First The Birds, Now The Bees

The bees have taken great interest in the hummingbird feeder.  It makes sense that they would - the wildflowers are pretty much gone, but I expect that these guys still have some stocking up to do for the winter. 

Each of the little plastic flowers in the feeder was packed full of bees, with more trying to work their way in.  Hubby brought home some apple juice and has suggested that we put a bowl out for them.  He figures they'll like it better than the sugarwater in the feeder.  I'll have to stick it somewhere high to keep the grandkids and bees from getting too close to each other.

Some of the bees found their way into the house.  Not where they wanted to be, and not where I wanted them to be, either.  I'm employing a catch-and-release program with them, catching them in a jar and taking them outside.  I recall hearing on the radio recently that bees are having a hard time around here. 

I don't know anything about bees, so went out to the web to discover whether feeding them now was a good thing to do.  It appears that it may be.  They're apparently not seasonal migrators, and live through the winter on what they've stored, so the extra meals here may be helpful. 

I don't think that any remaining hummingbirds will be too jazzed about their feeder being full of bees, though.



FT

There are still some hummingbirds

I was surprised that they're still around.  The feeder had pretty much gone dry, and I wasn't going to fill it back up, but I saw a hummingbird hovering around it Sunday morning.  I restocked it a bit and it's been a polular site ever since. 

The fellow I took the picture of here is on his way to somewhere else.  He seemed awfully chubby as hummingbirds go, but I suppose he would have to be for the trip he's got ahead of him. 

I recall reading an article that suggested that an increased sugar content to the nectar in the fall, when the birds are migrating, would be a good thing.  I think I'll fill the thing up a bit and strengthen the dose.  An extra tablespoon or so of sugar might be helpful to them on their way south.


FT

A Nice Treat for Hubby

I'd forgotten all about the radishes I'd planted about a month ago.  They were obscured by a nasturtium that decided to start growing right in the middle of them.  Hubby loves radish sandwiches, so this will be a happy surprise for him.

I don't think that I planted the seeds deeply enough - they're kind of sitting on top of the soil.  The shade from the nasturtium kept them in good shape, though.  They're big, plump, beautiful things.


FT

Update On The Guest Cat

He seems to have gone away.  We haven't seen him for several days.  Last Sunday hubby found him in our bedroom, and once we got him out (by leaving him alone and waiting for him to find his way out on his own) we started latching the back door.  Our cats didn't like that too well, since they couldn't get in and out at will anymore.  The orange and white cat apparently didn't like it, either.  Hubby saw him at the end of the driveway (about 1/8 mile from the house) on Tuesday, but we haven't seen him since then. 

I doubt he'll be back.  It has been our experience that the dumped cats don't stick around if they can't get at some food and don't come back once they've been gone for a few days.  I'm guessing that he's going to go check out the neighbors' homes and see if they have any easily accessible eats for him, but I don't think he'll have any luck.  I know that the neighbor to the west won't have anything for him, and the neighbor to the south has dogs that aren't fond of cats. 

I feel guilty about the orange and white cat.  I wish that there was more I could have done with/for him.  I'm feeling guilty about not fulfilling some random asshole stranger's duty to this animal.  That really pisses me off.  Whomever's pet he was cared so little about him that they dumped him out here to fend for himself, and I'm the one feeling guilty.  I'm sure that the jackass is telling his-or-herself that it was giving the cat a chance at a better life or some such nonsense, but that's a pathetic load of self-deception.  When you dump a housecat in the country, chances are it's going to die.  If it's lucky, it will be killed soon after it's dumpage by a hawk or coyote, if it's unlucky it will die slowly of starvation, ravaged by parasites of one sort or another.  Only the lottery winners, like Bucky and Boo, find a happy home.

There are some country-folk who have a shoot-on-sight policy for dealing with dumped pets.  Considering the alternatives, I don't think that is unkind.  If I'd kept all of the cats that have been dumped here over the years, I'd have a couple of dozen cats now, and my home would be a health hazard. 

I've been able to find homes for some of them.  The family on the right here is a success story.  Mom - the beautiful calico - showed up here a few years ago.  She was incredibly friendly.  She'd been dumped along with a batch of kittens - a different batch than those in the pic.  Only one of those kittens made it up to the house with her.  We had seen a few others along the road, but they apparently fell prey to something along the way.

