postaday

Self sabotage

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

*sigh*

My mother did it again.

Last night, I had a voice message on my cell phone, letting my know that there was no one to do my mother’s evening med assist.

Early this morning, I got a call from the home care coordinator, and found out what happened.

My mother’s supper and evening med assists are usually done by the same person. When the home care aid came in for the suppertime visit, apparently my mother started making racist comments about “brown people” being “cockroaches”.

(in retrospect, I am second guessing this; that is not a word my mother would use. I don’t think she knows what a cockroach even is.)

The home care aid said that she found this insulting, because she is Metis, and my mother apparently responded by saying she was a cockroach.

The aid now refuses to go back to my mother, and did the paperwork for that. It went up the chain, and that’s why I got the call.

We talked about it for a while, and there is recognition that my mother’s cognitive decline is playing a part on this. The problem is that this can affect her long term care panel. My mother actually wants to be in a nursing home. A very specific one, and we’re trying to accomplish this for her. The staff at long term care and supporting living, however, are of all races, so this could be a problem.

My mother is basically self sabotaging herself.

When I was done with the call, I sent out a group message to my siblings about it. Not long after, messaged to let us know he’d phoned her from work. My mother did admit she shouldn’t have said what she said to the home care worker, and even said she was sorry. My brother told her that he wasn’t the one she should apologize to – she needs to apologize to the home care worker, but she won’t be coming back, because of how my mother treated her.

My mother was dismissive about it, saying there are lots of workers, and there’s always people looking for jobs. He told her, no, there is a shortage of workers, and you just don’t treat people like that.

She did seem to catch on that she had actually done something wrong.

The morning med assist arrived while they were talking, so they got off the phone. I later found out that my mother had told the morning person to extend her apologies.

I had my appointment in town, though, so I was going to call my mother later.

I got to my appointment early, so I popped into the Red Apple (a rural department store) for a bit. A display caught my eye and distracted me from what I planned to look at, and before long, I was walking out with a caftan and what I at first thought was a sleeveless summer dress, except it was pants, not a skirt. Something that is stepped into from the top, with no zippers or buttons. They were both “one size fits all”, but I didn’t have time to try on either of them. I figured if they didn’t fit me, they might fit my daughters. What I was really after was the caftan, though, for the upcoming summer heat.

Yes, this is relevant.

After my appointment, I remembered to pop over to the autobody shop to ask some questions. Since they were going to be working on the truck at some point, I asked about the door handle and the driver’s seatbelt. The handle broke off and I have to open the window to open it from the outside. I’d called our garage and got an estimate for it, but they don’t normally do that sort of work. The driver’s seatbelt buckle has a terrible habit of suddenly coming undone. Once it catches, it catches, but sometimes it feels like it’s buckled, but isn’t quite all the way, so it’ll suddenly come undone while I’m driving.

It turns out that yes, they could do this work for me, but it would be expensive. The door handle, which is snapped off, is expensive and would cost about the same as the garage would charge me. The garage, however, could go to a scrap yard or something, and find a second hand one. Something they can’t do. As for the seatbelt, that would also be really expensive, because they would have to replace the entire thing, not just the buckle, because that’s how it’s sold. Again, the garage could look for a second hand one for us at a better price.

Then we talked about our insurance claim.

Normally, the insurance will cover like for like and, if that can’t be found, they’ll allow an improvement, but the client pays the difference. The problem is, box covers like the one we had fit newer models, which have different sized truck boxes. The only one she could find that would fit our truck was an off market version, and the insurance company normally wouldn’t approve that. After talking to the adjuster, he said he would have to pass it up the line for approval and get back to her.

He hasn’t gotten back to her yet.

If they don’t approve the off market cover, and there are no other options, they might offer us cash, instead. We would still need a box cover, of course. As for cash, the adjuster put the value of the old box cover at a dollar, because he couldn’t find anything to tell him what it actually cost. So who knows what we would get.

The twisted frame is covered, though, as it needs to be fixed before a box cover can be installed. We’d be charged for part of the painting, because of the rust on the fender, around the wheel well. She told me she would ask the repair guys to try do it so only the top of the frame needs to be painted, not the whole panel. That would save us up to $140.

Then there was the broken tail light cover. The insurance company won’t cover that and, since I can’t prove it wasn’t broken before the box cover was ripped off by the wind, I am not going to contest it. She’s going to see if they can find an off market one for us. The entire tail light assembly gets replaced, not just the cover, and a new market value one can cost $250-$300.

So now I know the status of our insurance claim, and to contact our garage to see if they can find the parts we need from the scrap yard or something. Getting the door handle fixed before winter would be good, that’s for sure!

By the time I got home, it was about mid afternoon. I grabbed a quick lunch, then headed outside. I decided to work on the permanent trellis bed, but needed to clear around it, first. In this area, it made more sense to break out my brother’s push mower first, then go back with the weed trimmer.

Of course, since I had the mower going anyhow, I kept mowing further out. I hadn’t refilled the tank before I started, so I basically just kept going until I ran out of gas, then went to get some more.

Which is when I discovered I had a voice mail message.

From home care.

There was no one to do my mother’s suppertime or evening med assists.

Then, while I was listening to this message, a text message came in.

If was from my mother’s LifeLine provider, telling me it looked like the pendant was no longer connected to the based, and saying to test it. If a test didn’t work, it gave a number to call.

I put away the gas can, and the lawn mower.

Once back inside, I called up my mother. The first thing was to explain about the text I got, and get her to press the button on her LifeLine pendant.

There was no response.

I would have to phone the company.

I then told my mother about the call I got from home care, and that there was no one to come for her two evening med assists. She asked if I knew why, and I told her, I just had a phone message. Her response was, “oh, they’re trying to “get” me”, or something like that. My mother thinks the home care aids are deliberately not coming to give her her meds so that she’ll die. I told her, no, you did this to yourself. Because of how you treated the home care aid, they don’t want to work with you anymore.

