After spending 2 days in the kitchen with big pots, jars, bags and things to put into them, I am tired of it. Tomorrow we will be splitting wood with our friend's hydraulic log splitter. We will start early, soon after daylight and work until we are tired or the sun gets hot, whichever comes first. The splitter is ours to use until Sunday, then we have to return it. Three mornings should be enough time with it.
Nine more bags of corn are in the freezer for winter dinners, and the grapes yielded 16 quarts of juice. I wish I knew somebody with more grapes who doesn't want to use them. I should ask a few people and maybe I'll find some. My neighbor has apricots and offered me some of them but I think they aren't quite ripe yet. Apricot juice would be nice. Last week when I was doing chores I saw wasps all over them so it won't be long. They'll have to be picked right after daylight on a cool morning.
Hubby helped me take down the netting that protected the grapes, and roll it up on a long cardboard tube. This evening before dark I saw 3 deer headed for the garden. Surprise! All they will find are the leaves of the grapes.
My horses changed color today, but only because it rained and they rolled. Rain tickles so they roll to blot it. A thunderstorm rolled through last night bringing us some showers which continue today, with some wind but without the electrical display. I'm glad we got all that firewood split and stacked in the woodshed before the rain started. It was a big job but we got it done in 2 days instead of 3 that we expected to be working on it.
Yesterday after we finished with the firewood and returned the splitter to our neighbor and visited for a while, I got back to the flower bed cleaning project. It's a long slow job but is looking better all the time. As I go along I keep thinking of changes I could make, and I think that keeping the volunteer rose bushes outside the fence will help a lot. They look good from the driveway side, too. I will move some of the tall phlox to other places and maybe just eliminate it altogether in that bed because I have another invasive plant growing among the phlox that has similiar leaves, making it hard to tell what to pull and what to leave when I am weeding in the spring. Cosmos might be my replacement choice. They come in a variety of pink and pink with stripes, bloom longer, and the leaves don't look a bit like that invasive thing. A packet or two of seeds will be on the list for spring planting.
Back in the corner behind the big tree I might let a few of the roses come back and stay because they seem to be one of the few things that wants to grow back there. The other plant that I am allowing to stay in limited quantities is sweet violets. They are pretty much toast this year because I stopped watering that corner a few weeks ago knowing I was going to rip everything out. If the violets don't survive this, their offspring surely will. A few weeks ago I cleaned out another flower bed where I had taken the violets out last fall. It had a solid green carpet of violets that sprouted from the seed that was left in the ground.
The leaves on the Virginia Creeper vine that rambles over the rail fence have turned bright red and are falling. I can actually see the fence now, and also the clusters of dark purple seeds that look a lot like grapes. I think the plants might be related. Grape leaves are a different shape and the tendrils on my grapes are thicker and stronger. The Virginia Creeper will get a pruning when I get about 30 feet farther down the fenceline with the flower bed cleaning project. It roots everywhere it touches the ground so every year it gets trimmed to keep it where I want it and not everywhere it wants to be.
Just now I looked out at the rain on the window and happened to think that God is washing my kitchen window so maybe I won't have to do it. (Well, it never hurts to dream!) The bird feeder that never was taken down is swinging in the breeze, empty because I don't think the tweety birds need help at this time of the year with all the weeds having gone to seed, but they'll know where to find dinner when times get hard. All the hummingbrids have gone south. We miss the little guys, they are so entertaining, but now they have gone to entertain somebody else. They fly like little bullets, so I wonder how long it takes them to get to their winter homes.
Snow has fallen on the high mountain range to the north and east of us. It's a bit early for snow, even up there. We would still like to get another load of firewood but with early snow this year, maybe we won't. We have plenty for this winter and a good start for next year.
The forecast for tonight says 28 to 35 degrees, so I covered the winter squash patch with old blankets, just in case. Some of the squash are looking about half ripe. I picked the last few tomatoes of this year's dismal crop, looked at the summer squash to see if there was anything that needed to be rescued, picked the last of the cucumbers, checked on the last planting of corn which still isn't ready and may never be, and noticed that the deer have been snacking on a few of the grape leaves. I didn't even look at the green beans, having picked some just a few days ago. The weather has been too cool for anything to grow much since then.
Breezy helped while I stacked some irrigation pipes that run through his pasture. I'm sure I have watered everything down there for the last time this season, so it is time to pick up pipes and stack them next to the fence, coil up hoses and bring them to the shed, and be ready to rototill after the frost kills everything.
