Broccoli was eating at the kibble house, so I took a quick check.
She has not moved her babies!
The old garden shed is a good place for them, other than the fact that we actually still use it.
In other things, the rain started yesterday, off and on, and will continue throught today. No downpours or anything like that. Just intermittent light rain. Enough to make the ground too wet to work in the garden beds or process the felled spruced.
If my husband is up to it, there will be a trip into town for some blood work.
I don’t think he’s up to it.
One of my older daughters, however, has offered to treat us to some Chinese food today, so a trip to town is still a possibility!
That would be a nice treat on a wet and chilly day. 🩷
I got the strawberries through one of their $20 specials. This was supposed to be a package of eight, but there turned out to be nine in the package. Bonus! Thanks, Veseys!
I’d gone to their website yesterday, to get the planting instructions. The first step was to set the roots to soak, while I continued working on the bed I prepared yesterday – which I found covered with kitty footprints, this morning!
I decided to add more soil, so I brought over the last of the amended soil left from when we redid the bed against the chain link fence. The extra soil from making the bed narrower has come in very handy!
After leveling off the new soil, I made holes to plant in and filled them with water. The instructions said to spread the bare roots over a small hill of soil, so I added soil back to make one in each hole, while the water was being absorbed. Next, the bare roots were spread over each hill, and soil pulled back around them, making sure the growing tops were above soil and supported.
After that, I brought over some straw that has been in the potato grow bags last year, and carefully mulched around each plant. I wanted to make sure the hills of soil were well covered so it wouldn’t erode when watered, as well as packing extra around the outside, to make it less likely for water to wash the soil out under the frame. Once that was all in place, it got a deep watering. Yes, we’re expecting rain this afternoon, but with our weird little climate bubble in our area, it could pass us by completely and we might not get more than a few drops.
From the information on the Veseys website, they recommend pruning away the flowers in the first year, to have stronger and more productive plants the next year – except for everbearing varieties. These are everbearing, so there will be no need to prune them.
Which means we should have strawberries to harvest this year – if they survive being transplanted!
We are supposed to get rain this afternoon, which would be great, considering it is fire season right now, so I made sure to get some work done outside. As I was putting things away, I noticed Broccoli by the house, so I dashed around to check the garden shed.
Yes, the babies are still there! Which means there is still hope of socializing them. Broccoli seems to be content with her nest, though lately she won’t let me anywhere near her. Not even at feeding time. It is, however, normal for the yard cat mamas to move their kittens several times, before they get big enough that they start bringing them along to the kibble houses for solid food.
I was thinking of sticking to the brassica theme for naming the calicos. We started with Cabbages, then Broccoli. We’ve got Brussel and Sprout, who are even more feral than their mother. What should we name the two calicos here?
Boc and Choy?
Kohl and Rabi?
One of the calicos is quite a bit larger than her siblings. You can’t really see it in the photo, but her head is huge compared to the other two!
They are so flippin’ adorable. Broccoli makes beautiful babies!
Yesterday’s progress turned out to be a lot more work than it should have been, but the job got done. Rather than try and post pictures through Instagram, I decided to take them and make a vlog, instead.
It’s coming up on 1am as I post this. Time to go to bed and, hopefully, the old bod won’t stiffen up and break down too badly overnight!
Our bare root strawberries came in today, and they need to be planted soon. My original thoughts on where to plant them is too far from the house, so I had to decided on someplace closer, which turned out to be a much bigger job that it should have been. This was after I’d done some yard clean up, then amended and added more soil to the empty raised bed in the West yard.
I’ve taken pain killers, but will need to take more, if I’m going to get any sleep tonight. Still, the job got done, and tomorrow we’ll be able to plant the strawberries.
We’ve got a much cooler day today – as I write this, it’s coming up on 1pm, and it’s still only 6C/39F, with a high of 13C/55F by about 6pm expected. I took full advantage of the cooler temperatures to get some things done! We’re supposed to start getting rain tomorrow, have more rain, off and on, over the next few days, so the more we can get done out there, the better!
