As I go into the sunroom to get cat kibble and start my morning rounds, I usually see at least one cat waiting outside for me. Typically, it’s Potato Beetle, sometimes Butterscotch or Rosencrantz, and once in a while, I’ll see Broccoli or Nosencrantz near the door.
This morning, I saw a little tuxedo at the door!!!
Even Junk Pile’s kittens are figuring out where the food is coming from, and getting curious!
A couple of kittens had run off before I could take this picture. The kittens inside the kibble house with Potato Beetle (against the wall on the right) are tree of Butterscotch’s. The white tail tip shows that it’s Bradicous in the kibble house, which makes it Chadicous at the food tray outside the kibble house. There are actually three kittens there. You can see the tuxedo’s tail, Chadicous’ face and body, and behind Chadicous is one of Junk Pile’s tabbies.
While Nosencrantz will come to the kibble house as I bring the food out, in the end, Rosencrantz, Nosencrantz and Toesencrantz all prefer their separate kibble tray under the shrine.
I’ve been finding the tray on the ground every now and then. The skunks also like this tray, and pull it off the platform when it’s empty.
On a completely different topic, our lovely rains have brought out the ‘shrooms.
I love finding these tree mushrooms! Which should be oyster mushrooms, but I am not confident enough about that to try eating any. :-D
Today is supposed to be on the hot side, though well within average temperature, with no rain, so I hope to get more progress on the low raised bed today. Tomorrow we celebrated my mother’s 90th birthday early, so it’s either today, or I won’t be able to get at it until next week. Thankfully, these beds are for next year, so there is no urgency to get it done, yet.
We did not get the predicted thunderstorms last night, though we did get rain. While I was out doing my morning rounds, I could hear thunder around us, and it was even starting to rain a bit by the time I was done. So, no work was done on the garden bed I’d started on yesterday. We had rain on and off all day, so hopefully those bottom layers got a good soaking.
A few more of the Mongolian Giant sunflowers have started to open up. If the mild temperature continue, I hope to at least see some Hopi Black Dye sunflowers open as well, before the first frost hits. Some areas in our province have already had frost in August, but so far, we are good.
I am really hoping that first frost holds off for quite a while, so that these Red Kuri squash get a chance to mature. Our first frost date for our area is Sept. 10; just over a week from now. From the looks of our long range forecasts, we will continue to have very nice overnight temperatures; cool, but nowhere near freezing.
I especially would love for the Teddy winter squash to have a chance. Yes, we finally have fruit developing on them! Again. I found three of them this morning. Where the Red Kuri/Little Gem squash ripen to a deep orange-red, the Teddy are a mini acorn squash, becoming a deep green and only about a pound in size. The critters have been staying away, after using the cayenne pepper all over the garden beds, even though we have no been able to re-apply the cayenne due to the rain. I am hoping that, having gotten a mouth full of pepper, the critters have learned to associate the garden beds with “ouch”. :-D If we can keep them away, these are supposed to be a prolific variety, and their small mature size should mean they may have a chance to fully ripen if we have a mild fall.
After checking the outside of the squash tunnel on the winter squash side, I went through the inside of the tunnel and found something waiting for me!