We got the chipper running and it took us most of a day to gather and chip all the bark that fell off the firewood when it was split, plus rose bush trimmings and other miscellaneous tree branches. The chipped material was directed into a makeshift bin, but it flew everywhere. The bin is beside the greenhouse, and there is chips and bark dust up there on the roof. The rain we had softened the bark but it is still dusty when ground up. We were so filthy when we finished that we blew the dust off with compressed air in the shop, shed clothes just inside the back door and immediately headed for the shower.
I want to buy more crocus and small dafodills for some of the flower beds. Today I bought more pansys to go along the sidewalk leading from the front door to the gate since those strips have been cleaned already. It's been a few days since I had time to work on the flower beds, but I'll get back to them, maybe tomorrow. The new mulch will go on the flower beds, but I would like to have the pansys and bulbs planted before I put it down so I don't have to move it to plant things. That's just extra work and I have plenty already.
Our recent rain plus a little warmth put a slight green tinge on the brownish hills again. We probably got about .5 of an inch, but in an area that has very little rain, that is good.
We took a quick trip to the other side of the state this week, our first priority was to see my hubby's sister who had been in the hospital recently. She is back home now and in good spirits. Her husband is in a nursing home with Alzheimers. He still recognizes her, but doesn't know his children. His memory has receeded back to his childhood.
From the sister's house, we went to friends for dinner about an hour away and stayed overnight with them. The next day we did some shopping for things we can't find without a trip to a city. Our hostess was happy to drive us around. The highlight of my day was visiting a large nursery and loading up with bulbs of lilys, daffodils, crocus, hyacinths, three new iris, some shaggy tulips in wild colors, and a few bargain plants in 4 inch pots. Most of those will be part of a succulent mosiac that I started about 3 years ago. It is just starting to fill in nicely. These plants were so nice, and there is still room for them along the edges. Most of the bulbs will go into the flower bed I am cleaning.
Our second evening included a missions meeting and dinner next to a nice bonfire. We stayed up late visiting with one of their daughters who attends college about 30 miles away.
The next morning we left after breakfast to start home, but stopped to do more shopping at a big box store. I went in looking for special flower pots for orchids that allow for air to reach the roots, didn't find any but came out with 3 bags of potting soil and 5 gold mums. My hubby was waiting for me on a bench near the door and laughed as I ducked down behind the mums when he saw me.
We stopped for lunch at a country style restaurant where they have an old John Deere tractor in the dining room and all sorts of interesting farmy things decorating the walls. There is also a small train that circles around inside. A big tank from a boiler has been made into a fireplace with multiple openings which I assume they use in the winter. If the place hadn't been so crowded I would have liked to look around more. There'll be another time, now that we know about the place.
We got home just before dark. My neighbor fed the critters for us while we were away, but of course they were all glad to see us again because it was mealtime. AmandaPanda, our full time indoor cat, was especially glad to see me. She was a good girl while we were gone, she didn't knock any flower pots off the windowsills. Three days alone in the house was a bit of a stretch for her I think, but she did just fine.
Today it was back to the regular stuff, doing laundry which dried nicely on the line in the sun, watering the greenhouse plants, and cleaning a bit more of that messy flower bed that will be home to many of my new bulbs.
We had another beautiful sunrise this morning, the sky was a peachy color with wispy grayish clouds, then turned pink just before the sun appeared from behind it's hiding place. Every day it comes up a bit farther to the south.
I'm making progress on the flower bed, have chopped out all the rosebush roots, rescued tulip and narcissis bulbs, hauled a tractor bucketload of dirt and manure from the big pile and dumped it over the fence, spread it with a rake, and now have iris and tall phlox planted in one end of it. These plants come from farther down the bed, so when I dig them up and clean the quackgrass roots from them, I'm actually making more progress. The challenge, besides just getting them out of the ground, is deciding what color the iris are. Last spring I put some labels around them when they bloomed, but with 2 colors growing together, about 12 plants and 3 labels, you can see there is the potential for surprises next spring.
My new mums have not yet been planted, but I dug out the old plants and potted them up, hopefully they will revive to be replanted somewhere else next spring. I raked up the mulch and saved it in a big plastic tub, then dumped a scoop of dirt over the fence onto that bed too. The new mums got a good soaking yesterday, and planting them where the old ones came out is a priority for today.
