I was able to zoom in to get a shot of Brussel and Sprout, sharing the tray under the water shelter. When I first came out this morning, I saw only about a 14 cats, but more kept showing up, including these two. I think I counted 22 in total, with some of them skulking around in the distance, waiting for me to leave the food area.
While doing my evening rounds, I took the winter mulch, which was corn stalks, off the asparagus and sunchoke beds. There is still no sign of the sunchokes or the asparagus, but…
… the four strawberry plants that share the asparagus bed were looking great! I wasn’t sure if they’d survive the winter. Not only did they survive, but they are looking better now than they did at the end of the season, last year! I’m hoping they’ll put out more runners this year, that we’ll transplant elsewhere. Strawberries are among the plants we want to have a lot of. They’re so incredibly expensive in the grocery stores!
Of course, I had to check on the crocuses and found this little guy.
The very first yellow crocus! There are a lot of purple ones blooming this morning, and a lot of white buds showing up, but still just the one yellow buds visible.
I should make a point of checking the bed I inoculated with morel spawn more often. May is the time of year they usually fruit. It would be cool if the giant puff balls emerged, too, but if they do, it’ll be later in the season.
It’s a good thing today is Sunday, which I try to keep as a day of rest. I didn’t do a lot when reclaiming the bed to plant poppies yesterday, but it was enough to increase the pain levels. It’s turning out to be a really windy day, too. So, tomorrow will be my day to really get into the manual labour needed in the old kitchen garden. Hopefully, at the very least, the winds will die down!
I had a HUGE and wonderful surprise yesterday evening!
Now that things are nicer outside, I’ve been able to do more extended evening rounds after feeding the outside cats for the night. My first surprise came as I was putting kibble out in the sun room. The Phantom was there, as usual, and I’ve been able to sneak some pets while she eats. I tried again, and she actually let me pet her more instead of running away! She was quite enjoying them until I left to her finish eating and continued me rounds.
I was just finishing up and about to come inside, when I saw Broccoli had finally come over to eat, and was on the cat house roof.
So, while she had her back to me, I decided to try and sneak a pet.
Not only did she not run away when she realized I was petting her, but she wanted more! She was absolutely all over, rolling around and pushing against my hands, wanting more pets. This is a cat we’ve been trying to socialize for more than two years, with no progress, and suddenly, BAM!
But would it happen again?
This morning, she came out for food later again, and much of the kibble on the cat house roof was gone, but there was still enough for her nibble. When I came over, she happily accepted pets again!
She was also clearly very, very hungry, so I didn’t bother her too much.
She is such a beauty!
She is also very skinny and bony.
Yesterday, I tried to touch her belly, to see if she was nursing, but I couldn’t tell. Yes, I could feel nip, but none seemed more prominent than the others. Without actually seeing her belly, though, I can’t say for sure. Given the time of year, it would not surprise me if she lost a litter. I don’t know. I’m happy to see her eating well, though, because this girl needs meat on her bones!
This girl, however, is fine.
Marlee is a solid slab of compact muscle!
While I’m sitting at my computer in the evenings, she comes over and demands I reach down to pet her, but she will NOT let me pick her up. She’s also been spending more time on my bed, even with other cats beside her. There’s quite the difference, though. Where the other cats are relaxed and tend to turn into big puddles on the soft, comfy bed, she is a tight little ball, with everything tucked in, and looking very alert, even when she’s asleep. She’s still got those survival habits in place, that’s for sure. She still won’t leave the room. I did try taking her with me into the living room while I was working on potting things up, but she just hunkered down at the barrier door and wouldn’t move until I opened it, and then she went right to my bedroom door, wanting back in.
I’m back from doing the Costco shopping today, but before I post about that painful trip, here’s some good news!
While doing my rounds, I found new growth in various places!
There are more purple crocuses up and blooming, plus more white crocus buds are up.
There is no sign of the muscari/grape hyacinth yet, but I did have a wonderful surprise nearby.
Okay, I know they’re hard to see, but there are at least 14 tulips coming up here! Before resizing the photo to post here, I looked at it at full size to try and find them all. Some of the green is blades of grass, but I spotted the leaves of a few tulip plants piercing through the dried leaves above them. I’ll have to keep an eye on those. I remember last year, seeing some of them getting taller, but not able to break through the leaves they’d grown through, so they were all squished together. Once they get taller, and I know where not to step, I’ll go in and pull the dead leaves off, so they can spread out and grow properly.