There were a couple of dumped tomcats up here at the time, one orange tabby and one grey long-haired, and they both appear to have impregnated Mom.  The pic on the right is that litter.  The grey kitten went to a friend who tells me he is the most spoiled and obnoxious kitty she's ever seen, but she loves him just the same.  The rest, along with mom and the kittens' aunt, went to a farm site that a friend was getting ready to move in to.  The kittens had been well-socialized - my grandkids saw to that.  There was a daycare center across the road from the farm site, and the cats moved over there so that they could play with the kids.  The cats and the kids are all happy with the situation, and some other cats have moved into the farm site outbuildings to replace those that moved over to the daycare.

There have been other successes, but for every success, there have been a couple of dumped cats who have disappeared - died of disease or hunger or predation.  It irritates the hell out of me.  I was taught that taking on a pet is a life-long commitment to a living being who is depending on me.  If I get a kitten, I'm making a 15-20 year commitment to care for that cat.  If I'm not prepared to make that commitment, I don't get the pet.

What were these people who dump their pets out in the country taught? 

FT

More Grapes

I thought I was about done with grapes.  There are some more on the vines on the dead tree we knocked down, but to get to any of the good ones that are left you have to reach through the buckthorn or Virginia Creeper, and I don't really like doing that.  I'd checked some other viny spots and hadn't seen too much.  Since the easy picking seemed to be over, this last batch of juice was going to be my last batch of juice, and I was going to start thinking about how to turn it into jelly.

I was walking home from my daughter's this morning and decided to check along the edge of the woods rather than come straight down the driveway.  I saw a bunch of vines strangling off what I think is an elm tree, and found another buttload of grapes.  Most of the clusters seem to be made up of ripe grapes.  Most are also a bit out of reach, so we'll have to get some kind of hook to pull them down or some kind of platform so that we can reach them.

I've got about a gallon of grape juice now, and I might get another gallon from the vines I found today.  There have to be more out there.  I don't think we'll keep looking once we've harvested these, though.

I'm going to have to get on killing some of the buckthorn and Virginia creeper.  I guess the buckthorn serves a purpose in that it keeps the kids from wandering off into the woods, but black-caps would do that just as effectively.  The Virginia creeper is a pretty red this time of year, but the berries are poisonous and the stuff makes hubby itchy.

FT

The Guest Cat

We have a visiting cat.  He (I think he's a he, but haven't been able to get close enough to know for sure) is in our bedroom right now.  He's a big orange and white guy.  We've propped the back door open and are hoping that he'll work his way outside pretty soon. 

He wasn't invited, and I don't think that he really wants to be here.  He's not really people-shy or he wouldn't be sneaking in the house, but he's not friendly.  He runs whenever we come near.  He looks pretty healthy and well-kept.  My guess is that someone dumped him out here. 

In the eight years we've lived out here, we've dealt with a couple of dozen dumped cats.  They were all obviously someone's pet, but not anyone around here or they'd go home and get something to eat.  I've found homes for about half of them.  The rest have been too skittish to socialize and find homes for.  They look okay when they get here, but before too long they start looking pretty skinny and scruffy, then eventually we just don't see them anymore.  I assume they get sick and die or a coyote or hawk gets them. 

My cat, Bill, pictured at left, is 17 years old.  He was an only cat for about a year after my cat, Bob, died about 3 years ago, of diabetes at age 15. 

While Bill missed Bob, he enjoyed being king of the castle after Bob passed on.  His face changed - he'd always had this sweet, wide-eyed look, but he developed a kind of regal scowl and a bit of a strut after a year of being in charge of the household.

While we love Bill and are doing what we can to keep him healthy and happy, hubby and I are way tired of the cat box and having cat hair all over everything.  On top of that, I have a mild cat allergy.  When I pet them I have to wash my hands right away.  We were looking forward to being cat-less when Bill was no longer with us. 

This was not to be.

In March of 2008, a kitten showed up on our doorstep.  I'd guess he was about 3 months old.  He was sweet and friendly, and just kept hanging around.  I tried to ignore him and rather hoped he'd just go away.  He didn't. 

One day I came home from work and he was sitting on the stairs at my daughter's house (halfway down my driveway).  It was sleeting and he was covered with ice.  I tried not to look at him, but told hubby about it when I got to our house.  He went down and picked the poor little thing up and brought him home. 

That's him - Bucky - on the right, taken today.  He's a big, sturdy, handsome boy.  He's got lovely bed manners.  When he stays in the house at night he curls up by our feet and just stays put.  He likes to lay by my feet when I'm sitting in the living room and is a wonderful footwarmer.  He helps me in the garden and accompanies me when I'm hunting wild berries along the edge of the woods.  And he's a fabulous mouser.  We got through last winter without seeing a single mouse or hearing any in the walls.  That was amazing. 

Bill wasn't too happy about it, but Bucky seemed to respect Bill's supremacy inside the house, so they reached a kind of truce and managed to get along.

