Today, we woke up to rain. Not a little bit, either, but a wonderful steady and heavy rain. It’s expected to keep raining through to tomorrow morning, and I am quite happy to see it. Even in the hours it took me to go to the city and back, the leaf buds on the lilacs beside the house have gotten huge!
It wasn’t heavy enough to cause problems with the drive to and from the city, even with reduced visibility, so that was good, too.
Costco was really busy while I was there. Almost weekend level busy! I was in no hurry, though, which was a good thing. They must have just gotten a huge shipment in, because the wider aisles all had rows of pallets down the middle, with barely enough room for a flat cart to get through on either side. Then there were the abandoned carts, and all the people who would just block traffic. I spent a lot of time waiting for things to clear enough to be able to maneuver around with the flat cart. Of course, there are always those who seem to think I can stop on a dime, and cut me off.
*sigh*
I hate shopping.
But, the first stock up shopping trip for May is now done. This is what a total of $911.58 looks like.
The scary thing is, this is almost all our budget for the month, yet this will not last us the entire month, and there’s really nothing there that’s being added to the pantry. Some things, like the paper products, will last us the month, and I did manage to pick up some good deals on protein. Our next trip will be for the fresh stuff that I generally don’t get at Costco, though I did get more of those bagged salads that they have as much cheaper prices than others.
Once at the till, I had the cat food put on a separate bill again.
With the leaky butt issues with the cats, I did not get the Kirkland brand dry cat food at all, and instead got six 11.6kg bags of Whiskas. For dry cat food, those are pretty much the only two options. Kirkland has 2 options, with one being smaller, more expensive bags.
I also got two cases of wet cat food. Each has 48 cans, which puts the price at 78¢ per can.
Grand total for cat food this time: $340.17 after taxes.
Six bags of kibble will probably last us only 2 or 3 weeks.
*sigh*
Then there was the stuff for us.
Among the non-food items, we got facial tissue (on sale), paper towel (with cat clean ups, we go through quite a bit of that) and toilet paper. There’s ibuprofen for my daughters and acetaminophen for me. That, at least, is inexpensive.
For dairy products, I got our usual 5 pounds of butter; I used to get 10 pounds every month, but with the price of butter going up, while the Costco buckets of ghee are still such a good price, we use that instead for many things. Whipping cream is a much better price at Costco, so I got two of those. Then there were the block cheeses (mozza and old cheddar) and soft cheeses (cream cheese and goat cheese).
Among the fresh items were the double bags of salad mixes; each pair of bags is not much higher than the price of one bag, elsewhere. So I got two double bags in two flavour mixes. That’s the one down side. Not a lot of flavour options. I also got a container of cremini mushrooms (the “mini bellas” on the receipt).
I got only one double flat of eggs this time, plus 2 two-packs of rye bread and three packs of tortilla wraps.
Then there was the mayo, peanut butter, strawberry jam, butter chicken sauce, a bag of hazelnuts, a bag of flour and popcorn.
I did grab a decent amount of protein this time, including fish for the girls. Some, like the ribs and the trout fillet, were on sale. I got canned chicken and their 4 pk of bacon, mild Italian sausage, cod fillets, a really nice, big meaty slab of pork belly, and two hot rotisserie chickens.
There were some good deals in there but, with the cat food, it still broke $900.
Ouch.
Then there was the gas. On the way out, I put $30 in the tank, at $1.449/L That brought my tank to half full so, of course, it was below half by the time I got to Costco.
Filling the tank at $1.329/L totaled $75.96, so my total for gas for the day was $105.96
With $911.58 spent at Costco, that brought the total for the day to $1017.54
Ouch.
The scary thing is, due to a “price break” our provincial government extended on the gas taxes, we have probably the lowest gas prices in the country right now. Yup. I just double checked. Our provincial average price is the lowest in the country. The highest provincial average today is $1.978/L in BC. I just took a look at BC prices overall, and the highest price they’ve got today is $2.239!
If we had those prices here, we couldn’t afford to do the driving that we do.
Speaking of which, my husband had a follow up telephone appointment with his doctor about the new pain meds they are trying him on, to replace the ones that aren’t available anymore. He had only 2 weeks of meds for the trial. His dose has been increased, and the doctor sent the prescription to the pharmacy. I didn’t realize when my husband messaged me about it, that I was supposed to pick them up on the way home. So I’ll have to do that, tomorrow.
While making these trips to the city to stock up saves us a lot, they just suck the energy right out of me. It’s only 6pm as I write this, and I’m fighting the urge to just go to bed!
Things started going down last night, with Little Miss Leaky Butt making a mess on my bed. I changed my bedding and got the first load of laundry started before going to bed.
This morning, I woke to find another mess at the foot of my bed. A small one, but wet enough to soak through to the mattress cover.
So I take the sheets off, but leave the cover for later, since I was out of clean bedding. With the price of king size sheets, I don’t have extra spares. There was just one small damp spot, anyhow.
Then Peanut Butter Cup jumped onto the bed next to me while I was taking my supplements, and aimed her butt at me like a shotgun.
I shooed her away, but she still managed to leave a drip behind!
Meanwhile, my younger daughter had already gone through the dining room on her way to the kitchen, where she discovered Ginger had peed on the dining table.
Unfortunately, the dining table being a flat surface, it had stuff on it. Some of which had to be thrown away.
So for the next while, we were starting more laundry and more clean up. I did the litters, and after I left, my daughter continued doing a deep clean.
I left early so I could pick up our order of lysine for the cats, then continued to town. I picked up a couple of cheap vinyl table cloths, then got a few things at the grocery store. Including tweezers to dig out the sliver I got yesterday, but didn’t discover until this morning, and antihistamines. I don’t normally have allergic reactions to anything, but I am definitely allergic to something outside. Likely tree pollen.