The first job, of course, was to feed the yard cats. I counted 28 in total, I think. Knowing that we have kittens in the junk pile, I now put food out under the shrine, and even on the bench nearby. Which the Blue Jays appreciate… 🫤
Stinky, Hypotenose and Syndol were all pushing each other around, trying to get at pets!
I spotted Broccoli at the food bowls, so I interrupted my usual morning rounds and dashed to the garden shed.
I started taking out as many things as I could think to grab – garden stakes, hoses, netting, etc. I had to get under where the kittens were, so I lifted them all up in the self heating mat and set them on the ground as I worked. Once I got the stuff I thought I would need right away, I returned the tarp and the felted grow bags Broccoli has made her nest in, made sure it was flattened in such a way that no kittens would accidently roll off and get stuck somewhere, then carefully put them, still half snoozing, back in in their soft, fuzzy and warm mat.
By this time, Broccoli had come around the house and was watching me. When I was done and continued my rounds, she followed me around the garden. I’m hoping she will be okay with what I did, and not take her kittens away and hide them. By removing the stuff I did, I’m hoping we won’t need to open the door and disturb her and her babies for a while. I’ll still check on the, of course, but will try to do it only when I know Broccoli isn’t in there with them.
That done, I started doing garden related stuff. While rain may be on the way, we can’t count on it actually reaching us, so I did the watering. It looks like we finally have carrots sprouting, so I’ve moved the protective boards off of them. The German Butterball potatoes got the grass clipping mulch returned. I’m still putting the cover with the plastic on it over them, to keep the cats out. The garlic also got their mulch returned, now that they’re bigger, and watered.
After all the watering was done, I checked on the grapes. The false spirea growing nearby is trying to spread into them again, so I got some pruners to cut them away. Normally, I’d try to pull them up by the roots, but I can’t do that when they are right in with the grape vines.
Then I started clearing other spirea to clear more space around the grapes.
Before I knew it, I’d gone through the entire corner, clearing away dead false spirea, trimmed dead branches and last year’s flower husks, finding and clearing around a perennial flower that gets buried by the bushes every year, and really opening things up and cleaning them out.
The cats are very happy with this! They like to go under there. When they are in full leaf, it’s a shady spot they can hide in, and now it’s nice and clear of dead branches and twigs.
While the false spirea is leafing out, and the grapes are showing leaf buds, other things are further along. The “Mr. Honeyberry” haskap is in full bloom right now. I even saw a bumble bee among the flowers! The “Mrs. Honeyberry”, however, might have some leaves, not no flower buds yet. There’s no way proper cross pollination can happen, which means no berries.
*sigh*
The plum trees are blooming; they always bloom before they get their leaves. Quite a few tulips are showing flower buds, which is pretty awesome. The trees are also getting very green. So nice to see!
I look forward to getting back to work, when I get back from running errands!
My younger daughter and I started talking about what we wanted to do over the next while, both shorter and longer term. We got so into it, we ended up walking around the outer yard to talk about it more!
One of the stops we made was in the pump shack, where we tested out the old hand pump.
Much to my surprise, we soon had water flowing! I took video while my daughter started pumping. This confirms to me that all we need are new leathers for it to work properly. It shouldn’t take that long for water to start flowing again, once it had already started. It should stay primed and water should start flowing almost immediately.
Yes, the whole pump moves as the handle is pumped. It spins in place. I asked my brother about this, and he tells me this is because it is designed to basically float, allowing for the rise and fall of the water table. A neighbour of ours had the same system, but when they dug a new well and got indoor running water, they closed off the old well – I can’t remember how exactly that was done, but in the spring, when all the snow was melting and the water table rose, their pump ended up going through the roof of their pump shack!
