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I fought a tree, and won

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I’m still having a hard time after yesterday’s assassination, so my posts might seem a bit out of sorts for the next while.

This is what I meant to write about, yesterday. I fought a tree and – eventually! – won.

This is what came down, about a week ago.

I originally thought both pieces were from the same tree, but I was wrong. The piece that fell on the hawthorn was actually from the tree that was holding up the other piece!

The first order of business was to get the piece on the hawthorn clear. I didn’t stop to take pictures, mostly because I was more focused on not getting stabbed. At one point, while cutting sections of the dead branch clear, I felt something on my chest. Looking town, I found a twig of hawthorn had come loose and a single 2-3 inch long thorn was stabbing me, right in the sternum! Also, thank goodness I always wear a hat!

Thankfully, that living fence my mother planted years ago isn’t just hawthorn, but also caragana. Those were much easier to work around! Still, it was very careful going before I cut enough free that I could move the rest of the log off. A few broken hawthorn branches had to be cut off. Those ended up on the branch pile just past the fence by the fire pit. No way those were going onto the branch pile meant for the fire pit!

In the process I realized the piece that was hung up on the branch above was so long, its end was actually entangled with the one I cut up and got free! After the shorter section was down, I decided to go ahead and try to get the other one down. It was too high up for me to use my baby chainsaw (electric pruning saw with a 4″ blade) to cut into smaller sections first, so I got the extended pole pruning saw. There was no way to actually cut anything with it – it all just swung and bounced around – but I was able to use the hook at the end of the saw and simply yank on it.

Which left me with this.

Still hung up at the top, and held in place by two branches.

The extended pole pruning saw was at maximum length; the knobs to loosen or tighten the clamp so the length could be adjusted broke off long before we moved here. While using it to pull at the branches, it would shift and spin, with the weight resting on first one branch, then the other, before the two sections of the extended pole finally separated. I didn’t feel like getting pliers to deal with that, plus it was obviously going to take more than yanking on it with the hook to get the whole thing down. Time to shift gears.

What I needed was rope, and a fairly long one. With how much the whole thing was spinning, its fall would be completely unpredictable, and I needed to keep my distance.

I found some rope in the old garden shed. I tied it on the smaller branch that was holding the entire weight and was able to shift it a bit, but it wasn’t enough. In the end, I made a stop cut in the branch a few feet above ground, then shifted the rope near the cut. That way, when I next pulled on the rope (with my end of the rope wrapped around a stick to make a handle), the smaller branch would break and the whole thing could drop. Which is exactly what it did.

Right on top of the other side of the Y branch.

Okay. I’ll just tie the rope to the end, near the ground, and pull it up. There was hardly any contact with the big tree branch that it was leaning against at the top, so it should have been fairly easy.

It wasn’t.

Every time I shifted the branch, the end would dig deeper into the soil rather than lifting up.

I even used a nearby tree to wrap the rope around, then used the stick I was using as a handle around the rope on the other side of my handy tree to get extra torque.

It still just dug deeper.

I had to find a different solution.

After ensuring it was safe to do so, I made a pair of stop cuts on opposite sides of the branch, a few feet above ground, and with a couple of inches of space between them. Then I set the rope in between the stop cuts and went back to my tree.

It worked.

The branch broke at the stop cuts and the whole thing came down, falling in the opposite direction that I was pulling from. It didn’t even land on the hawthorn, but on the ground beside it!

As for the section of branch below the stop cuts, it was still sticking up from the ground. After pulling it up and seeing just how far it had been driven into the soil, it was no wonder pulling from the bottom couldn’t work!

Next was clean up time for both sections.

I broke down all the smaller pieces and made two piles; one for fire wood, the other for kindling. The pieces that were too big for my baby chainsaw would have to wait. I’ll break those down with the chain saw or, if I’m not up to dragging an extension cord across the yard, with a buck saw. For now, they’ve just been moved aside. These have been dead for quite a long time and are completely dry, so they weren’t particularly heavy – at least not like it was while the entire weight was balanced on a couple of inches!

In the last picture of the slide show above, I have arrows pointing to where the branches had broken off from. The tree on the left lost its other section a few years back, in the winter, landing on top of the canopy tent we had near the fire pit for winter cookouts. With this other section broken off, that dead tree can now be safely cut down without any risk of it getting hung up on anything as it comes down.

The other tree on the right still has a section that is alive, but there’s another large section that’s dead. That one has grown off into the row of elm trees behind the storage house. We don’t have the equipment needed to safely take it down in sections.

There’s a third tree on the far left of the photo that is also got dead sections. That tree is the largest of the three and one of the dead branches is massive. It also stretches out over the open yard, so that part at least will not require any special equipment to get it down. I do want to leave part of it up. It’s almost horizontal from the trunk, which makes a great place for the cats to hang out. The fact that it’s so thick, my chainsaw would not be able to cut through it at the trunk without getting creative has a bit to do with it, too!

Before working on this, I’d already gotten quite a few other things done in garden clean up. My daughter helped me with the awkward stuff, like straightening and untangling the netting and getting that rolled up for storage. We also got the catio moved closer to the house, and I got a whole bunch of other little things done. By the time I got the pieces of tree down and cleaned up, I’ve been working outside for several house, so I was done.

While I tried to be pre-emptive before going to bed, the exertion did catch up with me and I started to get hit with a Charlie horse during the night. A mild one, thankfully, and some Voltaren took care of it rather quickly.

Still, I decided today would be a good day to avoid more physical exertion. It has turned out to be a dreary day, anyhow. Which has suited the mood, really. I’ve been fighting tears for most of the day. I’ve never been affected by the death of someone I don’t know personally like this before. It’s more than just Charlie Kirk, who was such an amazing person, nor the circumstances of his assassination. It’s the culmination of something that I’ve been watching build up for years. It’s not just grief, but anger, too. Being in Canada is no barrier, either. While leftists have been celebrating the assassination, there are already people saying that Premier Danielle Smith of Alberta should be “next”. If anything, leftists here in Canada are worse, as they hold more institutional power.

