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Morning kitties!

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With the sun room converted for the transplants, we don’t feed the cats in there anymore, though they can still access the room and the beds we have in there for them. Instead, I’ve been making a point of spreading the kibble around more. Knowing there are likely still kittens in the junk pile (I haven’t heard them lately, and wouldn’t expect to see them for weeks yet), we’re back to leaving kibble under the shrine nearby, but I’m also leaving little piles of kibble on the sidewalk blocks in front of the sun room, and even under the swing bench under the kitchen window. This allows the shier cats to access food – and prevent fights. Sad Face and some of the boys do not get along, so if they don’t have to go near each other to eat, that reduces the potential for fights.

If I see Broccoli at the kibble bowls, I also go to the garden shed to check on her babies. Yes, they are still there, and I think she is okay with us knowing they are there.

This morning, I actually took them out and set them in the small bin I use to carry the kibble around, so I could rearrange their “nest”. It’s sitting on top of one of the cover pieces for the carport we found in the barn, but couldn’t assemble last year. It’s been pushed around and got all lumpy, making it hard for the self warming mat I gave them to stay spread out. I didn’t want the kittens to fall into a fold or crevice they couldn’t get out of. So I fixed that up a bit, put the self warming mat back, and returned the kittens. The bonus of doing stuff like this is, it helps to socialize the babies – something we’ve never quite been able to do with their mother!

I think they liked the new set up. More fluffy blanket to squirm around in!

I had closed up the door and was leaving more kibble outside the shed, in a sheltered spot, when Broccoli came around the house and saw me, so I left a bit more kibble while she could see where I was putting it. She came over quickly as I left, but started to run off when I paused and tried to see if she’d let me come closer. Our attempt to get her and the kittens into the sun room seems to have backfired with her (though not with the kittens). She’s been more standoffish since then. It’s a shame. I wonder if that third kitten would have survived if they had been in the sun room, instead? Not knowing why it died makes it impossible to be sure.

Meanwhile…

… the boys are the complete opposite! While the females are getting harder to get close to, even at feeding time (I think Caramel has had her litter; she’s looking a bit skinnier this morning), more and more of the males are getting friendly! In the video above, there were six of them, but three more joined the fray. Not only is it a challenge to pet nine cats at the same time, but Syndol wanted me to pick him up and kept trying to climb up my shoulder!

He is such a sweet boy!

Speaking of sweet kitties, I was chatting with the Cat Lady yesterday. The Wolfman is still with them. He’s so gorgeous, there have been quite a few people interested in adopting him, but every time someone has come to see him, he makes strange and disappears! Which is so weird. He was always the more gregarious one among last year’s kittens that we brought inside. Going to the Cat Lady and all that vet care and treatment for his injured eye seems to have made him much less trusting. He has bonded with their younger daughter, though, and they adore him – in spite of the fact that he likes to destroy their plants! – so they’re not in any hurry to adopt him out.

The Cat Lady is burning out, though. She told me her phone goes off constantly, every day, with people wanting her to do something with strays to the north of us. She’s telling people, no more intakes. Part of the problem is, while there is a local branch of the Humane Society, she’s basically the only rescue specifically for our region. Right now, they’ve got so many cats that are pretty much unadoptable – too many medical needs – it’s pretty overwhelming, even with at least 7 or 8 people taking care of them. That fact that she’s still open to helping us is so greatly appreciated. There is the province wide rescue that she used to be connected with, but we won’t be going back to them. Aside from how badly they treated her, finding out that they were accusing us of deliberately breeding cats means we likely wouldn’t be getting help from them, anyhow. Plus, it seems the bigger a rescue gets, the less they become about the animals, and more about internal politics and drama.

So we do the best we can, and try not to put too much on the Cat Lady.

I’m glad that The Wolfman is with them, though, and his eye is all healed up. We couldn’t have done that for him. As it is, we’ve got two cats that need to see a vet, and we just don’t have the funds. Peanut Butter Cup concerns me. She still has leaky butt issues, though at least it’s not so liquid anymore, but she’s having increasing problems with her breathing. Not constant, but sometimes she sounds like she’s got stuffed sinuses, and starts coughing or sneezing. Something is definitely going on with her breathing. The fact that it comes and goes is curious.

Then there’s our old grandma that moved out here with us. She’s about 14 or 15 years old (we’re guessing she was about a year old when she first showed up on our balcony). There’s something bothering her with her mouth, so she’s not eating as much as she should be. She won’t let us look and see. I’ve been making a point of making sure she has soft food, including softening lysine enhanced kibble for her. She enjoyed the cat milk that was donated a while back, but we’re all out of that, and my goodness, those little boxes have gotten expensive! We pick some up when they are on sale, but that’s not often. We do what we can for them, and have to be satisfied with that. There’s no sense in angst-ing over something we have no control over. 🫤

Oh, there’s something we’d like to try one of these days; making “soup” for the cats. I found a recipe on the Furball Farm Cat Sanctuary website. They are for adult feral cats only, and I absolutely love their facilities! I’d love to make a smaller version for our own yard cats. It would be much easier to get those ladies spayed if we could get them into a giant fenced in haven!

