Well, the worst of our first blizzard of the winter hit us last night. The snow has stopped, but we are still under Orange Alert (severe, rather than red for extreme – that’s to the south of us, and into the US) blizzard warning. Today is supposed to be high winds, with snow starting again tomorrow. We’ve already passed our high of -21C/9F (wind chill, -43C/-45F) and are expected to slowly drop in temperature to -31C/24F in the wee hours of tomorrow morning.
The wind direction was the worst for our set up. It drifted snow all across the front of the house, and snow blew into the food and water bowl shelters. I had the snow shovel close to the sun room, so I only had to push through a small snow drift to be able to reach it.
There were LOTS of cats in the sun room. The nice, warm sun room.
There was no sign of the path through here before. There was a bit of drifting into the entry of the covered greenhouse, but the thermometer in there was reading 0C/32F!
First priority was to dig out in front of the sun room and get to the isolation shelter, clearing the greenhouse entry along the way. I’ll have to go back later and clear the well cap. It’s completely buried and at least partially now covered by the snow I dug out to clear the path. I wanted to make sure to move the snow away from the house, so there are fewer issues with snowmelt at that corner by the basement window in the spring.
I had to dig around the isolation shelter – that entry was almost completely blocked – to reach the windows on each side, and top up their food and water. There were six cats in there, all warm and cozy, watching me dig.
Clearing the kibble and water bowl shelters took a bit more doing. Once I cleared the snow in the middle, I dug out the kibble trays and dumped them out, then tried to clear out as much snow as possible, without taking all the straw out. The heated water bowl was completely full. No cats were going there to drink! I got as much snow as I could out of there, taking the bed and cat cave out and clearing them of snow, too. There was even snow piling up in front of the cat house entry, which I cleared. There were no tracks in the snow, so no cats had used it all night, but after I cleared it, I spotted the white with grey tabby spots inside, looking at me through the window. When I saw her earlier, she had come out from under the storage house, so I was glad to see her in a cozy bed in the cat house.
I neglected to take a “before” picture to the catio. Almost all the area to the left of the first photo had been cleared to make room for the truck. Now, you can’t even tell. It was all blown over, flat with snow.
I only dug one path to the catio door. I didn’t bother clearing the shrine feeding station yet. The food dish had been shoved off to the side, so clearly some critter had been digging around in there, looking for kibble. A small amount of snow did blow in through the opening, but just a dusting.
The rest will have to wait. It’s getting colder and it’s just too windy. I didn’t even try to clear the steps in front of the main doorway, nor the sidewalk. Once this all blows over, we might be able to get little Spewie out, but it’s not going to be easy for that little thing to get through the drifts, so we’ll be doing a lot of shoveling.
The important thing is, the yard cats have food and water and shelter.
Gotta have priorities!
Speaking of priorities, I have an update on my mother. My brother called the hospital this morning, but the new shift were in their morning meeting still, so he was asked to call back later. The nurse he spoke to was able to tell him that my mother did well overnight, though she struggled to go to the washroom, so they brought her a commode. The alarming thing, though, was that they were talking about sending my mother home!
Aside from the fact that my mother should not be going home at all right now, my brother pointed out it wasn’t even possible. All the highways are closed. The nurse was quite aware of that. When her shift ended last night, she couldn’t leave. Not even to go to a hotel. She spent the night in the hospital and just started her shift in the morning.
!!!
When my brother called back, he was told they were still monitoring her. They were putting her on an IV with a diuretic to try and get the swelling in her legs down. No doctor had arrived yet. Which isn’t much of a surprise, considering the road conditions. At the very least, we know they won’t try to discharge her from the ER until a doctor sees her today. However, they also can’t admit her to the hospital until a doctor sees her, either. So she’s stuck in the ER.
I’m just flabbergasted that there was even a possibility of her being sent home, even if the roads were open. I strongly suspect my mother is in her “I don’t want to bother anyone” mode and downplaying her issues again. Which she only does when there really are issues! When it comes to minor complaints, she has no problem “bothering people” at all, and expects us all to drop everything and cater to her. But when she’s have real struggles, suddenly it’s the opposite.
My mother’s biggest problem is that she’s too flipping strong and resilient! So she can “pass” as being better than she actually is.
I’ll be calling the hospital myself to check on her soon. I forgot to mention my mother’s kidney function concerns. I have no idea how much of her file they can access.
So it’s still a waiting game. None of us can do anything right now, regardless. I checked the provincial highway status map earlier. The closed highways are marked in red. The bypass highway around the city is shut down – all of it – so it’s completely encircled in red. Pretty much every highway leading to the city is also shut down, including four major highways heading north, in our direction. Right now, the map looks like a giant red spider with its body over the city, and red legs sprawling out over half the province in all directions.
I also checked the local highways group I follow on FB, as they tend to be much faster with information than the provincial website. It was filled with posts from people talking about zero visibility. The most recent one was someone who had tried to use the highway that goes past our place. They made it as far as the large town our doctor is in before turning around and going home. It was simply too dangerous. Everyone was saying, stay home if you can.
Not that we can do anything else, until we can clear the driveway. Which may not happen until Saturday, since we’re expecting more snow tomorrow (Friday).
A good day to drink lots of hot tea, and listen to Christmas music. Like this remarkable cover of It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.
This morning, my sister updated us on our group chat. My mother had just phoned her. A bit odd that she didn’t call me, but it’s likely she thought my sister might drop everything and drive her to the hospital.
Did I mention we’re getting our first blizzard of the year?
My sister encouraged her to use the Lifeline and get an ambulance. The home care worker was encouraging her to use the Lifeline. My mother was worried. About her Meals on Wheels coming today. About her cash stash. About her stuff. She said she would get the lunch assist home care worker to help her get dressed. But would she actually push that button? My sister even let her know, there was a blizzard coming. She needed to decide right away.
It was about 1pm when I got a phone call from Lifeline, telling me an ambulance was on the way, and could I be there to tend to my mother until they arrived? I said yes, but that it would take me half an hour to get there.
It was just starting to snow here when I left. By the time I reached my mother’s town, visibility was dropping fast, with more snow and more wind. The ambulance was already there, and they had my mother hooked up to a machine that monitored her vitals.
Now, to them, my mother was looking pretty good. She actually looked and sounded better than she has for the past week. Her vitals were all really good. I mentioned that when she was in the hospital before, it was for pulmonary edema, and they told us that if she started getting swelling, to come back. I said that my mother has said she’s feeling like she did before she went to the hospital, last time. They asked about the swelling, and while it didn’t seem too bad at the time (that we could see through her layered pant legs and woolly leggings underneath) but we confirmed that it’s been pretty constant for a while now. One of the paramedics listened to her lungs and said she sounded clear.
I asked where they would be taking her. When my mother heard that they were taking her to the town nearest us, she was “what? No! Take me to [nearer small city]!” Why, I don’t know, but we told her, they have to take her to this other town’s ER. One of the paramedics told her, if she went to the smaller city, she’d be waiting a LOT longer before being seen.
As they were getting her into the stretcher, my mother was more worried about having her coat, having the bag she packed to take with her, and she would start talking to me in Polish to tell me things like not to let anyone know (meaning her neighbours) that she was going to the hospital, because there’s “some” people living there. Basically, she believes that if they know she’s at the hospital, they’ll go into her apartment and steal her stuff. I assured her that I would take care of things and (given the weather) that I could even stay the night, if it came down to that.
As they set her in the stretcher, mostly lying flat, my mother jerked as if in pain, started gasping and I could see she was struggling to try and roll over. They were alarmed and asked her what was happening, and she told them “I’m dying.”
*sigh*
I explained to them that it’s worse when she’s lying down, and she usually lies on her side. Which they don’t really do on the stretcher, so they got her sitting up as much as possible and put her on oxygen.
Then they tried to wheel her to the ambulance.
This “accessible” apartment building is not very accessible. The stretcher barely fit through the doors, and got caught on the push bar handled of the outer door. They had to back up the stretcher then fight to angle it – with the inside door blocking the way – to get it through.
Once they had her loaded up, I went back to my mother’s apartment. There were a few things to put in the fridge and dishes to wash, and otherwise make things secure. I also called the home care office to let them know my mother was on the way to the hospital, so her visits needed to be suspended. I then locked things up and started heading home as quickly as I could. The weather had deteriorated a lot in what was really a short time. Not as bad as our drive into town yesterday, but getting there fast.
I do wish my mother hadn’t delayed using her Lifeline for so long, but at least she would get to the hospital before things went from “storm conditions” to “orange alert blizzard” conditions.
For now, it’s a waiting game. Will she be admitted to the hospital from ER? Will they try to send her home? Will she finally be allowed to go straight to a nursing home, like she’s been asking for the past couple of years? That would be her most desired “Christmas present”. The nursing home she wants to go to is just a few blocks from the hospital she’s been taken to. It’s also the same hospital she was at for three weeks, before. I am at a loss as to why she wanted the other hospital, as she’s done nothing but complain about her past ER trips to that hospital.
The main thing is, she’s finally in. Once the storm is passed and the roads are cleared, I expect to be going into town fairly regularly. Depending on how long she’s expected to be there, I’ll likely be tending her apartment, too.
I’d be really ticked off if they try to send her home!
Today was going to be a lot warmer, though not going above freezing as was being forecast off and on for the past few days.
We were planning to do a much needed dump run, then go into town for errands. With that, and the warmer temperatures, in mind, I scraped the packed snow off the sidewalks and cleared them, so they could warm up faster and melt clear. We had both rain and snow in the forecast, though, so I wasn’t sure just how much good it would do, but at least it got done.
