Before I get into what took up most of my day, here are some kitty pictures.
While the mama burst out of the shelf and hid behind the kibble house again, I put some food in both shelves of the shelf shelter, then stuck my phone in and managed to get a decent picture of the babies.
They are SO mashed into that corner!
Today was a warmer day with no rain, so I started taking the transplants outside.
Mama did not like that.
After the transplants were out and I continued my morning rounds, I came around and found the little calico in the grass by the kibble house.
I can’t tell if it’s eyes are shut because of its age, or because it has gooby eyes like David and Keith did, when they were little.
I put it back in the shelf, then found it in the grass a few minutes later.
I put it back in the shelf, then found it in the grass again.
I put it in the shelf, then found a different one in the grass!
That is one ticked off looking kitten. :-D
Sadly, the mama kept trying to take the kittens out, even while I was around. I kept putting them back after she would eventually drop them, hoping she would stop.
She just waited until I was gone.
After I was back inside, I went into the sun room several times to check. Which is when I had a surprise.
That white tail tip. There’s only one grey tabby with a white tail tip.
The mama is Bradiccus!
We were sure Bradiccus was male!
I suppose the first hint should have been that we still saw Bradiccus around, even after Chadiccus, Agnoos and Tuxedo Mask all disappeared. The young males all tend to take off shortly after the snow is gone. Sometimes they come back for the winter. Sometimes we never see them again.
I guess that means the other ‘iccuses that are still around are female, too. They run around too much for us to really see, one way or the other.
I had another surprise later on. While puttering in the kitchen, I could see the two mamas that are co-parenting, hovering around the big branch pile, near where the entrance into the pile is. The last time I did a burn, I had heard a kitten in there, but haven’t heard any since, so I was sure they’d moved it. So it was quite unexpected to see the little tuxedo emerge with one of the moms. Then all three of them went across to my late father’s car before disappearing around it.
When I came out later on, I took a quick peak, and sure enough, the shelf shelter was empty. Bradiccus had moved her kittens out. I figured it would happen, but I still hoped they wouldn’t be dragged off again to some unknown nest.
Last night, my daughters heard the sounds of a kitten meowing outside. It was dark and raining, so we went out to check.
What we found, barely visible in the shadows, was a kitten on the patio blocks in front of the shelf shelter. It appeared that a cat was moving her kittens into the shelf! By the time I got out, there was no sign of the mother, but I saw the kibble trays were all empty. After topping those up, I quickly scooped up the cold, wet kitten – it was even smaller than the last kitten we found in the lawn! – and tucked it into the bottom shelf shelter. I just wanted to get it out of the rain, and it would be easy for the mama to find.
When I came out of the sun room to do my morning rounds, one of the ‘iccuses exploded out of the shelf shelter. I came prepared, though. I grabbed a scoop of kibble, along with my usual container full, and quickly poured some into both shelves that are insulated and enclosed, then filled the rest of the kibble trays. Potato Beetle emerged from the cats’ house while I did, but he preferred to follow me into the sun room to eat there. Aside from him, I saw only 3 other yard cats, and I think they were all mamas.
While going past the shelf after setting out some bird seed (we have no feeders out right now, because of the racoons, so it’s a daily toss onto the ground), I quickly stuck my phone into the openings and got pictures.
There were kittens in the higher shelf. It was terribly out of focus, but I could see three kittens.
Just a little while ago, I went out to chase a pair of skunks out of the kibble house. The mama ran out of the shelter shelf and hid around the back of the kibble house, so I quickly tried to take another picture.
I was wrong! There are four kittens. :-)
I hope the mama is willing to let her litter stay here. We will try to avoid using the sun room door as much as we can, since it’s right next to the shelf. Good thing my brother did a quick fix on the main entry door! It’s still a high traffic area, though. Not only is the kibble and bird seed store in there, so are many of our yard and garden tools and supplies and, of course, the transplants in the sun room, with the outside platform we put them next to it, too. The fact that she actually brought her kittens so this shelf anyway suggests maybe her previous location got rained out or something.
I believe this is now the third litter we’ve seen kittens from, though the other two have been moved twice now. Broccoli has her litter around somewhere, too, and I’m sure Ghost Baby must have a litter. How many will survive long enough to start coming to the kibble house with their moms, we won’t know for probably at least another month, maybe two. The shyer mothers tend to keep their babies away longer, but after a while, they start coming over on their own.
Hopefully, these ones will do well in their new home.
Before I get into how the rest of the day has been going – aside from “wet” – the rest of our order from T&T Seeds came in! You can read about the whole order, and why we chose what we did, here.