I had another pleasant surprise in the old kitchen garden, too.
We have one Egyptian walking onion that’s been trying to grow every year since we moved here. Last year, it actually survived long enough to form bulbils. After building a new, little raised bed, I took those bulbils and planted them in front. Here, you can see two of them have sprouted! There were several more, too. I can’t remember how many were planted, but I’m pretty stoked that they survived the winter and are now emerging through the mulch. I didn’t see if the “parent” onion has started to emerge, but think I might have seen, maybe, possibly, leaves from one of the flower bulbs my daughter planted along the edge of this garden. Last year, some leaves came up, but none bloomed. There’s another spot, at one end, where she planted daffodils which did bloom last year but, so far, no sign of them.
I did also check the carrots, and there are no sprouts that I could see, but I was just peaking under the edges of the plastic and couldn’t see very far in. I need to put a priority on building covers for those beds, as the current set up is very temporary, and not as functional.
We’ve got highs of 9C/48F predicted for today and tomorrow, with a bit of rain now and then. After that, we’re supposed to warm up a bit more and have sun for at least 5 days. Great weather to get work done out there!
But maybe not today. City trips three days in a row has sucked all the energy out of me! Right now, I just want to crawl into bed and sleep for a week.
This morning, we had new weather warnings – this time for fog!
This is taken through my bedroom window, and the phone camera automatically cleans up the image, so the visibility was actually for less than this. We had no wind, so it hung around until past 10 or so, and as I write this, it’s nice and clear. In fact, I’m seriously considering making another trip to the city. Not for the Costco shopping. That trip is going to be big enough, I’ll wait for my husband’s private insurance disability payment to come in, but the international grocery store we try to go to regularly has a case lot sale starting today. There are a few things we find only in this store (I’m not willing to drive around the city to find other stores that might carry them), so it would work out. However, it would also mean making trips to the city, two days in a row, plus yesterday’s trip to the smaller city.
We shall see.
Meanwhile, I had a bit of a surprise when I headed out to do the morning rounds.
We had several cats trapped in the sun room. The wind had blown the outer door closed. Since we keep the pair of doors just barely open for the cats to squeeze in, but still keep the weather out, we couldn’t tell when checking through the bathroom window that it was closed.
They did have food and water, but the litter box that used to be in there is in the cat house now.
Yeah. I could tell when I walked in!
The cats that were stuck outside were very hungry! The food trays outside get emptied a lot faster than the sun room trays that they could no longer access. I still counted only about a dozen or so cats, including Sad Face, skulking away.
Considering how high the winds got yesterday, I was rather impressed with how little damage there was. The girls did check repeatedly while I was out yesterday, so this is stuff that happened after I got home. The diverter over the rain barrel was knocked right off, which means the rain barrel was overflowing during the night. The diverter being knocked off isn’t all that uncommon, but this hasn’t happened in a long while…
The metal roofing sheets got blown off the garden shed! You can see the strap that held them in place, dangling off a tree branch.
We tried to fix these permanently to the roof, but just couldn’t do it. Not only is there too much rot, but there are too many odd… things… that were attached to it to cover the leak. It is also no longer flat, which I think is also due to a rotten section.
We really need to get another garden shed built!!!
So those metal sheets were just laid out on top and held in place with the strap. They used to get blown out of place all the time, when winds came from the north, until we overlapped them differently and found a way to get them to lie somewhat flatter. Yesterday’s winds, however, were from the south. Still, that strap didn’t break. It somehow got unhooked.
Well, one of my goals for this year is to finally haul away the junk from around this shed, add it to the pile that will get taken to the dump, and store away stuff that we can use again, like that roll of snow fencing. It’ll be good to get this clear. Once we build the new shed, I will quite happily tear this old thing apart! I’m curious to see what it looks like underneath. At the very least, I know we’ll find a groundhog den. The whole thing is sitting on top of rocks, which I think my daughters will find useful for the forge shelter they’re planning to build. I believe they plan to build mostly rock walls, to keep things as fire proof as possible.
Anyhow.