A couple of nights ago I was husking corn right outside my back door when I heard a strange noise. It sounded like a cat in distress, although there was no yowling that typically happens in a cat fight, this sounded more like a cat choking. When I went to see, there in the middle of my driveway was a dying cat, actually he died about 10 seconds after I saw him. This was not my cat, and although we see strays from time to time, I had never seen this one. My guess is that he was somebody's barn cat that took a long walk. He didn't look sick although he was thin, and there was no blood around or under him. I think he probably ate here at night for the two nights when we were gone and was coming back for another meal. It's sure a mystery. I hope he didn't have some contageous disease. My cats seem to be ok so far.
We checked the sauerkraut last night, and had some baked with sausage. It's not sour enough so we'll taste it again in a couple of weeks. Right now, even with rinsing, it is too salty.
My neighbor brought more peaches, not enough to can, but enough for eating several per day until the bucket is empty. Maybe I will make a cobbler if they ripen faster than we can eat them.
Today we need to go to town to take care of some business and do some grocery shopping. If I play my cards right, we might also have breakfast. Then this afternoon I will be back to the flower beds.
Signs of fall are everywhere. Some trees are starting to look gold or red. Tumbleweeds are turning from green to pink and orange, ripening their seeds as the plant dies. Wind will break them loose from their stems and send them bouncing across the countryside scattering seeds with every bounce. By the time they start breaking loose from their roots they dry to a tan color. One year I found a small perfectly shaped one that I put into a box and mailed to hubby's cousin in Virginia who had been visiting us when the plants were still green. She decorated it like a little Christmas tree and hung it upside down in the corner of her dining room, way up close to the ceeling. Nobody guessed what it was.
Canada geese are doing practice flights and squalking loudly. After a lazy summer they need to build up their stamina for the long flight south. I remember thinking they had some kind of Bermuda Triangle experience, being confused about which way was south, but then realized they need to get in shape and some of them will be making the migration for the first time. Last week a flock of them went over me, close enough so that I could hear the noise their wings made.
It's time to take the hummingbird feeders down and put them away for winter. We did get a couple of loners coming through, each stayed for 2 days and went on, but I haven't seen any for a week now.
Coyotes killed one of our neighbor's ewes, so now every evening he brings them to a pasture that is safer. We are on coyote watch but haven't seen any.
Hubby has started work on an unfinished closet in the guest bedroom. It has old boards on the walls, so he plans to sheetrock it after he moves the light and runs a wire to install a switch instead of turning it on with a pull string. It shines right in our faces now, but the new location will have the light above the door. He will build shelves to hold our extra blankets and comforters, and make a small section beside it for hanging clothes. Before it is finished we will also replace the flooring in the bedroom and the closet will get the same. The goal is to have it all finished before Thanksgiving when we will have as many as 9 overnight guests for 4 nights.
Today we went to town for electrical boxes and several other things for the project. We looked at the vinyl that is available locally and picked out one that looks like a multicolored carpet. It will be much easier to keep clean than carpet, and won't be harboring dust mites. I will look for some area rugs to use next to the bed so people won't be stepping out of a warm bed on to a cold hard floor.
Yesterday I planted 2 blueberry bushes. Hubby dug the holes for me and put the soil in a wheelbarrow. I added an equal volume of peat moss, and mixed it with my hands, partially filled the holes with the mixture and then planted the bushes. We have 2 varieties and want to get a couple more plants of other kinds, but the nurserys won't restock until spring.
We had some wet stuff fall out of the sky on us this evening. I had laundry on the line, so I stopped my flower bed cleaning and rescued it before they got wet again. Showers are in the forecast for the next couple of days.
A couple of days ago I got a wasp sting on my neck just where the neck of my t-shirt rubs on it. I think the wasp rode inside on my shirt as they are looking for places to get inside for winter and there were several near the back door. Stings always get red, swollen and itchy, so I started taking antihistamine right away. They make me very sleepy. Today I nodded off while riding home in the car. Good thing I wasn't driving. It usually takes 2 weeks for a bite to quit itching. Next week I can back off on the pills a bit as it settles down.
Horses don't drool, but that's just what Breezy was doing yesterday morning when I went to feed him. He looked like he had a mouthfull of soap, and was licking, chewing although his mouth had nothing in it, and blowing bubbles! Very odd. I dropped the hay outside his fence and went to see if I could tell what was the cause of this. He seemed to be normal otherwise, hungry, a bit impatient because his breakfast was on the wrong side of the fence and I was trying to look into his mouth. He didn't seem to be in any distress and I could see no blood.
