I had a really slow start to the day. For some reason, I just couldn’t fall asleep last night. By around 3am, I was hungry, so I got up to eat, then went back to be. I finally fell asleep somewhere around 4 am.
I still woke with the light, 2 or 3 hours later. I asked my daughters to take care of feeding the outside cats for me, so I could try and get more sleep.
Which sort of worked.
I finally got up around 11 and was sitting down to breakfast by about noon. That’s the one bonus of having my daughters take care of feeding the cats for me in the morning. Normally, I do my rounds and morning routine before I eat, which usually means I’m famished by the time I get inside.
By the time I finally went outside to check on the garden, it was mid afternoon. We’d reached our predicted high of 24C/75F. I don’t know what the humidex was at the time, but as I write this, coming up on 7pm, we’re at 21C/70F, while the humidex puts us at 24C/75F.
I feel like that’s on the low side.
Here is what I was able to harvest while checking on the garden.
Those three melons sure take up a lot of space in my giant colandar! One of them looks like it’s a bit over ripe, but it did not want to break free from its vine.
There are actually a few San Marzano tomatoes in there, but they rolled under the melons, along with some of the Black Cherry tomatoes. Since I harvested so many Forme de Couer tomatoes yesterday, there wasn’t much that needed picking today. There was one larger G Star patty pan I decided to pick.
What I was really happy to see was that red Cheyenne pepper! I was eyeballing it yesterday, when it still had a green tip. There’s another one that’s almost ripe that I will likely be picking tomorrow. The hot Cheyenne pepper plants have a LOT of peppers on them, so we will likely have enough hot peppers to preserve and supply us for a very long time. My daughters tried having one with a meal, using an entire small ripe pepper. Small as it was, it turned out to be too much, so they know to use a much smaller quantity in the future. This one large pepper would be enough for many meals.
Everything in the garden was most definitely feeling the heat. We keep getting vague forecasts for possible rain, but I decided to go ahead and water the garden, anyhow. I’m glad I did. Looking at the weather radar, it seems the system is going to blow right past us. The weather app on my computer actually says we are getting rain right now, which we are not.
While watering, I noticed that we are finally having more bell peppers starting to blush. The purple ones get dark very quickly, and we’ve got a couple Sweet Chocolate peppers that have started to turn. Today, for the first time, I could see another colour. I couldn’t tell if the one pepper I could see will be turning orange or turning yellow, but it is definitely getting bright.
When I got to watering the west melon bed, I found a lovely little surprise among the leaves that are dying back.
It’s absolutely tiny – about the size of a softball. I’m very happy to see it, though. After spending most of the summer assuming the big vine in the bed was the one surviving watermelon, only to finally realize it was a winter squash, I thought we wouldn’t have any watermelons at all, and that the transplant had died.
They are supposed to get quite a bit bigger, but I don’t care. By the colours of the stripes on the outside, it may even be close to ripe.
I wonder how many more surprises like this I will find, as the leaves and vines die back?
I took footage for garden tour video on the 10th – our average first frost date – but haven’t had a chance to actually make the video. Now I’m glad it got delayed, as I can include things I missed, like this watermelon, when I’m editing it.
The melon on the right is the first honeydew type we’ve harvested, having already fallen off its vine when I checked it.
I decided to harvest a few young eggplant today, even though they can still get larger. I really look forward to trying them. The last time we were able to grow either of these, we only managed to have very little ones to harvest before the frost. We enjoyed them, so I expect we will enjoy them at their bigger size, too.
The two together are the Little Finger eggplant, while the one on the other side of the green Seychelle beans is a classic eggplant. The Seychelle beans growing with the Crespo squash, have had a growth spurt and suddenly have loads of flowers. There are even a few green beans from the single plant growing with the Carminat beans.
The purple beans are almost all Royal Burgundy bush beans. There’s just a few Carminat pole beans in with them. They seem to be picking up on the blooms, too. I guess they liked the rain we finally got last night? We didn’t get a significant amount, though. I probably should have watered the garden this morning, anyway, as we got pretty hot today.