Oh, you know about that, she said…

I told her I got a call this morning from the home care coordinator about it. My mother said she’d called her, herself, and wanted her to “visit” (have a meeting). By then, the office was closed, so I told her she wouldn’t hear back until Monday. I then told her I needed to call the LifeLine number, and would be coming over to do her med assist.

After being on hold for awhile, I got through to someone and explained the text message I got, and that I got my mother to test her pendent, with no response. He looked up her file and it seemed her pendent was no longer synced with the base. So he gave me step by step instructions on how to reset it and test it again, and told me that if it didn’t work, call back.

That done, I finally got to finish cleaning up and changing. Our predicted high of 22C/72F turned out to be 27C/81F, so I decided to wear my new caftan, which did fit (the other garment did not, so I have it to my daughters to try one). It is a very loud, mostly deep red, with bold colours in the patterns. More importantly, it’s made of a very light, breezy fabric that feels as close to being naked in the heat, without actually being naked.

So, off I went to my mother’s. When I got there, she was fussing in the kitchen and didn’t stop, so I asked for her LifeLine pendent and did the reset, as instructed, ending with a test. When it was done, what should have happened when I pressed the pendant button at the end was an almost instant human voice responding.

There was nothing.

So I called the number on the machine, using my cell phone (the machine is linked through my mother’s land line). I got the guy on speaker as we talked and he walked me through doing the reset again, then doing the test call.

Nothing.

At which point, they simply replace the machine, and he started that request going. If necessary, they know to call me on our land line first, before trying my cell phone.

That done, I went back to my mother, who was at her dining table, so update her and start getting her meds.

Which is when she noticed what I was wearing.

She commented on it and I told her I had picked it up, just today.

She started laughing at me, because of course she would, and told me it looked like something for sleeping in.

*sigh*

I told her no, not at all. It would be terrible to sleep in (it’s ankle length, I’d be tangled in it in a heartbeat!).

She still said it looked like something to sleep in, but that’s okay, she’s got something similar that she uses to sleep in, too.

…

No, she doesn’t have anything like a caftan. She has night gowns.

She was absolutely oblivious to the idea that laughing at me for what I was wearing was not a nice thing to do. It’s something I have come to expect from her, so it doesn’t really bother me, but she does this to everyone.

That did give me the segue to talk about what happened yesterday.

Long story short, it seems my mother did genuinely seem to realize she had done something wrong. She still tried to justify it. Saying things like, she gave her opinion, the home care worker gave her opinion, like it was some normal conversation. Then she started saying, she’s alone at home all day, and she wants to talk.

I told her, when they come to her place, they are there to do their job and leave. They are not there to talk about politic or religion or race or whatever. She needs to treat people nicely, and I stressed that her behaviour could keep her from getting into the nursing home she wants to be in.

As we talked, she mentioned again that she’d called the case coordinator, while bringing out the home care worker list of names and times they’d be coming. The number on there is what she called and left a message.

She called the shift scheduler.

I told her, this number was for someone else. I’d given her the number for the case coordinator, and it was with the schedule, but it was gone. Meanwhile, my mother was angry that the number she wanted wasn’t on there. I told her, this number would have different people answering, depending on the time of day and day of the week. The number she wanted is office hours only.

Meanwhile, I got her supper time meds out, and she took them a bit early. That freed up her little pill counting bowl and I set out her before bed pills, plus her inhaler, for later. I also updated the notebook I keep inside the lock box for the next home care aid to see.

Once all of that was done and everything was put away, I stayed for a while longer, and we talked some more about her behaviour. This time, my mother took out what she’d showed the home care worker. It was a photocopy from a new article, showing a grown of anti-Western, pro-terrorist demonstrators, in Canada, and she had basically asked the woman her opinion. Apparently, she said she agreed with the pro-terrorist demonstrators, which ticked my mother off. The women then told my mother that her ex-husband was black, and her kids were half black.

…

The case coordinator told me she’d said she was Metis.

So we have another discrepancy on the stories, here!

I asked my mother, why do you even have this? (She would have had to get someone to print out or make a photo copy of the image for her) And why would you show it to the home care aid?

My mother started talking about being lonely and wanting to have someone to talk to. (It sounds like her neighbours in the building are avoiding her now.) I said fine. Talk about the weather. Talk about the gardens (the building’s garden plots are visible out her window). Don’t talk about stuff like this.

I also recommended she stop watching TV news, because it’s not good for her!

My mother agreed that she would not talk about things unrelated to her med assist when the home care workers came.

Once I was sure she was set up for the evening, I headed home. By then, it was time for my own supper. My plans to work in the garden after clearing around the bed I was going to work on were out the window, but it was light enough to at least do the watering, including the new trees and bushes.

While I was watering the high raised bed, I picked a couple of things.

One is a Purple Prince turnip. I thought the yellow one should have been a Zlata radish, but it was so big, I thought maybe I somehow had some Gold Ball turnip seeds in there.

Later on, while watering the low raised bed in the east yard, which as the same mix, plus lettuce seeds, I picked a few more of the yellow ones. They really are radishes, not turnips. It just happens that this one is very large for a radish!

While I was still out there, my older daughter came out to talk about a potential visit from my son from another mother, later in the year. It has been a long time since we’ve seen him! She stayed out to help with the watering, too. The girls had already taken care of feeding the outside cats while I was done, but after I was done watering, I stayed out to play with Poirot’s kittens. They REALLY want attention, and love to get under foot!

Some of the bigger kittens have infected eyes, but I was able to wash only Sir Robin’s eye. I tried to get Havarti (the one orange tabby kitten) to wash one of his eyes, but he would not let me get him. I hope I’ll be able to wash it out, tomorrow.