One of the Halona melons had dropped to the ground! I am so happy with how they are doing. :-) Of course, after finding this, I checked all the others, but none were loose. After I finished my morning rounds, I made a quick trip into town to run some errands, then headed out again later to meet a friend. While I was gone and there was a break in the rain, the girls picked the beans and some summer squash – and found two more Halona melons on the ground! I’m a bit surprised that it’s only the Halona melons that are dropping; the Pixies are still hanging in there. Literally! :-D
My friend and I went to the local Farmer’s Market this afternoon, and I had a chance to talk to my neighbour that sells pork – this time with a budget, and I picked up some sausages. :-) We had a chance to talk for quite a while, and I’m really looking forward to being able to get together with them. There are quite a few things they are doing that I would like to do as well, and I am eager to see their methods! And, from the looks of it, I won’t be able to go back to the market this year. Starting tomorrow, our province is imposing medical apartheid. With nothing to justify it, either. If we want to go to any “non-essential” places, we will have to show our papers to prove we’ve gotten the double jab for Schrodinger’s virus. The jab that works so well, those that have already got it are going to have to get a third one, while still covering their faces and remaining in physical isolation from other human beings. Our government doesn’t actually have the authority to impose such segregation, but they’re doing it anyhow, and people are being forced to comply through threats and coercion. Most illogically, while those who can’t have, or decline to have, the jab are now barred from doing things like buying food from a farmer at a market, instead of in a grocery store, the market vendors themselves are not required to have the jab. The levels of psychological manipulation and behavioural modification from our politicians and in the media, including social media, have gone into overdrive and, sadly, many people are getting sucked in and don’t even realize it. The levels of bullying and verbal abuse I’m seeing online has also increased substantially, in just the last few days. In typical gaslighting fashion, the same people who are doing the bullying are also the same people virtue signalling about how, if we don’t like it, don’t take it out on the poor employees trying to enforce the (illegal) restrictions. The obvious implication being that people who disagree with anyone being forced to partake in medical interventions against their will are the bullies when they voice their objections.
Meanwhile, another neighbor of ours I only recently met in person had an accident almost a week ago, breaking his neck. He requires surgery but isn’t getting it, nor is his family allowed to see him. They are literally denying him health care right now, because he is declining medical certain medical procedures that are unnecessary. Our health care system sucked before this, but now, it’s gotten beyond ridiculous.
Ugh. I was talking about my garden. I didn’t intend to go into a rant. It’s part of what we’re dealing with now, though, so I’m leaving it there.
I am so incredibly thankful that we are living here on the farm, and not in any urban setting. When I came up with the sub-title for the blog, “Sometimes you need to go back, to go forward”, I had no idea how true that would be.
I mean, by the time someone reaches 90, they pretty much have everything they want and need by then.
Ah, but there is an added twist.
The 90 year old in question is my mother.
My mother is… difficult. And often obliviously cruel.
Still, the family is planning a birthday party for her, and I will be driving her to it.
Yesterday, I finally settled on getting her a necklace. I already know she will complain about it but she might actually wear it anyway.
I also decided to make it a double gift, and stayed up late last night to make this little bag, rather than wrapping the necklace in a jewelry box.
It’s about 3 inches square, and the necklace is already in it in the photos. I figure she can use the bag to hold her rosary or something, afterwards.
This was done using a tulip stitch, which I’ve never done before. Here is the video tutorial that I used. It’s really quite simple.
The main difference is that I worked the bag in the round, rather than a flat panel, so I just needed to have a total number of stitches divisible by three, without the +1 needed in the starting chain when having to turn rows. The single crochet rounds in the bag are 48 stitches.
The yarn is from a package of cotton mini skeins in 8 colours, similar to Lion Brand’s Bonbons. It was gifted to me, and I’ve hung on to it for years before finding a project I wanted to use it for! :-) The bag used four colours, and I used a 2.25mm hook. After the bag was completed, I did a round of single crochet to finish the edges and create a button loop, then crocheted bobble stitch flower petals around the button loop. The button itself was from a bag of mixed, vintage buttons.
I’m happy with how it turned out. My mother will probably hate it. At least out loud and in public. Privately, she might actually like it. It’s really hard to know, with her! :-D
We had a brave little visitor while I was putting kibble out this morning.
Junk Pile’s kittens still run off when we come out, but a couple of them are getting a bit more brave about not going far, or coming back sooner. This handsome little tuxedo seems to be the more daring of them. Since they are still really nervous about going into the kibble house while we are outside, I have set up a more permanent food tray, sheltered under the shrine. When I come out with kibble in the mornings, Rosencrantz and, sometimes, Nosencrantz will be waiting at the sun room door for me, then they run over to the shrine and wait for me to bring their share. Being a regular place for food, I am now seeing Junk Pile’s kittens get over to it, rather than the kibble house or simply running away.
We’re having some pretty hot and humid days of late. Not heat like we’ve been having all summer, thankfully, but more “average for August” hot. Though it didn’t rain last night, when I came out to do my morning rounds, the dew was so heavy, I would have though we’d had some, had everything else not been completely dry.
