squash

Let’s give this a try

/ Re-Farmer / 9 Comments

While my daughters and I were in the city, my darling husband finally got through to our internet provider and had a little chat with them.

We had internet soon after.

The problem is still not solved, though. It’s just a make-do until a tech comes out to check the secondary account’s satellite disk.

When they first brought this up with my husband, they said it would cost us $125, just to have someone come out.

By the time he was done with them, that fee was waived!

Also, we are back to using our primary account for now, and we will NOT be charged double the price per gig. However, anything we do use is that much more on our bill, so we will be rationing our data for a lot of things.

While we do have a signal with this dish, it is not the same as it was, before all these problems started, just a few days ago. Data transfer speeds are insanely slow, and it can take several attempts just to get a web page to load. WordPress has always been troublesome, but it took me about 8 minutes just to get the editor loaded so I could write this post!

Still, it should mean I can catch up on posts with images. I always resize the images into smaller file sizes, so they don’t take up much data. The following photos all uploaded faster than I could get the editor to load!

So these go back a couple of days. :-)

In the last while, we have been regularly putting the kittens and Beep Beep in the basement for the night, then my husband is usually the one who opens the door for them in the mornings. So we still have cat food both upstairs and down.

The cats, of course, always act as though they’re starving, even though there’s plenty of food in the upstairs bowls. What they’re really begging for is wet cat food, and they get that only once a day. The dry kibble is always available.

Since the adults cats now go into the basement regularly, they’re also going for the kittens’ food bowls, so I added larger tin, so that the kittens could still get at some.

Just look at those buggers! They’re crowing around the smaller containers, like they haven’t eaten in a week!

We have been mixing kitten kibble in with the adult kibble. I think the adult cats like the kitten kibble better! :-D

While I was tending to the kitties that day, it was also the day to check the temperature and humidity in the root cellar. While there, I noticed something I had forgotten about.

The two bottles of our most recent batch of mead!

We were supposed to taste test a bottle after different lengths of time. One of them was supposed to be opened up on my birthday. I completely forgot about it!

At some point, I’ll grab one and bring it up for a taste test. :-)

While checking the garden plots, I discovered something unfortunate.

All three beds of beets had quite a lot of their greens missing. It seems we had a deer visiting! She especially seemed to like this Baldor variety.

In the squash bed, I had a more pleasant surprise.

The largest squash plants that I thought were green zucchini turned out to be…

… sunburst squash!

From the number of buds we’re seeing, it looks like we’ll have quite a lot of them over the summer, too. :-)

I had one last surprise that morning.

While checking the usual spots for fallen branches, I went by the fire pit, which hasn’t been used in over a year. I noticed the skunks had been digging in the dirt, right beside it, and something in the dirt caught my eye.

That white you see?

That’s a glazed brick. One of the many we have all over the place.

Looking around at other spots the skunks had dug up, I saw signs of more.

The fire pit has a ring of bricks around it, completely buried.

It must have taken years for them to be covered by that much soil!

With no fire bans right now, we can actually use our fire pit, and uncovering the bricks will be a good thing to get done, too.

I am really looking forward to being able to do cook outs again!

The Re-Farmer

Storms done, and pretty things

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Yesterday was a day where the weather lurched from pouring rain to brilliant sunshine! Things had cleared up enough that I even turned my computer back on again for a while. The weather radar looked like we would be getting rain, but the more severe parts of the system would miss us, again.

Then, part way through a phone call, I began to see the lightning. It didn’t take long for the sky to turn completely black. Off went the computer, and I’m glad I did. Not only did we loose internet a couple of times (something we now expect, whenever the weather gets wild), but the power flickered out enough to shut everything down. Thankfully, not enough for my husband to notice his CPAP had stopped!

We were supposed to go into town this morning, so he could get some blood work and an ECG done. Unfortunately, pain had him up at 2am, and by the time I was getting ready to do my rounds, he was more than ready to try and sleep again, having completely forgotten about the tests, and couldn’t remember if fasting was required (it wasn’t; these tests are for the cardio clinic). Normally, blood work is just a drop in, but with an ECG as well, we’ll double check to see what has changed with the pandemic restrictions. Not that it’s an issue where we are. Our province never got hit hard, and there haven’t been any new cases of the virus in over a week.