Kitten therapy is good.

This has turned out to be a pretty messed up day. I really hope my mother takes our warnings to heart, and starts behaving better.

In talking about the situation, my brother had a good point, though. As people age, this sort of thing is not at all unusual. This is usually something that would play a part in getting someone IN to long term care, not out of it. My brother remembers an eye doctor we used to go to, many years ago. He was the sweetest man every, but when dementia hit, he suddenly starting saying some incredibly racist things. It was actually a big part of how he ended up in long term care. I supposed it’s different with my mother, since she has always been racist. Her cognitive decline is just bringing it out more, not creating it. The end result is the same, though, and as bad as my mother can be, others in long term care are far worse.

*sigh* again.

Well, whatever happens, happens. We do the best we can.

What other choice is there?

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: corn, bush beans, and another outing, after all

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

I had a late start in the garden today.

I woke at my usual time, which is basically when it starts getting light out (about 5-5:30am, these days), but was in massive pain. I did manage to get outside to feed the yard cats, but wasn’t able to do the rest of my morning rounds. Instead, I took some painkillers and headed back to bed.

I didn’t wake up again until about noon!

I did feel a lot better by then, though, which is good, because – as always – the job I needed to do took more than expected!

The bed I need to work on is where I had eggplant and hot peppers growing, last year. These had been mulched first with cardboard, then grass clippings on top of the cardboard. In the fall, I just did a chop and drop, leaving it pretty much as it was for the winter.

What you see in the first photo is what was able to grow through the openings in the cardboard where the peppers and eggplant were growing through, and areas around the edges where rhizomes in particular were able to work their way up the side walls of the bed.

The box frame was secured to hold plastic I’d set around the eggplant and peppers to form a sort of open top greenhouse. The twine wrapped around was there to reduce billowing in the wind. If the wind were not an issue, it would have worked out quite well, but it was a pretty constant battle. Even the cover with the wire that is stored on top of the box frame would get blown off, and it was there to weigh down the tops of the plastic, and didn’t have anything else over it! Which is why it got lashed down with paracord, later on.

Removing the mulch and remaining bits of cardboard did clear a lot of the elm seeds off, but there were so many seeds, the mulch can’t be used again, nor would I want to put it on the compost pile. Instead, I put it around the base of the box on the outside, to hopefully smother any weeds that would come up through the gaps.

Then it was time to fluffify the soil and pull the weeds, including the roots.

Which was absolutely brutal. It was like concrete.

I normally would have gone over it with a garden fork, first, but with the box frame in place, that wasn’t an option. So I was just using my little hand cultivator.

That has got to be my favourite garden tool right now. It really does the job! It was still pretty difficult. In the end, I spent more than an hour, just breaking up that soil. There weren’t a lot of weeds to pull, thanks to that mulch, but getting the roots out was almost impossible. Even after breaking up the soil first, if there were any clumps at all, the roots and rhizomes would just break apart.

I keep water with me while I work but, once the soil was prepped, I had to head inside for a sit down and hydration break. Thank God for cooler temperatures! Unfortunately, I’m out of any amendments that would help reduce this sort of compaction.

For this bed, I wanted to plant the Orchard Baby corn, which has only 65 days to maturity, with some beans. I had some yellow Custard bean seeds left. Which is a bit funny because, a few years back, we grew a different variety of corn in this bed, with beans from this same packet, in between!

Given that the beans are a few years old, I don’t expect a high germination rate, but bean seeds last a lot longer than other things.

Using the end of one of the larger plastic coated plant stakes, I marked off 5 fairly deep lines in the soil – three for corn, two for beans – then filled the resulting little trenches with water. Then I ran the stake over the lines again, and this time used the hose on the jet setting, to drive the water deeper in the planting areas.

In the slide show above, right after the photo of the seeds, the seeds are laid out in the rows. Even the bright pink inoculated bean seeds are hard to see, but they’re there!

The beans were planted pretty far apart; there were enough that I knew there would be plenty left behind. They’re more of a “bonus” crop.

The corn was supposed to be about 50 seeds per packet, and I did hope to get them all in, but there just wasn’t the space, even setting them pretty close together. They will be thinned later, if the germination rate is high.

To actually plant the seeds, I cheated, and used the end of the plant stake I used to make the rows to push the seeds into the soil, which you can see in the next picture. For each one, I’d give the stake a spin to make sure no seeds stuck to the end, before moving to the next one! Then I gently dragged the stake over the rows to cover the seeds before finishing off with a gentle watering, which further ensured the seeds were well covered.

I still had those leftover corn seeds, though. I didn’t want to hang on to such a small amount, but what to do with them?

Well, there was this little bed nearby, with the Arikara squash in it.

Corn and squash are supposed to do well together!

So I opened up the mulch, where there seemed to be the most room, including right in the very middle, and planted the leftover seeds there. These beds are close enough that wind pollination between them should work out fine. For now, though, the mosquito netting cover got put back on until the squash is large enough I won’t have to worry about something getting at them.

Then I went to the tomato bed and, using the plant stake to make holes in the soil, planted more beans down the middle of the bed, plus the gap between the Black Beauty and Chocolate Cherry tomatoes. Bonus beans, plus they will act as a living mulch later on.

That done, I brought out the stove pellets for the corn and beans bed. I scattered them all over the bed, then misted them with water. After the pellets had a chance to expand and start breaking up into sawdust, I sprinkled some more pellets on and misted it again.

As there is nothing in this bed with protective collars or anything like that, it was going to need something to keep the cats out. A few years back, my daughter bought us a large roll of netting. I’ve been reusing pieces of it in other areas but, for the amount I needed, I brought the remaining roll out. You can see it in the second last photo of the corn and beans slideshow. The netting on that roll is actually folded in half. I left it as it was, though. Using ground staples to fasten the netting to the wire above the box cover, I unrolled it all the way around, with a decent amount of overlap, before cutting it. Roughly 25 feet, in total. There is still lots on the roll.