The squash and gourds are certainly enjoying the moist heat!
The Ozark Nest Egg gourd plants are busily climbing the fence and blooming – and completely dwarfing the Thai Bottle gourd plants (on the left).
One of the flowers even made its way through the chicken wire critter barrier! :-D
So far, they all appear to be male flowers. No gourds forming, though it’s possible there are some hidden under the leaves. I won’t mess with the chicken wire to look.
Thanks to all the wonderful rain we’ve had, the grass is actually green and growing again, and in need of a mow. It took hours for the grass to dry enough for that to be an option, which meant mowing during the hottest part of the day.
Or it would have been, had the battery on the riding mower not been dead! It’s only been used once this year, and I had to charge it then, too.
With the time it took to charge the battery, it was actually starting to cool down, so I guess that was a good thing! I took advantage of it and was able to do both the inner and outer yards, including areas I did not more the one other time this year we mowed. I kept doing as long as the light held, and managed to get it done just before it was full dark, though the yard light had turned on well before I finished. I was even able to mow in front of the storage shed. Which means that, weather willing, in the next day or two, we’ll have lots of grass clippings to rake up and set aside for the garden.
By the time I finally came inside, it was 9pm, but it was worth it! :-)
Last night, for the first time in about two years, we actually used our fire pit and had a cookout!
We even used the new fire grill my brother and his wife bought for us, for the first time. <3
It was spur of the moment, so all we had on hand was hot dogs – I missed getting a photo of toasting the half-frozen buns around the edge of the fire grill. I’d finally burned away the vines and whatnot that had been sitting in the pit for many months, then decided to go ahead and build up a cooking fire, using apple wood we’d pruned a couple of years ago.
I think we did actually light a fire once last year, to burn off the invasive weeds that could not go into the compost that were in there, but that was it. Even in previous years, when we used the fire pit, we had the hose going constantly spraying water around the pit, just to be on the safe side. The only time we didn’t need to do that was when we had a cookout in the winter, and there was two feet of snow. We’ve had enough rain in the last while, there was no need to do that. We just had the hose nearby for dousing the fire later.
It was an absolutely gorgeous evening for the fire pit. So very relaxing.
I finished off my rounds this morning by doing some harvesting in the garden. The beans in particular had plenty to pick. :-)
I found a yellow bean, growing on a green bean plant!
It didn’t get picked. It felt completely empty. Any beans it might have had did not develop. I did find one other yellow bean among the green beans, on another plant, that did have developing beans in it, but it was super soft for some reason.
There as a big enough haul this morning to need two containers! :-)
Among the sunburst squash, we have the one plant that is producing green squash instead of yellow, though some of the developing squash have streaks of yellow in them. An interesting mutant plant! :-D
The yellow beans are pretty much done. We’ll still be picking them for the next while, but just a few here and there.
I found flowers on both green and purple bean plants! Just a few, but still a surprise, this late in the season. We’ll be having plenty of those to pick for a while, from the looks of it. Lots of little ones developing on the plants.
Our first potatoes! We could have picked potatoes earlier, but we’ve been leaving them for now. This morning, I decided to reach into a few bags and dug around until I felt a potato and pulled it up. These are the yellow Yukon Gem and red Norland potatoes. I did not try to pick any of the fingerlings, yet.
That’s a pretty good harvest for the day! There are enough beans there to do another bag for the freezer, if we want. :-)
I used a bit of everything when I made breakfast this morning. :-)
I made a hash using all three types of beans, a couple of sunburst squash, a zucchini, and one of each type of potato. I also used onion and garlic that we harvested earlier. Even the oil I used to cook with was infused with our chive blossoms, and the dried parsley on top is from last year’s garden.
Okay, I just have to start with the obligatory garden photos. :-D I took these yesterday.
The largest seed head of the Mongolian Giant sunflowers is opening up beautifully. Still nowhere near the size a Mongolian Giant seed head should be, but we’ll see what happens in what’s left of our growing season.
What amazed me, though, was seeing several of these.
The King Tut purple peas are still growing and producing! The green peas next to them are basically gone; completely died off and dried out, barely visible among the weeds and wildflowers that are left. Peas do not usually last this long, so I’m quite impressed!