Without that trip into town, I got to spend more doing my rounds, while the temperatures were cooler. On Sunday, I’d watered the garden plots with a fertilizer attachment, and yesterday morning, the squashes were looking noticeably less yellow!

These ones in particular are much bigger than the others.

Since the transplants got all mixed up when the trays got knocked over, I don’t know what type of squash these actually are, but I’m pretty sure these are green zucchini from the summer squash mix (which had 3 types of zucchini in it), only because I remember my mother’s zucchini from when I was a kid. But then, I have no idea if the other types of zucchini in the mix look any different, so really, it could be any of them. They are definitely not the patti pan squash, though. I’ve grown those in a balcony garden, and remember their leaves never got that big.

I don’t think I’m going to bother with trellising this bed at all, either. I might still do the long row in the back, if only because they are closer to the row of trees. This year is my learning year, so I’m willing to change plans and use the results to make decisions next year.

Some of my mother’s flowers are still coming up, in between the apple and chokecherry trees at the sound end of the area we put the squash beds in.

This butterfly was just sitting there, kindly letting me get a picture. :-)

While checking on the various plots, I find myself kind of torn. On the one hand, things seem to be coming up well enough. Granted, some of the squash will probably never reach full potential, between the lateness of planting and damage from that one last frost, but others look like they are doing well. Then I read from people talking about how they are already seeing little squashes starting to form in their gardens. The carrots, beets and parsley are growing well (only 3 khol rabbi sprouts survived), and we’ll be able to use the plants we thin out in salads and such. Then I talk to my mother, and she mentioned how my sister has been bringing her fresh vegetables. I have no idea what she would have in her garden that’s ready to harvest already! Lettuces and spinach, maybe, but my mother never refers to those as vegetables. So is my garden doing well, for our region, or not? I didn’t plant things that late, for this area, and my sister is in the same climate zone we are in.

Oh, dear. I was just informed by husband that our washing mashing stopped working. The breaker has not been tripped, and there is no obvious reason why it stopped.

So let me just quickly share these fun photos with you, and then I have to see what I can figure out is going on with our washing machine!!

The Re-Farmer

The next steps

/ Re-Farmer / 6 Comments

After our incident with the kitchen pipe, yesterday, I headed into town as early as I could. Of my morning rounds, the only thing I took the time to do before I left was to make sure the outside cats had food.

There is an employee at the hardware store that I was very happy to see. Quite a few times now, I’ve been able to get help from him that went above and beyond. For all the times I’ve talked to him, he’s becoming aware of the state of the house we’re in, so he makes the effort to ask extra questions and give extra information.

This morning, I told him about what happened last night (I am extra glad I bought that box fan yesterday, because that was set up last night to dry the floor under the sink!), then showed him a piece that had come off my daughter had given me, just in case there were other types and sizes.

He’s never seen that part broken off like that before!

So he went over the different types of flexible pipes available, and I ended up getting a pair of 24 inch ones with built in shut off valves. We’ll just go ahead and replace them for both taps. He then asked if we had copper pipes, which we do, so he brought me over to a display sample in another aisle that had copper pipe in it, describing to me how to cut off the end, while popping the display piece apart to show me how it should look after abrading it…

Cut off the end. Of course, we have no cutter!

He found one for me.

Once I had the necessary bits and pieces, I picked up some other things my daughter put on the list for me – some of it are for the next time something like this happens! :-D

The down side is having to go into our contingency fund, to pay for all this. :-( But at least we have one!

Now, it’s up to my more able bodied girls to do the installation! They’re just going to wait until everyone is done using the water for a while, before shutting water for the whole house down again.

Once home again, I finished my rounds outside which, today, included using more of that anti-wasp stuff. I’d found a wasp nest in a corner of the house. We’d found one there last year, too. I’d hosed it away, and I thought they were gone, but last night I hosed it one more time, just in case.