About this time, I got a notification on my phone for a voicemail message. Turns out my Wi-Fi calling had shut itself off. Why I was still able to listen to the voicemail message, but not get the call itself, I have no idea.

It was home care, letting me know that there would be no one available for my mother’s bed time med assist.

It was almost 6pm when I got the message, which means she would have just had her suppertime med assist.

I had time to finish setting up the netting. The top was secured with ground staples to the wire cover at several points. This netting catches on everything, so I was able to make use of that and got it “stuck” at each corner. Then, just to be on the safe side, I used more ground staples to secure the netting between the box frame and the walls of the bed. The box frame is tied down tight enough that it was hard to make the space to slide the ground staples through. Those aren’t going anywhere! The netting would rip, first.

Once that was finished and everything cleaned up and put away, I got a daughter to take over and do the watering of the rest of the garden, while I washed up and changed, before going to my mother’s.

It’s been almost a week since I did my mother’s grocery shopping, and I have an appointment in town tomorrow, so I left early enough to hit the grocery store, first. I knew she’d be running out of milk, at the very least – she is always running out of milk, but refuses to buy more than one 2L carton at a time – so I got that, plus a few other things I thought she might be running out of by now. Since I was there anyhow, I spotted some excellent sales and picked up some stuff for ourselves, too.

When I got to my mother’s she was so very happy when she saw I’d brought her more milk! She had told me, she even considered asking me if I could pick some up on the way, but had decided against it.

I was early for her evening pills but, once everything was put away, I opened up the lock box and got them ready for her. Which gave her time to tell me why the cover was missing on the tiny tagine shaped bowl I gave her to put her pills into, so they could be double checked and counted before she took them.

It turns out that, a couple of times now, someone would open the bowl to put in her dose for the time, only to find one of her half pills from the previous med assist, still sitting in the bowl. It had been counted out, but she missed it when she took them – and clearly, the home care aid didn’t double check to make sure my mother had actually taken all the pills!

So it was decided that she would tuck the lid away so that, if a pill got accidentally left behind again, it could actually be seen and she could take it right away.

Good thinking, but really, part of the home care aid’s job is to make sure my mother takes her pills properly. That’s why they’re there, and the pills are in a lock box, after all!

I did get a bit of a visit in before I headed home, much appreciating the longer daylight hours! I’ve made these trips in the winter, when it was dark by the time my mother was supposed to get her suppertime visit, but this time of year, I was driving home in full light. Much easier to watch for deer!

Tomorrow, I’ve got an appointment in town, but my afternoon is free. I’m waffling between working on the bed at the chain link fence, or the bed that will have a permanent trellis built into it.

I’ll see what I feel up to, after I get home!

For now, it’s time to take some pain killers and get to bed. Maybe even before midnight!

Ha!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: two quick supports

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

I had an entire day at home, with excellent weather. Which means I got lots done!

Of course, I took full advantage of it. While getting the transplants in was my primary goal, I got as many other things done in between that I could.

One of them was to add some horizontal supports for the Spoon tomatoes.

Spoon tomatoes can get pretty tall, but they don’t tend to get particularly large or heavy. Each transplant has its own pair of vertical supports, and I wove the horizontal supports through. The bamboo stakes I used are about 6′ long, and the row of tomatoes is about 13 or 14 feet long. I ended up weaving two bamboo stakes through, then using whatever sticks I had handy to finish off the last bit. The tomato plants should be light enough that this should be enough to hold them. I might have to secure the supports to the metal posts, if they start to get tippy, as the tomatoes get bigger. There’s a possibility that, once the trellises start filling in, they will start acting like sails in the wind. We’ll see, as the season progresses.

With the temperatures at a more reasonable level, I haven’t had to water every morning to protect the garden beds from the heat. Even with that lovely rain we got recently, though, things dry out really quickly, so I watered the beds in the main garden area, after I was done with the tomato supports. The other beds got watered as I was working in the areas, later on.

When working in the old kitchen garden, there were a few things that needed to be done before I could start on the transplants. One of them was dealing with the pink rose bush. This rose bush is insanely thorny, and it wants to sprawl. Part of it died over the winter, too.

So this afternoon, I broke out the leather gloves and pruned away the dead parts. There was more of that then I expected! Then I dug out the pair of wire supports I’d picked up at the dollar store last year. I used them on their own, as three sided supports, last year, but for the rose bush, I joined them together.

I didn’t think to get a picture until much later, though, after the transplanting was mostly done.

The green wire is hard to see with all the other greens around it, but you can just make it out in the photo. It’s tall enough that it should keep the branches from leaning into the garden bed or the paths. It had a tendency to flop all over the place, so we’d tied it off with twine and, for the tallest stem, I actually had it tied to a branch of the ornamental crab apple tree.

I think that tree might be why the rose bush doesn’t seem to be doing as well this year. We pruned it back quite a bit, years ago and, once it started getting sunlight, the rose bush finally recovered and started to thrive. The crabapple tree has filled in again, though, and the rose bush is being shaded out again. We’re going to have to prune it back again.

The ornamental apple tree at the other corner did get some pruning. Aside from a few low hanging branches that kept catching on my hat, there were some large, dead branches that needed to be cleared away, too. On that side of the garden, there is a white rose bush that is aggressively spreading. I cleared spreading little rose bushes away from the wattle weave bed and out of the rhubarb, old asparagus and some flowers in that area. It was even coming up through the stack of small logs I’ve got stored in that corner. There is more that needs to be cleared away, but for today, I just cleared enough that I could get into where I needed to work, without getting attacked by rose bushes or crabapple branches!