We got our forage radish seeds a while ago, and it was the perishable stock that had to wait to be shipped in time for planting in our zone. I never got a shipping notification. I’d actually gone to the website a few days ago to look up my order and see if there was anything to tell me when it would be shipped, so we could be ready for it. There was nothing. Not even anything to say that the seeds got shipped already. So I tried their live chat function. I ended up getting an automated reply, apologizing for being really busy, and giving me the option of leaving my email with my question, and they’d respond later. I did that, but the only thing I got in my email was a transcript of the chat that didn’t happen.
Well, something must have happened, because suddenly, here they are!
We have decided the highbush cranberry will be added to one end of the rows of silver buffalo berry, where we’d grown corn and sunflowers last year. The sweet potato slips will be split between a grow bag and a bed where we’d grown potatoes last year. The sunchokes are still not 100% decided, but I think there’s really just one spot for them; in an unused bed near the garage. We’d tried to grow strawberry spinach there last year, but that didn’t work. There are invasive that keep trying to take it over, but sunchokes have a reputation for being somewhat invasive, too, and I think they’d win out on that battle. ;-)
I also got a shipping notification for our TreeTime order. You can read about what we ordered and why, here. We’re expecting a total of 41 trees and shrubs that will need to be planted right away.
Which is going to be difficult. What came in today needs to be planted as quickly as possible, but it’s been very rainy off and on, all day today, and it’s expected to continue through tomorrow. In fact, we have started to get weather alerts.
There’s another Colorado Low on the way.
At least it’s bringing rain and not snow, though we’ve have a rather cool May, and it’s looking like June will be, too.
The warnings for our area is for heavy rain falls. Once again, the south end of the several provinces are expected to get the worst of it, as the system swirls its way east and west. There are even tornado warnings!
The transplants did not get taken outside today. They are probably okay with the temperatures by now, but being in pots, and the pots in trays and bins where they get watered from below, it doesn’t take much for rain to accumulate too much in their containers.
For the stuff that can’t be planted until after last frost, it’s looking like we won’t be able to get them out until after June 5, because of the overnight temperatures. Once they’re in and established, if temperatures dip again, we can try protecting them with row covers, but not while they are still undergoing transplant shock.
One good think about everything being in at least low raised beds: the paths may be full of mud and water, the the beds are still good.
Somewhere in there, we need a break in the rain – or at least the heavy rain – and get our T&T Seeds order into the ground!
It started to rain again, while I was doing my morning rounds, but there were some bright colours to make an otherwise gloomy and overcast day a bit more cheerful.
The grape hyacinths are reaching their full maturity. At some point, I hope that they will take over this area, replacing the invasive greens that are already there. I don’t mind them too much in this area, and they don’t seem to be choking out the hyacinths, but they sure do take over when growing among less resilient plants!
Then there was this little bit of sunshine.
The very first of my daughter’s daffodils have finally bloomed! After last year’s failure to thrive, and not being sure they’d survive the winter, my daughter is quite thrilled at how well they’re doing this year.
I got the transplants outside, but for a while there, I thought we’d have to bring them back in. The rain started coming down pretty hard, but it slowed down and now seems to have stopped for a while, so they should be fine. Mostly, we don’t want too much water accumulating in their bins and trays.
Unfortunately, with how wet everything is, that means no progress on the garden. Everything is just too muddy. It’s frustrating, because we have so many things that should already be in the ground, like the peas, the potatoes, and the strawberries, as well as more cool weather things to direct sow. Then there are more beds to prepare for the warm weather crops to direct sow, as well as areas for all the transplants.
One of the things I did this morning was check out what’s in the barn. I’m eyeballing the remains of salvaged and scrap wood, trying to think if there’s enough to start building a chicken coop.
I also popped my head up into the old hay loft, climbing the ladder as high as I dared. My brother says there is a car port frame up there, but I can’t see it. There are still some bags of insulation left behind – there was a lot more, but it grew legs and walked away, along with so many other things. It’s the kind of insulation that’s like a powder and gets blown into the walls. They’re scattered about and I can’t see the corner my brother says it’s in. What I did see, however, was what temptingly looked like a stack of lumber. I will have to come back with a daughter or two, as I don’t dare go up there on my own. With my knees, will have difficulty getting back down again, and parts of the floor up there are rotted out. If there is salvageable material up there, I want to get it out and stored someplace more accessible. Even those old bags of insulation might come in handy at some point. Who knows.
Oh! A daughter just came by. There’s a break in the rain, so she wants to do some gardening. Let’s see what we can manage before the rain starts up again!
