So here it is, mid-June, and the gardens here are going a bit crazy. everything is growing fast thanks to frequent rain and relatively mild temperatures. We have had critter problems, though. Here’s our pole beans, for example.
They should be much bigger than this but something, we suspect rabbits, ate the top leaves off the plants after they got about 4 inches tall. The red stuff you see on the plants and soil up there is crushed dried red pepper, a type normally used for making kimchi. I buy the stuff in 2 pound bags off Amazon. Whatever critters are eating our plants seem to dislike this stuff enormously. It’s a relatively inexpensive way to repel the little buggers without having to resort to traps or toxic chemicals. You definitely do not want to handle the stuff with your bare hands if you have cuts or scrapes, and make damned sure you wash your hands thoroughly after scattering it around because if you accidentally rub your eyes… Well let’s just say you’ll have the delightful experience of learning what it’s like to be pepper sprayed.
I never used to like cilantro but then a few years ago it was like a switch flipped in my head and I started to love the stuff. Why? Who knows.
We put in lots of cilantro this year. We were told by someone who supposedly “knows these things” that it would repel the critters eating our plants. It doesn’t. But it does taste amazing! I’m always astonished by the difference in taste and smell between the home grown stuff and even the “fresh” herbs we get at the grocery store. We bought a couple of bunches of fresh cilantro at Walmart in late winter for a special Mexican dinner we did and it was really rather sad. Had very little flavor. This stuff will knock your socks off. Bright, brilliant flavor and aroma… Damn I need to stop talking about food. I’m getting hungry.
MrsGF ran a batch through the dehydrator to see how that works out.
We planted quite a few carrots this year. We need to get out there and thin them out or it’s going to be a mess. Rabbits never bother carrots. Despite the Bugs Bunny cartoons, rabbits don’t like carrots all that much and they hate the green tops.
The onions… I don’t know what’s going on with the onions this year but they’ve been going nuts. I looked back at photos from the last couple of years and this year the onions are literally twice as big as they were at this time in previous years. I’m not complaining. I’m just wondering why?
The beets got hit hard by the critters. Almost all the beet tops were chewed off before we noticed and started putting out the pepper flakes. Some managed to survive but they look rather poorly. Just to make sure we get something we planted more. A bit late but we should still get something.
The celery is looking amazing as well this year. It’s already about 8 inches tall and looking beautiful. Celery is another one of those plants where there is no comparison between the flavor of the store bought varieties and the home grown ones. Interestingly, people are so used to the insipid flavor and aroma of grocery store celery that when they encounter really good, full flavor celery they think it’s too intensely flavored and don’t like it.
Let’s wrap this up with Doofus Cat…
That’s what I’ve started to call her because, well, that’s what she is, a doofus. I love her dearly and she’s a sweet heart but let’s face it, she’s just not very bright. The other morning she was trying to lick up a dark spot on the wood floor in the dining room because she thought it was a cat treat. Sigh…
She has her own comfy pillow back there in the office that she can snooze on. You can see it just to the lower left. But she’s decided she’d rather nap on top of the printer for some reason.
She is also a big kitty. She’s bigger than a lot of the dogs in the neighborhood. She weighs about 13 pounds and it’s all muscle. I’ve seen her do a standing high jump from the living room floor to the mantle above the fireplace, almost 5 feet straight up, without even straining herself.
Apparently Cat 1 cloned herself and we got two tabbies now? Sort of a matched set? Yeah, we got two of them now. That’s Cat 1 on the right and Cat 2 on the left. Or is it Cat 1 on the left and Cat 2 on the right? Both tabby, both large economy sized kitties and I’ve already resigned myself to constantly confusing which one is which.
Cat 2 is a sort of refugee. She was a shelter kitty who was adopted into a home where a pre-existing cat decided she hated her and beat the crap out of her every chance she had. Not a good situation. So we agreed to try taking her in and see how Cat 1 would handle having another kitty in the house. As you can see, Cat 1 has no problem with having a new roommate at all. The two of them have been together about 4 days now and are getting along just fine. They aren’t exactly cuddle buddies but there’s been no hissing or spitting or growling or fighting. In fact no drama at all.
