Little Critter Friends

June 9, 2018June 9, 2018 / Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

I thought I got some pictures of how the area near the firepit looks, after my daughters raked, but apparently, I didn’t.

So, instead, I stole a couple of pictures my older daughter took. :-D

While they were raking, they got visited by two wood frogs. This one, and one that jumped right into a downspout. I neglected to steal her pictures of a blurry frog butt in a tunnel. ;-)

She also managed to get a good picture of one of these guys…

They have a distinctively shrimp-like body, and are really big! They are also hard to get pictures of, they move so much. They just LOVE this lilac bush by the house. They are Snowberry Clearwing Moths, also called hummingbird moths. They do sound like hummingbirds, and are almost as big as the one variety of hummingbirds we have in our area.

Meanwhile, I added the bird seed I found to the feeder and stand we’ve put near the living room window. The birds are just starting to discover it, and I hope to get photos, soon. I also saw a deer last night, just quickly passing through our yard. All I managed was one blurry photo before it ran off. Good to know they are still willing to come by, even with all the yard activity these days. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Lilacs and Lenses

June 8, 2018 / Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

A bit of an experiment for the day.

Most of the photos I take are done with my phone’s camera; for the most part, I leave the DSLR on the tripod at the living room window, with our 70-300mm lens on it, to take pictures of the deer and birds. Things are quiet out there this time of year, so it’s been sitting idle.

This morning, I decided to grab it and get some flower photos. I put on an 18-55mm lens, then took a few more shots with the 70-300mm lens back on.

Much to my surprise, there is quite a noticeable difference in the pictures, with the big lens looking much better. Part of the surprise is that, with the big lens, I had to step quite far back from the subject, just for the camera to be able to focus (another time, I’ll break out the macro lens). My hands tend to shake, which can really affect photos taken with a bigger lens. So I fully expected the photos with the smaller lens to be clearer.

Here is a comparison. Aside from resizing the photos and adding the text and frame, they are untouched. No post processing.

This one was taken with the 18-55mm lens.

It’s certainly a pretty photo (that lilac tree is just a mass of flowers right now!). I would have preferred crisper focus; that softness was not deliberate, but the result of my hand shake. Still, the softness is nice, too.

Here is the one taken with the 70-300mm lens.

The focal points are much sharper. Even though I had to stand further back and zoom in more to get photos, it was unaffected by my hand shake. The 70-300mm is a newer, faster, lens than the 18-55mm that we have.

I’m happy with both, but it was interesting to see the differences.

The Re-Farmer

Yard in Bloom

June 6, 2018June 6, 2018 / Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

With all the yard work we’ve been doing over the past while, I’ve been really appreciating all the blooms.

The ornamental apple trees and plums are long since finished blooming, but now we have all sorts of flowers, scenting the air!

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Right by the sun room door is this white rose. There are others in the flower garden, but they are not as prolific as this one is!

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After clearing away the vines that had climbed up the lilacs by the people gate, I could finally see that they were blooming! I’m sure my mother told me, at some point, that these were white lilacs. Not that I can remember one way or the other! So it was a nice surprise. :-)

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This is the huge lilac bush with teeny, tiny leaves and flowers, that I’d cleared a maple tree out of, earlier. I’ll need to go back to this garden and finish cleaning and clearing it. It, too, is inundated with vines! There are regular lilac bushes at the other end of this flower garden.

This is also technically the “front yard”, and the door in the middle of this side of the house is the front door. Which isn’t used. In fact, I still haven’t been able to open the screen door; it’s still stuck at the base, and I don’t want to force it and break something.

If all goes as planned, though, that is the door the ramp we hope to have added will be installed at. Depending on the dimensions, it may be necessary to remove this garden.

The post in the foreground had a bird feeder on it. I took it off after I turned away from pruning a branch and smacked right into it with my glasses, knocking them askew.

Thankfully, the base was designed to lift right off. It needs to be cleaned up and repaired, anyhow. :-)

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In the big flower garden, off the old kitchen, is this honeysuckle bush, in full bloom! When talking to my mother about clearing this garden, one of the things she requested as to save this bush. It was being choked out by the invasive undergrowth!