I have no illusions about the evil we’re dealing with. I’ve seen it far too often, and I’ve been threatened myself. I’m long past the stage where I can be intimidated and, my goodness, do these leftists loose their s**t when someone stands up to them rather than bend the knee.

In the end, though, they are cowards. It takes a special kind of coward to do what was done to Charlie Kirk.

The Re-Farmer

Rescued! Also, I feel like an idiot.

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What. A. Day.

I had a pretty sleepless night, with concerns about our foundling kittens. I kept checking the critter cam and had to chase out the raccoon family and a couple of skunks. The foundlings were set up in the carrier that has a lid in the roof, in hopes the mother, or one of the creche mothers, would go in to them, but none did. One of my daughters and I fed them kitten soup with a syringe again. They were very hungry, but it was a very messy way to feed the kittens! A couple of them preferred to either lick the food off my hands, or “nurse” on my hand while my daughter carefully squirted the food next to their mouths. Before returning a kitten to the sun room, I made sure to wipe down their bellies and tried to stimulate their neither regions, like a mother grooming them, with a cloth to get them able to eliminate.

The first picture is the kittens, after we found them yesterday, and the second is where we found them. Not the clearly visible mower on the right. We had to move that one out completely to reach the second one, barely visible on the left. That’s the one they were under!

With a couple of kittens preferring to lick at the food, we also place a small shallow plate in the carrier with them, in case they wanted to eat again during the night. It was empty by morning, but that could have been some other cat jumping in with them and eating it. When we fed them this morning, we left the plate with some food in it with them, again.

Meanwhile, I reached out to a stray cat group chat I normally just lurk on. After talking to the Cat Lady, I am a bit leery of being active on there.

I explained about the kittens, and that we had come to the conclusion that the mother is no more. I was hoping someone knew of anyone able to foster the kittens, as there’s no way we could keep up with the care they needed. Even just feeding them every 2 hours was not something we could manage, and we aren’t even in a position to bring them into the house. I estimated them to be about 3 weeks old but, after looking at some photos, came to the conclusion that they are less than 3 weeks old. Not by much, but definitely not more than 3 weeks.

After some discussion, my morning plans changed. I needed to go into town to pick up some refills for one of my husband’s injections. It was suggested I try the local branch of the humane society, so I looked up their hours. They had some very strange hours, but they were open today, for two hours starting at 8am, then again for two hours starting at 5pm. I left in time to get there just a few minutes past 8am…

… only to find a hand written sign saying they were closed for the “rest of” the day. “Rest of?” They hadn’t even opened at all!

So much for that.

My next stop was at the vet clinic to see if they had any kitten formula. They did, so I picked up a tin. Talking to the staff as I bought it, I got the names of two other rescues to try.

That done, I had half an hour before the pharmacy opened, so I made a stop at the grocery store to pick up a breakfast I could eat in the truck while waiting for the pharmacy to open their doors. My husband’s refill was already prepared, so that didn’t take long at all, and I was soon on my way home.

Throughout all this, I was updating various people, including the Cat Lady, keeping them up to day. One of the people on the stray rescue group started messaging me privately. She was in the city and ran a small cat rescue, and she told me that, if I couldn’t get through to any of the other places recommended to me, to let her know, as she would take them. As we were talking, I explained why we were in no position to give the kittens the level of care they needed. In the end, she told me to please bring them to her! All she asked was for me to include the formula for them, which I was more than happy to do.

I had not been home for long when that decision was made. I mixed up a small amount of formula and was going to feed them, before we worked out when I’d be heading out. The kittens were sleeping peacefully, though, so we skipped it for the time being. The kittens, however, were a real mess! They looked like they had taken a bath in the now empty plate of kitten soup!

When the time came to leave, I quickly grabbed a puppy pad to put between the kittens and the now messy cat bed that I’d put on the bottom of the carrier for them, then headed out.

I had my phone set up on the dash board holder with Google Maps giving me directions to where I needed to go in the city. I was almost at my mother’s town when my cell phone started to ring. I recognized the name as the woman from the group that had given us huge amounts of donated cat food last year. I should have been able to answer the call hands free, but it just wouldn’t work. I finally had to pull over and tried to talk more directly into the phone, but it still wouldn’t work. I could sometimes hear here talking, but couldn’t even turn on the speaker phone to hear her properly. All I could tell is that she was starting to get angry because I was … using up her minutes? Her battery? Something like that.

It was the Google Maps app that was messing up the call. I finally figured out how to stop it from trying to give me directions, even after I’d closed the app, and could finally talk to her on the phone.

She had called to tell me, don’t give the kittens to this women.

???

I asked why, of course.

She is overwhelmed. She takes on too many cats. She keeps asking for food donations. She was asking for ear mite medication. She had some cats with really bad ear mites… Her heart is in the right place, but…

Funny. When I was going to meet up with her about the donated cat food, I’d gotten a warning about her, too, saying “her heart is in the right place, but…”. In her case, though, her actions have gotten the province involved and resulted in colony cats being killed rather than rescued. To have her now “warn” me about this other woman with a rescue that said she would take the kittens was… intersting.

She again basically ordered me to not give the cats to this woman. I finally told her, I’m pulled over on the highway, on the way to the city, right now. Do you have somewhere else I can take them, or what? Because we are not in any position to care for such small kittens.

Oh, you’re doing a good job already…

She was making assumptions based on what I had been telling the group about what we were doing with the kittens. I did not, of course, tell them about other stuff, like the various disabilities and other health issues we are dealing with in this household.

When it became clear that I was going to this woman’s place anyhow, she seemed to get pretty angry at me again. She then told me to scope her very small house myself when I got there, and to only believe a quarter of anything she told me.

I thanked her for the warning, and continued on my way.

Thankfully, getting to her place was pretty straightforward. After parking as close to the house as I could, I messaged to let her know I was there, and what I was driving.

Which is when I saw the messages in the group chat, where the woman that called me was telling the woman I was about to meet that she should not take the kittens because she already had too many cats and had an ear mite issue. Both claims that she responded by saying it was already dealt with.

