I recently harvested the two biggest heads of sunflower seeds that were done blooming. They are now hanging in the basement to dry, where the birds can’t get at them.
As for the rest of them, we’ve got seed heads at all stages! Not all will have time to mature before the growing season ends, but we should still have a decent number of them to harvest and dry for the winter.
Click on the images to see larger sizes, though they are all 25% of the original size.
That one mutant sunflower, with all the extra seed heads developing, is one to keep an eye on! We might actually get a couple of seed heads mature enough to harvest before the end of the growing season.
While going through some of the photos I took with one of my daughters, she was suggesting I make some available for sale, in various forms. We’re still trying to come up with ways to be able to raise funds for things like a new roof, when I cannot get a job (for the new folks following this blog; as we are living on my husband’s health insurance disability payments, anything I earn would be deducted from his payments. If I were to earn more than his payments, he would lose his plan, which means no more coverage for his prescriptions). I was considering offering things up as fundraisers: all proceeds go towards replacing the roof, or getting yard cats fixed, or building a wheelchair ramp, etc.
So I’m putting the idea out there. If I were to, say, make photos available on, say, Redbubble, as prints, mugs, t-shirts, etc., would this interest you? I’ve had it suggested to put a donation button up, but I don’t like to ask for something for nothing. Other people use sites like Patreon, where there are rewards for different tiers. Of course, there are always affiliate links, like with Amazon, where the site would earn a commission. All proceeds would go to specific things, such as a new roof (long term goal) or getting yard cats spayed and neutered (short term goal) or building a wheelchair ramp (mid term goal), etc. It would have to be fundraising for a specific project, not an income for us. We would have to be very careful about that.
Lately, when I open the doors to the sunroom to get the cat kibble during my morning rounds, I have had company.
Little Braveheart has been dashing in and out as I load up on kibble. Even Tabby has been coming closer, but not quite as close as Braveheart.
Right now, I’ve put several of the kibble bowls by the old dog house shelter, to encourage the cats to go into it, but I do still have one near the sunroom door. This morning, Little Braveheart was eating at that container – and I was able to gently pat her back! It took her a few moments to decide she didn’t like it after all, and moved away.
Awesome progress!!!
Then there was the creepy.
Part of my rounds includes switching out the memory card on the trail cam. Something weird started happening with our first one, where it the motion sensor would get triggered, but it wouldn’t stop. So I’d come by the next day to find the red light blinking, the batteries almost dead, and nothing on the memory card. So the newer camera is now set up near that same area. It has a wide angle lens, which is great, because it not only picks up the gate, but the fence on both sides, too. I did end up moving it to a fence post instead of the tree it was on, since the wide angle was blocked by other trees on one side.
Since it’s on the post, I don’t need to go through the trees to reach the camera, and can use the driveway. Since our vandal had glued our locks, before vandalizing the gate itself, over the months, I make a point of checking the lock to see if it’s glued, or for anything else that might be vandalized.
When I got to the gate this morning, the lock was on the wrong side of the gate. As I locked the gate behind me yesterday, the lock was left on the inside of the gate, and the excess chain was wrapped around the bars so as not to dangle. This morning, the chain was turned to the outside of the gate, and the extra length was dangling under the lock.
When I checked the files, sure enough, there was our vandal. In one video, he was just standing right at the gate on one side, looking down the driveway and from side to side. At a couple of points, he seemed to be looking at the camera. In the next video, he had moved to the middle of the gate and was moving the chain around so he could look at the lock. Then he let it go and walked away.
Creeper was creeping again.
Of course, it’s the weekend. As he has been repeatedly told to stay away by the police, I would normally call the non-emergency number to talk to someone about it. The RCMP offices are closed on the weekends, though, and I’m not about to call 911 for this, so it will have to wait until Monday.
*sigh*
I really don’t get why our vandal is so obsessed with this property.
I did make sure to pass on the files to my brother before we headed out to visit.
Which brings me to the awesome.
It was a fantastic visit! We were able to just relax and chat. When he comes here, it’s usually because there is something that needs to be fixed or, as most recently, for a family gathering, so we don’t really get much chance to just be with each other. It was just fantastic. He and his wife are some of my favourite people, and I don’t spend anywhere near as much time with them as I would like!
