planning ahead

Recommended: The Curd Nerd, Gavin Webber

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Welcome to my “Recommended” series of posts. These will be weekly – for now – posts about resources I have found over the past while that I found so excellent, I want to share them with you, my dear readers. 🙂 Whether or not I continue to post these, and how often they are posted, will depend on feedback. Please feel free to comment below, and if you have a favorite resource of your own, do share, and I will review them for possible future posts.

I hope you find these recommendations as useful and enjoyable as I have!

When I was a kid, I was pretty indifferent to cheese. For commercial cheese, we got your basic cheddar, processed cheese slices, and I even remember the odd block of Velveeta (yeah, I know…). I honestly don’t think there was much else available. Some Mozzarella, cream cheese, marble cheese and grated Parmesan in a shaker. The odd triangle of expensive blue cheese. Our choices were limited.

Even as an adult, there really wasn’t a lot of variety available. I liked cheese, certainly, but it wasn’t really a thing for me. The one major discovery for me was commercial cottage cheese. My mother made cottage cheese, and I really didn’t like it. I recently asked her how she made it, since I only remembered bits and pieces, and it was far more convoluted than I expected. It took two days, and included the addition of baking soda, but no cream.

The end product was very, very dry.

It was, of course, used as a filling in pierogi. I loved my mother’s potato pierogi, but never liked the ones with cottage cheese or sauerkraut stuffings. So very un-Polish of me. :-D

Then one day, I tried commercial cottage cheese and realized that yeah, that stuff is actually good!

Over the years, I regularly bought cheddar, but every now and then I’d get adventurous and try some Havarty or Montery Jack. Discovering Brie was an eye opening experience for me. I’d never had anything like it before, and it’s still one of my favourite cheeses.

Then, a few years back, one of our local grocery stores added a new cheese section.

You know you’re getting old when something like that is exciting. :-D

Suddenly, there was the wild and crazy selection of cheeses available, at pretty much every major grocery store. Then we found a local chain that specialized in European imports, baked their own bread in wood fired ovens, and had a deli consistently rated as the best in the city, year after year. It was thanks to this store that I discovered charcuterie platters, which became a much enjoyed treat, any time we could. We began to try new cheeses every time we could squeeze it into the budget.

I’ve long been interested in making as many things myself as I could, including making yogurt and yogurt cheese.

I definitely was interested in making other cheeses, and never really thought I could do more than make something like mozzarella or ricotta – cheeses that don’t require any aging. Then we moved provinces, and I discovered that apparently, cheeses just aren’t as popular out here. The specialty cheese sections in grocery stores don’t have anywhere near the variety, even in the city, that we’d become used to. But, what are we to do? It’s not like we could make any of these, ourselves, right? I mean, it’s not like we had access to raw milk in the first place, never mind the equipment, space, access to cultures and so on. I knew people who did make cheeses like Gouda at home, but they were farmers with cows or goats they were milking.

Then I stumbled upon The Curd Nerd, Gavin Webber, and his YouTube channel.

Talk about inspiring!!

Gavin Webber is an Australian who has been doing cheese making tutorials and “Ask the Cheesemaker” live streams and podcasts since late 2009. You’ll find videos on the making of MANY different types of cheese, followed up later with taste tests. He talks about what equipment is needed (much less than I expected), how to sanitize them, how to age cheese in a fridge, how to wax cheeses, and more. All done in his own home.

He even talks about the failures.

There are even videos on how to clean your cheese cloth, and other topics, like making mead, and the construction of his cob oven.

It was these next two videos – especially the taste testing one – that won me over.

We need to start making our own cheese.

I just love how enthusiastic and excited he gets about cheese!!! Oh, how I want to be tasting those cheeses with him!

Inspiring indeed!

I now feel we actually can start making a wide variety of cheeses at home. We are looking to convert the old root cellar into a cheese cave, but even if it turns out to not have the conditions needed, I now know we can work around that and still be able to make our own ages cheeses – in varieties that are not available locally, or well beyond our budget to indulge in.

After finding this channel, I’m downright excited about the possibilities.

Who knows. I might even become a Curd Nerd myself!