The peppers are the Dragonfly variety. Some of the pepper plants were falling over under the weight of their fruit. As I was straightening one to add more support to it, a branch broke off! Those are the Sweet Chocolate peppers, with only one starting to show a blush of colour. They should still ripen, so I left them on the branch and brought them inside, too.
I did not harvest any tomatoes, today. We harvested so many yesterday, I decided to wait. Last night, I decided to start a slow cooker tomato sauce, to use up as many tomatoes, and some other vegetables we had on hand, as I could. That included a couple of Uzbek Golden carrots, a couple of small onion bulbs, that one shallot I found pulled up, several cloves of garlic, the remaining beans we had, and even one Purple Beauty pepper that hadn’t been used yet, all chopped very fine. I added the usual salt and pepper, plus what herbs I had in my cupboard, some olive oil and apple cider vinegar.
Then I started adding the tomatoes.
I used all the San Marzano tomatoes I could find. Those didn’t yield much per tomato. They were a lot like peppers, with a hollow space in most, and the seeds clustered around the core. That did make them easy to deseed and core, but there wasn’t much tomato left after that.
All the Black Cherry tomatoes we had went in, and then I started on the Forme de Couer. Those, I just kept chopping up until I couldn’t fit any more in the slow cooker. No de-seeding or coring needed with those!
That still left us with quite a few tomatoes – and I didn’t even start on the basin of tomatoes we picked yesterday!
We kept the slow cooker going through the night, with occasional stirring. The warm setting on the slow cooker seems pretty high, so even after the time was done and it switched from Low to Warm, it continued cooking.
In the morning, one of my daughters took the immersion blender to it, and we turned it back to low. I propped the lid slightly with a wooden spoon to let the steam out, though we eventually put it on high, so we can cook it down to a thicker consistency.
My brother and his wife came out this morning. My brother was towing a piece of farm equipment that was very wide, and my SIL followed in her car with her hazard lights going. He was able to only go about 50-60 kph and sometimes, he later told me, that was too fast!
When they got here, my SIL gave me some vinyl table protectors she had been about to put into recycling until she heard I’d picked some up to put around the eggplant and pepper bed as a sort of greenhouse. I was quite happy to take them! I had a large melon for them and it reminded her to ask if I had any more tomatoes I was willing to part with.
Oh, was I happy to hear that!
I bagged up the last of the Forme De Couer I didn’t have room for last night, then brought another bag and the basin for her to take as much more as she wanted! (She can’t come into the house, as she is allergic to cats.) They’ve had so much going on this year, they didn’t really do much in the garden, and the few tomatoes they planted this year aren’t ripening yet, so I was more than happy to share the bounty! We still have tomatoes in the freezer from last year! 😄
My SIL headed home soon after, and I helped my brother secure a new tarp over the box on the dump truck. He’d already parked and unhooked the machine he’d hauled, and was planning to come back with another load on the trailer.
After he left, I was able to work on a few things I haven’t been able to get to, with all the running around I did last week, but that will be for my next post!
Oh, what a day it’s been! I’ll cover that in another post, though.
When I got home, my daughter was doing a walkabout, checking the yard for fallen branches and whatnot. We are supposed to get rain today but, so far, it’s just been sprinkles. I hope we get more, because I’ve been holding off watering the garden for it.
Instead of rain, we’ve been getting gusts of high winds. The catio Gouda is still in for 1 more night just has the temporary plastic roof over it, and the wind was tearing it loose from the cord that’s tying it down. We ended up putting a large floor mat on top to weigh it down, then added weights to that, to keep it from being blown off. I’m so glad we did, because that plastic would have been blown right off, not long after we did it!
Gouda, however, seems to be doing okay in the catio. He’s not too pleased about being stuck in there – and the other cats are not pleased about not being able to go in and steal his wet cat food! He only has to be in there for one more night. The catio’s walls are all mesh, but he does have his box nest with a blanket in there, and is using it. The catio is also sheltered by the house on one side, and a tree on the other, and branches above.
