Virginia Real : August 2017

Ahhhh, The Beauty of Nature...

Summer is quickly winding down. The gardens at the farm and at our current house are producing as well as can be expected, considering there's little time for either of them. One of our cats had a problem with a blocked bladder, which made it necessary for me to stay at home with him for about a month while he adjusted to the new urinary tract health formula of cat food that the vet prescribed. So the garden at home looked really nice...for a while. Now the tomato vines are looking pretty dry even though I water them when we're there. No matter, though, I really don't have time to “put them up” any way. My sister is picking the ripe ones and using them, so they're not going to waste.

The garden at the farm has been producing nicely although it, too, is a bit weedy...well, more than a bit, but it is what it is at this point. We had planted some Kentucky Wonder green beans and they produced nicely. I've frozen about twenty quarts of these tasty beans, which should easily carry us into the next growing season. We just started picking our farm tomatoes about a week ago. Some of these tomatoes (mostly heirloom Mortgage Lifters) are very large and tasty. I have found the time to can five quarts of salsa and five pints of pizza sauce. I'm hoping to can more salsa, pasta sauce, and tomatoes in the coming weeks with the tomatoes from the farm. We also are having a good harvest of what I like to call “Tom Squash”. These are Candy Roaster squash grown from seeds provided by one of Charming's friends. The vines like to roam and so far, have produced four large, yellow, banana-shaped squash. I had never grown them before this year, but according to my research, they store well and taste somewhat like sweet potatoes or pumpkin. I'm really looking forward to having these during the winter months. Our russet potatoes did pretty well. We planted six short rows and so far I've dug up three rows which gave us about eighty pounds that are of decent size. We're storing the smaller ones to use as seed for next year. The corn was a flop, but that was because the deer ate most of the young tender plants. We'll find a remedy for the deer problem after we move here permanently...I have a feeling that the remedy will probably have something to do with our freezer.

Charming has been busy on all fronts. Poor thing, problems keep popping up and it seems as if he's playing “Whack A Mole” with all the different directions in which he's being pulled. As you've read, he replaced the roof on the house because some shingles had blown off. He figured he might as well do the whole roof while the weather was good. So that's done. Then we had a problem with the water. One day he noticed the sound of water flowing as he walked past the outside water hydrant. After digging down about three feet to get to the actual pipe, he discovered that there was a small hole in the pipe. This, in turn, was causing the pump to come on more than it should. So, fearing that the pump might wear out from so much work, he decided to fix the pipe. (When we purchased the property, the real estate agent mentioned that the previous owner had replaced the pump and we're guessing that the hole might have gone unnoticed to the previous owners and perhaps that's why the pump had to be replaced.) Poor Charming had to dig out more dirt to allow enough space in which to work. Thank goodness the land perks really well so there wasn't a ton of mud to deal with. It took several attempts to get the correct parts. He had hoped that the job could be accomplished with plastic parts, but he could not get those to cinch down enough on the plastic piping that was already in place. To make a long story short, he ended up searching for and finally finding the proper metal part and replaced it. He then filled the hole back in with dirt and the hydrant is working properly now. He also plans to install something that will allow him to monitor how much the water pump turns on so that , in the future, this type of problem might be addressed sooner. Luckily, the leak was not enough to drain our well or kill the pump. God loves us!

Currently we're dealing with varmints. They literally seem to be coming at us from all sides (a given when living in the country I know, but nevertheless annoying). As you've read, we got two nice barn kitties from the local animal shelter. A wonderful deal! They were free (although we did give a donation to express our gratitude to the shelter). For the price of supplemental cat food, these little ladies provide rodent control on demand. The best part is that they work behind the scenes and we never see the actual “catch”. Before we got “The Belles” (mother and daughter rodent-killing team, Maribelle and Baby Belle), Charming regularly found nests in the sheds, in the 5-gallon buckets where he keeps a lot of his tools, and even under the tractor seat and in the grill of the tractor. So the cats solved that problem for us. However, we keep food for the cats in an automatic feeder and we noticed that the cats were going through lots of cat food in a short period of time. With my years of growing up in a rural setting, I knew that it could be any number of small animals...'possum,, raccoon, chipmunk, squirrel. However, given that The Belles could easily take down chipmunks or squirrels, we reasoned that it was more likely the 'possum or raccoon. So we purchased a “game camera”. I had no idea that there was such a thing, but I guess since Americans find it necessary to have baby monitors/cameras and doorbell monitors/cameras, this idea is not so far-fetched. Anyhow, Charming set up the camera and it clearly showed numerous visits to the door of the shed by a guilty-looking raccoon. Since there were several pictures of a raccoon at different intervals during the same night, there could possibly be more than one culprit. Charming dutifully baited his Hav-A-Heart trap with some stinky smelly dog food and caught...A Possum! He drove the possum to a local national park and released it into the wild. That's about as far as we're willing to go in preserving local wildlife and it's much kinder to the possum than becoming a “Jax Snack”.

Not only do we have ground varmints, we have flying varmints. Last time we were at the farm, we noticed a big wasp nest under the eave of the tool shed. Charming wanted to throw gas on it, but I didn't like that idea and I really didn't want him to get that close to the bees. (He was stung by a bee several years ago and his foot was so swollen and painful that he couldn't walk for about a week.) So he conceded and when I got home I could do some research on how to get rid of the nest. On the Internet, I came across a video on YouTube that showed a man hosing a nest down with the garden hose and then swatting the remaining bees with a tennis racquet. (Not kidding!) As I watched it, I was rolling with laughter and shaking my head at anyone who would do such a crazy thing. Charming came in to see why I was laughing and we both had another good laugh about the zany things that people do.

Meanwhile, back at the farm...as Charming was dragging out the water hose and a long length of plastic conduit, I was pouring a glass of Crystal Light, dispensing two tablets of Benadryl onto the counter, and digging in my purse for my car keys in case an emergency trip to the hospital was necessary. Charming made me promise not to leave the camper while he was blasting the wasp nest with the icy cold water. All I could do was snap photos through the camper window, while staying close to the dose of Benadryl and Crystal Light. About five minutes later, after giving the nest a quick poke or two with the long piece of conduit (yes, he actually POKED a bee's NEST!), he slowly backed away from the shed while continuing to spray the nest. When he was far enough away that the spray of water no longer reached the nest, he threw down the water hose, did a little dance (not sure if it was a victory dance or if there were a few stray bees after him), and sprinted to the camper. Amazingly, he did not get stung or even break out in a sweat. I breathed a huge sigh of relief. I can already tell that life on the farm is going to be very interesting for us...and stressful for me. (I won't even go into the story about him killing a rather large snake with the grass trimmer a few weeks ago.)

On the calmer side of things, the electrical work has basically been finished in the kitchen and in the part of the living room where the wood stove is located. The kitchen has been painted. The wood stove has been installed and looks great. The replacement windows have been ordered and should be available for pick up sometime within the next week or so. Since we will be picking up the windows, Charming has decided to put the work in the kitchen on the back burner (so to speak) and work on re-siding the house. I'm fine with this as it will make the outside of the house look so much better. As it stands right now, it looks rather ratty and now that we have the wood stove installed we can actually work on painting and installing the kitchen cabinets when the weather cools down. So we still have plenty to work on, but we're making progress.

Oh, dear...Charming just came in and said he saw wasps flying into a hole in the siding on the house. Excuse me while I go hide the water hose.