After we ran water for a while, I even gave it a taste, and it tastes better than our household tap water. We really need to get our house well water tested, but we would need to do the full testing to find out what’s going on with it, which is out of our budget. Plus, once the samples are collected (full testing needs 2 samples in different sizes), we’d have to get it to a lab in the city within 24 hours. The sterile containers to collect the samples are, I believe, available in one of the larger towns in our municipality, but I’d have to confirm that. A fair amount of logistics is required for us to get the water tested, simply because of where we live. The full test, however, would include coliform, E. coli, HPC, Nitrogen-Nitrates and Nitrogen-Nitrites, total dissolved solids, calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium, manganese, zinc, iron, Chloride sulfate, pH, hardness, conductivity, arsenic, boron, barium, fluoride, uranium, lead and copper – and the cost for all that has almost doubled since I first looked into it, 5 or so years ago. The basic test for just coliform and E. coli is just $30, but there are 7 different levels of testing available, including the total testing for everything.
Anyhow…
The important thing, though, is knowing we do have back up water, if something ever happens to our household water.
My daughter and I went through most of the old shacks and outbuildings, and into the barn, looking at the various materials strewn about. There are SO many old doors and windows, it’s mind boggling.
What started this all was my daughter asking what we needed before we could get some sheep or goats, and where we would set them up. We also talked about the trees that need harvesting, and the old shed with the collapsed roof that still needs to be dismantled. My daughter, it turns out, really dislikes working in the garden, doesn’t feel she’s good at it, and would much rather do other stuff. So for the next while, she’ll focus on harvesting and processing the dead trees and dismantling the old shed. The lumber from there can be used to build an animal shelter. The lumber used to frame it is still good, and the old cladding, which is very weathered and rotting, covers wider boards, protecting them enough that those should be useable, too.
I had originally thought we’d build our outdoor kitchen where the shed with the collapsed roof is, or right in front of it, but we now know that area is lower, collects water and the ground gets really soft. The other area I considered was next to the pump shack, facing the “driveway”. The old fuel tanks are still there, and we have no reason to move them. The outdoor kitchen is going to be 20’x20′, and those tanks would be in the way. There is, however, enough space behind the pump shack, between it and the old chicken coop. We just have to get it cleaned up of old tires and appliances still sitting there.
We also looked at the old chicken coop. This is a log building that still has its roof, though that is damaged. The original roof is wood shingled, and it had been covered with … tin? … corrugated sheets. I don’t think corrugated is the right word, but I don’t know what it’s actually called. Unfortunately, as with so many other areas, trees were allowed to grow right against the building. One had branches that scraped across the roof in the wind, which eventually tore off several of these metal sheets, destroying them and damaging the roof beneath, which now has holes in it, and the weather gets into the “attic” portion. We have other metal roof sheets like this that we can salvage from another collapsed shed by the barn, but have no way to safely get up there. We would need scaffolding, but the scaffolding my brother remembers being here is gone.
Still, we want to salvage this building. The log walls are still pretty solid. This building had been used as a summer kitchen, before my parents bought the property converted it to a chicken coop. It had electricity wired to it for lights, and heat lamps for the chicks. When my parents stopped having chickens, no one cleaned out the coop, so it’s quite a mess in there, and there are some things that were tossed in for storage, too.
We could potentially clean it up and fix it up. The whole building is slowly sinking. Instead of being on a concrete or rock foundation, it’s on giant wooden beams, and those are both sinking and rotting away, but they are also why the building is sinking evenly, and not twisting. The roof, however, is also dropping, to the point that the door had to be taken off entirely for us to be able to get in.
So that’s a project my daughter will work on as well; clearing up around the old chicken coop, first, then working inwards. Mostly, though, we have to cut back the trees some more – I’d already done some of that a few years back, but these are maples, so they’re growing back.
We’ll have to do the same around the pump shack, but one old stump has been sending out useable suckers. It’s basically been accidentally coppiced. We can maintain that. More material for wattle weaving! 😁 We also talked about what we can do to fix up the old pump shack. The exterior cladding it starting to rot and pieces are falling off – and on this building, there is no inner layer of boards the cladding is covering. It’s directly attached to the open wall joists, as you can see in the Instagram video. The concrete floor is cracking, but the bones of the structure are still sound, so we’ve got ideas on how to fix and maintain it.