I’ll still be much happier when the isolation shelter is done, with a fully enclosed top level.
After we took care of that, we went through the garden beds and ended up picking another melon that had fallen of its stem, and a handful of the purple pole beans.
Then we started on the tomatoes in the old kitchen garden.
They haven’t been harvested for the last couple of days.
My daughter ended up bringing over the basin from the old kitchen to hold them all!
In the basin is a few San Marzano tomatoes, a whole lot of Forme de Couer tomatoes, and Black Cherry tomatoes.
In the second photo of the slide show, I was able to zoom in for a picture of a newly blooming female luffa flower. There is one other that I spotted, but there are no male flowers at all, anywhere. The male flowers bloom in clusters, making them easier to spot. I supposed it’s possible there are some way up high and hidden among the lilac branches, but it seems unlikely.
We have a whole bunch of things we will be doing with tomatoes over the next while; one of them is going to be using the slow cooker to make a sauce. It’s big enough that we should be able to use most of the tomatoes we’ve got waiting to be processed, along with a few other vegetables we have that can be included.
I won’t be starting on that for a while, though. I need to just sit and decompress for now. Much progress has been made in getting my mother into supportive living, as she has been wanting for some time now, but my goodness, am I ever mentally exhausted right now!!
I’ll cover that in my next post. Just writing about it, as much as I can on a public blog, will be very therapeutic!
While doing my rounds this morning, I found a few tomatoes to pick. We have enough in the house now, that we can start looking into makes sauces or soups, or other ways to process and preserve them.
My initial thought was to make a big batch of tomato soup, and freezing it in individual portions. With that in mind, I picked our first onions of the year.
We planted a lot of onions, but we’re not going to get much out of them, as far as size goes. So many of them have already had their stems broken, like the ones I picked this morning. Most look like they got rolled on by cats or something. I’m not sure, when it comes to the bed that’s almost all onions in the main garden area. The ones planted in the old kitchen garden were definitely flattened by cats. They actually seem to enjoy napping on the onions! The ones planted around the San Marzano tomatoes in the main garden area have been crushed by the tomato branches.
My plans to make tomato soup, however, changed rather quickly. I found out my brother was on his way, along with the guy with the triple axle trailer. I ended up spending most of the day outside, and got quite a bit done in between loads.
The tomato soup will have to wait for another day. With the way things are going, I might have to get my daughters to do something with the tomatoes, instead.
We shall see.
Meanwhile, we’ve got our very first Frontier yellow bulb onions harvested.
Not long ago, I found one of the Summer of Melons Blend melons had turned yellow and was looking misshapen. When I picked it up, it fell of the vine. Technically, that should have meant it was ripe, but it didn’t look ripe. We haven’t cut it open yet, though. Too much other stuff going on.
Just a little while ago, my daughter and I did a sort of Florida weave to support the rest of the San Marzano tomatoes in the main garden area. That didn’t take long at all. My daughter’s been working on commissions, still mostly at night, lastly, so she hadn’t seen the garden in a while. As we were looking at the melon bed near the tomatoes, I noticed one of them had turned yellow, and fallen off the brick that was keeping it from direct contact with the ground. I went to put it back, and discovered it had fallen off its vine completely!
How handy, that my husband’s giant self healing cutting mat is still on the dining table. 😄 You can see that it’s about 8 inches long.
In the next photo, you can see the stem end. That’s how it’s supposed to be with melons, when they are fully ripe.
We haven’t cut it open yet. We’ll probably do that – and the little one – this evening, so we can compare.
I can hardly wait to try it! Being part of the Summer of Melon’s blend, we have no idea what variety it is, but if we like it, I want to save some of the seeds.
I hadn’t planned on harvesting anything while doing my evening rounds.
My garden had other plans!
I ended up using the bottom of my shirt to carry everything, because I didn’t have my usual giant colander that I use for harvesting and washing the produce.
My shirt got very loaded down!
Before I got to that point, I spotted these seed heads.
