Finally, I am home for the day and can start the tomato sauce. We have tomatoes all over the place, and I gathered all the ripest Roma VF, leaving the Black Beauty and Indigo Blue, for now.
It was enough to fill a kitchen sink.
After going over numerous recipes for roasted tomato sauce, I decided on how I would make these.
I have 3 roasting pans and can fit them all in the oven together.
To start, the bottoms got a generous splash of olive oil. I then took advantage of this and used the smaller onions and garlic. I finished off an entire small braid of onions, which gave me the equivalent of maybe 2 large onions. 😁 I also smashed and peeled cloves from about a dozen small garlic bulbs. That gave me the equivalent of about 2 large bulbs.
I wasn’t too concerned about the proportions in each roasting pan. They will all go into one pot, later. That’s when I will be adding fresh herbs and seasonings.
The down side of using the smallest bulbs is that it took a really long time standing at the counter, prepping them.
My back is killing me, and I took painkillers before I started.
So I am taking a break now.
Next step is to trim and deseed the tomatoes. That’s going to be another long time, standing at the counter!
I plan on leaving the skins, though, as I will be using the immersion blender as a final step.
As for the black tomatoes, once the sauce is done in the oven, I think I will slice the ripest ones and dehydrate them. As much as I can fit on baking pans, at least. There are more Romas ripening, so there will likely be more sauce or paste to make, later.
I noticed the leaves on the Roma VF were looking like they got a fungus. I don’t know if it’s tomato blight or something else, but they needed to be pulled.
I started by picking the ripe and almost ripe tomatoes first, then my daughter and I picked the green and mostly green tomatoes and pulled up the bamboo stakes. Then she pulled the diseased plants, while I picked ripe Black Beauty and Indigo Blue tomatoes.
The green and almost green Roma are currently on the screens under the old market tent, while the ripe and almost ripe went into a box for indoors. These corrugated plastic boxes are very handy, but they have air circulation holes on the bottom and sides that are a bit big for some of the tomatoes, so I lined the bottom with carboard egg trays to keep them from falling out.
The Roma tomato plants will be allowed to dry out and will get burned with our paper garbage. That might be a while, since we are actually getting rain today! I’m even hearing a bit of thunder.
We now have a whole lot of very ripe tomatoes ready for processing. I’ll be doing more tomato sauce, first. I’m thinking of dehydrating some in the oven, late, and preserving some of the dried tomato in olive oil.
I’m still looking at recipes for making tomato sauce using roasted tomatoes and figuring out how I want to do them. I want to use as few cooking vessels as I can get away with, so there’s less to wash up! 😄
I’m heading to my mother’s this afternoon, then taking her to a medical appointment, so I thought I would bring some things from our garden to her.
I picked the potatoes from under just one Irish Cobbler plant, which had a pretty decent amount of larger potatoes. There were also small ones, so I just buried them and the plant roots again. There’s a few orange carrots, a zucchini we harvested earlier, some Roma and Indigo Blue tomatoes and a Sweet Chocolate bell pepper. While cutting some thyme, I noticed a shallot that got missed, so I grabbed that, then added a couple more we’d harvested earlier. I also cut some spearmint for her. I decided to add one of the Black Beauty tomatoes we harvested earlier, too. The softest one I could find among the lot. After bagging it up, I remembered to grab a head of garlic for her, too.
My mother being my mother, I expect to get a lot of snarky comments and backhanded insults. 😄 She’ll have issues with the brown pepper and different coloured tomatoes. She did ask me to give her some of the tomatoes to try, but then launched into a long speech about how bad it is to have not-red coloured tomatoes. And, of course, she’ll tell me how my sister brought her soooooo much from her garden, and it’s so much better, and she’s just one person, so it’s all too much, and how bad it was for me to bring more.
My mother is very predictable. 😁
But I’m giving them to her anyways. Who knows. She might actually show appreciation for a change. 😄
We did have one really nice, ripe Indigo Blue Chocolate tomato for my daughter to taste test. I’d picked three and put them in my pocket so I could use both hands. One was so ripe, it split when I bent over, so it needed to be eaten right away.
My daughter found them absolutely delicious. Nice and sweet. Juicy, but not too juicy, with a rich tomato flavour. We have others harvested that will need to be eaten quickly, and I don’t think that’s going to be a problem at all! 😄
The Indigo Blues are an indeterminate tomato, so I can expect to be able to harvest small amounts of them more often, from now one. The Romas are starting to ripen in mass quantities, so I might just wait on processing the ones we’ve picked, so we can do larger quantities all at once.