Before I could even get out of the truck, she was coming over with a box to transfer the kittens into.

She told me that she had already been to a dollar store and back to get puppy pads and other such supplies in preparation for the kittens – and she mentioned the woman that had told me not to bring the kittens! I told her that I had just read the conversation about it, and that I’d gotten a phone call, too. It turned out that the ear mite situation had already been addressed, and she was just looking for more meds to have on hang, in case she got more cats with ear mites again. The other issues had already been dealt with.

From all I could see, everything was looking fine. I had zero issues over turning the kittens over to her.

That done, I was soon back on the road and headed home.

By the time I parked the truck, I had received messages and photos. The kittens have been bathed, toileted, fed and set on a warming pad.

Here are the before and after pictures; the second one was sent by the women who took them in.

I took the first picture through the door of the carrier, after they were loaded into the truck. What a mess! that cat bed turned out to be just covered in spilled kitten soup.

The second picture is after they got bathed and fed, and there is a warming pad under the blanket they are on. She got all that taken care of so quickly!

Meanwhile, I’d kept the Cat Lady up to date. Once home, I let her know about the kerfuffle on the group chat and being ordered not to give the kittens to this person. The Cat Lady knew both of them and was honest in saying she didn’t trust either of them! It seems the cat rescue community if filled with all sorts of such antagonism.

No wonder she’s getting out of rescue.

The kittens, however, are now rescued and will be well cared for!

I am now more convinced that their mother was Brussel, though I’ve gone from about 10% certainty to maybe 25% certainty.

Note I say “was”. Once again, Brussel did not show up at feeding time today. By now, I don’t expect to see her again.

I was talking to my brother this evening and mentioned to him that, if I didn’t go outside, looking for a data signal during the power outage yesterday, I would not have heard the kitten crying. With no mother around, they probably would not have lasted long at all, and we would never had known there were even kittens in that old shed.

Serendipity, to be sure!

Speaking of my brother…

Not long after I got home, I got a message from my SIL, letting me know they were on their way out! I was not expecting to see them this weekend, but I guess their grandson was already returned home, and now they’re here.

My brother had a bunch of things he wanted to check out, including their riding mower that I told him I feared I’d broken, because it wouldn’t move anymore, though everything seemed to be fine about it.

Before I even realized they were here, my brother had already taken it out and checked it.

Then he wanted to check on my mother’s car, but it’s been sitting so long, the battery was almost completely dead, so he had to charge it, first. We parked it after I tried using it, and it started making a very alarming banging noise when I tried to drive it. I turned around and came right home, and it hasn’t moved since.

It also had a flat. I’d found it with two flat tires during at the end of the first winter it was parked. I used the compressor to pump them up and the rear tire has been fine, since, but the front tire was flat by morning, every time I pumped it up. So I eventually stopped.

Then there was the compressor itself, which had started to trip the breaker every time we used it. When that happened, I would have to get a daughter to come over with a small step latter to climb onto the counter against the back wall of the garage, to reach the breaker panel and switch it back on.

Today was a scorcher and I’d intended to water the garden this morning, but with all the kitten stuff, that never got done. I went out to water it last this afternoon, while my brother was checking and fixing things, and my SIL was already mowing the rest of the outer yard with their zero turn mower (which I won’t touch!).

When to got to where I was taking the hose to water the East garden beds, I suddenly realized my mother’s car was in the yard, as my brother hosed off the accumulated gravel dust it was covered with. I went over to talk to him and learned:

… the riding mower that wouldn’t go? Worked fine for him. He got it up on a ramp and checked under it and he found zero damage.

… the compressor was working fine. He’d even used it last weekend, with no issues.

… the banging noise I heard from my mother’s car? He found zero damage. There was nothing to make the noise. After charging the battery enough to start the engine, and pumping up the tire, the car was running fine. He was driving it around the inner and outer yard, leaving the engine running to keep charging the battery. No banging noises. Not troubles at all. We just have to make sure it’s plugged in, for the trickle charger.

… I told him why I’d stopped pumping the front tire and said it would be flat in the morning. He said that yes, it will be!

So there’s all these things that went wrong for us, but as soon as my brother checked on them, it was all working fine.

I told him afterwards, I feel like an idiot now.

He told me, that’s just how it is with him. Even at his work, it’s the same thing, People have troubles with something, he comes over to try and fix it, and there’s nothing to fix. Things just start working again for him, all the time!

So it’s not just me… 😄

I still feel like an idiot. All this time, and we could have had access to my mother’s car.

Well.

Not really.

Now that we have the truck payments, we don’t have a budget to pay for the insurance on two vehicles anymore, not to mention the extra gas. The insurance for my mother’s car, however, is just suspended, not cancelled. If we need to, we could get it active again, even if for just a short time.

Not until that tire is replaced, though.

Which means that we will still be needing the courtesy vehicle while our truck’s box frame is being repaired and the new cover installed, at the end of September.

So we almost have a back up vehicle…

Meanwhile, not only did today turn out to be another 30C/86F day, but tomorrow is expected to be even hotter. Tomorrow, I will do what I intended to do today; water the garden early in the morning, then again in the evening. Today, I used the rain barrel to water the old kitchen garden. The poor eggplants were seriously drooping in the heat! That garden got ambient temperature water, and I drained the barrel as much as I could, watering, watering and watering again! I got the other garden areas done with the hose. I even did the fruit trees and berry bushes. Everything was just so, so dry.

We’ve got just a few more hot days, and then it’s supposed to drop right down, and I’ll likely have to cover the more sensitive plants in the garden at night, in less than a week!

As for right now, I am so very tired. Hopefully, I will get a good night’s sleep tonight, now that I’m not concerned about the foundling kittens!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: baby baked potatoes, and garden path progress

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While doing my rounds today, I noticed some really huge squash and pumpkin flowers were open. There was even one among the zucchini that I made sure to hand pollinate, since no male flowers were open.

In checking the winter squash, though, I had my first find of potential Baked Potato squash. Two little female flowers were finally forming.

Once those blossoms open, I will be sure to hand pollinate them, just to be on the safe side.