Wasps started coming out again.

Somewhere in there is a crack, and I think they’re getting into the roof above the old kitchen.

When I checked it this morning, there was no sign of wasps, and no sign that the nest was being rebuilt, but that’s what I saw last night. I sprayed it anyway. Sure enough, wasps started falling out of… somewhere.

Thankfully, this stuff will contact kill, so any wasps that are somewhere in the crack would not be able to get out without coming in contact with the spray. I made sure not to use up the whole can so that, if I need to, I can spray again. At least a little.

Of course, in my rounds, I checked on the garden plots.

More squash are blooming. :-)

The size difference between some of these plants is rather remarkable! Some are still so tiny. I don’t know how much of that is due to the different types of squash, or to any health problems or weather damage. The first squash bed has just a few survivors, struggling to grow. This is the one that got frost damaged, even though we covered them for the night. The rest were all transplanted at the same time, so it’s more likely the differences there are due to type, not damage.

It should be interesting to see what we get out of these.

The Re-Farmer

After a wild and crazy night!

/ Re-Farmer / 2 Comments

It was shortly after 1 am and, as I was lying awake in bed, something I was seeing finally soaked through my heat-numbed brain.

Lights.

Flashing lights, out my north facing window.

The sky was lighting up, over and over, hardly a break in between! Constant flashes of lightning.

My West facing window was open, but I heard nothing. No thunder. No rain. Hardly even wind.

But the flashes kept going.

After a while, I went to the main entry and watched the storm coming in through the outer door, before finally moving to the sun room.

Creamsicle and Potato Beetle were very thrilled to see me, and just begging for pets and cuddles!

While standing at the mostly-closed outer door, I heard a distinct crunching noise. Using the flashlight on my phone, I took a peak through the gap behind the garbage can, and could just see the tip of a skunk’s nose!

He waddled away, pausing to scream for a while, soon after.

Skunks make the strangest noise!

One of my daughters came down after hearing me go through the old kitchen, but with Creamsicle and Potato Beetle at the door into the sun room, she decided to go out through the main entrance.

After making sure we were clear of skunk.

We stood outside for a while, watching the sky.

Time and again, the entire yard was lit up bright as day!

Then it started to rain, so we went into the sun room. After a while, my daughter went back into the house, through the main entry, making sure to prop a sawhorse in front of the outer door (we still haven’t been able to finish fixing the frame on that!), to keep it from blowing open, while still being open enough for the cats to come in for shelter.

I remained in the sun room, watching the storm through the outer door, when my other daughter came to join me. She was just telling me about how she had checked the weather radar, and the main part of the storm looked like it was passing us by, but we were still getting warnings for hail… when the hail started!

Then the wind pulled open the outer door, sending the saw horse flying. Even though I was inside, I immediately started getting hit with rain, so I quickly closed up the inner door, and continued watching through the window on that.

The video is much MUCH darker than it actually was outside.

Creamsicle was very happy to be inside the sun room, with me! He kept trying to get my attention while I took photos and video so, after a while, I put the phone away and just cuddled him. He was in heaven, giving me all kinds of hugs and kisses!

Then Potato Beetle got in on the action, and soon I was holding both of them, and watching the storm!

The storm passed by rather quickly, and I was soon able to get the outer door set up with the saw horse to keep it from blowing open again, then went inside. Once inside, a quick check on Facebook found I was not the only one up at almost 2am, posting about the storm!

One of the pages I follow is a local weather group, and they posted an image showing the hundreds of places lightning was detected on the weather radar. The storm itself, amazingly, split just before reaching us. Most of it passed by to the North, and a tiny bit passed us by to the South. What we got was the less severe gap in the middle.

Wow.

So when I headed out to do my morning rounds today, I did a more thorough check for fallen branches and see what other storm damage there might be. There was quite a lot branches to pick up. Only two were live branches, though. The rest were already dead. The elm tree in front of our kitchen window lost so many tiny dead twigs, I didn’t even try to pick them up. I’d need a rake to get them all.