Anyhow, this is their recipe.

“Soup” Recipe makes one blender
1 Tablespoon Lysine
1/4 cup pure pumpkin
10-12 cans pate/grilled/shredded cat food**
2 cups warm water**
**actual measurements for these items can vary based on cat preference of soup consistency

We’d be doing this for the inside cats, and would probably do half the recipe. Maybe even a quarter, since it would be a supplemental treat. We have no pumpkin, though. The next time we’re at a grocery store, I’ll see if I can find canned pumpkin with nothing else added to it. I supposed we could make it without the pumpkin at first. Pumpkin is supposed to be helpful for loose stools, constipation and hair balls, and very little of it can go a long way. Something to try, anyhow!

It would also make it easier to dose the cats with lysine. I had found a new source of the fine powdered lysine that sticks to the kibble when tossed together, but it has disappeared. That’s two different brands that carried lysine in that form that have disappeared, since we started using it! I had to go back to another brand, which is more granular. It doesn’t like to stick to the kibble very well at all, and most ends up on the bottom of the kibble bin. Making the soup won’t help the outside cats any – we just can’t afford to feed the outside cats wet cat food as well as the inside cats. Plus, they hunt, so they don’t need it like the inside cats do. If we do end up making a fenced in sanctuary for them, though, that would change, to supplementing with wet cat food would be on the table.

What can I say.

We’re sucks for the cats.

Now, about winning that jackpot, to pay for all this…

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 Garden: starting to rework the low raised beds (video)

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As I write this, the video I made is still uploading, so I’ve scheduled this to be published tomorrow morning.

One bed is prepped and ready for logs to be placed around it. My younger daughter is working in the spruce grove to get them for me, but has to clear away pieces of trees and branches that have fallen in high winds, and other debris, just to reach them. She handles heat even worse than I do, and the humidity sure didn’t help. She ended up needing to use a cane to get around the house until the painkillers kicked in.

She’ll have tomorrow to recover, though. The rain started up again this evening, with thunderstorm warnings. It’s supposed to keep raining all through tomorrow (meaning today, by the time this is published). A good day for me to be helping my mother out with her errands.

Sunday is supposed to be sunnier, though rain is expected to start again in the evening, so we might get a few hours of work in during the day. Then the rain is supposed to be back on Monday.

This weekend is a long weekend, when many people will be putting in their gardens. While we could probably direct sow some things, our area still has a while to go. Looking at the 14 day forecast is frustrating, since it seems to change every time I look at it, but at one point I was seeing predictions of overnight temperatures dropping below freezing in the last few days of May. When I look at it now, though, it shows a few chilly nights, just above freezing, and then overnight temperatures are predicted to be considerably warmer. Once I look into June, the daytime highs are all supposed to be 20C/68F or higher, for the entire month!

Of course, that might change completely, the next time I look.

Well, whatever ends up happening, we’ve got a lot of hard work to do before we can plant in the main garden area.

The low raised beds have been wildly overrun by crab grass in particular, with some beds heavily invaded by dandelions, and at least one has a pretty bad infestation of Creeping Charlie. Since they all need to be heavily reworked anyhow, we’re going to go ahead and redo them. Or, more specifically, I’ll be doing the weeding and shifting. My daughter will be harvesting and processing the dead spruces to build walls around them. This late in the game, I’ll be happy if we build them just one log high. They just need to be done! We can add more height to them, as time goes buy. Once these low raised beds are reworked, we can switch our focus back to building the trellis beds. Those will require even more work, since we’ll be bringing soil in from what’s left of the purchased garden soil pile, as well as layers of organic material at their bottoms.

For transplants, we’ve got the winter squash and melons, which will take up the most space, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, onions, gourds, some thyme and Orange Butterfly Flower (a milkweed) plus the mulberry saplings to transplant. Depending on the space available, I want to direct sow summer squash, shelling peas, bush beans, pole beans and more carrots, plus the dwarf nasturtiums. If we really do well for space, I’d like to plant at least one variety of corn, but I don’t expect that to happen. There will be a fair bit of intercropping, plus we plan to have things growing vertically as much as possible, so that should help with space. Still, there are quite a few things I expect to skip entirely this year, like cucumbers, beets, radishes, chard and lettuces, simply because I don’t expect to have the prepared space for them. Mind you, things like radishes and chard can be planted later, after the garlic is harvested and those beds are freed up.