While shifting and preparing the low raised beds, I spotted a small plant I recognized as a flower that shows up in our main garden area. Rather than tossing it with the weeds, I decided to transplant it into the log framed bed, with the onions I’d been finding. I had no idea if it would survive a transplant.
Well, not only has it survived, it has thrived! It has become quite large and, while the flowers are not particularly large, the seed heads are amazing! Each one of those puffs in the photo are bigger than the palm of my hand.
I don’t want it to seed itself in the raised bed, so whenever the seed heads open like this, I gather the seeds and let them loose in an area just north of the beds. I figure at least some of them will manage to germinate, in the spring.
While checking on this bed, I also spotted one of the larger melons starting to look a bit yellow. I went to pick it up and it fell off its vine, so I included it in my harvest.
Since this from the Summer of Melons mix, I have no idea if this is a variety that turns yellow like this at maturity. I suspect not, to be honest. Still, we’ll crack it open and see what it’s like inside. So I’m not sure if this is a “first” for the melons or not.
You may notice something else different in the photo.
A bright red Cheyenne hot pepper! Red from stem to tip! There was another, next to it, that is about half red. We grew these previously, in grow bags, but they stayed green. When we had frost predictions, we tried to protect them, but were late covering them up one nice. The next morning, I harvested all the green peppers that weren’t frost damaged, and we set them up in the living room. They did turn red as as they dried, eventually, but they didn’t look very palatable. So I’m very happy to have some ripening while still on their plants!
I think I could have harvested several Dragonfly peppers. Some are quite large and so dark a purple, they look black. I will wait a bit, though. I think we’d end up with too many to use quickly, so I want to be prepared to dehydrate some of them, before I bring them in.
As for the cherry tomatoes, they got all mixed up while I was carrying them in my shirt. I honestly can’t tell the difference between the Chocolate cherry and the Black cherry! I’ll have to ask the family if they can tell the difference by taste.
I’m really quite happy with the harvests we’ve been getting. I had been so sure that we’d have almost nothing to harvest regularly this summer, except maybe tomatoes, since we have four varieties. Granted, this is the sort of harvesting we should have been getting in July and early August, not in September, but I’m just so happy to have anything at all!
If the temperatures stay mild enough, though, we should have a pretty awesome harvest of winter squash and melons! I’m quite looking forward to it!
As part of my morning rounds today, I checked on the grapes, got a bit of a harvest, and did some watering, as we were expecting to get very warm today.
The first picture above shows how dark some of the grapes are starting to get. There are still more green than purple grapes, but they are coming along!
Though I’d picked quite a lot yesterday, I still was able to pick some beans and Forme de Couer tomatoes this morning. We are at that stage with these tomatoes where a lot of people pick them to finish ripening indoors. We don’t have the space for that, but I try to pick as many as I can, just to reduce the weight on the vines. I’m going to have to snag one or both of the girls tomorrow morning to help add more supports to some of the vines and stakes. We were actually supposed to do that today, but other things happened, instead!
That will be a topic for my next post, though.
Yesterday evening, I did go through the tomatoes that I could reach (not very many, among the Black Cherry vines!) and the trellised melons and pruned their tops. This should trigger the plants to focus more on ripening their fruit, rather than trying to grow more of them. I probably should have done that a while ago.
Only 7 more days (not counting today) before our first average frost. There are people in one of my zone 3 gardening groups that are expected to get frost tonight!
We have no way to cover the squash, trellised melons or tomatoes. The only beds we’d be able to cover is the eggplant and hot pepper bed, and the bell peppers in the high raised bed. We just might be able to cover the melon bed that isn’t trellised, too, but anything we use would be resting directly on the plants.
We’ll have to watch the forecast closely. If it comes down to the wire, we might have to just harvest everything early. I pray it doesn’t come to that!
It has been a bit longer than usual since I’ve actually done a morning harvest. With all the stuff going on for the past while, I lost track of time! I do try to harvest at least every other day. Since I’m in the habit of taking pictures what I harvest, unless it’s just one or two tomatoes or something like that, I checked the dates on my photos. Turns out, I haven’t done a harvest in 4 days!