The Re-Farmer

So many cats… and a bit of a hang up

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I was talking to my daughter a little while ago when she happened to mention the current indoor cat count we have right now.

Eighteen.

I … really hadn’t thought about that. We’ve now got 8 cats upstairs, plus the 2 mamas and their 8 babies in the basement.

That is insane.

Two Face has changed noticeably after her surgery. She is so much more cuddly now. Lately, this is what I’ve been waking up to.

She now likes to lean hard against me while I’m sleep. Cheddar also likes to do that, so I woke up book ended in cats.

Then there are the boys outside. I think they’re lonely! All the ladies, except Rosencrantz (who didn’t make an appearance this morning) are now indoors.

Potato Beetle was funny this morning.

He wanted SO much attention!

One of the things I started to do this morning is dismantle the shelter we made with the old dog houses, so I can use the black tarp to help warm up the soil in one of the areas we want to plant.

There was a bit of a hang up.

The snow had accumulated in one area, enough for the cloth to touch the ground. Of course, that created a puddle when the snow melted.

Freezing the tarp to the ground.

I used a metal bar that was one of the weights keeping the tarp from blowing away to bash apart the ice, then left it to weigh down the tarp. The ice should melt away faster now.

But not today.

We’re barely above freezing temperatures today. Starting tomorrow, and for the next 14 days, according to the long range forecasts, we will finally hit double digit temperatures.

The dog houses were well used over the winter, I was happy to see.

I could see tamped down paths in the straw around them, the insides were flattened, and there was a hole leading under one of them. I even found a flattened spot on top of one of the dog house roofs, where something had curled up and made a nest in the straw, directly under the tarp.

The straw will be left here for now, though wind might be a problem.

In some places, it already is.

It’s been quite windy for the past couple of days. This tarp is being torn to shreds!

I would love to have someplace I could properly store this old post pounder, but the one shed that I could pull it into has a roof full of holes and is starting to fall apart. Like way too many other things around here! :-( If I could clear enough space in a section of the barn, we might be able to store it in there, though at this point, I don’t even know how we would pull it. The hitch damaged, and both tires are flat.

We’ll figure something out.

I am really looking forward to the warmer temperatures. I’m just itching to get to work around the yard! Tomorrow, though, I have the rest of the seeds I have waiting to get started indoors.

Then I have to start scavenging around the various sheds and the barn, to see what’s available to build trellises out of.

I’m looking forward to the work! :-)

The Re-Farmer

Morning kitties, cold damage and more thinking ahead

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Let’s play “can you spot all the kittens?”

I had to dig one of them out from behind Beep Beep’s head. :-D

Butterscotch’s kittens are much harder to get pictures of.

I finally just stuck my phone in and used voice activation to take some photos, hoping it was angled right.

I got one shot that managed to include all the babies. :-D

We want to move the kittens and mamas out of their nests so we can put down fresh, clean cat beds, but don’t want to disturb them so soon after birth.

In other areas…

I took a closer look at one of our surviving blue spruces, of a group of three that had been planted way two close together, some years ago.

Most of the remaining branches have cold damage like this at the tips. It should be okay, but might take a while to recover from having its newest growth killed off.

Yesterday, I posted a photo of one area we will need to address, when the time comes for us to plant the fruit and nut trees we are planning to do in the future. Here is another area we’ll have to figure out.

Among the trees I hope we will be able to plant are Korean pine. This is a tree that needs to have a “shade shelter” for the first couple of years, and this location naturally provides that for most of the day. However, as you can see, this is also where water pools in the spring. That shade also means the snow takes a lot longer to melt away, and the ground stays frozen longer.

What we eventually want to do is get this package of hardy nut trees. It will be some time before we can afford that. In the shorter term, I hope to slowly acquire a good variety of fruit trees and bushes from this site, that can survive in our growing zone. They even have a variety of apricot that can grow in a zone 3!

This is one of the reasons I want to expand the inner yard to include the outer yard. I see no point in replacing the old and broken fences around the inner yard. If we just get rid of those (the chain link fence is still sturdy, and can at least be used as a trellis), we’ll have easier access to areas we can plant food trees and bushes.

