One of the things I’ve been checking every morning of late, is how the crabapples are doing.
In the row of trees by the spruce grove, there are really just two trees that we can use. The others have such small apples, they’ll be left for the birds and the deer.
One of these two trees gets such bright red apples!
There are lots of them, too. I have actually thinned them, and with this tree, the easiest way to do that is just grab a branch and shake. They fall off a lot easier than the other trees!
This tree produces remarkably sweet apples. Last year, oddly, by the time we went to pick the apples, most of them had disappeared. I wasn’t even seeing many on the ground. Very strange, considering how full of apples it was, just the day before! Anyhow, I used them to make crabapple cider vinegar. You can read how that went in parts one, two and three of the process. I want to do this again, but this time, we’ll be using an airlock! Using a coffee filter was messy, and attracted fruit flies. We still don’t have fermentation weights, but we’ll figure something out.
The other tree in this row surprised me, last year. I would taste the apples from different trees to check their ripeness, and this one was… well, pretty awful tasting. We gathered what we could from the other trees, but left this one.
Then my mother insisted I bring her apples from the farm. I told here there weren’t many left, and the ones that were left didn’t taste good, but she said she would just be cooking them down and adding sugar, anyhow, so go ahead and bring them to her.
Much to my surprise, the apples actually tasted really good! They simply needed a lot more time to ripen, compared to the others.
This year, we cleaned out the dead part in the middle, and the remaining parts seem to be appreciating this.
Some of the apples are nearly 3x the size of the red ones on the other tree!
With the fungal disease attacking the row of crabapple trees, I would happily get rid of all the others, if it means saving these two trees.
There is one other crabapple tree, next to the old compost pile, that is ripening some pretty big apples. It should be ready to harvest soon, I think.
We should have lots of apples to make things with this year.
Maybe even enough try making some hard crabapple cider! :-)
I think it’s time to visit the brewery supply place in town. I’m starting to think that the 4 airlocks we have now are not going to be enough. Especially since we’ll be making gallon batches of mead, soon!
You know those times when you suddenly think of someone, and how you should talk to them… and then the phone rings, and it’s that person you were thinking about?
Yeah. That happened to me this morning!
Just as I was thinking that I should call my mother and ask if she needed help with grocery shopping or something, the phone rang. My mother was calling, to see if I were available to help her with grocery shopping!
Perfect timing.
So we arranged that for in the afternoon.
I had another nice surprise when I did my morning rounds. When I do the outdoors part, I always start with putting kibble out for the cats. The cats usually aren’t around in the mornings anymore – likely because it’s been getting so hot, so early! The last thing I’ve been doing in my rounds is going through the garden to pick what vegetables need picking.
As I came around the corner of the house to go to the garden, I saw this.
The tiny little calico was hungry enough to come out in the heat, all by herself!
Unfortunately, she ran off as soon as she became aware of me.
Ah, well. We’ll get them used to us, eventually!
At least, I hope so!
Meanwhile…
I got to my mother’s place, just before 2pm. So I was quite surprised when she told me she hadn’t had lunch yet! She wanted to go out to eat, and was waiting until I arrived. !!! She asked if one of the local restaurants was open again, since I had to drive past it to get to her place, and that’s where we ended up going.
This place used to be half restaurant, half convenience store. They’ve had to completely change everything, and the convenience store side is pretty much empty now.
Hopefully, they will get enough business to stay open. The shut down has been decimating small businesses like this. :-(
While we were eating, my mother started talking about garden sheds.
She has got it in her head to replace the old garden shed that’s here now, even though it’s a very low priority item. It’s come up a few times since we’ve moved here. However, there are a couple of places that have garden sheds in different sizes and styles on display, and she really likes them.
So we drove across the street to a hardware store to look at the one they had on display near the parking lot. She then asked me to go in and get information and a price for her. I ended up getting the information for several different kinds, including a couple of shed kits (which were decently priced) that we would have to put together ourselves, and several more fully assembled types (which are MUCH more expensive), as well as information about delivery and set up.
She then wanted to see where there is a display of 5 or 6 sheds, in the parking lot of an empty building, not far away.
Forgetting that today is Friday.
There’s a Farmer’s Market there, every Friday.
Which was fine, since both of us have been meaning to check it out, but hadn’t gotten around to it.
It was quite busy, but I did find one last parking spot – and found myself looking at the younger of my brothers! He was there with his chainsaw carvings. :-)
I made a quick dash to one of the display sheds to pick up their pamphlet, then rejoined my mother…
At my cousin’s honey display, right next to my brother!