These were the “little” things that gone done today.

I did manage to get all the transplants in, though! That will get its own post. See you there in a bit! 😊

The Re-Farmer

Morning pretties, and a longer day than expected

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

My daughter had a doctor’s appointment today, so I headed out to do my morning rounds early, then stayed out to work in the garden for a couple of hours. I’ll write about that in a separate garden post.

Before we headed out, I couldn’t resist getting a picture of Ginger.

Since Butterscotch has gone into another stressed out and hiding all day phase, I’ve been kicking the other cats out of my room for the night, so she can come out to eat, drink, use the litter box, and not be hiding under an armchair all night. Ginger is the one cat I’ve been allowing in the room at night, since he’s a bundle of nerves, too. He is taking full advantage of the perk, and luxuriating in comfortable cat beds and oodles of pets. Thankfully, he and Butterscotch get along!

This time of year, we’ve got quite a few things blooming, or starting to get into bloom. This year, a couple of bushes that normally don’t, are blooming prolifically for the first time since we’ve moved out here!

The white flowers are on a small bush near the house. It has been bashed and battered, and at one point, I was sure it was dead. Whatever it is, it’s incredibly hardy! This year, not only is it the largest I’ve seen it since our first year here – a major recovery – but it is covered in these clusters of white flowers.

The lilacs are on a bush that is at the fence on one side of the gate at our driveway. This area gets baked in the sun, though it at least gets some shade from a giant spruce tree in the evenings. It also doesn’t get a lot of moisture. This year, however, we have enough moisture that the “pond” not far away in the old hay yard still has some moisture in it. Since moving here, I’ve seen it bloom a couple of times, when we had very wet springs, but nothing like its blooming this year!

There is another lilac planted at the fence line on the other side of the gate. That area gets baked out from sunrise to sunset, and I’m amazes it’s surviving. No flowers this year, though.

When we finally get around to making the people gate near that sad lilac, I’m hoping to improve conditions around it and find a way to get water to it.

As my daughter and I were heading out, she got the truck out of the garage while I opened the gate, so I picked a few clusters of lilacs for her. She set them on the dash. When we came back to the truck after her appointment, they were completely flat and shriveled from the heat! I hope she remembered to take them out when she parked the truck in the garage.

Thankfully, she and I left really early for her appointment. My plan was to have lunch before her appointment. About twenty minutes from home, she suddenly remembered the prescription, an injection, she was supposed to bring with her today. It was still in the fridge at home! So we turned around and headed back while I messaged her sister to meet us at the gate with it in an insulated bag and some ice packs.

Even with the return trip, we got there early enough that we could have had lunch at the Subway next door – until we saw the line up. So we skipped that and headed for the clinic. She got into the examination room a bit early, but the doctor was running late and even had to leave part way through the visit and come back later. It was just a follow up visit, though, and there were no changes to my daughter’s mediations. She did get a chance to show and ask the doctor about some skin issues she’s been having. She’s had issues that she traced to an allergy to something in her deodorant, but with the recent heat, that’s gotten painfully worse, plus she’s got all sorts of skin issues. The doctor said it looks fungal, and recommended…

Head and Shoulders, used as a body wash.

She could have prescribed an anti-fungal cream but it turns out Head and Shoulders contains anti-fungal ingredients that work just as well, and it’s a lot cheaper!

She also recommended doing her laundry in hot water, and hanging her clothes on the line instead of using the drier. My daughter had already switched to using hot water and we’ve started to use the clothes line more often, too. Often enough that we’re looking to hook up two more lines. When I was growing up here, there were three laundry lines set up, so the hooks for pullies are already on the posts. I have no idea what happened to the pullies that used to be there. I spotted some kits that include 150′ (which is how much we would need) of medium strength, plastic coated metal laundry line, and all the parts and pieces, for about $50. The pullies and tightener, however are plastic, so I think we’d be better off paying a bit extra and getting metal pullies and tightener.

Anyhow, sunlight is also anti-fungal, so we’ll be using the clothes line more often. We’ll need to get more clothes pins, though. The kittens have discovered them and think they are toys!

After my daughter’s appointment was done, we finally had lunch. We were both pretty famished by then! We’d both had only very light breakfasts.

We also had a shopping trip planned. I was prepared to have to go to town to pick up new prescriptions, if necessary, but it wasn’t, so that made the day a bit shorter! The nearest Walmart to us is just 15 minutes away from the town our doctor is in, so that worked out well, too.

Since we were planning to get things that needed to stay cold, we popped over to the Dollarama, first. I got the rest of the tomato cages I wanted, which will be used over the eggplant and pepper transplants. I also got more plant clips, as my bucket with them seems to have disappeared!

The Walmart shopping was both stuff for my husband, and my daughters’ list. Nothing came out of my regular grocery budget, so I didn’t do my usual “this is what $X looks like” photo. The important thing is that I remembered to get more distilled water for my husband’s CPAP humidifier.

This year, I’ve been using his empty water bottles to make collars for transplants, much more than usual, since we’re expecting a dry year. I’ve used up all the old collars I’d used last year, plus made more with all the bottles I’ve been saving all winter. There’s only a few empty water bottles left and, if I want one for each of the remaining tomato plants, I’m going to have to find more.

Oh! I just remembered! I have a bunch of them on posts at the chimney block garden bet at the chain link fence! Which means I’ll only be short about 5 or 6 for the tomatoes I have left to do. I’m sure I can find enough other containers I’ve been saving to reuse somehow.

By the time we got home, it was about 5pm. As we pulled into the yard to unload, the yard cats were absolutely everywhere, waiting for their feeding time! As soon as my daughters and I got most of it in, I headed over to feed them and distract them away from the truck, so my daughter could safely leave the yard and park it.