And considering this is Cat 2’s fourth home in about 3 months she’s adjusting remarkably well. She spent about the first hour here under the sofa, then decided that was boring and went and sat under the bed for a while, and the next morning she was acting like she’s lived here all her life. She’s not a lap cat like Cat 1 is, but she’s become downright affectionate towards me.
We were nervous about how Cat 1 would handle an intruder but aside from eyeing her with suspicion for the first day or two there hasn’t been any problem at all. In fact I think the two of them colluded in a 4 AM raid on the butter dish this morning. I woke with a start upon hearing a loud crashing noise and rushed out to find the two of them sitting under the dining room table and pretending they had no idea how MrsGF’s favorite ceramic covered butter dish ended up in many pieces on the floor. They would have had to get a rather heavy, covered, ceramic dish, with a quarter pound of butter in it, lifted up over the top of a one inch thick cutting board, shoved about three feet along a counter and then onto the floor, and I don’t think either one of then could have done it by themselves so I think both of then were in on it.
So, it’s spring! Yeah, sure it is. Temperature was down around 28 degrees last night. Sigh… Good thing we haven’t got anything planted out in the gardens yet. We do have flowers, though. A few of the more daring plants have been putting on a show.
It’s wonderful to be seeing color out in the gardens again.
Let’s see, what else?
Oh, I mentioned before that we were going to be getting the roof on the house and garage replaced sometime this year. We had the contractor out here Monday morning to measure everything up, give us a quote, and now we have that scheduled for sometime in late May or early June. Estimated cost for that is going to be around $13,000. That’s actually a bit less than I had anticipated so I’m pleased with that.
Once the roof is replaced I can start thinking about putting up a permanent solar array on the south facing garage roof. Hopefully I’ll be able to finally get enough solar panels up there to adequately feed the solar power system so we can fully utilize it at last. Going to have to see what the budget can handle. Might have to wait a while for our household budget to be able to deal with about 5 KW of solar panels.
MrsGF made the cat her own sofa. Note the cord on the right side. It’s heated. No, the cat is not being spoiled. Not at all….
Woke up around 2 AM and found her in bed with me, snuggled up against my chest. Which was fine until about half an hour later she decided she needed to groom herself, and me. So I had to pick up the little goof and put her in her bed in the living room. Going to have to remember to keep the bedroom door closed.
We have a cat again! After we lost Meg to old age we weren’t sure we realy wanted another cat. But… I can’t believe how much I missed having a cat in the house. It was like there was this empty space in my life… Anyway, once again we have cat. Meet Charlie.
Like almost all of our other cats she is a sort of rescue kitty. Her owner is going in for ankle surgery and after that she is moving into an apartment that doesn’t allow pets so she had to give her up. Then we heard about it from some of our family and without even thinking I said “We’ll take her”. And here she is.
And she is amazing. i know, I know, everyone thinks their new cat is amazing but Charlie really is. She’s 12 years old and is the most mellow, affectionate, well adjusted kitty I’ve ever seen.
We were prepared for drama when Charlie moved in. Anyone who has ever had to move a cat into a new environment or took one into a new family will know what I mean. Cats generally are creatures of habit. They don’t like change. And before this kitty came along most of our cats haven’t exactly been, well, normal. They came from a variety of unpleasant situations where they often were not treated well. It sometimes took weeks, even months or longer before a new cat moving into our home adjusted and came to realize they were in a safe environment.
With Charlie, though? Charlie was always in a pleasant, loving environment from the time she was born and it shows. Within 10 minutes of coming into the house she’d decided she liked it here. She spent some time exploring, let us pet and brush her and make a fuss over her, purred at us a lot, rolled on the floor and asked for tummy rubs, had decided which chair was the most comfortable for naps. She showed us which toys she likes to play with, which brush she prefers. She loves snuggling and when she’s happy she has a purr you can hear from three feet away.