So getting those metal sheets back on top of the garden shed roof is a multi-person goal for the day. It may leak and be falling apart, but we’re still using it.
Other than that, I found a few small fallen branches, and that’s it! Those first few years of cleaning up dead branches has been paying off! Best of all, the cover on the carrot bed held just fine. I’m quite pleased!
Meanwhile, the 10 day forecast has changed again. We were supposed to warm up, then cool back down again, but now it’s saying we will warm up, and keep getting warmer. We’ve even got a 20C/68F day in the forecast!
My daughters were sweethearts and took care of the outside cats for me again this morning. Which was nice, because I was trapped in my bed by about half a dozen of them at the time!
When I headed out to switch the trail cam memory cards, only Rolando Moon was willing to follow me around!
She would not let me remove the burr she has stuck in her tail, though.
The driveway cam really takes a beating in this location! I need to find something to weigh down the base of the stand.
The camera was fine. Only the solar panel was touching the water. It and the camera are waterproof.
We had some heavy snowfall at times, but we’re also staying mostly above freezing temperatures. Even overnight, we’re just a degree or two below freezing. We’re getting snowfall warnings of up to 20cm/8in by the end of tomorrow, but from the looks of the weather radar, our strange little climate bubble is very much there. The snow is moving through our region but, directly above our area, the clouds part and go around! The southern part of our province is getting hit harder, and a neighbouring province has gotten 30cm/12 in places already. We’re doing just fine where we are. With how warm it is, the paved roads are staying clear. Not that I have any desire to go anywhere! 😄
We have about 3 or 4 more days of temperatures hovering above freezing, and then we start warming up again. About a week from now, the overnight temperatures are supposed to stay consistently above freezing, too. We’ll see how it actually works out!
Meanwhile, I’ve got some herbs to get started in the Jiffy pellets I started hydrating yesterday. 😊
I had a really rough night last night. No, not because of pain levels. Well. Only partly because of pain levels. More because of this little beast!
She even looks malevolent in this shot!
Throughout the night, if she wasn’t trying to dig under my keyboard or under my monitor (I have no idea what she is after under there!), she’s jumping up onto a craft shelf that really can’t support her, or goes right next to my head in bed, clawing at my sheets – I’m truly amazed I don’t have big holes in my sheets, yet! – before snuggling into my arms and cuddling hard up against me during the night.
She’s not the only one. I usually have her on one side, Cheddar jammed up against my back, and one or two more against my legs. It makes it very hard to roll over!
Then there were the cats determined to use the carpet as a scratching post instead of the scratching post, and the ones that do the non stop digging in the litter boxes (that includes Nosencrantz!) and generally waking me up repeatedly during the night. Oh, and of course there is the scratching at the door as various cats want in or out.
So this morning, I fed the outside cats while still in my pajamas, then went back to bed to try and get a least a couple more hours of sleep!
I almost got it, too.
Which is why I was later than usual when leaving to run some errands. We’re running low on dry kibble, and the price difference is enough to warrant going to the nearest Walmart. I left late enough that the post office had reopened after their lunch break, and my backordered seeds were supposed to be in, so that was my first stop.
Alas, my back ordered seeds did turn out to be yet another package of substitute seeds! Instead of the Improved Purple Queen beans I’d ordered, I got another package of Red Swan. That makes three packages, including the one that I’d actually ordered originally! Ah, well. I won’t bother trying to get the Improved Purple Queen again. They’re obviously having supply issues with that one. On the plus side, the seeds did come with a new catalog of garden supplies, including greenhouses. My older daughter is saving up for a hard sided greenhouse, so it will be great to look through what they have available, and get an idea of what it will cost.
I also got a surprise gift in the mail! I opened up the padded envelope to see, but didn’t open the boxes I found until I got home again. Check this out!
The insert says “Human Body Induction Night Light”. Apparently, they will turn on with body heat? Which is weird. Especially since they have motion sensors.
The box of AAA batteries to go with them was also greatly appreciated. We don’t use those a lot, and my last package got knocked behind a shelf by the cats and we have yet to be able to move that shelf to reclaim them.
I am just thrilled with these! Before moving out here, the townhouse we were living in had some dark hallways and corners. We had night lights all over the place, plus in the three bathrooms (gosh, I miss having more than one bathroom!) with motion sensors, so we could use the bathroom at night without blinding ourselves.