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I can see why she wants to keep it! :-)

The Re-Farmer

An Awesome Day, and growth explosion

May 27, 2018May 27, 2018 / Re-Farmer / 1 Comment

Today, all four of us made it into the city for a family get together. It made for a very long and painful day for my husband, but he hasn’t seen his sister in 4 years. She flies home soon, so he wasn’t about to miss this chance. It was so great to see everyone and spend time with them. It is a rare thing for everyone to be together at the same time, these days.

With all this wonderful rain we’ve been having, it’s just fantastic to see everything so GREEN, everywhere. Even the drive into the city looked completely different.

A short time ago, the trees were just showing green leaves, while everything else looked like the dead growth from last year that you can still see in the ditch. Now, it’s like the trees all just exploded in green.

(Also, I’m amused by the fact that there is a reflection of me driving, hovering in the sky. :-D )

When we got home, we found all sorts of cats had missed our company!

The inside cats were very curious about Nasty Crime boy.

It was a shared curiosity! :-D

I’m loving the long daylight hours, too. Though we didn’t get home until past 8pm, there was still plenty of light, so I did a quick walk around the yard to see how things were.

The crab apple trees north of the spruce grove are finally blooming. My sister and her husband pruned them back quite heavily last summer, but I can see that there are some dead branches that will need to be cut away. These might have died off over the winter.

A few days ago, these linden leaves were just barely new leaf buds!

I had a chance to ask my mother about the linden tree, because it looks so different than I remember it. So much so that, until the leaves unfurled, it looked like two different trees! She told me that she used to cut back the suckers every year, but no one continued that after she went to the senior’s centre she now lives in. That would explain why they look so different. The growth at the base – where these leaves are – is only about 4-5 years old, whereas the trunk in the middle is more like 30-35 years old.

These lilies had been showing in green clusters but after the rain, they shot up several inches and threw out flower stocks and buds virtually overnight!

Rolando Moon approves.

I also did a basement check this evening, and the old part basement is bone dry, though there is some water in the sump pump reservoir. Well below the level of the float.

We still need to get the old hot water tank out of there. It’s much bigger and heavier than modern ones!

I was just thinking, as I wrote this, how I can’t remember the last time the old part basement was still dry this far into spring, and I remembered one year when it flooded. This had to have happened before the new part was built, so I was probably about 6 years old, give or take a year or two. I remember going part way down the stairs to see. The water was a couple of feet deep – deep enough to cover several steps – and perfectly clean and clear.

Then, as I was looking, a frog went swimming past the bottom of the stairs!

I will never forget that frog! :-D

I hadn’t thought of that in years!

Funny how things trigger old memories of growing up in this house. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Redwing Blackbird

May 23, 2018 / Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

For the past few days, we haven’t been putting anything out at the feeding station; there was no point in continuing to put out deer feed this time of year, so I didn’t bother buying more when we ran out. When next we buy seeds, I hope to get mixed bird seed, and have a bird feeder out the living room window to put it in. :-)

There are still enough seeds left on the ground to attract birds, and today, I got photos of a male redwing blackbird (the females look VERY different).

This particular bird has very little of the red showing through its wing. Perhaps it is transitioning from juvenile to adult?

The red is certainly there, though under black feathers.

I really wasn’t expecting to see them in our yard, since they prefer wet and marshy areas.

Not that there are much of those right now.

I’ve read in the news today that there are 3 fires threatening some communities to the west of us. Not close enough for us to see any smoke.

We also got weather alerts today, for the heat. Though our local temperature is at “only” 19C, the next town is at 29C. I wish I knew where our local weather readings are coming from, because they seem to be on the low side. I’d like to see the weather station and how it’s situated. The station in the next town over is a class A station; about as perfectly situated as a weather station can be.

Stating tonight and through to Friday, there are possible thunderstorms but all for the southern and western parts of the province. They will likely miss us, though I hope we at least get rain. Temperatures are predicted to hit 23-25C, with humidexes of 31-35C.

From the weather alert;

Residents of and visitors to the above mentioned regions are advised to take the following precautions to protect themselves, their families and their neighbours;

drink plenty of water even before you feel thirsty and stay in a cool place.
reduce your heat risk. Schedule outdoor activities during the coolest parts of the day.
the risks are greater for young children, pregnant women, older adults, people with chronic illnesses and people working or exercising outdoors.
Outdoor workers should take regularly scheduled breaks in a cool place.

And that is why we aren’t doing yard work during the day!