On another note completely, we did try to use the new bread machine yesterday.
Something went wrong, but I don’t know what.
I came into the kitchen to check on it, and it was off. There was still power to it – the display was showing the exact settings I started with for a basic 1.5lb loaf. It should have been showing a count down on the time. It just wasn’t running. The bread dough had been completely kneaded and was just sitting and rising the pan, so I left it. Later on, my older daughter took the dough out and baked it in the oven, so we now have one, perfect little loaf in bread jail to try.
Hmmm… I wonder. We keep our bread in a bin – bread jail – to protect it from the cats. I wonder if maybe a cat stepped on the controls while we were not around, and shut it off? We’ve set the bread machine up on the counter near the microwave, where it could be plugged into an outlet on a different breaker, and plenty of space around it for when it’s hot and baking. It’s the one counter the cats are allowed on, as they like to sit and look out the window.
That’s about the only thing I can think of, other than mechanical failure.
My daughter plans to try again, later, so we’ll see!
Who knows. I might come home to some fresh bread to try. :-)
I headed outside to check on things just a little while ago. The winds are quite severe right now, and I was eyeballing some of the trees, wondering which one was going to come down, next! At least the wind is blowing in a direction where they would fall away from the house, not towards it.
After picking up a few fallen branches – not many – I checked on the garden.
The trellised tomatoes definitely needed some help! Even a few of the Romas needed to get extra support. The big surprise with them is how many of the almost ripe tomatoes I’d left behind were now ready to pick! I hadn’t planned on that and ended up using the bottom of my shirt to hold them all.
I had to add more support to a number of Indigo Blues and Black Beauties, plus adding structural support to the Black Beauty trellis. With the wind direction going through the garden, the plant laden trellises were acting like sails!
These are all the tomatoes that were picked today, including from this morning. On the left are the Black Beauties, including a broken branch I found, with a couple of tomatoes on it. I just looked up how to tell when Black Beauties are ripe, and I can’t say it helped much. From the photos and video I saw, the are supposed to get more red on the bottom. Other articles said they get completely dark. As you can see, one is completely purple on the bottom. The colour is photo sensitive, so the parts that get the most sunlight are the darkest. The ones with bright green on the bottom are at least clearly not-ripe. The information I found also said they should start to be soft and slightly squishy. They are all rock hard! Which means even the all purple one is not ripe.
I think.
They are now laid out on a screen in the cat free zone and will hopefully continue to ripen. The Roma VF tomatoes don’t need more time, but they will be fine like this until we find a sauce recipe we want to try. The Indigo Blues, for the most part, should be ready for fresh eating now.
I think.
On a completely different note, our new bread machine has been cleaned and set up, and we just need to wait for a couple of ingredient to reach room temperature before we start our first basic loaf. I’m quite looking forward to it!
Meanwhile, I’m going to start looking up some basic, refrigerator tomato sauce recipes now!
This morning, I had the largest harvest out of the garden for this year, and it was almost all tomatoes!
There are a couple of handfuls of green and yellow beans under all that.
I wasn’t sure about the Indigo Blue tomatoes, and how to tell if they were ready. Last night, I was reading about an almost identical Indigo type tomato (honestly, I think it was the same tomato with a slightly different name, because it was from a different company than where I got these), and it mentioned the bottoms getting very red when they ripened. We had some that have been red on the bottoms for a while now, so I decided to pick them. I’m glad I did, because they were starting to split!
As for the Romas, I picked the ripest looking ones, including the one I found had fallen off on its own. Some might have been good with a bit more time on the vine, but I wanted to get the weight off the vines. These are very prolific! According to my daughters, they’re not very good for fresh eating, though. There are enough to make some tomato sauce or something along those lines. Probably not enough to make it worth breaking out the canner, so likely just for the fridge and immediate use.
After finishing my morning rounds, I headed out to do some errands. My first stop was the post office; my husband had ordered a new exercise ball, now that we have a cat free zone to store it in, in between uses. Then I gassed up before heading to the nearest Canadian Tire and Walmart stores. It started to rain while I was heading to the gas station, but while driving to the next city, it cleared up – though it was still hazy from all the smoke! I was amazed all that rain wasn’t enough to get rid of the smoke. In the time it took me to get home, though, the winds have picked up and are now blowing from the south, so the smoke is being blown away from us, instead of towards us. I can finally flip the fan in my window to blow air in, instead of out!