In the photo are a few San Marzano tomatoes at the top, some black cherry tomatoes, and a nice bunch of Forme de Couer tomatoes. I had to battle some very spiky stems to reach those G Star patty pan squash! With the beans, there are all three varieties in there, including a very decent amount of the Royal Burgundy bush beans – but this is the first time I picked any of the green Seychelle beans from the main garden area, and not just from the trellis over the Crespo squash. I had planted some Seychelles in the gaps where the purple Carminat beans failed to germinate, but I think only 3 Seychelle germinated. However many there were, there’s only one plant left, and it’s finally producing beans!
Among the Carminat beans, I found a couple that had gotten too big to harvest; they would no longer be tender, so I left them on the vine. There probably isn’t time enough, but who knows. They might fully mature and give me a few seeds I can plant next year! This is definitely a variety that grows well here, and we do enjoy them, so we do want to grow them again.
Of course, along with checking on the garden, I checked on the kitties. After setting the food out, I tried to do a head count.
I counted 34 cats and kittens.
*sigh*
I don’t even want to think of how many there would be, if we hadn’t lost so many kittens this year, and at least one adult. There are other adult cats that I haven’t seen in a while, but they may come back and stay for the winter. Some of them, anyhow.
Eye baby is pretty active among the kittens, but also has her favourite place to hang out, in the cat cage.
Which she can’t do right now, because I took that cat bed out to give it a wash!
Her cuddle buddy doesn’t seem to care, either way! This bigger kitten seems to be rather protective of eye baby.
Or just likes to use her for a pillow.
~~~~~ pause for interruptions and treating of eye baby~~~~~
I’m back!
We just gave eye baby her daily dose of antibiotics, and a feeding of cat soup from the modified bottle. I did something a bit different, this time.
I remembered we were gifted one of those mixers, where you can make individual size smoothies or whatever. I used that to make the cat soup. It worked. We had zero issues of bits paté clogging the nipple.
Why didn’t we think of this before? 😄
I still don’t know what to make of that eye. I think it’s getting better overall, but I also still think the eye itself is lost.
Oh, and we have determined something else. At least I did, only just now, when I let eye baby back out in the sun room.
She, is a he.
The girls had been able to determine that when they took care of the cats outside recently. A couple of the kittens, including eye baby, decided to roll onto their backs and give a good view. The other kitten was female, but eye baby is definitely a little boy.
But I am getting ahead of myself!
Aside from my usual morning routine, I had a day “off” today. A friend of mine from another province is in town right now, and we had a lunch date!
After getting one of the girls to distract the outside cats away from the truck with some treats, I headed to town a bit early. There was a store I wanted to check out, but I didn’t find what I was looking for. What I did get, however, was clear Gorilla tape. That will be very useful in setting the “greenhouse” around the eggplant and hot pepper bed. I’m hoping that the two clear shower curtains, or the two clear table protectors, with be long enough to go all the way around the box frame, and I had been wondering how I would join them together. This should be strong enough to hold.
I then went to the dollar store and ended up getting a several packages of angle braces that can be used to reinforce the donated cat shelter, instead of the triangle blocks of wood I was intending to use. These would be much better for the size of wood the shelter is made out of. I also got a few more things to use on the shelters, plus new sonic deer/wildlife screamers for the truck. I was down to one, and they’re not much good if there isn’t a pair of them.
I had just finished putting them on the truck and started heading to where we had arranged to meet, when my friend caught up with me. Perfect timing!
We had intended to go to a fish ‘n chips place for lunch, at 1pm, that had reopened recently. They’d had a fire some time ago, and it took quite a long time to get things up and running again, and I wanted to see the renovations. They were so incredibly busy, though, we barely got in the door, and saw that every table was full (granted, there isn’t room for a lot of tables anyhow) with lots of people waiting to place orders at the counter. So we left and walked up the block to a Thai place. I’d thought this place had closed and moved to the city, but I guess they’d opened a second location, instead. I haven’t been there in years, but my friend has been going there regularly since she’s been in town.
We have a very lovely, quiet, lunch, with excellent service!