We also went around the warehouse, which used to be my late brother’s workshop. We could seriously use that building for a workshop ourselves, but it’s completely full of my parent’s stuff. There’s basically two short paths among the stuff, and we can’t get to the back of it at all. My mother is still obsessed with her stuff in there, and is so worried someone will steal it. At the very least, though, we need to get the old mattresses to the dump, as well as the bags and bags of old clothing. She had suggested we have a garage sale, which I will not do, but she did approve of my suggestion that we could try selling things online, instead. That would be one way to help pay for the things that need to be done around here! That, however, would require going through all those boxes and seeing what is actually worth selling, and what is just junk.
But I digress!
It was around the warehouse that we decided on a place we could build animal shelters. My daughter is interested in sheep, for their wool (she wants to process and spin yarn). I would like a couple of milk goats, partly for their use in permaculture, partly because my family are lactose intolerant, and they can drink goats milk without getting sick.
We did talk about getting chickens, but both my daughters are hesitant about that. The problem is, they have friends with pet chickens, and their chickens are always getting sick. They think if we get chickens, they’ll get sick all the time, too, and we’re very unlikely to take a chicken to a vet. In a way, I understand this, but I think chickens raised outdoors would be much hardier and healthier than chickens raised as pets. Honestly, I’d be more concerned about sheep, goats or pigs needing vet care.
Yeah, I’d like a couple of pigs, too. Partly, all these animals animals are an important part of regenerative practices, and would go a long way in helping us to reclaim and improve our soil, with each contributing in different ways, and partly, they are a food source. Get a couple of piglets in the spring, send them out for processing in the fall, and have a freezer full of meat! I suppose we could get a steer and do the same thing, but I don’t think we’re up to an animal that big. Mostly, though, we need grazing animals for the outer yard. There’s no way we can mow all of it; it’s too rough in places. The overgrown areas are a fire hazard. A controlled burn would fix that, but with so many outbuildings, that would be very risky. Grazing animals would take care of that problem for us.
So my daughter is going to focus more on harvesting and processing the dead spruces for me to build raised beds, dismantle the shed and salvage materials to build animals shelters, as well as the outdoor kitchen and her smithy that she wants to build. I’ll focus more and gardening and building garden structures, and maintaining the yards. There will be crossover, of course, as we help each other out on the big stuff, but it’s clarified with each other what our areas of focus will be.
All in all, this made for a grand Mother’s Day! Well… except for all the wood ticks. We were picking those off our clothes constantly, and had to shower when we got back inside!
However, the three racks of ribs that have been slow roasting in the oven are now down, so it’s time to start focusing on our Mother’s Day dinner!
Well, it seems we blew away the high that was forecast for today. My app says we are at 31C/88F out there, and it sure feels like it!
We kept an eye on the sunroom to see if Broccoli would find her kittens. They slept peacefully the entire time, so she had no reason to go in there, though she did show up briefly at the kibble house.
In this heat, the cats don’t have much appetite! They sure appreciated having the water bowls refilled with nice, cold well water!
After a few hours, though, I decided to give them a light feeding, making sure to make lots of noise when the kibble hit the metal food trays in the kibble house. The kibble house provides some shade, so those trays were empty, while there was still food out in other, more exposed, spots.
Broccoli did show up, but wouldn’t go to the kibble with us there. She ended up running behind the storage house, instead, and just sitting under a tree. Eventually, she came around the front again. We even brought the carrier with the kittens out, and made sure she could see them.
She behaved indifferent to them.
We left the top open on the carrier and put it in the shade by the kibble and water bowl shelters, then watched from the sunroom. She did eventually go for the tray under the water bowl house and eat for a while. While other cats were curious about the cat carrier and peaked inside, she did not, and eventually left for the back of the house, where the old garden shed is.
We tried moving the carrier into a shady spot there but, again, she ignored it. She then disappeared behind the garden shed, where I know the hole in the wall is, hidden by junk that needs to be hauled away.