Budget? What’s that?
*sigh*
I made sure to grab a food for lunch to eat in the truck, then called my mother to let her know I would be early. She was just starting her own lunch, so that was going to work out.
When I got there, I found she had already started on her apartment, and even pulled some furniture from the wall. As we were talking, she mentioned that she might stay at a motel for tomorrow night, because my sister suggested it.
Of course, both my brother and I had also suggested it, but my mother does love trying to play us against each other.
Which is how things started going downhill.
First, she started attacking my brother, making all sorts of accusations about how he is after her money (as if she has any worth fighting for!). Then she started defending our vandal, who really is after the millions he believes she has squirreled away. Then she started playing us against each other, while saying how she just wanted us to all get along.
Of course, I defended my brother, while also pointing out how some of the things she was complaining about were the consequences of her own actions. She still doesn’t understand how badly she screwed herself up when she stabbed my brother in the back, months ago.
I’m not going to say more about the things she said, but she started getting increasingly vile.
Then she brought my daughters into it.
My daughters, who were doing a deep clean at home, so I could be at my mother’s to take care of her place, due to the consequences of her own actions.
At which point, I told her, that’s it. I’m done.
Then I left.
So I never got in further than her dining table, just a few feet from her door.
On the way out, I pulled over to email my siblings about the situation, then let my family know I was on my way home, and why.
When I got home, my poor daughter was totally wiped out. She’d had to scrub on her hands and knees in places, and she wasn’t feeling well in the first place.
Oh, and the power was out.
It just came back as I was writing this. It was out for about an hour.
What a mess of a day.
I’m done.
I keep saying I’m done with my mother, too. I don’t need to put up with her abuse. Who am I kidding, though? I’ll still help her out. Not so much for her, but for my brother. After what she did to him, he tried to cut her out, but he is too good of a man. He will always do the right thing, even when it breaks his heart.
I think that, more than anything else, bothers me the most about my mother. She can’t hurt me anymore, but she sure hurts the ones I love.
I had a very rough time getting going this morning, and I’m not sure why. Bad pain day, joints and muscles, and so very sleepy. I got the girls to do my morning routine for me so I could sleep in as much as the cats would allow. Still, I had to do something outside, on this gorgeous day! This afternoon, I picked a smaller job and worked on the garden bed my daughter weeded and prepped for me yesterday. Like the others, it was bowing out where the boards were jointed at a support.
Since posting a lot of photos isn’t an option for me right now, I took the pictures I would otherwise have included here and made them into a short video.
After I was done with the raised bed, I puttered around the yard and enjoyed the day. One thing I decided to do was raise the old market tent higher and secure the corners. Particularly the corners on either side of where it’s broken. At some point during the winter, the canopy supports collapsed, but I couldn’t see why.
I got three legs extended, but the fourth one just would not happen. I even lubricated it and took a hammer to the base plate, but it just would not extend! Meanwhile, even after attaching cords to the other three corners and securing them, the canopy supports kept folding down for some reason.
Which is when I realized the pins at the corners had snapped free of where they were hinged at the corners, and were literally floating free above the legs!
Well, that tent is toast.
We’ll dismantle it and keep the parts and pieces, like the one that had a piece of tree fall on it. We’re still finding uses for those pieces in the garden, so I’m sure we’ll find plenty of uses for these pieces, too. At some point, we’ll pick up another Walmart cheapie. These tents are very handy.
One of the things I want to do is move the home-made folding table that had been sheltered under the tent all winter, closer to the house. It will be used when it’s time to harden off the transplants.
I won’t be able to get much done outside tomorrow, though. I don’t want to start anything then have to leave it when it’s time to go to my mother’s and start bagging things and moving furniture for when the exterminator comes the next day.
Oh! My brother ended up calling me when he had a few minutes at work. He’d actually made it to that funeral my mother had tried to guilt me into going to, even though I really don’t remember these relatives. My brother does, and he hadn’t known about the funeral until we talked about my mother. He went to work super early to get things done, then even booked the time for a meeting he couldn’t miss for when he knew he’d be in the town it was held in – a town north of us! – so he could attend the meeting by phone, from the parking lot. He wasn’t even sure he’d have a cell phone single, but it worked out. He was glad to have been able to go and catch up with a distant cousin. The only down side was, our vandal was there, too. Our vandal has been treating my brother cruelly for many years longer than we’ve been back. My brother is much more tender hearted than I am, so being around our vandal actually made my brother feel ill, even though they had no contact. He wasn’t even sure if our vandal saw my brother among the crowd. Ah, well.
Then we got to talk about my mother, and I found out something disturbing, if not surprising. Not long ago, my mother had proudly told me that she’d skipped all but one of her medications, instead taking the echinacea my sister had brought for her, for her cold. I had quite the talk with her about how potentially dangerous that can be, partly because she’s been on them for so long. I’m also concerned that she isn’t remembering which pill is for what, getting what they are mixed up, and so on. Well, it turns out she’s still doing it, and told my brother about it.
This is on top of her putting her own tenancy at risk by refusing to allow the exterminators in, and accusing them of theft.