What it boils down to is we love her, and she seems to love us and her new home. This is the third day we’ve had her and every time I see her I grin like an idiot.
Egads, I haven’t written anything here in a long time so let’s get this started with catching up with what’s been going on in the gardens.
As you probably know by now we had what looks like the hottest summer of all time here in Wisconsin with average temperatures above normal all season long. On top of that we’ve been under drought conditions almost all summer as well. We just went through yet another multi-day heat wave, with high temperatures pushing 95F here. And now we’re finally going to be getting down to more seasonable temps. It’s currently about 55 here at 7 AM and won’t get much above 60 they tell me. We were supposed to get some badly needed rain as the cold front came through, but nope, except for some spotty showers we got pretty much zip.
But let’s look at some butternut squash…
Not a squash.
Oops, wait a minute, that’s not a squash, that’s Solar Cat, isn’t it?
Ah, here we go, that’s the squash up there piled up in the old coaster wagon. And yes, they’re massive this year. We were watering those suckers almost every evening all summer long and now we’re finally getting our reward. They’re beautiful. MrsGF and I both love squash (she makes a squash soup that would probably make Gordon Ramsey jealous). But we sure as heck can’t handle all of those. We’ll end up giving a lot of them away to friends or anyone else who can use them. That’s part of the fun of gardening, giving stuff away to friends who don’t have the space to have a garden themselves or swapping our stuff for stuff other people grew that we didn’t have room for. In fact MrsGF just swapped one of those for a big bag of pears from one of our neighbors.
We tried a new variety of tomato this year, something called Amish Golden Slicers. We got the seed from Jung and they’ve been well above average. Tomatoes can come in a wide variety of colors ranging from gold to orange to red to purple to even green. What matters most is not color but flavor and texture. Some tomatoes are best for eating fresh, some are better for making sauces, some are in between. These are probably best for eating fresh. They have an amazingly lush, slightly tart flavor that I absolutely love, although MrsGF isn’t all that thrilled with them for some reason. We only put in 3 plants this year but that’s still more than we can eat fresh, so we’ve been making sauces and soups with them.
We put in lots of peppers of various types, bell, banana and jalapeno, and they’ve all been doing amazingly well this year for some reason. The bell peppers especially. They’re freaking huge this year. We’ve had to stake up some of the plants because the weight of the fruit has been making them fall over. Again way more than we can use ourselves so we’ve been giving those away too.
And of course there’s the jalapenos. We have 5 of those, two in pots on the front stairs and three in the raised beds. The two in pots didn’t do well but the ones in the raised bed have been producing way more than normal just like the bells have been.
MrsGF put in a couple of banana peppers just for some variety. We’ve always had good luck with banana peppers and this year is no exception. Lots of very nice fruits, good flavor.
Wax beans were just sad this year even though we watered them just about every day. I think it was just too hot for them.
Alas the wax beans did not do very well this year. I suspect that the heat didn’t help them any. The pole beans we put in weren’t the best either but with them it was because little four footed critters were nibbling them off almost as soon as they started to grow.
Then our son brought over this weird houseplant…
Oh, wait, that’s another cat, isn’t it? We catsat our youngest son’s kitty while he was gone on a three day weekend. That’s Kai the Wondercat. I love her. She hates me. Go figure.
And let’s wrap this up with some flowers because why not?
The weather here in NE Wisconsin was absolutely beautiful for a few days and I took advantage of that and got out on the bike for a while. But that’s changing fast. They’re now talking about a possibility of snow for us by next week. Sigh…
Jalapeno peppers still growing outside in mid October? Yep. Actually they’re doing better now than they did all summer. I didn’t get more than a dozen or so peppers of both plants during the summer but now the dopey things are covered with flowers and baby fruits. Go figure…
But that being said we have no right to complain. The fall weather has been pretty darned nice. We still haven’t had a hard freeze. We’ve had a few mornings when there was frost on the ground but not enough to really cause any damage. We still have flowers growing around the house and I have two jalapeno pepper plants that are still in flower for heaven’s sake.