In the end, we finally decided to put the kittens back, though we did lay out the self warming mat, first, so they couldn’t roll in between the grow bags and tarp that she had made a nest onto. I’ve got a timer on, and we’ll check them later. If they are still there, but look like they have not been tended to, we’ll probably bring them inside, get some kitten formula and start bottle feeding them. Unfortunately, at this point “good news” would be to find them gone. That would mean she has taken them to a new nest somewhere, and it caring for them. If she’s not there and they’re just peacefully sleeping, that hopefully means she nursed them and left them after they fell asleep.
*sigh*
It was worth a try, I guess. Broccoli is one of the cats that does sometimes let us pet her, while she is eating. We hoped that would make her easier to lure with her babies to where we can fully socialize her and care for her and her babies.
We shall see how it turns out.
In other things, we had ourselves a strange mystery that was solved late last night. A mystery that had us worried about plumbing issues again!
My daughter went into the kitchen, and discovered a large puddle of water on the floor between the sink and the fridge. Our floors are not level, so that is where any spilled liquid pools. We had no idea where it came from, and thought maybe a pot that was soaking in the sink, but was not on the side counter, had been knocked over. My husband was the last person in the kitchen. He had emptied the pot and set it aside so he had room to use the tap, but there had been no water on the floor. This was maybe 20 minutes before my daughter found the puddle.
We cleaned it up with a towel and my daughter checked under the sink, but it was all dry.
Not long after, I went into the kitchen, and there was another puddle. So I cleaned that up, too.
While going to the washing machine with the wet towel, however, I walked past our big bottle of drinking water. It has one of those syphon pumps to get at the water. When we took the old dishwasher out of the kitchen, we set it in front of the counter that is a divider between the kitchen and the dining room, intending to add it to the junk pile. We put shelves under the counter on the dining room side, and the dishwasher covered the one that had storage cubes filled with winter hats, scarves, gloves, etc. The cats were determined to tear the cubes apart and dig into them, and the old dishwasher blocked it almost perfectly. Some more determined cats still managed to claw in behind it, but for the most part, it does the job. This dishwasher it the kind that you attach to a kitchen tap when in use, then unhook and store to the side when not in use, so it has a fake butcher block top. That turned out to be perfect to hold our jug of drinking water.
As I walked past it, I found a big splash of water on the floor, under the spout. It was as if someone – or something – had pushed down on the pump, with nothing under the spout. We try to make it inaccessible, but it’s possible a cat had decided to get onto the counter and then jumped on it? Another mystery!
So I cleaned that mess up, too.
Some time later, I went into the kitchen again, and sure enough, another puddle was forming. This time, however, I could see that the water was leaking out from under the counter. This counter, like the ones on either side of the oven, can be moved – at least it could be moved, if it didn’t have a sink and water pipes running through the bottom, and a drain pipe that goes to one side, before going down to the basement.
I checked the pipes in the basement.
Everything there was dry. If there were a leak in the pipes between the bottom of the cupboards and the floor, there would be water dripping through at the pipes. There was nothing.
So where was the water coming from?
The only way to know for sure would be to look under the floor of the cupboard. The only way we could think of was to cut a hole through the floor of the cupboard, and we sure didn’t want to do that.
I cleaned up the new mess and this time, left a towel on the floor.
With there being a solar storm and the expectation of incredible Northern Lights, I decided to take a couple of hours nap, then get up around 11 or so to go out and see the lights. By the time I got up, my younger daughter had gone to bed, but her sister was just gearing up for a night of working on commissions. She wanted to go out with me to see the Northern Lights, first.
As we were getting ready to go out is when we discovered a cat had gotten onto the dining table and knocked my bowl of pea seeds over. We found as many as we could and those got tucked away. My daughter checked on the wet area in the kitchen floor. The towel I’d left was quite wet, but it kept another puddle from forming.
I was getting a tripod ready at the dining table when I happened to look towards the entry…
… and spotted another big splash of water on the floor.