We’ve talked to her already about moving away from where she is now, partly because of some of her neighbours messing with her head, partly because our vandal randomly shows up. Mostly, though, she’s going to start needing more help, and there is an assisted living apartment not far from her. However, we’ve also talked to her about going to the nursing home her sister and my father both spent their last years. My mother isn’t at that point, and it would require a doctor’s assessment, first. She’s in favour of living there, when the time comes. The question is, with the things she is doing, is the time coming faster? The added benefit for her living there would be the extra security. If she moves there and our vandal finds out, we can make sure he’s on the list as not being allowed to see her. She would also have access to physiotherapy for those knees of hers, and there’s even a chapel, right in the building. They’d make sure she was taking her medications, having proper meals, and hydrating. If I remember correctly, they even have doctors coming in to see the patients there, instead of the patients having to go to a clinic. I know my father was very happy there. When I made my weekly phone calls to him, he would go on and on about how well they were treating him and taking care of him. But then, my father was someone who told the staff what a great job they were doing, while my mother is the sort that would only complain and find fault.
Still, as she’s messing around with her prescriptions, this is something we need to consider more seriously.
*sigh*
Well, I’ll be seeing her tomorrow afternoon. Hopefully, things will go well though, to be honest, just thinking about it makes me feel overwhelmed. She lives in such a tiny little apartment, but she has so. Much. Stuff. I’m the last person to have any credibility when it comes to that sort of judgement, but I’m not living by myself, with no pets, in an apartment that’s about the size of the room that was her bedroom, here at the farm. The room that is now my bedroom, office and craft room, altogether.
Hhmm… Now that I think about it, this room might actually be a bit bigger than her apartment.
Today I was going to be helping my mother with her grocery shopping, so I took advantage of the trip, leaving a bit early to swing by a hardware store. I didn’t find everything I was looking for, but found other things I needed, instead. Then I swung by another store to pick up something for my mother I knew she was intending to skip this time, before finally going to the grocery store. I was intending to pick up a couple of their prepared hot meals that my mother likes so much, for our lunch. Unfortunately, they didn’t have any this time. They did have pieces of hot rotisserie chicken, though, so I got some and other ingredients for our meal. We were running low on kibble again, so I bought an 11kg bag that I hope will last us.
After taxes, it cost $50, which is totally insane.
My mother was happy with what I got her for lunch, which was nice. As we were eating, I kept waiting for her to bring up about the situation with the exterminators coming in at the end of the week. We went over her shopping list, then discussed whether she was up to going to the store with me, or just giving me the list to do the shopping for her. In the end, she decided to stay at home. The local senior’s centre has social activities in her building on Tuesdays, which she loves, and all she needs to do it walk down the hallway to attend.
I finally brought up that we needed to talk. I could tell by the look on her face, she new exactly what I wanted to talk about. It was a look of rather scornful humour that I see way too often. I explained to her that the public housing department is required to do this, and they really could evict her if she doesn’t go along. She kept smirking and scoffing in response, (all this for just one bug?) before bringing up the things she is convinced an exterminator stole from her. Particularly the old passports. She had four of them together, she says, and now there’s just two. I didn’t even think to ask, why would someone not only go digging through her boxes papers to find them, then take only two of them. Particularly since the exterminator is in and out very quickly. I reminded her that she’s accused people of stealing before, only to find the “stolen” item later. It’s entirely possible she decided to put them someplace “safe” and forgot where, as happens to everyone. I also brought up a few things she does that are far more of a safety and security thing than someone using 70 year old passports that look nothing like modern ones to make fake ID, but that just had her going off on a rant that completely contradicted her concerns about “scam people”.
I managed to get the conversation back to the exterminator visit – and found out hers is not the only apartment that’s going to be treated. I took a moment to check my email and found a response from my sister. It turned out she had also suggested that my mother just get a motel room for Thursday night, but she refused. My sister’s house is not very accessible, and my mother didn’t want to stay at her place, anyhow. So my sister was planning to come out at 7am on Friday morning! With that confirmed with my mother, we worked out that I will come out on Thursday afternoon to bag her fabric items and move furniture away from the walls in most of her apartment. My sister will have to do the stuff in my mother’s bedroom when she gets there, since the bedroom is so tiny, it can’t be done in advance and still have space for her to sleep. Plus, of course, her bedding needs to be bagged.
That finally worked out, I headed to the grocery store with her list. As I was getting her stuff, I noticed they had some sale prices on some things that were even better than in the city, and decided it was worth going back, later. I got my mother’s stuff and was at her place just as the social event was being set up and my mother was already in the lounge, so I took care of putting everything away. She didn’t like that I used the main doors (the other people would see her shopping), though. I used them because they have the automatic door openers that I can activate with my knee, rather than putting the bags down and fighting with keys and very heavy doors. After I put everything away, I started going down the hall to the lobby to say my goodbyes, only to have her meet me and tell me to leave out the other doors! 😄😄
Which was fine by me, but I found it very funny.
I went back to the grocery store for the third time (the cashiers were laughing at seeing me again!), got a few things that were sale. I got about $160 of stuff that would otherwise have cost me about $300 at regular prices in the city. More, if they were regular local prices! A quick stop at the gas station, and I was on my way home. I only had one more side trip, as my husband message me to let me know he had a notification that another package had arrived at the post office. As I was getting it, though, the postmaster had another package she hadn’t make a pick up slip for yet.
I love it when packages come in early!
By the time I got home, though, I was totally drained. While I took a break, my younger daughter headed outside to weed the third raised bed in the west yard for me.
With how things have been going, the past few days, I’d neglected to check on the squash seeds that were still pre-germinating. I remembered to check them this morning, and found little squidlings! So once I was done taking a break, I went to get them planted.
Squidlings! 😄😄
I had three 5″ biodegradable pots left from last year, so I used those for the three biggest seeds, and 4″ pots for the rest.
Because the seed leaves were already pushing themselves out of their shells, I planted them so that the leaf portions were partially emerged from the soil.