She bought herself some honey, and I placed an order for a 9kg bucket of liquid honey.
We’re finally going to be making mead again!
I’ll be going to their honey farm on Monday to pick it up, as he didn’t have any buckets that big at the time. I keep driving past there and thinking I need to stop by and get some honey, without being able to stop during that particular trip! So I’m extra glad we stopped for the market.
We checked out my brother’s display, of course, but he was with customers, so we didn’t stay long. He’s been making some really nice mushroom lawn ornaments lately. I love his morels, of course, but the fly’s bane he’s been making lately are just adorable, with a tall one surrounded by little ones. My mother was thrilled to see them. As a child in Poland, she remembers picking mushrooms in the forest, and they had these. They could grow to knee height, she says! Now, that might be knee high to a child, but that’s still really tall! She says her mother would cook them, then leave them on the window sill, for the flies to land on and die. I knew they were used that way, but had never heard of them being cooked, first!
Once we were done at the market, we did her grocery shopping, then I stayed for a while as we talked garden sheds.
After going over the information I got and explaining things, I did offer an alternative.
That’s a lot of money, and we don’t really need a garden shed right now. With the roof on the old one covered with strips of metal roofing, the old one no longer has a leak, and is adequate to our needs. What would be more useful for us right now would actually be a gas powered wood chipper, so we can get rid of all those piles of branches all over the place.
To think, when we first moved here, I thought we would be able to use the wood I cleaned up in the fire pit, during cookouts. Aside from not being able to actually use the fire pit more than a couple of times, due to fire bans, we cleaned up far more wood and branches than I ever imagined. Even without a fire ban, there’s just too much to burn. I told her about the estimate I got, to have a company come out with their huge wood chipper. They estimated 6 hours to do the job, at $750 (though, after all this time, I would expect it to be more now). But if we had our own chipper, we could clean out the piles, and have something we could use, year after year.
Unfortunately, when I mention that we can also use the wood chips, she gets upset, because she’s never heard of anyone doing this before, she didn’t do it, so why do I want to do it?
…
*sigh*
Still, a chipper would be less expensive than a shed and, for us, more needed at this time.
I left the suggestion with her to think about. She told me she would talk to my older brother for advice. Which she has actually done before, at least once, that I know of.
In the end, I honestly don’t expect it to happen. If it does – either a shed or a chipper – I’ll be happy, but the likelihood is very low.
And that’s okay.
In the end, it turned out to be a very good visit. My mother got an outing she really, really needed, she got her groceries, and we even got to enjoy the market and see other family.
I got to follow up on a couple of things this evening.
We hit 32C/89F today, so once things got cooler, I headed out to water the garden beds.
Yesterday evening, after letting the silicon sealant cure for more than 24 hours, I filled the rain barrel by the garden, so today was the litmus test. I’m happy to report, there were no leaks at all at the cracks in the barrel.
With the barrel set up in the shade of a tree, the water in it was actually still cool! But not cold, which I’m sure the squash pants appreciated. Some of the leaves look like they got shocked by the cold, the last time I used a hose to water them.
While watering the beets and carrot beds, I startled a little friend.
It even gave me a chance to get pretty close with my phone to take pictures, before disappearing. This is the first time I’ve seen one of the green tree frogs jumping out of these beds. Gosh, they’re pretty!
While there, I decided to check on my other green friend, in the chokecherry tree by the junk pile.
The caterpillar is still there – and noticeably bigger! If you look at the veins in the leaf to compare between the two dates, you can see he’s quite a bit longer. The colouring has smoothed out, too. I’ll have to check again over the next while; he might get as big as the ones I found when I was a kid!
I’m happy to add that I saw flashes if kittens while making my way between the garden beds. While I was checking on the caterpillar, Butterscotch even emerged from the spirea to say hello and let me pet her. :-)
I’m glad she didn’t move her kittens.
The next thing I’ll be following up on is how things go tomorrow! We’re headed to the city for my husband’s first appointment with the pain clinic. I’m glad it’s finally happening, though to be honest, I don’t have much confidence in how it’ll go. After all these years, I think I’ve gotten way too jaded, but between the 2 years it took for my husband to get a 14 page form to fill out, and what was in the form itself, I am already not impressed with this place.
