stacked on top of each other – and secured together. The girls found a way to secure the pot with a Bungee cord, so it couldn’t get knocked off by the cats. At some point, it needs to be transplanted into a bigger pot, which is going to make it even more difficult to move around! We do have wheeled plant platforms, but that’s not much use then the plant is several feet above the floor.

But it’s done. The mini greenhouse frame and several shelves (a couple of them are bookshelves converted from old TVs, back when the screens were in wooden cabinets) are now set up all along the window, stuff that was taken out are all back and in their new spots, and we actually have an open space in the middle of the living room, instead of it being cut in half by the couch and shelves. All we need to do now is get the cat barriers built and set up.

I look forward to the cats not having access to that room. Ever since I finished last night, they’ve been all over the place, investigating things and crawling into spaces they shouldn’t be in!

I “celebrated” by watching a movie when I was done.

From across the room.

Boy, do I need a new prescription for my glasses!

During the night is when I started paying for it all. My whole body has stiffened up, and everything is hurting – and that’s with painkillers!

A day of rest it is!

The Re-Farmer

Protecting the jade tree, and critter capers

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So… we’ve had problems with the more recent additions to our cat colony indoors. They’ve decided our plants are for them to play with and dig in.

One of the pots we’ve been trying to protect is has the parent jade trees that we brought with us when we moved. During the drive out, it got cold enough to kill some of the plants in the back of the van, and most of the jade tree died off, but it amazingly did recover and has been doing very well.

Now the cats are trying to kill it.

Mostly Cabbages, and her dirt digging, but the other cats have discovered that jade tree leaves make good toys. We’ve done a number of things to protect the plants but, with this particular pot, some cats – and we’re not sure which ones – have managed to knock aside the things we’ve used to protect it, and get right into the middle of the pot. Along with the soil being dug up, the stems of the plants were being bent outwards, with some getting snapped off.

Yesterday, I engaged in a bit of a rescue.

You can see cat toothmarks on a number of leaves!

I was able to get the pot outside – a job that required one daughter with a spray bottle to keep the cats at bay, while the other opened the doors for me.

The pipes that you see are the spare uprights from one of the shelves we put up in the old basement. The basement is too low for the full height of the shelves, so we never added on the top self. In trying to protect the several jade trees in this pot, I shoved 4 of the unused uprights from the shelf into the pot, and used them and some cotton yarn as supports.

I discovered they also work really well to water the pot. I can just pour water into a pipe to water from below. The pot is actually a self-watering pot, but the opening to the reservoir on the bottom is small and hard to get at.

In their efforts to get at the middle of the pot, the cats ended up pushing the yarn down the pipes, and they were no longer supporting the plant stems. All the stems were bent and spread outwards, like a massive spider. So I redid it, this time making sure to loop around some of the bigger stems. It should not slide down anymore.

I’m amazed by how resilient jade trees are!

After replacing the dug out soil in the middle, I had the thought that using some of the grass clippings and garden soil mix I had left over from “hilling” the potato bags might help keep the cats out of it. Then I gave the whole thing a nice shower with the hose, with water that had been warmed by the sun.

When it was brought back inside, one of the first things that happened was several cats going over to investigate.

Then start chewing on the grass clippings.

*sigh*

They were so determined to get at it, I ended up trying to put a leftover piece of wire mesh around the bottom. It wasn’t big enough, so I tried protecting the rest with a transparent recycling bag. We still had to make liberal use of the spray bottle to keep the cats away!

Of course, we couldn’t stay in the living room all evening, monitoring a plant pot. Coming back a couple of hours later, we found some determined cat had managed to get under the plastic and spread grass clippings all over the place.

And our vacuum cleaner is broken, with no budget to replace it until next month.

*sigh*

In the end, with the assistance of a daughter keeping the cats at bay while opening doors for me, we moved the pot into the sun room to keep it safe.

In the process, I discovered a piece of the jade tree had been broken off, so I stuck it into another jade tree pot; a smaller one with a plastic ring cut from the top of a Costco corn puff container to protect it.

That was yesterday.

This morning, I was awakened by the noise of cats trying to get through the screen between the basements again. There’s nothing I can do about that, so I tried to ignore it.

Then I heard the big thump.

Going into the living room, I found one of the pots with an aloe vera in it, on the floor.

Thankfully, between the dense plant and the plastic protector around it, it didn’t actually fall out of the pot and virtually no soil was lost.