The previous batch of seeds I planted are still on the heat mat, and I can see little hills forming where the seedlings are starting to emerge, but these ones are far enough along, they don’t need to be on a heat mat. I did set the pots in water, though. The soil was premoistened, as always, but I want those pots to absorb water, so they don’t dry out the soil.
The gourds, meanwhile, have finally been moved to the mini greenhouse frame in the window.
The next thing that needed to be done was to pot up the early peppers from their tiny tray.
Yes, one pot looks completely empty. There was one cell that I didn’t think had any peppers germinating, but two seedlings started to show up this morning. I wasn’t going to leave just one cell in the tray, so I transplanted the stronger looking one, with as much of the soil around it as I could include. It’ll probably not survive being potted up, but you never know!
Most of the cells had just one seedling in them, but a few had two, and one had three. I thinned them to have just four seedlings (including the one that you can barely see in the vermiculite) per variety. With the hot peppers we already have, plus the Sweet Chocolate peppers, we have way more than we need, and can afford some losses.
At this point, we have pretty much run out of space in the living room for seedlings – and we don’t have anywhere near as many as we started last year! Tomorrow is supposed to be a warm and dry day, so I’m planning on snagging a daughter to help me empty the sun room, clean up the messes the critters left for us over the winter, then set things up for the transplants. The sun room is staying warm enough overnight that I think it’s safe to start moving them out of the living room set up.
Looking at the 10 day forecast, I’m seeing days forecast with highs above 20C/68F! At those temperatures, the sun room will probably be hitting closer to 30C/86F, so if we are we are able to start putting transplants there this week, we will have to make sure to have the ceiling fan going, and the doors wide open during the day.
The bed my daughter weeded today is also bowing out at the sides, to I’m hoping to fix that, tomorrow, then work some sulfur into the soil.
Oh, that reminds me; while at the hardware store, I found they had a sulfur powder available. This can apparently be dusted directly onto the plants, or added to a watering can, rather than being worked into the soil like the granular stuff we got. That might be worth getting later on, but I want to see how the beds do with the granular sulfur worked into the soil, first. Getting a bale of peat would be higher on the priority list right now, though.
For all the running around I was doing today, at least we got a few things accomplished at home, too!
I’m going to call this a mostly good, somewhat productive, somewhat frustrating day.
This afternoon, after checking the tracking information again to confirm I had five parcels to pick up at the post office, I headed out once it had reopened for the afternoon. A couple of them were in envelopes, but the others were in boxes. When the fifth one turned out to be the largest of them all, I left it to load the others into the truck, then came back for the last one. Just as I was picking it up, the postmaster quickly added a 6th parcel! There were 5 slips in my mail box, but she found one more! One that was expected to arrive tomorrow, it turns out. Thankfully, it was another bulky envelope, rather than a box.
So this was good. Especially since one of the packages that came in early was a heart monitor my husband got for himself. The kind you strap on while exercising. Our sulfur came in, so I was happy, too.
I was driving home when I heard a Messenger notification on my phone. I pulled into the yard to unload, but remembered to check the message before I went in.
I’m glad I did.
It was from my brother, who was at work. He’d gotten a call from the public housing department about my mother, since he is her Power of Attorney. He needed to talk to me, so I let him know I just got home, then got my daughters to unload and park the truck. I barely got to my office when the phone started ringing.
My poor brother.
The first thing that came up was that they had talked to my mother and asked for his number, since he’s PoA, but she told them she didn’t remember it. They got my brother’s number from me, but this was awhile ago! This is also not the first time my mother has done this. Which is strange, because she calls him herself, and has all our numbers written down in a list on her wall, along with postal addresses, birthdays and anniversaries.
The reason they were calling him, though, was about the bed bug situation. She got their notification that they’re coming in this Friday. My mother has been refusing to let them in for the last few times. This time, she called the number on the letter and talked to the exterminator, saying she didn’t want them coming in, and once again accusing them of theft. The guy would have had to tell the department about this, which leads us to the next issue.
They are coming in on Friday, and she has to have the place prepared – stuff moved away from the walls (difficult, given how tiny her place is), fabric items bagged up, etc. They will be coming in at around 9am, and she has to be gone all day (I believe they know she has respiratory issues, which means she needs to be out for at least 12 hours, instead of the usual 6 hours).
If she doesn’t do this, she will be evicted.
*sigh*
We’ve tried to warn her about this.
My poor brother was already having a stressful time at work, and now he had to deal with this on top of it!
One thing they will also do, though, is provide her with a special mattress cover that will kill off anything on her mattress that might have gotten missed, by denying oxygen.
We talked for a bit and, once he’s home from work, he’ll send a group email to the family. My suggestion was that I could go over on Thursday night to help with bagging things and moving furniture. The best thing would be for my mother to stay at my sister’s on Thursday night, since she has Fridays off, but I forgot that my sister works nights on Thursdays. I’ll be on my own for prepping her apartment. I’d be willing to drive my mother to my sister’s, but she would have to drive my mother back, since Friday will be our first city shopping day. Worse comes to worse, my mother could stay at the motel again, but she would have to check out by noon on Friday, unless she stays for 2 nights, and she would not be willing to do that.
She has no choice, though. She either goes along with this, or gets evicted.
One thing’s for sure. Since I’m the only one that will be able to go over to help her with her stuff on Thursday, I’ll be going straight to the shower, and my clothes to the wash, as soon as I get home!
My mother has zero understanding of just how much her behavior causes problems the rest of us have to fix, and now she’s putting her own housing at risk.
My brother couldn’t talk long, though, since he was already interrupting his work day, but we’ll connect again later today.