We just have to make sure the fence around the outer yard doesn’t have any gaps or weak spots the renter’s cows can break through, if his electric fence gives out again. :-)

We still need to finish clearing and cleaning the inner yard, but if all goes well, I hope to get started on the outer yard this summer, too. Especially if we want to start salvaging some things we’re finding to use for gardening and so one. I can foresee a time when we’ll even have greenhouses in the outer yard area. But first, we need to do a lot of clean up out there – including cleaning up a collapsing log building, and figuring out how to salvage the log building that we used to use as a chicken coop, when I was a kid. That one still looks solid.

Little by little, we’re making progress! :-)

The Re-Farmer

Morning surprise, and checking things out

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My morning routine now includes checking on the mamas in the basement. I wanted to see how Butterscotch and her babies were doing inside the old radio she decided to give birth in.

Unfortunately, we never thought we’d need to clean the inside of it.

I’m glad one of the cat beds I crocheted fit in there, because the rest of it is really dirty and gross.

Also, this old radio also has a record player in it. I didn’t realize that until I noticed a piece of it sticking out like a drawer. Turns out there is a pullout turntable. Gutted, of course, but the drawer is still there.

While I was checking out Butterscotch, Beep Beep was in the cardboard box we’d made a cat cave out of that fits under a chair. She was curled up in the back, but I could still reach to pet her. Both of them were purring furiously, too. Then, since I was taking pictures of Butterscotch, I decided to take a picture of Beep Beep, too.

It wasn’t until I saw something odd in the picture preview that I realized, she was not alone!

Two little wormy babies!

I’m pretty sure she wasn’t done, either. I expect to find a couple more, the next time I head down to check on them. :-)

While doing my rounds outside, I have been making a point of checking various areas we haven’t been able to get to throughout the winter and assessing things.

The Potato Beetle assisted me in checking out the deer damage on one of the birch trees.

This huge lake of a puddle still had a sheet of ice on the surface. We’re supposed to reach 9C this afternoon; the warmest we’re expected to get for the next week or so. I expect this is going to either get bigger, or finally start to be absorbed into the ground. When it comes time for us to plant the fruit and nut trees we are planning on, we will have to take into account areas like this that flood every spring. This area may puddle in the spring, but in the summer, all of this area gets very dry. The north-east corner is the area that is the worst. Even grass and weeds have a hard time growing in that corner.

I also took the opportunity to extend my rounds into the outer yard. If we were to do a burn, this would be the perfect time for it, as the ground is still quite wet. It would be really good to get rid of the years of dried grass built up, as it becomes a major fire hazard by summer.

With future plans becoming more solidified, I have been looking at the stuff lying about with a new eye for salvage or other usefulness. There are, for example, two really good saw horses outside the storage shed. The ones I have currently in the garage are in much worse shape, so I want to bring these ones over to the house.

Once they are no longer frozen to the ground.

There are some other things, like metal… balcony rails? … that could be set up as temporary fencing around some garden areas. There are a lot of things that have been shoved under the storage shed itself that I’ll want to take a closer look at.

Inside the shed itself, there are things that we could definitely find uses for. If we can get at it. As we cleared out my parents’ stuff from the house, we’ve shoved so many things into here, it’s going to be hard to get at things. We will have to get into there and re-arrange things, though. Some of the stacks of boxes are collapsing, as bottom boxes have given out. This shed was my late brother’s workshop, and I’m sure there are all kinds of useful things hidden away in there. I’d love to be able to reclaim it as a workshop some day, but what do we do with all my parents’ stuff? My mother is adamant that we keep it all, though she has said I could sell some of it off, if I want. She keeps suggesting holding a garage sale, which I have no interest in doing. I’ve done these in the city with little success. What good is having a garage sale this far off the beaten path? I might try using eBay or something, but am in no position to sort through things and take pictures right now.

It would be a good way to try and raise money for a new roof, though. We’ve got to come up with some way to raise the money, because we sure as heck won’t be able to save up for it with our current fixed income. Not with so many other things making demands on every spare penny. I most definitely am not complaining; that fact that we have spare any pennies at all is something I am grateful for. The reality of it is, if we’re going to keep this place up just in the basics of maintenance and repair, we’re going to have to come up with other solutions.

Any suggestions?