On top of that, my mother’s car handled the drive very well! No more alarming noises, coming from anywhere! :-D It’s amazing how quiet that car is, now that everything’s fixed! :-D Plus, it has working fans and air conditioning, too! Rather nice to not have to drive with the windows open. :-)
My brother has helped my mother with this car for many years, so before we left, he popped the hood to show me some things. I’m glad he did, because I was wondering about some of it. I knew he had a trickle charger as well as the block heater attached to an extension cord. It also has a battery warmer. He had the extension cord all neatly laid out so that it was tucked safely aside, all three could be plugged in, and the plug for the extension cord could be left hanging outside the hood to plug it in, in the winter. It seems that every time the car was worked on, even from when I’d taken it to the garage near my mother’s place, things got moved around. Only the trickle charger was still plugged in but, of course, the clips were no longer on the battery, since it had been pulled out to be charged, just a few days ago. I don’t know when the extension cord was first moved to where it is now, but when I popped the hood to take the end out so I could plug it in in the garage, prior to last winter, I found a loop of it was touching the serpentine belt, and was starting to get worn. It never got put back under the hood before I left it at the garage, several months ago, for the mechanic to check it as he was able. My brother had tucked it away, so I showed the worn out part to my brother. As we looked closely in the sunlight, we could see the layers had broken and we could see exposed wire. !! So I will have to replace that (along with a burnt out bulb in one headlight) before plugging in and tidying up all the cords again.
Changing that light bulb is going to be so much easier than our van. You can just reach in and pop it out. With our van, we have to unscrew and unfasten the entire headlamp unit, and pull it out completely.
I’m so glad to have my brother to turn to for advice and information! When we moved out here, we were just sort of plunked into the middle of things. We would be pretty lost, without him!
Let’s start by enjoying this lovely photo I was able to get this morning.
There were two bees on this sunflower, busily pollinating!
A nice, cheerful burst of sunshine.
I feel like I need it right now.
I had intended to use my mother’s car to run some errands in town today, just to get it on the road. Then my mother called me in the morning, asking for help to do her shopping, so I did my errands at her town, instead. Plus, I got to surprise her with her own car, which is easier for her to get in an out of than our van.
So that worked out rather well.
Of course, it was a visit with my mother, and all that this entailed. It was a pretty good visit, overall, but as usual, it left me drained. As an example of just one of the things that came up, apparently we did our celebration on Sunday all wrong. Not only was she still upset about the ceiling fan, but apparently we each, individually, were supposed to give her cards, there was supposed to be a tablecloth and candles, and after dinner, we were all supposed to make speeches.
???
Never mind that we were originally supposed to have a cookout and be eating outside, or that two other people’s birthdays and an anniversary were being celebrated at the same time. She had an expectation, and we didn’t meet it, therefore it was all wrong.
So is everything about our gardening this year, and the fall planting we’re intending to do later this month.
And so on. Everything is all wrong, because it’s now how she would do it, or the way she thinks it used to be, or how she thinks the “proper” way to do something is.
*sigh*
But that’s okay. Tomorrow, I get to recharge. We are taking my mother’s car out for a longer highway drive, and finally visiting my older brother at his place. He has come out here so many times, yet since we’ve moved in, we’ve managed to go to his place only a couple of times.
It’s going to be really great to see them!
For now, it’s back to recovering from visiting my mom, and appreciating the beauty of bees and sunflowers! ;-)
My husband has an appointment at the heart clinic in the city today, so I was out a bit earlier to do my rounds this morning.
As I write this, it’s still only 1C (33F), with a “real feel” that has warmed up to -2C (28F) since I last checked. Our high today is supposed to reach 15C (59F), which is warmer than the last few days. We’re then supposed to go above 20C (68F) for a couple of days, before dropping back to the mid-teens, which is more typical for this time of year.
We don’t have what we need to be able to cover plants as large as our squash right now, so this morning was more about surveying the damage.
I will check them again, after we get back from the city. Some look like they’re completely killed off, but others might still make it through the rest of the season.
I’m pretty sure the pumpkins are a total loss, though.
This is the largest of them, and you can see where the frost was on the pumpkin itself.
This pumpkin hill is the one that’s the furthest South – which means that it gets more shade from the trees than the others. It isn’t much, but as you can see by the plant, it doesn’t take much, either. This plant still had visible frost on it.
The other two hills were pretty much clear of frost. The developing pumpkins don’t show signs of direct frost on them – but from the state of the plants, I think they’re likely complete losses, too. We shall see.
Remember this little birdhouse gourd, bravely blooming just yesterday?