[Update: Well, I’m confused. We’ve got 3 weather warnings right now. Two for wind, one for smoke. According to the weather maps, the winds are coming from the north/northwest. But as I drove home, the car was being buffeted from the south side of the road. As I look at the security camera live feed, I’m seeing trees being blown around, and it looks like it’s from the south. I look out my window, and it looks like they’re being blown from the west. So I guess things are swirling around a lot! I’ll be looking for downed trees and branches, when this is over.]
At the Canadian Tire, I was after pellets for the litter boxes. They keep them in the vestibule by the exit, and I saw the hardwood pellets, but when I was ready to pay for a couple of bags, I was asked if I wanted hard or soft wood. The hardwood pellets had gone up in price awhile ago, so I got the softwood pellets.
Then I picked up the bags on the way out and realized the price on those had gone up, and they now cost more than the hardwood pellets. It’s only a difference of 50¢ a bag, but I’ll have to remember that. I do wish Walmart had them in stock more regularly, because they’re almost $3 per bag cheaper.
While at the Cdn Tire, I went looking for puppy pads, but the ones they had were far more expensive. I did, however, find some carpet powder designed for cat or dog mess cleanup. I’d run out of that awhile ago, but couldn’t find any the last time I was in the city. I also found the fire bricks I’ve been slowly stocking up on. The last time I was at a Canadian Tire, it was a different location, and I couldn’t find them, nor even the section they would have been in. The lady I asked didn’t even understand what I was asking about, and assumed they were a seasonal item. I’ve been buying the bricks in groups of four. By the time we will need them when building our outdoor kitchen, I hope to have enough to spare for other projects.
I found the puppy pads I needed at Walmart. Things seem to have improved in that respect. I’m no longer finding giant turds under my desk. Just giant pee spots. It seems Two Toes has figured out the litter boxes for at least one job! I came home to no mess at all, so maybe she’s figured it out for the other job. Thankfully, the kittens seem to have all figured out the litter boxes. Finally! Still, I was almost out of puppy pads already. I need at least 4 of them to protect the space. Two folded in half, and partway up the wall, and two fully open, layered on top and covering extra carpet. I’m also using pet odour eliminators and, now that I have it again, the carpet powder to dissuade cats from the area.
After talking it over with the family, we decided it was worth it to dip into savings a bit and pick up a new “toy” for the kitchen.
I got a bread making machine.
These were our choices.
The box on the right, with the white background, is a larger machine and has two different size Express settings, while the other, with the blue, has one Express setting, but also a yogurt setting. We’re more likely to be making yogurt than Express bread, which needs both bread flour and fast acting yeast. I did get fast acting yeast, but we never buy bread flour.
I believe the one on the right was a Hamilton Beach brand. It was $10 cheaper. I went with the blue boxed Oster brand for one simple reason: the other brand had only one box on the shelf, and it was bashed up. The outer packaging of the Oster brand didn’t list what its 12 functions were, so I couldn’t use those to decide. I didn’t see the list until I opened the box at home and read the instruction manual.
We’ve considered getting a bread machine for some time. With the summer heat, it’s really unpleasant to be kneading dough during the day, then the baking heats up the house even more, so my daughter would stay up all night, baking bread. All of us are also broken, one way or another, and it’s been getting increasingly painful to knead dough. So we’ve been buying most of our bread. With this, we can put everything in the machine and have fresh baked bread by morning, without wrecking anyone’s back or knees, and without heating the house up. Plus, if we want, we can set it to just make the dough during the night, then take it out and bake it in the oven in the morning. A friend of mine does that and says it really improves the taste and texture that way.
The only thing we’ll have to be careful of is, where to set it up and plug it in. As it is now, we can’t run the AC and the kettle at the same time, without tripping a breaker! The kettle is on a power bar, but the AC has to be plugged directly into the outlet.
That’s one way to find out that particular outlet is on the same breaker as the dining room outlets – plus the living room ceiling light and the kitchen’s range hood!
Hopefully, we’ll be able to get it set up and bake our first loaf of bread tonight. 😊
Just a wee one, but big enough that I didn’t have room in my pocket for the patty pan. I’m going to have to start bringing out my harvest colander, just in case!
Also, it is SO much more comfortable to harvest bush beans in a high raised bed. Even in the low raised bed we grew some in last year, while much better than harvesting at ground level, it was still painful. The high raised bed is just awesome!