Weather willing, I hope to be able to get at least one of the low raised beds weeded and shifted over in a day. With one done today, there’s four left to do. If the weather forecasts are at all accurate, that means they should be done by the end of next week. Then the log walls need to be placed and secured, and the soil amended with sulfur granules. Hopefully, that will also get done by the end of next week, because the week after has me doing a lot of driving around, from getting my mother to a medical appointment, to our monthly stock up shopping, to hopefully being able to connect with a friend that is back in Canada for a while.

It’s a very busy time of year!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 Garden: a preview

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I headed out to do some weeding and prep in the main garden area. Just to get the beds ready for planting, and for adding more permanent walls around the low raised beds.

Of course, things turned out to be more than I expected, so I decided to set up the tripod for a future video. Here is a preview.

The plan is to have the beds in uniform sizes in this area, to match the trellis tunnel beds that will also be added. We don’t have a lot of time left to prep before things need to get into the ground, so we need to shift focus to getting these existing beds ready.

Part of the problem with the existing beds is that they are bordered by shorter chunks of logs, just laying on the ground. They don’t do a very good job of keeping the soil in place, and some of them get knocked out of position more easily. Plus, the crab grass rhizomes just grow right under them.

What we’re working towards is beds that are 4′ wide from the outside, with 4′ paths in between. They will also all be 18′ long, so each bed could fit a pair of the 9′ x 3′ covers we’ve been making (taking into account the width of the logs, the growing space will be closer to 3′.

Using the high raised bed as the starting point, I marked out the 4′ distances for the paths and the beds.

You’ll notice that the markers don’t line up with the existing beds. We never measured anything when we laid those down. To get the sizes and distances we are after, they will all need to be shifted over. Some more than others.

The photo above, however, was taken before I realized my mistake when I first started measuring them out.

My brain was thinking about using those covers on them.

The 9′ x 3′ covers. The ones made to fit over 9′ x 3′ beds built out of 1″ x 6″ boards, so they fit exactly right.

I had marked the rows at 4′, but the beds at 3′.

Thankfully, I caught my mistake early enough and reset them all 4′ apart.

At the far end, I only marked out the two beds closest to the high raised bed. Which required digging out some rocks, so I could push the markers into the ground. Since the high raised bed is shorter, I used the end of the first trellis bed as my guide. It doesn’t have to be exact. Just within an inch or so.

I got most of the bed with the Red Wethersfield onions in it done – I was originally going to just weed that one, but when I saw how much things needed to be shifted, I decided to transplant the onions and get it done right from the start. I paused for a break when I was working at the far end – the one closest to that row of trees – when I started breaking new ground, and hitting larger roots and more rocks.

So I paused to take a break, transplanting the onions I pulled out, into the first trellis bed.

Then it started raining.

So I too a longer break!

My daughter, meanwhile, has headed out to process logs for the beds. If we get them framed just one log deep this year, that will do. We can add more logs to make them higher after that, but we really need to get them ready for planting. Something that it taking far longer than it should!

I won’t be able to work in it tomorrow, since I’ll be helping my mother with shopping, so I’ll head back out in between the rain to keep at it. It’s not supposed to start raining hard until 7pm, so I should get at least a couple more hours in.

But first… food. It’s 2pm as I write this, and I forgot to have lunch!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 Garden: hardening off begins, and new growth

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We had rain all night, with a foggy morning. We’re supposed to get possible showers this afternoon, with thunderstorm warnings for the night, and roughly the same tomorrow. Hopefully, this rain is reaching the fires to the north of us in adequate amounts. Currently, we’ve got 5 forest fires burning, with 2 still listed as out of control. That’s actually down two fires from when I checked, yesterday.

With the overcast morning, it was a perfect day to set the transplants outside to begin hardening off. Just a couple more weeks, and we can start transplanting them into the garden.

Oh, my sad, sad San Marzano tomatoes!

While I took out the trays in the sun room, my daughter brought the last of the trays that were in the mini greenhouse frame in the living room. As of now, the only things left in the house are three pots in the aquarium greenhouse; one Zucca melon that’s finally breaking the surface and one Pixie melon. There’s a second Pixie melon that has yet to emerge. The seeds that were left for pre-germination, however, have shown no progress. The Zucca seeds will be going into the compost, as they are starting to show signs of mold, but the three remaining Pixie melons look completely unchanged.

Most of our trays of transplants fit on the folding table we made, while a few went onto the set up we made above the seat of the laundry platform. A handy spot, though I always feel nervous going up those steps while carrying trays of plants. I’m never quite sure my knees won’t just give out at some point. Stairs and I do not get along, at all! 😄😄

While continuing my rounds, I checked on the bed with the peas, carrots and spinach planted in it. Of the first peas that were planted, there is one sprouting. I did see what might possibly be a second one, but it’s so tiny, I’m not sure yet. The second planting doesn’t have anything showing yet.

I checked the Royalty raspberries, as usual, and we are finally seeing new growth at the bottom of one of last year’s canes. These were supposed to be first year canes, which should have fruited for the first time this year, but they ended up producing berries last year, then dying back. I contacted Veseys about it and they assured me they would come back this year. So far, they are right about one of them! However, this does mean that any growth we get this year should not produce any berries until next year.