I waited until before noon, when things were still warming up, to bring the truck into the yard and load it for the dump. I left it running, partly to defrost all the windows, but also to keep the cats from going under it.
It didn’t stop a couple from going under the back!
Thankfully, they cleared themselves out before my daughter and I were ready to leave.
Right away, before even getting through the gate, we knew we were going to have issues. Everything was so slippery!
As we drove towards the highway, we started getting hit by the wind. Just turning onto the highway, I knew I wasn’t going to reach full speed! Thankfully, the dump isn’t that far, but we were getting hit with a cross wind and sudden gusts. I’ve got good all weather tires, but they are just all weathers, not winter tires, and I could feel that wind trying to blow us off the road.
The dump run done, we headed back towards our little hamlet and, by then, conditions were getting worse. We drove through our hamlet towards town, which was more shelters, so instead of blowing snow, we were getting accumulated snow. On top of ice.
Once we cleared town, the wind was even worse than on the highway to the dump. The closer we got to town – and the lake beyond it – the worse things got. The snow was heavier and the visibility kept dropping. I was doing well below the speed limit and wasn’t even being passed, which says a lot for our area!
Once in town, our first stop was the pharmacy. Since it was past lunch by this time, I originally planned for us to grab a bite after the pharmacy, but the weather changed that plan! Instead, we went straight to the grocery store. We had four of our 18.9L/5 gallon water jugs to refill on this trip, so we needed two carts. I only needed to pick up some bread and eggs, but my daughter picked up a few things as well.
As we got out of the store, I thought things looked like they were clearing up a bit.
My daughter got this shot out her window. She tried to get a shot of the road ahead of us but the camera frustratingly clears up the shots so much, you could actually read the signs – something we couldn’t do while driving!
At least we were driving out of the worst of it, but I was still driving even slower than we did on the drive in.
Once at home, we pulled in front of the house to unload. Thankfully, we’re pretty well shelters from the north, though not so much from the west, and the winds were coming from the northwest. After unloading, my daughter was going to park the truck in the garage while I went to go the outside cat feeding early, and my other daughter put everything away.
As I came out, I found my daughter still in the driveway, stuck!
I went over to try and give her a hand when I realized something.
The truck was set to rear wheel drive. One back tire was spinning like it was elevated and floating on air! I got her attention and she switched it to 4 wheel drive – and got out easily after that!
Gotta remember. When we take the truck to the garage, they switch it from auto, to 2 wheel drive.
So that was all taken care of.
My mother had called while I was in town, though, so as soon as I could, I called her back, thinking she was calling because she wasn’t feeling well.
She was calling to check on the cards she asked me to mail. Especially the card for our vandal.
*sigh*
So I reassured her about the mail, then asked how she was feeling.
Terrible.
She then spent some time talking about how bed she felt, like she felt before going to the hospital, it’s worse in the mornings, much of which I was able to get out of her while there yesterday.
I encouraged her to use the Lifeline and have them get her to a hospital. If she has water in her lungs, she needs to go to a hospital. Only she can make that decision.
She then went on about various other things and even went so far as to say, she doesn’t want to bother anybody.
…
I told her, you do it all the time. And that’s okay. Sometimes, you need to do that. This is one of those times.
After several more minutes of encouraging her to use the Lifeline and get herself to a hospital, and reassuring her that we would take care of all her stuff that she’s worries about, I told her I would let her get off the phone, so she could use her Lifeline (which is through the phone line).
I don’t think she’s going to do it.
*sigh*
If she’s going to do it, I really hope she does it today. Tomorrow, we’re supposed to get 7.5cm/3″ of snow, with another 10cm/4″ of snow overnight into Thursday morning, then on Friday, another 4cm/1.5″ of snow.
Right now, my brother and SIL and I are tentatively planning to visit my mother on the weekend, as they will be spending Christmas with their grandsons in another province. Obviously, if she goes to the hospital, those plans will change.
The grey fluff ball in the first picture seems to be in the catio shelter a lot. Like it’s claimed the space, though the more feral adult cats also use it. Those ones run off when I come close. This one makes sure to be out of reach, but has figured out that it doesn’t need to leave the catio. I just reach in through the door to fill the food and water bowls.
The second picture is of Colby. This morning, I was actually able to give him pets and scritches that he happily accepted without trying to run away. It was while he was going for the food trays, but he stopped for the pets. When I did the evening feeding, he wouldn’t come close enough for me to touch him, but being able to give him such thorough pets this morning is a huge leap.
While refilling the water bowls, I suddenly started to smell something strange. Like … smoke? Not the wood smoke I sometimes smell, wafting in from neighbours that heat with wood. More acrid.
Of course, I was looking all over for a possible source, but could find nothing.
After I was done and ready to head inside, I paused to pet cats that were under one of the heat lamps. Havarti was one of them and, as I started to pet him, he arched his back into my hand, tail straight up and stiff…
Right up into the heat lamp’s shield.
Suddenly, there was smoke billowing out. I pushed his tail out and saw the singed fur. Just the fur. He never felt a thing. Some of that fur must have stuck to the ceramic heat bulb, because that kept smoking for a while!
Worse, he kept coming back for more pets, going right under the heat lamp with his tail up high like a flag.
So I’m guessing that’s what I was smelling. One of the cats must have stretched or something while under the heat lamp, and a tail brushed the bulb. This lamp doesn’t have a guard, like the bigger one does, but even the guard can’t stop something as skinny as a tail!
Today was my day to go to my mother’s, but I first made a stop at the post office. I’m happy to say that I did get my new credit card. The one they sent me in the middle of September – three months ago – to replace my expiring one still has not shown up, thanks to the postal strike. The strike is over but, at this point, I doubt it ever will come in. I’m glad I went with the option to have the original cancelled as “lost”, so they could expedite a new one.
I also picked up my new, 4th edition, of Back to Basics.
The second picture is of the table of contents. Sorry about the flash reflection, but it was the only way to get rid of the shadow of my arms holding my phone.
Tonight, I plan to get my old edition out to check out the differences between them.
After getting the mail, it was off to my mother’s. I timed it so I could pick up some fried chicken at the gas station. My mother’s building has group meals every now and then, that everyone contributes a few dollars towards, every month. The most recent one had meals brought in from one of the restaurants that specializes in fried chicken, but it’s very different from the franchise in this gas station. My mother was not impressed and commented on how much better the gas station’s chicken is. They also have potato wedges with the same coating as the chicken that she really likes. So I got some chicken and wedges for myself, then a second box of chicken and wedges for my mother. She had her Meals on Wheels today, so I figured she could have it for supper, or for lunch tomorrow, as a treat.
I got to my mother’s shortly after 11am. Her Meals on Wheels gets delivered at noon, so I used the time to get a few things done or at least started, including the one load of laundry she had left. One of the machines is broken, so my sister was able to do only one load while she was out, a few days ago, making sure to wash the things my mother needed right away. I even had time to change her bedding before her lunch arrived.
One request she had for me that was rather different.
She wanted me to mail her Christmas cards – but not in her town. She wanted me to take them to our post office, because she doesn’t trust the one in her town.
*sigh*
One of them was a card for our vandal. Which, she told me, had money in it. *sigh* She couldn’t remember his box number, but it’s at our post office, so the postmaster knows what it is. She wanted them to just stamp it with a postmark and stick it in his mail box. Another of the cards was to a relative that live in the town nearest us, and she wanted it to not go to the city first, but to go straight to that town.
My mother has no understanding of how the postal system works.
My mother’s Meals on Wheels is delivered by a volunteer from the senior’s centre, who also does all sorts of activities in her building, so my mother has gotten to know her pretty well. This woman also knows our vandal. When she delivered the meal, she paused to let my mother know that she’d run into him recently, and he’s looking really bad right now. She almost didn’t recognize him. She said they spoke, and he asked her to pass on his Christmas well wishes to my mother.
*sigh*
This did remind my mother to ask about the letter from our vandal that she’d delivered. She’s brought it along with the Meals on Wheels tray. This was almost 2 weeks ago, and she could not remember. It must have been left on my mother’s walker. He’d given her letters to give to my mother before, and she would have remembered that, but he hasn’t done that in a very long time.
We ended up telling her briefly some of the things he’s been doing. My mother said that, the last time he came to see her, he behaved so badly, she told him not to come back. I had pictures of the letter, with a date, so I was able to confirm exactly what day she had brought it, and she simply could not remember. I told her, very briefly, about what was in the letter, and how our vandal has been behaving towards us, including blaming me and my brother for causing his cancer. When I mentioned, I really don’t want to get another restraining order, she actually said, I might have to do that. She gets along with him, but is quite aware that there’s something wrong with him.
Her meal delivered, my mother and I had lunch together. We’d already worked on her shopping list and got that ready, so once we were done and I saw that it would be a while before her laundry could be switched to the dryer, I headed out to do her errands. After going to the pharmacy and grocery store – for someone who yelled at me a couple of days ago that she didn’t need groceries, today was actually a larger grocery list than usual! – it was back to my mother’s to finish things up. The big job was saved for last – mopping her floors. Which is when I discovered she doesn’t have any cleaners. She uses laundry detergent for her floors! When I asked her about it and she told me she used laundry detergent, she asked what I used. I told her, floor cleaner! Well. All purpose cleaner, but they make cleaners special for floors. Which I find weird because, growing up, I know full well she used other kinds of cleaners, but she acted as if she’d never heard of floor cleaner before!