I told my daughter that I’d already cleaned a similar mess up earlier, and couldn’t figure out how the water was splashing like that.
She asked if it was possible this was where the water in the kitchen was from.
There was nowhere near enough water on the floor for that.
What if we move the dishwasher?
As I was fussing around the water bottle to see, I checked the mat under it. We have it resting on one of those microfiber absorbent dish drying mats.
It was soaking wet!
We moved the dishwasher and, sure enough, there was water under it.
The water jug had a leak. I’m guessing a split in the seam from the mold that formed it, but we couldn’t actually see a hole. I guess once the mat was saturated, it started dripping onto the floor, creating the splash I was finding. Then, because the floors on this old house are so uneven, the water drained under the counter until it pooled in the middle of the kitchen floor.
Which was honestly the best possible reason for the water we were finding! Not a plumbing issue at all.
There was an empty water jug set aside to dry, so my daughter and I emptied the leaking jug into it and cleaned things up.
We also put another towel behind the dishwasher and pushed it back in place. We can’t not have it there, without finding some way to protect the things in the shelve it’s covering. I’m seriously considering getting storage bins for the stuff, then leaving the shelf empty for the cats to climb in!
Once that was all taken care of, my daughter and I finally went out to see the Northern Lights.
We didn’t even try to bring out the old DSLR, and just used my phone, on “pro”, and played around with the settings. To the naked eye, the Northern Lights basically just looked like whitish light to us. My daughter could see hints of pinks and green. The camera, with different ISOs, shutter speed, etc., could pick up the colours we couldn’t see – all sorts of greens and purples and pinks. It was very dramatic! I’m glad we did it. The last time we had a major light show like this, I slept through it.
I’m glad I was out to see them, but it meant for a very short night, since my younger daughter and I were set to be outside early to get work done. It’s coming up on 6pm as I write this, and I’m trying very hard not to fall asleep at my computer! We’ve cooled down to 29C/84F and could that be thunder I’m hearing out my window? Why yes! Yes it is!
Oh, darn. I just checked the weather radar. There are lots of scattered little storms out there, and they are all missing us.
I’m sure hearing some nice, loud, thunder right now, though!
Meanwhile, as I was working on this, my timer went off and my daughter and I went to check on the kittens. They are still in the garden shed, sprawled all over the blanket we left with them. I spotted Broccoli some distance away, loafed on a pile of logs, watching us. So she does seem to know they are there. I’ve reset my timer, and we will check on them again.
Today, finally, we planted the German Butterball potatoes.
Orders of perishables like this get sent out in time for planting, which means we could have planted them weeks ago. The Purple Caribe had to wait until the bed they were intended for was redone. We hadn’t quite decided where to plant the German Butterballs, but today we decided to use one of the prepared raised beds in the West yard, where we also needed to tend to the bed with peas, carrots and spinach planted in it.
The first thing we did was weed the bed, again. My daughter went digging around with the garden fork first, pulling out the bigger stuff she found, while I followed along and dug deep with my hands and pulled out the smaller stuff. Once again, we were finding lots of tree roots from the nearby Chinese elm. We went over the bed twice, finding more roots, each time!
I did remember to use the pH meter to see if there was any change, before we topped up the bed. At this point, the bed was amended only with the sulfur granules. I was thrilled to see the needle was actually, ever so slightly, moved. It’s still pretty much at 8, but the needle is now just barely touching the green colour at the 8, instead of about as far as it could possibly go on the alkaline side.
We then added a wheelbarrow load of soil left over from amending the previous beds. This soil has more sulfur granules in it, plus peat. Once that was spread out, we worked it into the bed with our hands – and pulled out more roots. Then, while my daughter went to fill watering cans from the rain barrel, I used the stirrup hoe to stir and level the soil – and pull out more roots – before using my hands to create a broad trench down the middle.
There turned out to be exactly 32 potatoes, so we laid them out evenly in two rows. Yes, they are probably being planted too close together, but this is the space we have available, so it’ll have to do.