In other things…

I counted 25 yard cats this morning, though at least one or two more showed up later on. When I saw Broccoli while I was still setting the food out, I went around to the garden shed and left some food in a dry spot, then checked on the babies. They seem a bit more active. I ended up leaving some food for Broccoli not far from her baby nest.

With everything being so wet, and more rain and possible storms to come, I decided this was a good day to make a run to the nearest Walmart to get a few things. That took enough time that the transplants were brought back inside when I got back. We’re actually seeing a bit of sunshine, peeking through the clouds right now, too.

As I write this, it’s just past 2pm, and we’ve reached 16C/61F, with the humidex making it feel like 20C/68F. We’re supposed to get just a bit warmer before the end of the day. With how muddy things are, a lot of what we need to do outside has to wait. Very frustrating!

Ah, well. It is what it is! We just shift gears and do other stuff, like going into town for some errands, a bit earlier than planned – which I will cover in my next post. 😊

The Re-Farmer

Still there!

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Broccoli was eating at the kibble house, so I took a quick check.

She has not moved her babies! 

The old garden shed is a good place for them, other than the fact that we actually still use it. 

In other things, the rain started yesterday, off and on, and will continue throught today.  No downpours or anything like that.  Just intermittent light rain.  Enough to make the ground too wet to work in the garden beds or process the felled spruced.

If my husband is up to it, there will be a trip into town for some blood work. 

I don’t think he’s up to it.

One of my older daughters, however, has offered to treat us to some Chinese food today, so a trip to town is still a possibility!

That would be a nice treat on a wet and chilly day. 🩷

The Re-Farmer

A productive day

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Yesterday’s progress turned out to be a lot more work than it should have been, but the job got done. Rather than try and post pictures through Instagram, I decided to take them and make a vlog, instead.

It’s coming up on 1am as I post this. Time to go to bed and, hopefully, the old bod won’t stiffen up and break down too badly overnight!

The Re-Farmer

The morning outside

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We’ve got a much cooler day today – as I write this, it’s coming up on 1pm, and it’s still only 6C/39F, with a high of 13C/55F by about 6pm expected. I took full advantage of the cooler temperatures to get some things done! We’re supposed to start getting rain tomorrow, have more rain, off and on, over the next few days, so the more we can get done out there, the better!

The first job, of course, was to feed the yard cats. I counted 28 in total, I think. Knowing that we have kittens in the junk pile, I now put food out under the shrine, and even on the bench nearby. Which the Blue Jays appreciate… 🫤

Stinky, Hypotenose and Syndol were all pushing each other around, trying to get at pets!

I spotted Broccoli at the food bowls, so I interrupted my usual morning rounds and dashed to the garden shed.

I started taking out as many things as I could think to grab – garden stakes, hoses, netting, etc. I had to get under where the kittens were, so I lifted them all up in the self heating mat and set them on the ground as I worked. Once I got the stuff I thought I would need right away, I returned the tarp and the felted grow bags Broccoli has made her nest in, made sure it was flattened in such a way that no kittens would accidently roll off and get stuck somewhere, then carefully put them, still half snoozing, back in in their soft, fuzzy and warm mat.

By this time, Broccoli had come around the house and was watching me. When I was done and continued my rounds, she followed me around the garden. I’m hoping she will be okay with what I did, and not take her kittens away and hide them. By removing the stuff I did, I’m hoping we won’t need to open the door and disturb her and her babies for a while. I’ll still check on the, of course, but will try to do it only when I know Broccoli isn’t in there with them.

That done, I started doing garden related stuff. While rain may be on the way, we can’t count on it actually reaching us, so I did the watering. It looks like we finally have carrots sprouting, so I’ve moved the protective boards off of them. The German Butterball potatoes got the grass clipping mulch returned. I’m still putting the cover with the plastic on it over them, to keep the cats out. The garlic also got their mulch returned, now that they’re bigger, and watered.

After all the watering was done, I checked on the grapes. The false spirea growing nearby is trying to spread into them again, so I got some pruners to cut them away. Normally, I’d try to pull them up by the roots, but I can’t do that when they are right in with the grape vines.

Then I started clearing other spirea to clear more space around the grapes.

Before I knew it, I’d gone through the entire corner, clearing away dead false spirea, trimmed dead branches and last year’s flower husks, finding and clearing around a perennial flower that gets buried by the bushes every year, and really opening things up and cleaning them out.

The cats are very happy with this! They like to go under there. When they are in full leaf, it’s a shady spot they can hide in, and now it’s nice and clear of dead branches and twigs.

While the false spirea is leafing out, and the grapes are showing leaf buds, other things are further along. The “Mr. Honeyberry” haskap is in full bloom right now. I even saw a bumble bee among the flowers! The “Mrs. Honeyberry”, however, might have some leaves, not no flower buds yet. There’s no way proper cross pollination can happen, which means no berries.