Before I catch up on the other stuff, I just have to share the best part of all.
My brother made it out today, and he got the outlet fixed for us!
He tried getting here using his usual route, only to find the road closed sign was still at the south end of the road past our place, so he turned around and took a different route, adding an extra 3 miles of gravel road to the drive. It rained steadily all last night, and the section of road near our intersection was so muddy, he had difficulty getting through with is 4 wheel drive. The grader went through a couple of days ago, but even it went around that spot! It’s just mush in the middle of the road.
But he made it and checked the outlet for us, and it turned out to be less damaged than he feared it might be.
When I noticed what happened, I quickly unplugged the 2 power bars that were plugged into it and just dropped them. After that, we were more interested in making sure nothing started burning in the wall. When we moved the DVD shelf to access the outlet, I never even thought to look at either of them.
I think we found the cause of the fry out.
This power bar had the TV plugged into, as well as the Xbox, I think (we use is as a DVD player, but it doesn’t always work) and the USB adapter for our Roku. He thinks something had to have been drawing a lot of power, but they should have only been using just a trickle. So we still don’t know why it blew.
As my brother was removing the receptacle, he commented that our father had installed it some 50 years ago!
Can you tell?
I’m pretty sure that 61 visible on the white sticker is the original price.
Marshall Wells hasn’t been around since 1988 and, even before then, it had been bought out a couple of times and was under a different name since about 1978.
While replacing the receptacle, my brother found one of the wires was loose, and the ground was no longer attached at the wall. He replaced the ground wire but discovered he couldn’t screw it in to the wall – it was stripped. There was a second hole, and that was stripped, too. He had to drill a third hole and use a new, longer screw! The end of the black wire was melted, so he repaired that, too.
Of course, it was tested out right away, after I turned the breaker back on, and all worked perfectly!
And my daughter’s computers started turning on. A light upstairs turned on, too. I had no idea until then, that any of the ceiling lights was on that breaker, too.
We now have a light and fan in the bathroom again. :-D
Then, because he’s a sweetheart, and had his bag with 5 or 6 different lengths of screws handy, my brother “fixed” the main door by replacing some of the hinge screws with longer ones. I hadn’t done it before, because the door is hollow, so I didn’t think it would help any, but it did. He was able to pull a couple of the other hinge screws out with just his fingers. !! We still need to replace the entire door and frame, as the fame itself is splitting at the top and middle hinges. My brother suggested I use longer screws into the frame, too, to compensate. A door is only as secure as its frame, though, and I want an insulated metal door with a metal frame! He doesn’t think it needs to be replaced, but if we want to do it, he’s okay with that.
The main thing is, we can use the main door again. I don’t know how long that will last, but we’ll see.
Meanwhile, my older daughter has been busily catching up on commissions. I believe all of her clients were okay with the delay, too, which is nice.
Then, after he was finished here, my brother was going to go to town to pick up some milk for our mother, in the plastic 2L jugs that are no longer available where she lives, then drive back to her place – adding almost an extra hour to his drive home!
My brother is the best!
He mentioned talking to our mother last night, and that they’d talked about her getting home care and Meals on Wheels, since she is in so much pain right now. I had brought that up with her, too, and she seems agreeable to that. I’m also thinking she might finally be willing to get a hospital bed through home care, like my husband was able to do. I think being able to adjust the height, and have support under her knees or sleep at an incline would be a help.
We shall see how her telephone appointment with the doctor does, a couple of days from now.
Today was my day to go into the city to do part of our monthly shop. I ended up going to 4 places today, spent about as much as I usually do, but came home with a lot less groceries for our money. The non-grocery purchases were pretty much unchanged. :-/
It’s been a really long, hot day, and while we got a lot done, it feels like I got nothing done. Does that make sense?
Definitely a day to get to bed early. Which probably won’t happen, but I can daydream, can’t I? ;-)
I hope my brother does make it out tomorrow morning, though knowing him, he’ll probably be leaving his place at 5 am or something. :-D We’ll see. I have no idea if he’ll be able to fix the outlet, but we just really enjoy his company.
I’ll have to do a catch up post, some time tomorrow. I’m too exhausted to think straight right now!
Yesterday evening, while puttering in the kitchen, I heard a strange and sudden noise. A very out of place noise, coming from the living room.
So out of place, even the cats started to gather round, searching for the source.
In fact, it was the cats that lead me right to the source, partially hidden by a shelf.
For some reason, this outlet fried itself.