I was happy to note that there was no substantial hail damage to any of the garden plots. I did, however, have a wonderful surprise in the squash.

Two of them have suddenly bloomed! These were not there yesterday, and I really was not expecting to see flowers while the plants are still so small.

These are in the second, larger bed that was transplanted later, and they are doing much much better than the others. The long row in the back that was planted at the same time is doing all right, but not as well as the wider bed. The first bed I’d planted, that got frost damage in spite of our covering them first, is still struggling.

Of the three pumpkin mounds, one of the ones that had a packet of 3 seeds planted in it, now has a second seedling sprouting. The mound that had the packet of 5 seeds planted it in has a first seedling just starting to break ground now.

This late in the season, the only way we’ll get ripe pumpkins, I think, is if we have a late and long, mild fall.

Which could happen. We’ll see.

The surviving first planting of sunflowers have also made a very noticeable increase in growth.

No hail damage on anything planted in the old garden area. No deer damage, either.

It wasn’t until I was almost done my rounds that I found the one tree that fell during the storm.

It’s one of the dead trees I need to clean out, anyway, so this actually saves me some work! :-D

With the heat wave, our weekly checking of the root cellar has provided useful information already. With the possibility of building a cheese cave in there, a few years from now, we are looking for a temperature range of between 7C – 12C (45F – 55F) and a humidity level in the 85-95% range, though some types of cheese require different temperatures. As of this morning, the root cellar was at 17C/62F, and the humidity was at 88%. It was the same last week, too. So for most types of cheeses, it would be too warm. It also is not as consistent as it should be. There is an air vent that goes straight outside, with nothing but window screen mesh to keep the bugs out, at the end. I’d tried partially blocking it, but enough of a wind gets through that it blows out whatever is used. It might be worthwhile to add some sort of vent covering that can be opened and closed to help keep the temperatures from fluctuating too much.

Meanwhile, the heat wave continues. We’re already at 29C/84F (“feels like” 33C/91F), with a predicted high of 31C/87F (humidex: 36C/96F). Heat alerts remain. At least the high water and flood alerts have stopped for now, though we have more thunderstorms predicted overnight, so that might change.

Heat or no heat, we have really got to get the counter moved out, so we can put in the new stove. With the old stove, we’d already stopped using one of the elements, due to sparking when it was turned on or off. The girls, who have taken to cooking and eating at night rather than during the day, have noticed other elements have started to spark, too.

It’s going to be dreadful, and take hours to accomplish, but it has to be done.

Installing the stove itself will be the easy part. Juggling the dining table, chairs, shelves, the contents of the counter, and the counter itself, while still leaving room for the old stove to be pulled out, and the new stove to be moved in, is the hard part.

The Re-Farmer

Morning roundup, and I’m a tree!

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After the heat we’ve had for the past while, it actually got remarkably chilly last night.

It was great!

I had some concern about how it got for the kittens, but the basement is pretty good at remaining a constant temperature.

This morning, I took one of the long boxes that held pieces of my new bed frame and lay it out on the floor for the kittens to play in.

They just loved it!

Leyendecker, however, got distracted by something that was apparently much more interesting.

Me.

He climbed me like a tree! All the way up to my head, where he began to tackle my ear and try to eat my hair.

What a silly boy!

The outside cats were eagerly awaiting me when I got outside. Their food bowls had been completely cleaned out. By them, or other animals, I’m not sure.

Butterscotch allowed my daughter to check her out yesterday, and it seems she is pregnant again. Considering how it went when we tried to bring her in before, that is just not something we can do again.

I’m happy to say that, when both Butterscotch and Creamsicle joined me while checking out my mother’s flowers, there was NO fighting, at all.

When checking out the squash beds, I’d found a pleasant little surprise.

Some pumpkins are sprouting!

These two hills had 3 seeds each planted in them. The other one had 5 seeds in the package, but so far, none have sprouted.

Most of the more recently transplanted squash are noticeably growing bigger, though they have also gotten pretty yellow. One of the possible reasons I’ve seen is a lack of iron. Which means we likely should supplement the soil with bloodmeal. I just haven’t been able to find any!