*sigh*

The plum trees are blooming; they always bloom before they get their leaves. Quite a few tulips are showing flower buds, which is pretty awesome. The trees are also getting very green. So nice to see!

I look forward to getting back to work, when I get back from running errands!

The Re-Farmer

It’s a good thing they’re so cute! Also, babies

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The inside cats have been particularly messy and destructive for the past couple of days. The outside cats did some damage, too but, at least with them, it wasn’t on purpose (more on that in another post).

While doing my rounds this morning, I caught this little bugger.

There’s Syndol, using the tiny raised bed’s cover as a hammock again!

I’m actually impressed on how well it’s keeping him suspended above the garlic!

My daughter and I were working in the garden this morning, before it got too hot. The weather apps seem to change the forecast every time I check them, but we’ve had predicted highs ranging from 26C/78F to 29C/84F! We’re already at 22C/72F as I write this, and it’s not even noon, yet. I had to go into the garden shed, where I thought Broccoli might have her babies – the cats can get in through a hole in the wall in the back. Sure enough, I startled her when I opened the door, but I didn’t hear or see any kittens. It wasn’t until I went back again later that I saw them – and they were not actually all that hidden, either!

Broccoli was not around at the time, but we knew that, with our needing to go in and out of the shed, that she would end up moving her babies to who knows where. So we took a big risk. While my daughter kept an eye on the babies, I brought the big cat carrier from the sunroom over. It already had a blanket inside, but I added the self warming mat for the babies.

As we were moving them into the carrier, I could see Broccoli at the corner of the house in the old kitchen garden, watching us. Before we were done, I saw her dashing through the maple grove on the far side of the shed.

The carrier is now set up in the sunroom, and I’ve even more the critter cam so I can see it from my phone. My daughter is also monitoring the house from across the yard. It’s pretty normal for the mamas to leave their babies to sleep while they go hunting or whatever, so it might be hours before Broccoli comes back to the shed to nurse her babies, then figure out where they are. As I write this, the kittens are peacefully sleeping, but when the get hungry, they will start calling for her, so she should find them all right. If we can get her with them in the sunroom, we can close the door. She can stay safe with her babies in there, with her own food, water and litter box, and we should finally be able to socialize her! We’ll be able to give her some wet cat food, which we normally don’t give to the outside cats, which should help. I’ve already sent pictures to the Cat Lady. If all goes well, we’ll be able to finally get Broccoli spayed when the kittens are older, and be able to socialize the kittens as well.

It all hinged on whether or not we can lure her into the sunroom and keep her there!

Her two calicos, we assume, are female. I didn’t even bother to check. As we were moving them, I could see the black and white is a male.

They are so flippin’ adorable.

This does mean we will need to avoid going into the sunroom as much as possible, until we’ve lured her in and closed the door. The sunroom is where we keep a lot of our tools and supplies. Hopefully, it won’t be long before we can close the door with mama in with her babies. After that, we’ll just have to do things like go in only through the old kitchen. Unless we can move her and the babies into the baby jail cage under the plant table, and close her in with them briefly, while we go in and out of the sunroom. Whatever it takes to get her with her babies and not hide them somewhere else!

We are such sucks for the cats.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2024 Garden: Pixies and shifting things around

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According to the Window 11 weather icon on my new computer, it’s 15C/59F out there. According to the other weather app that came with my computer (why is there two of them?), it’s 17C/63F. According to the app on my phone, it was 19C/66F, but has already cooled down to 18C/65F. The thermometer on the wall of the sun room says it’s 20C/68F in there.

I don’t think any of the apps are right, because when I walk out the sun room door, it’s like walking into an oven. The sun room is cool, in comparison!

We have high winds today, which suggests that it would feel even hotter outside, without it!

My plan to get to bed early then start outside before things got too hot, did not succeed. The longer I lay in bed, the more awake I became. By the time I finally fell asleep, it was starting to get light out. *sigh*

My younger daughter and I were talking about this, and how the temperatures are expected to continue to be about the same for the next while. She had the same plans that I was trying to accomplish; to go to bed early, then get up and work outside while it was still cool.

She’s been as successful at it as I have been.

Still, that’s what we’re going to try doing. Maybe it’ll work out better if we encourage each other about it!

I did manage to get some gardening related stuff done, though.

The last two trays of tomatoes have been moved out of the living room and into the sun room. I ended up rearranging the transplants a bit. The Crespo squash are getting so big, they were shading the luffa and drum gourd sharing their bin, so those got moved to a tray and are now in the window, while the Crespo squash have a bin to themselves. I also moved the Black Cherry and Florme de Coeur tomatoes in individual pots out of the plastic tray they were in, and onto a metal one. The plastic tray was just too wobbly, while carrying them. For now, I’m using the plastic tray for the luffa and drums, but I’ll switch that out to metal trays later on. We’ll be starting to harden things off, soon, and I don’t want to risk dropping any because of a bendy tray!