Not a bad first bean harvest, considering the plants got eaten by a deer. Especially the green beans. They’ve still got a lot more recovery, but I’m seeing so many developing pods in the process! I did pick some beans a couple of days ago; just a tiny handful, and not enough to call a “harvest”, really. Plus there have been a few early Romas ripening every few days or so. I picked one of the two larger G Star patty pans, leaving the other to get larger, while still more are developing.
While checking the garden, I found more blooming female squash flowers to hand pollinate. It looks like we’ve got a few squash that have pollinated successfully. Here are some of them.
Goldy yellow zucchini. I’m happy to see that large one developing, as there were no male flowers on the plant. I hand pollinated from a hulless pumpkin that was blooming, and it seems to have taken!
G Star patty pan. These are easily the most successful plants we have. I picked one of the larger squash, choosing the slightly misshapen on, leaving the other to get bigger. There are many more developing.
Georgia Candy Roaster. Another one that got hand pollinated from another variety.
Sunburst patty pans. The one surviving plant is looking strong and healthy now, and starting to bloom.
Pink Banana. The first, tiny female flower! I’ll have to keep an eye on it, to make sure it gets pollinated as soon as it opens.
Honeyboat Delicata. There’s still just the one, even though we have the most plants of these. It seems to be doing all right.
Red Kuri. We have a couple of these, one on each plant. Previously, we grew these on trellises. It should be interesting to see how they do, without climbing.
Endeavor zucchini. One sad green zucchini plant is finally looking stronger and healthier, and starting to produce female flowers.
There are others, but I didn’t take pictures of everything. The entire squash patch looks SO much better than last year. The slugs may have done a number on the summer squash, but now they seem to be leaving them alone.
July is almost gone, though. We’re really going to need a long, mild fall for the winter squash to reach full maturity.
I’ll have to remember to take photos, but I’m wondering if I’ve miss labelled the little patch with the African Drum gourds and Zucca melons. While transplanting, there were three labelled Drum gourd, three labelled Zucca melon, and three where I could no longer reach the label, so it could be one or the other. These got planted and replanted when starting the seeds.
Right now, we are seeing female flowers in the drum gourd row that I’ve been hand pollinating. As they get bigger and start dropping down, I’m seeing that they are developing a sort of hourglass shape.
Kinda like this shape, except tiny, and fuzzy.
That is an image of mature zucca melon, from the Baker Creek website.
This is the Baker Creek image for the African drum gourd. The developing gourds we have do not look like that.
If I accidentally mislabelled things, does that mean the other plants, which have no female flowers yet, are the drum gourds? Or are they all zucca, and no drums? The flowers and leaves for all the gourds we’ve grown look very similar. Even compared to the attempted apple and canteen gourds from last year. The plants on the chain link fence were the surviving first seed starts; one of each, and I know those were labelled correctly. They are blooming, but the vines are so long and skinny, and there are only male flowers, so there isn’t much to help identify there.
Well, I did get some sleep last night! The kittens did tackle me, but I almost slept through it. I really, really have to watch myself, though. I leaned forward in bed this morning, and something moved. Turned out I had a kitten curled up right against my belly!
My daughter, unfortunately, did not get any sleep at all last night. Big Rig would not leave her alone! So she was up and about early to find Leyendecker for his morning medications. As I was getting up to help her, I realized I was hearing pouring rain over the sound of my fan! We were not supposed to get rain today. That’s why I watered the garden yesterday!
My daughter went on to feed the outside cats while I supervised Leyendecker, trying to get him to eat his new food. The first time my daughter gave it to him, he ate it hungrily. Now, he won’t eat it at all. We’re not sure what’s going on. Even when he’s around the main food bowls, which we now keep empty between feedings, he hasn’t even really been looking for more food. It’s likely the medications are causing him to loose his appetite, but I don’t remember it happening when he was on them before.
Since it was pouring so hard out, I went back to bed. My sense of time is now completely messed up! I went out to do my “morning” rounds a little while ago, but it was about 3pm. It still feels like morning.
Anyhow, here are some of my finds of the day!
When I saw Octomom heading for the kibble house, I checked on her babies. Usually, they’re asleep when she leaves, but not today!
It took me watching this a couple of times, counting and recounting, before I finally spotted the eighth kitten, under the two black ones! 😄
While finishing my rounds, I spotted the kittens in the junk pile with their mama.
Looks like it’s just the 2 of them, and they’re starting to go further afield! I expect we’ll soon be seeing them eating in the bowl under the shrine. 😊
I managed to get a picture of the tuxedo with the messed up eye. This photo is cropped closer, to see it better.