One of Poirot’s babies made an achievement today. Japp got out of the cat cage! I’m not sure if s/he climbed out the “door”, or if s/he found the opening at the bottom (it was blocked with a stuffy). We’re really going to have to watch our step, now!

The days are long enough and warm enough that I seriously considered going back out to at least work on the garden bed I’ll be planting in tomorrow, but I need to keep my limits in mind. I’m already pushing them on a daily basis right now. Plus, we’re getting weather alerts for possible thunderstorms. Looking at the weather radar, I don’t think we’ll be hit with any, but it’s possible I certainly won’t complain about getting more rain!

I’ve got a couple of days with no outings or appointments planned. If all goes well, I should have everything transplanted or direct sown by then. After that, it’s more construction type stuff, like making the wattle weave walls on the bed in the old kitchen garden, and working on the permanent trellis supports.

The main focus right now is just to get plants and seeds in the ground!

Tomorrow.

I’m done for today.

😄

The Re-Farmer

We got rain!

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Before heading to bed last night, I noticed the forecast was starting to suggest rain by this morning. Just a bit, and a fairly low chance of it.

By morning, my weather app was telling me things like, “rain expected to end in 30 minutes” or the like. When I headed out to do my morning rounds, though, it was barely even spitting.

With today expected to be much cooler, I didn’t water everything this morning, so my rounds were done a lot faster. Then my daughter came by to let me know that she had called in a prescription that she needed to bring to her doctor’s appointment, tomorrow. I didn’t realize just how much faster I was done my rounds until we had left and I was thinking to stop at the post office and realized they had only just opened!

By the time we left, though, it was actually raining. A gorgeous, solid rain!

It was still insanely smoky, though, and the smoke got thicker, the closer we got to town. There’s a large fire on the other side of the lake, so they were getting hit by the smoke a lot more than we were.

Both my daughters were not feeling well all last night, and no one was up to cooking, so they decided to treat us with burgers. When we finished at the pharmacy, they still weren’t open, so we drove around to take a look at the lake.

Which we could barely see! It was still pouring rain when I too the above photo.

It was no longer raining when we got home, and the smoke was far less. The good news was in checking the weather radar. The rain we got was being pushed straight towards the biggest fire across the lake. There’s rain up north, too. As welcome as it is, there isn’t anywhere near enough to do much for all the fires. From the looks of it, we won’t be getting more for almost a week.

My goal for today is still to get more transplants in, but delay due to rain is not a bad thing!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: new asparagus bed, garlic and potatoes

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

My goal for the day was to get all the transplants in.

Ha!

No, I didn’t achieve that goal.

I did, however, get a LOT done, until the 34C/93F heat finally did me in. Enough that I’ll be breaking it up into several posts.

The start of the day was the same as it has been for the past while; after my morning rounds, everything got a watering in preparation for the coming heat. I was quite appreciating the new watering can, which holds twice as much as the breaking apart bucket I’ve been using! So that part of the watering went a lot faster.

Before I started watering the new asparagus bed, though, I did some modification. The landscape fabric or whatever it is had just been folded back to uncover the space I planted in, and the rocks I pulled out was just tossed on top. I lifted the folded side to shift all the rocks towards the opposite side, then laid the edge out close to the little wire fence protecting the strawberries. After weighing that down, I pulled the other end to cover a new section of what had been our squash patch in previous years.

There was still some grass clippings on the fabric, and that got used to lightly mulch the asparagus area, and heavily mulch along the wire fence. Once that was done, it all got a thorough watering.

The light mulch should be enough to protect the soil, while still making it easy for the baby asparagus to poke through. The heavy mulch should, hopefully, keep any weeds from coming back by the strawberries.

I’d left a couple of buckets filled with water to keep them from blowing them away. I noticed the cats have been drinking from them, often, so now I keep them full for the kitties. 😊

Next to the new asparagus bed is our garlic bed, then the potatoes.

The garlic is looking so good! We should start getting scapes soon. We are all looking forward to cooking with those!

The potatoes are coming up a lot faster now. When watering that bed, I noticed there are SO many frogs! They get startled when I water the potatoes, and jump into the netting. They seem to be able to get in and out just fine, though – at least when they’re not being scared by something!

Once all the watering was done, it was finally time to start transplanting things.

See you at my next post!

The Re-Farmer

So tired

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

I’ve definitely been running around too much, over the past while.

With the trips to the city, I haven’t been doing as much physical labour, but I’m still in a lot of pain. Mostly the OA joint pain, but it’s definitely more of a mental fatigue than a physical one.

I headed out early today to do the morning watering. I didn’t need my older daughter to help out this time, nor was my younger daughter heading out with me, so they got to do some catching up on stuff in the house, instead.

My younger daughter was going to get the lawn mowing done as much as she could, in the heat. So, just riding mower stuff! We will just need to do the areas that can only be reached with either the push mower or the weed trimmer, later on.

I picked up some of my mother’s favourite fried chicken and potato wedges for our lunch today, so we had a relaxed visit over food, first. She was having one of her better days, behaviour wise, which made it much more pleasant! After that, we went over her shopping list. I spotted some gaps and asked a few questions, and did end up adding a couple of things to her list, too.

Before I headed out, I changed her bedding for her, so she could lie down while I was gone. She is really having a much harder time moving around her apartment of late. For all the heat, she’s also been finding herself getting cold!

I hit a couple of stores to get her shopping list done. It wasn’t a large list, but still came out to over $90. That’s just for one person for a week, and she has Meals on Wheels three times a week!

After her groceries were put away, I did some light housekeeping for her, then headed out. I made a brief stop at the hardware store, hoping to find some buckets in smaller sizes than 5 gallons, or watering cans. There weren’t any in the store, but I did remember to get handles to attach to the isolation shelter, to make it easier to move around, and caps for the end of the emergency septic pump bypass, so we can close that off and finally set aside the last of the outside parts of the emergency bypass.