Hubby and I talked about what we'd do if another cat showed up.  We had run out of homes for them, we didn't want them dying or getting killed, and we felt really bad for them.  It wasn't their fault that their owners were low-down scum, and they didn't deserve to suffer.  On the other paw, there was a limit to what we could do.  We can't feed feral cats without attracting racoons and possums, so we decided that any cat who was friendly and wanted to be part of our household could join us. 

Then we met Boo.  He showed up here a week before Halloween last year.  He was just a few months old, and uberfriendly, loving everyone and everything.  He's sable, but looks black.  A pretty boy.

He's also a huge pain in the butt.  He doesn't understand anything about social interactions in either the cat or human worlds.  When he wants cuddles, he will not take no for an answer and will cuddle up to anything with a pulse to get some loving. 

He got himself all kinds of beat up here a while back, I assume cuddling up to some critter that didn't want to be cuddled up to.  We found him covered with mud with a mangled tail and ripped up toe out on the back porch.  We cleaned him up and fixed him as best we could.  He got himself beaten up to a lesser extent quite a few times after that, coming home with gashes on one part of him or another.  Fortunately for us, he didn't object much to the application of peroxide.  Any cuddling is good cuddling in his world, and holding him down was just a snug cuddle, I guess.  He seems to have wised up a bit and hasn't been injured in a while.  I wouldn't have thought he was capable of figuring this out, but I guess he's smarter than I thought he was. 

So we're trying to get friendly with the orange and white guy before winter.  If he will get social and let us pet him and such, he'll have a home for the winter.  If he doesn't get friendly, he's probably going to die.  That he's getting skinny and keeps sneaking into the house to eat leads me to believe that he's not much of a hunter.  I'm going to work on him some, but I don't have much hope that he'll get friendly.  He's an older cat - a couple of years, at least - and they just don't form new attachments that easily.  We'll see what happens with this guy.

FT

Today in the Garden

I got some nice stuff out of the garden tonight.  The tomatoes are ripening up nicely.  I'll be making sauce again pretty soon if the weather stays nice.  It looks like it should - the forecast says sunny and 80's for the next four days.  No rain, so I'll have to get on the watering. 

The beans (Kentucky Wonder pole beans) are starting to flower again.  They'd pretty much stopped producing for a while.  It may have been too cool for them to set blossoms.  It looks like I'll have a nice crop in a week or two.  I'm going to let some of the last pods mature and dry, and save the seeds to plant next year. 

I'm starting to contemplate getting the garden beds ready for winter.  I didn't clean one of the beds up too well last fall and had a batch of cutworms this spring.  They're disgusting.  They eat through the stems of small plants at ground level.  That's it.  They don't eat up the leaves, just eat enough of the stem to completely destroy the plant.  I lost beets and romaine to them. I'll be collaring my young plantlings this coming spring, but seedlings are a bit tougher to protect.  I found that the best method was to dig out the roots of the plant that was severed the previous night, find the little bugger - he'll be close to the roots of the plant - and squash him.  It's definitely a satisfying thing to do, of a little gross.  They're fat, juicy 1.5" furless catepillars.  I understand that cleaning the beds well in teh fall will help prevent this.  The bed that got infested had quite a bit of detritus left in it.

I'm going to be looking at where I want my new beds pretty soon.  I want a big bed for strawberries.  I've got a couple of June-bearing plants that are lost in a bed of grass and weeds, and they need a better home.  I want a few more beds for veggies, and some room for pumpkins, gourds and sweet corn.  I've got room for at least 60 square feet more of raised beds inside my current garden space, and as much of a couple acres as I want to use outside of it.  That would pretty much double my space.  I've got two 4 ft x 4 ft beds, a 1 ft x 16ft bed and a 1 ft x 8ft bed - 56 square feet in all.  It produces a fair amount of stuff.  Right now I've got 7 tomato plants, 5 feet of beans, one cucumber, 5 peppers, 100+ carrots, 5 dozen beets or so, a couple of potato plants, some lettuce...  We've got a variety in that small space, and enough coming out to provide for our veggie needs for now, but not really enough to put any up. 

Next year I'll have space to grow veggies for storage, so I'll be making some different choices.  It's fun to ponder what next year's garden will look like.


FT

What I've Learned About Wild Grapes

It's been really interesting working with the wild grapes.  Here's what I've learned.

5 pounds of grape bunches yeilds about 3 pounds of usable grapes.  While there are some bunches that are full of ripe grapes, most have a combination of ripe grapes, green grapes and rock-hard little former raisins.  Occcasionally there's an actual raisin.  In any case, there is a lot of detritus.