There were two power cords plugged into it. On one of them, nothing plugged into it was being used. On the other there was a salt lamp and a Orbi WiFi mesh device, both of which are always on, neither of which take a lot of power.
The breaker tripped, as it should, which has lead to some other problems.
We’re discovering what else was on that breaker.
On the panel, it’s labelled living room and bathroom. The living room has only 3 outlets. There’s the one that fried, of course. Another that powered the aquarium greenhouses, which are empty right now, is no longer working. The third, which powers the charger for a cordless phone handset, is still working.
The bathroom lights and fan no longer work. At least the bathroom already had a battery operated LED light switch to use, rather than blinding ourselves when going to the bathroom at night. With a second portable LED light next to the mirror, the room gets let up pretty well. Plus, there’s the window into the sun room. That gives us some light during the day, and we can open it more to make up for the lack of a fan.
I discovered an outlet in the new basement, which was being used to power a fan aimed at a damp spot in the corner, was no longer working. Nor is the light switch for the unfinished bar we’re now using as cat-proof storage. I was able to plug the fan in at another outlet, though it needed a much longer extension cord. That actually allowed me to put the fan in a more efficient spot, so no real complaints there.
Overall, things would be fine, except for one more outlet that stopped working. An upstairs outlet.
The one the girls’ computers is plugged into.
That room has only two outlets, a two prong and a three prong. So they can’t even plug into the other outlet.
Which means my older daughter can’t work.
She now has to find a way to email her clients and ask if they’re okay with a delay in their commissions, or if they want their money back.
Hopefully, we’ll be able to get our electrician in to fix it, but we can’t do that until my husband’s disability payment comes in – which, thankfully, is soon.
We had started some Yakteen gourd seeds indoors a while back, but none germinated. There was also one pot with hulless pumpkin in it that didn’t germinate, so I took the last 6 seeds we had left and replanted them in the three pots.
One has finally germinated!
Since I took this photo this morning, the seedling has fully emerged from the soil.
So far, there’s just the one, but I moved all of them to the sun room. Hopefully, more will germinate. This is one of those rare varieties that I want to save seeds from, to keep it going. This is really late for starting indoors, but maybe we’ll have another long and mild fall – to make up for how long it took for winter to let go, only to have a cold, wet “spring”.
We got a lot of garden related stuff done today, and I took lots of pictures, so I’ll be making several shorter posts rather than one huge one!
I made arrangements to pick up some more cardboard this morning, so I was out doing my rounds a bit earlier today. I was quite happy to see some new flowers showing up.
The grape hyacinths are finally pushing up their flower spikes!
Also, does anyone know what those broad-leafed plants all around it are? This stuff is absolutely everywhere, very invasive, and very hard to get rid of!
The very fist of my daughter’s daffodils is starting for form flower buds! Her flowers did so poorly in their first year, she’s thrilled that the managed to survive at all. The irises are still incredibly sparse and thin, but at least they’re there and still growing. Perhaps next year, we’ll finally see flowers from those. With the tulip area fenced off, even the eaten ones are recovering, while the survivors have flower buds that look ready to bloom any time now.
After my morning rounds, I headed out to pick up the cardboard, stopping for gas along the way, where I found something unexpected.
A random skull, just sitting on the concrete next to the gas pump! It looks like some sort of large rodent.
What a fascinating and unexpected find! I can just imagine someone leaving it there and giggling at the thought of how people might react to seeing it. It looks like something someone found half buried in a ditch somewhere. There’s even moss growing on it.
Hmmm… I wonder… Could it be from one of these?
When the grogs go into one of these chimney liners, I’m able to get quite close to them and get a photo. This little guy was chittering and hissing at me, so I made sure to stay out of its view, and just stuck my phone around to take the picture, then left it alone.
You know. The more I think about it, the most I think that might indeed be a groundhog skull!
Today has turned out to be a warmer day than predicted, and beautifully sunny. When heading out to do my morning rounds, I had a whole crowd of hungry kitties, waiting by the sun room door for me!
They were running around so much, I didn’t even try to count them. While putting food in the kibble house, TDG not only let me pet him, but let me pull the big ole wood tick in the tip of his ear! In fact, he didn’t even seem to notice I did it.
Which reminds me; while topping up the cat food last night, I got to touch Rosencrantz a bit and finally got a closer look at one of her ears. I thought she might have lost the tip to frost bite over the winter, but the tip is still there! It’s just badly torn. Not a new injury. Not much we can do about it, unfortunately.
The transplants got set outside for hardening off. They were supposed to be out for 5 hours, but we ended up bringing them in a bit early. The winds really picked up, and some of the pots were being blown around.