The hardware store did have their garden centre section open, so I checked it out. I did find watering cans there, but only got one, as the price was pretty steep. I also spotted some lovely looking sage transplants and picked up two. There’s just enough room in the tiny raised bed, with the other herbs, for them.

All of this took long enough that, when I got home, it was already time to do the outside cat feeding, so I took care of that right away. A couple of kittens needed eye washing, and I changed out the ice packs in the sun room cat cage, for Poirot and her babies.

It’s barely past 5pm as I write this, and I am so drained, I’ll be heading to bed pretty much as soon as I’m done supper. Tomorrow is supposed to be even hotter, and then we’re going to cool down a touch for the next while. I’m hoping to get the rest of the transplants in, and maybe even get the direct sowing done. I noticed this morning that some of the Spoon tomatoes have started to show flower buds!

This is what WP’s AI image generator thinks I look like. 😄

At some point, I need to edit my May garden tour video, too. I decided to keep the video files I took, back on the 21st, and here we are, last day of May, and it still hasn’t been put together!

Little by little, it’ll get done.

I just wish there weren’t so many distractions pulling me away, at times!

Food, next, then bed!

The Re-Farmer

We got a bit of rain, plus this is what $586 looks like

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

With another trip to the city planned for today, I got my older daughter to help we water the garden and trees this morning, while things were still cooler. Much to my surprise, things actually looked damper than with just the morning dew. Then I spotted the turnip leaves in the high raised bed. It looks like we got a touch of rain last night!

All of these larger leaves had drops of water around their edges. Nothing else. I guess these ones had just the right “pockets” for it!

My younger daughter and I headed out later in the morning, making a stop at a gas station just outside of town, about 15 minutes away, to pick up some energy drinks for the road. While there, we decided to get a car wash, too. I figured, it was a good time to do it, while there’s no box cover.

The car wash couldn’t quite get all the gravel dust out of the corners of the box. 😄

By the time we got to the city, it was lunch time, so our first stop was at a mall near the Costco for food, then a stop at the Dollarama. I was looking for more buckets or watering cans to replace the ones we’ve been using. The buckets with plastic handles I’ve been using to water the walnut tree/seeds all have broken handles now. I had one small bucket with a metal handle that I’ve been using in the food forest area, and the bucket itself is breaking apart. These are all buckets I found around the property, so they predate us living here, and are either so old, or so exposed to the elements, that the plastic has become brittle and is breaking up.

Both the buckets and watering cans we found were too small, but we did find some other things. For the garden, I picked up 10 wire tomato cages that will go over the pepper and eggplant transplants – I’ll need at least 8 more. My daughter found another sparkly baseball cap that she got for my collection. 😄 Then we ended up spending some time choosing artificial flowers and a heavy vase for my MIL’s grave. The last time we tried to visit her grave, we never found it. We did eventually find a sign saying that, due to the spring flooding, a number of stones were damaged and removed for repair, and that they would eventually be returned. We haven’t been able to make it back, since. We want to fix that!

Once we were done there, we headed to the Costco, filling the gas tank, first. Gas was at $1.219/L, while elsewhere was about $1.309 in the city. In town, it had dropped from $1.359 yesterday, to $1.329 today.

That done, we finally were able to grab a flat cart and start shopping.

We did a much smaller trip this time.

This is what $586.66 looks like.

*sigh*

This time, I got a picture of the receipt.

We got two 9kg and two 11.6kg bags of dry kibble and two cases of 48 cats of wet cat food. We got more puppy pads as well.

This trip, we got a large bag of flour for under $10, which is a really good price right now. Everywhere else, I’ve been seeing the same size bag with sale prices of about $12. I get the cheap stuff. Going with the brand name stuff, a big bag of flour is closer to $20.

There’s a case of Monster energy drinks, which I will be paid back for, and we ended up getting a bulk sized box of instant oatmeal.

We got a couple of Kirkland brand jars of mayonnaise, plus a couple of jars of Peanut Butter, some brown sugar, and a large cannister type container of peppercorns, and a large container of ground pink salt. I prefer course, to use in our salt drinker, but this is what they had. My husband prefers the pink salt over regular table salt.

We still have butter in the freezer, so I only got two more, a block of Old cheddar cheese, plus we got a 3 pack of orange juice for the girls. I would have gotten oat milk for them, but my daughter told me they still have. There’s a 3 pack of all beef wieners and a pack of Spam – the only meat we got today. There’s a 9 pack of pasta, and my husband requested some tortilla chips, olives and dip. They didn’t have the 7 layer dip he wanted, so we got him roasted red pepper hummus instead.

They had a fundraiser thing going on. I could tell by the sudden bell ringing and cheering. When my items were all scanned and the cashier asked if I wanted to donate, I first made sure: no bells and yells! She just laughed and said yes. I think they get that a lot! So I donated a bit, too. That brought the sub total to $549.34, and we paid another $37.32 in taxes, for a total of 31 items.

[Edit: I completely forgot about the Pizza Pops! Which is what we’re having for supper tonight.]

We got almost no meat, there’s no eggs, no milk or cream, no breads or wraps.

And it still came to almost $600! A little over $250 (after taxes) of that is all cat supplies.

Part of the reason we did a smaller trip is because we had to squeeze so much of it into the back of the truck cab. The other reason is, we need to empty out the chest freezer and defrost it, so I didn’t want to get anything that would need to go into the chest freezer, other than the ice packs we brought to put with the cold stuff.