For me, the biggest problem is right at my bedroom door. It’s very dark on both sides, and with cats constantly wanting in and out of my room, I’ve accidentally stepped on or kicked way too many of them. I now have one attached to the wall at the inside of my door, and one attached to the basement door on the outside, both at cat height. It wasn’t long at all before they were tested out, too. Perfect!
I do have the decorative fairy lights in the hallway to light our way without having to turn on the main light, I’ve been using the leftover batteries from the trail cams for those. They each take 8 AA batteries. When the batteries are too low for the cameras, there’s still quite a bit of charge in them. Enough for the LED lights. So I’ve been keeping those separate to use in the LED lights. Now that we have the solar camera and just one other working trail cam, we’re not going through as many batteries as we used to. I’m finally working my way through the box I’ve been storing them in! Since they’re already partly used, they drain fairly quickly. With the fairy lights, they just get dimmer and dimmer.
So, I now have one of these new lights set up in our very dark hallway at about knee height. Another is set up in the even darker corner one of the upstairs litter boxes is in. There’s an old mirror we have yet to remove from the opposite wall, so the light reflects and brightens the whole space. Another went on a bathroom wall opposite the mirror for the same reason. We do have a battery operated LED light switch style light in the bathroom, but it’s a pain to change the batteries on it. We have another in the corner where one of the upstairs litter boxes it, too. They’re held to the wall with self adhesive Velcro, which would come off either the wall or the fixture. I ended up buying heavier duty self adhesive Velcro for the bathroom one, which holds in place better, but now it’s harder to remove to change the batteries. Plus, as the batteries die, the light starts to blink on and off like a strobe, so we’ve pretty much stopped using them. With these new lights, the backs slide off easily. The back stays on the wall while the batteries get changed.
The last light went just inside the old basement door, under the light switch. There is no light over the stairs, so right at the door is quite dark. Not a problem when you’re going down, but when going up, it’s hard to see, and where the new motion sensor light is set, it perfectly lights up the door knob as you reach the top of the stairs.
I am just loving these things! I’ve asked for the link, so we can pick up more! There are so many dark spaces in this house. Plus, of course, if we lose power, we will still have these lights. There are strategic places I can think to put more of them, if I can figure out how to attach them. The self adhesive mounting strips won’t work on the old basement walls, for example.
I had another rough morning today. Along with pain and stiff joints, I had almost no balance, bouncing off the walls going to and from the bathroom, so I asked my daughters to feed the outside cats for me again.
Since Easter, when I was no longer on my Lenten fast from sugar and starchy foods, I have still not been eating a lot of either. I might include a potato with my breakfast, or some rice with my supper, and even had a couple of cookies my daughter recently bakes. That’s about it. I think, however, I am going to have to go back. I was mostly pain free during my fast, and certain other… bodily functions, shall we say… had improved. I even had days where I didn’t take any painkillers at all. Granted, some of the pain issues I’m having now may be related to how the temperature fluctuations affect my osteoarthritis, but that can only explain so much. Fatigue is another issue.
A lot of this stuff was so constant, I didn’t even really notice them until they came back after I ended my fast. So it looks like I’m going to need to cut out the sugar and starches, if I want to accomplish the things I need to get done this year. When I finally headed outside, it was because I made myself go. I sure as heck didn’t feel up to it. But, today is working out to be another gorgeous and sunny day, and I had things I wanted to check on.
The first thing I heard when I got outside was a very familiar crunching noise, so I checked the kibble house.
No wonder I was seeing cats cautiously circling around their shelters! Stinky Kitty was moved right in!
This little bugger did not want to leave, either. It’s still too cold to set up the hoses, so I tried to convince it to leave with a long stick. The little bugger just sniffed the end of the stick and kept on eating. He (she?) finally left after I went around the kibble house, banging on the roof and kicking at the back wall.