This is how it looked this morning.
*sigh*
Well, this year was our year to figure things out, and we’ve learned a lot.
We will have to work on finding different ways to cover and protect our plants from late and early frosts. Especially since we do want to keep growing squash, which are more easily damaged by the cold. The beets, carrots and parsley are just fine. Even the cucamelons showed less frost damage than the squash, which surprised me.
Altogether, though, we did far better with our gardening this year than I expected. It really has been a successful year, for the circumstances!
You’d think, having grown up here and helped my mother with the gardening for my entire childhood, I would already know what is needed, but everything is really quite different than the garden of my childhood. Especially with my parents planting or allowing so many trees to encroach into the garden.
While we will continue to have garden plots in this area, my mind is already starting to look at the outer yard, towards the barn, for possible raised beds, polytunnels or greenhouses for vegetable gardening.
Today, for the first time since we had produce we could harvest from the garden this summer, I collected nothing at all this morning.
Normally, I would have at least collected a few sunburst squash. With the cooler temperatures, though, the many little squashes out there are growing a lot more slowly. I like to pick them, and the zucchini, while they are still quite small, but not that small!
Amazingly, even though we dipped to almost freezing last night, one of the bottleneck gourds has started to bloom! This is one of the last ones that got transplanted. Of the tray of seed starts, a few germinated well after the others had already been transplanted, so I planted them, even though it was so late in the season.
I suppose I could have harvested some carrots and beets this morning, but they do better in the ground until we’re ready to use them. The potatoes are ready to be dug up, but it’s going to warm up a bit over the next few days, so I might wait a day or two.
I’m really hoping this little cool down is an aberration, and we’ll have a long, mild fall. If the pattern of that last couple of years continues, though, we should have a blizzard right around Thanksgiving in October! :-D
Today, the girls and I worked on juicing apples and getting some hard crab apple cider started (which I will post about next). While I was de-stemming the crab apples and cutting off any nasty bits, they took care of sanitizing the gallon jugs and the various items that would be needed.
They usually did the sanitizing part during our few beginner attempts at making alcoholic drinks.
That’s my excuse!
You see, when I used sanitizer to start the crab apple cider vinegar a couple of nights ago, I made a mistake. A silly, forgetful mistake. A laughable mistake, even.
But for the cider vinegar, it was a deadly, disastrous mistake.
As I listened to the girls chatting while using the sanitation solution, then rinsing everything off and setting it aside on a towel to drip dry, I suddenly realized my horrible mistake.
When I sanitized everything for the vinegar, I set everything out to drip dry – but forgot to give them a final rinse, first. Which means, when I made the vinegar, everything had dried sanitizing solution on them.
There’s no way they’d be able to ferment at all!
Later, while my younger daughter and I were juicing apples, I mentioned it to her. Oh, my, the look on her face!
Sweetheart that she is, she took over the juicing while I went and got the jars.
There was, of course, no sign of bubbling in the air lock, but after only 2 days, would there have been any? I don’t know. However, when I opened them up, I could see they were already a loss. There may not have been any fermentation happening, but decomposition had already started at the very top. :-(
Thankfully, since I had prepped all the other apples for juicing, I was able to wash, sanitize and RINSE THE HECK OUT OF everything, then quickly chop apples into pieces for a new batch.
The only thing different from last time, aside from actually rinsing everything after sanitization, was to not fill the jars as much as I had before. The recipe had said to fill the jars 3/4 full. I think I was still over that, but the first batch was full almost to the top. Here, you can sort of see through the container they are in, that there is a fair bit of space under the floating apple pieces.
I foresee only one problem right now.
These are in the old kitchen and, right now, it’s pretty cold. It was cold enough today that the furnace actually turned on – and the thermostat was dropped quite low over the summer! As I write this, it’s already dropped to 4C (39F), and we have frost warnings for tonight. Amazingly, we’re supposed to go above 20C (68F) in a couple of days, but for now, it’s downright chilly! The old kitchen doesn’t have any heat going into it. Back in the day, with the wood stove going, it was a source of heat for the rest of the house, not the other way around! I don’t even know what the old kitchen has for insulation, if anything. It stays cools in the summer, and in the winter, it gets pretty close to freezing in there. We can actually use the room as an extra refrigerator in the winter.
The cider vinegar should be done well before we reach those sorts of temperatures all the time, but the next couple of days might slow things down a bit!
We shall see how it goes.