I didn’t get to posting yesterday for a happy reason. An old friend from high school is in the province and was able to come for a visit. Even my husband was able to join us for a while. Aside from running into her briefly at the grocery store, we haven’t seen each other since we graduated! We had 35 years of catching up to do, and it was awesome. :-) Then, she and I headed out to a local farmer’s market. I’ve driven past it many times, but had never stopped in. With the crazy going on these days, I wasn’t sure if it was even a safe place to go for someone who can’t wear a mask. The mandates were over, though, so we gave it a visit, and that was awesome, too. No issues at all. Best of all, I found a vendor that has a homestead and supplies pork, among other things – and they live only a few miles away from us! In the spring, we’ll be able to make arrangements for getting a half pig in the fall, so they know how many piglets to raise. So now we have local suppliers for both beef and pork!
The place has a little bistro during market hours, and we ended up enjoying some awesome food and just talking until they closed down. Wonderful people running the place. We definitely will be coming back before my friend heads home.
Today was our city shopping trip, so I headed out as soon as I was done my morning rounds. I actually made it to Costco this time. With restrictions relaxed, I didn’t have to worry about being able to stand in line outside. It was the most pleasant Costco trip I’ve had in a long time. Unfortunately, by the end of it, my hip was giving out, so that was the only stop I made before heading home. Which was okay. I was able to stock up on the main things. It was a bit disconcerting, though. I didn’t buy more than I usually did at Costco. In fact, I probably bought less than usual. And yet the final bill was about $200 more than the last time I was able to do a full stock-up trip there. Prices have really gone up in the past few months. :-(
While I was out, I got word about a freedom rally in town this evening. I had time to get home, unload, then head out again. I wanted to be early, because I wasn’t quite sure where it was happening. It’s not an area of town I usually go to. There were people already there and even my friend was eventually able to join us, so that was awesome. The rally was to protest the school board forcing children to wear masks all the time which is, at its most basic, illegal. The government and health department can make recommendations, but cannot force, anything that goes against the charter rights and freedoms, or the human rights code. That’s actually written into the health act and the charter. Anyhow, there was a really good turnout, and I ended up meeting people in person that I’d been getting to know online, and even a family that may become “neighbours” soon! It was funny to discover we had other personal connections, too.
The people from the school board were not particularly useful to talk to. Their stance was basically, they’re just following orders. Now where in history have we heard that line before?
While there, I learned our province has made another step backwards. While I was on the road home from the city, our government announced that the mask mandates start again tomorrow, even in many outdoor venues that had been exempt before. There is no actual reason to do this. We aren’t seeing any surge in hospitalizations or deaths. It’s all been so arbitrary, and like all the lockdowns and restrictions is just as illegal as the schools forcing kids to wear masks.
All the families there with school aged children were planning to homeschool, rather than engage in government enforced child abuse. The school is going to lose a lot of funding over this. Some of the parents I spoke to told me they were getting to many calls from the school to get them to register this year, it bordered on harassment. I’m hoping to keep in touch with some of these families, since we homeschooled the girls completely. I look forward to being able to help and encourage a new generation of families taking this route! There is the makings of a vibrant local community. Something that didn’t exist, when we last lived here and were homeschooling.
The whole event just happened to be next to the grocery store, so when it was all done, I stopped by to pick up a few things I wasn’t able to get in the city before heading home. Even with the the sale prices, I still spent way too much money. :-(
One of the things I want to do is get chickens, for eggs and meat, but we are not at all ready to have birds yet. I was hoping to get to that point in a year or two, but the way things are going, I think we need to prioritize that and make it so that we can get chicks in the spring.
So, along with building high raised garden beds for next year, we need to build/acquire a chicken coop. Preferably a mobile one. That way, the chickens will be playing a significant part in soil preparation for planting.
After all the running around over the past couple of days, and being around so many people, I am feeling quite tired. It is, however, a good tired!
It’s been a while since I had a whole crowd of cats and kittens following me around in the mornings, but now that Potato Beetle is back, he does tend to join me.
After breakfast, of course.