Not that it’s likely we’ll get anything from them. We’re well into the second half of August right now. These are shorter season varieties, but even if these female flowers get properly pollinated and start to grow, it’s unlikely we have enough season left for full maturity.

Once I was done my rounds, I grabbed the wheelbarrow and started bringing wood chips over to cover some garden paths. I forgot to get a “before” picture of the first one I started on, so I instead have a “half way done” picture.

That first picture is after three wheelbarrow loads. Some of the wood chips were also spread around the north ends of the two beds.

The second picture shows that path finished, including the ends of the two beds, with a total of five wheelbarrow loads. I especially wanted to make sure there was a thick, stamped down layer right up against the walls of the raised beds.

The only down side is that, while loading the wheelbarrow from the wood chip pile, I broke up an ant hill. Which means that, along with the wood chips, I also brought over a whole bunch of red ants and their eggs.

I’ll need to pick up some ant traps soon.

Once this was done, I headed inside for breakfast. By the time I came out again, it was just starting to almost, kinda, sorta rain. More of a misting than a rain. I was already soaked with sweat from the humidity, so I figured I may as well keep at it.

For the second path, I remembered to get a proper “before” picture.

For this one, I tried to load the wheelbarrow as much as I could, without losing woodchips along the way. It still took five loads, but I had enough to add to the ends, as well as more to put along the sides of the flower bed. That bed will get walls eventually, and the wood chips are where the walls would go, but that’s okay. As it is now, if I’m not careful while watering, the soil mound the flowers are planted in starts to erode, and the wood chips will reduce that.

The high raised bed already had its own ant colony in one corner, so I just added more ants… 🫤

Definitely need to get ant traps.

Here is how it looked from the north end.

Those bricks at the end of the flower bed were added because the cats were digging there to use the soil as a littler box.

The Cosmos are getting nice and tall, and looking really healthy! Hopefully, they aren’t shading out the memorial asters too much.

I did finally remove the hoops that were still over that section. I’d left them after removing the netting simply because they weren’t in the way of anything, and it was as good a place to store them as any.

Eventually, this end will have a more developed 4′ wide path, but that will happen after we get rid of those killer trees and build more beds to reclaim the space they’ve taken over. For now, I just need a narrower mulched path to keep the weeds down.

Once this was done, it had gone from misting to raining, so it was time to stop. This area won’t get more wood chips for a while, as I’m adding that after the raised beds on either side of a path are permanently framed with logs.

I did use up a decent chunk of the wood chip pile!

Not only was there a big ant nest in it, but poplar roots were working their way through it, too. It’s been there a few years, now. Where I’m standing to take the picture is how far it extended when the tree company we hired to get rid of the big branch pile for us dumped it there. This area is meant to be kept open, wide enough to drive through, if needed, so it’ll be good to use up that pile. We’ll need to go over with with the landscape rake when we’ve cleared as much as we can, just so we can mow over it without the lawnmower blades doing much crunching and munching, and potentially getting damaged.

The next areas I’ll be adding wood chips to are around the raised beds in the east yard, and around the newest food forest additions.

Which I might actually get some progress on, as it seems to have stopped raining. We’re getting into the hottest part of the day, though, so I might work on another project, instead.

I’m so enjoying finally getting some stuff done out there!

The Re-Farmer

The other side, plus adorableness

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After my last post and how little seemed to have been done after all that mowing, when I headed out again this evening, I just had to get pictures from the other side.

In the first photo, you can actually see how little there is left to clear.

It’s also the densest section, so it’s going to take probably just as long to clear that section as it did to clear everything around it.

The fruit trees and bushes by the leaky rain barrel look so much better, now that it’s been weed trimmed and mowed around. Not that you can even see them in the photo! Over time, they will get a wood chip mulch around them, too.

The next picture is taken from the other end of the silver buffaloberry rows, and near the end of the crab apple tree row. That section by the crab apple trees was part of the super dense area, but it is also some of the roughest and uneven soil. When this section was plowed – badly – before we moved out here, there seemed to be some issue with turning the tractor in that corner. This was done by our vandal to “help” my parents. My sister is sure he was drunk when he did it. From the state of things, even after all these years, I think she’s right.

At this end, we will be planting more fruit trees on the north side, around where the newest ones are planted now. Along the east side we will probably be planting raspberry varieties that mature at different rates, so we can have raspberries for many months, along with other berry bushes and some varieties of nuts that grow on bushes, rather than trees. There are few nut trees that can grow where we are, and they can get very large, so those will get planted in the outer yard, as we acquire them.

Aside from feeling better about things after seeing just how little is left to clear in that corner, I got to enjoy some adorableness. My daughters took care feeding the yard cats while I was mowing, so they were all pretty calm.

While walking past the isolation shelter, I spotted a kitten looking back at me. Then another from the hammock.

Then more heads popped up!

Altogether, I saw three in the hammock, plus two by the water bowl.

I was considering moving the catio closer to the garage for the garage babies, but it was occupied, so I left it for now.

In the next image in the slideshow above, I managed to get a picture of the absolutely gorgeous little black and white kitten I’d been wondering about earlier, and whether it was a newcomer. I have concluded that is it not a new one; just one that I’m finally able to see well enough to identify it.

Must socialize the babies – and find them forever homes!!!

While I was outside, I could hear some thunder. Some areas of our province was getting tornado warnings, but where we are. Instead, the rain that was supposed to arrive in the wee hours of the morning was expected to hit this evening, instead. Then that changed again, and now we’re supposed to get rain closer to midnight, and it is supposed to keep raining for about four hours.

The garden will love that!

The Re-Farmer

Little by little…

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… it’s getting done.

I headed out this afternoon to continue working on cleaning up the main garden area. I started off by doing some weed trimming first, as I knew I wouldn’t have the energy to do it after mowing the overgrown area. I wanted to get around the log framed raised beds, as they will be getting wood chips added to their paths soon. I also trimmed around the newest food forest additions.