By the time we got home, it was about 4pm, so once everything was unloaded and put away, I fed the outside cats. The ice packs around Poirot and her babies needed to be changed out, though when I picked up one water bottle, I found it was still cold, if no longer frozen, so I tucked it right into the cat bed. Before long, I came over and found the kittens all but hugging it! There’s a large ice pack under their bed that probably needs to be changed out, but I didn’t want to disturb the kittens too much. Instead, I changed out the ice pack that’s on the floor of the cube above the bed. The second level cubes have pieces of rigid insulation over the wire to create floors they can walk on, which I set on top of the ice pack. This way, the cook air will flow downwards, and the bit of insulation will slow down the thaw a little bit.

All their water bowls needed to be refilled, but the water in the hose was so hot, I used it to refill the garbage can “heat sink” in the portable greenhouse. I still haven’t found the leak in that thing, but at this time of day, filling it will actually help cool the greenhouse down. The only plants in there are the pots with luffa, and they seem to be quite liking the heat! The thermometer in there was reading about 55C/131F.

Filling the can in the greenhouse also gave me time to scrub the water bowls as best I could. With this heat, algae starts to grow very quickly. The plastic water bowls get pretty stained, too. When refilling the bowls in the sun room, I also wet down the floor mats, so the evaporation could help cool things down, too.

As I write this, at almost 6pm, we’ve cooled down to 26C/79F, with the humidex putting us at 29C/84F – which is the high we hit a couple of hours ago. Tomorrow is supposed to be at least as hot, and the day ever, we’re supposed to hit 32C/90F.

Heat or no heat, things need to get done. Tomorrow morning, I’m hoping to get some of the winter squash transplanted, as they are growing out of their pots, and my daughter is planning on mowing the lawn. With going to the city three days in a row, we’re pretty behind on things! It’ll be good to catch up.

Unless I end up doing grocery shopping for my mother tomorrow.

We shall see.

The Re-Farmer

addendum: yes, I’m doing my mothers grocery shopping tomorrow!

A slightly different morning!

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

We’re expected to reach around 30C/86F today, with the next couple of days potentially getting even hotter. So I’ve been heading out early in the mornings to water the garden and the saplings. This morning, I snagged my older daughter to give me a hand, since it was already 16C/61F by 6am.

While I went to the old kitchen to start getting food ready for the outside cats, my daughter shoed up and went out through the main door. It makes things easier to pass things from the old kitchen to someone in the sun room through the old kitchen door with the missing screen.

I had quite a surprise when I opened the inner door, though!

Miss Lemon, Hastings and Japp were tucked in, between the doors again!

The old kitchen is quite a bit cooler, so I’m guessing Poirot moved her babies to get them out of the heat again.

With that in mind, we left them there for a while, and worked on the cat cage. My daughter set one of the larger ice packs right under their cat bed. As thick as the cat bed it, it should still feel cooler, and it won’t melt as quickly. We set a couple of frozen water bottles around, too, before I started passing the kittens over for my daughter to tuck them back into the cat cage. By then, Poirot had come in and was very interesting in what we were doing to her babies!

After that, I headed out with the kibble and some leftover cat soup to distract the adult cats, while my daughter started preparing the wet cat food for the bigger kittens, mixing in some lysine/pumpkin seed powder and splitting it up between all the little bowls we have for them. We switched out a frozen water bottle in one of the cat beds in the water bowl shelter, too.

My daughter then grabbed the wagon, which already had containers of water waiting, to the outer yard and watered the walnut and Korean pine trees while I did the rest of my rounds. By the time I was switching out the memory card at the sign cam, my daughter was done refilling containers to finish watering the trees in the outer yard, while I got the hose going into the leaky rain barrel, and used a bucket to water the trees out there.

I was very happy to spot this.

The very first leaf bud on the Opal plum has emerged! It was rather strange to water a stick in the ground, not knowing if it survived its time in the mail, and being transplanted. Today, we have proof of life!

Once the food forest saplings were watered, I worked on the main garden area. There are quite a few potato leaves pushing their way through the mulch!

I think I’ll grab a small bucket of stove pellets, though, and head back to the garden before my younger daughter and I head back to the city today. The bed the flowers were replanted has no mulch at all, and it’s just baking in the sun. The high raised bed, and the newly planted strawberries, also need protection. On being watered, the pellets will break up into sawdust, so they won’t disturb the more delicate seedlings, will hold water longer, and should help keep the soil at least a bit cooler.

Some things are enjoying the heat, though.

These lilacs are at almost full bloom in most places! The double lilacs in the old kitchen garden are also opening up. I’m not seeing white lilacs yet. The dwarf Korean lilacs by the house will bloom later on, and the variety I can’t remember the name of right now, closer to the chain link fence, will bloom last of all.

I like having such an extended lilac season.

We’re already creeping up to 20C/68F, just in the time it took me to write this. I’d better get out there with those pellets before things get to hot!

The Re-Farmer

Silly kitties, and under warning

/ Re-Farmer / Leave a comment

Just a little while ago, all our phones started going off with alert warnings. Our province has declared a state of emergency due to wildfires. We are fortunate in that there are no fires near us, but several towns and a small city to the north have been, or are in the process, of evacuating. The closest fire is actually to the south of us, and much closer to my sister’s farm, but it is listed as “under control”.

As you can see from the live fire map, there sweeping line of fires runs across the prairies. That area is pretty much all boreal forest. The red ones are all wildfires. The orange ones are prescribed fires.

While we are in no danger where we are at the moment, we always closely monitor the wildfire situation, every spring. ’tis the season, unfortunately.

One a more “normal” note, here is something to smile about.

Sir Robin the Brave, it turns out, can squeeze through a gap between the raised bed cover and a corner of the raised bed walls!

The bigger kittens are all doing rather well outside, taking advantage of shade. The littles in the sun room are getting extra help with ice packs and frozen water bottles, frequently changed out, because they thaw out so quickly.

The littles are getting big, and much more active! It won’t be long before they’re making their way out of the cat cage and exploring. 😊

The Re-Farmer