I also moved a tray of winter squash to the sun room, leaving the onions and shallots in the mini greenhouse frame. I was going to set the Summer of Melons tray out of the aquarium greenhouse and to the window, but decided to take them straight to the living room, instead. I put them on the bottom shelf at the window, where they would get the best sunlight – with the overhang of the roof, the lower shelves get more sun than the upper shelves. I’m trusting the cats will leave them alone.

The makeshift table under the lights got rearranged a bit to use the space more effectively. There is a wall about a food wide between the east facing windows, casting a shadow across the table, so I’ve left a gap between the trays and bins, moving one bin of peppers and thyme to the shelf between the south facing windows, next to the mulberry and the Butterfly Flower.

Oh, we might have some oregano, after all! When they didn’t sprout, I returned the seed starting mix to the big bowl I use to pre-moisten the mix before filling pots and cells, mixing it all together. Now, some of the tomatoes look like they have oregano growing with them! They’re looking pretty leggy, but I’m leaving them be for now. They’re not big enough to be a problem for the tomatoes. If the survive, we’ll just transplant them at the same time we transplant the tomatoes.

Some of the other melons and watermelon we pregerminated have emerged from their soil, so I moved those ones off the heat mat and into the mini greenhouse frame with the onions and shallots. I checked the remaining seeds set to pre-germinate. Still nothing on the remaining two Zucca melon seeds, but one of the Pixies had its radical, and another was open, so I planted both. Those got added to the tray on the warming mat, along with the other pre-germinated melons that haven’t emerged yet. I ended up adding water to the trays under the cardboard and peat pots a couple of times. The pots were drying out, and I didn’t want them sucking the moisture out of the growing medium, and wow did they ever absorb the water from the trays fast! These are needing to be watered more often, because of the pots. The transplants in the plastic pots don’t have this problem.

Tomorrow morning, the plan is for my daughter and I to prep one of the empty raised beds in the West yard, next to the peas, carrots and spinach, with the peat and sulfur amended soil left from other beds, and finally get those German Butterball potatoes planted. We then want to set up netting of some kind around the other bed, to protect the spinach from hungry critters, as well as from the cats walking all over it, but in such a way that we can easily left the netting to tend to the bed. There are still no peas emerging, but it would be a good time to add trellis netting to the support posts set up for it. By now, I’m guessing they all failed, and I don’t know why. We do have shelling peas to plant, but I think I might buy another package of edible pod peas for that bed. It’s starting to get too hot to plant peas, though!

Hmm… I just looked at the time. The post office is open for the afternoon, and my husband’s medical grade latex tubing arrived early. They have a seed display. I’ll check and see if they have any edible pod peas! We might even plant them tomorrow morning, after planting the potatoes.

What we try to do next will depend on the weather. If it’s not still windy, we might even try to take down some dead trees!

We shall see.

The Re-Farmer

More than expected

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Much to my surprise, it actually worked!

I got to bed “early” (which, for me, is anything before midnight), got actual sleep, and was outside and working while it was still cool out!

I even made sure to have breakfast before I headed outside, so that I could get right to work after finishing my rounds, though I did upload and check the trail cam files, first. Now that the weather is nice, I’m seeing our vandal going by fairly regularly, rubbernecking towards our place as he drives by on his quad. *sigh*

Anyhow.

My goal for the morning was to get the chimney block planters along the chain link fence ready to plant into, then maybe move on to the ones that form the retaining wall in the old kitchen garden. I thought I might have time to do both, before things got too hot for that sort of work.

Ha!

I should know better by now.

I took progress pictures and posted them on Instagram, since I don’t have the storage space to upload so many images onto Word Press anymore. I didn’t think to set up the tripod and take a time lapse video, as I do for other projects, because I thought this would be done quickly. I did consider taking the stills and making a brief video, with narration, but decided against it.

Let me know, though, which you would prefer. I know not everyone can see the images when I embed them from Instagram, without having to click on the embed area and go to Instagram to view them. Would you prefer a short video, even if it’s just a bunch of stills, and making a vlog post out of it? YouTube doesn’t have the storage limitations that WP does.

Anyhow… I have the slideshow here…

I remembered to take a “before” shot, too. There’s a bit of crab grass showing through the grass clipping mulch, but things didn’t look too bad. I figured, maybe an hour to get it done, give or take.

Then I removed the grass clipping mulch and tried weeding the first block.

At first I thought the soil was strangely compacted, but even using some tools to loosen the soil, it was still a struggle. There were quite a lot of roots in there… Way too many roots. I set the sifter up over the wheel barrow and started trying to lift handfuls of soil out, but it just wasn’t working. Finally, I just grabbed the entire block and tipped it off the soil.