More potatoes are starting to show up through the straw mulch. When mowing last night, I moved out the wooden frames that were around the beds. They are no longer needed, and taking them out makes it easier to mow around the beds. I don’t know if I’ll be able to finish the mowing today; we might be getting showers this afternoon.

This evening, we’re planning to get all wild and crazy. Father’s Day and my daughter’s birthday fall on the same day this year. Knowing how busy things are likely to be on Sunday, we’ve decided to celebrate today. Our favorite Chinese restaurant is open again, so we’re planning on ordering a whole lot of take-out!

It’s going to be such a treat!! :-D

The Re-Farmer

Garden progress: finally!!

/ Re-Farmer / 5 Comments

Yes!!!

It’s finally done!

Everything we started from seed has finally been transplanted.

At least, everything that sprouted…

These are all the pellets that didn’t sprout. The tray in the background was the squashes tray. I’d say most of those empty pellets are the gourds. The ones in the foreground are mostly fennel, with maybe a cucamelon or two.

It’s entirely possible some might eventually sprout, so I’m just leaving them out.

Today, both my daughters were able to help, at the same time! Things went very fast with three people working at once.

The first thing we did was transplant the cucamelons in the chimney block retaining wall. It had been our intention to bring up the remaining blocks from the basement, to use as planters in another location, but there is no safe way to take them out. At least not while the kittens are downstairs. So we planted them here, instead. With the ornamental apple trees growing nearby, they won’t have the full sun they should be getting. There are 3 metal posts I couldn’t take out, when I removed the fence that used to be here, so we will use them to hold a trellis. Hopefully, that will help them get more sunlight as they grow bigger.

The few fennel that sprouted were planted in the soil beside the blocks. All 6 of them. They are so leggy, I don’t know that they’ll even survive, but we’ll see.

That done, we moved on to the squash garden.

We had exactly 11 transplants, so we marked a spot in the middle of the row, then measured and marked out every 2 feet in each direction.

In this photo, each has been transplanted into its “pot” of soil mix, and we were starting to add the mulch. These would mostly be the zucchini mix and pattypans (it’s all a surprise mix now, after the tray got knocked over!), but some of them are the birdhouse gourds. We’ll figure out which is which, as they grow! :-D

I had intended to build some rather heavy duty trellises for the squashes, but things aren’t quite working out to get that done, so I picked up some bamboo poles. We’ll use them and, if I can find some, some plastic mesh instead of the chicken wire. The wire, I want to reserve for when I finally do make something more heavy duty.

After we finished mulching and watering, I set out the poles.

I’ve mentioned a few times, how rocky this area is. Just pushing in those flags typically involves readjusting a few times, to get around rocks we hit, inches into the soil.

When pushing in the bamboo poles, I made a point of pushing the narrower ends into the ground, as they were more pointed. I had to make several attempts on pretty much every pole.

Including this one.

I still managed to hit a rock hard enough to break the end off the pole!

This is how it looks now.

It’s hard to say how many of the frost damaged squash will survive, but I still put poles in to trellis whatever makes it. We’ve got the mixed squash on the far right and far left, three pumpkin hills in the middle, and now a row of mixed squash and gourds along the back.

And it’s all done! No more planting!

While working in the area, we also took the time to water various things, including the gooseberry bushes.

Which are not gooseberry bushes.

While cleaning in the maple grove, two springs ago, I uncovered several gooseberry bushes. They were not doing well, with the lack of space and sunlight from all the overgrowth and closely planted, some dead or dying, trees.

Last year, they started to recover, but with the drought, there were almost no berries. Of the few there were, I noticed they were much smaller and darker than I expected, but with the drought, that was true of many of the berries we had.

It was when I was going through the Vesey’s catalog that I saw photos of gooseberries, right next to currants, and realized these might not be gooseberries at all. The leaves look much the same, but the berries are slightly different.

When I had the chance, I asked my mom if the gooseberry bushes really were gooseberries.

Nope. They weren’t.

So what are they?