I called the vet's office as soon as they were open, and made an appointment to take him. Since I didn't know what the problem was, I decided not to feed him in case there was a blockage of some kind. Food packed up against something would not be a good thing.
Hubby took the wood hauling racks off the truck, reinstalled the trailer hitch ball in the middle of the truck bed, and hooked up the trailer. Breezy nibbled weeds in his pasture and looked longingly at me waiting for hay. He wasn't coughing, and didn't seem to be uncomfortable, just hungry.
After getting a quick history of the problem, and observing Breezy for a couple of minutes, the vet was ready to start trying to find the cause of the drooling. Breezy was taken inside the diagnostic area, and put into a stock made of heavy pipe imbedded in a cement floor with heavy rubber pads to keep animals from slipping. He was given a sedative, had a heavy metal apparatus put on his head that would hold his mouth open so the vet could safely insert a hand and feel for anything abnormal. The examination revealed nothing unusual, nothing stuck in between teeth, under or into the tongue, roof of the mouth, or into the cheeks.
The next step was to take xrays of the head and neck. They showed nothing. If there was something sticking somewhere, it would have showed.
Just to be sure there was no blockage below where the xray showed, the vet passed a tube through Breezy's nostril and down into his stomach. There was nothing blocking it. We discussed other diagnostic options, and possible causes for excessive saliva, and the most likely cause seemed to be something he had eaten, either in the hay or the weeds in the pasture. I have him on limited hay because he has gained a lot of weight just standing around and not doing endurance rides anymore.
I made a tentative appointment for more tests later in the week if he didn't improve with a change of pasture and hay. He was still drunk on his feet from the sedative when I loaded him into the trailer, which was kind of comical to watch since he had to step up into the trailer.
When I got him home I put him back into his own pasture, the one Patch has been occupying since he cut his foot several weeks ago. He was given some hay off the new stack in case there was something in the old hay, and immediately started eating. I watched, everything seemed normal. Later I saw him nibbling the grass in the pasture, getting about 1/4 inch per bite, but enough to taste good so he kept at it. Before I went to bed I went out with a flashlight to check him, he was still nibbling grass and looking happy. I couldn't tell if he was still drooling because he had food going in and was swallowing often. He had eaten all the hay I had given him.
This morning I took him out of the pasture and tied him to the trailer where there was nothing he could eat, to see if the drooling had stopped. It had, so I guess there was something toxic in the weeds in the other pasture. I seriously doubt if it was a problem in the older hay. Patch is in that pasture now, but his metabolism is different, and he gets enough hay to keep him happy, so his comsumption of the weeds will be minimal and probably not be a problem. I plan to start eliminating the weeds and stacking them somewhere out of the pasture so they can be burned.
Another thing that is different this year, is that the ewes were not on our place late in the summer as they usually are. They get bored with where they should be and some of them ducked under the fence into the horse pasture, and they have done a good job of eating those weeds. But not this year, plus, Breezy got fat and I put him on a diet, so he ate the weeds since they were there. I wonder which of 4 or 5 kinds of weeds is the bad one.
Today was a nice normal day, so I was able to work in the flower beds this afternoon. Tomorrow I can call the vet's office and cancel the second appointment.
Snow in October isn't funny, and it is 6 weeks early. The snowshowers yesterday didn't produce enough to stick at our place, but the hills between us and town have snow beside the road, and it went all the way to the valley floor on that side of the ridge. We got a blast of cold air 2 days ago, accompanied by a lot of clouds that produced a few little rain showers, and yesterday, snow showers. Tomorrow begins a 4 day warming trend if the forecasters are right.
I picked 2 big buckets full of corn, taking every ear that looked big enough, knowing that about 1/4 of them will not be mature enough to taste like corn, but Patch won't care. When I did this it was cold and so was I, so I didn't take time to sort them. The wind makes it hard to keep the blankets over the butternut squash so every evening I straighten them up for the night, hoping to protect the squash from the middle 20's temperatures. Some of them are looking brownish now, but others still show some green, meaning they are not ripe, will not taste sweet, and will not store for the winter.