It was really great to be able to sit and talk and get all caught up with each other.
After lunch, we just walked around and went to different places, checking out the marina and the local art club’s art gallery, and stopping at other restaurants for her to collect take out menus for her mother, who still lives out here. One place didn’t have any take out menus and the guy I asked said it was all their website, but her mother isn’t online, so that was of no use for her!
Town was really busy, as a lot of people use this long weekend to close up their cottages for the winter, and spend one last weekend on the beach before their kids go back to school. It wasn’t too bad, really, but neither of us enjoy crowds! All in all, though, we spent a couple of hours just hanging out together, and it was grand!
After we finally said our goodbyes – we may or may not have a chance to get together before she has to leave – I made a quick stop at the grocery store before going home. My husband has a birthday this month, so we’ll be doing things for him over the next week or so. We never celebrate birthdays on the actual day. 😄
I picked up some snacks he likes for now, and the girls tucked away the ice cream I got for later. My younger daughter plans to bake him a cake. His take out meal of choice was Chinese food, and I confirmed their hours while I was in town and got a fresh take out menu, just in case anything had changed.
They don’t have a website. 😄
We will be able to do the take out on Tuesday – after the long weekend is over!
It looks like I’m going to be doing a lot of running around over the next couple of weeks. We’ve got not only my husband’s birthday stuff going on, but the girls and I are taking my mother out to a nature reserve as part of her 93rd birthday celebrations – sort of. My mother said she didn’t want any fuss for her birthday this year, but she did want an outing to the nature reserve with my daughters, so we’re going to do both. Then there’s at least one appointment for my mother that I will be driving her to, and hopefully another in her home with the home care guy. My husband has to get to a lab for some bloodwork. I will hopefully see my friend one more time before she leaves. I also need to get back to the town my mother lives in to pick up kibble and lysine at the feed store, and will likely be back another day to pick up the clear plastic roofing material I’d ordered from the hardware store.
All of that in just the first two weeks of September, and I’m sure I’m forgetting something!
Meanwhile, I still don’t have the date for the spay/neuter the rescue has set up for us! I’ll have to contact her again. They’ve been insanely busy, too.
A couple of weeks from now, we should have someone coming in to excavate and repair the expeller on our septic system.
This is going to be a really crazy month!
After that, things should settle down, though.
I hope!
Pretty much all of this is good stuff, though, so no complaints!
After my last post, I intended to grab something to eat, then head outside and see what I could get done while the light was still good.
As an aside, after I published my last post, I hit the AI “generate feedback”. It had the usual, break up your paragraphs, include photos, etc. – then at the very end, it included an encouraging statement about making sure I ate regularly! Too funny!
So, for the AI, should I do that again: this post is going to have Instagram slideshows of photos. Lots of them.
I didn’t get outside as quickly as I intended, however. I had started to make a meal for myself when my daughter came down and asked if I wanted to do charcuterie and Columbo with her.
Heck yes!
My husband doesn’t like charcuterie, and his back can’t handle sitting in the living room for long, so the food I had started to cook because his supper, instead. 😄
My older daughter wasn’t able to join us either; she’s been up all night and all day, busting her butt, trying to get several commissions finished before her end of the month deadline. She did come down and grab a plate to take upstairs, though.
My younger daughter and I quite enjoyed the Columbo episode. It was a season 4 episode, and they were hour long movies at this point of the series.
By the time we were done, there was still light out, so I did my evening rounds, then remembered to take progress photos of all the squash, pumpkins, gourds and melons, with my hand in most of the shots, for perspective.
For some reason, though, Instagram turned my most of the photos upside down when they were shared. They were not upside down when I uploaded them! I also make extra sure when I’m taking the photos, that the camera on my phone hadn’t flipped orientation. It does that way too often.
With that caveat, let’s start with the Crespo squash bed.
There are more of them now, even after losing some! The darkest green one that’s bumpy is the oldest one. They are supposed to get really huge, though, but I’ll take a little one, too!