As I put it back on the shelf, I saw the dirt.

The smaller jade tree, with its protective collar, had been dug into. Some small, determined cat managed to reach through the opening and get at the soil.

I moved the pot to the dining table, went back to clean up a bit, returned to the dining room, just in time to discover Susan – SUSAN!! – on the table, trying to get into the pot.

*sigh*

I ended up shoving some mesh fabric around the opening, but it looks like this pot is going to have to go into the sun room, too.

A while later, I went to do my rounds outside and found two cats on the platform under the basement window, looking at me. Possibly Turmeric and Susan. Or Saffron and Big Rig. It’s a bit hard to see through the two layers of mesh on the window.

*sigh*

I let the girls know they were there. The last time I tried to go into that basement to get cats out, I popped a kneecap on the stairs.

So… that was my start to the day. :-/

The Re-Farmer

Desperate Measures

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One of the down sides of having so many cats in the house is how much they “love” our houseplants! We’ve had to get increasingly creative to protect them. The smaller ones ended up getting hung up. Thankfully, my daughter’s orchid kokedama are very light, as they ended up being hung from a curtain rod we don’t use. I had several succulents, one of which was apparently delicious to cats. I’ve managed to save two, while a third ended up being totally destroyed.

The problem is with the larger plants. I have a big umbrella tree, we have a whole bunch of aloe vera (less than we started out with) and several jade trees. We’re down a few jade trees, too. :-( I also had 5 avocados growing in one large pot. They had been doing very well, too.

Then Cabbages happened.

She has a thing for digging in dirt. She’s not interested in the plants themselves. She just wants to dig. The other cats like to bite the aloe vera leaves, which at least won’t harm them, but they also like to break of jade tree leaves, and play with them like cat toys. Jade trees are not good for cats! None of the other cats have Cabbage’s obsession with dirt digging. Thank God for that, or I wouldn’t have any plants left!

We’ve tried many things to deter them. Our aloe vera now all have protective rings of plastic around their bases (except the biggest one, which is so big, with so many babies growing under it, it can protect itself!), cut from those cheese ball and pork rind containers from Costco we’d been keeping to use as garden cloche. They’ve been coming in handy for a lot of other things!

The umbrella tree got a ring of 1 inch wire mesh around its base. The kittens would still jump over it and sit in the middle of the umbrella tree but, as they’ve grown bigger, they seem to have stopped doing that. The smaller plants got the plastic containers put over them as cloche, but some of the cats figure out how to knock those off – and the pots under them. The larger jade trees got various things stuck into the soil to both support their stems, which were being pushed over by cats sitting in the middle of the pots, and to make things difficult for the cats to get in.

The pot the avocado were growing in is a large double-layer pot. The inner pot holds the soil while the outer pot has a reservoir for water, so the roots can be watered from below. In one corner is a triangular piece that holds a float in place, and covered the opening where water is poured into the base.

This pot is on a shelf by the dining room window, along with a number of other plants. Eventually, though, we were down to just one other plant on the shelf; another jade tree. To stop the digging, we tried things like putting duct tape, sticky side up, over the dirt. The jade tree got a plastic collar, which kept getting knocked out of place, so we tried wrapping it with plastic, and even sticking in dozens of bamboo skewers in all directions, to dissuade the digging. Nothing worked for long. We even ended up putting the pot on top of an upturned bucket to raise it higher above the window ledge that cats like to lie on, but Cabbages is very determined, and still managed to get in to dig!

The remaining two avocados got a shield of hardware cloth around the perimeter of the soil. That worked for a while, until Cabbages discovered she could just jump over the top. We ended up putting a box over the top, but it was too late for the avocado. We just needed to stop her from making a mess. When she started digging, she throws dirt everywhere! She knows not to try for it while we’re around, too, so we’d find the mess in the morning, of after we’d been outside for a few hours.

Well, she still managed to get the box off the top and get into the dirt again. She also got into the jade tree again. So today, my daughters got the pot outside. The remains of the avocado were removed, and the jade tree was transplanted into the bigger pot. The hardware cloth got wrapped around it again, and the extra piece I had left from the roll got folded over the top as a cover. Then it went back to the shelf at the dining room window.

This evening, I went into the dining room only to find David lounging on the table – they are not allowed on the dining table – so at first I missed it. My husband was coming in behind me and saw it right away. The hardware cloth that was on top was gone, the rest was askew, and there was dirt, everywhere.