Our corded weed trimmer died on us earlier this year, so my brother dug his battery operated weed trimmer out of storage for me to use. Thankfully, he has many batteries! I drained two of them and was working on a third before I finished. Along with the main garden area, I made sure to trim around the east yard garden beds, as well as some stumps, rocks and roots, so that they where no longer hidden. Hitting those with a lawn mower is not fun!

The trimming done, my focus was the overgrown area, starting with opening up the higher traffic area towards the fruit trees, where I run a hose through to the old leaky rain barrel. This meant setting the mower as high as it could go for a first run.

Here is how it was yesterday afternoon, before any mowing started.

I took that one before starting to mow around where new trellis tunnel beds will be built, without trying for the overgrown area yet. I got an in progress photo last night, and then again today, when I had to stop.

In the first photo, you can see I cleared away the logs and solarization plastic. The cardboard was left for now. It will be laid over where the next trellis bed will be built and, if there is enough, over some of the paths before the wood chips are laid down.

The next photo is almost depressing. It really doesn’t look like much was done! That is partly because the remaining tall grass hides what was mowed around the sliver buffalo berry area. It really is a huge space, too.

The gas can is next to the stump that was under the pile of logs, where a diseased crab apple tree had died and was removed. There’s another off frame to the left, but it’s almost low enough to mow over.

I didn’t even need to refill the gas tank before I had to stop. It was simply too hot and humid, and I was starting to feel like I was about to pass out. Definitely time to get in out of the sun and hydrate!

Once that last section of tall grass, poplar saplings, alfalfa, clover, stink weed and various other things gets cleared with the push mower, it will need to be done again at a lower setting – but at that point, we could use the riding mower. Carefully. I don’t want to break my brother’s riding mower in there!

Over time, this area will get at least five more low raised beds that will be paired off with trellis tunnels, for a total of six, including the current one we’re already using. We might go with one more pair after that, but we may not need to. We won’t be going all the way in that direction with garden beds, though, as we will be planting more food forest items out there, and I want to have a wider lane between the two areas, in case we need to drive through with a vehicle.

In the other direction, the existing beds will be framed with logs, plus the area that used to be our squash patch, which is also overgrown and needs to be mowed, will be worked on. Instead of more 18′ beds, though, sections of it will be made into perennial gardens, like the asparagus bed we started this year. We might also make wider blocks for planting things like corn, potatoes or even wheat, instead of the long and narrow beds we’ve got going right now. The area we first grew what we thought was kulli corn but was actually Montana Morado has some really good soil, compared to everywhere else in that area, so I would really like to reclaim it again.

In the longer term, after we get rid of that killer row of elms and maples along the north side of our garden beds, we will probably make more raised beds, right on top of where the trees are now. Partly to make sure there is no chance that they will grow back, partly to reclaim more garden space. When I was a kid, where those trees are now was part of my mother’s garden, and they are taking up a LOT of square footage that used to grow food!

A lot of clean up will be required before we can build anything there. For now, we’ve been tossing a lot of the rocks we’ve been picking out of the garden beds into where the trees are. Some of them are large enough that we’ll likely use them to weigh down row covers or the like. With how many rocks we grow every spring, we could probably collect enough to make some gabion structures. Along with the rocks, there’s also lots of Virginian Creeper and Creeping Charlie, among other things, that will need to be dealt with, too.

All in good time.

Little by little, it’s getting done.

The Re-Farmer

Okay, not recovered after all, and more kitties

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I did get some done.

My first priority was to mow around the chat shelters. Get that over with and give them time to calm down before it was time for the evening feeding.

Eyelet is SO deaf. He was sitting with his back to me on the sidewalk as I was mowing alongside it. Other cats ran off, but it wasn’t until he turned his head and actually saw me, having just stopped because he wasn’t moving, that he finally ran away from the mower.

For all the rain we had, only parts of that section of yard needed to be mowed, so I was done quickly and could move on to where I really wanted to get into.

This area.

My ultimate goal is to get all that overgrown area mowed, but not quite yet. First I had to move those logs that are meant to be vertical supports for future trellis beds. Then I cleared away where the plastic has been solarizing where the next trellis bed will be. Most of that was plastic I found while cleaning up after we moved in, and I think it was meant to be used under shingles. It’s seen a few years use already, so it was disintegrating. As a result, the area isn’t very solarized, but it’s a start. That cardboard on the side will be laid over it, eventually.

The solarized area got cleared out, but I left the cardboard for now. I started off mowing in between the existing beds, as I plan to add wood chips in a couple of paths soon. I’ll be going over that with a weed trimmer next.

From the paths, I started mowing the open area I’d cleared before, but only got a little more than half of it done. It wasn’t just because I was still feeling weak from being sick, though. That area gets the full brunt of the sun for many hours. We were expected to reach a high of 24C/75F today, but we hit 25C/77F while I was out there. I don’t know what the humidex was but as I write this, a couple of hours later, it has dropped to 23C/73F and the humidex is at 28C/82F. Which means the humidex probably broke 30C/86F while I was out there.

Not the sort of temperatures to be moving logs, cleaning things up and using a push mower while in full sun at the best of times, never mind while still recovering from illness.

In the end, I had to stop, get inside, cool off and hydrate. Later on, I did go out to feed the outside cats while my daughter put away the lawn mower and gas can, and then made a quick… I was going to say supper, but I guess it was really lunch.

Yeah, I probably should have eaten before I went outside, too. I just wasn’t feeling hungry!

After putting the mower away, my daughter came over to help with the cat feeding, and I showed her what I found in the isolation shelter.

Most of the time, when I come by and there are kittens in there, they run off in a panic. This one hunkered down and tried to make itself small, instead. Which a prefer, since that meant it could get to the food I’d just put in faster, and was already next to a full water bowl, with a lovely, soft cat bed in between. Later on, I saw it in the lower level, peaking out from between the two box nests that are down there.

As we made our way back to the house, my daughter spotted Adam, covered in kittens. I snuck around and managed to get some pictures.