The Re-Farmer

I see four

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Before heading into town, I paused to say hello to the mamas. Butterscotch was content to stay in her cave and just stick her head out every now and then to accept scritches, purring away. The opening is not that big, and it’s dark in that old radio, so I tried the technological method.

Sticking my phone in the opening and taking a picture.

Butterscotch was not too keen on that whole “flash” thing! :-D

I did, however, manage to get a picture of the kitties!

Unless there are others hidden somewhere, it looks like she’s had 4 kittens again; three orange tabbies and one grey and white tabby.

They. Are. So. Cute!!!

Judging from how active Beep Beep is, she might not be due for another week or two. :-D But who knows? We might have more kittens sooner than that.

I’m glad we have the mamas inside. Today has been an odd day, weather wise. When I did my rounds, it was rather pleasant. After dropping my daughter off at work, it was a combination of rain and snow. By the time I got to the dump, it was snowing, then when I got home, it was raining one moment, snowing the next. Well. More snow than rain.

This turned out to be not very pleasant for my daughter at work. They’ve had to close down the staff lunch room, because it’s too small to maintain physical distancing. For most of the staff, that didn’t matter. They live close enough that they could just go home for lunch. My daughter picked up lunch at a nearby grocery store, then ate outside. Which meant she was sitting on a concrete sidewalk in the cold for almost an hour, because there is no indoor public place anyone can sit and eat anymore. :-( Thankfully, she’s one of those people with a built in furnace and isn’t as bothered by the cold.

Also, it’s a good thing we still have my husband’s disability income to live on during the current lock down, because she’s down to just one shift a week. Her employer is actually adding a bonus to people’s wages to make up for some of the loss of hours, but of course, it isn’t much. Who knows how long any of this can be sustained.

I headed into town very early, because as far as I knew, the hardware store closed at 4. As I was approaching the doors, I saw a staff member putting away the outside displays already, so I made sure to look for the hours. I found the sign saying they closed at 3. It was 2:55! I commented to the guy, apologetically, about how they were about to close and was about to leave. He stopped me and asked me to go ahead in, assuring me I they wouldn’t lock the doors on me! :-D Thankfully, I knew exactly where I needed to go to find the sandpaper I was looking for. Normally, I would have looked around for anything else I might need, but not today.

As I was paying for it, more people were coming into the store, and no one was telling them the store was about to close. Normally, this would be one of those times you’d read about in Not Always Right, and the rude customers forcing staff to stay long before their shifts have ended because they came in after closing. I did not get that impression today. I got the sense they would love to have stayed open longer, and wanted all the customers they can get right now! Even a large, national franchise like this one can only take so much loss. :-(

The grocery store nearby, however, had no such time restrictions. Happily, I was able to find a large box of cat litter (the last one, hidden way in the back of the shelf) and a large bag of cat food. If we’re careful (and keep the kibble bin in the house, instead of the sun room for the skunks to get into), we should be okay for the rest of the month.

So we are well stocked and, aside from a trip to the vet with another cat on Monday, and my daughter’s 1 shift a week, we can be homebodies for the rest of the month. If the weather co-operates, I hope that means I can start cleaning up all the fallen branches in the yard, now that the snow is almost all gone, and get some black plastic over some of the areas we are planning to garden in this year, to help the soil warm up faster. :-)

There is certainly no shortage of things that need to be done. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Morning kitties

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So many kitties!

Of course, I visited the mamas first thing this morning.

They are much more comfortable in their new surroundings, and quite eager for human attention.

Just look at those round, round baby bellies!!

I’d kept the cardboard box from the hot water tank, and it’s now serving as a rug on top of the concrete. :-D I’m also finding Beep Beep on top of the chairs, and she’ll even go up on the table. Butterscotch, likely because she if farther along that Beep Beep, makes no attempt to jump up onto anything! :-D

Going into the sun room, there was little sign of the skunks. They’d been in there, but I don’t think they stayed long. All the kibble was gone, but it was already low in the evening and we didn’t top it up, so there was not much left for them to get into.

It did mean, however, that the outside cats were quite hungry.