I was not a happy camper!

This time, it looked like Cabbages got under the mesh. The cover for the water reservoir was knocked completely off, too. We found the wire mesh that had been on top, rolled up under the dining table, with Tissue curled up inside. !!

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

The hardware cloth got placed around the jade tree again, but instead of putting it on the inside of the put and pushing it into the soil, it was jammed between the inner and outer pots. Unfortunately, it wasn’t long enough anymore, so the piece that had been over the top was squeezed in, too. Then, we got the remains of a roll of 1 inch wire mesh and used that to create a top.

The wire mesh on the sides has been pushed down quite far between the two layers of pots, so there’s no way a cat is getting under it or lifting it out. The 1 inch mesh on the top is wider than paws, so if a cat tries to jump on top, it will hold the weight, but little paws will tend to slip through, which will be a deterrent.

The down sides are, we can no longer use the opening in the corner to water into the bottom of the reservoir, and watering from the top is going to be a challenge! We also can’t reach the plant to tend it. The top is held in place with a couple of twist ties, but the wire ends along some edges were also bent inwards, to help hold it in place. It can be taken off, but it’ll be a pain in the butt.

It should, however, finally be safe from Cabbages and her digging!

This poor plant!

The Re-Farmer

Yes, I got kitten pictures for you!

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I just couldn’t let a day go buy without kitten pictures, could I?

Well, yes, I could, but I don’t want to. :-)

Our scorcher of a day was finally cooled down by a lovely rainfall – storms will once again go right past us, it looks like – so no chance to make use of the new mower.

*sadness*

;-)

So I decided it was a good time to once again do some practice carving on the spoon blank that came with my carving kit.

Which meant spending lots of time with adorable little furballs with sharp, sharp claws.

They were determined to use me as a bed, after using me as a jungle gym.

Even Beep Beep got in on the action, clambering over her babies, then lying on her back, going from laying with her head in my elbow to licking my nose enthusiastically! :-D

Apparently, I tasted good today, because all the kittens were after my arms and fingers. It might have something to do with the ham I had with lunch before coming downstairs.

It was pretty rough and tumble, with Beep Beep moving around and pushing her own kittens around before giving up and moving on.

Eventually, a daughter was able to come and rescue me.

Big Rig REALLY liked that glove.

Yes, one is missing. Nicco snuggled with Beep Beep on another chair until Beep Beep took off.

Once the kittens were extricated, I went back to trying to carve, only to have them return. Which was okay. I can continue to carve with a couple of kittens on the table in front of me.

Yeah, my arm is a mess! When Beep Beep was shifting around, she pushed Big Rig off my arm. She grabbed my arm as she fell and was dangling there for a while before she was able to scramble up.

Yes, it is all cleaned up and treated with antibiotic cream.

Saffron is just adorable! Turmeric was content on my lap for a while.

It didn’t last, of course.

They certainly do make things interesting!!

I did, at least, get some progress on that spoon! :-D

Unfortunately, there was other damage.

From the other cats.

At one point, I had two kittens in my arms and three on my head and shoulders, when we heard a loud crash above us. The three kittens exploded off my shoulders to the ground. The two in my arms, thankfully, didn’t panic like that.

Which reminds me. I need to get my husband to check my shoulders for wounds.

Later, as my daughters were on their way from the second floor to rescue me, they found the cause.

One of the cats had knocked over a plant pot with a substantial jade tree in it.

I am not impressed.

After seeing how the jade tree recovered after our move, however, I would not be surprised to see now branches and leaves growing out of that stem.

Assuming the cats don’t destroy it completely, before then. :-(

The Re-Farmer

Transplants finally indoors… mostly

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So most of the indoor plants that I transplanted have been sitting outside all this time. The only ones that came inside where ones that I could hang up.

20190701.trasplanting.in.done

The ivy went back to the living room, but is now in the middle, with the two types of ivy strung out onto hooks on either side. One container of little succulents went to hang at the kitchen window, where I hope they will get better light. Another bowl of succulents that the cats just loved to try and eat is now hanging in the dining room.

All of these are on hooks that were already up when we moved in, which has worked out rather well.