Finishing the mopping was perfect timing. I went to check the laundry, just in time to hear the dryer give its finishing buzz. That was the last thing left to do. I got her laundry folded and was putting it all away, as well as putting away other things that were done with and generally just finishing up.
My mother took that as me getting ready to leave, because she started accusing me, “You said you had all day for me today. You said you’d give me all day.”
Which had me looking at the clock and saying, It’s almost 2:30. I’ve been here a long time. Oh, but you said all day…
…
After several hours of constant activity, I was certainly ready to sit down for a bit, but I did remind her that she wanted me to mail things are our post office, so I had to leave before they closed. She at least acknowledged that!
Once I sat down, though, she suddenly starting getting in on what a bad parent I am because I “hide the girls” and “do everything for them.” You see, earlier, she wanted me to take home a magazine the social workers give her. A magazine we don’t read. She was basically wanting to give us her garbage. I told her, we don’t read that kind of magazine. She suggested the girls might like it. I just laughed and said no, they don’t read that kind of magazine, either (it was one of those check out display women’s magazines). She started telling me not to speak for them, to which I asked, are they here? No? I know them. I know what they like.
Anyhow, because she doesn’t see them (she doesn’t understand that she has driven them away by her own actions, and they dread being around her), she just makes up reasons for it, and all those reasons involve me being a terrible person. Oh, and if I got the girls to do more of the cooking and cleaning at home (which is what they do the most of, already), that would give me more time to be with her.
…
I told her, they do most of the inside stuff, I do most of the outside stuff.
You don’t have cows. What do you have to do? Shovel snow?
…
On it went.
I had barely sat down when she started on this. I’d hoped to get a bit of a rest before leaving, but that was it. I got up and started getting my coat on.
She did change her tune, sort of, and we did part on a more positive note, at least, but it blew me away how quickly she went from being okay, to attack mode. She really does seem to hate me. Or at least hold me in contempt. Until she needs me for something, of course. *sigh* Ah, well. Nothing we can do about that.
On another note, my mother is not doing well. It took some questioning (and it turned out she was telling the home care coordinator different things than she was telling me, which I found out when checking my email while doing her shopping), but eventually my mother said that she felt like she did before she went to the hospital. Which was for pulmonary edema. Given her shortness of breath and swollen legs, that makes sense.
Now, since we’ve moved out here, my mother has gotten us (including my brother) to take her to the ER for all sorts of things, several times, for far less problems, She would end up in the ER, with one of us with her, for over 10 hours, each time, would get sent home and then be angry that they didn’t find anything wrong with her. The one time she actually ended up in the hospital, it was after one of her church neighbours had taken her to the local clinic to see a Nurse Practitioner – an actual appointment – and they ended up sending her to the ER in the town closest to us by ambulance. Now that it looks like she actually should go to the hospital, and we’re encouraging her to use her Life Line, so they can get an ambulance for her (the most efficient and safest way to transport her), she suddenly doesn’t want to. She did acknowledge that she probably should go to the hospital, but she says she doesn’t want to leave her home.
…
This from the person who’s been fighting to get into a nursing home for about 2 years now.
We can’t force her to do it, though. She has to make that decision herself. Part of the problem is, she thinks if she’s gone for any length of time, people will steal her stuff. The other part of the problem is, my mother doesn’t like to make decisions for herself. She wants other people to make decisions for her, so she can then blame them if things don’t go the way she wants. This is a life long pattern.
So that was the state of things when I left. As promised, on the way home, I stopped at our post office to mail her cards.
When I got there, I saw someone at the post office, picking up packages. This is someone I grew up with, like one of my own brothers. Actually, at one point, I decided I was going to marry him. I think I was about 8 years old at the time. 😄 He’s one of the few people still managing to be friends with our vandal, and the last time I saw him in person was at the de-consecration service for our hamlet’s church that someone tried to burn down and cannot be salvaged. When he drove in and parked, just behind our vandal and his wife, I’d gone over to talk to him. I’d recently sent him a message about something our vandal had said/done, but hadn’t gotten a response. When I got to him, he actually started yelling at me, and was really angry about what I’d said about our vandal, and that I should “just stop”. Stop what, I had no idea. During the service, our vandal can actually been okay around me and we even spoke briefly. I had some hope, until he sent another really vile voice mail message to my brother, that same evening. I ended up sending a copy of that message, plus another one, to this friend, with a message that included saying I had no idea what I was doing that he thought I should stop; I hadn’t had contact with our vandal in ages. After getting that message, I got a brief response. He was clearly shocked by the messages, and said he needed to do some thinking.
That’s the last time I had any real contact with him, other than waving at each other as we pass each other on the gravel roads.
Seeing him at the post office, collecting his packages, I went to hold the door open for him. When he came around and saw me, I joked that I figured he would have his hands full!
He absolutely lit up when he saw me. As he came over, still holding his packages, he managed to give me a great big, warm hug. We exchanged Christmas and New Year’s wishes before he left. It felt so good! With our vandal seeming to have turned so many of our neighbours against us, this really just made my day. We will probably never be able to repair the relationship I had with our vandal again, but at least this dear friend is still a dear friend!
From there, I went to take care of my mother’s mail. I explained about the one for our vandal, and that my mother didn’t remember his box number. It was a new postal employee, though, and she said she didn’t know any of that stuff yet, but she promised to set the cards aside for the postmaster (who grew up here and knows pretty much everyone) to take care of. That one card might actually go straight to the postal box there, but the other two will have to go through the usual routine!
Then, since I was there anyhow, I picked up a few things. While waiting my turn for the post office, I was standing next to one of the booze displays (that corner is the “liquor store” part of this old fashioned general store). I spotted a chocolate whiskey that looked very interesting – and it was a very reasonable price – so I picked up a bottle. My daughters and I will have to taste test it, later!
By the time I got home, it was time to do my evening routine, including tending the outside cats, before it got dark. Then I made sure to update my family in our group chat about my mother, then update and respond to the home care coordinator’s email. That no show on my mother’s bed time meds on Friday, after I’d given the okay for the male home care worker to do the med assist, even though he couldn’t to any personal assist, got a strange answer. According to her, there was no med assist scheduled for that night, with a note that this was confirmed with me by phone. Which is the opposite of what happened!
Something went very wrong, there!
Thankfully, my daughters had a supper ready and waiting for me when I got home (which, according to my mother, they never do!), so I could take care of all this stuff right away.
Tomorrow, I’m going to be out most of the day again. The current forecast says we’re going to get a high of 2C/36F, so it’s going to be laundry day (since we’re still running the washer’s drainage hose out the window in our new front door). While that is being take care of, I’ll be doing a dump run, possibly with one of my daughters, then going to town for errands of our own. While I was gone today, we got a call from the pharmacy confirming we have stuff ready for pick up – that would be my request to have 3 months worth or refills done, instead of just 1 month, for myself and my daughter. My husband had something scheduled to be delivered, but since I’ll be in town anyhow, I’ll be able to pick it up – and I can give the pharmacy my new credit card number for their files, to use to pay for any future prescription deliveries.
Warm as tomorrow is supposed to be, the winds are supposed to pick up even more – and keep picking up more over the next few days.
Thankfully, the gas prices went down again and I was able to fill my tank before leaving my mother’s town, at $1.109/L.
Just a bit more running around between now and Christmas. I really try to avoid shopping this time of year, but there will be one more city trip between now and then.
It had actually warmed up a bit, by the time I took this screen shot. There was no wind that I could tell, yet it takes next to no breeze at all to drive the wind chill down.
That cats outside seem to be okay. I spotted one of the more feral mamas inside the cat house, alone, while the crowd was in the sun room and isolation shelter, when I first started putting the food out. I start out with two gallon jugs of hot water, but it’s just warm by the time I fill the water bowls.
I changed out the litter boxes in the sun room today. They were frozen solid. As soon as they were done, I turned around and there were too kittens using them! One ran off when I came too close. I’m glad they figured out the litter boxes, though some clearly are just going on the concrete. Something to clean up in the spring, when the mess is no longer frozen. Beats trying to go in the snow, so I can’t fault them for doing it!
Ha! No thanks, Bing. I’ll stay inside, where it’s warm.
All righty. Time to get my thoughts organized about how things went this year, and what I want to do next year.
When this post gets published, I’ll actually be at my mother’s place, doing some housekeeping for her and getting her apartment the way she wants it for Christmas. We’re already getting weather warnings for this weekend. Today’s high (Thursday) was -11C/12F. Wind chills at around -22C/-8F. Tomorrow (Friday, when this will be published) and Saturday, our highs are supposed to be -21C/-6F, but we are getting warning of wind chills dropping things to -40C/-40F. !!!!!
Then it’s supposed to start warming up again, up to a high of -5C/23F on Tuesday, before dropping again. There are no longer any predicted highs above freezing around Christmas, but we’re still expecting major swings in temperature.
I’m so glad the winter sown beds got that extra layer or straw.
Speaking of which, here are my final thoughts on how our 2025 garden did.
Winter Sowing
This was the big experiment this year. If it didn’t work, we would have had a very different gardening year, that’s for sure! The other part of the experiment was broadcasting mixes of seeds, some of them years old, which gave me the chance to restock with fresh seed, later on.
Two of the mixes were complete failures, but for very different reasons. The summer squash just never came up. If anything did sprout, they got rolled over by cats. Which is what killed off the “tall and climbing things” bed, and the winter sown flowers. I did see things start to sprout, but they didn’t survive long.