She had no idea.

My sister had brought them and planted them, but my mother did not know what they were. Since she didn’t know what they were, she figured they were poisonous (as if my sister would give her poisonous berries for her garden???), so she’d never tried them. I happened to mentioned I’d eaten some of the very few berries we had last year, and she was all “oh… you’re okay, so I guess they’re safe.”

*facepalm*

So I think we actually have currants, not gooseberries.

This year, we’ve been better able to water them, and they are looking much better. There are lots of flowers, so I hope that means that, this year, we’ll have lots of fruit!

It had taken a lot of work, but we found quite a few fruit and berry bushes as we cleaned up many years of neglect. After a couple of years, now that these foundlings have space and sunlight again, they are all looking stronger and healthier. Hopefully, that will mean higher yields, to go along with our first attempt at gardening, since moving out here!

I’m looking forward to it. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Another productive day

/ Re-Farmer / 4 Comments

Oy, what a day. We’re already at 27C/80F (feels like 29C/84F), and we haven’t even reached the hottest part of the day, yet! Hard to believe we had frost, just a few nights ago.

Speaking of which, it looks like the frost damage to the squash was worse than it originally looked like. I think we’re going to lose most of the one bed.

The new transplants, on the other hand, are looking great!

Before I headed into town this morning, I took the time to use water from the rain barrel to water the new garden plot with the carrots and beets. Things are growing rather well in there, too.

Once in town and after I dropped off the van, it was still cool enough to make walking around town quite pleasant. When I had the chance, I tried calling our doctor’s clinic, as we need to get prescriptions renewed, but the call went to “this customer is not available” messages. That surprised me, as it usually means a number is no longer active, so I called the hospital the clinic is in, and talked to the nursing station. I told her what happened, and after confirming I was calling the right number, she tried transferring me. It didn’t work! It turns out the clinic is just really busy with doctors making calls. They are still only doing telephone appointments now, and I don’t think they have very many phone lines available. We will have to keep trying, because my husband got only a week’s worth of meds. For his pain killers, they can’t be faxed to the pharmacy, so the fastest way for them to be delivered is if I drive to the clinic, then deliver them to the pharmacy myself.

I stopped trying after getting a phone call from the garage, saying now was a good time to come and discuss the van and my mother’s car.

That never sounds good. :-D

I had three things I hoped to get done on my van. Only one was done.

The lift gate now lifts. No more pole!

The AC is shot. The compressor isn’t even working. To fix it would cost well over a thousand dollars, and he basically said it wasn’t worth it.

The door hinge is going to wait. It wasn’t the easy thing. It’s a welding job. The holes are starting to become ovals. It is, however, just starting to happen. While there is a little bit of play in the door, it is still fine and not a concern. He recommended we wait the door dropping becomes and issue, then bring it back.

So only one out of three jobs got done.

Then there is my mother’s car.

He was able to find a second hand differential, but the total cost would be just over $950, plus taxes. We talked about it for a bit, and I asked about the possibility of making payments. Since I’d budgeted for 3 jobs and only had to pay for one, I offered to make a deposit of $300 now (which kept me under budget), then make another deposit next month. After that, he’ll start working on the car, and I can pay it off in full the month after.

The down side is, this is money that would have gone towards things like what we’ll need to purchase to build the cordwood outhouse. The payments are low enough to still have some left over that can go towards that, but not as much as I’d like. Ah, well. There are still things we can do that don’t involve any money at all. Like clearing away the sod, cutting wood to size, and making bottle bricks.

That done, I made a quick trip to the hardware store. I was looking for another garden hose. Thanks to a sale, instead of one, light duty 100′ hose, I got a pair of medium duty 80′ hoses.

We now have enough hoses (that don’t leak!) to be able to reach all the sunflowers!

When I got home, the girls were mostly done with stuff in the yard, including getting out the weed trimmer and cleaning up around the edges of the inner yard.

That lawn already needs to be mowed again, and I haven’t even finished with what I’d started!

We have a lot of lawn.