Leaving behind a packed cube.

A cube filled with tree roots.

Yup. Just like with the grow bags near the row of trees my mother allowed to grow after she transplanted her row of raspberries, roots from the nearby Chinese elm had made their way into the growing space from below.

After that first one, I just pulled the next block over, without even trying to dig into the soil, first. The soil cube stayed behind, held in place by all the roots below. Others came loose with the block, as the soil was so filled with roots, it stayed packed into the block, even as the roots were being torn from the ground below, and I had to force the soil cube out. Then there was breaking up the blocks on the sifter, pulling out handfuls of roots. There were some crab grass rhizomes, but even they seemed to be choked out by the tree roots!

Now we know why all the vining gourds that we planted there last year, failed so miserably. They were completely choked out by invading tree roots.

While I was working my way down the row of blocks, there was something else that was unexpected.

The distinct sound of kittens, mewing!

One of the other mamas has had a litter, and it sounds like they are in the old freezer lying on its side in the junk pile. I didn’t see any of the mamas, though I did eventually see a black cat come out of that area. I didn’t think we had a black cat that was female. I certainly didn’t notice any that looked pregnant. Not even the one tuxedo that I figure is female, after seeing the boys going after her. Mind you, the cat I saw might not have been a mama. All the cats like to take shelter and climb around the junk pile.

After a while, though, I guess they all fell asleep, because I no longer heard the mewing.

Once the blocks were all moved off and the soil sifted, I did as much weeding as I could in the soil underneath where the blocks were, but there were just too many tree roots. The best I could do with a lot of them was simply severe them.

Then I took a rake to the area, getting rid of the weeds and roots, before leveling where the blocks would go. We’ve been saving our cardboard that’s suitable to use in the garden, so I took some of that and laid down a double layer. Hopefully, it will be thick enough to discourage the roots from growing up into the blocks.

The carboard got a soaking, but it takes a lot to saturate cardboard. I got it decently wet, then put the blocks back.

This is where I really appreciate steel toed shoes! After lining the blocks up first by hand, the final touch was to kick them into place.

I’ve gotten way too used to wearing steel toes all the time. Every now and then, I’ll be out somewhere, forgetting I’m wearing normal shoes, and almost break my toes kicking at something! 😄

Once the blocks were in place, I walked back and forth over them a few times, using my own weight to settle them into place, then took the hose to them. The blocks helped by actually holding the water and letting it start to pool, rather than running off the sides, allowing the cardboard to become better saturated.

The next step was to start amending the soil.

The wheel barrow was pretty full, so adding the peat and sulfur granules was done in batches; enough to fill a couple of blocks before the next batch of soil was amended.

Since the peat made for greater volume, there was soil left over in the wheel barrel after all the blocks were filled. Each block then got topped with a couple of handfuls of stove pellets to act as a mulch. The blocks got a watering, then left for the pellets to absorb moisture and start swelling, while I watered the potato bed and haskaps, nearby. The one “Mr. Honeyberry” haskap has all sorts of flower buds, with some of them even starting to bloom! The two “Mrs. Honeyberry” aren’t anywhere near that point.

*sigh*

That took enough time for the stove pellets to swell to the point that the sawdust could be spread around a bit, before getting another thorough watering.

The very last thing to do before clean up was to return the support posts – they had to be hammered through the cardboard. We need to put something similar along the bed with the potatoes, so we can place netting of some kind over them. This will be to protect the beds and anything growing in them from being suffocated by the Chinese Elm seeds, when they start dropping in their millions.

What I thought was a job that might take me about an hour, ended up talking almost 3 hours – though I did take a hydration break, part way through.

By then, it was starting to get pretty warm, too; the perfect time to be done!

After that, my daughter and I headed into town. We had some parcels to pick up on the way home, but the post office closed shortly after I finished working, so we had to find extra things to do. That way, we could time our trip home for when it reopened again. We ended up going to the beach; something we haven’t done in at least two years! The lake is mostly clear of ice, but there were a few patches being blown against the beach by the winds.

It was all candle ice, and in places, you could hear it tinkling like wind chimes in the waves! I tried to capture the sound with my phone.

That area of the beach has quite a lot of rocks, making it our favourite part. We spent the entire time, trying to find interesting ones. We found quite a few, including some that sparkled amazingly in the sun. I tried to capture the sparkle in photos, but the camera just couldn’t pick up the glitter.

We had no problem at all, taking up the extra time we needed to, on the beach!

From there, it was a stop at the grocery store. I just needed to refill a couple of the big water jugs and get some eggs. My daughter had her own shopping list. That done, it was back home, with a stop at the post office to pick up a parcel.

Which turned out to be five parcels!

One was for my daughter, which arrived faster than she expected. A couple more for my husband arrived early as well, plus there turned out to be another with the courier company packages. I didn’t know anything about that one, but the store owner stopped me on the way out to give it to me.