I think we might want to move the bird bath over to the East side of the house, too, once we clean it up.

The Re-Farmer

Flower Garden Progress: cardboard layer

May 23, 2018 / Re-Farmer / 8 Comments

The ornamental apples in the flower garden are very enthusiastically blooming right now!

While working under it last night, I could hear a constant hum of bees over my head!

I worked on layering cardboard onto the cleaned out flower garden for as long as I had light. Most of the time was spent taking tape off the boxes.

That’s one way to use up all those boxes from moving!

I was able to clear out most of the boxes in the Old Kitchen that my sister gave me to pack up my parents’ stuff before the movers arrived. I kept the strongest ones for packing the books and whatnot that are in the sun room when we finally get to it. Then we started on our own moving boxes. Getting those up the stairs from the new part basement was surprisingly dangerous. We have to close the door behind us because it’s not safe for our cats to go down there until we start cleaning the basements out. The door opens inward, over the steps. There’s just no good way to open a door from a steep set of stairs while clutching a bunch of boxes that are busily working on sliding out of your grip and falling down the stairs! :-D

At least the stairs are not as steep or skinny as the ones to the old part basement!

I could really tell which boxes were ones we packed, and which the movers packed. I was reminded, again, of what a terrible job they did. :-( The ones packed by the movers were a lot easier to remove the tape from, though, since there was hardly any, and they didn’t make any effort to make sure it stuck to the cardboard. :-/

So this is what the flower garden looked like last night.

When I ran out of boxes again, I just stopped. By the time I brought up more and removed the tape, it would have been full dark.

The temperatures were just perfect, though. :-D

I actually stayed out after taking this picture and started spraying the cardboard with water, more to add the weight of water, just in case a wind picked up. The hose we were using was too short, so I found a much longer one in the garden shed (using a flashlight) and set that up.

It wasn’t until hours later that I remembered that there is another tap on the other side of the Old Kitchen. Without the sun room to go around, that tap is much closer to the garden.

Oops. :-D

I brought up more boxes this morning – I even managed to bring up more than I actually needed. Which is good. More boxes available to pack up the sun room and the Old Kitchen.

This is what it looked like this morning, after I finished layering the cardboard.

Next thing to do was saturate the cardboard.

I’d grabbed a lawn sprinkler from the garden shed last night, only to have 3 others come with it. Turns out they were tied together. This morning, I went through them to try and figure out which was the least broken and hooked it up.

The adjustment was jammed in one position, so I took advantage of that and started from close to the house and left it there a while. It didn’t quite reach the opposite side, plus there were voids here and there from the bushes and the clothes line platform. After a while, I moved it to the other side.

There were still some voids, but I got more coverage in more areas missed.

After some fighting with the knob, I did eventually get the sprinkler on the “full” setting, so I could put it in the middle.

I left it there for maybe half an hour, so the whole thing got probably an hour or more of watering.

It wasn’t enough, but things were starting to heat up fast.

I didn’t get pictures yet, but after clearing out the hose, I started moving over the flax straw that was used to cover the septic tank cover for the winter, plus the straw that was in front of the cat house by the old kitchen, then started working on one of the piles of leaves my daughters had left by the garden for me.

For all the soaking it got, by the time I stopped, the cardboard was already starting to dry in many spots!

After I finish covering the cardboard, I will set up the sprinkler and have it run for the night, to make sure everything it thoroughly saturated. Well. At least as much as the sprinkler can reach.

This is some of what I’d pulled out of the flower garden while using the weed trimmer.

No wonder the rake kept catching on things.

I’d made the mistake, yesterday, of doing a bit of raking without gloves. This was the result. :-(

I have learned that this is a very bad place for an open wound. It seems everything I try to handle with my left hand (being left handed, that’s most things) hits it.

Nothing a bit of aloe vera and open air can’t handle. :-)

It’s not even 11am yet, and already we’re at 16C, with a “real feel” of 21C. Our high is supposed to be 23C today.

No more yard work today until things cool down.

Tomorrow is supposed to be even hotter, with a possible thunderstorm. Which works out, since my husband has medical appointments both today and tomorrow.

While working on the garden and cleaning up today, I couldn’t help but notice all sorts of areas that we need to get into, and think; that job is going to be SO much easier, now that we have a working weed trimmer! :-D Having the right tools makes all the difference!