I was quite tickled to go into the sun room this morning and discover not only the adult cats waiting for me, but Broccoli and Chadicous, too! Even Junk Pile’s kittens were hanging around, though they kept running off anytime I came near.
Potato has a habit of trying to climb me when he wants attention. I managed to dodge him while opening up the trail cam to switch the card, so he climbed the post, instead.
The photo was taken the moment before he leapt onto my shoulders.
He did it again from the saw horse next to the summer squash, and the garden cam!
I have no idea where he’s been for the past few months, but he does seem happy to be back!
While checking the remains of the purple corn, something odd on one of the deer chomped cobs caught my eye, so I took a closer look.
A corn fungus had set in. I’ve seen a few people posting photos on gardening groups of this, asking what it is. Others got very excited about it. Apparently, this stuff is edible and very tasty.
I have no intention of finding out. :-D
Then there is something I checked on that I actually discovered yesterday.
The old kitchen was tacked onto the log cabin portion of the house at a later date. It has it’s own foundation with a crawl space under it, and it the only part of the house that is not on a basement.
That foundation has cracks in it. One of them is on the North side, near the septic tank.
Yesterday, I spotted wasps all over the area and realized they were going in and out of the crack.
Of course, getting picture of the actual wasps didn’t work out too well. LOL There is one in the shot, crawling through, where the arrow is pointing.
Last year, we had issues with wasps in the corner nearby, under the eaves where the old kitchen and the rest of the roof joined. It was bad enough to pick up wasp killer to get rid of them. So far, this nest hasn’t been a problem, but we will probably have to get rid of it before we get the septic tank emptied for the winter.
What this does tell me, though, is that the crack is open all the way through to the crawl space.
Which also tells me the old kitchen is sinking.
We did sort of know that already. We have seen that the sun room is shifting quite a bit, too – enough to affect the angles of the door, and crack windows.
Which reminds me. We’re having to use the old kitchen to go in and out of the house again. The fix I did on the main doors has given out. You can read about that here, here and here.
There is so much major work that needs to be done on this house, it’s pretty discouraging. What should be done it to get it all fixed before things get worse and end up costing more, but we’re still looking at repairs and renovations probably costing more than the house is worth. Even if my entire family pooled our resources to fix up the home we grew up in, we couldn’t come up with enough.
We’ll just take care of what we can as we go along. I must say, though, a lottery win would sure come in handy right now! :-D
Last night turned out to be one of those odd nights. I’d stayed up late to finish of part of a crochet project, then work the set up on the next part of it, before going to bed.
I didn’t sleep a wink.
This wasn’t even a sleepy night of tossing and turning or interruptions, but just plain, “hmm. I’m awake.”
The problem with such sleepless nights is that I end up feeling hungry. So by 4am, I finally gave up and got something to eat, then watched some Midsomer Murders on Tubi. By 6am, I figuring I could actually fall asleep, but it was getting light out, so I did my morning rounds, first.
As early as it was, Rosencrantz was already waiting for breakfast! :-D
While checking on the garden beds after switching out the memory card on the garden cam, I was very happy to see these.
The one Red Kuri (Little Gem) squash is changing colour so nicely! One of my crochet projects has been to make mesh hammocks for the squash and melons. We have all smaller varieties, so the vines can hold the weight. The hammocks are more to ensure that, if they do drop off their vines, the ones that are higher up won’t hit the ground.
After all this time, we FINALLY have another winter squash developing. Possibly more, but this is the biggest, and shows no sign of dying off like so many others have done. Which is, on the one hand, quite exciting to see. On the other, it’s a bit frustrating. Our first frost date is September 10, and it’s already August 24. Hopefully, we won’t actually get frost that early, but that chances of this, and any others, reaching full maturity before first frost is low. These varieties were chosen specifically for their shorter growing season, but even with our watering and fertilizing, the drought has set so many things back. Now, after all that heat, it’s our cooler days and almost cold overnight temperatures that are slowing things down again.
Ah, well. We shall see what the fall brings us.
Meanwhile, I did manage a few hours of sleep. It’s drizzling outside, so I think I’ll continue on the crochet projects I’m working on.