I was happy to see Big Jim hanging out in the sun room. The blood I’d seen on his face previously is dried up and disappearing – he is such a filthy boy! – and I was unable to spot where it came from. It may have come from a scratch on an ear, near the head. Wherever the wound is, it’s too small to be seen through his fur.

Also, Rosencrantz! We’ve started to see her a bit more often of late.

The kitties were hungry enough that Junk Pile cat almost came inside while I was there.

Usually, when I add food to the outside bowls, Junk Pile and Pump Shack cats are pretty skittish about eating until I leave.

They were still skittish, but hungry enough to tolerate my nearness more than usual.

The only outside cat I didn’t see this morning was Potato Beetle. Even Nicky the Nose was hanging around.

Waiting for me to leave, before he comes to the house to eat.

In the sun room, I started to take the rigid insulation off the south facing windows. We’re at a point were the passive solar heat would be more beneficial than the insulation We’ll take the rest down when we can finally start emptying the room out to clean it.

I also removed some of the insulation around the base of the house to uncover a couple of windows to the basement. This way, Butterscotch and Beep Beep can have natural light. When we can start hauling stuff we removed from the basement to the barn, we’ll take all the insulation around the base of the house to the barn for storage until next fall.

One of my goals for today is to start some cucamelons indoors. :-) They apparently take a very long time to germinate, compared to other things. I’ve worked out the timing of when to start different seeds, and even those I plan to start 2 weeks from now might actually start germinating sooner than the cucamelons. It should be interesting to see how these all turn out.

Time to get back at it! :-)

The Re-Farmer

Budding

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My daughter spotted a surprise in our largest aloe vera, Sarlac 2.

It’s starting to send up a flower spike!

This aloe traveled with us during the move. Before the move, we were able to sell quite a few things, including several of Sarlac 1’s transplanted babies. We had intended to bring the Sarlac along with us, but realized it was simply too big to fit in our van, even without all the other stuff we had to jam into there. So when someone came to buy this plant, I asked if they’d be willing to upgrade to the mama plant and we’d keep this one.

Not only did they agree to take the mother aloe, they ended up buying almost all the remaining potted aloes as well!

So that saved us a whole lot of space.

The Sarlac was a massive, toothy aloe we’d had for quite a few years, but it wasn’t until we moved to a larger townhouse in the co-op that it apparently got the amount of sun it was longing for. Shortly after, it threw out a flower spike with three buds on it – then a second spike, soon after! I’d never seen an aloe bloom before. Unfortunately, the spikes tipped the balance of the aloe – literally. The pot fell under the weight. Everything survived just fine, including the pot, but we transplanted to a pot with straight sides, instead of the more decorative pot with a narrower base.

Our umbrella tree is in that pot right now, and this experience is why I’m really wanting to find a larger, straight sided pot for it.

The girls and I will be re-arranging the living room over the next week. My husband has moved his computer set up into his bedroom, closer to his hospital bed, so now there’s this strange empty space. As we move things around, we’ll hopefully find a better arrangement for the plants in the process, including a better spot for the mini-greenhouse until it can go outside.

I did end up stopping at the post office today, where I could also pick up some more deer feed (the post office is in an old style general store, so it’s got a little bit of all kinds of things!) and found my back ordered birdhouse gourd seeds in the mail box. We will be starting these indoors, too. I was more than ready to start the cucamelon and fennel, but even if we were to transplant earlier than the last frost date, it would still be way too early to start them indoors. They can be started closer to the middle of the month, then the rest of the things we want to start indoors, like these gourds, can be started about a week later.

It’s nice to think about budding things when there’s still snow on the ground!

The Re-Farmer

Winter is back!

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So are the juncos.

The deer have suddenly stopped coming around, which leaves plenty of seeds for the returning juncos. I haven’t seen these guys in ages!

I’m certainly glad my mother’s appointment had been rescheduled for yesterday and not, say, today. Yesterday was a very pleasant day and the roads were great. If it had been for today, I’d have already called to reschedule by now!

There is, in fact, a large puddle of water over much of the area here. Thankfully, the lower part of my snow boots are waterproof, so as long as I skirted the edges of where I knew the water to be, I would be fine.

Some little critter got wet feet!