While it only takes minutes to gather up 5 pounds of bunches, it takes a couple of hours to pick the ripe ones from the stems.  They stain fingers blue and purple.  It comes off after about a half-dozen hand-washings or so.  My hands were really pretty after squeezing the pulp while I was making juice, but that's another story.  The blue is mostly from that.  That's from the skins, I believe. 

It's a really pretty blue.  I've got some white cotton gauze material that I haven't decided what to do with.  I have a hard time with white - it always ends up with some food stain or other.  I might see if I can dye it with the grape skins.  Then again, it's not like I'm looking for a new hobby just now...

There aren't many bugs in the bunches, nor is there much bug damage on the fruit.  I suspect that this is because any nice, well-packed bunch of grapes is going to have a little spider silk at it's center.  There were little white/yellow spiders still in the grapes as I was pulling them off the stems, having a hard time deciding whether to try to hide back in the grapes or take off and look for new digs.  I don't kill them.  I'm not a big fan of spiders, but they eat bugs that I'm less fond of.

The grapes range in size quite a bit.  It's wonderful to find a bunch of big, fat juicy ones.  They're about the size of a plump blueberry.  On the other end of the scale are some that aren't much bigger than elderberries.

I've made some of the grapes into liqueur - about 2 pounds of them - and the rest are being turned into juice that will be turned into jelly as soon as I have all of the necessary equipment to do it. 


FT

Labor Day, But Not Much To Celebrate

A study came out this past week - Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers.  They looked at front-line workers (not including managers and supervisors) in low wage industries in New York, Chicago and LA.

We found that many employment and labor laws are regularly and systematically violated, impacting a significant part of the low-wage labor force in the nation’s largest cities.

I'm reading the study now, and it's pretty disturbing.  I'm not surprised that this stuff is going on, but like most folks, I assumed that this was one of those "few bad apples" things.  There are many employers in low wage industried who don't screw their employees, but the magnitude and pervasiveness of the problem is shocking.  Of the people they studied, 3/4 of those who worked overtime were cheated out of some or all of their overtime pay.  Half of those who had a serious workplace injury experienced a violation of workmen's compensation laws by their employer.  43% of workers who complained about a workplace issue or tried to form a union experienced retaliation from their employer. 

Rebuilding our economy on the back of illegal working conditions is not only morally but also economically untenable. When unscrupulous employers break the law and drive down labor standards, they rob families of badly needed money to put food on the table. They rob communities of spending power. They rob state and local governments of vital tax revenues. And they rob the nation of the good jobs and workplace standards needed to compete in the global economy.

They're right about that, of course, but I don't suspect that we're going to see anything done about it any time soon.  Our country has a really weird relationship with it's low-wage workers.  We'd be completely sunk without them, although we don't like to admit it.  They're the grease that keeps our economy moving.  But we don't really value what they do, nor do we value them.  They're "not like us".  They're lazy, unmotivated, probably not very bright, probably not very honest.  We resist any attempts to raise their wages to an amount sufficient to pay for food, shelter, etc. because what they do isn't worth a decent wage.  We resent having to expend tax dollars for public assistance programs to make up the gap between what they're paid and what it costs to live.  

We stack the deck against them then tell them it's their fault they're losing, and that they'd be greedy and ungrateful to ask for a reshuffle, and disrespectful of all of the work their betters did in putting the deck together for them. 

It's a heck of a world...



FT

More Grapes

Hubby and I went back out tonight and got about 3 pounds of wild grapes in about 15 minutes.  Now that I've got a lot of grapes, I'll have to figure out what to do with them. 

I hadn't planned on working on jams this fall, but maybe I'll have to.  There are a LOT more wild grapes out there along the edge of the woods.  If I got busy collecting them, I could make a buttload of jam.  Yummy!




FT

Today In The Garden - 9/5

There was nothing to harvest in the garden today.  I took some newspaper and covered up the bits of the boxes where I'm not going to be planting anything else this year.  The newspaper should kill the weeds underneath, and help get the spot ready for next spring. 

There's still some lettuce in this bed, both some soft stuff, which I don't really like all that much, and some romaine, which I'm rather fond of.  There are a bunch of beets, too, although they''re still pretty tiny.  I hope that the weather holds out until the beets are a bit bigger.  I really like beets, particularly little, sweet ones.