Mind you, I don’t think I’ll even be able to go in with him. They said he’ll have to wear a mask to go in, without anything about medical exemptions – and he has several conditions that would apply! I already know wearing a mask triggers my chronic cough, so maybe we’ll both be able to get exemptions, but I doubt it. Another reason for my expectations to be very low.
This post is to follow up on a comment from My Home Farm about sunflowers. They’re doing some awesome things on their property and Victorian era house, so do head over to visit their website and YouTube channel!
On learning we were planting sunflowers, my mother had made a big deal about how the birds were going to eat them all. She had planted sunflowers in the garden in the past, and told me they never had a chance to get any, because of the birds.
Well, I know that isn’t quite true, since I remember as a kid, pulling sunflowers out of a head and eating them, inside the house. So we obviously managed to harvest at least one seed head! :-D
The sunflowers we have planted are intended to be used as bird feed over the winter, though we will certainly eat some of them ourselves. To do that, however, we need to be able to harvest and preserve the seed heads before the birds eat them off the plants!
In looking up how to do that a while back, I found this video.
After watching this, I am thinking that my parents may have left the seed heads out for too long, before trying to harvest them.
Any seed heads we harvest will be hung up in our basement to dry.
Right now, our giant varieties of sunflowers are still developing their seed heads. We haven’t had issues with squirrels or mice, but the deer do seem to enjoy them! Of the original planting of 2 varieties of giant sunflowers, we had about a 50% loss. Some simply didn’t germinate, but most were lost to deer. A third variety of giant sunflowers were planted to fill in the gaps, and almost all of them came up, with a few later lost to deer. It should be interesting to see if they will have enough of a growing season left to produce seed heads we’ll be able to harvest, too. We do intend to plant sunflowers again next year, including trying some other, unusual, varieties. We intend to plant more of each, with the expectation of losses, but will also try to fence things off to keep the deer away, too.
But first, we’ll see what we will be able to harvest, this year!
Yesterday, I moved the metal ring the compost pile was in to its new location. I ended up using the same wires to hold the seam together; they’ll just be much easier to undo in the future! That allowed me to simply roll the whole thing over.
This is where we decided to put it. I’ve trimmed around this old tree stump many times, but those little trees (several kinds of them) keep coming back.
In the background, you can see part of what was cleared to get at the chokecherry trees, including another tree stump, and the pile of spirea and thistles from clearing towards the junk pile.
Now that we’ve discovered her babies, I fear Butterscotch has already moved them somewhere else. I hope not!
After taking a pruner to the saplings and adding a pile of dried weeds and grasses I’d pulled up when clearing here earlier, it looks full already!
The tree stump does take up a lot of space.
Time to start burning!
I needed to burn out all around the stump, to hopefully kill off the root systems those saplings keep growing from.
By the time I was done, several hours had past, and it was completely dark when the girls came to help me make sure all the coals were out and put everything away.
I had the hose going so much, spraying around the fire and keeping the sparks from getting far, it was actually muddy by the ring.
On the plus side, I got rid of the pile of spirea and thistles in the process.
Of course, I needed dry wood to keep the fire going, since much of what I was burning away was pretty green. So I raided the pile of branches by the garage that’s waiting to be chipped.
I couldn’t see anything, but I am convinced there is a wasp nest somewhere in that pile. I can hear them, and the sound is NOT coming from the nearby Chinese elm.
!!
This is how it looked this morning.
Hmm. I am thinking I might need to do this again, before we start using it for compost. The stump didn’t burn much, but that’s okay. It’s the area around it that has stuff I want to kill off, so they don’t start growing into the compost when we start it.
I’m thinking this will be a good location. We’re happy enough with the nearby garden beds (even with the deer decimating our beets) that we will continue growing there, so having a compost pile nearby will be handy. It’s closer to the house – but not too close! This is near where we plan to build the cordwood shed to use as an outdoor bathroom with a composting toilet. It might be in the way during construction, but the way things have been going, I’ll be happy if we can just dig out the sod where we want to lay down gravel and level things, first.
Though we plan to have a composting toilet, the contents will NOT be used for compost in any of our garden beds. I’ve seen many sites talk about how great human waste is for compost, and it absolutely horrifies me. It’s not the waste itself I have concerns with, but what might be in it. Not many people are in my husband’s situation, having to take more than a dozen different prescriptions, but even if it’s just OTC pain killers, hormonal birth control, or other prescriptions, it will be an issue. So we will have a separate dumping site, well away from anywhere food will be grown.
So that is how things are progressing with the new compost location.