The deeper water is still filling with snow. Though it’s -7C (19F) right now, with a wind chill of -15C (5F), the water is not yet freezing. Just filling with snow.

By the time I’d gone to bed last night (past 2am!), it was still raining. The van had been parked by the house so we wouldn’t have to walk through the water and mud between the house and the garage. I looked out the window a few times last night, debating if I should move it to the garage.

I probably should have moved it to the garage, but trying to skirt around the water and mud in the dark to get back to the house just didn’t appeal to me.

With the rainfall earlier, the van doors had started to freeze shut. I brushed only a bit of the snow off, and scraped enough of the windshield to see enough to drive to the garage. In the time it took me to put away the scraper and start the van, the snow was already covering the windshield enough to make it harder to see again!

I am really thankful to have a garage for the van. It may have only a dirt floor and be filled with mystery stuff and junk, but I love having it. Before moving here, we parked outdoors, but at least if something went wrong, it was relatively easy to get it to a mechanic – unlike now, when we have to take it to other towns! With a vehicle like ours, I want to protect and baby it as much as possible. I don’t know how many years we’ve got left in it, and we depend on it so much.

While looking at the long range forecasts a few days ago, I remember thinking about how there is almost always one last blowout in April, usually around our anniversary. Which is in a few days. :-D The forecasts at the time showed nothing but warm and pleasant conditions.

It took a few days for the forecasts to change, but here it is! We’re expected to get 5-10cm (2-4 inches) of snow in our area today, with snow continuing through to tomorrow. To the south of us, especially around the city, they’re predicting 10-15cm (4-6 inches). It’s supposed to warm up for the weekend, then we’ll continue to have more snow off and on over the next week. We’re getting the big stuff now, though, with a huge weather system sweeping up from the US.

I think this is a good day to start prepping our seed trays and maybe starting the cucamelons. They’re the ones that need the most time before transplanting and, for our region, absolutely must be started indoors. That mini greenhouse my daughter bought for me with be great to not only help keep the planting trays warm in this chilly house, but protect them from the cats! :-)

The Re-Farmer

A couple more steps closer!

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Since we had to go into town today to pick up prescriptions, we added in as many errands as we could think of, so we wouldn’t have to come back any time soon.

Which would have been a moot point, since one of my husband’s prescriptions can’t be filled until tomorrow (one of the highly regulated drugs he’s on). I will be taking my mother to a doctor’s appointment tomorrow, though, in a different town. Thankfully, my husband has enough that it can wait for my daughter to pick up when she’s at work on Saturday.

I knew the seeds we ordered were waiting for us at the post office, so we swung by a hardware store, where I hoped to pick up a soil mix specifically for vegetables. I couldn’t find any, so I picked up a couple of trays and extra Jiffy pellets. When I asked about the soil, I expected to hear the inventory wasn’t in yet. Nope. They’re sold out!

My daughter was a sweetheart and picked this up for me.

A mini greenhouse kit! I’ve wanted one of these for years. <3

Cheddar decided he would help me put it together.

In looking at the seeds that have come in, and deciding which ones we’ll want to start indoors, and which we’ll seed outside, I finally went and looked up when our last frost date is. Since the seeds say to start them X number of weeks before all danger of frost is past, I figured I should probably confirm when that is! For most people here, it’s traditional to get their gardens in on the May long weekend.

It turns out that, for our area, the frost date is June 2nd. !! In the city, an hour’s drive south of us, it’s May 28th.

Which means the earliest we would need to start seeds indoors is May 5th! I was expecting to be starting them in mid-April, at the latest.

Hhhmmm. I think we’ll still start some of them in mid-April anyhow. Particularly the cucamelon, which needs at lot more warmth and longer growing season compared to anything else we’ve picked up.

I had something else come in the mail that needed to be assembled. Unlike the mini-greenhouse, this did not come with assembly instructions.

Along with our seeds order (minus the gourd seeds, which were back ordered but should be in very soon), we got the bottle cutter I’d ordered. I chose this one specifically because it can cut square as well as round bottles. While it came with instructions for use, I had to use a photo on the other side of the sheet to figure out how the back plate was supposed to be put on.

