summer sowing

More cuteness, and a quick direct sow

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I just got back from outside, and get to share a bit of cuteness with you!

Drier Sheet is back today, and still just a bundle of nerves. I was, however, able to get a look at the stitches on his leg. We were not able to dose him with the remaining painkillers the vet sent home with him because he simply disappeared for several days. The wound seems to be healing nicely, though, and the dissolving stitches are still holding.

Button has been an easy one to catch and hold. In fact, we have to be really careful walking around the sun room, and just outside, because he has this terrible habit of going under our feet.

This kitten has the absolute bluest eyes, and I think that may be his permanent colour! I tried to get a picture to capture the colour, but did not succeed. Still cute as a Button, though!

One of the things in the packages I picked up today was a donation of kitten food and some cat treats. When I did the evening feeding, I used the regular kibble outside to lure the adults away, then put kitten food in the sun room and other places the kittens tend to congregate in, in hopes the adult cats wouldn’t eat the kitten food before the littles got some.

It was somewhat successful. There are several male cats that prefer to eat inside the sun room, though. We have several bowls, spread apart, and sometimes I’ll find a kitten eating with an adult cat. Mostly, though, the adults just push their way over the bowls and scarf down the food. With the kitten food, I actually had to chase some of the adult cats out so they wouldn’t eat all the kittens’ food!

All the while I was out there, I was hearing thunder in the near distance. I decided to take advantage of possible rain and quickly weeded and loosened some soil in the potato bed at the chain link fence, where the potatoes didn’t come up, and direct seeded some White Vienne kohlrabi. I’ve seen several resources saying that they can be planted now as a fall crop in our area. In the past, I’d always planted them in the early spring, but if they ever germinated, something ate them right away. Perhaps if I try them now, it’s past the season of whatever ate them. That and they are in a completely different location, which might also help. We shall see!

Meanwhile, as I worked, it was so hot and humid, I had sweat just pouring off my face!

I used to dream of some day living in, or at least visiting, a tropical paradise. I could have handled it in my younger days, but as I’ve gotten older, I just can’t seem to tolerate the heat anymore!

As for the thunder I was hearing, I just checked the weather radar, and it passed us by completely. It’s almost 10pm as I write this, and we’re still at 25C/77F with a matching humidex. The predicted rain that was supposed to start around 11pm and last until about 2am, is now expected to to be light showers, starting at 2am, lasting about an hour, then starting again at about 5am and lasting another hour.

It’s a good thing I gave the freshly sown kohlrabi a through watering. Later, I’ll cover it with some mesh or something, to keep the cats off.

Aside from planting the kohlrabi, about the only other thing I got done in the garden was to harvest the last of the garden scapes. We have been hanging on to most of the previous harvests, so we can make a big batch or two of… something. We haven’t decided it. Tonight, though, the girls are planning to use some to make a pasta sauce. Sounds wonderful!

As for me, given that I got pretty much no sleep last night, I should probably got to bed but…

Yup. You guessed it.

The later it gets, the more awake I am!

That and it’s so hot and humid in my room, I don’t know how I’m going to be able to sleep anyhow. Especially when Butterscotch, Cheddar, Clarence, Peanut Butter Cup, Ghosty, Fenrir and Freya, all decide they need to snuggle right up against me as they sleep! Not necessarily all at once, but usually at least 4 of them at a time. You’d think they’d try and avoid more heat, but nope…

We have the old basement door open, hardware cloth barrier in place to keep the cats out of the basement, and a blower fan at the bottom of the stairs, blowing cooler air up. It helps quite a bit, but the basement door has to be fully open.

When the basement door is fully open, it covered the doorway into my room. Which means all that cool air doesn’t go into my bedroom at all. I do have a box fan in my room, but it mostly just blows around warm air.

Ah, well. Better the heat than the cold. If we lose power or something major breaks down now, it’s not that big of a deal. If the same thing happens at in the winter, it can be life threatening.

So yeah; I’ll put up with the heat!

The Re-Farmer

Some kittens, and a day of rest

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I can’t say it was a good start to the day. I was awakened about about 3am, and the cats kept me from falling back asleep again. I finally got up around 7 to feed the outside cats, have some breakfast, then go back to bed for a few hours of real, honest to goodness, restful sleep.

I did the rest of my rounds quite late, and did get a few things done. As always, I checked on the garden beds. I remembered to bring along the Seychelle green pole bean seeds, to replant them because the Crespo squash. Since so few Carminate purple pole beans germinated, I planted some Seychelle in the gaps. We’ll see if there will be enough growing season left for pole beans! Assuming they germinate at all.

The Royal Burgundy beans that I replanted have quite a few sprouting right now – but only in one row. I’d planted two rows, on either side of the original single row, and there’s just a couple of those that survived. Now, there’s at least half a dozen sprouts coming up, but they area all in the row closer to the outside of the bed. The row closer to the middle has nothing. Very strange!

While going in and out of the sun room for my garden tools and whatnot, I got to see many babies.

The puffy one that’s asleep while through the cube wall is one of Adam’s tinies, and just too cute for words. It won’t let me near it. When it sees me, it immediately runs and hides. This tiny little fluff ball bouncing into the sun room. I want to scoop it up, so badly! 😄

Before heading inside, I gathered a bunch of rhubarb. This has been the best year for rhubarb we’ve had since moving here. The chives are looking amazing, too. We have quite a bit of cream cheese right now, and my daughters are talking about making a chives infused cream cheese spread. That sounds really good!