The second last photo in the slideshow (which is upside down) is in a cherry tree. The last one, also upside down, is one I couldn’t reach to have my hand in the shot. This one is in the A frame pole bean trellis.
Next are the Summer of Melons blend melons in the east bed. I had to split these up into three slideshows to fit them all, even with having multiple melons in some photos.
The only drum gourd we’ve got that was getting bigger seems to be wilting away. There are other small ones on the vines, but none seem to be getting bigger.
It would have been really nice to have at least one drum gourd of a decent size! Ah, well.
Next up, more upside down images of the East winter squash bed.
The fourth photo in – the pale yellowish one – is one I was sure was dying off, but it seems that colour is what it’s actually supposed to be – and it’s starting to develop a textured surface. I hope it matures enough that we can identify the variety.
The first photo is all Summer of Melons blend, as is the second photo. There are actually two melons in that photo; the second one is hard to see, in the back. After that, it’s Sarah’s Choice and Pixie melons.
This set is all Sarah’s Choice and Pixie melons, with our one remaining Cream of Saskatchewan watermelon. The others that started to grow all died off. The one survivor is getting big – and looks more like a squash than a watermelon!
This image from the Heritage Harvest website is what they’re supposed to look like, when fully mature. The one I’ve got not only looks much lighter in colour, with no dark stripes, but seems to be developing ribs.
Considering I pre-germinated the melons after I’d started the winter squash, it’s not possible that I got the seeds and seedlings mixed up. No other seeds I started look like watermelon seeds, either.
Very curious!
While I was fighting my way around leaves and stems – and fighting off mosquitoes! – I had a little entourage following me around. It was all adult cats, except for this little cutie.
I don’t know why this one kitten has decided to follow me around the garden, but it does make me happy when I see it! I was even able to pick it up and carry it for a little while.
By the time I was done my evening rounds, and getting the photos, it was getting time to give eye baby her medication. We got everything ready, including the modified bottle with cat soup in it. When I came inside, I couldn’t see eye baby anywhere, but when I went out again to look for her, I quickly found her.
She started running towards the sun room from the shelters as soon as she heard me going through the old kitchen doors!
She was purring before I even picked her up!
She most definitely is enjoying these evening ministrations. Which is rather surprising, considering we wrap her up in a towel, dose her with medications, then get the fur around her eye wet, while moistening the … whatever it is… over her eye, and trying to rub the area around her eye as clean as we can first.
She also likes that modified bottle feeding, even though it gets pretty messy at times! No matter how much we mash up the cat food in the water/lysine mix, there’s always bits that manage to clog the modified nipple opening. Sometimes, it unclogs unexpectedly and she gets sprayed all over her mouth with cat soup! Even wrapped in a towel, it end up all over her neck and chest, too. It doesn’t seem to bother her one bit.
She does let us know when she’s done, though.
I still don’t know what to say about how her eye is doing. The swelling of the eyelids has gone down, but not completely. The swollen inner lids seem to be covering the eyeball, and the eye is still bulging out of its socket, though not at much. As we were tending to her, my daughter did see her attempt at blinking, and the eye does move, as if she’s trying to look from side to side.
For now, all we can do is keep up with the antibiotics the rescue provided for us, and giving her the supplemented cat soup. It doesn’t seem to be bothering her, she can obviously see out the other eye that is healed up, and she is quite active and playful.
My daughters took care of the garden this morning, while I headed into town for groceries, so I didn’t get a chance to check things out until this afternoon.
Meanwhile, not counting today, we’ve got only 14 days left before average first frost. Hard to say if we’ll get anything!
I did check on the long range forecast, and it has changed back to saying we’ll have temperatures of 30C/86F for the 10th and 11th – and his 32C/90F on the 12th! In fact, most of that week is now supposed to have highs in the 30s! Even the week after is supposed to be just below 30C/86F! The last time I looked at the September forecasts, we were looking at highs below 20C/68F, and lows dropping down to 2 or 3C/36-37F
What a difference in forecasts!
Me, I’m hoping the heat stays longer. With everything behind by about a month, we need every hot day we can get!