The root vegetables mix in two beds did really well, though one almost got chocked out by the insanely productive Jabousek lettuce seeds that were added. I’m even happier with the greens mix, having finally been able to grow kohlrabi, and those Swiss Chard were an excellent cut and come again crop.
In the end, if it weren’t for the winter sown beds that survived, we would have had a much less productive year! This is a major game changer for me, and I expect to keep doing this from now on. Not only did we get much earlier growth, but it saved me a lot of work in the spring.
The biggest problems
Cats.
I thought it would be the elm seeds, and they were definitely a problem in the expected places, too, but the yard cats were particularly destructive this year.
What I won’t do again, and what I’m doing instead
Definitely not broadcasting mixes. That did give me a good idea of what could be successfully winter sown in our climate zone, though. Particularly with the drought, heat and smoke we got this year. This time, the winter sowing was much more planned out. The beds also got more thoroughly mulched before the hard frosts hit.
With that in mind, we’ve planted carrots, peas, spinach, chard, kohl rabi, cabbage, beets, and Hedou Tiny bok choi. Plus, of course, garlic. There were also lots of little onions found while cleaning up the old kitchen garden that got transplanted. Those might bulb, or go to seed. Either one works for me.
I will also have to make sure to put cat proof protective covers on pretty much everything.
I was also happy with having radish pods instead of radish bulbs. There is a variety grown specifically for their pods that I might pick up at some point but, for now, we quite enjoyed the proliferation of pods to snack on and do quick pickles with. You get a LOT more food from a single radish by eating the pods, too. Definitely for winter sowing, though, as I’ve read they taste a lot stronger when they are direct sown in the spring.
Transplants
This was a really hard year for all our transplants. The heat, drought and smoke likely played a big part in that, but in some beds, it looks like tree roots invading the beds also played a part. We got very little out of our transplants. The ones we started indoors that did best were the Chocolate Cherry and Spoon tomatoes, even as stunted as they were. The worst were probably the melons. The pepper and eggplant plants did rather well, but to so much for blooming and productivity. The purchased herb transplants, on the other hand, did great in their tiny raised bed!
The biggest problems
The transplants were something we could protect from cats rather well. In the end, it was probably a combination of drought conditions and those tree roots. Not a lot that was in our zone of control that we could have done anything about.
What I won’t do again, and what I’m doing instead.
I won’t winter sow onions again. Instead, I will be starting them indoors for transplanting. I had hoped they would at least grow enough to use the greens and deter deer, but most of them simply got choked out.
We will, of course, still be starting seeds indoors to transplant in the spring, but we need to set up a seed starting area and the aquarium greenhouses in the basement. If for no other reason than we need to clear space in the cat free zone, AKA the living room. Now that cats aren’t allowed in the new basement anymore, I can open up the “window” between the basements, near the furnaces. That should help more warm air from the old basement to flow into the new basement and equalize things. There is the “doorway” (a vaguely door shaped hole cut into the wall when the new basement was built) but no real air flow between the two basements.
As for what we can do instead, for better success with our transplants… I honestly don’t know. There isn’t much I can do about heat waves. There are limits to watering during a drought, and not just due to the lower water table. Our well pump still needs to be replaced, if we dare risk the foot valve, so the more the hose is used, the more wear and tear on the pump. In the end, it comes down to the weather, really.
As for the tree roots, we need to cut that row of self-seeded trees down completely, and ensure no suckers start coming up at the stumps. My mother was adamant about not cutting those trees down, even though I see signs that someone tried to at some point. Probably my late brother tried to get rid of them. I recall my mother laughing about how angry he would get because she would stick trees all over the place, making it hard for him to take care of things.
Now my oldest brother owns the property, though, and he is very much in agreement with getting rid of them. He had issues with where and how my parents chose to plant trees, too, and we’re both now dealing with the consequences.
Other than clearing those trees out, the only other thing we can really do is more raised beds. The higher, the better but, for now, even low raised beds help. Once the trees are cut down, I’m even thinking of putting a long, higher raised bed over where they are, to make sure they get good and dead. That would also reclaim the garden space lost to my mother allowing those trees to grow after she transplanted out the raspberries that were there.
As for the purchased herb transplants, those did quite well. I certainly won’t turn my nose up at buying transplants to supplement anything we start indoors.
Yes, I will still be trying luffa again! 😄
Spring Direct Sowing
These where the most affected by this year’s climate conditions of all. It was pretty brutal.
We direct sowed pole beans, bush beans, corn, carrots, peas and more summer squash. I’ll add potatoes to this list as well. I think the potatoes did the best, even though they never reached the blooming stage. The summer squash and two types of beans were the worst.
The biggest problems.
There’s only so much I can blame on the drought. We haven’t had much luck direct sowing summer squash in the past, either. Granted, last year it was slugs that were the big problem, and this year, we had lots of frogs taking care of those for us!
In the end, though, I think most of our issues were the same as with the transplants. Too much heat, drought conditions (even with watering twice a day) and so much smoke. Plus, tree roots.
What I won’t do again, and what I’m doing instead
I will have to find space for them, but summer squash will be started indoors again, for transplanting instead of direct sowing.
Beans and corn; there really isn’t anything I can do differently with those.
The peas did surprisingly well, but we need to ramp up our deer protection.
The carrots need less tree roots competing for space. Those have been winter sown in the trellis bed. If I plant more in the spring, I need to be strategic on where, to avoid those roots.
The chard I direct sowed were a complete fail. I have more varieties to direct sow in the spring, and those will go in earlier. I suspect it was partly too hot when they were planted, and the soil too compacted by watering.
Soil compaction is an issue. We need to add more organic matter to our soil. Preferably something like peat moss (Canadian peat moss is ethically harvested) that will also increase the acidity.
That might be another issue for everything. Our soil is so alkaline, and most things do better in slightly acidic soil. I’ve been amending with Sulphur, but it’s really hard to increase soil acidity. Especially with dark grey zone soil like ours, that leaches everything so quickly.
More high raised beds will allow us to control for that more, but this is the sort of thing that takes years to amend, even the slightest.
Food forest and perennials
Happily, we got quite a boost with our food forest this spring, adding a plum, another variety of eating apple more suited to our climate zone, new cross pollinating varieties of haskap and gooseberry. I remember we had gooseberry here when I was a kid and so loved eating them when they were really really sour! I look forward to eating them again.
The biggest problems
Deer. Drought. The insane number of rocks I find when digging holes to plant in.
What I won’t do again, and what I’ll do instead.
I won’t underestimate how determined deer can be, nor assume they won’t like something! I got spoiled by them ignoring the silver buffalo berry and sea buckthorn, though they did go after that one highbush cranberry, over and over again, last year.
In the spring, I’ll be making more wire mesh cages for the fruit and nut trees. The berry bushes seem to be okay.
I really need to find a place to transplant those grapes to.
Now that I’ve got the new strawberry and asparagus bed, I’m thinking of slowly turning that section over to perennials. Not next year, though. I have other plans for there, first.
Final thoughts
There were a lot of things out of our control this year, and some things I am just not sure what went wrong. Like with the red noodle beans.
With so many changes to our garden this past year, and not being able to reclaim spaces we’d planted in, in previous years, it really isn’t a typical year at all. We did have some surprise successes (peas, crocus) and big disappointments (no melons and almost no squash at all!).
At least I can call it a learning experience.
Here is the last garden tour video I did, where you can see the beds that are already winter sown.
Planning ahead to our 2026 Garden
Obviously, some of that is already in and done, with the winter sowing. We’ve got quite a head start to next year’s garden already.
Doing that meant I got a lot of seeds in advance. I took advantage of some big sales and replenished my stock from MI Gardener.
Here is what I got.
No, we aren’t planting all of that!
But we will be planting both old and new seeds.
My daughters and I went though my seed inventory to make some decisions on what we’ll be planting next year, outside of what I’ve already winter sown.
I just went into the basement, where my seed bins are stored, to get my lists and diagrams. Since I was there anyhow, I went ahead and uncovered the window between the two basements. I’d covered it with a piece of rigid insulation and had poked holes in it to allow for some air flow, but it clearly wasn’t enough. Once that was down, there was a literal wind of warmer air coming in from the old basement! Wow!
So that will make a difference. I’ll have to keep an eye on the thermometer I’ve got over my seed bin. The new basement tends to stay between 10-13C/50-55F, all year. I don’t have a thermometer in the old basement, but it’s often warmer than the main floor!
I didn’t write a list the varieties we intend to plant yet, but have the seed packets set aside. We intend to grow fewer plants of more varieties in some things. The varieties will be listed in future posts, but this is what we’ve decided to grow this year.
To start indoors
Winter squash and gourds. The gourds are my “fun” thing to grow. Summer Squash. Melons. Cucumbers Onions – bulb and bunching Eggplant – hopefully, a variety my daughter is not allergic to! Tomatoes Peppers Celery Herbs Flowers
So… yeah, I’m going to need to make space!
That doesn’t leave much for us to direct sow in the spring!
Spring Direct Sowing
Corn – short season and not to short season Beans – pole and bush. If I have room, beans for drying Potatoes Flowers
Succession sowing
Peas Chard Spinach Carrots
One thing I will have for 2026 is more room to plant in. There is one bed in the old kitchen garden that took forever to re-work, but it is now ready for planting, and included supports to hold hoops or whatever I end up using to hold covers and protect the bed from critters.