One of these days I intend to get some dual roller composting bins. They are supposed to compost a lot faster but, for me, it’s more about accessibility and mobility. We may not need it now but, at some point, it will be more of an issue.
That’s one thing I learned about living in the housing co-op we were in before moving back here. It was one of the few places that had a lot of wheelchair accessible housing, and many of my friends and neighbours had a variety of mobility issues. Now, I see everything with different eyes. It did make the transition to my husband becoming disabled much easier, to be honest. It can happen to any of us and, as we age, it’s almost inevitable. One woman I know uses the term TAB to describe people without disabilities: Temporarily Able Bodied.
Accessibility is now an almost constant thought in the back of my mind as we work on things and plan ahead.
It was a hot day to be taking my mother for her medical appointment in a van with no air conditioning!
It was already cooling down when I took the above screencap. 28C/82F, with the humidex bringing it to 35C/95F From the weather radar, I don’t expect to get that predicted thunderstorm; it appears to be moving to the north of us. I hope we’ll at least get some rain. It’s been a challenge to keep the garden beds watered. At least I haven’t needed to mow the lawn in a while. :-D
While driving my mother to her appointment, she actually asked me to open the windows more, even though we were at highway speeds. Normally, she’s asking me to close them because of the wind! Well, hopefully we’ll have her car back next week. I could see she was really struggling to get into our van. She’s so tiny! :-D
Her appointment went well. She is frustratingly healthy. All her tests came back excellent. She has obvious issues with arthritis, which there’s really nothing more she can do about, and problems with her knees. She could get surgery to fix those but, considering she won’t even wear her knee brace, there is significant doubt she would keep up with the post surgical requirements, so it didn’t even come up. Her major concern is with her “heart”. By which she means her breathing. But only sometimes, and only in the morning, when she sometimes wakes up gasping for air. The doctor suggested she try sleeping upright, to relieve pressure on her chest from certain generously proportioned parts of her anatomy. I mentioned my siblings and I have discussed getting her a sleep chair, and he said he thought that would help her a lot. He also suggested we try putting something under her mattress to elevate it. I figure we can try that for a few weeks, then assess how it helps or not. She might actually do well with a hospital bed, like my husband’s, which would allow her to lower the whole thing to get in and out easier, too.
He will also be referring her to a geriatric team to assess her. Or an “elder care team”, as he put it. She still didn’t quite understand what he meant, so when we were talking about it later, I explained to her about how some doctors specialized in helping older people, with their physical and mental needs that are different from younger people. Once she understood, she was quite excited about that, saying that yes, she needs that!
Since I was driving her around anyhow, I also helped her get some grocery shopping done, and then we had a very late lunch – in a nice, air conditioned restaurant!
All in all, it went really well, and she was on much better behavior than usual. She was having one of her good days, so it made a huge difference.
After I got home and updated my siblings on how things went, I went to do my evening rounds a bit earlier. The girls had already watered the garden beds. I tried weeding around the beets a bit, but so many of the leaves have been eaten by deer, I don’t know if I should even bother. I’d mentioned this problem to my mother, and she decided that meant we needed a dog. A dog will keep the deer away! I wish I’d remembered to mention that my sister has a dog, and they still had to fence their garden to keep the deer out. And bears, but that’s a problem we, at least, don’t have! :-D
With the bird feeder painted and done, the girls are still doing coats of paint on both sides of the screened window frame for the old basement. Today, I flipped the picnic table and scrubbed the bottoms of the legs clean of dirt, so that we can apply the spray rubber on the ends. I also cleaned a rain barrel I’ve moved near the squash beds, around the cracks it has in one area. I was going to look for some sort of silicon caulking or something to patch the cracks when I realized the spray rubber would actually be better. The application will wait until tomorrow. According to the instructions on the can, the weather we’re predicted to have will affect how well it works. The 14 day forecast predicts continued high temperatures, but no rain, so that will be a good time to start applying layers of this stuff. Meanwhile I want to make some sort of screen cover for this rain barrel, plus the one set up by the house, to keep debris and critters out. I found a bird downed in the one by the house once already – I’m guessing it flew into a sun room window, knocked itself out, then fell into the barrel. :-( Once I have a cover made, and the cracks coated, I will keep the one barrel filled so that we can use ambient temperature water on the squash, instead of cold well water. If we don’t get rain tonight, I’ll likely be filling the rain barrel by the house to warm up, too.
In the long term, I want to get some large tanks like this.