By the time I was off the phone, the girls had taken care of things and parked the truck, so I could get stuff together to go back outside and work on the carrot bed. It still had the plastic covered frame on it, so the first thing I did was add metal brackets to the corners before moving it. I most definitely could tell these brackets make a difference!
I was not intending to make another time lapse video of the progress, since I figured it would be pretty boring. I just took still shots of the progress, but I’ve since confirmed a frustration.
To make the photos I included in my previous post smaller, I cropped one, then reduced it to 50% original size. The two garden ones weren’t cropped, but I reduced those to 30%, plus I reduced the colours. Those two ended up being smaller file sizes than the 50% and cropped one. All the photos were uploaded to Google Photos, and inserted into my post from there. On my desktop, WP just tells me my storage is at 98% full, but the app gives decimal points, so when I had the chance, I checked on my phone to see if there was any change.
My storage went from 98.3% full to 98.5% full. Usually, I can upload many more than 3 photos before it goes up by even 0.1%, but for only 3 photos, greatly reduced in file size, to make it to up by 0.2%? Wth, WP?
Clearly, there is zero benefit to storing my images on Google Photo. I’ve tried embedding them, using the share link, etc., but instead of the images, the code shows instead.
So I guess I’ll make a vlog with the still shots, since it turned out to be a bigger job than I expected!
Very early on, though, I got an interruption. One of my daughters came out to let me know my mother had called; they were working in the kitchen and couldn’t get to the phone, but could hear my mother leave a message on the answering machine.
I considered calling her back later, but decided to do it right away.
*sigh*
When I got through to her, she was all chatty, asking how my cold was (I had started to feel one coming on, but that went away a while ago), before going on about how hers is no better (she sounds perfectly healthy), and it was so bad, she thought she was going to die, because of her breathing. At that point, I told her flat out, she says this every time, and it’s getting to the point where I don’t know whether to believe her or not. So she dropped it and instead said she called my sister and asked her to come and take “stuff”. Stuff? What kind of stuff? My mother hemmed and hawed before saying that my sister sews, so… then changed the subject. I guess she was trying to say fabric items? But I’ve helped pack her stuff into bags for previous bed bug spraying, so I don’t know what she’s talking about. With the way she hemmed and hawed before answering, then changing the subject, I suspect she’s trying to hide something from me, and intends to give my sister things that my only my brother, as her PoA, should be seeing.
Then she started asking if I knew about a distant relative that passed away, and I did, because my sister does genealogy stuff and shared the obituary online. My mother wanted me to go to the funeral on the weekend. I don’t know these people at all. I suggested my sister might go, since she’s the one who keeps track of all these relatives, but apparently she already said no, because the funeral is on the Sabbath. ??? I managed to preemptively cut off the possibility of my brother going, since he’s so incredibly busy already, and probably doesn’t even remember them anymore, giving how many decades it’s been since we’ve had any contact. Why my mother suddenly thought it was important for some member of the family to be there, I don’t know. We’ve had other distant relatives pass, and she was never like this before – though she did mention our vandal would probably be there, because apparently he’s friends with them, etc., etc. Okay. So then he should be there. Not me!
I finally got a chance to ask about her grocery status and it turns out that was why she was calling. Her fridge is empty, and she has only 1 bun left. Then she started telling me about the various things she was about to start cooking…
So did she want me to come over tomorrow?
Well, she’s making her list right now, and this and that and….
She would not commit to asking me to come over tomorrow, though when I asked if she wanted me to come over today, she said no. I kept trying to get more information out of her, like if she needed to go to the pharmacy or the bank or anywhere else, and she said now, but with much hesitation. So I finally just said, I’ll come over tomorrow, at the usual time. The usual time? Will I be bringing lunch? I told her that the last time I was at her grocery store, I saw they had the hot meals again, so I could pick up a couple and we’ll have them for lunch. She got downright excited about that!
As we were talking, I kept asking her, is there anything else you need? Anything else you want to tell me? Anything else that’s new?
Nothing came up about the exterminator notification letter or about Friday.
So I let it be. I’ll wait until my brother has had a chance to talk to her.
Which he has tried to do, while I was writing this, but there’s been no answer.
*sigh*
So that was quite the thing.
I’d told her from the start that I’d been working outside, so I finally brought the call to a close so I could get back to it. I think my mother was bored again. I do wish she wouldn’t wait until she’s running out of food, because calling me to help her with groceries! She refuses to do otherwise, though, telling me that if there’s food in the house, that means she has to eat it…
…
…
I never quite know how to take that. It’s not like she’s a glutton who sits around over eating all day, but she makes it sound like the mere act of eating food is a bad thing.
Anyhow.
I’ll be going there tomorrow, and we’ll see if she’s up to climbing into the truck to do her own shopping this time. With only one place to go, I think she might be up to it.
That done, it was back to working on the garden bed, which also involved pulling in the bowed out sides. I’ll do a vlog about that later. For now, I will say, I am really, really starting to hate those @#$@!% Chinese elms!!! Good grief!
I got it done, though, and even added sulfur to the soil at the end. It took way longer than it should have, but it’s done. Tonight, I’ll see if I can put together a vlog using my still shots, instead of posting any pictures. I suppose I could upload them to Instagram, but it seems not everyone can see them when I embed from Instagram, and I wouldn’t be able to explain what’s going on, anyhow.
I’d like to get more stuff done outside while the weather is good, but now I’m going to have to be at my mother’s at least 2 days this week, then on Friday I’m in the city.
This seems to be a constant pattern, pretty much since we’ve moved here. The more work we need to get on top of around here, the more external responsibilities end up taking priority. It seems to be getting worse, instead of better, to the point that we are falling behind rather than getting ahead. Such is life, but when it comes to things like my mother deliberately disrupting things and hurting people the way she does, it’s getting much harder not to get angry at her – and it takes a LOT to make me truly angry!