Some of the flowers that have survived this fall so far are a bit surprising, like the alyssum. This little cluster of flowers popped up in the spring all by themselves, which surprised me a great deal. But I was very pleased to see them because I love those tiny little flowers, not just because they’re beautiful but because some types of alyssum are amazingly fragrant.
Getting out on the backroads and trails on the bike this fall has been great fun. I’m really going to miss being out there every day once winter hits. It’s been especially interesting out there because I’ve been seeing a lot of reptiles and amphibians out there, far more than usual. I’ve seen dozens of snakes, usually grass snakes and the like. We have two of those little beauties living in the backyard. Unfortunately they’re fast little buggers and my attempts to get them on camera haven’t been very successful. I’ve seen quite a few of them out in the wild as well. Unfortunately I’ve also seen quite a few of them flattened on the roads as well because some of them have a habit of sunning themselves on the roadway.
I’ve seen quite a few turtles out there too, including Fred, who is a regular sight down near the stone bridge that goes over the river.
Almost any sunny day I’d find Fred sunning himself on his favorite spot. He’s a cute little guy, maybe about six inches across with beautiful markings. I’ve managed to get about six or seven fairly decent photos of him.
Most of the migrating birds are gone now. I’ve seen a few cranes still hanging around but those will be gone soon. Ducks and geese are mostly gone. I’ve seen very few birds coming to the feeder in the yard as well. I haven’t had to refill in it some time now. But this time of year the seed eating birds are finding more than enough to eat out there in the wild.
Let’s see, what else? MrsGF and I are sketching out plans for major changes to the gardens now that those big trees are down. Now that the area back there is getting full sun it opens up a lot of options. We want to move two of the raised vegetable beds over to that area because they’re now getting shaded out by a fast growing maple where they are now. The area where the beds are now may become occupied by a garden shed because we need the storage space. We want to put a large decorative raised bed where the stump from the ash tree is located, one that matches the existing bed we have now that surrounds the little maple.
That’s not going to be a cheap project, though. If we do everything we’ve been thinking of it’s probably going to end up costing us in the neighborhood of $5K when it’s all said and done.
We’re still waiting for the garage door company to get the new doors in so they can replace the 30+ year old garage doors and openers. They’re in pretty rough shape and I don’t think they’ll last the winter.
Let’s wrap this up with a siamese cat because why not?
Meg, we’re not sure how old she is but she’s at least 16, maybe 17, and an absolute sweetheart. This foot rubbing thing is fairly new with her but I’m told it isn’t uncommon with kitties. She’s turned into quite the lap cat. If there is a lap anywhere in the house, she will find it and sit on it. She has this thing now where when she’s on my lap she likes to climb up on my chest and rub her face in my beard which is cute but that cat’s claws are like little razors and when she gets relaxed she starts doing this kneading thing it gets a bit interesting.
Oh, almost forgot, the new vacuum thingie. It’s a Shark self emptying robotic vacuum. Normally I wouldn’t have bought one of these but I got the dopey thing on some kind of sale on Amazon for less than half the normal retail price. It was marked down to $200 or so from $500, and I admit that it was sort of an impulse buy.
Now we had a robot vacuum before, one of the early Roomba machines, and it was utterly horrible in every single way. It was incredibly noisy. It couldn’t deal with even 1/4″ tall thresholds between rooms, couldn’t deal with, well, it couldn’t deal with anything, really. It fell down the basement stairs twice. It would just stop dead in its tracks for no apparent reason. And even worse it was damn near worthless at actually cleaning anything.
This one is actually surprisingly good. It maps the rooms as it cleans so it can develop a more efficient pattern of movement. It doesn’t just scurry around at random. It’s been able to negotiate even the rather steep threshold between the dining room and living room. It wanders back to its dock and recharges itself when it needs to and when the battery is topped off it picks up where it left off. And best of all it empties itself! The bin on the dock has to be dumped every couple of weeks or so but that’s no big deal. It hasn’t fallen down the basement stairs yet. And best of all it does a pretty darned nice job cleaning the floors.