Wind or no wind, I was determined to get the old kitchen garden finally planted!
This is now our beet bed. We bought two types of beets this year, Cylindra and Bresko, plus we had some Merlin left over from last year. The support posts handily divided the bed into three sections, so that makes it easy to keep track of where one type starts and another one ends.
After the bed was seeded and watered, I broke open the roll of netting. This is the stuff my daughter picked out that I thought could be used for deer fencing. It’s a much finer net than I expected! The black just disappears, too, but in the photo, you can see where the excess is bunched up along the sides. I’m really glad I found that big bag of cheap tent pegs in the garage. We used quite a few of them to pin down the edges of the netting. The short ends are held in place at one end by a stick rolled up in the excess, while at the other end, the excess went under a board I was using to mark the end of the bed.
Next was the L shaped bed. Lettuce went into there. I thought I had 4 types of lettuce left over from last year, but it turned out one of the envelopes was empty. That actually worked out, for the amount of seeds in the remaining packets.
The hard part was covering the odd shaped bed. One of my daughters came out and we sized up a piece of netting for the longer part of the L shape and cut it. The netting is 14′ wide, so we stretched it out on the grass and cut it in half.
The short side of the L, up to the label you can see near the bottom of the photo, is one type of lettuce, which is about as much as the other two together! There were still a few seeds left over, including some that had spilled in the baggie the seed packets were in, so those got scattered in the odd little bit of space next to the rose bush. They didn’t get covered with netting; the space is too small to bother.
The long side of the L shape was pretty easy to cover, but the short side curves around the lilac and gets wider at the end. While I used pieces from the canopy tent frame as supports at one end, there weren’t enough of that length for the whole bed, so I dug out some metal support rods I got last year. They’re not very strong and some had pieces broken off, making them shorter. Those matched the tent frame pieces more easily, but other were full length. I could push most if them deep enough to match heights, but with a couple, I kept hitting rocks that were big enough, I couldn’t seem to get around it. That one stake that has a spider web of cords from it is the highest of them all, and there was no way I could adjust it to avoid the rock I was hitting, and still have it where I needed it. (The bottoms of water bottles are there to keep the netting from falling down the stakes) That extra height in particular made pegging the netting down more of a challenge. In the end, we just had to push some of the stakes inwards to create some slack. We managed it, though.
That left one more bed to plant in.
For this bed, I transplanted the Red Baron bunching onions, in little groups of 3 or 4 seedlings. These are not going to get covered, since nothing eats the onions. Hopefully, the cats will leave the bed alone!
While working on this, I checked out the small bed we planted the poppy seeds saved from last year. I think they are starting to come up, but there are so many things coming up with them, it’s hard to tell! For all the roots I dug out of these beds, we’re still going to have a lot of weeds to fight off.
Now, the only thing left in the old kitchen garden are the retaining wall blocks. I’d transplanted mint into alternating blocks, but they’re not showing yet. I don’t know if they’re going to show up later, or if they got killed by the winter cold. It takes a lot to kill mint, but they did just get transplanted. I’ll leave those for now, but still plan to plant things in the remaining blocks. I just haven’t decided what, yet, since we will likely not be covering those. Plus, this area gets shaded by the ornamental apple trees a lot. With the T posts there, we could put up trellis netting and plant climbers, but anything like that would be deer or groundhog buffet, so we would have to find a way to cover them. It was very difficult to cover the retaining wall blocks last year. We’d planted lettuce in it last year, which we were able to protect from the deer, but didn’t count on the groundhogs getting at them.
We’ll figure it out. We can tuck something into the blocks, later one. For now, I’m just glad to finally get this garden basically done!
Oh, before I forget, just a quite update on my mother. I called her up this morning, and she’s still in a lot of pain. She’s quite surprised by it, it seems. She’s also disappointed. She thought that the doctor would be able to fix her. I tried to explain, they can’t fix everything, but she started taking about how, with all the modern technology we have, there must be something. I had to go back to using my husband as an example, since he’s been dealing with debilitating back pain for a very long time now. Even if they technically could do surgery for one thing, the risk was too high for little benefit, and it would have to be done again in 2 years anyhow – and that wasn’t even for the main source of his pain, for which there is nothing that can be done other than painkillers and, for some of it, physio. He hasn’t been able to do physio since we moved here. Some things just can’t be fixed. I don’t think my mother realised just how fortunate she is to have reached 90 and not had to deal with something like this before.
Ah, well. It is what it is. We just deal with the hand we’re dealt with!