The Re-Farmer

We… don’t have rain. :-(

May 18, 2018May 18, 2018 / Re-Farmer / 3 Comments

So much for weather forecasts.

For all the lower temperatures and overcast skies, and forecasts of 80% chance for rain, there has been none today. Going into town with another errand, my daughter and I played a bit of Pokemon Go. In the game, which is linked to local weather in some way, showed pouring rain on our maps. In the real world, there wasn’t a drop.

Once home again, I did a quick check around the yard and garden area. After talking to my mother yesterday, I learned that the trees in the flower garden are not cherry trees, after all, but ornamental apple trees. The cherry trees, she tells me, are in the spruce grove, behind where the wood pile used to be. No sign of blossoms there, yet. I am not sure why edible cherries would be planted among spruce trees, while ornamental (I assume that means they don’t produce anything edible) apples are planted next to the house.

The apple trees in the flower garden are leafing and budding up nicely, too. The row of apples (all varieties of crab apples, as I recall) are barely in leaf.

Planted on the north side of the spruce grove, they wouldn’t have anywhere near as much sun as the ones in the flower garden, which is the most likely reason why they are so much slower to revive for the season.

On the far side of the garden, along the fence line, the lilac border is showing flower buds already on some bushes. I was looking for a sign of the chokecherry tree that used to be there. The lilac border runs the entire length of the fence line now, but when I was a child, it was only about half the distance, and the chokecherry tree was at the end of the row, about the middle of the length of the garden at the time. I may have found it, but can’t be sure, as it’s behind lilac bushes. The tree I saw that might be it also seems to be dead; likely the chokecherry tree was choked out by the lilacs. :-( I will see if I can confirm that with my mother one of these days.

This is part of a row of what appears to be raspberry canes, though it’s hard to identify them among the scrub and without any leaf buds to be seen. On one side, it’s almost right up against a row of spruces. On the other, I can see that it was plowed within inches of the stems. They would be getting light only in the early hours of the morning, now that the sun is rising so much farther to the north than it did in the winter. By about 9 or 10 am, they would be in shade until sunrise. We’ll see what raspberries we get this year, if any. Most varieties of raspberries have canes that produce in the second year, before dying back. At that point, the spent canes should be cut away, but that is something my parents never did, as far as I can recall; they just let them be until it was decided to transplant them. I remember when they were planted on the far side of the garden, beyond where a row of trees is now planted. At the height of raspberry season, we could pick several ice cream pails’ worth of berries in the morning, then come back by evening and have more ripened berries to pick. On our list of things we eventually want to plant are three different varieties of raspberries, each with a different harvesting period, so we could have raspberries from July through September.

Whenever that happens, we will be sure to plant them somewhere that actually gets full sun.

The Re-Farmer

We got rain!

May 17, 2018May 17, 2018 / Re-Farmer / 1 Comment

A chilly day today – enough that we actually turned the furnace back up again – but that’s okay. We got rain!

Not much, mind you, and I never actually saw it rain, but things are damp out there, which is so good to see. Tomorrow, we’re supposed to get more. I certainly hope we do! As nice as what we got today was, it’s no where near enough, though we are still supposed to get more now and again, throughout the night.

We saw a new bird this morning. I just barely got a few photos before it took off.

An American Goldfinch. I’ve seen them at my sister’s bird feeder, and was hoping they would show up in our area, too. Just the one, so far, but at least I know we can expect to see more of them.

Though we did get rain today, there is still a burn ban, and we haven’t done a burn in ages, so our trip to the dump today included stuff that would normally go into the burn barrel. We also got another load of paint out of the garage. One more trip should clear out the last of what’s there right now.

After going to the dump, my daughter and I went into town for an errand, taking advantage of the trip to play some Pokemon Go. Which meant our regular stop at a Pokegym at the beach. The lake was so choppy in the wind, I had to go and get pictures.

The town has finished grooming the beach. It all looks like a giant Zen garden right now. :-D

Definitely not boating conditions! The water is still very cold, and the wind off of the lake was pretty chill. Neither of us had jackets, so we didn’t stay long!