The bed that was winter sown with tall and climbing things was a major issue and a complete fail. I did have mesh netting to protect from the seeds, but it couldn’t protect from playful kittens. I’ve been gathering the materials and will rework that bed, yet again. It will be taller, narrower by a few inches, and like the reworked bed in the old kitchen garden, it will have supports I can attached hoops or wire or whatever I need to cover and protect the bed from elm seeds and critters.
The plan so far.
Which, I’m sure, will change a few times before the garden is completely in!
Let’s start with the old kitchen garden, which is mostly winter sown. There is the short side of the L shaped wattle weave bed that is open. I intend to plant herbs there, including fennel, though we want that more as a vegetable than an herb.
The newly finished rectangular bed could have root vegetables planted in it, so I was thinking of more carrots. However, it might be a better place to plant summer squash in.
The open retaining wall blocks are now all filled with transplanted alpine or whatever they are strawberries. Those will be for perennials, since nothing else seems to want to grow in them.
I did the same with the retaining wall blocks by the chain link fence. Hopefully, they will survive the winter. It’s hard to say, being planted in concrete blocks, but all the chimney block planters did get mulched for winter insulation.
Once the longer bed at the other section of chain link fence is redone, I am thinking winter squash and/or gourds would be good to put there. They can be covered until they’re too big for cats to get into, can climb the fence, and are too spikey for deer to eat.
In the East yard, two out of three rectangular beds are winter sown. In the third one, I’m thinking a couple of varieties of tomatoes can go in there.
There is a 4′ square bed in this section, which will get white eggplants transplanted into it.
In the main garden area, one of the beds is sown with Daikon radish on one side, turnips on the other. Down the middle, I plan to direct sow pole beans.
The high raised bed will get bush beans.
In the trellis bed, the winter sown peas didn’t fill the entire row, so we will transplant cucumbers in the last couple of feet.
Of the three remaining 18′ beds in the main garden area, one will have peppers, celery and tomatoes. The other will get squash and/or melons. The third bed will get potatoes.
The area near where the new asparagus and strawberry bed is, is still covered with black plastic, which has mostly killed off the grass and weeds that took over what used to be a squash patch before. I plan to pull that back and use that area to plant two varieties of corn that mature at very different rates, so there should be no issue with cross pollination.
Further out is the area where the Albion Everbearing strawberries were. I plan to sow bread seed poppies in that location, as part of the plan to slowly convert that whole section to perennials, or self seeding annuals that can be treated as perennials.
What you’re not seeing in there is flowers or onions.
The onions will get interplanted all over the place. The bulb onions are saved seed, but the bunching onions are new, so those I’ll try to keep in one spot. Perhaps interplanted with the herbs in the old kitchen garden or something.
The space at the end of the high raised bed will have flowers again – hopefully including those self seeded asters – but I also intend to have both transplanted and direct sown flowers scattered all over, interplanted wherever I find the space.
Somewhere in there, I want to direct sow some of the saved Hopi Black Dye seeds.
If all goes well, I’ll have at least one additional trellis bed done, and we can finish our first trellis tunnel, though maybe not in time for spring planting. If my brother is able to get one of his tractors going and we start dragging dead spruces out of the spruce grove – maybe even cut more of the dead ones down – I will have the logs needed to continue building pairs of trellis beds and, if all works out, pairs of beds that will become polytunnels. Once the second bed for the first trellis tunnel is done, though, framing the existing low raised beds are priority. Those will be only one log high for now, while the trellis beds will be started at two logs high. I’ve got only so many dead spruces to work with, so building the beds up higher will be left after we’ve got all the beds framed out that need it. Over time, I’d like for at least half of the raised beds to be increased to match the high raised bed – 4 logs high. I’m finding that the perfect height for reach, and for my back. I do want to leave some beds lower for things that grow tall, like corn or pole beans. The trellis tunnel beds may eventually be increased to 3 logs high, but we’ll see.
Then there are the perennials and trees.
I’ve placed an order for some Manchurian Walnut, which is one of the few nut trees out there that are hardy enough to grow here – it’s actually hardy to zone 2b, which is what we are in Canadian. I could only afford to get one, rather than any of their bundles. It will be planted in the outer year. In the same order, I was able to get a bundle of five Bleu Basket Willow. Those will be planted beyond the outer yard, where they will eventually be coppiced and used to grow stems for everything from, yes, weaving baskets, to wattle weaving and even willow furniture, if we want. Over time, I plan to get two other varieties of basket willows that are different colours.
We might have to buy replacement Korean Pine, too. We shall see.
We’re also looking at other types of hardy fruit trees to get as the budget allows, such as pears, or varieties of cherry that actually grow and produce in our climate zone.
All in good time.
All done!
Well, there we have it.
In the end, 2025 was a really rough year for gardening. Yes, we were able to harvest and the winter sown beds made a huge difference, but nothing really reached its full potential, including the winter sown beds, as well as the surviving ones did. So many people in our region struggled with their gardens.
I know a lot of people have been going on about “survival gardens” or sharing those idiotic memes about how, if we all grew gardens instead of lawns, no one would starve. Hogwash. Obviously, I’m all for growing as much of your own food as possible, however you can manage is, and to be as self sufficient as possible. I absolutely encourage people to do that, every chance I get. Especially in these unstable times. But the hype and expectations I’m seeing out there are not helping. Years like this show exactly how little control we actually have when it comes to growing our own food. There are bad growing seasons like this, but even if you have an excellent growing season and your garden is doing great, one storm could wipe it all out. Or it could be destroyed by animals, insects or disease.
As the old saying goes, hope for the best, plan for the worst. There will always be things happening we have no control over, other than how we respond to it.
I’m actually starting this post on Wednesday night, and scheduling it to publish in the morning, so when I say “today” at any point, it will actually be “yesterday” when it gets published.
I have just spent most of today outside.
After doing the morning routine, I started to shovel, while the snow was still light and fluffy. I got the paths around the house and to the feeding stations, around the fire pit, to the wood piles and even to the compost pile before I finally stopped and headed inside. My daughters, sweethearts that they are, had a hot breakfast waiting for me when I came in, though it was closer to lunch time than breakfast by then!
I completely forgot that I needed to go into town today. One of my husband’s meds is a “controlled substance” so he can only get refills when they are almost out. He called it in on Monday, and the pharmacy had to order in the refill, which was ready for pick up today. He did not have any left for tomorrow, so this wasn’t something to get delivered. They *really* cut it tight with that stuff.
I wanted to talk to the pharmacy anyhow.
It was shortly past noon when I headed into town. Props to the poor pharmacist assistant that was helping me out! It took some doing to figure out if they could even do what I was asking.
For my daughter and I, who share a doctor, requests have been sent to update our refills, so that we can fill 3 months worth (slightly less for one of my daughters’ meds, as we’re coming up on the cut off date for her pharmacare coverage). I’ll get a call when they have a response. Some of the items have to be special ordered in.
On looking at my husband’s file, though, we just won’t be able to do it. He’s got the injections, for starters. Yes, he has a medication fridge, but they would be past their “best before” date before he finished them. Bubble packs are only done 4 weeks at a time. No more. Some of his meds are also controlled substances and they are not allowed to dispense more than a month’s worth at a time. Potentially, we could talk to his doctor about changing that, but since he can’t get 3 months worth for most of his meds, there’s really no point.
Hopefully, we will won’t have a winter that will leave us snowed in or whatever. Yes, my brother has his snow blowers out here, but there are “tricks” to starting them, and I don’t know what they are. He’s got snow clearing equipment that are much larger and get pulled by a tractor, but his tractors need work.
Thankfully, this truck can handle deeper snow than our previous van could, but we’ve had so many weird and unexpected issues crop up, I really don’t want to take too many chances in winter. Of course, meds can be delivered, but if the roads are such that we can’t get out with the truck, the delivery driver sure as heck isn’t going to make it with his car! Nor would we want him to even try.
After getting as much of that straightened out as possible, I let them know that my credit card on file to pay for anything not covered is now listed as “lost”, so it won’t work anymore. She took the information out of our files completely and, once my replacement card comes in, in 3-4 business days, I will give them a call with the new information. Then I got my husband’s single refill that he needed before picking up some gas (prices went up to $1.199) and headed home.
It was still light out, but I knew that wouldn’t last, so as soon as I got everything settled, I was back outside. This time to break out little Spewie.
We put that little electric snow blower (I think it’s actually considered an electric snow shovel) through so much more than it was made for!
I used it to clear out a large enough space in front of our garage for the truck to be able to back up, turn around, and go into the inner yard. I didn’t go down the driveway to the road, though. At one point, I was hearing something odd over the sound of Spewie. It turned out to be our vandal’s tractor going by. I couldn’t see if he was driving it, or his wife. I was going back and forth and basically ignoring it, but saw that he’d actually parked the tractor in a spot where I could just see it through the trees, so something was going on, within view of our driveway. So once the area in front of the garage was done, I switched to working in the inner yard. At one point, I heard the tractor again and, when I later came out to switch out the memory cards on the trail cams, it was gone. I’ve checked the files and he (or his wife) never got close enough to trigger the motion sensor, so that’s just fine. I only care what happens at our own driveway.
So there is still about half the driveway, through the gate to the road, that needs to be done, plus a couple of paths in the outer yard. By then, I was getting really cold, even with my (old and ratty, but still really warm) down filled coat. I did quickly take care of feeding and watering the outside cats, since I was still dressed for outside, and did my evening rounds before calling it a day.
Definitely a pain killer day. I might even be taking extra anti-inflammatories before going to bed. I can already feel my joints stiffening up and getting painful. I don’t feel any of that while I’m working outside, but once I’m inside, in the warm and settling down, my entire body starts to stiffen up and hurt. Hopefully, I didn’t over do it and I’ll be able to walk normally tomorrow.