We've used these cold days to work on the closets. One had horrible bright pink paint which I have hated and wanted to paint for several years. Whenever I had time I didn't have paint, or ambition. Now it is done but I still have to put everything back. How can so much stuff come out of such a small closet? Among other things, it houses the ironing board and the vacuum cleaner, jackets, boots and a shelf full of miscellaneous. It never had a light, and now being painted an off white/pinkish beige, it is nice and bright. We will actually be able to see what's in there!
Tomorrow we are talking about traveling about 100 miles to shop at a couple of big box stores for a door to fit the closet that has none, and to visit some nurserys in that area to see if we can find 2 or 3 more blueberry bushes of different varieties to add to our row. 5 bushes should be enough for 2 people when they start producing. Another item on the priority list is lunch at a nice Italian restaurant. The selection of restaurants in our area is quite limited, so we treat ourselves to something different whenever we have the chance.
Painting is done, at least for now. The bathroom got a nice bright coat and I really like it. Two years ago I painted it, and while it looked good in natural light, at night it was a bad combination with the countertop. So, when hubby was between paint jobs in closets, and the roller was saturated with paint, we decided to paint 3 of the 4 walls in the bathroom. It looks bigger as well as brighter!
Now that the wind has stopped blowing and the temperature has warmed up about 15-20 degrees, I am back to working on that messy flower bed. The part I am digging in now has never had good soil added to it, and I am finding a lot of rocks which make it hard to dig more than about 4 inches deep. No wonder even the weeds have not done well in that area. I will dump a tractor bucket load of good soil on it tomorrow.
Today we planted the 2 blueberry bushes we bought a few days ago. I thought there would be room for 1 more bush in the row, but there is not, so 4 is the limit unless I want to start another row. Hubby helped me dig the holes, and we prayed that God would help these bushes grow and produce a lot of fruit.
Patch has a continuing problem with the cut on his foot. I thought it was healed except for the skin growing back over the wound, but I noticed a lump, and when I investigated, I found that he has some proud flesh there. Horses are especially prone to having this problem. People get it too, but not so often. It is fast growning, non malignant tissue that is very granular in appearance, bright pink and moist. I'm cleaning it every day and using a powdered medicine on it to dry it up and shrink it. There are quite a few OTC preparations that are available to deal with it, so I hope this one works and we can avoid having to have the excessive tissue trimmed off by a vet. I'm convinced that sooner or later, if a person owns horses, they will get a pretty good education just dealing with the injuries and illnesses. Horses are big and strong, but they are also quite fragile at times.
Yesterday morning I saw racoon tracks, so I am being extra carefull not to leave the cat food outside after dark, and to bury the contents of the compost bucket so that he will find nothing to eat here, and will go visit somebody else. They are cute, but I don't want one living here!
One of these days soon, we will take the shade cloth off the greenhouse, but for now, we are just too busy with other things to do it. I've concluded that the reflective shade cloth lets in too much light, so I plan to buy the black kind that we normally see over greenhouses to keep my plants from getting sunburned. The shiny kind we have now would be fine in a location that does not get the intensive sun we have here. Our air is clean, and we are at 3300 ft elevation which puts even less polutants between the sun and our little section of the earth. Oh, no, I'm not knocking clean air!
The lump of proud flesh on Patch's foot looks like it hasn't gotten any larger. It's hard to tell about things like this sometimes when looking at it every day. A "before" picture might have been helpful. Yesterday I noticed blood on his face, he appears to have rolled into the fence again. Maybe I need to put a row of rocks about 3-4 ft out from the fence to keep him out of the wire. We got him when he was 18 months old, and have had him about 9 years living in the same bunch of pastures without a mishap. Why now?
Yesterday we borrowed our friend's wood splitter to use on a pile of wood that once was a 2 ft in diameter limb on one of our cottonwood trees. It blew off this summer in a windstorm and came down beside a fence. The fence has a bit of damage, but thankfully only some of the side limbs hit the fence, so that will be easily fixed. When the neighbor has sheep and cattle in the field on the other side, they are looking up at that part of the fence, which also helps keep them on their own side of it.
Today's project is that messy flower bed, again. I'm getting close to the end of it, and have relocated several plants to the mostly finished end. I dug up some asters and a shasta daisy and have them in buckets while I decide where to put them. The daisy was competing with tree roots, a Virginia creeper and a honeysuckle, so I think the other 2 also need to be moved. I thought they would look good with the black eyed susans I have nearby, but they just had too much competition for water and nutrients. The black eyed susans might get moved too, and I can put annuals there. That would make it easier to add compost every year. Good plan. Thanks for helping me decide!
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