I’m really surprised. That eye is clearing up really well! The inner eyelid is swollen like crazy, but I was sure he was going to lose that eye completely. I am happy to say, it looks like I was wrong!
Meanwhile, I had a first in the (very well watered!) garden today!
Our very first ripe Roma tomato! It picked itself. This was the first tomato to show up, so no surprise it ripened first. I reached out to touch it and it fell off the vine into my hand!
The next picture is of ripening Indigo Blue Chocolate tomatoes. Now I can see where the “chocolate” part of the name came from!
I didn’t get a picture, but I saw a female Crespo squash in full flower, and I made sure to hand pollinate it. In the photos above, you can see the female African Drum gourd flowers are getting larger. The male flowers have been blooming consistently, so I expect to be able to pollinate those by hand when they finally open.
The last picture is of the G-Star patty pans, and we’ve got a switch on that one! The female flowers are blooming, but the male flowers just buds right now. Which means those lovely looking squash are not going to develop fully. There aren’t even any other summer squash blossoms I could use to pollinate with. I suppose I could try using a winter squash blossom, but I don’t know if they are similar enough for that to work. The G-Star plants are doing very well, though, so I expect we’ll have both male and female flowers blossoming at the same time, fairly soon.
I’m thinking it might be time to harvest the garlic. I want to give the bulbs time to get nice and big – we have so few of them this year – but the stems are drying out, which means they probably won’t get much bigger than they are now. That will free up an entire bed for something else, if we harvest those soon.
In the wattle weave bed, I transplanted 4 different early peppers, just in case we didn’t get a chance to transplant more in the grow bags. When watering last night, it looked like one of them has suddenly died. I could not find a reason why, but it’s wilting away. Nothing else around it is affected. There is no insect damage that I can find. It even looks strong around the stem and roots. I hope it perks up, but I don’t think it will. Everything else in that bed is doing well. Even the chamomile is starting to bloom. That first luffa we planted in there is getting so big, it has started to climb the lilac above it, and clusters of flower buds are starting to appear.
My sense of time is not just messed up about today, where I feel like it’s so much earlier in the day. I also get that sense, in reverse, when tending the garden. “Spring” arrived so early this year, it feels like we’re heading into fall, when we’ve still got half the summer to go. I keep thinking I should be harvesting things from the garden regularly by now. I’ve looked back at photos I took in July over the last two years to get some comparison, and we weren’t harvesting much at all at this time. When we grew melons successfully, 2 years ago, we had baseball sized fruits developing at this time. This year’s melons germinated so late, they’re just starting to bloom right now, and just male flowers so far. Some of the corn was behind what we have now, while others ahead. No surprise the summer squash was ahead compared to this year, since this year we have barely any and did direct sowing instead of transplants. I’m glad I took so many photos. It helps me get a sense of what to expect now, more or less, based on how things did in past years. Taking into account that 2 years ago was a drought year with heat waves (which the melons loved!) and last year a lot of things were lost to flooding in the spring.
I guess I feel better after looking at the photos from previous years. Some things, I can’t quite figure out why there is a significant different between them and this year. Others, it’s pretty obvious!
At least we’re not having to deal with groundhogs eating everything again! They seem to have moved on and are staying away, and I’m quite happy with that!
Now we just have to worry about racoons! Especially when it comes to the corn.
The first Roma VF tomatoes that showed up are now starting to change colour from green to yellowish and now kinda orange.
I still am not sure how we’ll be able to tell when the Black Beauty and Indigo Blue Chocolates are ready to pick. They practically started out at the colours they’re supposed to be, when ripe. I guess it’ll come down to how soft they feel, and how easily they come off the vine. The very first Black Beauty tomato that showed up is getting quite large, so that’s another thing to use as a guide, I guess.
We also have squash and gourds developing – I hope!
The G-Star patty pan squash are looking big and healthy – the slugs don’t seem to like them! Here, the first flower buds are forming, with both male and females forming at the same time! With everything else, we’ve just been seeing male flowers. There is one exception. We have one yellow zucchini plant that the slugs seem to just love, but it’s surviving. There is a single female flower bud, with a bright yellow baby squash under the flower, but the male flower buds are just barely emerging. It’s unlikely the female flower will have any male flowers to pollinate it when it finally opens.
The second photo is of our very first female African Drum gourd flower bud!
I was not expecting it to be fuzzy.