A couple of kittens had run off by then, so the first couple of pictures have “only” three kittens nursing. I wasn’t able to catch them all, but there were kittens going in and out of that chimney flu in front of the cat house entrance – they use that to get under the “porch” side of the cat house. There were so many of them under there! No way to count, though. For all we could tell, with how much they were moving around, we were seeing the same ones over and over again.

Oh, and that handsome boy in the middle of the second last photo of the slide show is “Cat #1”. I was able to spot the tattoo in his ear, which makes him the kitten that we had neutered at the same time Kohl was spayed, all grown up now! He stays nearby and I’ve managed to sneak a pet every now and then, but he is not socialized.

He is such a beauty, though!

Anyhow.

I’m not done for the day, as far as outside stuff goes. I’ll try to rest up some more, and will try mowing again tomorrow, BEFORE it gets hot out! Tomorrow’s high is supposed to be 26C/79F. Mind you, even our overnight low is supposed to be 20C/68F, so it’s not like we’re really cooling down much. We’re also supposed to get about an hour of rain in the wee hours of the night. I’m not complaining, but it will make mowing that overgrown area more challenging, as well as cutting away all the poplars that are trying to take over.

Little by little, it’ll get done.

The Re-Farmer

Morning in the garden, afternoon kitties, and not a good day

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I’m having a rather bad day today – and I don’t know why!

But first, the good stuff.

In the first photo above, you can see our growing pumpkin now has a sling to support it on the trellis. Or, more accurately, to take the weight off the plastic trellis netting so it won’t snap. The weight is now being held by the vertical supports for the permanent trellis, plus I wrapped garden twist ties around the strand of the netting holding the most weight, to strengthen it and put some of that weight onto the horizontal support bar above.

The next picture is of the Hedou Tiny Bok Choy seeds I gathered. I keep getting that name wrong, but I looked up the old post from when I got them as free seeds with an order from Baker Creek, back in 2022, for our 2023 garden.

The seeds in the container are actually from today’s pods I gathered, plus some I gathered earlier, as the pods dried out earlier. We will have plenty of seeds to plant this fall, for next year.

The funny thing is, we’ve never actually grown any of this variety of bok choy. The first year I tried them, they were in the bed by the chain link fence, before we know how destructive those Chinese elm seeds were. The entire bed was completely choked out. Yet, a couple of little bok choy survived and promptly bolted. All of two plants. I left them be and collected the seeds. They got planted last fall, in the “greens” mix of seeds planted in the old kitchen garden.

The problem was, the mix was scatter planted and things were pretty crowded out. I never saw the bok choy until the bolted – again, just a couple of plants – sending their flower stalks up through the mass of kohlrabi leaves. They were able to get much bigger, even being crowded out as they were, and I had a lot more pods to collect once they dried up. The pods were so dry, they started snapping open in my fingers as I tried to collect them. Most of the seeds ended up in my hand, but I’m sure a few ended up on the soil. I finally broke off the flower stalk lower down and brought the whole thing inside. For now, the seeds are in the cooler living room, with the container open to make sure they are completely dry.

When I do the winter sowing this fall, it will be a lot more organizes and planned, know that I know how the different things worked out. These tiny bok choi will be planted where they won’t be hidden or crowded out by other plants, and with protection from cats. Hopefully, next year, we’ll actually be able to harvest some and find out what they taste like!

There might still be some stalks of pods hidden under the kohlrabi leaves, but I definitely got most of them. While looking around, I did a bit of weeding and suddenly realized I was looking at a whole lot of new sprouts that were NOT weeds.

We left more spinach to go to seed than we need, and some of them got so leggy and spread out when they bolted, I pulled them like weeds, and just dropped them as mulch. Well, it looks like those seeds continued to develop, even after the plants were pulled!

We’ll be having an unintended fall spinach crop!

I was really struggling this morning, though. I couldn’t sleep for some reason, and after I did finally sleep, I woke up (was awakened) with this simmering undertone of anger, and it just hasn’t gone away. It didn’t get better after I had breakfast, so I tried for a nap.

It didn’t get better after a nap.

So I’ve asked the girls to take over on various things, but the outside jobs I could have done today, aren’t getting done. My head space is so messed up right now, I can’t even think of which project I would be working on. On top of it all, even though I just bought more kibble during the Walmart trip, it was just one 9kg bag for the inside cats, and another for the outside cats, and we’re already running low. I need to go to the feed store and pick up a couple more 40 pound bags, if I want to last until the first stock up trip at the end of August. I’m in no shape to do it today, but I will have to do it tomorrow.

Weather forecast is now saying we’re going to have more rain tomorrow morning. Maybe. The weather app on my phone was saying thunderstorms starting in the wee hours and ending by late morning. Now, it says no rain at all. The app on my desktop says we’ll get a bit of rain in the late morning, then again in the evening. We’re also supposed to get a lot hotter. It’s going to be topsy turvy temperatures for the next while. Last night, the forecasted low was 10C/50F. We ended up dropping to 8C/46F, instead. I actually got cold last night, and when I did my rounds, I wore a sweater for the first time in months. While not cold enough to need to cover things, anything below 10C/50F is not good for our garden, when everything is so far behind.

Anyhow.

I did head out to do the evening cat feeding earlier than usual as I wanted to make sure the littles hiding under the counter shelf could have a chance to eat without the bigger cats pushing them around. I’ve only seen one or two at a time, so I still don’t know how many are under there. For all I know, one of the moms has moved some of them.

After putting the food out, I did a head count of adult cats.

Five.

Yup. Just five! Not twenty five or thirty five. Just five

Of course, there were a lot more in the morning, but I haven’t been able to do a head count. They move around too much.

I did get a couple of pictures this afternoon, though.

Eyelet couldn’t hear the sound of the food being added to the trays and stayed in his comfy bed, making it easy to get his picture. Syndol REALLY wanted me to be paying attention to him instead of Eyelet, though!

As I write this, I have the critter cam live feed up. I can see one little kitten – the one I found in the garage, and later rescued from following other cats around the yard – running around. I saw a skunk earlier and my husband went to try and check it out, but it went under the counter shelf, instead.

Not as fast as usual, though! It would have come face first with however many kittens are under there.