As we work on clearing, cleaning and reclaiming the yard and planting our first garden beds, I’ve been keeping a close eye on details to keep in mind for the future. Things that will help us decide what needs to be done next, what to change or what to keep the same.
This morning, I found myself making a lot of comparisons.
The cutest one is the cucamelons.
This is the largest one that is developing, with my fingers giving an idea of just show small these are!
Isn’t that just the cutest thing? :-D This is the first one big enough to start seeing the patterns developing.
The trellis I made for these is just cotton yarn. It is working very well, except for on thing.
The cats.
When I am out there and the boys come over for some attention, they will plow their way through the trellis, pulling tendrils off in the process, then look at me all confused over why I’m flipping out at them. :-D They also try to lean and rub against the strands of yarn, only to flop over onto the plants. !!!
We already know that this location doesn’t have enough sun for cucamelons. If we grow them in the future, they will be planted somewhere with full sun. Our original intention was to plant them against the chain link fence for them to climb, and the cats are showing us exactly why that’s a very good idea! If not there, then we will have to make sure to have trellises that are sturdier, with strands much closer together. Not because the cucamelons themselves need it, but because of the cats!
Here is another comparison. These two squash plants, with the mottled leaves.
They look pretty much like the same kind of plant, don’t they?
Now look at the developing squash.
They’re completely different!
I’m looking forward to being able to start harvesting these. My favourite way to eat them is raw, with dip. No need for anything else, when they’re at just the right stage. :-)
It was looking at the chokecherry trees that I am really seeing what a difference even minor changes in conditions makes.
This first one is at the south side of the garden where the squash beds are.
This one gets sun in the mornings, but for most of the day, it is shaded by spruce and maple trees to the South and West of it. It is not crowded by other trees. It has quite a lot of berries that are looking big and juicy (well… as much as chokecherries can be! ;-) ). Even last year, during the drought, it had larger berries. While I do not specifically water this tree, I do sometimes water the little patch of flowers and raspberries on one side of it, and the black current bush (my sister confirmed what it was for me) on the other side, so it does get extra water from that. While is has larger berries, it also ripens later. As you can see, the berries are still very much on the red side of things.
This next one is the chokecherry tree that is engulfed by lilacs.
This one gets full sun for most of the day, though it does get slightly shaded at the end of the day, by the trees my mother left to grow after she moved the raspberries they’d self-sown in between, years ago. This whole area gets quite dry, and we do not make any effort to try and water anything here.
The berries themselves are noticeably smaller than in the previous tree, and there are less of them, but they are also ripening faster.
Then there is this tree, right nearby.
This is the top of a young, small tree that was self-sown and allowed to grow (rather than get mowed over, like all the other saplings) in a grassy band between the old garden area (with the row of trees mentioned previously) and the lilac hedge. It might get some shade towards the end of the day, but otherwise gets full sun. Our first summer here, it did not produce fruit yet, and I wasn’t even completely sure what kind of tree it was. Our second summer, it had a few berries. This year, it has matured enough to produce quite a lot of berries. With full sun most of the day, not at all crowded, and little moisture, the berries are still not as big as the ones closer to the house, but the clusters are dense and ripening quickly.
You can see how this tree is situated in the background of the next photo, below. This next chokecherry is also among the lilacs, but on the edge of the hedge, not in the middle of them.
Here, it gets no shade at all. It has lots of berries that are already ripe. As you can see, though, some of the leaves are turning yellow. Only a few branches are like this, not all of them. It’s not stopping them from heavily fruiting! Like the other two along this side of the old garden, the berries are not as large as the trees nearer the house.
This next one was a surprise find, along with the Saskatoon berries. This area had been full of spirea that I had pulled up. It’s starting to grow back, so I’ll have to do it again, as pulling them up has been a good thing for other trees. The Saskatoons thrived this summer, and we discovered another chokecherry tree among them.
This area is under spruce trees, both living and dead, getting very little sun. In the above photo are the berries on the North side of the tree, where it gets even less sun. As you can see, they are just turning from green to red here.
This next photo is of the same tree, but on the South side.
That little bit more sunlight sure makes a noticeable difference in how fast they ripen!
Again, while I have not really been watering these trees, they are near the horseradish, and with the spirea taken out, wildflowers have come up and I’ve been watering those. So they will have benefited a bit from that, too. Mostly, though, being under the spruces as they are, they don’t get the full heat of the day, so the soil doesn’t dry out after a rainfall as quickly, either.