A few other winter squash are also starting to show female flower buds, including the Crespo squash. Hopefully, the buds will actually reach the blooming stage. With the Crespo squash in particular, the only ones that showed up before now, dried up and fell off long before they got big enough to start blooming. They sure have a lot of male flowers, though! More than any other squash that has started blooming.
It was thundering and threatening rain while I was checking the garden beds, but I went ahead and made a first harvest, before heading in.
I dug around and gathered our first Irish Cobbler potatoes. These are from under 2 plants. There were still tiny potatoes among the roots, so I left the plants in the ground to hopefully keep growing.
I just picked enough for one meal. We’ll leave the rest to fully mature before we pick them again; there just aren’t that many plants, so the longer we leave them be, hopefully the better the harvest in the fall. We’ll likely try the Red Thumb potatoes too, but with the Purple Peruvian growing in feed bags, we’ll probably not bother with those. We’ve grown them before, anyhow, so we know what they taste like.
We had quite a lot of rain last night. Enough to refill the barrel by the sunroom to overflowing! With all the thunder I was hearing while checking the garden, I didn’t start any outdoor jobs. Instead, a daughter and I went into town to refill some water jugs and pick up a few things, including kitten kibble. I ran out of that last night. The storm I was hearing passed us by, though, so we should be able to get at least one of those frames done this evening.
For all that our garden ended up much smaller than intended for this year, I’m happy with how things have been turning out.
Yesterday was hot, and today is supposed to be a hotter, so I made sure to give the garden a thorough watering last night. I think it really appreciated it!
The mock orange next to the laundry platform is just exploding with flowers. Even the smaller one against the east side of the house that I keep forgetting to water is starting to bloom (we really need to move both of them!).
I found a few surprises this morning.
We have ripening strawberries. The ones in the photo look like they had some pollination issues, but it looks like all the plants are producing.
The big surprise was finding Roma tomatoes! They’re not the first to start blooming, and where the third variety to be transplanted, so for them to be the first to have developing tomatoes was very unexpected.
Some, but not all, of the resown green beans have germinated. Even some of the summer squash have started to germinate. With the winter squash, while transplanting Jiffy pellets with sprouts in them, I also transplanted the pellets that didn’t germinate. At least one of those has sprouted with big, strong seed leaves emerging. All of the squash seem to be recovering from transplant shock, little by little.
There was one transplant I did not expect to survive. There was a squash of some sort that sprouted in the wattle weave garden bed, between a bell pepper and some shallots. I did not plant it there, and it would have to go, since a squash plant there would completely envelop the shallots and peppers. So I transplanted it to an open space next to the pink rose bush, where we grew leftover lettuce seeds last year. As I tried to gently dig up the squash plant, I discovered that it was far, far deeper than I expected. I’m guessing the seed came with the garden soil, which has compost in the mix. When I pulled it up, it was basically all long, buried stem, but I did see a hint of a root just under what had been the soil level, so I transplanted it anyway. When I saw it the next day, drooping on the ground, I figured it didn’t survive, but included it when watering, anyway. This morning, it was looking perked up and much stronger! So it might actually survive, and we’ll find out what kind of squash it is.
I also got a harvest this morning! We don’t have a lot of garlic this year, and one variety is a soft neck garlic, so even fewer will develop scapes. I’d noticed scapes starting to show up recently, so it was a surprise to see they were ready to harvest, this morning! I picked almost all of them. There are a few remaining that should be ready tomorrow or the day after. Then they will be done.
Next year, we have to make sure to plant a lot more hard neck garlic, and protect the bed over the winter more thoroughly.
In other things, when I came out with the cat food this morning, I saw Caramel out and about, looking very hungry. She even let me pet her, though I think that was more because she wanted food. I dropped a handful of kibble at the opening where she had her kittens. It wasn’t long before she eating it, and was back under the cat house. I could hear the squeaking of kittens. She may have let me pet her while she was on the cat house roof, but when I tried to use my phone again to look under the cat house, she was back to growling!
There was one unpleasant surprise this morning, though. When I got to the kibble house with food, I found blood all over the place! On the floor, in the empty trays, and even against the walls in a couple of places! I’ve seen blood around before. The cats do fight pretty violently at times. Never this much, though. While doing my rounds, I kept an eye out for an injured cat, but saw nothing. Not even blood on the grass to show me where an injured cat might have gone. I’m assuming it was from a cat, though it’s possible it came from a racoon. Definitely not a skunk, since there was no smell.