After that, I did the rest of my rounds. Once more of the snow is gone and the ground it less muddy, we’re going to have to take the wagon or wheel barrow around to pick up all the little branches and garbage that have been blown around. There are a few more garden beds that can be worked on, but I’m physically just not up to it. I kept seeing stuff that I want to get working on, some of which I can start now, but the old bod just can’t handle it today. Which is really, really frustrating. This is stuff that needs to get done, whether I feel like it or not. Especially since the weather forecasts – but just on one of my weather apps – is saying we might get 2-3 cm (about an inch) of snow starting tomorrow, and continuing over the next couple of days. Other apps say it’ll be rain. Either way, not good conditions for the outside work I want to do.
Which I will get into more in a video tour I made yesterday. Unfortunately, every time I try to save the file in a format I can upload, the video gets corrupted. I’m sure the problem is my computer, though, not the software. I’m going to try again today and, if it finally works, I’ll upload and post it.
Then, I’m going to take a nap before I plan to go into town to meet the egg lady for a couple more flats of farm fresh eggs!
As I write this, we are currently at our expected high of 8C/46F. Things will cool down more over the next while, and we might start getting rain today and tomorrow.
We have standing water in all the usual places, like this low spot by the trail cam stand. I really want to dig a trench along that fence line to collect the water more, so it doesn’t spread out like this. All in good time.
The areas around the garage do still have standing water, but it has receded even as the snow melts, which means the ground is actually absorbing it.
After doing my rounds, I headed into town to refill our water jugs for drinking water and pick up a few fresh groceries. I filled the gas tank on my mom’s car, too. When I was last in the city, gas prices were around 160.9 cents per liter. The Esso station in town I had been going to was at 159.9 0 but the Husky station next to the grocery store was at 148.9! Ever since they reopened after getting some work done, they’ve somehow managed to keep their prices a lot lower than everywhere else.
When I got home, I was actually able to drive into the yard and back the car up to the house to unload! First time this year. Much better than trying to drag a wagon filled with heavy water bottles through mud and water.
We can’t quite get to everything yet, though. The outer yard in front of the barn is all snow, still, except for a “river” opened up by water draining from the moat near the garage. The storage warehouse has a lake in front of it, but I could access the pump shack and the old chicken coop. I was even able go get through some less water filled areas and check on the Korean pine.
It’s still too early to tell if they actually survived their first winter. With two of them, their protective cages were smushed to one side, but the saplings themselves were still protected, and I was able to straighten out the wire. One sapling was still completely covered with snow, but I could see its green needles through the snow.
With things cooling down for the next while, we decided to hold off on planting the carrots we made seed tape with. The plastic covering the bed they will go into is still on place – since it’s just held with duct tape, and the yard cats have a habit of jumping onto our garden protection, there is always some doubt! We will leave it to keep acting as a little greenhouse over that bed as we continue to prepare others over the next while. In particular, I want to get the bed along the chain link fence ready to do our first sowing of peas. The high raised bed in the main garden area no longer has snow on it, but the ground around it is still covered in snow, including the bed the garlic is planted in, so there’s nothing we can do there quite yet. We do need to start gathering the materials to make the permanent trellis tunnels and portable trellises, though, so once the ground is ready, we can get those started right away.
With the ground in the spruce grove now mostly free of snow, this would be a good time to start cutting down some of the dead trees, too, along with the ones I’ve singled out for the permanent trellis tunnel. I should probably get our electric chain saw checked over for service and maintenance first, though.
The to-do list is long! The challenge is prioritizing what needs to be done first, rather than what’s easiest or fastest to start.
Well, the storm has passed, and everyone is starting to dig their way out.
This is me, on my way to switch out the memory card in the gate cam.
No, I’m not standing in a drift. The snow reaches almost to me knees. Taking into account what was already on the ground, we definitely got at least 10 inches/25 cm in total.
I didn’t walk all the way to the road, as the end of the driveway is drifted over, so not only is it deeper, but harder packed. The road has not been plowed yet. I’d already seen people posting in local Facebook groups asking about the plows. Apparently, our new council members have not sent them out yet. Whether that’s for budgetary reasons or because they decided to simply let it melt was the question.
Of course, we couldn’t get out of our driveway right now, anyways, even with the van.
I found a whole train of cats waiting for me when I got back to the inner yard!
This path is now shovelled clear again. I also cleared the path to the garage, wide enough for walker or wagon, and enough space in front of the garage to open the side doors.
We can now open the doors on the storage side, and there’s room enough to maneuver little Spewie out. That little snow blower is going to get a work out, today!