Then there is this one…
That’s a chokecherry in the middle of the photo. I had cleared a path to the junk pile you can see part of, to try and find useful pieces of wood in it, but that’s as far as I got so far. The tree itself is not crowded by other, large trees, and is shaded only in the morning hours. It’s surrounded by spirea and thistles, so we can’t get at it right now, but it appears to be just loaded with ripe chokecherries.
Finally, there is this one.
This is the top of a chokecherry tree among the cherries. I can get close to it, but not enough to be able to harvest it until I clear away the cherries around it; mostly cherries that had been killed off by last year’s horrible spring, and the bits that are now growing up from the bases. They create a formidable barrier!
This tree also gets shade in the morning hours only. Our last two summers, I don’t recall seeing any flowers or berries at all. Last summer, I’d cleared away the old wood pile, which turned out to be a much, much larger job than I expected. You can read about it in this series of posts (all links should open in new tabs, so you won’t lose your place!); parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
Did I mention it turned out to be a really huge job?
Yeah.
So while there is still lots to clean up to work our way into the spruce grove, what has been done so far made a big difference. I’m thinking that, had the cherries not been so damaged by the previous spring conditions, they would have improved, too. Mind you, the one cherry tree I kept because it managed to actually produce a few berries, and is not at all crowded, did not produce even a blossom this year.
It’s amazing how the same type of tree, while not really all that far apart from each other, are so different based on even minor changes in sun, shade, moisture, etc. When it comes time for us to plant more food trees, the differences among these chokecherry trees is providing us with a lot of information.
First, I had a cheering squad waiting for me when I went to feed the fish.
Saffron, Cheddar, Big Rig and Two Face
The top of the big aquarium we can’t use right now has long been a favorite place for the cats to sit. Now, the kittens are big enough to appreciate it, too!
Also, Saffron wanted my phone.
It’s amazing, how one little fish fascinates the cats. :-D
Both girls ended up going into the city with me, which worked out rather well. I went into town first, to pick up my husband’s prescription refills. He got just one week’s worth, because of the weird rules over some of his more powerful medications, so he can’t get the rest until after Tuesday. We have actual doctor appointments on Thursday, so they should have updated prescriptions by Friday. Hopefully, that will end the problems we’ve been having regarding his refills, lately.
The bubble packs weren’t ready yet, so I made a quick run to the garage to see about my mother’s car. I was surprised to find it closed! My mother’s car was there, along with one other car, but that was it. Then I remembered that they often go into the city to pick up parts on Fridays. I’ll have to remember to call them tomorrow. I was able to get a medical appointment for my mother on Tuesday (Monday is a holiday this weekend), and it be nice to surprise her with her own car.
My mom’s car has been sitting there for so long, it has spider webs on the side mirror!
After getting the medications and heading home, it started to rain. I even drove through a very nice downpour! By the time I was unlocking the gate, it had slowed down a bit, but started to come down hard again as the girls and I were leaving.
By the time we were driving through the town my mother lives in, we had left the rain behind us and everything was dry! Which is basically the opposite of how it usually goes. :-D
The shopping went smoothly, which is something I can’t say about the drive. It was one of those days where it seemed like every other driver out there was determined to either tail gate me, or pass me into oncoming traffic!
Okay, I exaggerate.
A little.
A very little.
We had way too many close calls for my comfort.
I am so glad to not have to drive through city traffic all the time anymore!
We only had two places we needed to go, and once in the stores, things went much better. We found pretty much everything we needed, and the rest we can get locally as we need to throughout the month.
It feels good to be well stocked again.
Back on the highway, we drove into the rain again. By the time we got home, it was pouring. The girls unlocked the gate for me, so of course they got soaked while walking to the house. I pulled into the yard, right near the door, but got just as soaked while unloading the van.
It was beautiful! The rains have been passing us by for a while, now, so it was really nice to finally get some.
After the van was unloaded, one of my daughters went to check the picnic table under the tent. We hadn’t bothered to put on the walls, so it was possible rain could have been blown in from the sides. The back of the house provided enough shelter, though, to prevent that. The table was bone dry! The bird house I’d scrubbed last night was mostly dry, too. When doing my rounds this morning, I found something I could put the bird house on under the tent, just in case it rained, and I’m glad I did!
Tomorrow, if all goes to plan, we’ll flip the table and do the first coat on the top, as well as the bird house. I have to remember to bring the screened window over to paint, too. I’m leaving that as long as possible, since I’ll have to switch to the high density plastic window we use in the winter. I’ll be plugging in the big blower fan in the old basement to make up for the lack of air circulation while that one is in.