Inside the house was one big jade tree that did not need to be transplanted, but also an odd collection of succulents in a large planter that used to have our avocado tree. Half of that got broken off during the move, then the last of it just up and died. I think it was simply too cold in the house for it. So what I ended up doing was sticking succulent leaves that the cats kept knocking off into the dirt, and most of them took. Meanwhile, I started two more avocado seeds, and they have been ready to transplant for a while now.

Yard work has been put on hold again. Yesterday, I didn’t get back to it because we had hours of wonderful, glorious rain. It came down hard enough to take out our internet at one point, but none of us complained!

Today, we were back to the heat. So I focused on getting the indoor plants taken care of.

I started by removing the succulents from the pot I needed for the avocado pits. I realized I needed potting soil for them, though. It seems weird to be buying soil when we have so much of it outside, so I checked the compost pile.

No go. It’s got too many sticks and crud in the older stuff for it to be useful, and the areas we’ve been adding to aren’t composted well enough, yet.

So I ended up digging out an old plastic colander that was hanging behind the wood stove in the old kitchen (it used to be ours, from when we last moved out of province) and ended up using it to sift garden soil into a bucket. The garden soil is not only very rocky, but filled with all sorts of grass, clover, and weeds, so I wanted get that out. I was being eaten alive by mosquitoes as I did it, though.

While working on transplanting the avocados, I ended up going out for more soil, this time from a planter my mom made out of an old cream separator basin. I’ve left it where it was, so the stump it was sitting on would be more visible.

This was in the full sun, so while I wasn’t being eaten by mosquitoes, I was instead dripping sweat into my glasses!

Later, I decided to get more, this time digging out a huge stainless steel colander we no longer use in the kitchen, that fits nicely over a 5 gallon bucket. I used bug repellent and tried getting soil from the garden again. This time, however, I found the tiniest of red ants in the bucket, so I went back to the old planter.

I only needed a relatively small amount of soil, so it didn’t take long. I brought the whole bucket inside and transplanted a jade tree, then started bringing plants in from outside.

As I walked past the bucket, arms full of aloe vera, I found the bucket staring at me.

Fenrir had jumped in and was just sitting in the dirt, looking at me!

All the cats were really interested in what I was doing!

In the end, I got most of the plants outside, in. It did mean changing things up quite a bit.

I tried putting the big aloe back where it was in the dining room, but it’s just too big. Not only were the branches getting hung up in my daughter’s orchids and taking up space needed for other pots, it’s tall enough that it even gets in the way of the plant hanging above!

The big planter with the avocados in it had been where the huge jade tree is in the above photo, but I moved it to the other table, thinking I’d be able to get more around it.

This works a bit better, but my goodness, that aloe is difficult to move. It’s not just the size or weight of the pot; its leaves are very stabby!!! And they have teeth!

The bigger pot with the avocado was heavier, but much easier to move! Even with water sloshing around.

The flags around the edges are to keep the cats out.

This pot is self watering, with an inner pot that absorbs water from the bottom, and the outer pot gets filled when the float shows it’s getting low.

As you can see, it was pretty full of water when I moved it.

The plant hanging above it is the one the cats like to try and eat. It is doing very well, now that it’s hung up!!

I don’t know that the avocado are going to make it, though. While the root systems were very strong, when the pits split, they took up more space. The little glass jars I was using to sprout them are slightly narrower at the top. I ended up having to split the pits apart to pull them out, one half at a time, place them back together, then stick them in the soil.

It looks so weird to have this huge pot and just a couple of sprouting stems in the dirt! LOL

If they do survive, this should be a better location for them. There is a heat vent in between the shelves, and it’s right at the end of one shelf. It should get more heat in the winter than in the previous location.

This jade tree is doing so very well! Can you believe, this was started from broken leaves from the original tree?

This group of succulents used to be part of a tiny succulent “garden” my daughter got, years ago. After the move, they weren’t getting enough light where we had it, so they were getting very long and leggy. These are from our attempts to save them, by rooting leaves.

They don’t seem to have liked being outside.

I think I’m going to have to put stakes around this pot, too – I’ve already had to chase DahBoy out of it! The cats had gotten spoiled by having access to the tops of these shelves after the plants got moved outside.

Unfortunately, we still have 3 pots with aloe vera outside, and I have no idea where to put them. Other windows are either too dark for plants, or have other things around them, with no space for plant pots.

I’m thinking we need to put more hangers up.

And maybe, I should stop propagating the succulents. I still have a bunch that need to be potted!

The Re-Farmer