While I plan to test it out and make some practice cuts, I don’t think I’ll start making the bottle bricks yet. The plan for our first cordwood practice building is to build on a base of 8x8x16 concrete blocks.

Which has been strangely hard to find in the flat ended type I want. Most that I’m finding are 8x6x16, or 8x8x16’s with shaped ends. I hope to find what we are looking for at the salvage place I found (which, I found out, my brother has been to a few times), but inventory there is based on whatever the demolition crews happen to bring in. If I can’t get enough in the size I’m after, we might have to change the thickness of the walls. So I while I might make a bottle brick or two for practice, until we know what dimensions we’re working with, we will just continue to collect bottles and get them cleaned out and ready. If I can find some polishing paper and polishing paste, I could try cutting some bottles to make vases or something in the mean time.

So now that we have almost all our seeds, the seed starting supplies, the mini-greenhouse, the lawn mower blade sharpener and the bottle cutter, we’ve got the tools and materials to get quite a few things accomplished in the next while!

I look forward to getting things done! :-)

The Re-Farmer

Water, water, everywhere, and in recovery

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Doing my rounds this morning is, for the most part, getting easier as the snow melts. There are just a couple of shaded areas where sheets of ice and formerly hard-packed snow suddenly giving way under my feet, have made walking somewhat more dangerous!

It also means that, while the water between the house and the garage has gone from “lake” to ” large muddy puddles”, there is a lot more water in other areas, too.

I noticed this while going past the outhouse this morning.

The outhouse door has a piece of plywood in front of it, with a rotted out hole. I’d had a metal… something I don’t know the name of, but it’s used as steps on large vehicles… over the hole, but while it’s there, the outhouse door can’t be opened. It had been set aside during our septic troubles (not that we used the outhouse; it’s too disgusting in there!) and not put back yet. This allowed me to see that the hole under the door is getting bigger – and the pit is full of water! I checked the access area at the back, and could see the water there, too. That pit is completely filled.

The outhouse is sitting on what is probably beams of pressure treated wood, which look like they have sunk into the ground. It really should have been on concrete or something, and raised slightly above ground level. I doubt any of the outhouses that have ever been here were done that way. Which would explain why they have been replaced so many times over the years. I know of at least 3, not counting the one that was there that we used before we got running water in the house.

Another reason why we want to build a new outhouse, without a pit and on a proper base! Composting toilets have their own issues, but I’ll take those over dealing with a pit, thankyouverymuch. :-D

I also had something I could really appreciate while doing this morning’s rounds.

I was able to do them without needing a cane.

Yesterday evening, after all the walking around with the wheelbarrow I’d done earlier, was a difficult one. I definitely over did it. My hip gave out again, and it didn’t recover as it had earlier. Thankfully, we keep canes around the house, including one of my dad’s canes that we’ve left hanging on an arm bar between the old and new parts of the house. I had to get my daughter to bring it to me, because I couldn’t walk from my desk chair to get it. Even my left hip was becoming more of a problem. Both hips have mild osteoarthritis, but my left hip hurts pretty constantly, due to bone spurs. Typically, it’s a level of pain I can ignore, but that was getting hard to do, yesterday evening. When my right hip was X-rayed, it showed mild OA, but also fragments basically floating around, and I think that’s what’s causing my problems. I think fragments are getting into the joint, causing pain until they get worked out of the joint again.

I will have to get myself to a doctor again to check it out.

I got very little sleep last night, due to the pain and discomfort, even though I’d taken pain killers. It’s better now, in that I can walk without a cane and put weight on my right leg again, but even with painkillers, it’s still hurting quite a lot. I also needed to use my husband’s bath chair while I showered.

So today is going to be a day of recovery for me. Aside from heading out to the pharmacy this afternoon, to pick up prescriptions, I’m going to have to focus on giving my body a break to heal up. I figure this is a good time to catch up on some more crochet projects. :-) I’ll have to remember to get the mail today, too. My order from Vesey’s is ready for pick up. The girls and I will go over what we want to start indoors. Almost everything we got can actually be sown outdoors after danger of frost is past, which would be about mid-May, but getting a head start on some of them would also be good.

I’m really looking forward to being able to garden this year!

As long as my body holds out. :-(

The Re-Farmer