They seem to have made peace, though, as the skunk’s tail is no longer visible, and he’s all the way under.

*sigh*

I’ve accomplished pretty much nothing today, and I feel like I got hit by a truck. Not pain wise. That’s been so much better since I started the anti-inflammatories. Some of it is just a general malaise. My chronic cough hasn’t been very frequent for some time, but today it’s hitting me again. I’m not coughing a lot, but when I do, it’s bad enough that my old daughter was calling down from upstairs, asking if I was okay – and she was wearing headphones while she worked! My cough is like my throat is being torn up. I spent more than 10 years in two provinces going to different specialists to find the cause of my cough, and none was found, and I finally gave up. Nothing drives a doctor more insane than being a short, fat woman that every test shows as being extremely healthy, other than physical damage, like the OA and bone spurs. Aside from not having the laundry list of fat-people ailments they think I should have, they can’t find the cause of my respiratory issues. After test after normal test, they start looking at me sideways, and thinking I’m making it up. With my new doctor, I haven’t even brought it up. She knows it’s an issue, and it’s all in my file, but I see no point in asking for more tests again. I just live with it.

Still, it’s not my cough that’s causing me issues today. I know part of it is the cats and their destructiveness, which is what woke me up this morning. We just have too many cats in the house, and chances of adoption these days has basically dropped from slim to none. I don’t blame the Cat Lady for getting out of rescue, that’s for sure.

I think that might have something to do with that underlying anger I’m feeling today. I think maybe it’s just caught up to me. We do the best we can, but there are limits, and we’ve passed ours, long ago. I can’t even reach out to the stray and feral rescue group I’ve been following; people are very quick to make assumptions and get nasty. You’d think rescues would be a whole lot of people actually interested in rescuing cats and finding homes for them, not virtue signaling, one upping each other or reporting people to the province to “help”.

Oh, I need to stop. That underlying feeling of anger is bubbling up.

I think I’m really starting to burn out.

The Re-Farmer.

Our 2025 Garden: Finally!

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Yes!!! Finally! Our first Turkish Orange eggplants are forming!

These were damaged quite a bit by that one cold night was had, shortly after they were transplanted. It set them back and, while I saw them blooming, I was beginning to think there would be no eggplants forming at all.

Today, while watering, I finally spotted some! In fact, in the space of a couple of days, there are now more eggplants forming that there are of the peppers, in the same bed. There are still only three peppers forming among the 9 plants. Just one eggplant has more than that forming!

Now, the question is… do we have enough season left for them? Normally, these would have 80 days to maturity from transplant. We have barely 30 days of growing season left before average first frost. I’m still going by Sept 10 as our average first frost date, even though the 30 year adjusted averages that just came out now says our average first frost dates are between Sept. 21 and 24. If I look at the monthly forecasts in my desktop weather app, we might not get frost until the second half of October. Since moving out here, we have had everything from a blizzard in October to first frost in November. So really, there’s no way to be sure. With how badly our transplants and spring sowing have been, in general, I’m really hoping for a long, mild fall. If that does happen again, we might actually have stuff to harvest and preserve for the winter. With the way things are going right now, we have just a few things we can harvest every couple of days, to supplement a meal or two.

While watering this evening, I am actually noticing some growth. I might be imaging things, but even the red noodle beans seem to be looking a bit greener, and a bit bigger. The Giant Fordhook chard I planted as a fall crop, where the Royal Burgundy bush beans failed, are still just barely there, but they are getting bigger! The winter squash are blooming – no female flowers, though – and I even spotted a couple of tiny zucchini forming! I don’t know if they got pollinated before the blossoms closed up. They weren’t open when I did my rounds this morning, or I would have hand pollinated them. The pumpkin vines are doing well. Two of them are quite a bit ahead of the others, and the female flower on one that I hand pollinated is now a growing pumpkin. I’m training that one up the trellis, so we’ll need to make a hammock to support the weight of the pumpkin. When the trellis is finished, it will be built to hold the weight of winter squash of all kinds, but we’re not there yet!

It isn’t a lot, but I’m pretty excited about any progress we get right now!

The Re-Farmer

Our 2025 Garden: still kicking! Plus, bonus kittens and insane prices

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First, the cuteness!

When I went out this morning to feed the yard cats, I had an adorable little surprise. Fluffy Colby was with some other cats INSIDE the sun room! I found the other three kittens around the cat shelters and they did run off, but Colby stayed close.

When it was time to bring out the kitten soup bowls, I found him sharing a tray with Havarti. He ran off a bit when I put the kitten soup bowl down, but he was soon back, sharing with with his cousin.

I want to pet that kitten so much!!

The garage kittens, sadly, still won’t come closer.

Today, my plan was to focus on finally giving the garden, and the food forest additions, a deep watering. Particularly since tomorrow will be hotter again, and I will be doing my Costco shop in the city. Tomorrow is supposed to reach 25C/77F. Today reached a comparatively cool high of 23C/73F. I didn’t need to go anywhere today, so I hoped to get some progress outside.

Well, of course, that changed.

My husband called in refills for his injections, so a trip to the pharmacy was in order. Of course, I combined errands as much as possible, grabbing our big water bottles to refill at the grocery store after getting the meds. Then, since I was there anyhow, I checked out the sales and picked up a few things.

There were also a few things I did NOT pick up.

Like Necterines.

$5.49/lb, or $12.10/kg

*gasp*

*choke*

Nectarines always tended to be more expensive, but they still were usually under $2/lb in season.

The next image is of a beef tomahawk steak. This is a cut I almost never see. I know people on carnivore that prize these as having an excellent protein to fat ratio. I just can’t imaging spending $84.95 ($55.09/kg) for about 3 pounds of bone-in meat (1kg=2.2lbs) that would be just one meal. Sure, that might be enough for the entire day on carnivore, but… yikes!

I did pick up a family pack of stew meat, though, which was in the $20 range.

Once back at home, I was soon outside doing the watering. When I got to the high raised bed, though, I also did some harvesting. In this bed, I had left one Purple Prince turnip to go to seed. Which it did.