I still can’t believe I made such a silly mistake!
Yesterday’s high winds knocked quite a few branches down.
This one would have landed on the tent, if it had still been there.
We haven’t figured out what to do with the tent yet (other than keep the canvas parts). You can see two of the metal pieces that broke. On the table is the hub they had been attached to. It has no damage to it. :-/
We didn’t lose any trees this time, but we did lose part of one.
This is the apple tree at the very end of the row. In the spring, we had cut away the dead part in the middle, but the saplings that sprouted out the base looked healthy. They don’t have a lot of apples on them, but the ones they do have are larger than any of the other trees, so these young trees were already drooping from the weight.
This one simply broke away from the trunk of the original tree.
When I came back this morning, I was intending to pick the apples off, then cut away the broken tree.
Once I got a better look at it, however, I realized it was still quite attached to the roots. It just wasn’t attached to the dead tree trunk. Even after a chilly night, there wasn’t even any wilting at all.
In fact, it might actually be salvageable.
So instead of cutting it away, I took advantage of the remains of the dead tree, and tied it upright again.
If I can keep it supported upright long, as the tree grows, it should be able to old its own without the support of the trunk. It might take a few years, but that’s okay.
If it survives at all. If it doesn’t, I’ll cut it away then.
Check out the size of this apple!
It would have gotten larger, too, as it ripened. They probably could have used 2 or 3 more weeks.
These are all the apples from that one branch, including a few that had fallen to the ground.
I will be including them with my juicing, today. I’ll start off with just the sweet ones I used to make the crab apple cider vinegar; I’m hoping to get enough to do two gallons of hard apple cider. As the jugs will need room for the sugar, it’ll get less than 2 gallons of juice needed, but still pretty close. Once I get that, I don’t mind mixing different types of apples. Any remaining juice will be for drinking. :-)
The juicer is out of storage, and now I need to get off the computer, get everything prepped and start juicing! :-)
I just got back from doing my evening rounds. Our yard is littered with fallen branches. Especially willow branches in the South yard. I only picked up the biggest ones tonight. When the weather next allows for it, we’ll need to go around with the wagon to pick up all the smaller branches.
Two of Junk Pile cat’s kittens were running around while I was out. Little Braveheart was following Creamsicle around. He seems to get along with them very well! I topped up the kibble bowls, and while he was eating, Little Braveheart came over and booped her head against his before starting to eat, herself. :-) So cute!
I didn’t see Butterscotch’s kittens, which is no surprise in this weather. I did, however, get to spend some time with them yesterday, and they were co-operative enough to let me get some good photos of each of them!
Their eyes are starting to settle into their adult colours now. Which means the calico no longer looks terrifying up close! :-D Now she’s just all adorable!
We’re going to have a hard time telling these two apart!
Creamsicle Junior? He seems to be fuzzier than Creamsicle was at this age.
I think I have spotted another older kitten around. I’ve seen it at least twice, and had mistaken it for Junk Pile cat, but it has more white, and looks to be about the same age as her kittens. I have no idea where it is coming from, or which mama cat it is with! Perhaps one of Rosencrantz’s kittens? I thought she had three, but I just went back through my old photos, and I only ever captured two in the pictures; an orange one that we haven’t seen since, and the white one with grey and orange spots that I sometimes see.
More and more of the sunflowers are opening up, and today I spotted one that’s different.
Most look like this.
Bright, sunny, mostly yellow with light oranges and greens around the developing seeds.
Then there was this one.
The camera actually lightened it up a bit. Compared to the others, this one looks almost black in the middle! Very dramatic.
This may be the first of the slightly shorter variety of giant sunflowers we first planted, so start opening its seed head. If so, I expect to see more. :-)
Last night, the outside kittens got their first taste of cat treats!
It got their interest, but not quite enough to come close. ;-)
They were enough to keep Tabby from running away, though!
If Little Braveheart got any of the treats last night, I never saw it, but she has been increasingly less jumpy around me in the mornings, and preferring to eat by the house.
Even Tabby is not running off quite so quickly.
As for Little Braveheart and Tabby’s sibling, we still hardly see it at all. It’s the same with Rosencrantz’s baby – and it appears there’s just the one left from her litter. I have not seen any sign of the other two, since that one day I spotted them at the pump shack. :-(
Another reason to socialize the outside cats as much as possible. They’ll stay closer to the house, where their chances of survival are higher.
One of these days, I want to break out the big guns.