Right now, things have been pleasantly cooler. Overnight, we reached a low of 9C/48F. It got cold enough I actually turns the fans off in my bedroom. It must have been quite a relief for the girls upstairs! They get so much hotter out there.
In other things, I have not had any calls back from the other two septic companies. I’ll be in the city tomorrow, so I’ll give them that one more day, then try calling them again after that. If I still can’t get through to them, then we’ll just have to go with the one company I did connect with. I’ll just have to get confirmation with my mother, in paying for it, and my brother. I was a bit perplexed when he started messaging me, suggesting I track down someone that had done this sort of work for my father in the past, but who may not even live in the area anymore. Heck, for all I know, he might not even be alive anymore. I recognize the name, but have probably never met him in person. I thought my brother had a problem with the companies I’d contacted, but I think maybe he just remembered this guy and started suggesting him to me.
Then he started telling me about how the emergency back up pipe will need to be installed while it’s being worked on, and how he’s got a pipe extension that will drain the effluent into the maple grove (which we may still need) … as if it was going to be done tomorrow, or something!
I’m so anxious about all this, I honestly couldn’t tell if this was his way of telling me what I should be doing, instead of what I am doing. My brother is awesome, but we don’t do things the same way at times. I hadn’t even considered going to somebody who happens to have an excavator, rather than a licensed and insured company that specializes in this kind of work. When I asked him more about it, he just came back with, it’s not a problem, going with a company is fine.
I hate to think I’m doing something he thinks is the wrong way!
So basically, there was a potential diversion, but then it went away.
I did not call the scrap company today. I will do that later, because I did contact the guy that bought scrap cars for parts last year, as I remembered they’d been looking at them. I told him that we were looking into calling the scrap dealer for the threshing machine and several vehicles, including those two, but wanted to know if he was still interested in them.
So those are now sold. Not for as much as before, but still more than we’d likely get from the scrap dealer for them. He won’t be able to pick them up until the end of September, though, as he’d going into surgery tomorrow, and needs the time to recover. There was another vehicle, which basically just the shell of a panel van, he asked about, but my brother and I didn’t talk about any of the vehicles on that side of the outer yard fence. I would hope the scrap company can come earlier than the end of September, but if they do, I hope they can work around the two cars by the threshing machine.
Okay, I’m getting perplexed. As I’m writing this, I keep hearing the septic pump go off, but no one is using any water. It’s shutting itself off as it should, but why is the tank filling so quickly? I’m not hearing the well pump go off more often, which would happen if we had a leak of some kind that was fast enough to trigger the septic pump that often.
I wonder if it’s related to the problems at the expeller end? That’s some 300 feet away, though.
Man, I’ve been paranoid about the pumps since we’ve moved out here. Now, it’s even worse!
Relax, Re-Farmer. Breathe.
Think gardening thoughts. That should calm me down!
Meanwhile, I took advantage of the lovely cooler day and got some lawn mowing done, using the lawn tractor my brother lent us. I was going to try our riding mower, but the battery was dead again. My brother replaced that battery when he repaired it for us, so it shouldn’t be dying so quickly. I didn’t want to take the time to charge it, and just used my brother’s machine, instead. Not all the lawns needed to be done, and one area still has a piece of tree that broke in our recent storm, waiting to be broken down into firewood for the the fire pit. The grass around there doesn’t grow very fast, so it can do without being mowed for a while. I did get to do the outer yard and driveway, though, and will have plenty of clippings to collect and set aside for mulch and for composting.
Well, it’s just hit 9pm right now, and I should be going to bed. I want to start for the city quite early.
Hopefully, I’ll get some decent sleep tonight!
The Re-Farmer
[addendum: okay, this is too funny! After I hit publish, I went ahead and clicked on the AI “Generate Feedback” button. This time, I didn’t get suggestions on breaking up paragraphs or adding pictures. Nope. This time, I got suggestions for regular maintenance on equipment, better communication with my brother, and possibly getting help to deal with my anxiety over the septic issues, and ensuring good self-care. 😄😄😄]
The Re-Farmer 