Then the deer at the seed stalk.

So, I harvested the turnip.

Look at the size of that thing!

It’s probably past its best stage for eating, but it wasn’t regrowing a new seed stalk, so I figured it was harvest it, or it would start rotting.

In the next photo, you can find the fuzzy friend I found on one of the leaves. I broke off that section of leaf and set it aside, so as not to disturb the caterpillar. I have no idea what type of caterpillar it is. Hopefully, not something I will regret saving!

In the last image, you can see the turnip with the Uzbek golden carrots I also harvested. I was careful to pull the biggest ones. I’m leaving the smaller ones to give them a change to get bigger, instead of just harvesting the entire bed as I was considering doing. I found a single orange Napoli carrot large enough to harvest. I see hints of orange on some of the other carrots, but for the most part, it’s the Uzbek Golden carrots that have been growing. The Napoli carrot seeds were a couple of years older, and I finished off the last of what was left in the packet. I didn’t expect many of those to germinate.

For all the garden struggles this year, things are still kicking! In both winter sown beds, the radish seed stalks that the deer ate are trying to recover.

They’re blooming again, and sending out more leaves in some of them.

While watering the Spoon tomatoes, I noticed something. When they were being transplanted, I pruned off the bottom leaves before planting them inside the protective collars. One transplant had a larger branch that I pruned off. It was so nice and strong, I decided to just stick it into the ground between two other tomatoes and giving it a chance to grow.

It’s still tiny but, as you can see in the next image above, it’s producing tomatoes!!! The entire plant is maybe 8 inches high, if that. Just one little branch, and it’s producing!

As for those Royal Burgundy beans in front of the Spoon tomatoes – the whole three plants that emerged – one of them has a tiny bean starting to grow! I didn’t get a picture, but one of the yellow Custard beans planted with the tomatoes in the East yard had a whole bunch of tiny bean pods forming. It’s really late in the season, but we might actually have beans to harvest before summer is over!

Even the sugar snap peas are trying to make a come back! Some of them are dying back – they are well past their season – but after the deer munched away at them, some of the plants are pushing out new growth, and blooming! I’ve got one Super Sugar Snap pea plant that I’m leaving (and the deer have left alone) to fully mature so I can save the seeds, but it looks like we might have a few more fresh pods to enjoy, too.

If the deer don’t get to them, first!

It’s encouraging to see some signs of the garden trying to recover and grow. The tiny summer squash are getting a bit bigger, and blooming, though still just male flowers. The winter squash seem to be recovering a bit, too, and some are blooming. The melons are still tiny, but some of them are blooming. The pumpkins are doing quite well, and one of them even has a female flower bud showing!

Whether or not any of this will have time to recover, grow and produce before our season runs out is questionable. With some things, unlikely. Looking at the monthly forecast, it’s possible we’ll have all of September with no frost, though we would probably still need to cover things on colder nights. August, at least, looks like it’ll stay pretty warm. Of course, such long term forecasts are completely unreliable. I’m still going to assume our average Sept. 10 first frost date.

After finished up in the garden and bring the little harvest in, I used some of the carrots, onions from last year – yes, we still have a few! – and an entire head of fresh garlic in a beef and barley dish for my husband and I. The girls hate barley, but my husband and I love it, so they get to make their own supper using some of the fresh fish I picked up for them, yesterday. There will be enough of the beef and barely for my husband to have tomorrow, as well, while I am in the city. My younger daughter is having some PCOS issues right now, so she won’t be able to come with me this time. Which is fine; I don’t actually need the help, but I do like her company. I’ve been doing so much better myself, since I’ve been on the anti-inflammatories, I’ve actually been able to handle these outings better, too. I’m only taking them at the end of the day, instead of twice a day, before with my last meal before bed. I can take them up to 3 times a day, as needed. I just haven’t needed to take that many!

I haven’t taken any pain killers at all since I started on the anti-inflammatories. I do still have pain. Particularly if I lie on my left hip for too long, and I still have issues with my injured left arm. The pain, however is now more specific, and really not all that bad. Nothing worth taking more meds over. I should probably take some painkillers before I leave for the city, though, since I’ll be doing a lot of walking on concrete, and these shopping trips really take a lot out of me.

Morning in the garden

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Today is going to be a killer.

It never cooled down much during the night, so none of us got much sleep. We are now expected to reach a high of 30C/86F, with a humidex of 38C/100F While nothing much reached us, a massive storm blew in from the US across the south of our province, with alerts telling people to seek shelter.

As I write this, it’s 26C/79F, which is only slightly hotter than it was while I was watering the garden this morning. Humidex puts us at 30C/86F right now.

About all I can say for now it, at least it’s not windy like it was last night. I’m happy to say that we did not lose any trees. At least not anywhere that I could see.

My morning, of course, started off with feeding the yard cats. With the expected heat, I set frozen water bottles in the water bowls, too. I’ll change them out for fresh ones, later in the day.

I saw little Colby running around and playing in the grass.

In the second photo above, you can see his sisters still eating. I didn’t see the white and grey one anywhere, though. I hope it’s all right.

After doing my rounds, I gave the garden beds a deep watering, which ended up taking about 2 hours, maybe longer. I didn’t even make it to the trees. The heat and humidity was already getting to me. They still need to be done, though. I’ll have to go out again, later.

Meanwhile, I’m happy to say that some of our corn finally has tassels!

Only in the bed with the Arikara squash, where they are bigger than the ones in the corn bed. No sign of cobs, though.

When doing the watering, I often see lots of frogs jumping out from under the mulches and hopping away. Usually, they are the greyish, brownish wood frogs. Sometimes I’ll see some tiny copper or emerald ones.

Today, I got to see this beauty.

Apparently, this is a Pacific tree frog! Which is strange, because we are nowhere near their range. The other possibility is the common tree frog, but from the images I’m finding, that’s not it.

Well, whatever kind of frog it is, I am happy to see it!

Today is looking to be a day of staying out of the heat as much as possible. None of us tolerate heat very well, it seems!

The Re-Farmer