I’m trying to think of some way to put a barrier around the eggplant and hot pepper bed again. The plastic was completely destroyed by the wind, but I’m thinking what they might actually need is a bit more shade! They don’t seem to be growing much at all, and I think they’re getting baked. Which is odd, considering these are heat loving plants, and they’ve got plenty of heat. Both had done quite well int he wattle weave bed last year, and that bed is heavily shaded by one of the ornamental apple trees – both of which need more pruning, to open them up and let more air and light through. Honestly, I’d take them out completely, if they weren’t a food source for birds in the winter.

Anyhow, that’s pretty much the extent of my “work” today, and that was more fun than work. Sunday is supposed to be my day of rest, but it hasn’t worked out that way lately. We had to do as much as we could outside when there was a break in the rain, no matter what day that fell on. Now that those beds are shifted, and all the transplanting and direct sowing is done, I can get back to taking a regular day of rest. I seem to be really needing it, too. I had been planning to work on editing a video today, but for all that I did get solid sleep this morning, it’s been all I could do not to crawl back into bed all day! Even now, I can feel myself falling asleep at the keyboard. I don’t want to mess up my sleep cycle too much, though, and end up awake all night.

Anyhow.

The video editing will probably wait. It requires more mental focus than I can manage right now.

We’re supposed to get rain starting at about noon tomorrow, and continuing on through to 6am the day after. That would be as good a time as any to work on the video editing.

For today, I’ll take a break.

The Re-Farmer

Our 2021 garden; summer sowing

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Finally! I got the summer sowing done, in all three empty beds. :-)

Before I started on that, though, I made another attempt at trying to keep the woodchuck out of our carrot beds.

I’d read the Epsom salts are a thing they don’t like, while also being good for the garden. We didn’t have a lot left, so one of the beds was a bit sparser. We shall see if it helps, any.

Then I got to work on the first empty bed. This is the one that’s slightly wider, and that I’d already started to prep, and sized the mesh cover for.

I laid the board down as something to walk on, when we tend it later. The piece of scrap wood in the middle is a divider. In the foreground, I planted the Bright Lights Swiss Chard, and on the other side of the divider are French Breakfast radishes, with two short rows of each.

The tool you see in the middle is what I’m using as a hoe. The metal is quite thin, compared to most garden tools. If anyone knows what that is called, I’d love to know!

The second bed got three things planted in it.

Towards the middle of the bed is one long row of Fordhook Giant Swiss Chard.

You know, I hope we actually like Chard. :-D

The row on the outside has Cherry Belle radish in the foreground, and on the far side of the brick is the Russian Red kale.

In the last bed, the Early Purple Vienna kohlrabi are planted on the outside, and Champion radish is planted on this inside.

Later in the month, these beds will have spinach and lettuces planted in them. The kale is a frost hardy plant and I’ve read it tastes better after being hit with a frost. I planted the radishes sparsely, as they can get quite big when allowed to go to pod. We can start harvesting the chard in less than a month, and they should be done before first frost. By putting the taller plants that will be there for the rest of the growing season on the west side, I hope that they will help provide shade for the lettuces and spinach, and we can maybe plant them a bit earlier, as long as the soil doesn’t get too warm for germination.

We will have to monitor all our beds frequently. In the last little while, we’ve seen quite an increase in grasshoppers. Some people in the local gardening groups I’m on have had major problems with them, and they seem to be slowly making their way north.

I admit, this one was rather cute. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this sort of colour before!! I find myself wondering if this is grasshopper albinism, or a species that happens to be almost white in colour!

With the seeds sown, I worked on weeding around one of the onion beds for a while, then dragged my aching butt over to the water barrel at the furthest garden bed to fill it. The spray plastic coating we’d used to seal cracks had started to come loose on the inside, so I went to pull it off while I was filling the watering can. A huge chunk peeled off, and the barrel promptly started to leak at one of the cracks. We still have a bit of the silicon sealant left, so last night, I patched the crack. It should be cured by now, and I wanted to refill the barrel with water. That was when my daughter came out to let me know she needed to pick up a parcel in the mail and go to the grocery store in town, so I set that aside and headed in. Not before I got her to help me position the adapted wire mesh cover.

I had deliberately planted everything in shorter rows, leaving a lot of empty space at the ends of the beds, because of the length of these covers. We set the cover as far to one side as we could, and I was happy to find the row lengths worked out just right. They are completely covered, and the cross pieces at each end are beyond the ends of the rows, so no seedlings will be squished.

Then it was off to town with my daughter, with a quick stop at the post office along the way. I took advantage of the trip to pick up a few things at the grocery store and, as I was wandering down the aisles with the shopping cart, I suddenly realized I was getting the shakes and feeling dizzy. Usually I have to use the shopping cart as a walker because my knees will suddenly dislocate or a hip will give out, but this time, I was using it to not fall over. It took me a while to realize what was going on.

I’d forgotten to eat again.

*sigh*

I did have breakfast, but it was a small meal, and after I finished my last blog post, I headed straight out to work on the garden. It was well past lunch time by then. Had my daughter not come out to get me, I would have been out there for quite a while longer before noticing anything was wrong. Thankfully, I was able to grab something I could eat in the car while my daughter drove home.

Sometimes I’m an idiot, but I enjoy the work so much, I didn’t notice the time or how long it had been since I’d had anything to eat or drink.

I had been planning to go out again and do some weeding, or dig through some sheds to see what I can salvage to make another row cover, but I think that will have to wait until tomorrow.

The Re-Farmer