That done, I was able to use the grass clippings I’d collected while mowing in the outer yard. Only 2 days, and the core of the grass pile was already composting and getting so hot, I was almost burning my hands! We used up almost the entire pile to continue mulching around the sunflowers.

There’s only about 8 left to mulch, but I don’t have enough grass clippings to finish. My daughter followed along and dampened the mulch.

I’m happy to say, we are seeing sunflower sprouts!

It looks like the ones that have sprouted are all from one variety; the ones that grow to “only” 6-8″ in height.

I’m so glad I got these hoses. With how far we can now reach, we can be safer when we burn out the apple tree stumps that are infected with a fungal disease. Now is the time to cut out the diseased branches, before spores become a concern. The winds are so high, though, it might be a while before that gets done.

Meanwhile, the work outside has stopped for now, as it’s just too hot out there. I just checked the weather app, and we’ve got up another degree.

My husband had been trying to get through to the clinic for 5 hours, and has given up. Tomorrow, one of my daughters and I will be making a bonus trip to the city. I will try swinging by the clinic and talking to someone in person. My prescriptions can wait. My husband’s cannot.

Oh, and one last thing.

Here is your smile for the day!

None of them stayed still long enough for me to get a decent picture, but Big Rig almost co-operated. :-D

They are getting to very playful! :-D

The Re-Farmer

I started, and I couldn’t stop! Evening round up

/ Re-Farmer / 4 Comments

Today was a wonderfully productive day.

Also, I’m really going to pay for it tomorrow. But I don’t care. It was worth it!

The first order of the day, after dropping my daughter off at work and picking up prescription refills for my husband, was the transplanting. I combined the 3 bags of soil mix, plus a bunch of peat, together with water in the kiddie pool (that thing is coming in really handy!), then left it to give the peat a chance to absorb water.

It had warmed up enough by then to uncover the squash. Unfortunately, there was some frost damage.

We might lose a few, but I think most will recover.

I decided not to put the new transplants near the previous ones. My initial thought was to have the two beds near each other, with a walking path in between, but I decided to put the new ones at the opposite side of the area we mulched last year. That left a wide open space in the middle.

I was able to measure, and mark with flags, where the transplants would go before I headed back into town to meet my daughter for lunch. Before coming home, I broke down and picked up something I’d spotted at the pharmacy this morning, but hadn’t picked up. A Pulse Oximeter. My husband has severe obstructive sleep apnea (on top of everything else), so being able to measure his blood oxygen levels at home is a good thing. I’d looked for them about a month ago, but none were in stock. When I saw them this morning, there were two. I wasn’t sure I could justify the cost in the budget, but figured if I didn’t get it today, who knew when I’d find one again.

Of the two that I’d seen in the morning, the less expensive one was already gone.

We now have a pretty high end Pulse Oximeter. :-D

Once back at home, I added the wet soil mixture to the flagged spots, then transplanted the squash. I ended up with another 18 plants in.

There are still some left that are not ready to transplant, and it is looking like most of them are the gourds! Whatever is left will go in one long row along the north side of the area we mulched last year.

I mulched the new transplants with straw, and remembered that I still had those pumpkin seeds my mother gave me. Three little packets.

And there was this wide open space between the squash beds…

I used some of the wet soil mixture to create three mounds and planted several seeds in each. It is really late in the season to be planting pumpkins from seed, but we’ll see how they do!

The pumpkin mounds got mulch around them, too. :-)

That done, I had time to uncover the other garden bed (no sign of frost damage there! :-) ) before heading back into town. I left early, so I could stop at the grocery store and refill a couple of our big water bottles.

While there was no line up outside the store, but by the time I was ready to go to the checkout, the line up was all the way to the other end of the store, and heading up the freezer aisle! After searching for and finding the end of the line, a guy carrying one item came by and ended up behind me. Thankfully, the line was moving rather quickly, but he and I ended up chatting with each other.

The topics ranged all over, but after a while it got closer to home as he talked about what he did. He ended up asking where in town I lived, and I told him I didn’t live in town, but in our little hamlet.