I seriously considered skipping working on this post, but it really shouldn’t take long. I’m not going to spent too much time looking for old photos, etc. for this one. I’m just too tired.
So, without further ado, let’s start analyzing our perennial and food forest items.
The New Stuff – asparagus, strawberries, walnut, plum, apple, gooseberry and haskap.
I’d picked up some new varieties of asparagus, since our first bed turned out to be in a very bad location. I also wanted to try some new strawberry varieties. I’ve tried the white strawberries before, but they never grew.
Those ended up going into a new bed I made for them but, unfortunately, it took so long to get to planting them, I really didn’t know if any would make it. If I’d known it would take so long, I would have stored the bare roots differently to keep them going, but I really did expect to get them in the ground sooner. I made sure to pre-soak the bare roots before planting and hydrated the soil before and after planting.
In the end, none of the strawberries made it. Much to my shock, four out of five Jersey Giant asparagus showed up. Even when one got rolled on by a cat, in spite of the protective garden stake it was growing against, it sent up a new shoot! No sign of the Purple Passion, though.
Opal Plum, Haskap, Apple and Gooseberry
I was very excited to find a self pollinating variety of eating plum through Vesey’s that is hardy to zone 2! I also picked up a cross pollinating pair of haskaps, since the first ones we planted just aren’t thriving. Then, at a homesteader’s event, I was able to pick up an eating apple sapling (I’ve already forgotten the variety and don’t have the energy to look it up), a gooseberry bush and black walnut – a 1 yr sapling, plus seeds.
In the above picture, the Opal Plum is on the right, the apple on the left, and the gooseberry in the middle. We had to say goodbye to our elderly cat, Freya, this year, and we buried her where the Opal plum is now planted.
The plum got more protective fencing around it, along with pinwheel distractions, but that wasn’t enough, either. We ended up having to add chicken wire around it, too. The deer really wanted those plum leaves!
The new leaves stayed until well past several frosts, too.
With the drought and heat, I did make sure to water everything regularly during the summer. The old rain barrel we had set up there now leaks near the bottom, so I took advantage of that. I set it up between the apple and gooseberry. While the barrel was being filled with a hose, I used a watering can on everything else. By the time everything else got watered, the barrel would be pretty much full, so I just left it to leak. That basically gave the apple and gooseberry a slow, deep watering of about 40 gallons.
The area we’re planting the food forest in gets full sun all day in the summer, and absolutely baked. Something we have to compensate for, until things get large enough to provide their own shade on the ground below.
By the end of the year, everything seems to have survived. Now we’ll just have to see if they survive their first winter!
The black walnut, however, went much further afield.
The above image is what I got at the homesteader’s event; the year old walnut is the one in the pot. The wrapped ones are the gooseberry and apple. Then there’s the bag of walnut seeds, already cold stratified.
The sapling got planted first. The walnut went into the outer yard, well away from other things, due to the juglone from their roots. It took me way too long to get to the seeds, though – long enough that some of them pre-germinated!
I marked off spots for all of the seeds, but aside from the ones that pre-germinated, only one more got planted, on the grave of little Kale, a kitten that didn’t make it this year.
It was some time before the pre-germinated seeds broke ground.
Then, of course, the deer happened.
*sigh*
They only got the year old sapling, though, eating some of it. It did recover and start growing back. One of the saplings from the pre-germinated seeds also got disappeared by something. Not just eaten leaves, but the entire sapling, gone. I even dug around and there was nothing in the soil. Whatever got it, pulled it out by the roots. I’m not sure that’s something a deer would do!
The one planted over little Kale never showed up, and there are several other seeds that we just never had a chance to plant. Maybe they’ll survive another year? I don’t know.
In the spring, the current black walnut saplings will get chicken wire around them. I hope to get the last of the seeds planted, too. If they won’t make it, at least it’ll be easier to plant something else in their locations, later on.
If I remember correctly, it’ll be about 10 years before we get walnuts, if they survive that long. Normally, walnuts would not have enough season for the nuts to fully ripen out here, but these are from a nursery in the same growing zone as we are, so these might be better acclimated. Even if they don’t get a chance to fully ripen, they can still be used as a dye and, if they survive another 20 or 30 years, the trees could be potentially harvested for their wood. The last I looked, a fully mature black walnut tree could potentially be worth about $250K in lumber.
I probably won’t be around, by then! 😄
That’s it for the new stuff this year, and I was very happy that we were able to get so many new things for the food forest. It basically put us a few years ahead of what I had expected to be able to do. Assuming they survive!
The Old Stuff: Korean pine, rhubarb, walking onions, grapes, haskap, sunchokes, asparagus, strawberries, wild Saskatoons, strawberries, mulberry, silver buffaloberry, sea buckthorn and crab apples. Plus, surprise raspberry and saffron crocus!
Let’s start with the Korean pine.
Okay, we’re done.
Yeah. Nothing.
These were planted a few years ago. They were 2 yr old saplings, and from what I’ve read, they grow slowly in their first 5 years, then shoot up and grow quickly. Which should have started last year.
We have three of the original 6 left, and they did not grow at all.
It’s entirely possible I’ve been watering dead saplings.
Rhubarb.
We have two areas in the old kitchen garden with rhubarb that predate our living here. Usually, the one in the south corner does well, while the one in the north corner does poorly. This year, however, I pruned back the ornamental crab apple tree in that corner, allowing more light to reach the peppers bed. That meant more light for the rhubarb in that corner, too, and they did really well this year!
We had plenty to harvest for baking, and even enough to freeze.
I do think it’s time to transplant these, though. Maybe not next year, but now that we have the new asparagus and strawberry bed in the main garden area, I’m thinking we can plant more perennials in that section, slowly over the seasons.
When we first moved here, there was a single walking onion that kept coming up, only to get knocked down or broken by something, fairly early on. One year, I managed to protect it long enough to form bulbils. I planted those along the tiny raised bed, and they’ve been going great there, ever since. This spring, they were already growing as soon as the snow was gone!
As for the original, it never came up again.
We use the walking onions for their greens. I didn’t want them to start “walking” too far, though, so we harvested bulbils for eating, too. The remaining bulbils, I made sure they ended up in the area I want them to grow in, against that little raised bed, rather than spreading into the yard and in areas we have other things planted. These guys are very strong and did very well this year. The poor growing conditions we had this year didn’t phase them at all!
Grapes
We still haven’t transplanted these! I have not decided on a good new location for them.
This year, they did rather well, in spite of the fact that I kept forgetting to water them!
These caterpillars showed up again this year, though not for long.
We got a lot of grapes and they were probably the biggest we’ve seen since we unburied them from the spirea that had grown over them. Still smaller than they probably should be (we don’t know the variety, but they are probably Valiant). We ended up not harvesting much, though.
Here you can see some of the grapes we included with a harvest of Spoon, Sub Arctic and Chocolate Cherry tomatoes, herbs, Custard beans and a single Royal Burgundy bean, walking union bulbils and nasturtium seeds.
Mostly, though, we just snacked on the grapes whenever we were puttering around the yard.
Then, they were all gone.
Given the lack of damage, I’d say the birds got them. Which I didn’t mind too much, this year. When we do finally figure out where to transplant them, protecting them from birds and raccoons is going to be a priority!
Haskap
*sigh*
The original haskap we planted – two “Mrs. Honeyberry” and one “Mr. Honeyberry” are in a bed near the chain link fence. This year, as in previous years, the “Mr. Honeyberry”, which is much larger, leafed out and bloomed ealier.
One “Mrs. Honeyberry” that was planted the same year did show a few flowers and even had a berry or two. This spring, it looked so dead, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it never got any leaves at all. The second “Mrs. Honeyberry” was planted the next year and, while it gets leaves, it hasn’t been getting any bigger, and didn’t bloom at all this year.
The “Mr. Honeyberry” is self pollinating, and we did actually get almost a handful of berries this year. Probably the most, since we planted them, though not by much. By the end of the season, odd brown patches starting showing up on the leaves. I hope they didn’t end up with some sort of fungal disease!
They just don’t seem to be doing well in this location. We should have bushes covered in berries every year by this point, and it’s just not happening.
Which is why I bought two completely different cross-pollinating varieties. Varieties that should both bloom at the same time!
Sunchokes
These have never grown to the point of blooming, but we still get tubers out of them. They are not supposed to be affected by things like heat and drought that much, but they were much smaller this year than in previous years. I think the smoke, plus the elm tree near them needs to be pruned back again, contributed to that.
In the end, I only harvested part of the bed, leaving the others to keep growing as long as possible. They didn’t seem any smaller, even though the plants were! The unharvested tubers should mean a lot more plants for next year.
At least it didn’t happen until almost the end of the growing season. They’ll be fine over the winter.
Asparagus
Next to the sunchokes is the old asparagus bed. Though we didn’t have the flooding in the area we have had in previous years, I really didn’t expect anything to come up. These were planted long enough ago that we should have been able to harvest plenty of spears, every spring for the past two or three years, but it’s just not happening. We did have a few surprise spears show up, though, which I just left alone.
One of them, however, was a massive, thick asparagus spear that quickly grew into a huge fern, and went to seed.
I now have asparagus seed collected, and am looking to try planting them next year. The new purple asparagus we got this spring didn’t survive their delayed planting, so that would be a good spot to try planting seeds next year.