I’m not quite sure what in the world it’s doing under the sofa, though. It seems to spend an inordinate amount of time under there when it’s cleaning. Since it has wifi I suspect it’s looking at porn while it’s under there.
Anyway we’ve had this thing for a couple of weeks now and we’ll see how it goes. So far we like it. Even the cat doesn’t mind it.
Slab wood cut from a walnut log during the process of milling it into boards.
Once you start woodturning you rather quickly find out that if you buy wood from commercial sources to feed your woodturning addiction that the cost for wood from those sources is really expensive. A standardized woodturning blank from commercial sources generally is about 6″ to 8″ square, and about 2″ to 3″ thick. Cost of a typical blank can run from $10 or so at the low end up to $75 or even more depending on the species of wood. And as the size gets larger, the price goes up dramatically.
But there is a lot of free wood out there if you can be bothered to go look for it. Like that piece in the photo up there.
Now I have to admit that I completely forgot had this stuff laying around until MrsGF and I found these slabs laying around in the garage when we were cleaning it out this fall. A friend of a friend had cut down some black walnut trees on his property years ago and had them milled into lumber by a portable sawmill. When cutting logs into lumber you end up with these slabs where the bark was sliced off and generally there isn’t much you can do with them except turn them into mulch or firewood. But this was black walnut, which is ridiculously expensive, really nice, and some of the slabs were thick enough in places that I thought I could use them for something so I snagged some of them and stuck them in the garage and immediately forgot about them for something like six years until we stumbled across them a month or so ago.
We now have the time and ambition to finally get around to doing something with this stuff. At least one of the slabs is thick enough, wide enough and long enough to perhaps turn into a garden bench. But a lot of it didn’t look too promising until I thought hey, can I make bowls out of some of this stuff. So I cut it up into manageable sizes with the chainsaw, carried some of it down into the shop and started to experiment with the stuff and the first experiment turned out looking like this.
That, by the way, is a Sjobergs workbench. I definitely do not recommend them. But I bought into the hype and despite the insane cost bought one of the things and almost immediately started regretting it. It isn’t that well made, is ridiculously light weight, the materials aren’t that good, there is pretty much nothing about that bench that justifies the price.
Not bad for a piece of free wood, I thought.
If you look around you can find free wood just about everywhere. On any given day I can drive around the towns around here and find people trimming or cutting down trees, and most of that wood is going to end up either being chipped for mulch or composted. Most people won’t mind at all if you ask nicely to take a few bits of it.
Wood shows up all the time at my town’s compost site from people who’ve cut down or trimmed trees. They are only supposed to be dropping off easily chipped brush down there, but a lot of people can’t seem to be able to read the signs and we regularly end up with large branches and even tree trunks being dumped down there. You might have seen me down there with my little battery chain saw whacking off bits and pieces that might be useful, along with the locals who burn wood for heat.
And don’t forget Craig’s List! Start scrolling through the “Free” section of the listings and you’ll find dozens of people just begging someone, anyone, to come get the remains of trees they had to cut down.
If you do get your hands on some of this free wood, some caution is called for, however. There can be some issues with this stuff you need to be aware of.
The first is infestations of bugs. You never know what might be living in that wood. I would never store free wood inside the house or even in the garage unless I was sure it was free from things like carpenter ants, beetles, etc. Anything questionable ends up being burned in the fireplace out in the backyard while MrsGF and I sit around it with a beverage or two.
Rot is something you’ll have to deal with too. Now there are ways you can deal with rotted wood so you can still get something useful out of it by soaking it in types of epoxy resin and preservatives and all that. Frankly, don’t bother. Yes, you can do it but it isn’t worth the effort in my opinion. You need things like a vacuum tank, special wood preservatives and other equipment… Ain’t worth it. Chuck it into the firepit and move on to a solid piece of wood.