I cleared the path to the burn ring, too. We need to do another burn. I’d like to get more paths dug out, so that they will melt clear faster as things warm up. I’m not going to bother digging a path to the sign cam, though. There’s lots of space on the memory card, and the batteries were still good the last I checked, so it should be fine until I can get to it again. At least I can be confident our vandal isn’t going to fight his way through the snow to wreck the sign or something.
For now, I’m going to have myself another cup of tea before heading back out again.
Well, that predicted snow started falling last night, and will continue to fall for most of today!
We’re going to have a lot of clearing to do when it’s over.
I wouldn’t call our current conditions a storm, but other areas of the province are getting hit with more snow and higher winds than we are. No complaints, really! Even closer to home, others are getting things worse. I’m glad I was able to pick up those prescriptions and antihistamines yesterday. This morning, I got a call from the pharmacy, letting me know there would be no deliveries today. She was glad to hear I’d already picked them up. Being right on the lake, town would be getting a lot more snow and wind than we are, even though they are only about a 15 minute drive away.
Also yesterday, I spotted The Distinguished Guest in the sun room and managed to get a picture before he disappeared.
When I first looked through the window, he was fully inside the box we use as a kibble tray, picking over the last little bits of kibble he could find. I was able to see his left paw a bit. That was the paw he was limping on so badly, not that long ago. It definitely looks misshapen, but then, so do the rest of his paws that I could see. It could be from an injury, or it could just be full of matted winter fur. I made sure to put food out soon after I got this picture, even though it was earlier than usual, just to make sure he got something to eat.
As for this morning…
Most of the cats were inside the sun room when I came out, but a few still prefer to be outside. I wasn’t going to put kibble on the roof, but when I saw some jumping up and looking for food there, even though the trays we filled (one of the trays under the water bowl house had been pulled right out and ended up buried in the snow!), I shoveled the snow off, then got another container of food, putting some on the roof. I doubled their food this morning, putting most of the extra in the sun room, and more than usual in the entry of the cat house, where there is another tray, to encourage them to stay inside as much as possible.
Three of these trays are the baking sheets I bought to carry our transplants around. I’m going to have to reclaim them soon, which means I’ll need to find something to replace them with!
One of the things I had to do this morning was get a meter reading. After submitting the reading, I decided to check our data.
This is our electricity usage over the past year, compared to the year before.
You can really tell that February is when we had our cold snap! Spring of last year was when we had a heavy blizzard followed by flooding, so not only did we use more electricity for heat in March but, once it all started melting, our sump pump and septic pumps (the septic tank is where the new basement weeping tile drains into) were running very frequently.
Here is our usage for the last year, with weather overlay.
With an electric furnace, it’s pretty clear how much the temperatures affect our electricity usage!
It should be interesting to see how things change, if at all, over the next year, now that we have the new roof. We picked the lightest of shingles available and, hopefully, that will help keep the upstairs from overheating over the summer, at least a bit. The girls have fans running all summer, and my older daughter had to switch to working nights because it became too hot to use her computer during the day. The previous shingles were a dark brown, and would have warmed things up quite a bit.
As for now, the weather system that’s over us is quite large. but it doesn’t look like the worst of it will come anywhere near us. It’s expected to clear late tonight. We’ve got a high of -6C/21F forecast for today. Starting tomorrow, things are supposed to warm up and keep warming up. In a couple of days, our highs are supposed to go above freezing and stay there. By next week, we’re supposed to have temperatures in the double digits! (10C/50F and up) For the areas that are supposed to be getting up to 25cm/10 inches of snow in this storm, that will bring on the spring flooding in the river valley regions. I can’t say I’ll be complaining about any spring flooding we get. For all the massive flooding we got last year, our water table still hasn’t completely recovered from years of drought conditions. This spring snow will be a boon to for farmers and gardeners.
Speaking of which, I made a tray full of toilet paper tube pots yesterday evening. One of my goals for the day is to make space in the big aquarium greenhouse for new seed starts. I’m happy to say that some of our peppers have finally started to sprout, so we’ll be able to move that tray off the heat mat. I just need to set up the space next to it, so they will still be close to the warmth of the lights.
Snow days are a great time to be working on our future garden!
The Re-Farmer 