Albion Everbearing Strawberries
We planted these last year, and they did surprisingly well in their distant bed, though the deer got at them, too. This year, that bed was thoroughly neglected. It did have chicken wire over it, though, and some of the runners survived. After it became clear the new varieties I got did not survive their delayed planting, I dug up all the Albion Everbearing strawberries I could find – which was a surprising number of them, considering the conditions – and transplanted them were the failed strawberries had been. One of them even bloomed and produced a couple of berries! If they survive to next year, though, I expect to see more strawberries. I’ll be in a better position to maintain them in the new location, too.
Saskatoons
Some of you might know these as serviceberries.
These grow wild in several areas in our spruce grove. Most of them quickly get some sort of fungal damage? Insect damage? I’m not sure, but it renders whatever berries develop, inedible.
Near the house, however, we have some that produce good berries.
Once again, we didn’t really harvest them, but did snack on them, while we could. I also tried to prune away things that were growing back and crowding them out, and I cut away all the chokecherries that were crowding them. We don’t need that many chokecherry trees, that’s for sure. With the drought, the Saskatoon berries weren’t as big and juicy as they could have been, but they were still quite good.
Then they all disappeared.
Birds.
At some point, I’d like to buy specific varieties of Saskatoons for the food forest area, but for now, we are just fine with the wild ones.
Mulberry
These had a mixed up start. When we got them, it was two 1 year saplings instead of the one 2 yr sapling we ordered. They had run out of the 2 yr ones, so they were sending out pairs of 1 yr old saplings instead.
They were so small, we ended up potting them up and keeping them in the house that year, then planted them outside the following spring.
I’m happy to say, they survived their first winter, but seemed to struggle by the end of this season. I’m really hoping they survived their first drought! We’ll know for sure, in the spring.
Sea Buckthorn.
We have two survivors of the original five planted. This year, they seemed to do quite well, in spite of the conditions. They’re supposed to be quite hardy to the prairie weather, and they seemed to demonstrate that this year.
I still don’t know if we have two females, two males or one of each. It might be another year or two before we can figure it out. We’ll know when they finally start blooming. Which was not this year.
However…
Silver Buffaloberry
We saw our first silver buffaloberry berries this year!
I don’t think a drought year is a good time for tasting these. They were quite bitter and unpleasant.
These are being grown as a privacy screen, and if we don’t like the berries, they should be enjoyed by the birds, so no loss there.
Highbush Cranberry.
Now, onto the highbush cranberry.
Aaaannnd… we’re done.
Yup. Another one that didn’t seem to do anything this year. They got leaves, but did not get any bigger at all, even though they were among the things that got regular watering. Not sure why they’re not growing, though several possibilities come to mind.
Crab Apples.
With our weird spring, one of the crab apple trees never really bloomed and had almost no apples on it. That tree doesn’t have edible apples on it, anyhow, and gets left for the birds and the deer.
Of the ones that did produce, this one matures first.
They are small but, once ripe, they have really delicious sweet apples. Once again, we didn’t deliberately harvest much of them. I made sure to gather an ice cream bucket full for my mother. As the season got colder, I started to shake some of the branches so the apples would fall to the ground for the deer to eat. That way, they would have no reason to break any branches, trying to reach the apples.
This tree produced larger crab apples that mature about a month later than the first ones. My mother go a bucket full of these, too. She was quite happy with both types!
Then, one morning, I found a branch and been broken. It didn’t have enough apples on it for it to have been the weight of fruit to break it, so it was most likely a deer trying to pull off an apple. The broken branch didn’t die, though, and the apples remaining on it continued to ripen! I’ll prune that away in the early spring, when I can get a ladder to it.
Liberty Apple
This zone 4 variety, planted in a sheltered area, has so far survived our zone 3 winters. It’s still too young to produce fruit, though. It’ll be probably another 3 years before we get to that point. We just need to keep it alive!
Now, we have a couple of surprises.
Royalty Raspberry.
We’d ordered a 3 pack of these a couple of years ago, and planted them in the food forest area. They actually stared to produce berries their first year, which should have happened in their second year. The next year, only one survived. Barely. This year, I thought for sure they were all dead.
Then one showed up.
It never got bigger than a few inches, though once I found it, I made sure to water it regularly. We’ll see if it survives to next year.
We did have plenty of regular raspberries from before we moved out here, most of which have taken over the old compost pile near the main garden area. Those were often part of my breakfast, while doing my rounds!
Then there was an even bigger surprise.
Saffron crocus
I got some saffron crocus corms that are from a Canadian source, but they are still zone 4. We’re zone 3. I figured if we buried them deep enough and mulched them well enough, they might make it. The instructions specifically stated not to water them (I cheated this year), and we were to expect them to bloom in August. They are also supposed to spread quite a lot from season to season.
We planted them two falls ago. Their first year, we saw their greens pop up, but couldn’t keep them free of the weeds in the area, and soon couldn’t even find their leaves anymore. I figured they were a lost cause.
Then, this spring, they showed up again! I did try to keep the area weeded, but eventually, the greens just disappeared again. Considering these were an experiment I didn’t really expect to succeed, I figured we could just cut our losses.
Then we had our septic tank cleaned out in November, which is quite late for us. While that was being done, I was on kitten duty, making sure none came to close to the open tank. A couple of them were hanging out in the fenced off area where we have the Liberty Apple, tulips and the saffron crocus planted.
Much to my surprise, I spotted new crocus leaves. From quite a few areas. They had clearly been expanding.
This is about two months late! There was one flower that had fully bloomed before getting hit by frost. Nearby was a second flower bud that never opened.
We actually had a single saffron crocus to harvest a whole three saffron threads from.
Since then, this bed has been heavily mulched for the winter.
We might actually get saffron crocuses again, next year! Hopefully, not so late as November. 😄
Final analysis
Most of this stuff is long term planting and it’s still too early to know how they are doing. It may be years before we see anything from them.
Others, like the rhubarb, walking onion, Saskatoons, we just need to leave them be, though I do want to eventually transplant the rhubarb to a better location.
It’s been unexpectedly difficult to get things going in the food forest. Which is a big deal, when it can take 10 years before something starts to produce food!
Also, we really need to get on top of putting protection around our new food forest stuff. The dollar store tomato support kits we got seem to have been enough for most of the new things, but even the larger version was not enough to protect from the deer.
It’s a good thing I still have quite a bit of chicken wire left.
Over the next while, we intend to continue to plant more fruit trees hardy to our zone, more berry varieties and so on. I’m also looking to try planting things near or around stuff in the food forest area to help them out. I’ve been reading that planting garlic around fruit trees, for example, can deter deer. There are also “guilds” of things that can be planted around them. Even things like winter squash can potentially be planted around them, to help shade the soil and keep critters away. Things to consider as we expand these areas.
We are slowly working on building trellis tunnels attached to pairs of raised beds. I am thinking that, as we keep expanding the garden beds, we can start building pairs of raised beds closer to the food forest area, with poly tunnels over them, instead of trellis tunnels. This would allow us to expand what we can add to the food forest. For example, one of the tree sources I use has paw paw seedlings available. They are zone 5 and would normally not survive our winter. The area I’m thinking of adding polytunnels to gets a lot of sunlight, so even in winter, they would be considerably warmer, giving things like paw paws a chance to survive. We might not be able to grow, say, citrus, but having such structures would really open up what we could potentially grow.
It might take a few more years before we get to that point, though. Unless I’m able to harvest a lot more of those dead spruces to build raised beds with faster, with the help of my brother and a tractor to pull the trunks out of the spruce grove. We shall see.
So, that’s our perennial and food forest for this year. I’m really hoping the new things we got will succeed. It was a rough year for the food forest, too, it seems. We even lost a couple more silver buffaloberry, though that started out as a pack of 30, so there are still lots to form our privacy hedge.
It’s slow going with this stuff, but it will be worth it in the long term.
Okay, so we’ve gone over the winter sowing, then the very disappointing transplanting. How, we get into the direct sowing.
For direct sowing, we did summer squash, pumpkin, pole beans, bush beans, carrots, peas, corn, sunflowers and, to fill in space after losses, Fordhook Giant Swiss Chard. We also planted potatoes and, for a second try, flowers (which I covered a bit in my last post).
Sunflowers, Pumpkin, Corn, Beans and Chard
The pole beans we planted were the Red Noodle beans, in the same bed as the Hopi Black Dye sunflowers. This bed also had seed onions from last year, plus the oodles of tiny self seeded onions I found and transplanted in between the seed onions while preparing the bed.
The Red Noodle Beans germinated and started growing really quickly. I’d planted them along the trellis side of what will eventually be a trellis tunnel. They came up so fast, I rushed to put trellis netting up, even though the structure had only the vertical supports up.
I could have saved the effort. That initial growth spurt was it. They never got any bigger that what you can see in the above slide show. I had a few spare bean seeds left and ended up planting them in gaps between some sugar snap peas. Those stagnated just as much, in a completely different bed.
*sigh*
The Hopi Black Dye sunflowers, however, were a pleasant surprise. It took a long time, but they did finally germinate. They, too, stagnated and took a long time before they started blooming. Some had a single head, while other developed seed heads at almost every leaf junction.
In the same bed as the Red Noodle Beans and sunflowers, I planted the free pumpkin seeds that are given away at the grocery store in my mother’s town. This year, their packets (they limit one per person) had five seeds in it. Last year, they packets had three seeds.
There was no variety name given, but the town encourages people to grow the seeds and enter their pumpkins in their pumpkin fest, from which they later save seeds to give out for free the next year.