Nails, screws, wire and other nasties buried in the wood is also something you need to watch out for. People have this nasty habit of attaching things to living trees. They nail ornaments to them, screw signs to them, hang birdhouses to them, etc. and leave the hardware in the wood. Hitting a nail, screw or other bit of metal embedded in a piece of wood with a saw or gouge is not fun. It isn’t easy to find the stuff either because the tree can grow around the object and completely enclose it. Always inspect any piece of wood carefully before you start sawing it up or putting it on the lathe. Metal detectors specifically designed to find nails and the like in wood have come down in price quite dramatically in the last couple of decades. It might not be a bad idea to pick one up.
If you don’t mind glueing up your own blanks from bits and pieces of boards (You can get some really nice looking turning blanks from odds and ends glued together.) there is a lot of free stuff like that out there. Again, check Craig’s List free section and other sources like that. You’ll find odds and ends of lumber people had left over from remodeling and construction projects and things like that. Even some old furniture made from solid wood will end up sitting out on the curb that can be disassembled and used to glue up something useful.
Pallets – the damned things are everywhere, and nobody seems to want them. Should you consider old pallets as a source for turning wood? Personally I wouldn’t use them for a variety of reasons. The wood is generally very thin, rough cut so it would have to be planed before it could be glued up into a blank. They’re a pain in the ass to take apart and get all the nails and staples out of. Tearing apart a pallet to try to get wood to glue up into a turning blank seems like an awful lot of work for very little reward. And, frankly, you don’t know where the hell that thing has been and what it has been exposed to. For all you know that pallet had some toxic chemicals spilled all over it before it ended up in the “free wood” bin or out on the curb where you found it.
The last issue you need to deal with is the fact that a lot of this stuff is cut directly from living trees that were just cut down, so it is very, very wet and you need to be able to deal with that. Now I know a lot of turners who like working with wet wood and have developed ways of dealing with it, and if you’re one of those, that’s fantastic. But if you’re like me and you prefer to work with wood that is already dried, you need to be prepared to store this stuff for a long, long time before it’s going to be dried down to a usable moisture level, or you need to be able to dry it yourself. The walnut slabs I’m working with right now sat in a dry environment (my garage) for about 5 or 6 years so they’re down to about 10% – 15% moisture which I consider to be reasonably low enough for me to work with them without a lot of issues. But a lot of this stuff is going to be dripping wet when you get it. So you’re going to need to either store it in a protected area for a considerable amount of time for it to dry naturally, or you’re going to have to dry it yourself. There are plans out there on the internet for making your own drying boxes to accelerate the process and some of them even work reasonably well.
What’s Coming Up
Oh, oh… He’s got something cooking in the pot. Now we’re in trouble.
I’m working on the 2nd part of the intro to resin thing I’ve been doing. Yes, really I am. I haven’t forgotten about it. The project that I’ve been cooking up to accompany the 2nd part is curing in the pressure pot even as I write this and should be coming out tomorrow. I’ve got videos and everything for this one.
Well, I hope I’ll have videos. I’m still not sure if I’m using that dopey camera right. Anyway that will be coming up sometime in the next couple of weeks if all goes well.
I got in a new parting tool from a company called Woodpeckers that I’m waiting to try out. I’ve tried a variety of different parting tools since I got into this and I haven’t really liked any of them very much. The cheap carbide ones that seem to be made by the millions by some outfit in China and sold under a variety of different brand names not only don’t work very well and wear out quickly, they are just -just nasty all the way around. The one I use most often is an old fashioned steel one from Sorby which works but needs to be sharpened a lot.