Thank God my brother is our “landlord” now. Otherwise, I know we would have moved out by now. Even the short time we were here and she still owned the property, we reached a point where we were seriously considering it. We would have put up with the financial hardship but, if we had, it would have caused more hardship for my brother than my mother, and none of us would have wanted that. He and his wife are the shining light of awesomeness that makes it all worthwhile!
Well, it’s getting late in the day. If I’m going to my mother’s tomorrow, and put a video together, I’d better get to it.
Morning rounds are so much more enjoyable, now that it’s warmed up, and I don’t have to slog through snow, slush or mud. 😂
First, the cuteness!
Broccoli let me pet her today.
She is so very round.
I counted 32 yard cats today, including 5 that were following around one of the white and greys that was obviously in heat.
*sigh*
Of all of them, the least feral one was Shop Towel!
I tended to the raised bed that was planted in yesterday.
In the first photo, you can see that the stove pellet mulch has absorbed moisture and broken apart into sawdust. The second photo is after I gently spread it around. I like using stove pellets as mulch when direct sowing because even things with small seedlings, like the spinach, can easily push their way through the light and fluffy sawdust.
I also managed to get a picture of an emerging snow crocus!
We’re not seeing many, yet, and the few we do see tend to be too far from the path for me to get a decent photo. Looking at the forecast, I was happy to see rain, but a closer look at the hourly forecast shows that we have an only 4% chance of rain, so… none. At best, we’ve got a 25% chance of rain some time tonight.
After finishing my rounds, I headed to the post office to pick up a couple of parcels. One was a courier delivery, so timing wasn’t an issue, but the other was to our postal box, and I wanted to pick it up before the post office closed at 11:30.
There was nothing there.
Strange, but okay.
My husband was surprised, as he got email notifications for 4 different parcels, instead of just the 2 I was expecting. When I had the chance, I went online to check the tracking, which has timestamps on it.
Two showed “attempted delivery” times that were shortly after I left. Two others had time stamps that were after the post office was closed. A fifth (!!) simply said “delivered today”, which would have been a courier.
One of the packages that came in has our sulfur in it; last I checked the tracking information, that one was supposed to come in on Thursday, so it’s three days early!
The post office opens up again at 2, so I’ll head out again this afternoon.
Then it’s back to work in the garden beds! Woohoo!!
Okay, so I’ve scattered seeds and such, but today is the first day for direct sowing. It was such a gorgeous day for it, too!
I planted all the edible pod peas from the package, minus the ones that split apart as they soaked between damp paper towels overnight. Not a lot of carrots were planted; I’ll include them between other things, over the next while. I’ll probably do the same with more spinach. Basically, they’ll be space fillers and ground covers until it’s too warm to plant them anymore.
The box frame cover got worked on first, then set aside, since I put in the old salvaged T posts to hold netting for the peas to climb. I couldn’t drive them in very far, so they will need to have support added to them before any trellis netting is added, so they don’t get pulled into the bed by the weigh of the peas – or the net, for that matter! I intended to add a third post in the middle, but hit something hard. Possibly one of the branches set at the base of the bed, when it was first built and filled. Or a rock that got missed.
I found my pH meter and did a reading. No surprise the pH is still at 8. I even stuck it into the compost heap nearby, and the needle barely moved. I had a bit of an ah-ha moment earlier today. Well, more like a “duh, of course” moment. Maritime Gardening did an April garden tour video and was taking about how acidic his soil is, and mentioned that liming the soil can make the soil more alkaline.
Liming.
Lime.
Garden lime.
Which is made out of limestone.
Which is what we are sitting on top of.
Our area has limestone quarries and commercial gravel pits – we even have our own little gravel pit – with limestone based sand and gravel below a very narrow band of topsoil.
Of course our soil alkalinity is maxing out the pH meter. How could it be any different? *smacks forehead over what should have been obvious*
Increasing the acidity is going to be a challenge, that’s for sure. The use of raised beds will make it easier, at least.
Our order of sulfur is supposed to arrive by Thursday. Once we’ve got that in, we’ll be able to start amending the various beds with it, to increase the acidity. My husband actually ordered 2 different bags. One bag is 90% sulfur, 10% betonite clay. The other is guaranteed 99.5% elemental sulfur, but both are supposed to be broadcast evenly, then worked into the top 6 inches of soil, at a rate of 250g/10m² (0.5lb/100ft²). These low raised beds are 27ft², so they shouldn’t need much but, from what I’m reading, the more alkaline the soil, the more sulfur is needed (which makes sense), plus our soil type would also need more, for it to make a difference. Even so, it won’t actually do much for us this year; if we were treating a field, we’d be adding it to the soil a year before planting a crop. Any amending we do this year will mostly benefit what we grow, next year. Once we’ve started incorporating it into our soil, though, we should test the soil every few months to see how much difference it has made. Still, every little bit will help.
While it will be slow going to increase our soil acidity, using sulfur is supposed to be one of the quickest ways to do it!
Anyhow…
In the early evening, the girls and I went around the yard, checking things out and enjoying the longer daylight hours and warmth. We blew past our predicted high and reached 16C/61F! Plenty of trees and bushes have leaf buds showing. It took some searching, but we were thrilled to find a few shoots of snow crocuses and grape hyacinth emerging through the leaf litter. We even spotted the leaves of two tulips that had emerged near the saffron crocuses! These were not there, this morning!
We are getting into that period when everything starts to just explode into new growth.