Right now, the sky is blue and there’s a lovely breeze.
I think this is a good time to do my evening rounds.
Just minutes ago, we saw our mystery critter again – this time out by the compost pile!
We ended up bringing the DSLR, with it’s 700mm lens, and tripod over to try and zoom in for some pictures.
Unfortunately, the window we were looking through is the one that was not replaced, when all the others were. It has a sheet of plexiglass mounted on the inside, to keep the drafts out. Which means that there was nothing we could do to keep the auto focus from focusing on the glass, instead of the critter. I even tried manual focus, and the pictures I got were actually worse.
So these are the best of the bunch. I cropped the photos and resized them, but that’s it.
The question is: what is it?
It was eating grass and what I think were dandelion leaves. In one of the photos, it looks like it has a stuffed cheek!
It’s surprisingly large. About the size of our big skunk, but bulkier. Almost as big as a beaver! It kinda has a beaver shape, too, but the tail is completely different.
So it is a gopher? Groundhog? Prairie Dog?
Whatever it is, it’s adorable!
In other things, I just finished making our fall plantings order from Vesey’s. This is what we have ordered (all links should open in new tabs, so you don’t lose your place!):
Fall garlic collection 2: This collection of hard neck garlic includes Porcelain Music, Rocambole and Marble Purple Stripe. The Purple Stripe is supposed to be really good for roasting. The collection has 1 pound of each. We are planning to plant these where we currently have the beets and carrots.
The rest that we ordered are flowers.
Muscari: aka Grape Hyacinth. I’ve wanted these since I was a kid! When we lived in Victoria, BC, they grew everywhere, like weeds. I loved them! We’ve ordered 2 packages of 100 bulbs.
The girls picked the rest.
Snow Crocus Collection: “This collection contains 105 bulbs including 25 Dorothy and 20 each of Blue Pearl, Tricolour, Snowbunting and Spring Beauty Snow Crocus.” Our plan is to mix these bulbs with the Muscari, then plant them randomly in the areas we have picked for them.
Double Tulip Collection: “This collection contains 58 bulbs, 8 of Black Hero, Pamplona & Vanilla Coup and 10 each of Pinksize, Orca and Brownie Double Tulips.” The girls aren’t big fans of the typical tulip shape, but they really love the more unusual shapes.
Speaking of unusual tulip shapes, definitely click on the next link!
Bulls Eye Tulip: We got 1 package of 8 bulbs of these. What an unusual tulip! I can hardly wait to see how they grow.
Eye of the Tiger Iris: They could have had so many punny names for this one… :-D This one comes in a package of 15. We do have some irises in the flower garden the bird feeder stand is currently in. They’ve been there for as long as I can remember! Only 2 of them bloomed this year, and they were done so fast, my daughters never saw them!
Gardenia Daffodil: These come in a pack of 6, and quite different from the usual yellow daffodils I’m used to seeing. When we lived in a PMQ in Victoria, BC, there was a field between our duplex and the military hospital that was just filled with bright yellow daffodils. It should be interesting if these will have the same spreading habit!
And spreading is something we actually want, and they will be planted with that in mind. Especially for the muscari and crocuses. For those, we are hoping they will form a floral carpet to fill in areas between trees, so we don’t have to mow such awkward places.
For our zone, we expect these to be shipped to arrive in the second half of September, in time for immediate planting.
Yesterday evening, I happened to glance out my window facing the garden and saw a deer making its way into the yard. Something startled it and it ran off, but I figured that would be a good time to do my evening rounds – and check the sunflowers!
I headed out through the sun room and found another visitor.
The cheeky little bugger completely ignored me and the noise I was making as I came out the sun room doors.
He seems to have some odd matting in his fur. Or maybe something it caught in it?
It wasn’t until I started moving further from the doorway that he started paying attention to me.
(Yes, I was zooming in to take photos, and then I cropped the photos. I was staying well away from Stinky!)
He was not a happy Stinky! I just kept moving away, and he eventually ran off through the old kitchen garden.
So I made sure to go around the other side of the house, to check the garden! :-D
After checking the sunflowers and making my way back to the house, I saw Stinky again – with a friend! – running through the back yard towards the old garden shed. Of course, that was the direction I needed to go! I was able to skirt around them, then use the garden hose to discourage them from coming closer.
Alas, we did lose one of the smaller sunflowers.