Once we had the potatoes set out where we wanted them, I went around with a garden trowel and dug a hole for each one, while my daughter followed along and watered the holes, then I followed along behind her, planting each potato into the watered holes. Once she was done, she went to get more water from the rain barrel, while I covered the potatoes and used the soil from the sides to create hills over them. They got a final watering in the trench between them, then we put a cover over the bed, so the cats won’t go in and use that nice soft soil as a litter box!
Before we’d gone outside, I set the sugar snap pea seeds I bought yesterday to soak. Unfortunately, I’d put them in the bowl last night, and it got knocked over by the cats. My older daughter and I found most of them, but from the 24 seeds I’d counted when I opened the packet, we were down to 21 – and only because I found one more this morning.
I’m not impressed with the inside cats right now! It’s been no end of them getting into things they shouldn’t, lately!
Once the potatoes were done, my daughter went to get the peas while I used a bamboo stake to make a row of holes for them. I planted the previous two rows of snap peas, so I knew where I could do that, and not be on top of the previous rows. There may, possibly, be a single pea from the first planting emerging, but I’m not sure, yet. Last night, I found that something had dug into the bed over where some peas had been planted, and there was no sign of any peas when I pushed the soil back. I think most, if not all, that first planting of peas died off for some reason.
Once that was done, I went to the garden shed to get the trellis netting. That’s when I spotted Broccoli’s babies! I got the netting out, as a tiny calico hissed silently at me, then called my daughter over to look. She had already finished planting the peas by then. We paused for a bit to move the babies to a carrier, then my daughter went on mama-baby watch while I continued. I gave the bed a watering, first, then set the netting up on the T posts. Then it was back to the shed, partly to see if Broccoli was looking for her babies, and partly to get some netting to put around the bed. I’d already grabbed a bundle of supports and set six of them up around the bed. Unfortunately, the bundle of netting I grabbed was not long enough to go all the way around. There’s about 2/3 of one side that’s not shielded by netting. The netting is there to keep things from eating the spinach that’s coming up, as well as to keep the cats out. We’ll have to go through our other bundles of netting to see if we have either something short enough to fill the gap, or long enough to go all the way around, and replace what I put up today.
Eventually, we will need to set up something outside the beds to secure the T posts. If the peas actually start to grow, their weight will pull the T posts inwards, so we’ll need something to keep that from happening. There’s no hurry on that, though, since we’ll only need it if the peas survive in the first place! I don’t assume anything, at this point.
So we did manage to accomplish the goals we had for before things got too hot – we’re now at 26C/79F. 28F/82F, if I go by the website instead of my phone app.
For all the warmer highs we’re getting, over the next week to ten days, our lows are expected to dip to 1 or 2C/34 or 36F, which means we could get frost. If the long range forecasts are at all accurate, we’ll start to bed overnight temperatures consistently 6C/43F or warmer, which is about the minimum we’d need for the soil to get warm enough for direct sowing anything that isn’t cold hardy, like the peas and spinach. Mind you, with plastic covered covers for the raised beds, we could plant things and the covers will protect them.
What we really need to get working on is harvesting logs to build the raised beds we need. It’s too windy to try and cut down dead spruces, but we can process the ones that are already down.
We’ll have to make sure we use plenty of bug spray before going into the spruce grove. Not for mosquitoes. Those aren’t out yet. For wood ticks! It’s been a really bad year for them, already. So far, I’ve only pulled them off myself before they’ve attached themselves, but I’ve been pulling lots of them off of Syndol. With his long fur, he can’t get them off his neck or near his ears on his own. The short haired cats that let me pet them have no ticks. Just Syndol. Which makes me wonder about the other long haired cats, that don’t let us handle them like Syndol does.
Also, while I was writing this, Broccoli has been seen around the kibble house and walking around the sunroom, to the back of the house, but she has not gone into the sunroom. With her babies sleeping peacefully and not meowing, she would have no way to know they are there!
Moving them was a big risk. I hope she finds them, soon!
The Re-Farmer 