I've got a lot more tomatoes coming.  There are a lot of green ones, and quite a few starting to turn red.  I'm really happy with the way our trellis system worked this year.  We have the tomatoes, beans and cucumbers planted in a narrow raised bed with a beam about 6 feet up.  The beams were the outline of the garden our first year.  We got some 4' x 8' galvanized repanel (used to reinforce poured concrete) and attached it to the planks on both sides of the raised bed and to the beam at the top.  It's got a 6" x 6" grid, so it's easy to reach in to weed or harvest.  It was seriously cheap and much easier than putting up string to support the crops.  It may be a bit tough to clean off this fall - the beans in particular have wound themselves tightly around the mesh, but I figure that a wire brush ought to clean the stuff off once it's dead and brown. 

It's been a good year in the garden, despite the rather cool weather.  I'm already looking forward to next year.


FT

Too Late For Gooseberries, But...

I went out today to look at the gooseberries.  I'm too late - they're all gone.  It is the season for wild grapes, though.  They're mighty pretty right now.  I got a whole bunch of them that are nice and ripe - more than a quart once I've got the good ones picked - in about 10 minutes from one small group of vines.  There's a lot more of them out there.

I haven't done anything with wild grapes before.  The grandkids were fascinated - they tried them out several times, followed by much spitting to get the sour things out of their mouths. 

I am going to look for some more out there and look into making some wild grape jam.  And some wild grape liqueur.  I'm not going to try wine - that looks like a lot of work.

While I was picking grapes I discovered that I have a wild plum tree in the back yard.  At first I thought that it was crabapple, but the fruits were kind of squishy and plum-looking.  Hubby tasted one.  It was pretty astringent, but he said it tasted pretty plum-like.  I'm not going to get too excited about it - it looks like the grapevine has pretty much killed the wild plum tree.  It's singing its swan song this year, I think. 

I thought that we could collect some pits to try to grow some more wild plum trees, but hubby thinks it would be better to get some non-wild plum trees.  He's probably right about this. 



FT

Tomato Sauce

Hubby won't be home until late tonight, and I've got a bunch of tomatoes that need some attention, so I guess tonight I'll make tomato sauce.  I've got to make it work with the stuff that I have and hope for the best.  That works for me.

I thought I had some fresh garlic, but it was far from fresh.  Do you remember the part of the movie where the mummy disintegrates into dust?  That's what my fresh garlic was like.  I had a jar of garlic with about a teaspoon left in it, but that also has been in the fridge too long.  Rather than resort to powdered garlic, I think that I'll just do the maters and some herbs in the sauce and worry about sauted onion and garlic when I go to use the sauce. 

So here's what I'm doing...

I cut up about 6 pounds of  fresh sauce tomatoes (mine are Romas and Opalkas) into larger bite-sized chunks and out them in my big wok-like fry pan (I don't have a dutch oven at the moment or I'd be using that).  I've turned it on at low heat (about medium-low on my stove) and put the cover on.  I grabbed a handful of basil, thyme, chives and parsley out of the herb garden, crushed it up and threw it in there.

After about a half hour, I took the cover off.  The tomatoes are heated through and getting mooshy, and I want some of the liquid to evaporate.  I cooked it for about 2 1/2 hours, until I had to leave to go pick up hubby.  A good deal of the liquid evaporated, and I've got a pretty chunky sauce. 

It's Saturday morning and I just took the sauce out of the fridge and put it back on the stove.  I'd like a little more of the liquid to evaporate, but I think I'm going to leave it chunky rather than squish it through a seive. 

After an hour on the stove (med-low), it's looking pretty good.  It smells pretty good, too.  I've turned it off so that it can cool down.  I started picking the herbs out.  I didn't chop them up, just scruntched them up and threw them in there.  The thyme leaves all fell off the twigs, so they're still in there.  The chives are rather stringlike and the parsley is just big gobs - looks like of like canned spinach.  Some of the basil will stay in there. 

Once it's cool, I'm going to put it in freezer bags, about 2 cups to a bag.  I wish I had a silicone muffin pan.  Freezing the sauce in that would make it really easy to pull just what I need out of the freezer.  I'll have to try that next time. 

FT

Cattail Update

The bundling and hanging is working pretty well.  When I do this again, I will do smaller bundles - 8 to 10 leaves per bundle.  They're drying up really well, other than that the butt ends in the big bundles were a bit damp.  They're holding their colors pretty well.  They're still a nice green.

I'm going to have to go cut some more cattails.  This looks like it's going to be fun.


FT

Granola Update

Hubby is pretty happy with the granola.  I cooked it for about an hour and a half, and that wasn't quite enough.  This made a LOT of granola - a little too much to fit in the jar.  I used the liner pan from my 18 qt roaster oven for this.  It holds all of the granola, but it's a trick getting it in and out of my oven. 

When I do this next, I'm going to use 10 cups of rolled grain and more nuts and fruit.  Hubby wants me to try honey instead of sugar.  We'll see how that goes. 


FT