Oh, and Happy Cat! I almost forgot about her… Let’s see I got that video somewhere…
Wow it’s been busy here. Well, at least when it hasn’t been raining, which it seems to have been doing almost the entire month of May. I’d say we’ve had maybe 5 nice days out of the last 30. The rest of the time it’s either been raining, or cold with temperatures never getting much above 55 degrees, or both at the same time. The farms around here are running weeks behind with planting. Well, so is most of the midwest. This time of year we should have just about all of the corn crop planted. Instead we have about 45% of the crop in the ground because the fields around here look like this:
We’re at the point now where if farmers can’t get the corn in the ground in the next few days they might as well not bother at all. Every day’s delay means a significant reduction in yield, and it isn’t going to be long before even the faster growing varieties won’t reach maturity before we get frost in the fall.
The commodities markets were so distracted by the trade wars going on that they didn’t notice the weather problems we’ve had, but they sure have now. Corn prices have shot up over $1 per bushel in the last week and a half, and are now sitting around $4.30 on the Chicago market.
But I wanted to talk about gardening, not farming, so let’s drop that and get on with this.
It was a hard winter here, which was easy to tell from looking at our yard, especially behind the house. The decorative plantings got especially hard hit, and the decorative area back there was an absolute mess.
The bark mulch had disappeared, for the most part, probably floating off in the heavy rains, the rest was discolored and deteriorating badly, parts of the area had sunk in where the old koi pond had been, the irises were drowning, it was pretty bad back there. So we decided the whole thing had to be redone. So we started digging up the old plants, moving rocks, putting in something like 250 retaining wall blocks, and about a week of work, and this is what we ended up with.
Still a lot of work to do but we’re getting there. You can see the raised vegetable beds off to the right.
We still have a lot of work to do to finish it off obviously. Some of the block have to be straightened up, some things moved around, but we’re relatively pleased with the result. One problem is that boulder sitting there. I moved that sucker there when I still had the tractor because it seemed like a good idea at the time and since the tractor got sold, well that’s where it’s going to stay, so we’re stuck with it and have to work around it.
It’s still pretty messy back there and we have a lot to do. We’re debating whether or not we want to put capstones along the top of the retaining walls. We have probably several more yards of dirt to haul in to fill the planting bed, a lot of crushed rock for the area around and behind the boulder, lots of plants to transplant into there and buy, and probably a truckload or two of mulch.
The old stone wall containing the garden at the back of the garage isn’t in good shape either any more. You can see what’s left of it here at the back of the garage. It’s just barely hanging on and needs to be replaced. But we’re pretty sick of putting in retaining walls at the moment so we’ll let this go another year and worry about it next spring. Despite the cold, wet weather you can see the raspberries are doing pretty good back there.
The 55 gallon drum you see in the background behind the lilac at the corner of the garage is our rain recovery system. There’s a piping system attached to the rain gutters that diverts water into the barrel that we use for watering plants in the dry season. Works pretty well. That’s generally enough to handle all of potted plants around the house. Not enough to deal with the vegetable gardens as well, but it helps a lot in keeping the water bill down during the summer.
We’ve cut back on the vegetable plantings this year. We had ridiculous amounts of tomatoes last year so we cut way back on that. Lots of pepper plants, though. We seem to go through a lot of those. But tomatoes? We still have quarts and quarts of canned tomatoes on the shelves from last year, although we did run out of soup and spaghetti sauce.
That opened up space in the raised beds so we put in a variety of onions this year to see how that works. I love being able to just go out in the backyard and dig up fresh onions when I need them during the summer. But the area where we were planting onions until now didn’t work very well because it was getting shaded out by the trees. The onions would start out well but would never grow very big because of the lack of light.
But then I have this going on right now —
She’s been sitting there staring at me for the last half hour waiting for her breakfast so I suppose I better feed the little goof.
I’m glad we traded off the old coal fired steam cats. The new solar models are much less messy. No shoveling out the ashes, no steam and smoke, no stoking them up every four hours, no messy coal deliveries. Just have to remember to set them in the sun for about 5 hours every day to recharge them.
I thought I’d put this one up here at the same time I posted it on the old Tumblr account but I can’t seem to find it here. So here you go, how to draw your very own cat.
I have no idea what was going through my head when I drew this. Sometimes weird stuff just pops up in my brain.
grouchyfarmer 