The weird part is, no one heard any fighting last night. My daughters have a window facing that way that is kept open all night. My older daughter was working all night, as usual, and she didn’t hear a thing. My husband’s window is closer, but between the fans and his CPAP, he would only hear something if he’s up and about already. It would take a lot of noise outside to wake him from all the white noise he’s got going around him, inside.
It is a mystery.
The kittens inside are getting more active. In fact, I found one crawling around on the floor! I don’t want to risk stepping on one during the night while going to the bathroom or something, so with the help of a daughter, we move the cat cave, with the whole family inside, into baby jail. One of my daughter has put strips of carboard around the bottom few inches, so if any of the kittens get out of the cat cave, they won’t be able to get through the cage openings. They’re still small enough to squeeze through!
So far, they seem to be okay with the new arrangement.
It’s barely 3:30pm right now, and I could easily call it a day and go to bed right now!
I tried to get out early to beat the heat, but by 7:30, it was already feeling hot and muggy. The humidity is very high, and the uncut grass is covered with dew. Which means that, when the outside cats come over for breakfast, they tend to be completely soaked!
Like this bedraggled beast.
Decimous is so matted and full of burrs! Today, however, for the very first time, I got to give him ear and neck skritches – and he let me! He even started purring. He wasn’t sure about the situation, but he did let me reach out to give skritches – not pets – a few times. His fur is so full of lumps, burrs and mats, I’m sure petting him would be somewhat painful.
I was even able to confirm something.
He is a she.
Yup. Decimous is female.
She doesn’t look pregnant, though. I’m trying to think of how we can catch her and bring her inside, so we can lavish her with love (and wet cat food) and socialize her enough to get those mats cut out of her fur!! The problem, of course, is we already have too many cats in the house. I’d have to bring her into my room and have her in baby jail for a while. That is Marlee’s favourite hangout, though, and Marlee typically isn’t too keen on other cats.
We’ll figure it out.
My priority for this morning was to get as many of the Roma VF tomatoes transplanted in the last available bed as I could.
I focused on getting the largest ones in, first. I didn’t want to do three rows, since it’s harder to reach the middle, but … well, it is what it is. I’m sure I planted them closer together htan they should be. I staggered the rows to use the space more efficiently, and was able to get 41 transplants in It took a couple of hours. I didn’t have time to transplant tomatoes around the perimeter of the bed, nor mulch it right away. My daughter shredded more of our collected fliers and other garden safe paper while I was doing this, and brought out a couple of bags. As I write this, I honestly don’t know if she was able to get back outside to lay the shredded paper around the tomatoes. After that, they’d just need to be dampened, because the tomatoes were deeply watered while being transplanted.
Speaking of which…
These are the mystery squash that showed up with two of the tomatoes. I’d reused seed starting soil from pots where things did not germinate at all, and somehow missed that there were still viable seeds as I pulled out the sticks and rocks I was finding in the mix. We’ll see if they survive. If they do, I’ll find somewhere to plant them, after we get more beds ready. Right now, aside from a couple of scattered spots, we have nowhere left to put any transplants – including the more than 20 Spoon tomatoes, none of which are out, and another 20 or so leftover Romas!
So much work to do!
Today is our average last frost date, but in some places, we’re breaking 30 year heat records. I took some garden tour videos yesterday that I’ll put together and upload later. Lots of heat warnings and warnings for thunderstorms, with possible hail, etc.
The question is, will any of that rain reach us?
Once the transplants were in, I headed out early to my mother’s, stopping to pick up some Chinese food, which was my breakfast. Previously, my mother has started to say not to get rice, because rice makes her cough. She said to get her just lemon chicken. Unfortunately, the timing was off, and I was at her place on the one day of the week they closed. Then she mentioned some of her neighbours would get just onion rings from the restaurant; they have a small North American menu along with Chinese food menu. After that, she started saying she wanted onions rings. So today, I picked up both lemon chicken and onion rings for her, and a combination platter for me.
When I arrived with the food, she was first taken aback that I came early, but I told her I’d been working in the garden, and hadn’t and breakfast. I came early so we could eat together. Then she chastised me for not calling her first, because she’d had a large breakfast (she later mentioned what she had, and it was not a large breakfast. Just not typical breakfast fare). I hadn’t planned to do this, though, so calling ahead was not an option. After I set out the food, setting hers aside on the table while I sat down with my breakfast, she started nibbling on the onion rings anyway, then suddenly demanded to know why I got the lemon chicken, too, instead of just the onion rings. I reminded her that she’d talked about wanting lemon chicken in the past, and she didn’t have to eat it all at once if she didn’t want to . She then started talking about how it’s a “temptation” for her, and if there’s food in the fridge, she eats it…
…
I’m pretty sure that’s what food in the fridge is meant for.