He got a very interested look on his face, and asked where I lived there. I told him, more or less, where the farm is.

It turned out he knows my family. He went to school, and was friends with, my late brother!

Well, that got us talking to each other like we’d know each other for years! :-D

Then I found out that he is a scrap dealer, and also hauls junk.

Yes!!!!

When we were done in the store, I followed him over to his truck so he could give me one of his fliers. He says it’s not worth trying to get rid of scrap metal right now; nobody is buying. That is a longer term thing for us, though. In the shorter term, I now have someone I can call to get the junk pile hauled away! Someone with a family connection, too.

That was awesome!

After picking up my daughter, it was back outside for me. I wanted to get a path mowed to the barn. We are expecting my brother to come over tomorrow and work on the trailer frame. Knowing him, he will be loading his truck with everything but the kitchen sink – and the only reason he doesn’t pack a kitchen sink is because, while all the useful tools may have disappeared from this place, we have plenty of kitchen sinks all over.

Also, bathroom sinks.

And laundry sinks.

I guess they go with the toilet collection. :-D

The grass in front of the barn is incredibly dense. The riding mower struggles to get through it, and the clippings left behind make it even harder. Now that I can collect clippings with the push mower, that’s what I was using today.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but I really enjoy mowing. Whether it’s a push mower or a riding mower, I just love it. It’s almost a meditative thing, and I get a great sense of satisfaction from it. It was one of my favourite chores when I was a teen, and one my parents never needed to ask me to do.

Once I started mowing, I just couldn’t seem to stop. I kept trying to see how much further I could go, beyond the limited areas I could do with the riding mower. Since it will be easier to move the trailer out the back door of the barn, bring it around the barn and pull it through the “gate” on the side, I wanted to make sure that area was clear. Then, I decided to see how much further I could go along the fence. On the other side, I decided to clear a path to the shed.

By the time I was done, I’d reached the collapsing log building near the old chicken coop, was working my way along the fence to the hay yard, and was even starting to go down the driveway.

Every loop I did, I stopped the mower to empty the clippings. I’m not finished, but when I could no longer pull the cord hard enough to start the mower after emptying the bag, I figured that was enough for the day! :-D

I am so loving how it is looking.

I’m going to pay for this tomorrow. Big time.

It was so worth it!

Also, I now have a lovely, huge pile of grass clippings to help build up our garden beds!

It’s the little things that make me happy. :-)

The Re-Farmer

Frost warning

/ Re-Farmer / 3 Comments

I’m happy to say, that a day of rest seems to be just what the doctor ordered. In fact, I felt so good, and it looked so beautiful outside, I decided to see if there was something I could get started on today.

Because I’m an idiot like that.

The beautiful looking day lied! :-D It was still cold and windy out there! Those lilacs are looking gorgeous, though.

When I went to check the forecast, though, I found a weather alert. We’re supposed to get frost tonight.

I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t get those transplants done!

The girls and I headed out to make sure everything was covered.

The squash bed was a challenge. I didn’t have very many of the plastic containers I was keeping to use as cloches for exactly this purpose. We did, however, still have the five gallon size water bottles from when I did a complete water change of the fish tank (which, I am happy to say, shows no signs of turning cloudy or that mass of algae growing back; it was definitely our well water that was the problem!). I cut a bunch of them in half, and we got all the squashes covered!

I don’t know that the bricks balancing on the necks of bottles will do much good, but it’s worth a try, to make sure the cloches don’t get blown away.

The girls covered the new garden bed with plastic, as well.

The plastic row covers are sandwiched between pairs of boards, so the sprouts won’t get flattened too much.

We didn’t bother doing anything with the potato beds, since the straw mulch will insulate them just fine.

Based on the long range forecast, this should be the last frost of the year. We’re going to start getting hot again, tomorrow.

Meanwhile, here are some more smiles for you! :-)

The girls went to visit with the kittens for a bit, but only Big Rig stayed still long enough for a decent photo. :-D

As David does so well with the kittens, the girls let him come down, too.

He seems entranced by his tiny doppelganger!

:-D

The Re-Farmer