I planted them in protective collars, in between the self seeded onions and tomatoes I found in the bed.
The pumpkins where the last thing I direct sowed this year. All of them germinated, and the plants were all some of the healthiest squash we got. They actually came up faster than the sunflowers. When one of them started to develop a pumpkin, I trained that vine up the trellis netting – by then, it was obvious no beans would be climbing it.
These vines were very resilient. Even after they seemed to be completely killed off by frost, but we still had warmer days after, they started to grew new leaves and even started to try and bud!
At least we got one pumpkin out of it, with five plants. Last year, we had three plants, and got five pumpkins.
We got three. One of them got eaten by a deer. It recovered, though.
Despite this, those three little plants actually did start producing! We got a remarkable amount of beans from then, considering how spindly they were!
That did leave me with a lot of open space, and I was out of bean seeds, so I tried planting Swiss Chard.
All I can say about those is, they germinated. Quite a few of them, actually. None of which grew beyond their seed leaves.
*sigh*
I hadn’t planned on it, but I also planted some yellow Custard beans. These were from old seeds that I had, and they went in between rows of corn and between tomatoes.
The bush beans were included in these beds partly for their nitrogen fixing qualities. Corn is a heavy nitrogen feeder.
I planted Orchard Baby corn, which is a short season variety. I got three rows of corn with two rows of beans in between them. The tomatoes got a few beans planted down the middle of the bed, plus one went into a gap between tomato varieties.
I had extra corn seeds, so those got planted around the Arikara squash, nearby.
Most of the beans didn’t germinate at all. Only two or three made it. I wasn’t surprised by that, as these seeds were a few years old, so I replanted them. Eventually, pretty much all of the beans did germinate, as did the corn in that bed.
The corn with the Arikara squash, however, did much better! They germinated faster, grew faster and produced cobs faster.
As for the yellow Custard beans, they did eventually start to bloom and we even had beans to harvest, but the plants never grew even close to their full size or production. The ones planted among the tomatoes had a 100% germination rate, though one got dug up by a cat later on. They, too, struggled to grow, bloom and produce. We did, however, get yellow beans to harvest, later in the season.
Summer Squash and Potatoes
With the winter sown summer squash bed a complete fail, plus the small section of winter sown root vegetable mix by the garlic rolled on by cats, we had some open space to work with.
The winter sown summer squash bed became our potato bed.
While cleaned up the bed and digging a trench for the potatoes, I did find a couple of squash seeds but, overall, they seemed to have completely disappeared.
The potatoes we’d bought earlier and started chitting in the basement all failed. They started to grow shoots while in the basement, but I think it was too cold in there for them to do well. Once inside the portable greenhouse, however, they didn’t go any better – and then they got knocked over when the wind almost blew away the greenhouse, knocked over by cats and basically cooked in the heat of the greenhouse.
I got more seed potatoes. Those were chitted in the greenhouse, and did not get cooked.
With the cats seeing all freshly turned soil as an invitation, we made sure to put netting over the potatoes, right from the start. Over time, they got mulched, then mulched again.
I had to hand pollinate them, as the male and female flowers bloomed out of sink.
Only one white scallop squash survived, and that was set back even more than the zucchini. In the end, we got only one scallop squash to harvest.
It was very disappointing, but at least we got something, before the frosts killed them.
Peas and Carrots
The peas were among the first things we planted, and we had two varieties. Sugar Snap peas and Super Sugar Snap peas. We also had two varieties of carrots. The Uzbek Golden carrots were also in our winter sown mixes, plus we tried Atomic Red carrots this year.
The peas were already germinating when the carrots were planted. I’d already set boards out, which protected the carrots until they germinated, and then were used to keep the soil from eroding while watering, as this bed has no walls.
The peas were probably the best we’ve ever grown, even though they did not reach their full potential with the heat, drought and smoke.
There weren’t a lot of pods to harvest, but I could at least snack on them while doing my morning rounds – until the deer got at them.
*sigh*
The carrots were both successful and not successful. There was good germination, and we eventually did a fair bit of thinning by harvesting. Few got very big, though. At the end of the season, when it was time to harvest everything and prep the bed for next year, there were quite a lot of carrots.
Little carrots.
But will, we had something! In fact, once we concluded that we like the Super Sugar Snap peas more than the Sugar Snap peas, I was able to leave pods on select plants specifically for seed saving.
Flowers
I already covered this quite a bit in my last post, but we did direct sow flowers this year. The winter sown bed got destroyed, so we started over.
In the second photo of the above photo, you can see that cats were not the only problem we had, trying to protect the winter sown flowers. The wind completely destroyed the cover we put over them.
I found more Dwarf Jewel nasturtiums to try again. I also found some mixed Cosmos seeds, and decided to plant the memorial Crego Mixed Colors aster seeds I had.
My mother used to grow Cosmos, so I knew they could grew here. We also have wild asters growing, but not domestic ones, so I wasn’t sure on those. Nasturtiums are completely new.
The bed got protective netting as soon as it was planted.
They took so very long to germinate. The asters, longest of all.
The nasturtiums bloomed and we were able to collect seeds, but they were much smaller than they should have been. The Cosmos eventually got big and bushy, but by the time the started to bloom, it was late in the season and they were killed off by frost long before they could go to seed.
The asters were what I wanted to go to see the most, as they are in memory of an old friend. Thankfully, the Cosmos protected them from frost, and I did manage to collect seed.
Final thoughts.
This was a very rough year in the garden. It made me so very glad we had the winter sown beds! Much of what we planted, however, is stuff we will continue to plant. One really bad year is not going to stop that. Locations and varieties may change, but the staples will always be there.
Beans: as disappointing as this year was, beans are a staple crop and we will be growing them again; both pole and bush beans, to extend the season. By the time bush beans are no longer producing as much, the pole beans are ready for harvesting.
At least, that’s how it normally works.
I really want to grow red noodle beans again. They are supposed to do well in our climate zone. There’s only so much I can blame on the drought and heat, or even the smoke. Maybe not next year, though. I also want to grow beans for drying, but that will depend on space.
Corn: These were also disappointing this year, but I do plan to grow more next year. I’ve got way too many varieties of corn seeds, but I have more Yukon Chief, which is a super short season variety we’ve grown before, that I will be planting next year. I’m also going to be growing a sweet corn that matures later, so they can actually be planted close together and cross pollination should not be an issue. Corn is a heavy feeder and you don’t get a lot for the space they take up, but I just really like corn!
Sunflowers: I’ve got the saved seed from this year, and I’ll be trying those, next year. Each year we do that, the variety will get more acclimated to our area. At some point, we might even have enough to use the Hopi Black Dye sunflowers as a dye! At some point, I want to try the giant varieties again (like the Mongolian Giant we winter sowed, but everything in that bed failed), but probably not next year.
Chard: I’ve already got a new variety of those winter sown with our garlic. I might try others, both old and new varieties, with direct sowing early in the spring, but I’m quite blown away by how the ones I did direct sow never got past the seed leaf stage. Not sure what to make of that.
Pumpkin: we have a new variety of pumpkin seeds to try next year, which I will probably start indoors first. It’s the seeds we get locally that do amazing when direct sown, so I’ll likely get more of those next spring, too.
Summer Squash: Once again, we have new varieties to try. I might start them indoors again, too. Direct sowing just doesn’t seem to work well. I know my mother used to direct sow zucchini when she gardened here, but that was a long time ago, and the soil and growing conditions have changed quite a bit.
Peas: we already have some dwarf peas winter sown in the kitchen garden. I’ve got another new variety waiting to be planted in the spring, plus we have our saved Super Sugar Snap peas to plant next year. I’ve just got to figure out how to protect them from the deer!
Carrots: I’ve already got a rainbow mix of carrots, winter sown. Hopefully, they will do better, size wise, than this year’s did. I still have other varieties of carrot seeds, including saved Uzbek Golden carrot, which we quite like. I’ll probably direct sow some in the spring. It will, once again, depend on space available.
Potatoes: I’m still surprised by the potatoes that never bloomed. Of course, potatoes are a staple crop, so we’ll be planting them again. In digging them up to harvest them, and to clean up the bed in the fall, I found a LOT of tree roots had grown into the bed, which may have contributed to the problem.
We’ve got to do something about those trees!
For now, the amount of potatoes we grow is nowhere near enough to last us through a winter, but we’re still looking to find varieties that both grow well here, and that we like. In the future, as we reclaim lost garden spaces and continue to expand, the goal is to plant many more potatoes to store in the root cellar.
Flowers: Of course, I’ll be planting the saved memorial aster seeds, plus some dropped seed might come up on their own. We have new Cosmos varieties, Bachelor’s button, saved nasturtiums, and other flower seeds to plant. It’s more about deciding where to plant them, as some were specifically chosen so that they can self seed and be treated as perennials. Over time, we plan on having areas filled with wild flowers all over, to both attract pollinators and deter deer.
Well, if you’ve managed to slog your way through all that, congratulations! And thank you for taking the time! If you have any thoughts or feedback, please feel free to leave a comment.
While I tried to include quite a few images with this, since I’m posting images almost exclusively on Instagram (I’ve used up almost all the storage space that comes with my WP plan), it’s a bit messed up. So, if you want to get a better look at things, here are the garden tour videos I did in June and July.
I sounded so hopeful in June.
Not so much by the end of July!
Ah, well. It is what it is!
In my next post, I’ll be analyzing our perennial and food forest stuff, and then one last post in the series with an overall analysis, and what we’re planning on for next year.
We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us, that’s for sure!
The Re-Farmer 