I took this picture this morning. This is one of the third variety of giant sunflowers that we planted much later, to replace the ones we lost in the original planting.
The survivors of our first planting are doing pretty good, I think!
Most of them are approaching 5 feet in height, now. Once they got higher than a couple of feet, the deer seemed to ignore them. One of the last ones that got its top chomped off is surviving quite well, and is growing a new “head” from the side of the main stalk. I have high hopes that the most recently decapitated sunflower will do fine and grow a new head, though being one of the variety planted the latest, chances are it won’t have long enough of a growing season to fully mature. We shall see.
I’m just really impressed with how big the pattypan squash plants are getting! They are also filled with buds and blossoms, and little baby squashes. None of the others are even close. There’s a good possibility these will be the only squash that actually produce this year. Which is okay. This year is our experimental year. Anything we get is bonus, and we’re learning a lot.
I keep forgetting to take pictures of the potatoes. They actually look rather sparse, as far as foliage goes, but some have started to bloom, so we can definitely look forward to having our own potatoes this year. Whether or not we use the same method to grow them will be decided when we harvest them.
I also found a rather dramatic surprise this morning, when checking on the carrot and beet beds.
This is a chokecherry tree growing among the sour cherries that are doing so poorly. When I went past it last night, the berries were all still green!
This one is mostly by the cherry trees and a lot of other stuff that we will be taking out (the cherry tree by the house has ripening berries on it, but none of the ones in this other location). I want to make sure to keep the chokecherry tree, since it seems to be doing so well, now. Our first two summers here, this tree didn’t even bloom, so we didn’t realize what it was!
There is another chokecherry tree, in behind where the sad little Saskatoon bushes are, that also decided to bloom and produce this year. It is in an area still filled with spirea that we need to clear out.
Another surprise this year is that we have more, stronger and healthier Saskatoon bushes, hiding behind the stack of boards and junk that have Junk Pile kitten her name. (No kittens in there, this year!) They are still producing big, juicy berries. There is another chokecherry tree growing with them. It’s berries are still very green. In this location, this tree is in shade most of the time, whereas the other two get a lot of sun.
Which had me curious about the other trees we’d gathered chokecherries from, over the past two summers.
It was pretty windy when I tried to take this photo, so it’s not very clear, but you can see there are no red berries on here, yet. A few of the berries are starting to show just a bit of a blush on them. This tree has more shade, being planted so close to the maple grove and rows of spruce trees my parents added on the North side over the years. The berries on this tree ripened later than the other two I checked next, but the berries it produced were larger and juicier.
This chokecherry tree is being choked – by lilacs! It is tipped way over and hanging down. My daughters and I have been talking about what to do with this one. I’ve been thinking of cutting away the lilacs surrounding it, then adding some sort of support I can use to train the tree to start growing upright.
My daughter suggested we leave the lilacs, and get rid of this chokecherry! The lilac hedge serves as both a privacy and dust screen from the main road that goes by on this side of the property. It has quite a lot of traffic, for a gravel road. The reason my mother spent so many years planting and extending this hedge was partly because of just how much dust drifts in, every time a vehicle drove by. Plus, every now and then, vehicles going by would slow down to peer into our yard and garden. And not just the year we grew “konopie” from seeds my mother got from Poland, after regaling us with stories from her childhood. It turned out that konopie is Polish for hemp, but someone thought it was marijuana and stole a row and a half of it.
Anyone who tried to smoke that would probably have gotten rather ill rather than high!
Anyhow. The lilacs serve a purpose, and in that location, privacy and dust screening is more important than having chokecherries. Especially since it turns out we have so many more, elsewhere.
This chokecherry tree is also among the lilacs.
Unlike the other one, this one is growing from the inside of the hedge, instead of out from the middle of it somewhere. So it is growing straight and tall, rather than falling over. In the last couple of summers, I found that of the two among the lilacs, this one also produced better berries, and ripened sooner, than the one that’s falling over.
There is also a small chokecherry tree growing in the middle of the area I move, near where the falling over chokecherry is. It likely sowed itself, but over the years, it has been allowed to grow, rather than getting mowed over. We will likely leave that one be. In the open as it it, it will have lots of light and space to grow straight and tall, and eventually produce lots of berries.
It’s a good thing we like chokecherries. I like to eat them straight off the tree, even though they are very … astringent, I believe the word used is. Given how many trees we’ll have producing berries this year, we can expect to have lots to make things with!
The Re-Farmer 