With the chill and the damp, this evening sounds like a good time to sit with a hot cup of tea and catch up on some crochet. :-D

The Re-Farmer

Getting Things Done

May 16, 2018May 16, 2018 / Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

Today turned out to be a perfect day for working outside. A bit on the cool side, and not too sunny. It would have been nice of those clouds brought some rain, but it did mean we got a lot done outside. Best of all, my husband was actually up to going outside with his walker, and walk up and down the driveway a few times, then just sit outside and enjoy the day. There used to be a bench under the kitchen window that my late brother had built for my dad to sit and enjoy some time outside, but it is among those things that disappeared after my dad died. At some point, we’ll replace it with another bench. It’s a perfect spot to sit and relax.

The biggest accomplishment in the yardwork today is YAY! we finally got that pile of wood in the garden cleaned up. It is DONE.

While taking loads of broken down wood to the fire pit area with the wheelbarrow, I paused to get some photos of the blooming plum trees.

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On the one hand, it was really cool to see them starting to bloom.

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On the other, it was a bit disheartening to see how few blossoms there were. Just a few sparse branches spread over several trees.

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After we finished with the wood pile in the garden, we went back to clearing up around the yard. Soon, I hope to start going into these trees, and the maple grove behind them, clearing up the fallen branches, cutting away the dead wood that hasn’t fallen yet, and taking down some dead trees.

The girls worked their way around to the three big maple trees by the fire pit. These are the ones where I finally wrested away an old awning that had been left under them for some 20 years. Plus the remains of a chair. As they raked around the bases of the trees, they found three old license plates (one of them had stickers for 1981 and 1982 on it!) and a flat plastic thing that looked a bit like the bases in baseball, except for the hole and part of a pipe still attached, and the big MAC logo. They were buried under several inches of soil; composted leaves, really.

I finally got around to working on the flower garden by the old kitchen. The girls had started to rake around the outside of the fence line, and I took the opportunity to start cutting away some of the things that have started to grow on the outside of the fence. I got the dead asparagus foliage cleared away, but there is no sign of new asparagus growing under it.

I forgot to get a picture of my find under the leaves inside the flower garden. A wooden toy rocking horse, completely buried. I’m guessing it was on the bench on the platform for the clothes line and fell, and no one noticed. I ended up having to prune quite a few low hanging branches on the big cherry tree, just to be able to get under it. I could see that it had been pruned back to where I was cutting already, but not recently.

Cleaning that garden up is going to be a huge job. It hasn’t been tending in so many years, making it hard to rake. Plus, there’s some sort of vine that seems to be spreading, and I’m finding it as the rake gets caught on it. The ground is rock hard. Getting out that invasive plant my mom asked me to get rid of is not going to be easy.

It was good to get so much work done today, but my goodness, there is so much more to do.

Well, that’s what my mom asked us to live her to take care of for her! :-)

Now to go pick the burrs out of my clothes before putting them in the laundry… :-D

The Re-Farmer

There be Deer here

May 14, 2018 / Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

It seems that putting the feed out in the evening, instead of the morning, has been a good idea. Three deer came by, about half an hour after I put the feed out, when none at all showed up during the day. Which means they had plenty to eat, since the birds didn’t get a chance to eat it all, first! :-D

I think it’s the same trio that showed up last time, but I’d have to compare photos to be sure.

Just look at those little baby antlers! :-D

This one has such a loooong smooth face.

The fur on all of them was looking pretty rough.

This one had gone over to the edge of the trees and started nibbling on the new leaves on the wild roses, but it kept getting distracted. Then its fur got all puffed out as it kept staring in different areas.

The other two starting checking out the distraction, too.

Eventually, the source of their agitation emerged…

It was funny to see Nasty Crime Boy start crouching down in stalking position while staring down the deer!

When the deer showed up, I just started taking as many shots as quickly as I could, hoping I’d get at least a few good ones. I ended up taking over 100 pictures in the short time they were here. I got several of this deer making funny faces like this, with this one being the clearest. The deer was chewing on something that seemed to be giving it a hard time, resulting in photos that look like it’s having a good laugh!

There was the one deer with the long, smooth face. Then there is this one, with the lumpy, bumpy face.

Too cute!

The Re-Farmer

The Re-Farmer

Sometimes, you need to go back, to go forward.

nature photography

Little Critter Friends

Lilacs and Lenses

Yard in Bloom

An Awesome Day, and growth explosion

Redwing Blackbird

Flower Garden Progress: cardboard layer

We… don’t have rain. :-(

We got rain!

Getting Things Done

There be Deer here

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