I think she was trying to say that she had little self control when it came to food, but had a hard time coming up with the words for it!
After I’d eaten, and she nibbled, I suggested we head out earlier. She didn’t seem to want to go out and procrastinated. It wasn’t until we were in the car and on the road that she mentioned that, next time, she would give me a list and let me do her errands for here. Her knees are increasingly giving her grief. There’s one errand I can’t do, though, and that is to go the bank for her.
So we got her errands done and her groceries put away. She wanted me to take a couple of trees home with me, along with her vegetable peelings and a plant she’s decided is blocking her window too much (it isn’t).
I did have a bit of a surprise while checking on her air conditioner, next to her plant table. For some reason, it was set to go off at 26C, which is just way too hot. I lowered that, and it turned on and starting cooling things down, but for some reason, I was also feeling heat.
Yes, her heat was also on!
I checked her thermostat.
It was set to about 26C.
So she was heating and cooling her apoartment at the same time.
I turned that right down for her!
I didn’t take any plants from her, because I didn’t want them baking in the car while I did my own errands after I finished with hers. I had to ask her where the trees came from. Basically, she’s got a little maple and an elm in the pot together, and it looked odd. Turns out she’d found them in the few feet of garden space where she has some garlic growing – pretty much the only “gardening” she does right now – so she decided they should go to the farm and stuck them in a pot.
*sigh*
She has also been gathering linden seeds and is trying to get them to grow. She’s got at least a dozen that I could see, scattered at the top of a pot of soil. Something else she has in pots and plans to send to the farm.
This from the person that was laughing at me when I showed her pictures of the garden, because I had some herbs in a pot.
Somehow, my mother has got it in her head that, because the trees around her building drop seeds, she MUST gather then, give them to me to grow, or start growing them herself, so the trees can go to the farm, because they are “free”.
I’m getting a better understanding of why we have so many problem trees right now.
Also, we have GOT to get rid of the Chinese elms. There are millions of seeds drifting everywhere, and every bit of bare soil where I’ve planted seeds or transplanted something is getting filled with them. They have very deep tap roots, even as tiny seedlings, and are so hard to get rid of! There are other elms here that don’t do this, and they’re just fine, but the few Chinese elms are just horrible to deal with!
A job for another time, though.
Anyhow.
Even though my mother basically abandoned the farm a decade ago, she still wants to control what happens here, including giving me trees to plant that are basically weeds out of her own garden space.
She brought up when we can bring her out to the farm to see things – she still has seen only photos of the new roof. I told her that, weather willing, my brother and his wife are hoping to come out this weekend with their lawn mowing equipment to do the lawns. Right now, she wouldn’t be able to get through the grass with her walker! After that, we’ll see.
Once done at my mother’s, one of my errands was to go to the egg lady’s place. While driving out there, I went through several sections of driving rain! It was so good to see! There were a few times I was sure the car was being hit with hail. It wasn’t raining at the egg lady’s homestead, though, and they sure could have used some! She just finished processing 40 chickens, and was dying in the heat!
My next errand was back at my mother’s town, and I drove into rain again. It was awesome! The temperatures dropped about 10 degrees almost instantly, from 31C/88F (“feels like” 34C/93F!), to 20C/68F. It was still coming down so hard when I was ready to come home, I sent a message to let the family know it might be slow driving. And it was.
For a little while.
Then I drove out of the rain, and the closer I got t home, the drier it got.
As of this writing, we still have had no real rain at all. There might have been a few drips here and there, but nothing more.
*sigh*
Looks like our climate bubble is back in action.
We’ll see how things turn out. If it stays dry and keeps cooling down with the wind, I might be able to get more weed trimming done. I need to focus around the garden beds, and where we need to build up the squash patch and where the permanent trellis beds will be built.
Meanwhile, my poor daughter has been busting her butt, cleaning the kitchen and trying to catch up on the dishes, in this heat!
I think I need to shut down my computer, though. It’s starting to act up in the heat. It’s a good thing I know how to touch type, because I’ve been typing entire paragraphs, without anything actually showing up on the screen for almost a minute.
So if there are a lot of typoes or strange sentences in this post, it’s because I’m typing blind right now!
The Re-Farmer 