There was one parcel that would have been great to arrive early but, alas, it isn’t expected until next week. My husband needs to replace the face part of his CPAP set up. He’s been able to replace the hose the runs from the machine to the face mask, and he was able to get new nasal prongs. The part of the mask he can’t get has the latex tubes that attach to the sides of the nasal piece. Over time, the latex starts to harden, turn yellow and, eventually, begin to crack. My husband tends to wait way too long before replacing them, so they’re at that point, now. The problem is, it’s not in stock, and hasn’t been for months. It’s starting to look like they’re not being made anymore. So he’s simply ordered medical grade latex tubes to attach to the fittings, which are still fine.

What he really needs is a new machine. Medicare doesn’t cover CPAPs. His insurance does, but it’s by reimbursement, so he’d have to have the funds to buy it first, then submit a receipt. Medicare does cover BiPAPs, though, which would be better for him, anyhow. For that, however, he needs to get a new prescription. It’s been so long, he’ll need another sleep test, first. Which his new doctor has started the process of getting done. When he was diagnosed with severe obstructive sleep apnea, we were living in this province (for the second? third? time) and he spent the night in a lab at the sleep research centre. They actually interrupted the sleep test after a couple of hours and put him on a CPAP, because they were afraid he would die on them. That lab is no longer there. I don’t know if it moved to another hospital or city or province, or simply no longer exists. Now, they usually do home tests. Which should be… interesting.

However he ends up getting tested again, he’s on a waiting list, and has been for a few months now. Who knows when he’ll finally get tested.

Until then, he has to find ways to make do with what he has and, right now, it looks like he needs to buy parts and pieces to replace the worn out ones. He can’t even use a different style of mask, as they are made for specific machines, and the fittings can’t cross over. At least, not with the machine he has now.

Hopefully, the tubing he ordered will fit. He did order some earlier, but it turned out to be the wrong size for the fittings. It’s something we can find a use for, though, so no loss there.

Meanwhile…

As I finish this up, we’re coming up on 6pm, and it’s still 18C/64F (the high was 19C/66F), with the humidex putting it at 22C/72F. Unless I look at my other map, which has us a couple of degrees Celsius warmer!

While talking to my daughter earlier about what needs to be worked on next, we were both rather depressed at the thought of getting the low raised beds in the main garden area clear. The crab grass is taking over with a vengeance and, in one of them, Creeping Charlie is also invading. The only way to really make a difference when it’s that bad is to either use an herbicide, or sift it all. Since we also need to amend the soil with peat and sulfur, sifting it would be the best choice. Which basically means, every one of those beds needs to be redone – and these are all beds we want to make into higher raised beds. My daughter suggested we just skip ahead to making the beds higher, if we’re going to have to remove all that soil, anyhow.

Which means, we need to shift gears and start harvesting more of those dead spruces. We currently have only two downed trees to process. We need more. Lots more, even if we’re just doing middle height beds, like with the trellis beds we’re working on. Those are only two logs tall, which means we need four 18′ logs for the sides and four or five (depending on the width) 4′ logs for the ends, per bed. With the largest of the dead trees, the bottom 10′, which would be too thick for a garden bed, will be set aside for the vertical supports for the outdoor kitchen we will be building (we need 10 of those). Depending on how straight and tall the trees we harvest are, that means 2 or 3 trees per raised bed. We need to rebuild… hold on… let me look out the window and count… five low raised beds. One of those has the onions growing in it, so that one won’t be done this year; it’ll just get weeded for now. So, four that need to be rebuilt. Plus the other 3 beds we need to make to make two trellis tunnels (two beds per tunnel). So we’re looking at a minimum 7 new beds at 2 logs high. If we assume 3 trees per bed, we’re looking at about 21 trees that need to be harvested. I’m pretty sure we do have that many dead spruces that need to be cut down; I’d counted 22 before we cut down the ones we’ve done so far, but there are a couple that have fallen on their own and are stuck against other trees that we probably could use, plus I’m sure there are others in an overgrown area we can’t walk through. If worse comes to worse, there are more dead spruces in the old hay yard. It’s further to drag the logs but, at that point, we can use the truck to drag them out.

Which means, weather willing, we need to start cutting down all those dead spruces in the spruce grove. If we focus on cutting the dead trees down first, then processing them to the sizes we need and dragging the logs over, building the beds themselves won’t necessarily take long. Prepping the spaces usually takes longer.

That electric chainsaw is going to get quite a workout.

Hmm… I wonder if I can talk to my brother into coming out with his gas chainsaw? He’s so busy with so many things, though, I hate to ask him. Especially since we’d have no way of knowing if the weather would be good on a day he can come out.

Well, I guess tomorrow, I’m getting the chainsaw out and making sure it’s working after a winter in the garage!

It’ll be good to finally get those dead spruce trees cut down. Then we can start transplanting new ones!

The Re-Farmer