Before long, we’re probably going to be complaining over how hot it is! 😂😂
For now, I’m just really happy to get some progress done outside. We’re supposed to get some rain next week, but we should have plenty of lovely days like today, to get things done outside!
Well, I ended up doing a bit more than I expected to, yesterday evening!
The first thing I did as plant a few more pre-germinated Wild Bunch winter squash seeds. To make space, I changed out what the pots were sitting in.
They are now in a baking pan, over a cooling rack, to allow air to circulate under them. This is a recommendation from Gardening in Canada, as a way to keep the pots from getting moldy or starting to fall apart. The problem, though, is they can’t be bottom watered while on this, which means they’ll be watered mostly by misting.
I would love it if Costco got another shipment of these baking pans. They are basic, 9×13 pans and were very affordable. I didn’t realize just how good the price was, until they were gone and I tried finding more, elsewhere, only to find they cost 4 or 5 times more! Even the restaurant section of the wholesale store I checked out was ridiculously expensive.
Also, that’s the last of my 3″ biodegradable pots from last year. The new ones I got are 4″ pots, which is what the green plastic one is.
Speaking of “biodegradable” pots. The last thing I potted was the coffee tree I got for my daughters. I repurposed a pot that we’d planted thyme in, last year. The thyme had been started in one of these biodegradable pots and the whole thing was potted up. Unfortunately, the indoor thyme got forgotten about and died. It was set aside until tonight, when I finally went to remove the dead thyme – and pulled out a pot! It was completely whole; only brittle from being so dry. No degradation occurred while the plant was still alive, at all. That is not how these pots are supposed to be! When it comes time to plant these outdoors, I will most likely break the pot up so that at least the roots won’t be constrained. If I can remove them completely without damaging the roots, I will!
But I digress…
After potting the pre-germinated seeds and rearranging the aquarium greenhouse to fit them, it was time to work on the San Marzano tomatoes. I decided they needed to be done, even though they are still recovering from their accident, as they were just getting too crowded. I used another deep cell tray to transplant into, but instead of filling it with seed starting mix, I use a Pro Mix potting soil I picked up today. As usual, I premoistened the soil, first.
Good grief, there were a lot of sticks in it!
I can’t even say it’s a brand problem. My second bag of Miracle Grow seed starting mix was full of sticks, too. The first bag of Miracle Grow had them as well, though not as bad. The first bag of seed starting mix I got – Jiffy, I think, but I can’t remember for sure – was probably the best of the lot, with only a few sticks in it, but it was also a much smaller bag.
Once the new tray was full of potting soil, I went through the San Marzano seedlings. A couple were pretty much dead, so I just pulled them. After removing and potting up the “spares”, I top dressed the ones left behind with vermiculate, then set it back at the window.
They are definitely still in rough shape. I hope that, now that they have more room, a bit of fresh soil and the vermiculite, they will recover faster.
As for the spares I transplanted out, there were only 9 strong enough to transplant to the new tray, plus one that got transplanted into a cell in the original tray that lost its seedlings to the fall.
I’m honestly not sure these will all survive. 😞 We shall see!
That left 12 cells available. I had the small tray with 12 cells planted with three different types of tomatoes in them, so I decided to thin those by transplanting. With the Chocolate Cherry and the Black Cherry, there were 4 “spares” to transplant out, but with the Forme de Coeur, a couple of cells had 3 seeds sprouting when I thought I’d planted only two, giving me 6 “spares” to plant out.
Once I started working on them, though, I realized I would have to plant all of them out of the little tray, so once these were done, I planted the remainder into 4″ plastic pots.
The outside rows of 4 pots are the Black Cherry and Chocolate Cherry. I didn’t have room for all the Forme de Coeur, though…
… so the last one went into the bin with the peppers and thyme.
Hopefully, I didn’t want too long to transplant these from those little trays! This one’s looking particularly rough. 😞
I hadn’t planned to be filling an extra fourteen 4″ pots, so these ones were filled with a mix of seed starting mix and potting soil.
The other small tray with the peppers in it will need to be potted up, too. I’ll probably use Red Solo cups for those, since I only have 4 or 5 of the green pots left, and the new biodegradable ones I got, I’m saving for the winter squash. For the peppers in the small tray, I don’t think I’ll thin them by transplanting, though. Instead, I’ll just keep the 4 strongest seedlings of each variety.
Speaking of room, I need to make a decision on these guys.
These are getting large enough they’ll need to be moved out of the aquarium greenhouse. The question is, do I try to thin by transplanting, or do I just thin them?
Who am I kidding. I can’t bring myself to just yank and kill off so many strong, healthy seedlings! However, transplanting them means 7 more pots, on top of the 6 already here. I can fit them in the mini greenhouse frame at the window, if I can move out the onions and shallots.
Hmmm… onions are a cool weather crop. I could start hardening them off and transplant them outside.
Speaking of planting things outside, the last thing I did for the evening was set the snap pea seeds between wet paper towels for the night. Tomorrow, they go into the ground!
I love having cool weather crops that can be planted so early – earlier than usual, this year. I’m hoping the long range forecasts are at least close to accurate! Even if things end up cooler, this is stuff that should survive anything but an unseasonal deep freeze. Hopefully, we’ll soon be seeing our garlic coming up, as well as the snow crocuses.
I caught Peanut Butter Cup being adorable in her sleep.
