The girls and I made our trip into the city. While I didn’t need anything myself, I did take advantage of the trip – and summer clearance prices.
While we had cleaned and painted the old wooden bird feeder and replaced it on its metal post, not a lot of birds are using it. I believe it’s just too crowded by the novelty lilac, next to it. I’ve seen some of the smaller birds around it, but the larger birds, such as the mourning doves, are still trying to find seed on the ground by the old platform feeder (where we stopped adding bird seed, since our supply filled the newly painted one).
If I could get that metal post out of the ground without having to dig, I’d transfer it to the other end, where the platform feeder and bird bath are. It seems the better location for it, plus we can see them from the living room. We can’t see the metal post set up from inside the house.
The platform on the platform feeder, however, is in really bad shape. So today, when I spotted supports for bird feeders or hanging baskets on clearance, I grabbed one.
I’ll… go back and straighten that out, later. :-D
It’s a lot shorter than the platform feeder. Perfect for short little me to reach!
The old one was constantly being blown over in the wind, until we stopped actually hanging a bird feeder on its hook. One of the hanging feeders hit the ground so often, it no longer holds together very well. The base wasn’t very stable and, as you can see, where it was touching the ground is rotting.
The platform is also a complete loss, but the hook itself, and the pressure treated 2×4, are just fine.
I am thinking of removing the rotted platform, the pieces on the bottom, and cutting off the rotten end. If I can figure out a way to make it more stable, it might be worth making a new platform and setting it up again. Having hanging feeders is good, but some types of birds prefer the platform to feed from. Plus, with two hangers, we can have the suet feeder out again, too.
We shall see.
Meanwhile I wanted to share a really terrible, zoomed in photo I took this morning, before we headed to the city… :-D
The kittens were playing on the steps at the other door! I had started to move their food bowl further from the junk pile, to encourage them to come closer to the house, but Butterscotch beat me to it. :-D
Ultimately, I’d like the kittens to start coming around to the south side of the house. I’ve started to place food bowls near the entrance to the old doghouse my brother brought for them to use in the winter. It would be great if the whole little family would just move into there. As this litter is so much younger than the other kittens, they are more at risk when the cold weather hits. There is enough room in there that all of the yard cats can fit in there and be nice and warm, just like they used to all pile up together on the swing bench in the sun room. Petty differences between the cats seemed to disappear when it came to staying warm!
It was very encouraging to see the kittens playing by the house. What an adventurous bunch they are! They were just loving those stairs. :-D
I’m happy to say that last night’s frost seems to have had no effect on the sunflowers at all.
The only leaves with frost damage that I saw were leaves that had first been broken by the high winds we had a few days ago.
Right now, we’ve got seed heads at pretty much all stages of opening and ripening!
The birds seem to have finally discovered this one. Based on what I researched, I should be able to cut this seed head off and set it up to dry, but in the video I saw that demonstrated this, the guy was able to easily brush off the flower heads from the seeds. That isn’t happening on this seed head at all! The ones that haven’t already fallen off on their own are still attached quite well.
The girls and I will be heading into the city tomorrow, but I might harvest this seed head after we come back. If not then, then the day after. I’m planning to dig up the potato beds as well. We’ll see how the timing of things goes.
Hopefully, tomorrow’s trip to the city will be more productive than today’s – but that will get it’s own post later!
My husband has an appointment at the heart clinic in the city today, so I was out a bit earlier to do my rounds this morning.
As I write this, it’s still only 1C (33F), with a “real feel” that has warmed up to -2C (28F) since I last checked. Our high today is supposed to reach 15C (59F), which is warmer than the last few days. We’re then supposed to go above 20C (68F) for a couple of days, before dropping back to the mid-teens, which is more typical for this time of year.
We don’t have what we need to be able to cover plants as large as our squash right now, so this morning was more about surveying the damage.
I will check them again, after we get back from the city. Some look like they’re completely killed off, but others might still make it through the rest of the season.
I’m pretty sure the pumpkins are a total loss, though.
This is the largest of them, and you can see where the frost was on the pumpkin itself.
This pumpkin hill is the one that’s the furthest South – which means that it gets more shade from the trees than the others. It isn’t much, but as you can see by the plant, it doesn’t take much, either. This plant still had visible frost on it.
The other two hills were pretty much clear of frost. The developing pumpkins don’t show signs of direct frost on them – but from the state of the plants, I think they’re likely complete losses, too. We shall see.
Remember this little birdhouse gourd, bravely blooming just yesterday?
This is how it looked this morning.
*sigh*
Well, this year was our year to figure things out, and we’ve learned a lot.
We will have to work on finding different ways to cover and protect our plants from late and early frosts. Especially since we do want to keep growing squash, which are more easily damaged by the cold. The beets, carrots and parsley are just fine. Even the cucamelons showed less frost damage than the squash, which surprised me.
Altogether, though, we did far better with our gardening this year than I expected. It really has been a successful year, for the circumstances!
You’d think, having grown up here and helped my mother with the gardening for my entire childhood, I would already know what is needed, but everything is really quite different than the garden of my childhood. Especially with my parents planting or allowing so many trees to encroach into the garden.
While we will continue to have garden plots in this area, my mind is already starting to look at the outer yard, towards the barn, for possible raised beds, polytunnels or greenhouses for vegetable gardening.
Today, I headed out to pick the apples off of one of our crabapple trees.
This is the one that has such bright red, sweet apples. It also ripens earlier than the other trees.
Last year, most of the apples disappeared before I had a chance to harvest them, so I wanted to get them before the … deer? … get them first.
When we were cleaning things out, I was flummoxed by finding a grabber with spoons attached to it. My mother eventually remembered that my dad used it to pick apples.
I’m happy to say that it works absolutely beautifully!
Since there were so many apples to pick this year, I laid out a sheet on the ground for them to fall on. It also made it much easier to move the apples into a bucket.
I was able to fill a 5 gallon bucket just with the apples I could reach with my hands, or the grabber. I did try shaking the trees, too, but the branches are a bit too thick to be able to shake much at that height, so I didn’t get a lot that way.
Using the step ladder, I was able to fill another 5 gallon bucket. I could have gotten more, but by then, it was getting too dangerous to try and get the apples, even with the grabber. The remaining apples will be for the birds. :-)
Ten gallons of apples is so awesome! Last year, I used the apples from this tree to make apple cider vinegar. After trimming and chopping, I filled a quart jar 3/4s full.
That’s it. That’s all we had.
This year, I plan to make more apple cider vinegar, then juice at least a gallon, to make hard apple cider. There should still be plenty to give to my family, when they come out this weekend, if they want some.
For the hard apple cider, we have gallon jugs, bungs and airlocks to use. When we made apple cider vinegar in a quart jar last year, it was a success, but there was a problem with fruit flies being attracted to the coffee filter covered jar in the cupboard. So this year, I plan to use an air lock (they’re so cheap, I’ve been buying extras).
I’ll be using a repurposed gallon sized pickle jar for this, which means I need to find a way to get an airlock into the lid.
Which I’ve already gotten started, and will show how in my next post. :-)
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.
The Re-Farmer 