She has quite settled in, and I’ve even woken up to find her curled up on me! The only down side of that is, she’s got… digestive issues. Little Miss Leaky Butt has inadvertently created much laundry. She’s gotten better, but not as much as the others. For a while, we had a whole lot of cats having… liquidity issues. We had been using the Kirkland brand of cat food before changing up to other brands, including the donated kibble. I try to have different brands and flavours as much as is affordable (plus wet cat food, which we’ve been giving them more of, for other reasons), but when it comes to price per kilogram, the Kirkland brand is still the best deal, so that’s the dominant brand of kibble they all get. I wouldn’t have made any sort of connection until I read a blog post about the Kirkland dog formula changing, and the effect it had on their dog. I haven’t been able to confirm, but found that others have wondered if the cat kibble formula has also changed. Since our own cat problems reduced when they started eating mostly other kibble brands (when the bins are topped up, they can get mixed together), I am now suspicious as to the cause. PBC, however, is still a messy girl at times, even on the other brands.
I’d hoped we wouldn’t have to make another trip before our stock up shopping, but we ran out of kibble. For the prices, it was worth the cost of gas to go to the nearest Walmart to pick some up, and still have budget left over for other necessities. My younger daughter came along with me to do some of her own shopping.
Our first stop was at Canadian Tire, where we were able to sanitize and refill two of our 18.9L water jugs. Since we were there anyhow, I picked up 4 more of the deep cell planting trays, plus a couple more base trays to replace some cracked ones. I need to pot up some tomatoes. My daughter found a couple of replacement spatulas that we hope won’t melt like some of the others we have! We went through most of the store just looking at things and talking about what we need to pick up over the next few weeks/months. In the process I was very happy to find a campfire coffee percolator on clearance! I’ve been on the lookout for one, to include with our other firepit cooking supplies, but they’ve always been so insanely expensive. Now we have a very basic 9 cup coffee percolator that includes an extra handle for hanging over the fire, for just under $18.
Once done there, we headed to the Walmart, split up and got our necessities. I got the cat food we needed, plus some items for the pantry. Canned, flaked tuna, packed in water, dropped in price to 97¢ per can, down from $1.97 per can. Canned meats and seafood of all kinds seem to have almost tripled in price over the past few years (depending on where you shop, of course), so to see a price actually go down to something close to pre-illegal-lockdown was a nice surprise. Mind you, only the girls like canned tuna, so it’s just for them, but anything extra for the pantry is always a good thing.
My daughter and I caught up again at the Walmart McDonalds, where I’d ordered lunch (my daughter hadn’t had breakfast before we left!), so she took the cart and loaded the truck while I waited for the food. While heading back to the truck, I remembered that I wanted to go to the Dollarama that shares the parking lot. My daughter had just finished bagging our stuff and loading it into the truck, so we left the food for later and she went into the store with me. While there, I found a few more things I wanted for starting seeds indoors. My daughter found some stuff, too – and got a present for me. A new hat for my collection!
It’s the absolute blingy-est adult sized hat I could find! Not only does it sparkle, it’s fluffy. 😂 It was actually the only blingy adult sized hat they had, but I’m absolutely giddy over it.
It doesn’t take much to make me happy.
We need to make something for our entry wall just for hanging up our hats. We have so many of them! 😁
Today we reached our high of 10C/49F, with some lovely sunshine. The only unpleasant thing was the winds were high enough to buffet us on the drive home. We’re supposed to continue being nice and warm – even reaching as high as 18C/65F next week, which is going to feel down right tropical.
Since potting the pre-germinated winter squash seeds I’d made a video of, 2 days ago, I potted up 2 more yesterday, and this morning I found more had germinated, so I’ll be potting those tonight. I will also be thinning by transplanting the San Marzano tomatoes, now that I have more of the large celled trays. The seedlings are a bit beat up from their fall, but almost all survived. I also need to pot up the other tomatoes and peppers in the small trays. That can be done over the next few days. With the pleasant upcoming weather, though, I want to set my snap pea seeds to soak, then tomorrow I want to plant them, along with some of the Uzbek Golden Carrots I made seed tape out of, plus spinach, in the bed that’s ready for them. I’ve decided to plant the snap peas in this bed, instead of the shelling peas, since we have fewer snap pea seeds, and it’s a relatively small bed.
Tomorrow, I also want to check on the bed that is solarizing right now and see how it’s doing, after today’s warmth and sunshine. We ended up ordering some sulphur pellets online, to increase the acidity of our very alkaline soil. I will wait until those arrive and add some to the bed that’s solarizing, before I plant the purple caribe potatoes in it. Potatoes like a pH of 5-6, and ours is 8; probably higher. Our test trips and pH meter don’t go any higher. I’ll probably be adding it to all our beds – or as many as possible, before we run out. From what I’ve been reading, our high pH may be more responsible for some of our troubles than anything else, including the relatively low NPK in all our soil tests. The two dump truck loads of garden soil we purchased years ago had adequate amounts of NPK when tested, and that’s been used in all our garden beds, but even the purchased soil tested as alkaline.
We are supposed to be heading into another drought this summer, so anything we can do to improve things is going to help. The first year we tried to grow melons was a drought year with heat waves, and we had a surprisingly good harvest from them. This year, I plan to grow several types of melons, so I hope it works out for them again.
Tomorrow is 6 weeks before our last frost date and, if I can manage to make space in the aquarium greenhouse, I plan to start pre-germinating another batch of seeds. I’ll be looking closely at days to maturity to decide which ones I will be starting, but I expect we’ll start more seeds pretty much weekly, if not more often, at this point.
I really need to figure out how to make space for all the pots, though. We may have to kick the yard cats out of the sun room a bit early! We won’t be able to leave the sun room door open overnight anymore once we start putting plants in there. I’m not worried so much about the cats; they tended to ignore the bins and trays of seedlings last year. It’s the skunks and racoons that we need to keep out!
The Re-Farmer 